I like this! It's different from how I'd imagine it but very cool and well-executed.

Isaac_The_Khajiit

It was related to the general problem of large late-game mechanoid threats almost entirely obviating the need for players to have any economy at all, with the added problem that harder difficulty settings were in many ways easier because you got more resource deliveries from bigger raids. Economy was completely broken, and difficulties were inverted.

I'd like to add my 2 cents here about the problem I see with the late-game economy. Growing psychoid to make flake is incredibly easy once the initial struggles related to your biome have been solved, (getting greenhouses or hydroponics set up if you have a short growing season) and in the late game I usually have stacks of 400-600 flake sitting around at any given time just waiting for a trade ship to come take it off my hands. I could make a caravan to sell off the excess, but usually that feels like too much of a hassle when I can just wait for some to come to me.

On the other hand, when you get loot from raids, at least you had to work for those rewards.

This isn't a criticism, as I'm fine with how loot drops from mechanoids currently work, and I don't really have a good solution for the problem of excessive wealth in late game, unless you attempt some kind of dynamic economy in which flooding the market with one good will lower its value.

There will always be excessive wealth in late-game at a certain point, that's just the nature of how capital works. We can't involuntarily trash peoples' wealth. The game will always break down past a certain point. I have solutions to this but they're kind of involved (and in consideration).

This was more about alleviating the problem to some degree, not solving it entirely. E.g. You might have tons of flake, but converting that to other usable materials may be tricky. Versus getting massive straight deliveries of plasteel and steel and components - hyper-practical resources.

Cibranith

Thanks for clearing that up! Went to check why it was nerfed back then and the reasons given were mostly "economy" and "exploit" which made sense but also made me go "but why".

About the reward from raids I might have missed it so I checked again, they are droping from direct raids at a higher drop than clusters it seems, I got mostly clusters mid-game so that was the problem probably, clusters drop about 40%ish? of the raid drops (3700 points cluster vs raid, cluster gave 34 and raid dropped about 90)

I'll probably drop the reverse at mid game and see how it fares, on the meantime the helmets might help when 90% of the air turns into bullets from the turrets lol

Clusters generally have a big building in the middle with some loot in it (EMI dynamo or whatever), so they're supposed to handle that role. In principle. I've no doubt there is room for improvement in terms of the tuning.

So there's some missing information and zombie memes polluting this discussion, figured I'd try to shed some light.

It had nothing to do with mech assemblers. This was just one of those notions that someone invented that spreads like a meme, but it has no actual source. Mech assemblers were solved just by limiting them, we would never do something ridiculous like completely rebalance an entire enemy type for a problem that could be solved so much more narrowly.

It was related to the general problem of large late-game mechanoid threats almost entirely obviating the need for players to have any economy at all, with the added problem that harder difficulty settings were in many ways easier because you got more resource deliveries from bigger raids. Economy was completely broken, and difficulties were inverted.

We added resource rewards from the raids. They're assigned to one of the mechs (more if necessary). They'll drop piles of plasteel or components. Is this not being noticed? Is i...

They also have 2 uses now instead of 1.

EDIT: We changed it to 2 not 3 :p

I love the details in this. You can spend 60 seconds looking at it and discovering new things the whole time.

Also has me laughing pretty hard!

dalerian

I get what you mean about a framing issue.

You're saying that if it were presented as "here's a prospect, take them as a colonist or get a debuff" that would feel different to "here's your new colonist, keep them or kick them out for a debuff."

We'd at least get the illusion of a choice, even if the outcome was the same.

Technically, that's probably correct. And yes, you could extend that to other events.

And to all the things I listed. The person who's uncomfortable turning away a dying diseased stranger is probably also uncomfortable selling a lethal pleasure-drug to strangers.

Does this kind of samaritan exist? Definitely (I'm probably one myself).

Would declaring that all colonists feel that way improve the game? I don't think so.

That's building a specific moral view onto the existing colonists (one they don't already have), reducing the storytelling scope.

• Want a bunch of isolationists, maybe based around a faith or cult leader? Can do that now, won't be able to.
• Want a xenophobic tribe? No longer an option.
• Want a colony who knows that "abasia" is an Empire hoax and this person is a plant to overrule their soverign citizen rights as yeomen and thereby control them? Nope, can't do that. (Of course all colonists are rational people who accept medicinal science as real, because that's how humans are.)

But putting aside 'story telling scope' as a design goal, switch to realism. A thought experitment: when I put myself in the environment of RimWorld - a bunch of desperate survivors bombarded with life-ending threats and being regularly raided by gun-toting savages, do I think "trustingly inviting strangers into the colony" would be a healthy survival mechanic? No, I don't think so.

This is the Rim. Life is cheap. Law is whoever holds the gun, and you own only what you can defend, including your own emancipation. Trust is thin and hard-earned, and compassion is a luxury that not everyone can afford.

That is the setting, is it not?

I'm not seeing a police force. There is no "UN" nor a "League of Colonies." We are never helped by an NGO. No religious org is passing by and handing out charity, etc.

I'm seeing lawless raiders, travelling drug traders, and the closest thing to a "government" is a slave-trading Empire.

In that world - a settlement might rescue a dying stranger and patch them up, if they could spare the food, medicine, etc. But that person would be (at most) a guest, not a colonist. The patient would likely be in a secure hospital ward that probably is better described as "prison hospital."

Maybe they'd decide whether to invite the patient to join them once healed, and the patient would often accept. ("Often" because there are reasons they might not. Example: If I'm trying to reunite with my wife, I'd be forever grateful to these people for rescuing me, but I'm still leaving to find my wife.)

As an event, this would fit better if it were:

1. Here's this victim. Patch them up or not.
2. Time passed, they're healed - you have a choice to invite them to stay
3. They have a chance to accept/decline, with a high chance to accept.

"Maybe" have a consequence because this is the Rim, etc. But what consequence?

Maybe a rep hit with any nearby non-raider factions (assuming they can magically know about it)?

Maybe the slave-trading Empire takes a dim view of your lack of compassion and sends a psychic pulse to hurt people?

Maybe the human-hating mechanoids take this as a specific example of why they hate you, and send a raid?

But whatever it is, something that doesn't bake one specific moral compass into the colonists. Especially one that doesn't fit with life-is-cheap RimWorld.

TLDR; this would be enforcing a moral compass that doesn't fit the setting.

Edits: to break up wall of text and make this comment easier to read.

Colonists definitely have some specific moral beliefs, definitely. They make perfect sense for some backstories. Less so for others. This is an area of the game I've long wanted to improve.

ImAdrivan

Yeah but the issue is: the game makes a difference between killing a human (from another faction, or neutral) and killing a colonist. My colonists seem fine with us attacking visitors unprovoked (people just passing by), so they should be fine with us not taking in (or even killing) a refugee. Tbh i dont see why this event in particular has to be different than the regular transport pod crash

Honestly it would be better if the responded to more things, not less, but I see your point.

ImAdrivan

Im on OP's side on this. All that you said makes sense Tynan, except I dont know who invited the person to join the colony? The survivor crash landed. He is a stranger, not a colonist. If we want to help him, we can recruit him. Or we can take him as prisoner, or let him die. But who said he can join the colony just for crashing here?

The person is refugee. That means he invited himself, just like people fleeing danger who enter a country outside a border crossing. You can take those people who are now inside your community and banish them, or kill them, but there is no mind-control wall you can use to simply prevent them from entering your community. They walk in, and you have to choose how to respond.

NerdyBurner

I would prefer they functioned like the refugees where I can help them, then choose if they can stay, rather than being forced to accept a pyro with crappy skills just to be nice today.

You're not forced to help them at all. You can immediately kill or banish them. They're not willing to leave since they have nowhere else to go, so there is no "politely ask them to leave" option.

dalerian

Thanks for replying, Tynan. I appreciate you taking time away from making the game to reply - though I'm unconvinced by the reasoning.

You could make exactly the same argument for every event that offers a colonist. Whether they're a regular crash landed person, someone fleeing raiders or whatever. For each of those, there's a choice of what kind of colony we area, which includes the choice to reject the person.

Except this one. For this event, there is NO choice, and it's not a dilemma, because a dilemma is built around a choice. This is a forced circumstance without any agency to make that decision, I only have choice on how I respond to a decision that's made for me.

The crashlanded person is automatically a colonist, like it or not. Which is the problem.

If this event worked like the other colonist-with-a-trade-off events, it would be great. We'd be making a choice - do we rescue this person and accept the costs, or do we refuse? Sometimes, circumstances would mean my colony would accept the person. And sometimes, for various reasons, it wouldn't.

I'm not a fan of assuming that the existing colony members aren't ok with that choice, either. If I make a choice to make and sell space-meth, they're ok with that. If we get raiders attack, and I leave them all to bleed out, they're ok with that, too. If a slaver comes past, and I don't pay to rescue any of the slaves, my colonists don't bat an eyelid. If I sell luciferium to a backwards tribe, knowing it will slowly and agonisingly kill whoever takes it, my colonists are perfectly cool with that.

They may draw the line at abuse of prisoners, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily going to care about some random stranger who needs help.

For this event, there is NO choice, and it's not a dilemma, because a dilemma is built around a choice.

There is a choice. You can banish them, or kill them, or whatever.

We could alter the UI to make it look different (i.e. instead of banish them as a colonist, you reject them as a joiner, with the same mood outcomes), but that's just re-labeling what's already happening. Maybe we'll do that since this has come up before. I think it would solve the concern. It's just a framing issue. Framing changes solve game design problems all the time.

"If I make a choice to make and sell space-meth, they're ok with that. If we get raiders attack, and I leave them all to bleed out, they're ok with that, too. If a slaver comes past, and I don't pay to rescue any of the slaves, my colonists don't bat an eyelid. If I sell luciferium to a backwards tribe, knowing it will slowly and agonisingly kill whoever takes it, my colonists are perfectly cool with that."

These are all things they could ...

They came to you for help. You have the choice of helping them, leaving them to die, harvesting their organs.

But whatever you do, your colonists know what happened and will respond psychologically to the outcome. You can't just make everyone pretend it never happened.

This is as designed. It's, a moral dilemma, and a choice between emotions and resources, and a piece of story. What kind of colony are you?

azrael6947

Think you could do some patchy-patch?

It would probably be a good thing to be honest.

cuddlebuff

You can turn the Marraige Spot!?!

Damnit.

No...

We'd never remove vanilla content to make an expansion. Royalty just adds some quest content on top of the ones in the base game.

-desdinova-

My issue with this is that since a reactionless drive exists, there's no reason you can't accelerate to any arbitrary fraction of light speed. At a constant 1g acceleration it takes a little less than a year to accelerate to 99% of light speed. Because of relativistic time dilation, if you're going fast enough, the time elapsed during a journey perceived by the crew could be many times less than the time perceived by a stationary observer. Basically, any ship equipped with a Johnson-Tanaka drive is a potential starship.

Once you accelerate to 99.9% c, a journey of 10 light years would take less than 6 months from your perspective - just add a year to speed up and a year to slow down. You wouldn't even need cryptosleep caskets for many interstellar journeys.

It depends on the assumptions of course, but as I have the universe written:

Trade ships don't have JT drives.

JT drives don't give 1g.

Trade ships don't have foreshields to block lightspeed dust impacts (which you need to not have your ship annihilated if you go fast enough for time dilation to be really serious).

10 light years is very close, a more typical journey would be more like 50-100 ly (to get to a system with anything interesting in it).

And even in your hyper-optimistic scenario you're describing a 30-month journey. Without cryptosleep you need a ton of food, a ton of redundant life support, a ton of space to not go crazy being in a tin can for 2.5 years (all heavily rad-shielded), and lots of other things neither of us are even thinking of.

In any case, this is all way, way outside the scope of "give them some dog leather and ask to hitch a ride" from the OP.

Papergeist

Does this mean that trade ships don't travel between planets?

I ask because I'm not sure how that would work, and had generally assumed trade ships did indeed make the long hauls to other systems, while the Rim system was a nameless rock along the way to a real destination.

It seems pretty cool, but I've got a ton of questions about it too. Where do trade ships come from, do they have bases planetside, how do they maintain themselves, are they even manned at all, and why is it they can't assemble the means to make a long-haul trip to barter their way to a better world with space oddities.

I'm prone to making up lore, but if we've got more somewhere, I'd like to devour it.

The game doesn't nail down the details of the trade ships, but if you read the universe backstory you can infer that at the minimum they are not interstellar ships. They could be intraplanetary, cislunar, or interplanetary, it's not really specified.

It's like asking, "I'm stuck in Bangkok with $50, why can't I just pay a passing rickshaw to take me back to New York?"

Or, "Why can't Elon Musk just fly the Falcon 9 rocket to Alpha Centauri?"

RimWorld depicts space travel realistically. Moving across a planet is very different from traveling to a moon, which is very different from traveling to another planet, which is many many leagues below traveling to another star.

Consider: You're aware that there are people in Earth orbit now. You know a few people went to the moon once, but it's far harder than just going to orbit. You know there is talk of some day going to Mars, but it's much harder than the moon and nobody's ever done it (it takes months to get to Mars, where the moon takes 3 days). Going to Uranus would be way, way harder than going to Mars (years instead of months). And going to another star is just unimaginably harder on every level (thousands of years at current technology).

In the game, nobody in the rimworld syste...

Nightfish_

I don't think I said they should be equal and framing my point as such seems a bit unfair. I explicintly said:

"It doesn't have to be equal or even better"

But being cut off from the anima tree when the empire path does not do that seems really, really weird. Especially since the game doesn't tell you that. At least, I don't think it does. I'll double check the quest text next time but I don't remember it saying anything about that.

Between the lack of permits, the harder raids, losing out on the empire as a trading partner and having no speech from the throne mood buffs, the deserter path would still be harder if it allowed you to use the anima tree and gave you something else on top of that.

Again, let me clarify that I don't mind that the deserter path is harder. What I do mind is that you're cutting yourself off from a lot of tools by choosing that and some of that seems incredibly arbitrary, which is probably my biggest issue.

This seems quite different from picking a different biome because with a desert or an ice sheet, you know what you're getting into and it makes sense. Having trouble with growing plants makes sense in a desert and an ice sheet. Being denied quests because you got a tribal psycaster in your colony does not seem to follow logically, to me.

Or to look at it from another angle, if i were to do the deserter path, I would feel incredibly stupid if I actually tried to get psycasters like that instead of just recruting a few tribals (or starting as such) and than using the tree. Why would I ever wait for those quests when without even trying I can make so many more psycasters via the tree? I just did a tribal anti-empire run on losing is fun and by year 3 I already have several people at level 6 from the tree. As per the info in this thread, if I had tried to wait for quests, I'd have one guy at 5.

If the intent is that choosing the deserter path means that not even engaging with it is the better move, then I guess it just is what it is. I'm probably never going to play that route again, I was just interested to see what it's like because so far the only thing I saw said about it on forums was that it's bad and nobody should do it and I was quite ready to disagree with that sentiment.

Yeah, I agree it's definitely the weakest of the paths for a few reasons.

And you're correct I misread your original point somewhat, sorry.

AlexImHi

I love how shoopy has majestic eyes while the cows in the back got big ass foreheads

Cows look like they're worried about their taxes.