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

[IHaveHugeNick]

So this any good?

 

[Obsequious Approbation]

This game sure doesn't fuck around, I see.

This was my first attempt at Kenshi. I barely escaped slavery at some Holy Nation mine with a group of useless nobodies. Trouble is, now everyone is starving. So I sneak off to the south, avoid the slaver town and discover a farm. I proceed to slaughter some of the cattle here so that my men finally stop being so weak and malnourished. One of them cooks some 15 pieces of fresh meat, but before my poor sods can get to eating them, a small army of starving bandits overruns the farm. They proceed to beat the shit out of us (but not the local peasants, for some reason), and start looting us. I start getting flashbacks to what usually happened in Gothic at this particular juncture, but no, these bandits are victims too -- which is why they took only our food and left us comatose in a ditch.

 

[Tovias]

Don't turn your back on hungry bandits, they are no different from river raptors. At least the latter can give you profit form their hide.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I don't like how hard it is to kill people at times. Makes me wish there was a "Finish Off" command with KOed people that would prevent large battles from dragging on as people come in and out of consciousness to fight a bit more and only to get KOed again.

Problem is, if you give the player that ability then you also have to give it to enemies, which removes the key element of the game where taking an asskicking is the key to growth.

my first deaths, which amount to all my deaths, have been slow, painful, watching my character take hours to die, immobile, just a few steps from the city walls. boosting regeneration while giving a 2-5-10% chance for an npc to kill you off seems to me a huge improvement over this f9fest.

in the meantime, i was trying this enslaved start, it took a short while to realise it'd have been better to leave the game running to come back later with a much improved strength. after lunch i came back and found a new member of the team joined, a 20-30 skills fighter who lost an arm, and one of my starting characters who managed to escape: he was all by himself, far from the camp, "ex-slave", almost starved to death. what are you doing? back to the camp!

 

[toro]

Another long post.

Spoiler

Some maps are worth more cats than others.

Battle aftermath.

Found a Ninja's Tower. Proceed to termination.

My 1st Ancient book

Ninjas were hoarding Rum and Books. Good to know.

Went to the Grid area. Found another ruin. It was EMPTY!!! EMPTY FFS!!!

But close to the Workshop Complex I found an unmarked Ruin :D

Filled with goodies

Then I went for the Ancient Ruins in the middle of the Crater (Grid area). Security Spiders are pretty brutal.

I got like 8 Ancient books which meant it was time to go back to Hub. Unfortunately the Beak Things decided to throw a Fuckfest in my honor.

Question: Is there some kind of trigger!? Each time I loot something good they start spawning like crazy.

Found a bar with enough beds for my party. And a new party member. Look at the money.

No pictures: Reached Hub. Research Tech 4. Then I decided to recruit more Shek.

Noobs 1st encounter with reality Basically Molly is better than all of them combined

Tried to mine/craft and it became boring. Combined all forces and went for another Lost Library. 50% of my squad got rekt from Red Spiders.
Fun fact: Half of my squad are noobs therefore it went better than expected.
Note: Pack bull Toughness is 36! I need more of these.

The Lost Library was somewhat EMPTY but I managed to find something: coordinates to a Swamped Lab!?

No pictures: The Swamped Lab is EMPTY! By this point it looks like a recurrent theme with my play-through.

However I manage to found a philosophical robot

No pictures: Fucked around the South-West part of the map. I felt cocky until this bastard showed up and proceeded to beat the crap of my entire party

I have no idea who he is or what he is wearing. Just look at his smug face!!!

Game goals updated: need to find him and kill him

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

holy fucking fucker fuck of the fucked fuck =_= i was sure i saved on a separate slot, instead it looks like i only quicksaved my slaves game, so when i went back to another squad i erased all my progress.

edit: thinking of it again, i did save on a separate file. but i did it while the world game was still loading. potential bug, be careful.

 

[toro]

I think I just won the game

Spoiler

As I said before I was fucking around the South-West part of the world.

My team was almost out of food when a pack of Garru had the bad idea to come near me
Note: Nice emergent gameplay.

No, no, NOOO!!! The area is not noob friendly.

By dumb luck I stumbled upon this Ancient TechLab

Found one AI Core! I was ecstatic ...

...but then found more! For a total of: 4 AI cores, 16 Ancient Books, 2 Engineering Research!!! All in the same place!

Mu lost a leg for this find. A small sacrifice to pay for such a treasure

My favorite character is the Pack bull: he is doing 100+ damage on Skin Spiders. Absolutely insane. More damage except 2 of my own characters.

I'm rushing towards Hub. I have research to do. Tech 5 is waiting for me.

 

[Zanzoken]

Noble hunters are such cuntstains. Can't wait to run into one with my squad (update coming soon) and put him the fuck down.

 

[Tovias]

I think I just won the game

I've cleaned the entire grid and crater without finding more than two cores, lucky you.

 

[Beastro]

Ran through Heft at night and decided to check out what Emp Tengu had. Turns out he has a max grade katana I could grab at a decent percentage. Went on a leader hunt and found the Shek chick and Traders leader had a fragment axe and long-sword respectively. Got a wakashashi off the slaver chick in the north of the great desert too.

 

[Zanzoken]

I decide to increase the party size to three...

So as it happens, we're now at 7 members. The new additions:

- Phoenix, an escaped servant from the Holy Nation who I rescued from a prisoner pole in the Foglands.
- Juno, one of two slaves I rescued from a plantation in the UCs.
- Wish, the other rescued slave.
- Rin, from where I recruited Shryke but reskinned her to be a character I had used in a prior campaign.

The last few play sessions have been fairly grindy and focused on training the new recruits. Stealth and crossbow skills are coming along nicely, but melee is lagging behind, and I realize the ninja rags just don't offer enough protection for melee combat. I decide it's time to train Rin as an armorsmith and begin to long process to leveling her up to 80 so I can craft Specialist gear. I decide to build a workshop in Mongrel since there are two large sources of iron right outside the city gates.

Spoiler

I end up going with the Armored Rags set, but cheat a little by modding the Crossbow penalty on the body armor to 10% (down from 20%). It's annoying that most penalties don't reduce as the quality of the armor increases (the stealth penalty on chainmail is a notable exception).

Aesthetically I think it looks pretty sweet, and although I realize this is essentially akin to playing with barbie dolls, I give no fucks.

Spoiler

Spoiler

I have also developed Izumi as a scientist and made a lot of progress on the tech tree. We journey to the Scraphouse and pick up several Ancient Science books, Engineering Research, and -- in a really lucky case of RNG -- three AI Cores. I have been importing a new save every time the devs patch the game, but this is the one and only time I will purchase ancient tech. It's no fun if you can just buy all the rare artifacts you want.

Lots of good progress overall though. Our weapons and armor are now on point, and I am on the way to making these bitches into decent ninjas.

 

[Beastro]

I end up going with the Armored Rags set, but cheat a little by modding the Crossbow penalty on the body armor to 10% (down from 20%). It's annoying that most penalties don't reduce as the quality of the armor increases (the stealth penalty on chainmail is a notable exception).

Dustcoats are pretty damn OP that add benefits while also having a massive amount of good coverage.

I recommend Samurai clothpants over armour rags, at least if you find em higher quaity. Greater and higher coverage for less resistance and not penalties.

I still don't know how important coverage is, but the 60% on rags seems to be too little unless you get the best.

 

[Zanzoken]

Dustcoats are pretty damn OP that add benefits while also having a massive amount of good coverage.

I recommend Samurai clothpants over armour rags, at least if you find em higher quaity. Greater and higher coverage for less resistance and not penalties.

I still don't know how important coverage is, but the 60% on rags seems to be too little unless you get the best.

Good suggestions, and I did buy the Dustcoat blueprint so that's an option. The coverage on the rags definitely leaves something to be desired -- particularly in the stomach -- but their cut resistance efficiency is 90%, so you get more of a "true" DR than with lighter armors. They've done fairly well so far, albeit I've only been in a few fights since equipping.

 

[Beastro]

Rescue mission time!

Been working up my two skellies skills in preparation for breaking Agnu out of the Tower of Abuse. It's crawling with skellies and two names high lv ones so I doubt I could fight my way in, but I could use my main guys crazy athetlics to aggro and empty the place running off while the two others sneak in, break her out and make off together.

Whether or not it turns out well I think I'm gonna go look out for some new uniques, mainly some hiver guys since they seem to have less food consumption.

 

[toro]

I end up going with the Armored Rags set, but cheat a little by modding the Crossbow penalty on the body armor to 10% (down from 20%). It's annoying that most penalties don't reduce as the quality of the armor increases (the stealth penalty on chainmail is a notable exception).

Dustcoats are pretty damn OP that add benefits while also having a massive amount of good coverage.

I recommend Samurai clothpants over armour rags, at least if you find em higher quaity. Greater and higher coverage for less resistance and not penalties.

I still don't know how important coverage is, but the 60% on rags seems to be too little unless you get the best.

I was looking for that blueprint. I guess it's not around the Hub.

 

[Saduj]

Just took down the Tower of Abuse, which I found by buying an engineers map. By far my biggest score:

Spoiler

2 Meitou weapons + 2 masterwork robotic limbs + tons of valuable tech items including 3 AI cores + free soldier skeleton recruit (stats are all 1 except 50 strength).

I had ten in my squad at the time. One guy has stats in the 40s, 4 others with 40/30s, 3 with 30/20s and two in the low 20s. Gear probably averaged out to lower side of mid range.

I had to cheese a little bit:

Spoiler

Shows up as "ancient control tower" on the map before you go there. 1st attempt, I cleared out the bottom floor. Some enemies, including a boss, had rushed down from upstairs so I thought I had cleared the building. I went upstairs with my wounded squad. Full party wipe on 2nd floor. But I had seen the Meitou Sabre so I had to try again. Turns out, I had gotten lucky in that first fight because the next few times I tried, the entire enemy force would rush down the ramp from the 2nd floor and kick my ass. The trick was to keep the fighting as far away from the ramp to the 2nd floor as possible at the start, which is not hard. Kill/disarm the thralls downstairs. When an enemy got up, I moved my guys closer to the ramp briefly and the boss with the Sabre came down with a few more thralls. Party was still in decent shape so I then went up the ramp and finished the polearm boss and the remaining thralls. I imagine a better party wouldn't have to worry about the enemy numbers so much but fighting that many skeletons was tough for my guys. When my party went down, the skeletons seemed to just want them out. Carried them outside without even looting them and left them there. I reloaded because I didn't want to waste all the time healing. All in all, has to be one of the best risk/reward locations in the game given the 2 unique weapons.

I'm having fun just exploring the map and looking for valuable tech items to sell without getting everyone killed. Not very interested in base building at the moment, but I've been holding onto "unique" research items. My question is: How unique are these items really? Both the blueprints and the books stack and I've even seen them for sale so they don't seem to be truly unique. I'm sitting on well over 100K of this stuff and I don't do the stealth/stealing thing so this represents a huge portion of my party's overall wealth. Do each of these items unlock a specific part of a tech tree or do you just need X number of them to progress along a chosen tree? I'm somewhat reluctant to sell truly unique research items but if they are just a rare commodity, I care much less.

 

[Beastro]

I was looking for that blueprint. I guess it's not around the Hub.

It's in Mongrel. If you know where the Amrour King is, he also sells em.

 

[Saduj]

Rescue mission time!

Been working up my two skellies skills in preparation for breaking Agnu out of the Tower of Abuse. It's crawling with skellies and two names high lv ones so I doubt I could fight my way in, but I could use my main guys crazy athetlics to aggro and empty the place running off while the two others sneak in, break her out and make off together.

Whether or not it turns out well I think I'm gonna go look out for some new uniques, mainly some hiver guys since they seem to have less food consumption.

Was writing my last post when yours popped up.... It is worth clearing the tower for the loot and not too hard (see spoilers). All my guys are unique recruits so far too. Mostly free ones but I did pay for Kang and Infinite Wingwang. Kang is really worth it.

 

[toro]

Spoiler

Pretty funny

Rescue mission time!

Been working up my two skellies skills in preparation for breaking Agnu out of the Tower of Abuse. It's crawling with skellies and two names high lv ones so I doubt I could fight my way in, but I could use my main guys crazy athetlics to aggro and empty the place running off while the two others sneak in, break her out and make off together.

Spoiler

I've sent my noob team to a Holy Nation city and for some reason: two of them committed crimes. One of them (Mu) got caught.

My solution was to lock-pick the door and then run as fast as possible. The guy had something like 60 Athletics and no guard could catch him

Whether or not it turns out well I think I'm gonna go look out for some new uniques, mainly some hiver guys since they seem to have less food consumption.

Don't worry about food. You can hunt Garru, Wolfes and Beak Things. Use campfire to roast meat and profit.

Half of my party is Shek and those guys/gals eat like crazy.

 

[toro]

I'm having fun just exploring the map and looking for valuable tech items to sell without getting everyone killed. Not very interested in base building at the moment, but I've been holding onto "unique" research items. My question is: How unique are these items really? Both the blueprints and the books stack and I've even seen them for sale so they don't seem to be truly unique. I'm sitting on well over 100K of this stuff and I don't do the stealth/stealing thing so this represents a huge portion of my party's overall wealth. Do each of these items unlock a specific part of a tech tree or do you just need X number of them to progress along a chosen tree? I'm somewhat reluctant to sell truly unique research items but if they are just a rare commodity, I care much less.

The really rare things are (in order): AI Cores (very rare), Engineering Research (rare), Ancient Books (pretty common in small quantities, rare in bigger quantities) and Books (sold at every corner).

Spoiler

The rare stuff is randomly placed in game's world on new game therefore don't sell: AI Cores, Engineering Research and Ancient Books.

You will need at least 200k cats each to buy all the blueprints for weapons and armors. That being said, you can economize a lot if you know what you want. I buy all of them cause I'm an idiot.

Anyway, there are 6 tech levels where each tech level allows you to build some new stuff (probably in each branch). You start from Tech level 1 and then you can research for a superior tech level like below:

Research Tech Level 2 costs 6 Books
Research Tech Level 3 costs 10 Books
Research Tech Level 4 costs 4 Ancient Books
Research Tech Level 5 costs 8 Ancient Books
Research Tech Level 6 costs 2 AI Cores

I cannot say which new facilities are unlocked when you upgrade the Tech level but usually new stuff is available for research and build.

Most of the time you only need Books and Ancient Books to research on each branch but for the Industry and Crafting branches you need Engineering Research. Something like 4 of these.

From what I saw these are the best end game research things:
- Crafting branch (4 AI Cores) Craft EdgeType 1 weapons,
- Industry branch (1 AI Core) Automated Mining Tech,
- Farming branch (1 AI Core) Hydroponics (grow plants inside buildings).

Honestly, I'm trying to craft the best weapons but I'm not sure crafting is really worth the effort. The system seems to be half arsed as in: (1) the research requirements are quite chaotic, (2) the trading mechanic is fucked up (therefore good luck if you want to craft, mine, farm and profit) and (3) I think the weapons found in ruins are at least one tier above what it can be crafted (which is a real disappointment for me).

That's about it. Sorry if it didn't make sense but I'm tired.

 

[Major_Blackhart]

This is so awesome. Someone needs to create a LP thread for these.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Can't the mods do something and put spoiler tags on these things? Sheesh. Anyway, I decided to play ATOM RPG, but this is definitely on my short list of games to play next.

 

[Beastro]

Spoiler

Success! Plan worked perfectly, but had to import and respawn Agnu, he died somehow and wasn't in a cage. Anyway lured everyone out, then my bots went in and broken him out, gave him the gear I brought and went the other way.

Plan changed, though. Screamer the False was with the army and I got Joe to start taking pot shots at him as the three bots came around to meet him. Hid Agnu and started kiting everyone trying to work him down. Was rough in places cus Sadneils running wasn't as good as it could've been and took some damage., but managed to KO Screamer. Things then changed huge as I got Neil to grab him and we shifted into a fighting retreat as Joe took pot shots at the following army to slow them down and allow Neil and Agnu room between them, while if they got too Burn would turn around and take a swipe with his Paladin's Cross, which mostly got blocked, but once caught 3-4 guys and really disrupted the pursuing pack. Ran south for the nearest zone away from Venge and succeed, resulting in the thralls giving up and walking away.

I noticed Screamer was dying so I plopped him down and started healing him up, only for him to wake up. That resulted in everyone beating him back down, but shit he was tough and didn't drop until all his limbs were crippled. That now gives me the thought: Don't bring him back for a bounty, but prep a cage for him and use him as a living practice dummy.

I'll be back for Ponk once I can get everyone back to Heng and build their cages.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

I think the weapons found in ruins are at least one tier above what it can be crafted (which is a real disappointment for me).

I think you can craft up to edge 2 tier. Edeg 3 tier is the highest mass-produced weapon tier which can be bought (or found, but I never did).
There is 1 level above which is reserved for a few unique weapons which belong to specific npcs/put by hand.
Surprisingly, as far as armors go - you can craft highest tier armor (afaik) by yourself.

 

[Elim]

Armor is confirmed by me, I run around with the best kit (Masterwork) and that is easily reachable.

To be honest, Edge weapons are already pretty much overkill for anything.
That stuff should be found and not be easily craftable.