I’ve played a lot of rimworld and I think the main problem with it is the developers solution to difficulty after the early game is just more and bigger raids.
Everybody starts building kill boxes to deal with raids being the only challenge after midgame. Developers response is new types of raids that bypass kill boxes (drop, breacher).
Give us some different threats or ways to mitigate raids like paying off raiders or building outposts.
This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you’re located or anything else.
It sorta makes sense as you’re a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues (“immersion” is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.
To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy, not just the event timing system.
Auto scaling feels good IF it encourages you to play smarter or adapt.
Rimworld’s model encourages you to build the same death funnels/mazes on every single colony.
Which I think is my biggest complaint. Okay, no, the edgelord bullshit is my biggest. My SECOND biggest is that Rimworld is just so clearly designed around an optimum path. Whereas games like Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included very much are about actually running a colony. Making sure needs are satisfied and prioritizing them. Not “oh. Okay. The game decided I had too much food stockpiled so five meteors just hit my solar farm”.
If you are being hit by meteors you have a mod enabled. Mods can be very imbalanced. You don’t need to build a kill box or a specific defense to succeed. Some ARE more optimal but not required at all.
I’ve played a lot of rimworld and I think the main problem with it is the developers solution to difficulty after the early game is just more and bigger raids.
Everybody starts building kill boxes to deal with raids being the only challenge after midgame. Developers response is new types of raids that bypass kill boxes (drop, breacher).
Give us some different threats or ways to mitigate raids like paying off raiders or building outposts.
Are there mods to make that part more interesting? The colony building and management is my favorite part of the game.
Custom storytellers. I also like Vanilla Outposts Expanded. Send pawns to form defensive outposts that reduce raid sizes.
Those sound great. Will look! Thanks.
This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you’re located or anything else.
It sorta makes sense as you’re a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues (“immersion” is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.
To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy, not just the event timing system.
Auto scaling feels good IF it encourages you to play smarter or adapt.
Rimworld’s model encourages you to build the same death funnels/mazes on every single colony.
Which I think is my biggest complaint. Okay, no, the edgelord bullshit is my biggest. My SECOND biggest is that Rimworld is just so clearly designed around an optimum path. Whereas games like Dwarf Fortress or Oxygen Not Included very much are about actually running a colony. Making sure needs are satisfied and prioritizing them. Not “oh. Okay. The game decided I had too much food stockpiled so five meteors just hit my solar farm”.
If you are being hit by meteors you have a mod enabled. Mods can be very imbalanced. You don’t need to build a kill box or a specific defense to succeed. Some ARE more optimal but not required at all.