Messages

It was the latter in A15, it's now the former in A16. In A16, you can now rescue escape pod survivors; they have a very high chance of joining your colony afterwards.

The change was minor and not advertised well, hence why players still think you have to capture them.

The fastest victory would be for the person with higher combat stats to immediately raid the other player; no way they could get decent defenses up in time. You could just make their starting colonists identical, but then the first person to get the 4th colonist would immediately get a huge lead on the other player. The first person to be raided would automatically be at a disadvantage as well, especially if the other player decides to raid them simultaneously.

Balance issues aside, you also run into problems with gamespeed. RimWorld is heavily reliant on speeding time up when nothing's happening and pausing or slowing down when you need to do more detailed work. Having two players argue over the gamespeed would either lead to one player feeling too rushed or games lasting twice as long. I suspect the latter is more likely, especially since fighting a human opponent requires more micromanagement.

In short, dueling colonies on the same map in RimWorld would not be fun; the game simply isn't built to handle it well and attempts to bolt it on would result in a lurching Frankenstein's monster of a mode.

I am trying to figure out why this thread is still here, or why the original poster did not realize it would start massive arguments. I am guessing it was made intentionally to start fights.

That's my guess as well. More hidden/misc Melee modifiers isn't a good thing. Just handwave it as being part of the Melee skill rating and move on. Frankly, covering all melee fighting (unarmed, knife-fighting, sword-fighting, spear-fighting, etc) under a single skill is more unrealistic than treating all genders/bodytypes the same.

I like this suggestion but the dilemma is that it creates imbalance when you can just have work slaves and eliminates the point of recruiting people. There has to be some very harsh consequences to balance out the reward. And no, a risk of a prison break doesnt satisfy the balance issue. Im thinking the only way is to make it so that 1 warden is required per 1 prisoner. So basically, all your doing is trading skills by allowing the less-skilled warden to have a surrogate who can perform functions that he doesnt have the skillset for. I'm imagining this can work in a similar fashion to the animal obedience menu. If you could enslave every prisoner that you get then the game would be too easy, but it would be fun though wouldnt it.

Agreed. As I mentioned in another thread, it's a lot of work to implement for an end result of letting the player bypass a game mechanic. Prisoners consuming resources while you try to recruit them is the balancing mechanism; if they produce more than they consume, there's little reason to ever give up on trying to recruit them.

Although rereading the original post... if the prisoners are so crappy you don't want to recruit them into your colony, then why do you want to put them into forced labor? Do you think they'd be more productive as prisoners rather than recruited colonists? Are you trying to avoid the difficulty spikes from reaching X colonists? Or are you trying to avoid the demands full-fledged colonists would make?

Yeah, it feels like there's enough survival mechanics already in the game that worrying about water as well would just be too much. Food already covers daily survival concerns quite well. The main effect adding water management would have would be to limit the locations you can build a thriving base at.

Moral arguments about slavery aside, I would also argue that properly implementing a slavery system would require a lot of work to the game for the result of... actually reducing the complexity that matters.

The two advantages of slavery in the past were that you didn't have to pay them and they couldn't switch jobs. And in RimWorld, your colonists... don't get paid and can't switch colonies. So what advantage is left? You don't have to persuade them to join you? That's bypassing a gameplay mechanic. You don't have to worry about how happy they are? That's another gameplay mechanic ignored. You get to house them in substandard rooms and feed them gruel and kibble all day? Sounds like the usual treatment at some of the other colonies made in RimWorld.

You still need to set their work schedules and priorities like regular colonists, and you have to put in a new worktype for the colonist(s) that are watching them as they work, and it has to be separate from the existing Warden job because God help you if one of your Wardens can't actually fight, and then you have to set up entirely new gameplay events (slaves rioting or escaping on the job) and balance keeping slaves against having free colonists so the optimal solution isn't always to turn everyone who can't fight or do advanced work into a slave...

And what advantage do we get for all this? We can turn some colonists into (occasionally rebellious) animals instead of demanding, quirky (occasionally berserking) people. It's a lot of work to essentially let players ignore existing mechanics and strip the personalities off most of their colonists.

It'd be easier to make genetically-engineered slave monkeys for colonists to buy and put to work. And more entertaining. ("The monkeys are rebelling.")

No other skill caps at 100%
100% does not mean that you're as good as can be, just to give an idea of how much faster and effective they do stuff.

100% vs 300%, you know that one is three times as efficient as the other.

No other skill determines how many resources you get from a task. You can't get 42 steel instead of 35 from mining a single tile, or 15 potatoes instead of 10 from a single plant.

I've seen NPC caravans using camels as beasts of burden. With how often I get the Free Alpacas event, I hope they become pack animals soon.

Why not just put them in a room where animals are forbidden from entering?

Because the animals will leave their allowed zones to eat them; I saw that happen myself when my dog left his allowed zone to eat my meals. So you have to forbid the door to everyone (and I'm not sure even that works) and only unforbid it whenever a colonist needs to get in.

Alternately, you could start a caravan with all the drugs and then cancel it before it reaches the edge of the map. The colonists will return to their duties, but keep the caravan's inventory on them. This way, you can just keep your drugs on your colonists, out of reach of the animals, without hindering their hauling capacity or speed. Either way, you can completely negate the chance of animals eating drugs through a lot of micromanagement, which completely defeats the "balance" at the expense of increasing the player's busywork. Hence why I advocate balancing it through side effects of direct interaction (consuming and crafting).

In the Bugs forum, this issue cropped up:

"My cat, that I had from the very beginning of the game, suddenly overdosed on wakeup.

"I don't think animals should eat drugs so I think this is a bug. If it wasn't a bug then there would be no way to mass produce drugs without occasional animal deaths without HUGE micromanagement. I guess it would be ok, if they didn't die, like people, although I still don't think it makes sense for animals to eat drugs."

Tynan replied with:

It is intended, and it's one of the downsides of having drugs around. It balances their power and lucrativeness.

I'll be watching for balance feedback on this.

Here's my feedback: it's poor balance because we can't build the one blatantly obvious solution to this problem. Like shelves. Or boxes with latches on them. We literally have nothing to put the cookie jar on top of. Hell, technically we can't even make the cookie jar. Regardless of whether it actually balances drugs, it only works because the game's missing fundamental objects. And it makes its lack of them stick out like a sore thumb.

Personally, I'd love it if A17 had a Shelf object specifically to prevent pets from eating stuff on them (not to mention handle the problem of making 1-tile large stockpiles or temporarily holding meals until you have X amount to transfer). But regardless of whether or not they're added, there should be other ways of balancing drug use. My suggestions? Give drug-crafting (and randomly picked-up drugs) a failure rate similar to the chance of food poisoning, so there's a chance of overdosing or other bad side effects. Perhaps have the drug lab occasionally explode or catch on fire. You know, the actual risks of making (and taking) homebrewed drugs, the ones that aren't solved simply by putting them in a box.

If you have a colonist with a high enough Manipulation, you can get a butchery efficiency of 110%+. I think butchery efficiency should have a hardcap of 100%, since you can't conjure extra meat out of thin air through skill.

The strangest part is when you're in a hot jungle (average temp above 120F) so there's utterly no animals in the jungle. It's disturbing. But yeah, it seems like animals tolerate cold temperatures better than hot temperatures ATM.

Yea the events need to be synchronized for your colonies for sure. How have you liked running two colonies Mike?

It's not really that different yet. I only visit it occasionally to hunt. It's literally just a butcher's bench in an abandoned building with some sleeping spots on the ground. However, I just had 2 alpacas wander into my base, so I'm thinking about turning the 2nd colony into an alpaca farm for their soft cuddly wool. I also had the luck to have a tundra spot adjacent to my ice sheet base, so traveling between the two is near-instantaneous.

I'm not sure myself. I've been trying to get an answer, but nothing solid yet.

No, actually, you generate a % of the world, and it just stays that way. The default is set on 30%. 100% is EXTREMELY hard to play and may lead to multiple crashes. It sucks, but that's the way it is.

OP, You can also change the planet's overall average temperature and rainfall.

100% crashes on you? Weird, I'm running 100% worlds on a 5-yr old crummy computer and aside from a minute of loading whenever I access the world for the first time, it runs fine.

It would also be nice if you had a Random option where you only saw 10% of the world around your randomized crashsite and you had to explore to see more.