I love the stories of RimWorld. But I find the balance very lacking. Once you reach mid-game, it seems that the difference between easily wiping out a threat and having all your colonists killed is mostly luck. If a few of your pawns go down early, it can be very hard to come back from that.
What I would really like, would be an opportunity to rebuild and carry on my story, with the characters I know (even if many of them are dead).
Here is my suggestion. When your last pawn goes down, the game should fade out. A message on the screen could explain that "things aren't looking good", or something. But! - there would be a chance to continue!
If you choose to end the game, fine, the game is over. But if you choose to continue, the game would "loot" your base, taking 90% (or more) of the supplies and destroying much of the base itself. Then the game would auto-recover a percentage of your living pawns back to beds and mend their bleeding. The rest would die. Your few remaining pawns would awake in a daze... not knowing what happened... in the rubble of their old base, surrounded by the corpses of their friends. It would basically be a new game, but generated from your old game.
Heck, I wouldn't even really mind if the pawns memory was wiped (since I've heard that pawn memory is what leads to lag later in the game).
What do you guys think? Any feedback?
You can keep playing after all colonists die, and no you don't need good colonists for a successful colony. You can have a colony with all melee and shooting 0 and they'd still be effective if you make the right kill box designs (If they're all non violent this becomes an issue though) and loot all the guns your colonists get, early raids will be outnumbered 3 to 1. With infinite food, and wood you can trade and build all you need for defense.
Then haul slag/stones to create a nice buffer incase of sappers. If you get 3 colonists with wood and place them in a line next to an open doorway it'll cause a localized majority meaning 3 colonists will fight 1 raider who walks in.
If you wait a while after all your colonists die then one will join sooner or later. Thus letting you continue your colony like normal. Raiders might burn/loot the remains before then however, as would be expected.
Quote from: BetaSpectre on October 23, 2017, 11:19:28 PM
You can have a colony with all melee and shooting 0 and they'd still be effective if you make the right kill box designs (If they're all non violent this becomes an issue though) and loot all the guns your colonists get, early raids will be outnumbered 3 to 1. With infinite food, and wood you can trade and build all you need for defense.
This is basically my point.
Playing the game is like balancing on a wire. It's not too hard to build a colony that is OP, and it's really easy to build a colony that is terrible. But try building a colony that consistently loses 30% of it's polulation during a major event and continually recovers... I personally find it quite difficult. And yet, these parts of the story are by far my favorite!
It's great being left with a base full of wounded from both sides, and a few suffering pawns staying up late with gunshot wounds to care for the pawns who are bleeding out. It's fantastic drama to learn who's going to live or die and try to pick up the pieces. But it's just such a slippery slope in this game. I find that most of time, after one such event, the next one comes too soon, or the pawns are too beaten up to ever recover. Forcing one injured pawn out of bed to deal with a mad animal is enough to send them into a mental break and take down the whole colony.
Is this realistic? Sure. Of course it is. But RimWorld isn't a game you "win". RimWorld is about the story. I'm not playing to escape in the ship. I'm not playing to build up the whole map. And I'm certainly not playing to be taken out by a mad muffalo. I'm playing for the hilarious story arcs of these crazy little pawns in a ridiculous situation.
The idea behind getting to continue is just that little safety net... so that I don't have to build OP killboxes. I want my base to be a bit stupid and make mistakes. I want pawns to die, and new ones to join. I want a few battle-scarred veterans overseeing a base of refugees, telling them about the good ol' days back in 5503. When the mistakes are a little too big, and I slide down the slope of death, I want the option to restart with 1 or 2 of my friends - without having to reroll.
The real issue here IMO is the lack of easy recruitment. Enemies spawn in new ones like candy while fighting for weeks tooth and nail is needed to just replace losses.
The VE-CO mod lets you increase the pain caused by injuries doing so will mean pawns that are downed from combat are more likely to later stand up again after the pain goes away.
If it were easy to recruit prisoners though then the game lags due to bloated gains in colonists since they have alot of tasks to handle, though if you can put them into a stasis like state it's not so bad like they're all researching forever.