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I checked my Steam settings and it appears that I'm testing the latest public beta (I once helped test the pre-1.0 branch, and I didn't revert the setting apparently).

Anyway, the map loads but the game immediately pause when I click on play. See the included image for the exception trace.

[A) The problem]

A) The problem

Rimworld uses wealth as the main factor to determine raid sizes and expectations. I think it is a bad design choice.

1) It leads to perverse incentives such as damaging your weapons and tainting your armors to reduce their wealth value.

2) Your pawns react negatively to opulence. Building a beautiful golden sculpture to lift the mood of your pawns have the opposite effect: their mood decreases due to increased expectations.

3) It encourages players to avoid improving their bases and pawns to keep wealth under control. The optimal decision you can make to increase your odds of survival is to aggressively limit wealth. There are no feelings of progression and limited design options.

4) Since there are no restrictions on the number of traps / turrets you can use, and since raid size scales mostly through wealth rather than your number of pawns, your pawns become mostly useless for defence. It's doable to use 10 pawns against 20 pawns; less so when it's 10 pawns against 100 pawns. This happens because the game conflates opulence and defence strength, e.g. your sculpture is worth 50 turrets as far as the game is concerned.



B) Making wealth desirable

Suppose instead that wealth was a positive thing. You would rejoice when you finally got all your pawns dressed in hyperweave and power armor. Your pawns would like it when you made their rooms more beautiful. They would in fact become disgruntled if the wealth of the base didn't increase as time goes on. Wouldn't it be more fun?



C) The solution

Fixing the wealth issue is much more difficult than listing its shortcomings. What do you think could be done to improve the game with respect to difficulty? Discuss!

Keep in mind that it has to be simple to have a shot to be implemented, i.e. implementation effort must be handled as wealth

Start a new game -- the building wealth is non-zero and rather high, ~6K. Something's getting counted that shouldn't be counted.

The template for the message "<source> tried to woo <target> by bla bla bla is wrong. The source is used instead of the target, e.g. Wally tried to woo Wally.

When my pawn gets out of his daze, I don't get any catharsis buff. Build 1.0.1964.

I had a colonist who was going to die to malaria. I banished her to avoid the mood penalty. She joined an outlander faction, then became a slave in a rescue colonist event. I went to rescue her, but the malaria was still there, despite many days having passed. This is unrealistic.

Edit: Rimworld version 1.0.1954.