Kenshi - open-ended sandbox RPG set in a desert world

[Jinn]

Yeah, I always figured it'd be best to buy a house in a town somewhere to serve as a base early game, build your wealth and strength, then strike out to build a fortress of your own once you've accomplished those goals.

Could be wrong though. I've mainly spent my 10 hours with the game wandering around, carrying heavy things to build strength, and getting my ass beaten many times.

 

[Zanzoken]

Squin is a really easy place to start. Get money by mining and picking fights with bandits and critters that wonder by. You won't be able to beat up anything at first but you can run back to town and let the guards win the fight for you. Sell everything you loot until you have enough money to buy a longhouse. It's a lot cheaper to repair a damaged house than to buy an intact one.

Now get some recruits. You want a greenlander for research and a couple of scorchlanders for crafting. The rest I usually use Shek. Build a research bench and start with storage and leatherworking tech. Take the skins from any garru and goats you kill and convert those to leather, then convert the leather to light armor. This will increase your armor crafting pretty fast -- you want to get it to 80 so you can build top tier armor -- and also generate a lot of money as the quality of gear increases.

You can train your recruits in attack and strength without putting them in danger. There are training dummies in the police station for attack and you can build strength by filling a person's inventory with iron ore and having them carry someone (either an ally or a dead body). I usually train attack to about 12 (you can go to 15 but it's prohibitively slow) and strength to about 35.

Once you 6-8 guys with their basic training completed and some weapons, you can start trying to fight some. I recommend not equipping any armor -- you want to take damage because this increases toughness, which is quite important. Start with the easiest enemies and work your way up, and run back to town for help from the guards when you are getting wrecked.

I'll stop there since this post is getting lengthy. This strategy is quite conservative, takes some time, and isn't always the most interesting -- but you can use it to develop a solid team and resources while learning the game. After a few hours you will be strong and well-equipped enough to handle yourself out in the wild, and from there the game really opens up.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Base-building is mid to late gameplay and IMO that is how it should be.

People know settlements generate resources, so it's like having a huge target on your back. You'd better be pretty damn tough and ready to handle whatever the world throws at you.

I'm fine with that as a concept but there's two problems: The first is that means all the low tier tech shouldn't even exist. There's no point in having a tech for making paper walls and balsa wood swords if anyone actually making those things will be brutally murdered for doing so.

The second is that it doesn't mesh with the NPC factions. They have plenty of shittily defended settlements, and by the time you've got an army strong enough to fend off 30 ninja twice a day every day forever, you could have just taken over an existing mid sized town by killing everyone to a man. NPC bandits probably shouldn't be wasting their time sending elite squads out to butcher tiny camps of 4 people farming a few patches of wheat in a dusty wasteland. They should be raiding Squin and stealing all their 15,000 cat swords.

Anyways, it's a moot point for me now. My current character is a reasonably successful thief (whopping 12 strength and 0 melee defense, 2 dodge), with 30k in the bank and a snazzy specialist thief arm in his backpack, which I'm idly considering getting an arm chopped off to make use of. Will probably wait for more money to get all borged up at once though. Anyways, I'm long past the point where mining for ore or farming plants would be even remotely useful to me.

Question: what is the difference between stealth KO and kidnapping? KO'd people can just be picked up anyways right? Why would you ever use the kidnap option?

 

[Zanzoken]

Well the low-tier tech thing is a pretty minor concern isn't it? I haven't experimented too much with base building (only built a couple settlements so far) and I never used the basic walls. It may be possible to identify a purpose for them though. And sometimes in RPGs there is an aspect of "just because you can, doesn't mean you should". I think that is a neat thing about the genre.

Your point about the NPC factions is decent, but in my experience guards are pretty strong and there are at least a few of them in each town. If the game was designed for NPC factions raiding each other all the time then I am guessing the devs would have placed more. Each major faction also has roaming squads who could act as reinforcements.

And generally speaking, despite having intense disdain for one another the major factions seem content to maintain their zones of control. An upstart putting down roots in their demesne is much less tolerable, as it calls into question the faction's ability to protect itself and threatens to upset the balance of power.

I don't know the answer to your question as I haven't used stealth very much. For me the combat approach has worked well.

 

[Tovias]

A little late for the party but, I would normally use walls at the beginning as a way to funnel enemies towards a choke point, later on I would actually use a gate though. Even the shit tier walls did the job so I was wondering if the update that allows the AI to attack walls made them completely ignore chokepoints or what.

Spoiler

 

[Junmarko]

Played a few hours of current build. It's progressed a lot since I backed it (2012) nice surprise!

Exploration is good, world map clearly has had A LOT of work put into it, very impressive. Interesting lore/factions - campaign starting options.

A lot of the mechanics seem automated though, rarely makes you feel involved outside spectating - & don't care much for base-building. Combat could use a few more commands/UI tags as they seem to have gone the "Total War" route, might as well go all the way with it (victor/loser % bars, better squad customisation etc)

Trading badly needs custom tags & "sell all junk" option.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Zanzoken]

96% of recent reviews are positive. I am surprised that as the game gets more popular we aren't seeing people throw tantrums about the difficulty. Not that the game is actually that hard -- but it's also not very intuitive and getting your ass kicked is essentially the only way to progress.

 

[Mustawd]

96% of recent reviews are positive. I am surprised that as the game gets more popular we aren't seeing people throw tantrums about the difficulty. Not that the game is actually that hard -- but it's also not very intuitive and getting your ass kicked is essentially the only way to progress.

Kenshi also has almost twice as many reviews as PoE2. Which kind of tells you how much more Kenshi’s fanbase is excited compared to PoE2’s. When I saw they had 5,700+ reviews, I was extremely surprised.

 

[Zanzoken]

I really hope it gets good Steam placement tomorrow and during the Winter promotion. That is the #1 thing that drives sales.

 

[Mustawd]

Zombra do ypu have a question or something? I don’t understand your rating.

 

[Zombra]

Zombra do ypu have a question or something? I don’t understand your rating.

I use

as an "Oh my, that is shocking/surprising" when

is inappropriate due to its negative "wtf am I reading mustawd. are you stupid or something" attitude. I was as surprised as you to learn the volume of reviews compared to PoE2's.

 

[Mustawd]

Zombra do ypu have a question or something? I don’t understand your rating.

I use

as an "Oh my, that is shocking/surprising" when

is inappropriate due to its negative "wtf am I reading mustawd. are you stupid or something" attitude. I was as surprised as you to learn the volume of reviews compared to PoE2's.

Maybe try using “What?”. The lil mouse.

 

[santino27]

Zombra do ypu have a question or something? I don’t understand your rating.

I use

as an "Oh my, that is shocking/surprising" when

is inappropriate due to its negative "wtf am I reading mustawd. are you stupid or something" attitude. I was as surprised as you to learn the volume of reviews compared to PoE2's.

Maybe try using “What?”. The lil mouse.

That's a koala not a mouse.

 

[Mustawd]

Zombra do ypu have a question or something? I don’t understand your rating.

I use

as an "Oh my, that is shocking/surprising" when

is inappropriate due to its negative "wtf am I reading mustawd. are you stupid or something" attitude. I was as surprised as you to learn the volume of reviews compared to PoE2's.

Maybe try using “What?”. The lil mouse.

That's a koala not a mouse.

Jesus...my eyesight is shit...

 

[Jinn]

Button parade has gotten way out of control.

 

[Alienman]

So how is the performance nowadays?

Really excited to start playing again, but last time I tried it, the game had some major slowdowns.

 

[Jinn]

So how is the performance nowadays?

Really excited to start playing again, but last time I tried it, the game had some major slowdowns.

Last time I played (last week), performance seemed a fair amount better for me.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

I am so happy they managed to release it!

 

[Mustawd]

I am so happy they managed to release it!

You only say that cuz it’s not FPP.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Actually i play FPP games i just dislike the prospectively wrong shooter like eyes on neck retardness of almost every first person shooter around. I play Arma3.

I think this guys really deserve a lot of praise for what they done and kenshi is a game that gave me so many hours of fun and truly emergent gameplay ((Cyberpunk unlikely since they talk of emergent gameplay and then the game is just another generic FPS with lite roleplay elements.))

 

[HoboForEternity]

so is this gud

 

[HoboForEternity]

wow this looks good actually. what the fuck?

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

Go brother follow us under the burning sun make your ennemies bite the dust.

 

[HoboForEternity]

looks like gothic, even the jank looks the same, but bigger world and more free world.
i am scared rn