OK, my new game is doing much better. I cheesed the settler origin again, but this time I sent each of my dudes to the training dummy until they got to high 4. It caps at 5 and slows down a TON as you enter skill 4, so I was like ~blah. Only one guy can use the cop's dummy at a time, so the rest of my dudes were put on follow and worked up their athletics/strength running circles in town and picking up bandit loot. This was just to kill time while I trained. By time I got all my dudes to attack 4 most of my dudes were also athletic 15-20 (20 is the cap for the demo) and packing decent light armor/sabers from bandits. I then set out to build my town.
I settled just west of Fort Simon or w/e it's called in the south. Either I got lucky or pathing is reduced there. I only fought one bandit mob, but I did have to kite them to the guards. They only chased two of my faster characters so I left the majority of my guys at camp while I ran those off, looted and sold their stuff.
Unfortunately some more dudes came up while I was on my way back, but only 3 of them. I had my squad inside my shack with the door locked, and they were calmly waiting for reinforcements while the bandits were attacking the shack's door. The door is pretty robust, and 3 bandits took the entire time of my traveling to attack them to get it down to 95%.
When I started getting close the bandits aggroed on my arrivals and then
my guys in the shack automatically unlocked the door and opened itto help the group fight. I was not pleased since some of them were still hurt from the previous fight (I bought extra med kits while in town to pass out amongst my dudes). I couldn't get them to stop opening the door so I let them participate. We won, we healed up, and right as I was clicking to repair the door, the game crashed. I saved while leaving town to save my settlement so not much was lost, but
.
Only thing I'd have done differently at this point is buy more medkits before leaving the first time, and if I owned the full version I'd have more dudes overall. I'm researching beds and then storage containers next. I've got a farm, well, generator, stone mine, and processor, shack, and research table.
What should my emphasis be to keep 7 low-skill troops in the field without getting rolled?Walls is what I'm guessing. I set myself up in a crossroads type spot with mountains around me so I should be able to be efficient with walls.
Apparently you can use walls to cheese highways between your settlements and any towns you like by limiting onramps within areas you deem safe. They can also be used to make highways up mountains with the same method. I saw a thread on the forums about this guy making a super highway connecting towns and settlements in the northern desert.