While it’s a pretty good vpn all round that’s super easy to set and forget, I’ve been having issues the last ~6 months in Australia with the CIDR ranges getting blocked by Google, Reddit, and the like. It’s annoying to have it run fine for a few days, then suddenly have every second thing I do needing to solve a captcha for it.

Try the freemium tier for a while and see if it works for you - I may be wrong and you’ll run a whole month with nothing, but never hurts to verify.

Read up on your local laws, in Australia for example it’s required that 3 basic methods of cash, cheque, and bank transfer are accepted, may be something similar for you

Yeah I don’t think I’ve ever had a bad game honestly, the worst it gets is when the bots spike again and people start raging

Yeah ps4 works a charm, the hard part for me was figuring out why an Xbox controller didn’t. Turns out some of the older models had deprecated Bluetooth that it couldn’t connect to, so went with a ps4 one instead.

Fair enough if combat isn’t as much your thing! I find the stories that are generated to be excellent, and there tends to be more combat than most similar games which is why I focused more on it.

I was doing great up until ships kept crashing

My usual approach here is to either bombard it with mortars, have a trader “accidentally” set it off, or if neither are available set up a lot of traps and sandbags and get ready for a battle. Make sure you always have plenty of cover, and for psychics especially destroy them sooner to minimise the effects. If they’re the newer style of mechanoid raid, you may need to get really close and throw a few explosives in there or otherwise be inside the area and have everyone attack at once.

You can start building whenever you’re ready really, but definitely have a good defence set up before you start. For components I usually send a few people off with cattle to carry everything back from a friendly town (since traders can be somewhat sparse at times), and if you trade enough you may even be able to request reinforcements. I try to make sure everyone has the best armor and weapons I can afford/make - if you’ve got golden tiles but not much better than dusters, then a lot more deaths are likely. Even with the best gear, one of my characters was once killed by a lucky shot in the eye from a measly bow!

If you’re more for the survival aspect then definitely feel free to keep it on lower difficulties (I often do at the start), and you can usually make do without much strategy as long as you have good gear, decent cover, and a medic on standby with the best meds you can afford. Turrets or other friendlies are often great distractions, and if they’re taking the bullets then none of your colonists are.

Edit: I’d also add that learning from mistakes is great for all areas of life, if you can look at why you failed (not enough farms, too little meds, etc.) and learn from it then you’re going to do better the next time. Even if the general strategy stays the same, small changes can make a massive difference.

So a couple of tips I’ve learnt along the way: what makes a killbox work at all is managing how you can be attacked in the first place. If you can decide the battlefield and delay them as long as possible to be fully prepared, then you’re going to be a lot better off. Use traps everywhere, have more turrets than you do people, use artillery when you can, and give your enemy no cover to work with. It doesn’t have to be a killbox, but plenty of damage along the way and natural choke points can often defeat a raid before they can even score a hit.

The main point of wealth is that it scales the size of an attack proportionally. People have the greatest weight for wealth, so make sure you can hold off a raid before recruiting 20 prisoners. I don’t usually worry too much about keeping wealth low, but you see harder raids if your wealth has outpaced your defence.

The wiki also has plenty of solid strategies for defence if you’re stumped, and often working with the environment you’ve got can be much more fun than creating an artificial killbox (in my opinion anyway). Good defence is the basis for completing any of the quests I’ve found, so surviving long enough should absolutely help complete them.

Edit: I’d 100% recommend the game to anyone who’s interested in a colony builder that’s got a decent focus on survival, I’ve seen many hilarious and really fun things happen with a story that comes simply from chance.

If it’s over VPN, then it could be your VPN server got flagged. If not, then it’s probably just an unusual number of queries. Usually works to wait a few minutes either way.

(Intel)[https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005511/wireless.html) has a list of compatible cards and their drivers which may help, follow the instructions and reboot to run usually.

If it’s an adaptor there’s odds it’s not designed for it, I had issues with a USB mounted adaptor myself.