It may just be a result of the way I almost have to play Kenshi (ie, shut down everything other than Kenshi itself to get mostly-stable framerates and loading times), but I tend to play it for long periods. And I do mean long. I just binged it for two consecutive days. Here is the story of Hood's Honchos.
I used a modded start that gives 30 nobodies to start. They can be any race, but because I wanted to try and settle Okran's Valley I went with a pure human crowd. Previous attempts at this have resulted in tragedy 9/10 times.
Off to a great start! Game loads and everyone starts complaining about acid rain. Luckily I started inside an abandoned village, I run everyone indoors to escape the rain aaaaaaaaaand every building is full of killer robots. RUN AWAY!
What followed was a couple hours of trying to find my way to safer climes while occasionally quick-loading when I accidentally run smack into some killer crabs or packs of beak things. At one point some southern hive dudes decide to kick the crap out of my dudes, but fortunately don't kill any of them. My dudes wander through the wilderness, moving in a generally north-northwest direction. We spot a couple of leviathans but stay well clear.
Eventually we come across the legendary Catun! Although we have no money, we seek refuge in the city of smiths, and not a moment too soon! A leviathan and a horde of beak things besiege the city, and hordes of samurai rush out to fight them. I run my dudes through the chaos to grab beak thing meat and leather, while putting other dudes on the city's wall turrets to shoot at the leviathan. When it falls, I immediately rush a dude out to grab the beast's pearl. Victory! Money! Food!
Unfortunately I made a bit of an error. I splurge my new wealth on a a cheap scientist and a Shinobi membership, as well as a bunch of discounted thief backpacks, leaving little money for food. Not that Catun has a lot of food to choose from anyway. The Honchos, now 31 strong, move on.
There are more failures and more reloads along the way. I somehow manage to not find any major cities on the road, but I do find hostile settlements and bandit groups a-plenty. At one point, in a desert pockmarked with odd lakes, I get hit by like three bandit groups at once. Then the beak things showed up to feed. Reload.
It took a long time, but eventually I come to Waystation. I move everyone inside, send the healthiest ones out to mine ore, and send the dudes with backpacks out hunting for the Hub. They find a number of ruins, which they loot for everything they can carry and sell. They also find a tower that appears to be inhabited by dust bandits. Hmm.
With the funds from the ruin scavenging trips as well as the loot from Hub's little shack, I hire a squad of mercenaries and lead them to the tower. Honchos and mercs work together to bring down the Dust King along with his bodyguards. The Dust King, along with one of his goons that had a far smaller bounty, becomes my prisoner! Honchos loot the tower of everything even remotely valuable (except hashish; I don't know where to safely sell that) and free a prisoner named Cat, who becomes the 32nd Honcho.
Once everything is sorted, the group heads to Hub. The mercs, still under contract, protect the Honchos from another group of bandits and help hunt a large herd of wild goats, which goes a long way toward staving off starvation. The stop in Hub is brief, just long enough to sell off loot and buy more food before heading to Squin to turn in the two bounties. After Squin, we head to Stack.
Stack is the first real base for the Honchos. A small house is bought, basic research is completed, and a bunch of Honchos get to work mining copper from the land around Stack. Fast-moving dudes (one good thing about a cross-continental trip: almost everyone has good Athletics) head into Okran's Valley to prospect for likely base locations and look for free recruits (and find none, of course. I swear half the bars are completely depopulated). Using copper funds, I load an expedition with greenfruit and building supplies and send them out to get a base up and running.
And that is basically where I am now. Several fields are sown, the walls are up, buildings built, and except for the Stack Miners the entirety of the Honchos lives and works on the base full-time. Things are not yet self-sufficient, though. 30+ people go through a lot of food, and even with three large vegetable patches and two XL wheat patches, I still find myself sending pack mules to various cities to buy more food, which necessitates the Stack Miners continuing to work so I can keep the money flowing in. It's getting better all the time, but it'll be some time yet before I can trust things to run well enough to start mounting real exploration.
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Topic: Kenshi - An open ended, squad-based Strategy RPG (Read 182667 times)