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Has anyone played space colony ? Although i hated its gameplay (not that user-friendly) it focused largely on social interactions and character backgrounds (you can't make a "bimbo" fall in love with you by inviting her to a chess tournament - this is not an example taken from the game, i'm just saying, character backgrounds).

Although this is a far target it would be cool to see their backgrounds actually affecting their interactions or, even, their ability to fall in love with one another. A space pirate and a police officer won't really be friendly to each other. This could be negated by bonuses like "they fought together" or "he tended to his wounds" etc.

@Andurhil

We agree. And since i have not seen the trait in action i can't really argue about its neutrality. I'm all for adding more and more realism to this game. Anyway we agree.

I agree with Play2Jens, the game would end abruptly in most cases. I also agree that this (or these) should be an achievement and not an ending. I think the end of each colony should be triggered by building the ship (go or stay is your choice, but building the ship means you can go).

@Kegereneku

Great ideas, i will reply to that topic too.

@Jonofwrath

What i'm suggesting covers your gameplay needs. The way i see it you would need to play for ages before you would be able to even consider building the ship. Actually, you would even be the planet's dominant colony by then (so it would only be fair to win at that point and not earlier).

@Andurhil (and everyone else really)

When i posted my reply i thought the topic was about introducing the gay trait, not discussing the already introduced one (i had no idea there was a gay trait in the game). Now, reading your reply i noticed how you compared the "gay" trait to the "lazy" trait. Obviously i understand your intention was not to make the "gay" trait look as negative as the "lazy" one, however it will look like that to other players. So for example, you will have a lazy worker "but at least he's straight" or a gay worker "but at least he has the hard worker trait" (this example is just based on your example).

Personally, i am against political correctness. You are right in what you say, that it's not portrayed as a negative but if it happens to be then so be it (since it's survival). The reason why i raised this point is because it might be seen as a huge negative for the entire game by outsiders.

I was, indeed, looking at it socially rather than a mechanic, but i was also thinking about what would that mean for future requests or suggestions. Basically my entire point crumbles at the fact that i didn't know it had already been implemented.

@Zombra

I honestly hope it changes, however, we must not hate if it doesn't. Maybe our ideas go against Ludeon studios' ideas. I mean, if you designed a game and you thought "wouldn't it be great if the alien planet was terraformed beforehand and it's similar to Earth but with some small changes?" then doing what we're suggesting would be changing your entire scenario. I doubt this is how it was conceived but, on the other hand, there is always the possibility it was. It's just a pity to have an idea this big and cramp it inside Earth and its lifeforms.

As i said in a topic of mine i believe the ending should be there as it is, only harder to achieve. Right now you can achieve it in one generation and it doesn't make sense that you're able to create an entire spaceship this fast (four people working with their hands while they're mining, harvesting, defending themselves, etc etc). I would want the end-game to be so far away that you would get a feeling of "achieving the impossible" when you finally do it. Also, until you get to that point, it would be like the "staying" ending in your poll.

I'm for that. I also posted a topic about the world being too Earth-like and suggesting new creatures and colours, however someone pointed out that the game's canon states that rimworlds have been terraformed for future human colonists, so my argument was invalid. As the canon states there are no aliens (creatures or intelligent or even worlds) in this game. There are only human worlds (and, well, transcendent worlds) that feature different societies, and have evolved differently (but only society-wise).

It's a shame really. Surviving in an Earthlike planet is cool. Surviving in an alien one is so much cooler.

In my post i also included suggestions for features like poisonous water or air, so you would need water filtering or masks. Imagine also if you could grow alien plant life by picking seeds from elsewhere, and you would have to discover on your own what each plant is good for. All this is awesome, but again, canon states it's not possible (as someone replied to me).

I'm not against it and i'm not for it either. Before we come to this matter we have to agree if we want this to ultimately become a sims game (as long as relationships are concerned). For example, if "gay" and "straight" is added, why not "bisexual" or "asexual" or any other label.

Also, if we start adding such labels, then maybe we should add colonists' reactions to such labels. Someone doesn't like gay people / someone doesn't like straight people / a gay person falls in love with a straight person of the same sex / a straight person falls in love with a gay person of the opposite sex.

What i'm saying is that this would take a ton of work in order for it to be realistic. Also, especially if we add Rimkids - generations of colonists - which means the player would feel like having a gay person in his starting team would be a liability since he/she won't produce any offspring (which you would want for your colony to grow) which would be treated as if the game was designed to make you hate gay people.

Obviously in such a year we are above labels and sexualities and hatred towards the different sexuality than your own. However, to solve this realism problem, we could say that in such a year every human has been genetically engineered to be straight from birth. I'm not obviously saying that this would be moral or correct, i'm just saying that since that could be the case then the problem is solved in a second.

Also, think about this. A gay person plays the game and wants an all-gay colony and decides to sell straight people as prisoners. How will this colony survive? Gay women and gay men would be "forced against their nature" to have a sexual relationship for the sole purpose of growing the colony. That would be really "unfair" towards gay people. So then we should start thinking about alternate routes that would lead to offspring like making a lab that would have the sperm fertilize the egg without the need of the sexual activity between a gay male and a gay female.

The sole reason i'm saying all of these is to point out how much more work it would be even if you just wanted a gay/straight label show, without it meaning anything in the colony. Maybe, in ten years of alphas and betas that include generations, alien worlds, cybertech, guards, expeditions and in general, all the things everyone is longing for, they could also include different sexualities.

But again, think about what would that mean for the players. For a colony to survive it would be easier if everyone is straight (again, i'm saying this because of the offspring "availability") so the gay trait would be seen as a negative, and that would be wrong.

@CabbageFoot

What you say in the beginning is exactly what i'm saying. New game+ is a cool idea, at least as an option, it should be there. But i'd love to see the endgame so far away that, you know, you *won*. When i played it felt like you could win in mid-game.

@Kegereneku

When we're discussing these things we're basically trying to make our experience (and the experience of those who come after us) better. I think it would not be wise to experiment with such gameplay-altering additions without being able to at least visualise the result.

Trying to imagine FoW in daytime, having to manually lead each individual for a simple hunt or mining operation is extremely frustrating and tiresome. At night people will usually go to sleep, which is safe to say, you don't really need to see the entire map. *However* there has been an instance where i was being sieged and the siegers were sleeping at night so, in order to take them by surprise, i ordered all my colonists to sleep during the siege and attack when the enemy was sleeping. It was literally the safest and quickest fight, and i was really glad that the game "allowed" such a tactic.

So if people really want to implement FoW then the safest way (apart from an event) would be to use it at night, but also, in the early-game. Let's say a tech would remove it altogether when the sieges start.

But if that's the case, then why bother to put it in anyway. It seems like the things they can do (and already have on their list of doing) with this game are endless, so would anyone really want them to focus on this?

To sum up: i think the safest way to implement FoW (apart from an event) would be to only make it active at night, and only in the early game.

Concerning FoW i'd say it would be cool to have it as an event, or at nighttime. By event i mean something like a disaster. Now, at nighttime, it would be awesome if you could have this feeling that you are staying inside your colony, where it's safe from the unknown, you know?

Anyway, concerning guard posts and duties i think that would be cool but i don't think they should be focusing on that this much. I mean, we don't need patrol areas *and* guard posts *and* guard duties etc.  I would say, if you assign a colonist to a guard post, then he will basically live there and other colonists will bring him food etc. he can take walks outside so he avoids cabin fever, but basically that's what he will be doing now. And after a week or two he could complain that he needs to be back at the "normal" jobs for a while. And it would be *awesome* if it was his duty to also reset the traps that have sprung - this way you can have an automated defense system, but i'd suggest that this becomes effective in mid-game (in early game turrets would be more effective and having a guard post would be more consuming than providing) but yeah, i completely agree on that one.

@tylers2001

You are right. Although it's been a long time since i first played the game i remember that i picked a site close to a river due to water availability - i thought that was crucial. I then discovered water actually was a disadvantage (you can't build walls on it, it does nothing to aid the colonists, it's just dead space in your colony). This is completely unrealistic. However i think there are other issues that desperately need to be looked at before water. What i'm hinting at is, of course, the "neverending" aspect or "late game escape" that i talked about in another thread. But it seriously needs to be addressed because here we have hungry, ill, sad people who by some amazing coincidence have eradicated their (every) need for the most valuable resource in any planet: water.

@Boston

First of all i read the document you provided and i didn't see any mentions of the fact that the rimworlds were terraformed with anything Terran (hail starcraft right?) for human colonization, but then again maybe i missed it. However if that's the case, and that's actually in the lore of this universe, then i'm in the wrong and that's it. I just thought it would be far more interesting otherwise and would actually need the same amount of coding - or even less in some cases. Like in my "fricken" example, instead of mimicking life on Earth, you could just put anything and call it alive. Many sci fi movies feature Earthlike aliens anyway. If you take for example the game "startopia" which features a lot of aliens, most of them resemble human beings (actually i think all of them are) but they're still alien. You don't need to explain the entire biological system of an alien to make one. You can just answer these questions: genders? predators or passive creatures? fast or slow? tough or fragile? Intelligent/trainable? (and you can add stuff here to be more specific) and then pick an image that suits what you wrote et voila, you have an alien tribe. And i'm not talking about winged, one eyed, six armed, intelligent insectoids with bonuses to mellee combat and flight abilities or a hive mind. I'm talking about purple rastafarians with a farming culture (see farmers in startopia, you'll get what i mean).

Again, if no aliens exist per canon, i'm in the wrong. I'm saying all this to underline how easy it would be to make it so much more interesting for sci fi lovers (which this game is aimed at). Actually don't even mind what i say, imagine if you start a thread asking players to describe an easy-to-make alien, how many valid answers would you get. And you would only need two or three tribes, two more advanced cultures, and, well, replacing deer and elephants and chicken (i've already solved the last one). See where i'm getting at?

@SuperCaffeineDude

The easiest way to implement fishing so you can avoid all of what you said would be to just get x amount of meat per x amount of time. Let's say fishing could be the ineffective method of providing meat. You will obviously never have more than one or two people fishing so population won't ever be a problem. And if you have more than, say, ten people in your colony you will not be able to feed them this way - you will still need to slaughter large meat-providing animals.

We completely agree on the "alien" issue. An elephant with two sets of tusks is still an elephant by all means but an alien one. What really struck me badly was the deer. Here i am, stranded on this rim world and i'm thinking quick, i have to make a shelter, quick, we have no time it's an unknown world with unknown dangers, i have to find food, let's look at the map: deer. Even in fallout, which is on Earth itself, you have mutant cows. Just a cow with two heads. That, in rimworld, would be "alien". It wouldn't be alien, of course, by any sci-fi standards (since it evolved similarly to a cow from Earth then they would both have a common ancestor, which means they both come from Earth) but still, it wouldn't be a normal, ordinary, mundane cow.

Actually, now that i mentioned fallout, imagine if noone was affected by radioactivity and the canon was "well, noone was affected". Wouldn't that be a shame? Wouldn't you then say "dude, why didn't they put this in, it would be awesome!" - and they did, even in fallout 1 and 2, and it is a huge pain (since everyone from those tribes was modelled to look like a burnt, mutated human (in some cases even in 3d) *and* it wasn't really needed, the story in those two would be the same if you just had humans.) but they did it because it added so much to the feeling of the world.

But still. I had no idea this was supposed to be like Earth, i thought it was meant to be an unknown, alien planet. So wait, there are no aliens, anywhere? I mean, other planets must have alien civilizations right? Or is it just humans in the entire universe that this game takes place in?

Anyway, like i said in my first post, this is all food for thought.

Or we could just make the colonists unaffected by age. But that, i guess, is a step back