Messages

@SuperCaffeineDude

Like i said, i wasn't talking about hard things, that would need a lot of time and coding to be implemented like a brand new social structure or whatever. I am talking about simple things. For example what you said: "the simplest implementation might just literally sending out colonists on quests to gather/trade/battle whilst you wait at home"

So "fishing" would just be equivalent to "mining fish corpses from the river". So a person with hunting as his top priority, if he doesn't have a target, he would just fish. That's really simple and actually perfect.

But even then i don't care so much about fishing, i am just saying this for the sake of the argument. What i care about is the feeling of survival *and* on an alien planet. Right now it feels like survival in the early game but soon becomes "build your own trade station and defend it", while the "alien" aspect is just lost straight away, from the first tree you cut down, or the first deer you hunt down. Also, the grass is green, the water is blue, the dirt is brown. Even in some locations on Earth for example the water is green, or black, or red. Why is it so hard to paint water a different colour than blue, or grass a different colour than green?

I understand where you're coming from when you say "research miniguns from the mech race" and i agree. However i wanted to go a bit more futuristic there, i wanted to research not just an Earthly minigun but like a mecha-gun, which would be an extremely advanced technology in the hands of, well, primitives. I had one of their ships crash on my colony and it took a long time and ingenuity to kill them off and...i got really nothing. I was hoping i could get a data disk, or a weird weapon, or a tech to build something "out of this world" (for example a positive drone).

When i play such games i try to imagine what i would do in any given situation. So if i killed a deadly robot would i smelt it? Or would i examine his arm to see if i can make it into a weapon? Or his exterior into a make-shift armor? I mean it took a ton of damage to punch a hole in it, so why shouldn't i wear the thing in battles against bows?

Yeah, i love this kind of stories that you're talking about (starving colonist kills her husky) and i think that's what this game is supposed to be about. I literally spent ages micromanaging a chicken farm so that i always keep one male and many females for eggs and kill the surplus chicken for meat and...that type of micromanagement is not survival. I would go as far as to say remove all the chicken, they don't belong to rimworld. Bring fricken instead, who are hermaphrodite, are born adults from eggs and look like worms with legs.

It's an alien planet! Anything goes! Seriously imagine you can just put in a-ny-thing and it's still going to count as plausible. So why chicken? I mean of course you can help your imagination using Earthly creatures (the wormlike things would have, in essence, the same role as chicken) but from then on you're limitless! And it would need less coding, and it would be less of a hussle for the player to micromanage it. For example, now, the chicken farm seriously needs some kind of automation to be counted as a valuable asset to your colony. Otherwise it's just too much work. This automation needs more coding which would have been avoided if instead of Earthly creatures you had alien ones.

Away chicken! Bring fricken!!

@levgre - i agree, it could be a different scenario. It could just be a different game difficulty "normal" and "alien" or "known planet" and "unknown planet" (so that you get the non-tradeship factor normally).

Even if it was too expensive for them to come rescue the colonists they could still transfer the signal. It could take years but in the end they would get rescued by someone. Again, it ruins the feeling of being stranded and surviving on an alien planet, which is so cool an idea! And still, if you want to keep the tradeships, then it should be an endgame option, and even then it should be hard for them to actually hear you.

I'm not just talking about realism here, i'm talking about the "survivalist" feelings you get while playing the game. Imagine, "this war of mine" for example, if the traders were helicopters from another country that can transfer people (prisoners), instead of a runner surviving just like you. (If you haven't played it, it's a game where you try to survive inside a war, i'm not getting into much detail, but i wanted to make the analogy). The feeling must be that of survival and outside help greatly reduces that.

@keylocke

signalling tribes or other peoples' colonies is fine, although i think there should only be native tribes with no such tech (unless they buy it from you, or you give it for free so you can communicate). It's fine because you're still stranded. Maybe you can meet with a tech team that has set up a bio-dome there as an experiment and when you ask them to go with them they would answer that it can't happen due to the fact it's set up to hold a maximum of people which has already been reached - this way you can explain why you can't join other colonists who have already established their colonies and are surviving better than you.

Maybe after establishing the first colony you can choose four people and some resources to set up another colony and expand on that planet, and the endgame would come when you actually successfully set up four of those (thus you can commence a space program). Imagine if you could develop a colony near a river for water, near a mountain for mining, in an open space for food etc and can trade between these colonies (or ask for reinforcements or food or minerals etc.) while you're playing the current one (i'm not saying being able to manage all colonies at once of course. That would be immensely difficult and it would go away from this feeling that i'm trying to enhance.)

And i've seen mods of this game (images and such) which expand to cyber-techs etc. and i think these should be implemented too, you should be able to reach a level of tech where you can't yet go out of the planet but you can have advanced weapons or implants. Imagine, we have now 3d printers, virtual reality, etc, but we're still miles away from actually travelling through the galaxy like this game's escape plan suggests. let alone using just minerals found in an alien planet, right?

I mean you would have to be really lucky to get stranded on a random planet and that planet happens to be like this, with wood, steel, boars, fertile soil and drinkable water. Which is close enough to a sun to utilize solar power, has winds that won't damage wind turbines, a sequence of day and night that is really similar to ours etc. Actually if you pose this question to an astrophysicist: "you get lost in space, with a damaged ship, and your ship calculates which is the nearest planet which is better suited for human life and sends you there before exploding. What's the chance of that planet being so and so?" he would probably say (and i'm guessing here) that the chance is one in a quadrillion (actually i think it's a lot lot smaller). But i'm still not saying they should re-design the entire game, of course not, they could just say "..and by some miracle it so happens that the nearest planet is actually similar to Earth" but then shouldn't that planet have at least some alien features? At least alien plant life (not trees) and animals (not boars, squirrels and deer). And the natives could be bipedal, generally with functions similar to humans but they are aliens, they have their own language, their own society rules, they are organisms better suited to that environment than humans, so capturing a prisoner and actually converting one should be a lot more interesting.

Again i'm throwing ideas here, i'm not trying to bring the end of the world

It's just that i love the sci-fi element of the idea for this game, but the actual game is not really that sci-fi.

I'd like to start off with the fact that i have only played a very early version - i don't even remember if it was alpha or beta (but my bets are on alpha). However i have read about all the major changes since then and i am patiently waiting for the opportunity to have a neverending colony - i.e. multiple generations.

However the reason behind many people wanting multiple generations (apart from the fact it's pure realism) is, i guess, because they want to keep on playing - although the game is advertised for survival and escape, not establishing a village or city. I too get attached and want to stay there and be some kind of significant power on that new planet. Obviously this goes against what would happen in reality, for example some people may have families back home and want to escape as soon as possible etc.

So, you survived, you escaped, and...well that's it. And it's actually pretty easier than making a dominant colony with defenses etc. And it only makes sense that making and launching a missile into space is much much harder than actually creating a dominant village-like power. I understand that these guys aren't random and they're supposed to come from a technologically advanced civilization (i.e future humans) but if it's this easy to make a spaceship able of interstellar travel, i can only imagine it's extremely easier to make a simple sniper rifle, or a marble statue - which basically means it should take much less work. Obviously what i'm saying is that the ending should come much later, so the spaceship should be much more difficult to make.

So this would call for the "neverending colony". When you're heading towards this new endgame that i'm suggesting, you will have built so much and explored the game in such depth among multiple generations that you would be cool with it to end. Or keep on playing forever - that's your choice.

Before i go to more specific suggestions i have to mention some things that don't make sense to me. This is supposed to be an alien planet, right? Even if it was picked automatically by a computer so that it has "Earth's standards" it still doesn't explain how everyone is cool with breathing without any masks, modifications or special equipment. The planet even has squirells if i remember correctly or boars. I mean, it really only has but a few alien animals ("cantaloupes"? do i remember correctly? It was some camel-like animal) and all of them are actually Earth-like. I know i'm stretching it a bit here but it was a real let-down that i thought i'd visit something alien but it's basically Earth. Now that i think about it, it would be cool if it was actually Earth and it was revealed that it's Earth's past. Anyway, another thing that didn't make sense was that although you're trying to escape the planet and you can signal incoming ships to trade with them you cannot ask for help. That's the first thing anyone does anywhere if he's cast-away, signal for help.

Now, what i would adore would be to actually survive, in a very difficult and "grim" sense. It's called rimworld, which i suppose it means it's really really far away, which would mean that no trade ships go there on purpose. So i'd say, no trade-ships, at all, just debris or random events like hunters or thieves or killers escaping justice. Or even malfunctioning trade-ships which you can loot or come to some agreement with them - but always within the "noone will hear you here, we're in rimworld now" motif.

I understand all these would probably call for a "rimworld II" however i'd like the devs to consider it at least food for thought.

So now let's go on to list these and others into groups:

1. The colony needs to be able to be kept throughout a neverending game. The answer to this is simple, and everyone has said it, the people need to have children. You could make the children able to do other tasks rather than work, like caring for animals or gathering herbs or carrying medicine or flipping switches. You would need a teacher profession i guess but let's make it simple, it could be something like the coding used in animal training. For a child to be able to become a fully functional member of the colony, you would need to "train" him in "language" or "mathematics" or even just label it as "education" and be done with it altogether.

2. The game should be more about survival and less about escape (escaping should of course be the ending trigger but it needs to be much more difficult to achieve). When it starts it's grim and scary, that feeling should be preserved. Soon enough it becomes kinda "i wanted to start a colony here guys, i did it on purpose, i'm not shipwrecked at all" which should come (if ever) when you reach the endgame (and your village has become more like a space station)

3. There should be no comm-links and trading with passing ships, otherwise you could just escape this way. No talking with the outside world, we're stranded here, and we're alone, and we have to deal with this world's problems now, and its natives. As if noone has any idea this world even exists (let alone trade with it).

4. The planet needs some more "alienation", right now it's so similar to Earth it's as if it almost is, in fact, Earth. In fact it should be so alien that there is a hazard in everything (air, water, food, predator-type animals)

5. Diseases/illnesses that last forever - these should all be treatable towards the endgame. Like many suggested, if you have cataract you could get an eye implant or a bionic eye. That of course should happen towards the end, let's say third generation.

6. You should be able to send people on missions outside your colony. Contact a tribe or mine for resources (or find water, why not) or whatever.

7. On the subject of water, being close to a river should have some advantages. In snowy grounds you have to melt the snow, or in grounds away from the sea you have to build wells. When you're next to a river you could build a dam for electricity, get water straight from the river, or even "fish" whatever alien fish-life you'll find.

8. Please oh please dig deeper into the mech civilization you encounter. Their parts could hold some secrets or they may have their own story, it was really fascinating when they showed up but that was it, you kill them and you get metal. I really think this is a great idea.

I will finish this list here because i don't want it to become unreadable (maybe it is now) and i sincerely hope this becomes food for thought since i think this game has a *huge* potential to become one of the greatest sci-fi/colony/survival sims out there. Also, i didn't double-check what i wrote so i apologise for any typos or grammatical errors. Anyway. Feel free to discuss.