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Thanks, I already did, and it works now.

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.

The end goal is to make a ship capable of taking you off the god forsaken planet you're stranded on. This is not a sandbox game.

Rimworld has always supported both play styles -- building a ship, or playing indefinitely.

The good thing about a time-based system is that it rewards having a good economy, beautifying the base, etc.

There are downsides though.
- If you outpace the system, it gets boring.
- Raids will keep getting bigger and bigger, so the clean-up phase will become more tedious.
- Your pawn contribution matters less and less relative to the fixed defences required to deal with the larger raids.

I like Tynan's idea about the player choosing to undertake difficult events, beyond launching the ship. It's a great progression system!

I'd like to hear some opinions about my proposal to scale raids with (pop + defence strength + downscaled luxury wealth) rather than (pop + total wealth) -- everything else being the same.

It's not perfect (every system can be gamed), but it offers those advantages:
- Ease of implementation wrt the current system (even a partial fix would improve the situation a lot in 1.0).
- It still scales to total wealth, just much more slowly, so burning every weapon on the map won't work.
- Having a bigger base means you have more to cover, so defending becomes harder.
- Pawns have to fight!
- Raids don't get huge.
- You can have golden statues.

*Edit* By defence strength, I really mean add up those turrets, traps, armors, etc, and weight them by utility, not market value.

[The stronghold system]

Thanks all for the comments! Your feedback has been very helpful to improve my own proposal. Even though I can't please everybody, I tried to incorporate as many of your suggestions as I could.

First, let's discuss some fundamental scaling issues. Suppose that the raid strength depends primarily on wealth or defence strength or time. Two things can happen. If your effective defence strength increases faster than the raid strength, then the game becomes too easy. Conversely, if the raid strength increases faster than your ability to defend against it, you eventually lose. Neither those situations are desirable.

In particular, if the raid strength depends on wealth, and the game becomes exponentially harder with wealth, then we obtain the current state of Rimworld. Most of the wealth becomes focussed on defence. Raid sizes become huge and tedious to clean up. The computer starts to lag. Non-pawn-based defences become the dominant mean of defence. It leads to dubious incentives such as damaging your weapons and limiting the luxuries of your base.

Now, if the raid strength depends primarily on how well on how you dealt with the last one, then eventually, no matter how well you play, you'll get a bloody nose because the raid strength will keep increasing until you lose. I don't find this very satisfying.

I propose to resolve these scaling issues with a system based primarily on progression.

The stronghold system

The stronghold system offers an alternative for the players who do not seek to escape with the ship at the earliest opportunity. It is fully compatible with this goal, however.

There are three variables used by the system: the luxuries (aka wealth), the defences, and the development level. You start the game at the lowest development level. Your goal is to progressively increase your development level and reach the maximum level you can sustain, both militarily and economically.

At the beginning, the other factions look at you with contempt. Look at the little settlement, they say. No electricity. Play with a horseshoes pin. Savages! Even the actual savages look down at you.

Accumulating wealth is very dangerous initially. As per Thane's suggestion, the pirates will leave you alone so long as you have nothing worth taking. If you start churning out golden statues while your defences consist of a grand total of three traps, you'll be sorry. However, hoarding wealth becomes less of a worry at high development levels. By then, it will be widely known that the stuff is guarded.

In terms of mechanics, the raid strength is very sensitive to wealth at low development level. The wealth contribution levels off at high development level. Eventually you can hoard luxuries as much as you want. In fact, you'll have to if you play on high difficulty.

The pawn expectations depend only on the development level, with some exceptions made for caravans. As per Koek's suggestion, expectations start very low, but as the development level increase, wealth must be obtained to improve the base to please the pawns. Critically, high wealth by itself does not lead to high expectations.

The defences are counted in a different pool than the luxuries. This includes walls, doors, traps, turrets, weapons, worn apparels, pawns, bionics, and animals (based on actual combat potential -- chickens don't count for much).

Like Awe proposed, the weapon quality has no bearing on its defence rating; it only affects its market value. Thus, obtaining a legendary weapon is a major reason for celebrating. Conversely, awful weapons are truly awful. This is true for armor and apparel as well. Apparels like cloth dusters that don't provide meaningful protection do not count as defence.

The defence pool is soft-capped by the development level. You can build sky-high defences if you want, and sit back and relax while your traps and turrets take care of the raiders automatically. You'll have a mutiny on your hand, though.

See, your pawns interest lies mainly on having a good time and making progress. They'll put up with building some defences, but they won't tolerate ugly turrets everywhere they look, traps that can blow them up at a moment's notice, and walls so high they can't see the scenery anymore. Wealth won't placate them indefinitely. Yes, that golden statue looks very nice, but they'd rather watch X-rated movies on that plasma TV that they don't currently have in their neolithic development level.

In terms of mechanics, the raid strength is marginally influenced by your defence rating. Lower defences lead to slightly lowered aggression, since your attackers believe you're an easy prey. It helps you to recover between raids. The main raid scaling factor comes from your development level. The attackers guess your probable defences based on how advanced you are. When your development level increase, the raids become stronger, but your defence pool also becomes larger, i.e. you can build more turrets without incurring a revolt because your pawns acknowledge the necessity.

The defence pool is a critical resource to manage. At high difficulty, it is too small to realistically repel a raid using only fixed defences. You have to use every tool at your disposal, especially your pawns. The defence pool size increases slightly slower than the raid strength, so the game becomes harder as you go on. But, since time is not a major raid scaling factor, you have a chance even on sea ice. As many have suggested, the difficulty can also change dynamically when you're dealt a bloody nose. Adaptation mechanics are already in the game. Importantly, you never have to deal with gigantic raids that are a chore to handle.

The player upgrades its development level by researching the corresponding technology.

The core of the proposed system can be implemented without too many changes to the existing mechanics (possibly in a mod). Mostly, the accounting needs to be changed and the research tree must be tweaked to integrate the development thresholds. The main challenge is the balancing.

Optional stuff

Ideally, it would be very difficult to obtain high-level stuff in a low-development colony. Trade ships and outlanders snub you. Raiders don't carry high-level gear (and if they do, beware). Basically, you're stuck with the stuff of your era. Quests could be an interesting exception.

It could be fun to make the defence cost of an item non-linear with the amount of that item that you have, e.g. to give freebies. Say, the first 2 power armors you have don't contribute to your defence pool. So, this encourages you to use all of the variety of the tools at your disposal, even those with lower absolute utility.

The number of pawns you can recruit could be affected by the development level. Not many people want to live in a slum.

The development level could scale off indefinitely, so you can brag that you reached development level 12 on merciless. This allows the difficulty to increase smoothly past the intended difficulty of merciless, for the players who want to. Conversely, for players who just want to build the base, the defence pool is effectively unlimited.

Another possibility to soft-cap the defence pool is to make the raider strength non-linear with it, rather than incurring a debuff. Don't scare the neighborhood -- they don't like it.

The development level could also have economic consequences. To make your stronghold rise to pre-eminence in the world, you have to bribe politicians, impress the world with your art, and feed, dress and heal the hordes of visitors who seek your protection and charity. Then, the challenge becomes to increase your throughput to meet the demand. This makes your pawn skills important. Rimworld meet Factorio!

tl-dr
- Separate wealth from defence.
- Defence pool is limited, incur major debuff if exceeded.
- Expectations, defence pool and raid scaling depend mostly on development level.
- Development level increases at the player's pace, through research.

[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

I found out why my colonists no longer start with extremely low expectations on game start. The floor wealth is now counted for every tile on the map that isn't fogged.

this.wealthBuildings += this.wealthFloorsOnly;

So, it's no longer possible to add wealth to rooms through the floor without increasing the building wealth. That fixes the exploit.

Also, it removes the one sense of progression I had in the game. My main source of fun was to slowly improve the base by converting the floor into silver and gold tiles. It took a long time, but it was fun to try to survive during the process.

Reading the code, I see that everything meaningful counts toward wealth. Pawns, items, buildings, floors, even corpses apparently. It seems to me there's no point on working to accumulate wealth anymore. Having legendary sculptures, nice furniture and beautiful floors work against you. They increase the raid size, and also increase expectations, while not increasing the colonist mood enough to compensate.

I don't know what the solution is. I do feel that tying wealth to the difficulty is not fun. It adds perverse incentives. When players sabotage their own weapons, taint their own armors, in order to work around the wealth counter, something's not right.

Perhaps the difficulty could be induced by other means. E.g., the player could defy other factions, progressively wiping out the evil pirates, while facing increasingly challenging odds. That yields a tangible goal for the player (improve the world!) while not unduly penalizing the accumulation of wealth.

My hope is that the floor change gets reverted. Yes, it's an exploit, but it gives a sense of progression which is currently lacking in the game.

With that said, I like Rimworld a lot. Best of luck with the continued development.

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

It's just bionics/organs and flooring don't count towards wealth.

Are you sure about the bionics? I know it's true for the floor. But what about the indirect contribution of the bionics to the character quality multiplier? I thought the pawn market value was counted as wealth.

In 1.0.1982, pawns ignore their assigned zones. My hauler is suiciding by venturing outside with the manhunter pack.

[attachment deleted due to age]

In the latest version, auto-rearm still doesn't work outside the home area.

Wooden traps are overpowered in biomes with abundant wood.

I agree. The main annoyances are the mass-rebuild required when there's a manhunter pack, and the need to surround them with graves (or build roofs) to protect them from fire. Since traps are less valuable than they used to, spamming them has less impact on wealth.

Some ideas for nerfing. Add a per-pawn trap-awareness flag that has a chance to become set whenever the pawn or someone else triggers a trap. Or, set the trap-awareness flags on map entrance, with the odds based on the total number of traps (deployed or not to prevent cheese). Once a pawn is trap-aware, they never trigger traps, and they attack the traps if they get in their way. I would remove the per-rearm cost, to make them viable in all biomes again, and reduce the damage they do.

Also, it would be nice to see some blitzkrieg-style attack for the smarter raiders. They pick an attack vector and all of them blast their way in that direction. It would be more difficult to counter.

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.

-One request:  is there any way to fix the "can't clean off fresh blood/dirt" issue that currently exists (and existed in B18)?  This was something that I really hoped would get addressed in 1.0, because it's maddening, and feels "gamey":  currently, a pawn has to leave the room to be able to clean off blood and filth that was generated while they were in the room.

Can double that, this cleaning micro is maddening. Btw your doctor doesn't need to leave the room, it's enough just to stay there on a spot for a while, like 10 seconds or something.

I am going to "third" this. Specifically, I want the cook to clean up the dirt on the floor so my pawns stop getting food poisoned every other meal. The food poisoning is ultra-obnoxious atm.

It is most irritating when there's a high chance of a pawn developing an infection. Having to do this micro is annoying, and the fact that you can't order the pawn to clean the spot of blood you see on the floor makes it worst. My "solution" is to use two pawns when tending to another pawn. One to doctor, another to clean up when the UI allows me to.

My lone naked colonist landed in a flat jungle biome (Cassandra extreme). An unlucky start in what would prove to be a long ordeal. He just wasn't a lucky guy. In 100 days, he got malaria, muscle parasites that lasted about a year, the flu, and now he's fighting gut worms. He made new friends, but they didn't fare much better. Plague, gut worms and fibrous mechanites. None of them knew how to plant healroot. They managed by importing medecine from nearby settlements.

Early on, the colony almost got wiped out. A hunter triggered a whole herd of elephant manhunters. The hunter died, and my colonist got stomped trying to save him. He miraculously recovered before bleeding out and managed to patch himself. Still lost a toe in the process. Lesson learned: be more careful with elephants.

A toxic fallout also proved more difficult than expected. It turns out that poisoned animals are not edible. Fortunately, there were enough surviving berries to get by, and nearby settlements also had food. Had the fallout lasted longer, things might have turned ugly.

My colonist thought that traps would make a good defense. The universe disagreed. He lost an ear to his own trap. Then, a manhunter horde wiped out the traps used by the colony. A war council was convened.

It was established that the colony was now defenseless. The amount of work needed to replace the traps was subject to much debate. Everyone agreed that stone and steel were much too expensive to spend on traps. But, wooden traps could be viable given that wood is cheap in a jungle. Ultimately, the prevailing conclusion was that traps weren't very practical anymore. It was no longer possible to lay out a bunch of traps to secure a large perimeter; manhunters would destroy them before they could be hauled. Plus, it was a chore to constantly rebuild them, and not resource-effective in terms of wood and time. Moreover, they kill instead of knocking out, making recruitment more difficult.

The final decision was to rush turret research and only use wooden traps as a stop-gap solution.