Messages

Cool idea. I don't know how it will get implemented into the vanilla game, but at least adding space for it in the game's code could give scenario makers the reins to go crazy. There are already dozens of custom-made factions in the Workshops, enough that you could populate a whole game with only custom factions, and this would allow modders to give the factions more personality.

I like the idea of fog of war, but as other, better-informed people here have said, going all-out on it is too impractical from an AI standpoint.

I would be interested in a fog of war mod that factored in things such as natural obstacles, light, vision and equipped weapons t generate a different field of vision for each colonist, but I think anybody arguing for this has to be prepared to accept that it'll put them at a disadvantage to the AI (which is omniscient), and the game will NOT be balanced in a way to cater to this style.

In other words, I would like a fog of war option simply as a challenge/atmosphere thing, but there about about 1000 other, better things the developer could be doing than making sure this significantly game changing feature is balanced properly.

A populated city would cause memory overload (I don't know about you, but my middling PC already gets performance issues once the raids start getting huge and I have a large stockpile of wealth - all of which requires a bit of memory). However, I have been itching for an abandoned city map forever. One where the main terrain is cement - streets, parking lots, vehicles (denoted as crashed ship parts, I guess).

Where you have to scavenge through unexplored houses (many of which may hold the "Ancient Danger" risk and attack you with bugs or cryo-frozen survivors as soon as you break into them), break or reinstall all the furniture on the map because there are hardly any trees, farm out of areas that were once backyards, and have all the raid events basically be giant street fights using alleys and narrow roads.

A new kind of mental break, where a colonist that has been idle for to long has a mental break where they do something that they are passionate about.

e.g. A cook will cook lots of food, a miner will mine away random blocks, and an intellectual will research any random undone project.

I like it. On one hand, you lose control of the pawn so it sucks, but on the other hand there's a silver lining.

Good idea, simple solution for a minor annoyance.

Additionally, I would definitely suggest removing the joy-activity of visiting the grave from these. It's kind of weird to see colonists visit the filthy raider-scum they killed before.

Do colonists visit raider graves? I may be wrong, but I swear every time I've seen a colonist visit a grave it's one that houses a former colonist. In some playthroughs where I buried colonists and raiders together, I would actually use the colonist visiting a grave as a helpful way of letting me find my buried colonist (since the visiting colonist will always be beside a buried colonist).

That said, newer alphas may have buffed it so you get joy from all graves.

I feel like this must have been suggested before, but it just seems like such a sensible idea to have a shooting range be a joy/skill building item.

In more traditional societies, it was common for important skills to be incorporated into sports, to passively teach people (children, in particular) new skills while simultaneously providing them with a sense of cooperation, competition and sportsmanship that comes from athletics. In Rimworld, as far as I know, there is no other way to get your shooting/melee skill up aside from actual combat, where a poor shooter is at risk.

Balance-wise, I think the targets should only be able to take a finite amount of hits (give them an HP bar that will eventually run out). As for complaints that target practice may be "too easy", remember that only a mid-game colony will actually have the time and resources to train its colonists: locking a colonist into a training room for half a day to build up shooting skill means that this colonist ISN'T performing essential functions around the colony.

I'm still personally undecided on if doing this should automatically provide joy to any colonist, or only ones who have a passion for shooting: on one hand, the "interested/passion" mechanic already exists in-game, so to violate it would be counterintuitive to the player. On the other hand, targets being a type of "game" equitable to horseshoes should mean that everyone has a degree of fun playing.

Thoughts?

I didn't realize human meat was worth this much! I wil definitely have to get a cannibal/psychopath colonists STAT just to have them butchering.

As for negative traits on cannibals:
-Incapable of getting any kind of joy boost from meals, regardless of quality
- Mild (-5 or so) automatic dislike from other colonists.
- as per mumblemumble's suggestion, high risk of Kuru as cannibals will always prioritize human meat.

The idea sounds neat, though the actual execution sounds pretty excessive. You'd either have to have a pretty huge colony or some good killboxes to withstand everything you've mentioned (especially given that the wealthier you get, the better weapons/armour the raiders have).

I would want to make it more personal by saying a massive raid by the enemy faction that harassed you the most, and an enemy raid by the tribal faction that harassed you the most, but make that everything.

I really like the idea of about half of these (Rich Explorer despt, only evil animals, strict discipline, mountain lair, do nothing to improve relations) but the other half (no treating injuries, raw food only) are just needless obstacles that don't actually make you any more evil.

I'll be trying a game like this, granted with only about half of these conditions.

I suggest friendly fire chance be tied to the shooter's skill. The better they are, the lower the chances of ff.

I second this notion.  It would definitely be entertaining to see an intelligence curve where your expert marksmen wait until they have a clean shot while the trigger happy idiot with the minigun and poor aim happily guns down your colonists who are meleeing a rabbit.

Given that RNG operates on invisible dice rolls, aren't more skilled shooters already less likely to friendly fire by simple virtue of being more likely to hit their intended target?

Honestly, if there's one thing I have to hand to this game (frustrating though it may be), it's that every infuriating thing that happens to my pawns IS usually my fault. Friendly fire is one of those. I can't think of a single instance of friendly fire that didn't occur because I forgot to undraft a guy, or didn't micro a grenade/molotov thrower properly.

Yeah, it's frustrating, but this game is incredibly straight forward and intuitive about its AI processes (which is more than I can say for a lot of games - I have no clue what went wrong half the time in Castle Story or Banished). If pawns aren't acting how you want, it's always because YOU restricted the wrong thing, didn't prioritize your zones properly, forgot to toggle a switch or (in this case) didn't do a good job of positioning them in the fight and microing their drafts.

PS: In real life, it actually makes a ton of sense for civilian pawns (and most of your pawns have civilian backstories) to friendly fire each other if they're in the same equivalent line of fire, especially under high stress or when wounded. Yeah, friendly fire should be rolled less often the more skilled a shooter your pawn is, but as far as I know this is already in play.

Don't know if this is going to go down as an infuriating addition, but what if rescued spacers have a (slight) chance to attack the colonists?

I'm thinking of most post apocalyptic things I've seen (Walking Dead is a good example) where there's always a degree of uncertainty to the characters taking in newcomers because they don't know them, they might be crazy, and they may bring marauders in to take what you have.

In that vein, a rescued spacer no longer incapable of walking could have a slight chance to a.) find a weapon and attack the colonists (more like a prison break than a berserk) or b.) leave the map, then return shortly with friends.

At the very least, this would add another element to the downed spacer event aside from merely "are their stats good? Are they worth grabbing?"

Has the game changed? It used to be you had to capture and imprison the crashlanders just like everyone else, to be able to convert them.

If you just rescued and healed them up, they would then walk out and leave.

This was in A12-A14

As others have said, as of A16 rescued spacers join (I think officially they "have a chance to join", but in my experience they always join).

I agree with the OP on this that having a "chat and recuit" option for landed spacers woud be a good idea, and thanks to the prisoner system there's already a blueprint in place for it (and I've never used Hospitality, but from what I understand it does this already?).

From a storytelling standpoint, sometimes I want to keep my crew small and handpicked, but still want to be an altruistic colony. There's a lot of dissonance to letting a guy bleed out because his stats suck.

Hospitality does sound like a good mod, from all I've heard of it, and if I ever decide to use any mods, I'm sure that one will be one of them. As of now though, I fancy myself a bit of a purist when it comes to Rimworld.

You really should check some of the mods out, they're pretty great. And, historically, the popular mods tend to get added into the next patches anyway.

I also consider myself a "purist" in that I don't touch mods that seem like they mess with balance (two examples: there's a mod that gives more steel per refine, and a mod that allows more items on one stack. The former obviously makes it easier to collect steel, the latter makes it so you require less storage space). However, I love mods that actually add new elements to the game (new factions, new races, more variety in joy items/furniture, etc).

Also, since someone said the sex trade being common is why we can't add this : if making human skin coats became common, would tynan have to patch it out? What about murder? murder is more common than sex trafficking, but is allowed...what gives?

I want to start by saying I come back to this website after about 4 days and it's THIS thread that's still on the front page lol. This struck me as some crack idea that somebody decided to make a fun thread about, and then it became a debate somehow.

The argument "because it happens too often in real life" isn't a good one for this game because, yes, you can go full Donner party with a colony of cannibals and make a fortune selling human meat (which is, for some reason, very valuable to traders) and human leather coats.

The better argument is that it.... just doesn't add gameplay value. As others have said, nonconsensual sex doesn't occur in this game, so the only way to make selling young women as slaves intuitive to a player is to allow a player to also BUY sex slaves. Otherwise it's nothing more than an Easter egg. So unless you want the +30 moodlet "Pleasured by sex slave" for your own colonists (which would require a total morality overhaul, given that these guys still feel guilty for executing guilty prisoners) it would never fit in.

Upon further reading, this thread seems to have collected the "anti-PC" crowd, which is odd because opposition to this idea isn't due to political correctness, but rather to how little it would add to gameplay/immersion. Do you really feel pulled out of the realism of this game because a young female pawn isn't pulling in a rape-worthy price?