Currently when prisoners break out they have a fairly clear order of business: find weapons, overpower jailers, then dig to freedom or make for the nearest exit.
Now, this is a good bit of story generation (it can play out in many different ways) but it could be better.
What if, instead of following the default prisoner agenda, individual prisoners involved in the breakout have their own objectives in mind?
For example:
- Organ harvest prisoner: revenge against doctors.
- Free prisoners that aren't currently involved in the prison break and convince them to join the escape.
- Sabotage electrical systems - find battery room and break power connections or flip switches.
This may make those individual prisoners less efficient at making their own escapes, but pursuing these objectives makes them less 'Generic prisoner with recruitment difficulty 99' and more 'holy crap this guy is dangerous I'd better keep him isolated' or 'actually this guy is too dangerous to be allowed to live.'
It seems like this would be too much work for too little gain. It's a rarish event, and in a prison break, generally guys get about 5 feet before being slammed down, sometimes with turrets in the jail itself. So a lot of work only for players to never know the work was done.
Why don't we let the boss man decide what is too much work. His system works.
Well I mean, there's not much point if this isn't surfaced to the player really. It's not like prison architect where the prisoners outnumber you 10:1, in rimworld this is just a small, brief event. If A.I. were added to sabotage power lines, I doubt people would even notice. You'd have to add something to give prisoners a head start, like tunneling or pickpocketing weapons from wardens or something, but that's kind of a rabbit hole for just making this PA.
Fine. Forget I even suggested this.
i like it.
start fires, kidnap incap colonists, load up on supplies before leaving.
Now that I think about it, this could work if prisoners were aware of when you'd be distracted and would have a hard time dealing with them. For example, raid suddenly hits, half your guys are in a hospital, prison break! That would be pretty realistic, since of course prisoners would wait for the opportune moment to break out.