Yeah. I like RimWorld but it constantly throws ridiculously powered raids against my startup village no matter what difficulty settings I use. It's a story generator... but the stories aren't really that varied in my opinion.
The problem is that there are two ways to play RimWorld which will lead to very different results there.
A.) You do what "makes sense" to a normal human being dealing with a real situation.
B.) You know the algorithms and minmax.
If do A.) the game can be incredibly frustrating as you watch the colony you spent hours carefully building go down in flames despite the fact that you seemingly did nothing wrong.
In contrast, if you do B.) the game becomes so dead easy that you can't even impress other players anymore by starting alone, naked, as a tribal, on an ice sheet - with one leg!
Have you ever wondered why RimWorld likes to throw that "Imperial Deserter" quest at you right at the beginning of the game?
A.) people will think "This is silly, how could I possibly defeat an Imperial raid right at the start?"
Meanwhile B.) people are like "Sure, no problem. I can build a wodden trap corridor on day 1 which will kill the entire raid before they can even see a single of my pawns."
Also note that RimWorld raids are scaled according to colony wealth and number of pawns in the colony. Thus if you are an A.) player you are probably accidentally signing your own death sentence by e.g building fancy bed rooms for your pawns. Or givign your craftspeople chairs to sit on while they work..
I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make it a less frutstating experience for A.) players. Cheesey tactics like kill boxes which exploit the stupidity of the AI, and seemingly non-sensical decisions like not letting your colonists have chairs, should only be required at the highest difficulty level IMO.
Francis John on Youtube basically did this recently. He talks a good bit about the math of the game, and he minmaxes his minmaxing. You could just spend all your time cheesing the game, or you can cheese it when it doesn't really affect whatever narrative you are trying for in your playthrough. There are materials in your environment that ding you even if you don't gather or process them. There are materials that ding you less once processed. Knowing what's what mean you don't mine a mineral formation until you need the material.
If his camp wasn't constantly attacked by giant furry creatures he would have probably been toast. The RNG kept throwing him meat and cold weather clothing materials. He had to kite them but then real hunters of megafauna kind of do the same thing. He fed his animals meat that the humans would not eat (namely, the flesh of dead raiders).
Anyway, I think if you want to understand Rimworld 'physics' more, that series is probably a decent starting place. But he also makes no bones about how frequently the game is one or two clicks away from war crimes.
I've mostly just gone back to Oxygen Not Included and make do without narrative and variation that I kind of wish were there.
I'm not surprised he's done so well with the minmaxing, he mentioned in one video his day job is a network engineer :)
The raids compensate for their dumb AI with sheer size. A smarter AI could be more challenging but use fewer soldier. And maybe the AI could adapt its tactics...like once they learn there is a big wall outside your fortress, then maybe they should park themselves outside and call sappers for support or air droppers to arrive first. Maybe the game could introduce cannons to counter wall building. And to prevent cave dwelling, maybe there could be some crucial supplies that spoil such that it is essential to have some trade, and so enemy armies instead of doing a dumb assault could instead do proper siege warfare to conquer you by depriving you of crucial supplies until you die of starvation, thrist, disease, like was done for most of human warfare history.
There's... there's something already implemented to prevent cave dwelling. Some things, actually. Just keep living in the cave, you'll meet them eventually.
Not only that, but the only defense against artillery is to build in a mountain. There isn't otherwise a defense against artillery except to go kill the artillery before it starts pounding you. And good luck doing that when you're outnumbered ten to one...
You can have mods that warn you of incoming raids. Mods that add point defense laser turrets, suck it enemy artillery! Mods that add magic, so you can send your fire mage out to huck a fireball the enemy siege outpost and cook off their ammo, or call down a firestorm and watch the chaos. Mods that make tamed animals rideable so you can root out their artillerymen with a cavalry charge. Mods that add drop ships and bombing runs so you can counterbattery them before they even get set up, and so on and so forth.
but ... that's dwarf fortress' motto too! (even if it's not 100% accurate)
The best defense is a good offense.
There are plenty of ways to solve each challenge the game throws at you.
Yep. The problem is some people want to play like A but the game seems balanced around people playing like B.
Dwarf fortress lets you opt into a lot of this madness with their biomes. You still survive in a friendly biome if you're playing like A.
And no, hand tuning every aspect of the game isn't a good option. By that point you've lost most of your players. There should be an easy default option.
Yeah tell that to my 5 pawns with bows or maybe pistols looted from a previous raid when they're attacked by 50 raiders or a mech drop or whatever...
> Meanwhile B.) people are like "Sure, no problem. I can build a wodden trap corridor on day 1 which will kill the entire raid before they can even see a single of my pawns."
Been there, done that. Then my pawns hit their own damn traps and get raided while they're in the hospital minus a leg
> Also note that RimWorld raids are scaled according to colony wealth and number of pawns in the colony. Thus if you are an A.) player you are probably accidentally signing your own death sentence by e.g building fancy bed rooms for your pawns. Or givign your craftspeople chairs to sit on while they work..
Yup, exactly.
> I think the game needs to be rebalanced somehow to make it a less frutstating experience for A.) players.
Yes.
The StarCraft player in me wants to say: work on your micro!
That being said, I myself am more of an "A.)" player. I got bored with RimWorld after I realized it's more of a puzzle game than a story game. It fooled me longer than others, but eventually, the stateless RNG nature of it becomes apparent.
(Rivers with mountains are good to defend)
Chairs for workers?? Everyone who’s familiar with Russia’s history knows that automatic cannons should go first (and they did a rather good job in my case). It is non-sensical to let workers have chairs unless they refuse to work without them. Or until all your neighbors are reduced to the status of Canada and Mexico.
It can! As the player you can fine tune just about every aspect of the storyteller you might want. You can disable events you may not like, like toxic fallout or sunspots. You can tweak raid sizes, disable certain types of raids, change the impact curves that time and/or wealth have on raid sizes, etc.
I played RimWorld that way and I had a thoroughly fun experience learning the tech-tree. It's arguably not the way the game is meant to be played, but for the casual player, it works
I've done that. But it gets repetitive when every fight has three or four or ten red pawns for every one of mine.
Good and cheap defenses are intermittent walls (which have 75% cover).