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The Tabletop WH40k games. You can run a Rimworld game right out of the box with Dark Heresy.

Several things i would like to note:

1) firearms and bows are not differentiated, skill-wise

What do i mean by this? In real life, one of the reasons (arguably the MAIN reason) that firearms toook over from bows is that firearms are really easy to use. REALLY easy. With a bow, you have to practice for quite a long time, not only to become proficient, but also to build up enough strength to use it. An old saying is "if you want a good archer, start with his grandfather".

On the other hand, with firearms it can take as little as a week to achieve basic proficiency. You can take 12 year old Scouts that have never handled a rifle before in their lives, and after a week for shooting 2 hours a day at aummer camp, they can put 5 shots within a US $0.25 coin at 50 meters. On the archery range, said boys consider themselves lucky if they can put an arrow on the paper at 30 meters.

What does this mean?

Firearms should be effective at lower Shooting skill levels than bows.

2) the accuracy issues of snoothbore blackpowder weapons is hilariously misconsteued in modern pop culture.

Are smoothbore muskets laser weapons, capable of MOA accuracy? No, of course not. Are they usable beyond the 50 or so meters most people think of?

Yup. Ive done it, and it was done back in the 1700s.

When most people think of blackpowder smoothbore muskets, chances are they think of massive blocks of men, lining up and shooting at each other at close range. And..... Well, that isnt -incorrect-. Muskets were used in that fashion in MASSED BATTLE because that was how they were effective in MASSED BATTLE. Military thinking of that day and age revolved around putting as much fire down range as possible, as fast as possible, aka the "more dakka" theorem. This is because blackpowder, when used in large quantities, produces a large amount of opaque smoke. This smoke makes it hard to see, and therefore prevents long-range fire. That, coupled with how fast you can load a musket when youbdrill properly (20 seconds for average troops, 10 seconds for crack veterans) means that dheer weight of fire was a more effective use of musketry as opposed to accuracy. Soldiers would use undersized musket balls, so the bullet would fit easier into the barrel, use light or -no- patching, for the reason stated above, and slam the ball down onto the powder withbthe ramrod. All this was done in thebinterest of loading speed. And, yes, that makes a blackpowder musket loaded in that fashion rather unaccurate. The loose-fitting ball bounces dowb the barrel when fired, leading to an unpredictable trajectory upon leaving the barrel. Therefore, yeah, usable range of about 50 meters or so.

Skirmishers, on the other hand, loaded their muskets differently. They used a tighter-fitting ball, with a thicker patch ( i like using deerskin), and -gently-seated the ball onto the powder, so it sat even in the barrel. All those actions meant it took -much- longer to load (it generally takes me a minute to load a musket like that), but that style of loading also lends greater range. Power and accuracy. With a smoothbore musket resting on a bench and loaded skirmisher-style, i was making shots on a paper target at 100 meters.

And i had never fired that musket before.

3) blackpowder weapons are sustainable, where other firearms are not.

Blackpowder can be made with three ingredients: saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal. If you have livestock or an old latrine, you have saltpeter. Sulfur is the limiting reagent, but finely-ground rust can be substituted. And charcoal is readily available if you have wood.

Smokeless powder, on the other hand, requires several noxious chemicals and a degree of chemical synthesis. Not to mention primers, which require -more- toxic chemicals, like mercury. And the brass for casings has to come from somewhere.

You can literally make the entirety of a smoothbore blackpowder musket on a blacksmith forge if you have to. There is an old video on YouTube of someone doing just that.

If you read into the fiction of fantasy containing power armor (so, Fallout and WH40k, mainly), you will see that power armor, while strong, is not invulnerable.

In Fallout, Brotherhood of Steel members get killed all the time in power armor. One of their leaders was killed by taking an arrow through the eyeslit of his helmet.

Same thing in WH40k. In that universe, power armor is better, but in one story, a Space Marine gets killed by someone jamming a knife between the plates of their Power Armor into one of his hearts and two of his lungs  In another, a Marine gets killed by Guardsmen targeting the joints of his Power Armor with lasguns.

So.... Should Power Armor be strong? of course. Should it be invulnerable? No.

IMO, power armor should

1) be strong, but not invulnerable. The joints should be the weak spots.

2) support its own weight, plus then weight of any weapons eauipped, allowing the user to move faster.

3) offer bonuses in combat when wearing the helmet, due to autotargeting sensors and recoil stabilizers and the like

Protect from flames, smoke, poisonous gas and the like.

I agree.

There is a whole slew of potential technologies that could be added to the game: crossbows, other armor, shields, and blackpowder weaponry.

Right now, the game goes from Stone Age (timeless, really, but in-game they are referred to as Neolithic) clubs, spears and bows straight to bolt-action rifles and revolvers.

10,000 years, basically skipped over.

Part of the issue is that

1) It can be pretty simple in-game to secure your food from wild animals especially vermin, exactly the opposite of real life

2) Vermin don't pass on diseases in-game, like they do in real life.

Ergo, you don't have much of a reason to exterminate rats and the like in-game, when in real life you had/have people with careers as vermin-killers. THAT is what cats were used for, to both protect the food source of their human owners and to prevent disease.

Protip: the nonelectrical versions of, well, -everything- are there for a reason. Use them. Instead of trying to rush electricty as fast as you can, take smaller incremental steps.

- your pawns will survive without private bedrooms for a decent amount of time, so long as the barracks is clean and quiet.

- you don't -NEED- a freezer until you have massive surpluses of meat. Vegetables can last for a long time unrefridgerated, and so long as you dont have a glut of meat, you can make pemmican on a steady basis, which in and of itself lasts for forever. I restrict pemmican to meat and the berries you can gather ASAP.

Generally, so long as you keep your wealth down, you can generally ignore the first few raids.

Keeping your wealth down, in this case, also means keeping your population down. Some pawns are effectively useless, but even a useless pawn adds several hundred silver to your colonies value.

- dont produce what you dont need. Food surpluses are great, yes, but they also increase value. Same thing with cloth or statues or..... Well, anything and everything, really. Either keep smaller surpluses, or be ready to defend it.

- make friends with the tribals and the townies. Pirates and mechanoids are the only hard-coded hostiles in the game, and tribals and townies can attack in much greater numbers. By making friends with them, you tend to face smaller raids, which means you need fewer defenses, which means you need fewer resources, which means your wealth is lower, which means you tend to face fewer raids.....


Yadda yadda yadda

Ugh. No thanks.

Foreign human cultures are alien enough, and i dont see the need for xenohumans to be added to the mix. Flesh out the currently HILARIOUSLY-underdeveloped rimworld cultures before adding more shit, please.

Not to mention that the soldiers described in thr fiction primer would be hilariously uneffective as soldiers, but what-have- you.

Yup, Rimworld HILARIOUSLY abstracts the process for, well...... Pretty much everything.

It can take DAYS to properly dress an animal, cut the meat into joints, process and tan the hide, so on and so forth. That is why hides and furs were, and still are, so valuable. They took a lot of time and effort to make usable.

Just like cloth. Even using a spinning wheel and a horizontal loom, it can take quite some time to spin, dye, and weave cloth. Not to mention the time it takes to sew the finished cloth into clothing. Meanwhile, in-game cotton just..... "Appears" once you harvest a cotton plant.

Dont even mention farming! In-game, all the colonists do is yank out vegetation. They dont plow the soil, aerate it, break up clods, amything you need to do in order to grow crops worth eating.

I, for one, would LOVE to see the above processes in the game. It would make farming less of a silver-boost, even. Or at least more of a timesink.

Or the fact that crafting spears requires the "Long Blades" research.

Spears. A 400,000 year old weapon, that itsnt even confined to humans!

According to the game, a pointy bit on a stick is as complicated aa an arming sword.

Color me speechless.

Pretty much. For some reason, Tynan has this idea that Tribals don't know what a goddamn jacket and trousers are.

In Europe, clothing like trousers, jackets, shirts and the like have been made from wool and linen and hemp from AT LEAST the Bronze Age, and almost certainly earlier.

None of this nonsense about Tribals having to research "complex clothing" (snort).

Tribal technologies are really weird, to put it politely.

The tribes in RW are generally pre-bronze age. Their tech level is even named "neolithic". You'll note that the native people in America and Australia also lacked metalworking technology - not even bronze.

Heck, even medieval Europeans didn't usually wear anything as complex as a T-shirt and pants.

Anyway, about the OP, I've rebalanced a ton of things, including the production cost of war masks. I think it's 20 material now, IIRC.

-facepalm-

Tynan, Mesoamericans and Native North Americans had metalworking. One of the major reasons the Spanish invaded Mesoamerica was because they had massive gold and silver reserves.

Mesoamericans tended to use metal for decorative and votive objects instead of tools, but they indeed had copper, silver and gold-working skills. The Tarascans (enemies of the Aztecs) even had bronze. The Inca in South America were well into their own little Bronze Age when the Spanish arrived, with well-developed bronze weapons and armor.

In North America, both Pacific Coast natives and tribes all up and down the Missisippi River made use of copper, in 3000 BC. Most of the copper was mined in the Great Lakes region.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallurgy_in_pre-Columbian_America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Copper_Complex

"Heck, even medieval Europeans didnt wear anything as complex as a T-shirt and pants"

What?

....Tynan, what are braccae? What are tunics? Hell, if you want to be technical, the modern T-shirt is a descendant of the tunic, being a simple shirt that is pulled over the head. Not going to mention that medieval Europeans had jackets, hoods, capes, aka everything we have today.

As a final addendum, the weaving of cloth (and therefore presumably the wearing of cloth) has been found to be at least 9000 years old, with evidence pointing back to about 27,000 years, during the Paleolithic. Neolithic cultures in China were weaving hemp and silk since about 3500 BC. Wool working has been discovered to be around since 2000 BC. Cotton and alpaca/llama wool has been woven in the Americas since about 4000 BC.


And all of that is just stuff we have found in the archaeological record. Anthropoligists think the concepts have been around for far longer than that, we just have evidence for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weaving

Finally, i will just add this: the tribals in Rimworld are not discovering these technologies, concepts and materials in a vaccum. They live in a world whre there is tool-quality steel available from the side of cliff-faces the planet over. While they might not know to build a bloomery to smelt metal from raw ore..... They dont have to.

Finally:

1) brewing beer is a Neolithic era technology in real life. Some, not all,but some anthropologists think that the Neolithic Revolution (aka the spread of agriculture) wasnt undertaken tonprovide food per se,but to provide grain for beer making

2) the main intended effect for beer historically has not been intoxication, but as a means to preserve grain-based calories and to make water safe to drink. Intoxication was a happy and welcomed side effect.

3) hops have only been used sincd the 9th century AD, and was mainly used as a preservative. Before thatb most beer was ale, and used gruit as a flavoring.

Just saying. I mean no offense.

This is more of a general tribal problem then it is a resource problem. Tribals in Rimworld are so utterly bonkers in terms of tech they have much difficulty in adapting to climates that's not temperate or tropics.

Tribals IRL however range from bedouins to inuit people to steppe nomads. They have hard lives yes, but they thrive in it nonetheless.

Pretty much. For some reason, Tynan has this idea that Tribals don't know what a goddamn jacket and trousers are.

In Europe, clothing like trousers, jackets, shirts and the like have been made from wool and linen and hemp from AT LEAST the Bronze Age, and almost certainly earlier.

None of this nonsense about Tribals having to research "complex clothing" (snort).

Tribal technologies are really weird, to put it politely.

i think this is where real life gets less important than game balance. you cant have that ridiculous amount of land dedicated to only planting to be able to make it through winter. also, hunting is just more fun. i think it is a nice encouragement for players to hunt and sometimes get into trouble with manhunters.

besides, manhunters? really? i have yet to see a manhunting turtle that can bite a skilled hunter's nose off...but as said. for this issue i'd rather have a fun game than a realistic one.

It isn't only the comically-small amount of farmland required (although that is equally ridiculous. Preindustrial agriculture required on average 120 or so acres of land to feed a family), it is the fact that almost no work goes into preparing the soil.

In-game, all the pawns do is remove grass, trees and bushes. They dont break up clods, till the soil, mix in fertilizer, or kill weeds.

Not doing that would result in plants that are barely fit for eating.

The food system in Rimworld is way out of whack, i agree.

Plant crops provide way too much food, for too little work, and animals provide way too little food, for way too much work.

I don't. The fact that a TV station on a Rimworld

1) Has the equipment to broadcast
2) the equipment hasn't degraded. Seriously.
3) Has an audience. Just because this group has the resources to set up a broadcast station, that doesn't mean anyone else has the resources to receive it.
4) Speak the same language. Language drift is a thing, even in the same language, not to mention people from different planets

Is really stupid to me. Who the hell would go through the time and effort? More importantly, why would they go through the time and effort?

Much like most Rimworld lore, I just ignore it when it doesn't make sense.

Non-powered, or "primitive" play. Right now, vanilla Tribal starts are little more than speedbumps to electricity and the same things offworlder colonies have.

Mainly, this is due to how ineffective non-gunpowder weapons are. Believe me ornot, but an arrow to the heart or lung will kill you just as dead as a bullet will.