Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[JimboM12]

go into your squad menu and you'll see an option all the way to the right called AI, untick "ditch items". with that on, all guys who have the matching resource to the storage will attempt to store it in there if they're not carrying it somewhere to be used.

[Sirus]

Interesting, I had no idea that option existed.

That won't prevent my designated miner from storing the copper he's mining, will it? Not if he's got the job set up.

[JimboM12]

that shouldn't be an issue, when the mine gets full he should take it into his inventory and when that's full, he should take it to the nearest box to open up space. theoretically. i keep ditch items on. as a protip, the ai won't utilize backpacks that much if you equip them. i have my builders each have a scavenger can backpack but they still only take 2-3 building materials that can fit in their basic inventory. could just be a bug.

[nenjin]

I found it kind of annoying at first. When I'd give guys food for a journey somewhere, and stop to organize one or two other things, they'd all go running right back to the storage containers to drop off their stuff. Sometimes from a really, really long distance away.

So I turned off "Ditch Items" and found it didn't really affect the AI-ness of their jobs inside the base in any meaningful way. As long as there's a relevant storage container for what they are harvesting (food, hemp, leather, bread, w/e), I found they mostly did the drop off and sorting in a reasonable way without "Ditch Items" turned on.

[Sirus]

Random question: what's the best way to find new dudes to recruit? Do they wander the map, stopping at settlements for a while before moving on? Do new ones spawn in after a time? Or is each dude unique, and once you screw up their recruitment or they die you're out of luck?

Most of the guides I read say to grab any freebie and 3k dudes you can find in the early game, to build your numbers while saving money for food and supplies. Thing is, I can never find many of either. Most dudes I can find cost 6k or flat out refuse to join me.

[Majestic7]

Ditch items in annoying since I have my best archer as fletcher and best doctor as medicine man... when they produce things and store the produce, they empty their inventories of ammo and meds they should carry as standard set. I wish we could mark items as "do not store this". Oh well.

Best way to recruit is going to bars and looking for them there. There are unique recruits with dialogue and personalities and generic recruits. Generic recruits never run out. You can, though, recruit people by saving them from captivity and/or slavery. If you encounter runaway slaves in the desert, you can feed them and they sometimes join you as well. Recruiting prisoners/slaves might affect your relations with other factions.

[nenjin]

There's also a mod, I think it's Recruit Prisoners, that lets you do exactly that. Build a prison cage, throw them in, and keep talking to them until they beg you for a food item you have in your inventory. The endless attacks on your base by bandits and starvers and what not means you basically have a never ending supply of fresh recruits. Sure beats spending 3k and marching your ass halfway across the world just to recruit a guy with 0 in everything.

It's kind of cheating, no doubt, because you can recruit Dust Bandits and all sorts of guys which almost always start out better than any of the guys you get from the taverns. But there are some special guys that can't be recruited, apparently. I tried to recruit a Black Dragon Ninja I'd captured and got no dialog options for them. But I'm pretty sure I've recruited from the Band of Bones before.

[Ulfarr]

I would personally disagree with the "grab any freebie or 3k ones". Don't get me wrong, having a few extra people (2-4) is good and sometimes necessary but I think having more than that, especially in the early game is detrimental for the game experience/enjoyment, mostly because the more your group grows the more of a chore controlling them becomes ie food is depleted too fast if you rely on hunting/ buying and you can forget about fine tune control of a fight something that is very much doable with a solo run.

edit: I'm talking in a more general kind of guide approach, not specifically for your case Sirius. Also if you try to recruit shek people it really helps to send a shek do the talking.

[nenjin]

I think there's room for different tiers of gameplay.

Early game is very character focused. You don't have anything to manage, you're broke, you have a couple guys and it feels more like a small party adventure game.

Once you hit 6 people or so and decide to start building a base, the game shifts to more a sim management game.

Both parts are enjoyable. But I agree I wish I had played the "low level" part of the game a little more first before starting on base building, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Food becomes an issue, all resources become an issue and as soon as you have a base you need to start farming, setting up automated tasks, harvesting the shit out of everything....also I swear the first time you put down a permanent structure the AI bands start coming after you specifically. Which by default I don't think many people are equipped to deal with.

[PTTG??]

I hesitate to say it, but with one dude, it's easy to savescum so you are, effectively, very very lucky. Two characters? Doable, but annoying. After three, though, characters who die stay dead. As a system goes, this works for me.

[Ulfarr]

Luckily kenshi allows for a variety of gameplays, I wasn't trying to dictate the "one true way", if my post came like that I'm sorry. My argument was only against the "most guides suggest X action" which doesn't apply to all the styles , if the goal is to set a base then by all means get as many as can/want.

The solo run comparrison was just an example to showcase the difference in how one fighter can fight ( easily manageable hit and run tactics) vs a group (glob vs bigger glob and let's see who wins). I do agree that save scumming is mostly necessary in solo runs mostly because it's just boring to wait until your character finally die after being unconscious for a day or two.

[Zangi]

You could always choose to micromanage one or two people in a glob vs glob fight.  Let the rest of the fodder fend for themselves.
Though, the recovery time between fights effectively gets worse as you add more people... until the fodder finally learns to git gud.

And once you have a self-feeding automated base, you could just leave people at home and go out on extended expeditions. 
Protip: Save the game and load once you are away from base.   Game won't actually process attacks until you go back to 'look' at your base.  (Need to load in the assets I reckon.)

[nenjin]

Well that’s handy, thanks.

[Glloyd]

Yeah, there's no one right way to play Kenshi. I have one file where it's just two partners exploring and scavenging and having a grand old time, and I have another where I started with one guy and built up a huge anti-slavery empire. Even with that big empire though, I have a combat squad of 5 people that I use for exploring. The base ticks along just fine when they're on their expeditions. It's definitely harder to play solo because of what Ulfarr mentioned, but it's not impossible. I find that two people gets you a similar experience to solo play, but without the need to save scum if one of your guys gets knocked down bad.

[Gabeux]

Yeah, Kenshi is pretty varied in how you can play it. I like to quickly get a base just because I feel bad for purchasing stuff while I could just craft myself after some effort (weird). But I got used to the early versions where owning a base didn't mean the whole world wanted a piece many pieces every piece of you.
So I like to slowly grow in members, and pretend that the group is getting used to the new members..this means I'm figuring out what that person will do for its' whole virtual Kenshi career, and trying to connect to that character in some way. Once I'm used to having him in the party, I'm ready to get more.

Currently I have about 20 people, and I got 60k money but still waiting a bit to get more noobs. I'll probably save some slaves since the ones that joined me were pretty decent recruits and quickly found work in my town.
I'm not using any mods that break balance, just using a few to make it more to my tastes. But I still need to look into more vanilla-friendly/QoL mods if available.
The only unbalanced mod I have (and stopped using after I recruited 1 person) is the Recruit Prisoners mod. Since I play Rimworld in parallel, it's something I really think should be in Kenshi. But the way the mod does it is too cheaty. If I wanted I could easily get a 50+ attributes character very early, since all it takes is keeping the prisoner not-hungry and just asking him to join, as far as I know.

I do want to try a heavily modded run one day, though.

Spoiler: Some little mods I use (click to show/hide)

Pocket Change
Nice Map [Zones + Zone Names]
NPC Enjoys more Shopping
More Bounties
Dark UI
Strength Training Equipment (I rebalanced it to only train up to 25 strength, and it still takes [way] more time than the usual strength grind. Just a way so I don't have to micro every noob training as I'm too lazy for that)