Comment on RimWorld - Odyssey expansion and update 1.6 out now!
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I want to like Rimworld but every time I even think of giving it another go it is like a massive wave of fans come out of the woodwork to scream about how they are all cannibals with slaves locked up to make pleasure farms and just… yeah.
Also I am not a fan of the storyteller system. It is nice that you get some variety but it mostly just boils down to tedium (and I think most players just switch to Random Ricky or whatever so it won’t actively destroy their colonies?). And, overall, I don’t like that you can go from success to wipe in like ten days. I am not saying everything needs to be Dwarf Fortress “Oh… we have been in a fail state for ten years…” but I do prefer there to be a long enough time period to actually realize I done fucked up.
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.
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 prefer to play rich farmers in power armor. The colony wealth keeps attracting raiders, who we slaughter for their loot.
Random Randy is for the people who want the destruction of their colony.
I prefer the “Pheobe Chillax” one that allows me to just build and recruit with only occasional raids from enemies and/or natural disasters.
Rimworld is very customizable in this regard, and you can swap your ‘storyteller’ at any point mid-run.
Chillax is known to wipe floors with players tho, because she’s not really that more lenient, she’s just lazy. Delays the raid, so you build up wealth and then boom, Army of Armaggedon at your doors.
Randy is…Random. You may get 10 raids one after another, and strive to survive with great losses. Or you may have a few chill seasons to build up. It’s…fun. It doesn’t try to actively kill you, it doesn’t feel just delayed, it’s just story generating.
Randy Random is for the Leroy Jenkins of Rimworld players.
_cryptagion@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 months ago
I mean, you don’t have to commit war crimes. It’s just funny, especially when it means your colony dies in a spectacular and unintentional fashion.
If you prefer something more relaxed and less Geneva violating, your storyteller settings will let you configure the perfect game. I’ve personally played pacifist tree people who took an oath of nonviolence and charity, and had just as much fun as the tavern keeper run I did, and the sadistic vampire cult that uses humans as blood bags run.
Rimworld is all about finding what you enjoy, and doing that till you want to try something else.