Stellaris: One Year Later

Hard to believe that it's been almost one whole year since Paradox Interactive released Stellaris on May 9th, though I'd been getting myself hyped by reading the dev diaries, watching Quill18's space cats, and watching the friendly exploits of the Blorg Commonality on the official Extraterrestrial Thursday streams for months before the game hit. Since Stellaris has been one of my favorite games since then (alongside Starbound and Spore... interesting how they all start with "S"), I figured I'd look back at some of the major changes Paradox has made to the base game since 1.0 with the five (soon to be six) major patches and two expansions, and my personal opinions on them.
(Also, for more information than I could ever explain, you might want to check out the official Stellaris wiki.)

Excellent Changes (or OH MY GOD WHY WASN'T THIS IN THE BASE GAME)

• Borders (1.2/Asimov): It used to be that the game came to a screeching halt when your borders ran up against a rival empire and trapped you in your own territory. Their borders were always closed, unless you were in an alliance or somehow managed to bribe them, and you couldn't explore star systems or complete special project chains (such as collecting animals or surveying dead planets to hopefully avert a mass extinction) or go and kill those fanatical purifiers on the other side. Then along came the 1.2 update, which dramatically improved how borders function. Now, all borders are open by default but can be closed as part of or to instigate a rivalry. I can't tell you how much this improves the game; it means you can complete project chains in much quicker time and gives your science ships much more to do.

• Habitability (1.3/Heinlein): One of the more interesting concepts is the game is colonizing planets: you can only colonize certain planets depending on the biome of your homeworld-for example, humans prefer continental Earth-like planets but can do okay on ocean or jungle planets; and my Lyrites prefer rocky arid planets but can somewhat tolerate sandy deserts. However, before 1.3, the planets were arranged into a wheel pattern that caused some issues: people on arid planets could live on cold tundra planets with no problem, and jungle-dwellers could live in sandy deserts. I actually exploited this once when I uplifted some strong-but-dumb Zukakkans who lived on the arid planet Baidaan III and used some Kenjodans (a race of mammalians whose empire got partitioned into a war; I took two planets and allowed two others to form another empire based on my principles in something resembling a space East/West Germany). To make things even more frustrating, you only gained the ability to colonize planets based on technology, so I had to wait decades until the Kenjodans I conquered could settle new tundra planets and expand my dominion. Of course, this made no sense whatsoever, and finally in 1.3 it was solved when habitability was reworked: now planets are arranged into a grid based on climate, so desert-dwellers specifically prefer dry planets, ice-lovers like cold planets, and humans still like ocean/tropical planets. The technology requirements for colonization were also removed (and the latest patch allows you to start able to colonize... more on that later), so you can colonize every type of planet from the get-go.

• Integrating Aliens (1.5/Banks): As I mentioned, expansion to different types of planets is accomplished through either: 

• Sufficiently advanced robots

• Genetically modifying your people

• Using aliens who've come to your planets, peacefully or not

The latter option is the easiest, most interesting, and most readily available, but it comes at a cost since the aliens may not have the same ideologies and/or be cranky about you conquering their planets for some reason. However, perhaps you're benevolent and want to do more with your new citizens for colonizing; perhaps you want to allow them full rights and even allow them to produce leaders to aid your empire? It was possible in Stellaris, but as with colonization it was only possible via a technology that was really annoying to get. In the latest patch, 1.5, this has been changed so that you can not only have alien leaders from the start but also specially tune the rights each race in your empire has. For example, perhaps there's some lizard people who live long and gain experience quickly (making them amazing leaders), whereas a bunch of bird-people have short lifespans. In this case, you'd allow the lizards to produce leaders but bar the birds.

In my current game, I conquered a race of spiritualist lizards called the Netraxi, and soon had one of my top-level human scientists die peacefully of old age. I looked in the replacement panel and sure enough, there already was a Netraxi there waiting to get recruited. I of course said yes, and he might just become ruler of my empire, which is interesting to consider (especially since I'm not a xenophobe)

• Factions (1.5/Banks): Another recent change; before 1.5, factions in your empire would form and always be rebel scum that had to be suppressed and/or purged. Thankfully, this was changed so that factions represented political movements/parties that represented specific issues tied to the different ethics in your empire; for example, xenophobes hate aliens having equal rights and like having your primary species as ruler, whereas materialists love having robots but don't like it when you fall behind in technology. It makes things more interesting and actually makes factions helpful rather than an annoyance; it now becomes possible to embrace their ideology and change your ethics entirely!

• The Midgame (1.5/Banks): One of Stellaris' weaknesses is the midgame, where exploration slows and you start to interact with (i.e. conquer) the empires around you. Eventually, you realize that very little is happening and you decide to just abandon your current campaign and see what else there is to offer (well, I do anyways). Thankfully, this has been something Paradox has noticed and is attempting to improve, but I feel they really struck gold with the most recent (as of writing) patch and accompanying expansion Utopia. Now you can choose an endgame goal for your empire, such as uploading your people into robots or becoming psionic, and this gives you a better goal to work with and keep you waiting through the midgame. There's also the option to build megastructures such as ringworlds or Dyson spheres et al., giving you even more incentive to stick around for a bit and keep playing through the midgame slog-fest.

Good Changes (I haven't seen these personally, or perhaps they just aren't as good as the above)

• Slaves (1.2/Asimov): No decent sci-fi would be complete without slaving jerks, and thankfully this has been a key part of playing as collectivists/xenophobes from the very beginning. However, at first it was possible to game the system by enslaving people so that they didn't have happiness and thus join annoying rebel factions. In 1.2, this was changed so that slaves went into one of two factions: Docile slaves who only wanted regulation, and Malcontents who wanted freedom at any cost. With 1.5, this was changed further with an Unrest mechanic that makes slaves highly dangerous and rebellious if not controlled with armies.

• Fallen empires (1.3/Heinlein): Far more interesting than normal empires, fallen empires are ancient beings with advanced technology who once controlled much of the galaxy, though are isolationist and have a relatively small amount of territory (somewhat like the Siranians from Spore Revolution). However, they were relatively uninteresting and not varied enough before 1.3 came out, which made it so that they could awaken depending on galactic events and some of them will even ask the younger races for help. Under the right circumstances (i.e. an accompanying DLC), two awakened Empires can even start a massive War in Heaven that will involve all the younger races of the galaxy and massively reshape the map.

• Infiltration (1.5/Banks): Those of you who have read my Lyrite playthrough will know that it is possible to infiltrate industrial-age aliens in an attempt to gain control of their precious planet (like lizard-people are certainly not doing to our own Earth) by disguising your people to resemble the natives. Though pretty explicitly mentioned as due to genetic manipulation, I preferred to explain early-game infiltration (i.e. before you discover genetic engineering tech) as holographic disguises, until Banks came along last month. Now infiltration explicitly requires said technology, which makes it more of a midgame option. That's okay, because now it makes more sense and invading the poor fools is still a perfectly valid option.

• Space Monsters (1.3/Heinlein): Another classic sci-fi theme present in Stellaris is spaceborne creatures, like the various noncorporeal beings or the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek. From 1.0 onwards, the monsters were spread like butter over regions of the galaxy with no context of how they got there or where they came from (especially since I doubt many of them had "natural" FTL travel). In 1.3 however, space monsters were changed so that they inhabited a particular region of space, with a home system containing a powerful base and special rewards. I quite like this change as it makes finding space monsters less irregular, though it is somewhat obnoxious to see mining drones over and over again like in my current campaign.

Neutral Changes (not good, but not horrible either)

• Hyperdrive (1.3/Heinlein): In Stellaris, you have three options for faster-than-light travel (FTL): warp drive that allows you to travel slowly to any star system (based on the Alcubierre Drive and Star Trek's warp drive); hyperdrive that allows you to travel very fast along predetermined and strategic routes (my personal favorite); and wormholes that require special stations to send ships to any star instantly. Since release, the particular numbers behind the methods have been heavily balanced, but a drastic change was made in Heinlein when hyperdrive charging was increased and required ships to move to the outer edge of a star's gravity well to go to FTL (previously hyperdrive ships could jump to hyperspace anywhere in a system). While it slows down hyperdrive considerably, that particular method of FTL was pretty overpowered anyways.

Bad Changes (why Paradox why)

• Warp Drive (since 1.0): As I mentioned earlier, warp drives are slow; need to charge up and cool down when leaving and entering a solar system, respectively; but have the advantage of unlimited movement between star systems. Since release, however, that advantage has become somewhat moot with continuous nerfs to warp drive, whether it's slowing it down even further or increasing the chargeup/cooldown times. Warp drive is now almost unbearably slow and is not a good pick, which is a problem because I feel that there should be at least some incentive to choosing one FTL type over another, even if it is just to shake things up. However, I have heard that future plans for the game include making hyperdrive the starting option and having warp/wormholes be research options, so that may be the incentive for this.

• Uplifting (1.4/Kennedy): Oddly enough, this particular issue is going to be fixed in the upcoming 1.6/Adams patch on the 1-year anniversary, but until then this poor design decision is still valid and annoying. Anyways, remember how I mentioned the Zukakkans, the lizard people I uplifted from a pre-sentient state? This is a perfectly viable midgame option for empires wishing to gain  one or more of the following: access to new planet types for colonization, a new species, a working class of dumb laborers, or even the fabled cockroaches who can live anywhere (especially nuked planets). While it used to be perfectly fine to simply have their planet in your borders (I got access to Baidaan III by colonizing a nearby Earthlike planet the settlers named Albion), in 1.4 this was foolishly changed so that you had to colonize the planet itself to uplift them. Not only did this "break immersion" since researching/conquering planets has no habitability or colonizing requirements, it also made uplifting less of an incentive and reduced it to merely a prerequisite for actual genetic engineering. Sure, using robots is an option, but it's tedious to micromanage building them manually and there's always the chance they can rebel if your research makes them too smart. Furthermore, roughly 90% of uplifting happens because you want a species to be able to handle new planetary climates to expand your empire. At least this is going to be fixed very soon, but I'm still somewhat annoyed the colonization route was even considered to be a better option than simply allowing you to uplift when the planet's in your borders. Remember, game devs: if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

Conclusion

As mentioned before, these are only the biggest changes I felt affected me and were worth talking about. There are plenty of other tweaks that have been made over the years, like changing space battles so they aren't horrible swarming messes, minor weapons balances you'll only notice in a mouse-over tooltip, or the new set of beautiful skyboxes that replaced the bland default one. I feel that the game has improved significantly since release, especially with the new Banks update back in April (as you can tell by the changes I listed). Will the game be even more awesome on May 9th, 2018? Only time will tell...

Here's another one of my favorite Banks changes: ship/station colors
based on your flag! This in particular is a Netraxi construction ship,
since they had a purple and green flag.

Rimworld: The Story of Mewling-by-the-cliffs, Part Two

I hope you all enjoyed my first true look at Rimworld last time, because I'm back with another part! In this part, we'll continue to expand the community of Mewling-by-the-cliffs, both by building and mining, as well as hopefully getting some new faces on board.

Also, here's a bit about Emmie, since I didn't include too much about her last time.

How do Raiders Get In? Intruder Window! *rim(world)shot*

Emmie trades with the Orassans.

It was a normal spring day at Mewling-by-the-cliffs, with the exception of a small party of Orassan traders who'd arrived and were camping out by the newly-completed Raider-B-Gone Killbox™. Emmie, the sex slave who'd recently arrived, used her feminine charm to negotiate a purchase of some meals, steel, and a military helmet. However, the calm was shattered when a pirate scout named Mayumi showed up with the intention of raiding the colony, but thankfully she needed time to communicate with her superiors and analyze the defenses.

Finally, after a few hours, she decided to exploit an overlooked pass in the colony's defenses and charge straight on through. While I dreaded not closing the passage off, it turned out I didn't need to do anything: one moment Mayumi was charging through, and the next she was shot and incapacitated by one of the traders. 

Miyami got owned without me having to lift a finger! Thanks, Orassan traders!

Deciding she wasn't totally crap at working, I decided to see if I could convince her to join our little community. After building a prisoner compound (during which we stuffed Mayumi in a corridor of the main base-don't ask), we decided to let Vivis and Emmie at her to get the ex-raider on my side.

In the meantime, the pirates decided to go after a blacksmith named Hans-Joachim Saruma. He desperately called the colony for help. I pondered accepting his message: while we would get a new recruit without having to bother with chatting up, I had no way of knowing if he'd be good or not, and we didn't have the food to support another mouth... not to mention we'd have to deal with more pirates. I had no choice but to deny his request.

Here Comes the Bride

The day after the non-threatening raid, Chaz decided had known Vivis long enough to spend the rest of his life with her (that and I managed to get a nice double bed for them). While they were busy mining out the mountain to make a home, Chaz proposed to her outside. She eagerly accepted, and I decided to put a spot in the sleeping area-cum-workroom where they could have the ceremony performed at some point in the future.

Interlude: The Game Starts Rearing its Ugly Head

Even though I'm playing on a relatively low difficulty (since I'm still learning the game and I don't want to get my butt handed to me), the game still decided to annoy me slightly. Firstly, it decided to give me a mood-lowering psychic drone (as in buzzing sound drone, not UAV drone) that made all my female colonists annoyed. In other words, 3/4 of my people were now a bit more upset for a few days.

The game wasn't done yet; it then decided to have Arkab Nusakan's sun zorch the planet with a solar flare; making all our electronics go offline for a few hours. Thankfully, other than a few people upset from a lack of light, it didn't turn out to be too bad of a problem.

Worst of all were the short-outs of our power conduits; which set things on fire... including, at one point, Vivis and some of our crops. Despite being a pyromaniac, she wasn't too happy to herself be on fire, so Chaz had to once again play firefighter and make sure his fiancee didn't burn to a crisp.

But the worst came when a blight swept through the area and killed every single one of our hard-planted crops. Still, there was a silver lining: we did manage to get some crops harvested beforehand and we had plenty of meat thanks to Vivis' hunting, so all was well.

Also of note were the random raiders who came by, two of which bypassed my structure entirely and made me seal off the upper corners of the map. Another raider named Lavego (from one of the tribal villages) managed to survive the assault and we decided to recruit him as well, though he hasn't been as willing and I'm wondering about selling him into slavery... heh heh heh...

Poor Mayumi!

Remember Mayumi, the pirate who raided my colony only to be shot by space kitties with machine guns? Turns out Emmie was able to convince her to join her former enemies and perform basic tasks around the base. Unfortunately, a simple oversight in the game mechanics made her undoubtedly the most miserable one in our group. Allow me to explain:

In order to make sure you aren't totally overwhelmed during the first attack, the game makes your first opponent a nude meleer (regardless of difficulty), in this case Mayumi. Unfortunately, since she wasn't a nudist, she wasn't all too happy with having every single inch of bare skin on display for everyone to see (Emmie, of course, didn't mind), but thankfully Vivis stepped in and made her a basic outfit. To add to her misfortune, her nose had been blown clean off her face when she attacked, which only added to her innate ugliness. And now the icing on the cake: due to the abruptness of her recruitment, she didn't have a room of her own and thus had to be put in the temporary "quarters" (i.e. a sleeping spot in the hallway) where she'd

Mayumi sleeping in the hallway while things get... flashy and fiery outside.

previously been imprisoned. So in summation, she wasn't really happy. (Since she's somewhat on the verge of flipping out and making things unpleasant, I'm starting to wonder if she should take some happy-making drugs. There are quite a few that dropped in from outer space, and we could always grow our own. Then again, it's only a minor risk of her flipping out, so I may leave things as they are-if it ain't broke, don't fix it!)

Go North, Young Man (and Women)

Why couldn't it be somewhere nice, like Space Miami? Everybody parks their
ship in Space Miami!

On a midsummer morning, a peculiar message was received through the new communication console that'd been installed in the workroom. It came from an AI named Charlon Whitestone who'd known Chaz in the past, who said that "he" had a starship hidden away on the planet, and that it'd be ready to go as soon as the colonists found it. Vivis cross-referenced some coordinates in the message with the final scans of the Bengal, and found that the new ship was in a chilly location near the northern pole of the planet. It would be a long and dangerous journey to the northernmost wastes of the planet, and the colony barely had enough food to take a caravan to the Orassan base just on the other side of the mountains.

Closing Statements

Another part, another conclusion. I have little to say that hasn't already been said, other than keep your eye out for a journey to test out the caravan feature added in the last update that can be used for trading with friendlies or attacking your pirate foes, but I have too little food to make it worthwhile. I might just have to skip ahead somewhat until my food stores and higher; if I do, I'll make basically an interlude of some notable events that happened in the midtime (something as significant as Vivis and Chaz getting married will be its own thing, of course).

Rimworld: The Story of Mewling-by-the-cliffs, Part One

Hello, and apologies for my absence from this blog. I'm still creating STNL (now STNL: Rebirth) on my other one and got carried away. However, I decided to take a look at another game set in space: Rimworld, an indie early-access colony simulator where you attempt to help people of various backgrounds (nobles, space pirates, slaves, tribespeople with Hispanic names, etc.) survive on a distant world on the rim of the galaxy (it's a world on the rim, hence rimworld-get it?)
I'd seen it played on Youtube and recently decided it was worth a shot, especially since a new update was recently released that massively overhauled the mechanics to make your planet an actual... planet that you can travel across and colonize (previously, it was just a rectangular map). So, let's chronicle my first playthrough of this infuriatingly difficult and occasionally sadomasochist game! (In other words, expect a short run, whether I fail horribly or stop chronicling because reasons.)

A final note: This game, like Starbound and Stellaris, is one that is chock-full of possible Steam Workshop mods, but I will be playing the stock version, with the exception of a mod that adds a bunch of cold-loving space-cat-people called the Orassans, because [space] cats are awesome; as well as one that lets me make my colony into a hotel and eventually recruit people nicely (so as not to annoy the aforementioned space cats, who don't like being taken... I wonder why).

The Three Lone Survivors of the SS Bengal

Without further ado, let me introduce you to the three main people who I will be controlling (don't get to attached to them, they could die at any moment). They are:

Vivis, an Orassan colonizer charged with expanding their
space-cat empire. She is a pyromaniac, and I bet you all know what that means!

Erika, the only human (initially) in our group. She is a super-smart
particle physicist with an innate distrust for men (we only one of them to worry about, thankfully),
but she's also a pacifist, so no fighting people or fires.

Chaz, another Orassan who is a cook for their space navy. He has been known to experiment
with drugs, and living in cramped starship quarters has made him not care about
how spacious or beautiful the bedroom he sleeps in is.

Our World

And this is the planet that we crashed on, Arkab Nusukan. Being a rimworld and all, it is far away from the core worlds of the galaxy and thus has no central government. Nevertheless, there are still plenty of people here in diverse groups ranging from simple homesteaders to scummy pirates to Hispanic tribespeople (well, their names are pretty Spanish, anyways). Full information on planetary topography and population was unavailable due to the urgency of the ship's scan; there was only enough time to find a suitable location in the planet's north-western hemisphere. This is the data that was able to be received:

Acting upon this data, I wanted a temperate mountainous location (so building walls would be easier), and the two Orassans decided they wanted to be near their compatriots. This is ultimately where I decided to land:

The site of our first base, info on its climate, and the surroundings.
Note the white snowflake emblem, indicating an Orassan base.
The other two are a tribal village (yellow tepee) and a pirate hive
of scum and villainy (red Jolly Roger).

Thus concludes the initial setup of my colonists and base location. Now we move onto actual gameplay...

Setting Down

The SS Bengal, now a wrecked heap of metal,

burns up in Arkab Nusukan's atmosphere. This was captured by
some random guy on the planet who happened to be looking in
this direction.

FINAL COMPUTER ENTRY, SS BENGAL, 6SR-5500:

-Antimatter containment leak detected in Pylon 6B-

-Protocol "6FT0 Prime" Initiated-

-Scanning Planet RIM-9024-2D (ARKAB NUSUKAN)-

-Suitable Crashsite Identified, Deorbiting-

-Awaking Passengers and Instructing-

-Be S-

As the last flaming chunks of the Bengal fell towards the mountainous forest, our three passengers emerged from their escape pods. They were stranded lightyears from home on a distant rimworld, with little hope of escaping back to civilized space. Thankfully, they were in a temperate region of the planet during springtime, so temperature wouldn't be a problem (except for the cold-loving Orassan passengers, but it wasn't warm enough to cause more than mild discomfort).

The initial landing site, as well as me setting up jobs for the colonists.
The whiter the box, the awesomer they are at doing it.

Eagle-eyed viewers might notice that there are four names but only three people. This is because the "fourth" person, Kazumi, is actually a pet female warg (basically a super-wolf named after a creature from Norse mythology). Pets are a thing in this game, and you can even have normal Earth cats (that can't be trained like dogs and wargs, but oh well).

A quick recon of the map revealed an abandoned granite house to the south, in the middle of some mountains. I quickly decided that this would be an optimal location to set up shop and build out my base, due to its strategic position (in the center of the map and cordoned off by Thermopylae-style mountain passes) and the ability to mine into the nearby mountains for expansion, which I (perhaps foolishly) decided to do to start off.

The day after planetfall, this is the first expansion of our base from the small house/hut.
But before we could get to that, I had to endure a very annoying night...

Some People Just Want to Watch the (Rim)World Burn

Remember how I said that Vivis' pyromaniac tendencies would bite me in the rear? Turns out I only had to wait that night for her to cause trouble. Apparently, after spending years frozen in a starship (I presume it was years, but to be honest I don't know how long the trip took), she looked outside at all the plants and all the trees and realized that they could all burn. At that point, she just... snapped. She immediately whipped out her lighter and proceeded to ignite some grass. Chaz knew that even a single blade of flaming grass would expand into a forest fire that would threaten the entire area, so it was up to him to stop her from setting everything on fire.

Now, you might be asking "Why didn't Erika help? Surely two heads would be better than one in this case?" The answer is that Erika, in addition to being a pacifist, is deeply afraid of fire due to an accident in a lab she was working in and won't go anywhere near it. (Why she would travel and be in close proximity with a self-acknowledged pyromaniac is something I do not know). Suffice to say, only Chaz could stop forest fires.

And so, in an act of brave self-sacrifice, he spent nearly the entire night putting out the fires Vivis left in her wake. He thought about arresting her, but knew she probably wouldn't go willingly and could even be killed when he tried to subdue her. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she gave up willingly and both of them went to bed in their hastily-prepared sleeping spots.

Perhaps as a result of the incident, two days later, they came together-mewling like a pair of hungry kittens and entwining their tails, they decided that they were perfect for each other. (I sincerely hope that neither of them have family on this planet; otherwise things will get awkward).

Ooh la-la!

Three days after planetfall, Erika realized that the three of them were going to be on the planet for quite some time, and would need to identify both themselves and their community. Since her fellow colonists were both space cats and a friendly Orassan base was nearby, she chose to name the town Mewling-by-the-cliffs (as a reference to Old English towns such as Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of ancient Earth playwright William Shakespeare), and the people would call themselves the Cat's Meowers. Vivis and Chaz seemed to actually like the names, and the motion passed. 

The original town name suggested
by the game was of a similar naming scheme, so I went with that.

However, Erika wouldn't be the only human for long: On the fourth day, while the colonists were all working on building a wall and making the nearby pirates pay for it, a random wanderer named Emmie came strolling towards the base. She had witnessed the ship's atmospheric entry and went to the crash site to investigate, only to find three desperate people who looked like they needed all the help they could get. It all seemed pretty normal and I was happy to have another pair of hands to do the work we needed... and then I saw this:

 That's right, she is a former sex slave. You read that right. This was pretty much my initial reaction:

From what she told the colonists, she'd been illegally grown in a vat on an urbworld (basically a crowded planet covered in violent and polluted cities) for the sole purpose of being the perfect object of sexual gratification (most of the colonists were repulsed too; especially Vivis, who had also been genetically engineered for perfection by her parents). She was also used as a slave for doing dumb labor the "normal" residents of the urbworld were not willing to do. At some point, she finally grew tired of it and managed to escape on a starship; fate eventually bringing her to Arkab Nusukan like the colonists.

Despite being "born" on a completely different planet and then fleeing to this one, she hasn't aged a day
in cryptosleep, it seems. Also, I find it interesting that two of my colonists are
older at 50+ (biological) years but look younger (except Vivis, who's only 28; and Erika who
actually looks older than 52).

After Emmie arrived, Chaz decided to throw a base-warming party for her, so she could get to know the other colonists (in the non-Biblical sense, thankfully) and know the lay of the land.

No, new arrivals are not always welcomed with a party. It just happened
that the party happened after Emmie arrived, so I decided to go with it
being a base-warming party held on her behalf.

Final Remarks

And that's basically the start of my first proper game of Rimworld. Other than the aforementioned incidence of Vivis going berserk and starting fires, nothing too bad has happened. I did get a few traders from the Orassan base nearby (but the only things they were selling were some Orassan weapons that looked sweet but were much too expensive for our nascent colony), but other than that, things have been quiet and I've been able to develop a rather crappy defensive structure for the first raider[s] that attack us. As usual, if anyone bothers to read this, let me know about things I should do differently.