Prelude to a Sequel?

[peterpiper007]

A Challenge for you modders looking to make a name for yourself, or who just like the idea. Take the existing world and factions of Kenshi and make it sci-fi with new world immersion and gameplay features. This can be done in a few (but substantial) ways:

1) Guns! Fancy laser guns…

2) A dystopian government military faction who own the guns and who will absolutely murder anyone who even thinks about picking up a gun. These are small (6-8 person) patrols of humanoids in armored environmentally-sealed encounter suits who carry plasma rifles, and who are dropped off and picked up by aerial transport vehicles. Good luck with that. These soldiers are not peacekeepers in that they don’t give a hoot about anyone on the backwater waystation world they are currently assigned to. Their only mission to maintain planetary control and collect the annual tax.

3) A new “tax” system. All major faction cities must pay a “tax” to the government forces who patrol the world. But in a decimated ruin like the world we live in, what are they taxing? Babies. You ever wonder why you see no children in Kenshi? It’s because they are the single most valuable thing in the world, and are heavily guarded in special places. The tax is collected biennially at one baby per ten residents per city. For every ten residents in a settlement, if you had 50% males and 50% females producing one child per pair every year of their life you would produce 5 babies every year – population growth! However, people don’t breed annually like that, you have disproportionate men to women ratios, Skeletons, deaths, etc. At best you can hope for 1-2 babies per year per 10 residents. This helps us to understand why there are so many slave-loving factions – baby farms – and tax fodder. You see, when a faction city doesn’t make quota they must choose from their adult population a number of people equal to the remaining amount owed. Those people are lined up and shot. This is also why old people are freaky rare. What do they do with the babies? Nobody knows. Why do they shoot people? Well the whole point is population control... For sake of gameplay no realistic mathematical figures need to be applied since the populations of the world of Kenshi are figurative to limit game lag, who’s to say Stack isn’t a bustling city of hundreds of crazy Okranites?

4) A new building for all settlements: Nursery. This building cannot be entered and has no interior cell, it is interacted with like a resource hopper, you must continually provide food and medicine into its inventory. Doing so will create a steady but very slow child population growth rate which can be checked by interacting with the building. The building will have to be substantially upgraded to increase the child population limit. Also, this creates a new Raid type which only occurs before tax time whereby enemy factions try to steal your children. There need not be any actual children characters for this to work, just a static resource in the inventory that cannot be stacked (much like AI Cores), depicting a swaddled bundle implied to contain an infant. Skeleton-only settlements are exempt from this tax as they are not considered "real", but if a Skeleton is part of an organic community they will count towards the population.

5) Flying Transports: If remotely possible with this game’s engine, a flying transport craft which “lands” and “departs” when government soldiers are dropped off or picked up for routine patrols or at triggered events. If directly attacked while “landed” they should have their own defenses and animations, but should not be actually invincible.

6) New higher-level research: So, you don’t want to keep paying the “tax”? What’s that, you want flying vehicles and fancy fire-spewing sticks too? At some point AI Cores and ancient lab raids just aren’t going to cut it anymore when the government troops easily outclass you all day long. You’ll eventually have to take the fight to them to capture and reverse engineer their tech. This works just like farming, place two of a given piece of equipment (2 rifles, 2 boots, 2 radios, etc…) into the research bench with other research material to create some hybrid POS tech that allows you to survive just a little longer against the inevitable offensive that will come when the government finds out you attacked their patrol. What you get won’t be what they have, but it will be much better than what anyone else has. Why can’t you just use their stolen gear? Well of course I don’t know what a bio-encryption system is Mr. Skeleton, can you explain it again? As you unlock more advanced tech new map encounters will pop up, such as crashed government satellites, missing patrol locations, etc. Eventually you will be able to research ways to use actual government gear.

Why do any of this?
- It continues the theme that “you are not the chosen one..”, as neither is your whole darn planet. You were born on a planet conquered and decimated so long ago no one even remembers what happened, and your world continues as a backwater and entirely unimportant outpost for a presumably vast intergalactic civilization which most likely forgot you exist. And you were so proud when you finally beat the Dust Bandit King!
- It answers a lot of world immersion questions, and creates a few new ones. What happened way back when? Your world grew just barely advanced enough to be a threat to something much larger and ruin and conquest were the result. Why don’t the government troops care about the Skeletons, they’re advanced tech right? Last years “nanny bots” are more advanced, don’t make me laugh. Plus, they don’t make babies. Why don’t the government forces patrol the places with the best ancient tech? Because Leviathans and Blood Spiders don’t recognize their authoritay! Why do the Okranites swear off technology? They don’t want to incur the wrath of the government.
- Won’t the Hivers outnumber all the other races since they are insect people that can breed in large numbers? Yeah, that’s why they’re already more populous. Also, the larger the population, the larger the tax owed… so, that sucks right?
- It creates an interesting “end game” dynamic if you do pursue conflict with the government. Can you hope to fight them on your own or will you need to ally with a major faction? Will you have to wipe out your rivals to access the resources or manpower they possess (use a slavery or prisoner recruitment feature to grow your population). Ultimately, if you can overturn the planetary garrison you will gain access to their weapons and resources, it’s too bad you can’t take the fight to them though…

…. segway to Kenshi sequel: Space Pirate Kenshi! As your rebellion succeeded in overthrowing the tyrannical yoke of the government your planet fast becomes a bastion for the wanted and forgotten – a den of scum and villainy at the edge of civilized space! Now you can take the war to them!


A note on this forum post: I am not coder, scripter, modder, hacker, computer-anything-savvy. If some or all of this is possible, and you think it’s neat, go for it. If not, thanks for reading this far. If you want more ideas I'm happy to reply to posts.

[Hatsune_Neko]

Normal guns can be added and already have been by moders.

the rest. you talking about basically a new game overall. and pretty much not able to be added to Kenshi.