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by default the response to hostiles when undrafted is "flee". You can set this attack if you want.

Report.

I turned on the ship. ~590k wealth, 22 colonists.

Day 2 - first raid, 200+ tribal sappers, 4 groups. There was also 270 insect infest close during this reactor activation. Game running on <1 fps. Fights completely unplayable even if I'm not watching the spider vs tribals smackdown.

Basically only thing I could do to realistically fight these raids without computer destruction is mass doomsdays.

I am not sure whether it is intention that going over the old 10k raid point cap (think I'm at about 18k right now?) is intentionally punished with game unplayability. But surely there must be a better way than just dumping 400+ simultaneous units on field (even at 200 v 22 there were pretty big playability problems if there was an actual firefight, it came down to AoEing them down with rockets / doom before they could even shoot)

Quick note - released guests walk really slow. I checked their movement speed in information tab and they are moving like 3x slower than they should be

Year 5 cas/merci/commit/noob biome

After a day of thinking, I realized that my primary problem with the crashes was occuring from letting tribals fire their weapons. Now normally we are taught in rimworld school that letting enemies fire (at least at our pawns) is unacceptable, so it came to mind that we had a "souvenirs pile" that might possibly be useful for executing this raid from the start.



Result was deliciously un-laggy:



And now instead of buying stuff like bionics that will increase my raid strength, I can wealth control by investing in weapons of mass destruction inc. Everyone wins.

Doomsday takes care of the corpses too. Its great, would highly recommend. Tribal overflow parking was getting a bit too full anyways:

My conclusion is - the 100+ tribals are coming to test you for either stock of doomsday launchers or barring that, your computer strength.

The game can't ever become easier or safer as a colony improves, because then it would become boring. Dangers have to scale in line with the player's ability to handle them, keeping the risk level the same.

See how ARPGs like Diablo deal with this. The player never makes any lasting progress on difficulty, but progresses on story and aesthetics. Chain Lightning versus level 30 monsters isn't any easier than Shock Bolts at level 1, but it looks and sounds so much cooler, and the control feels smoother. Often, the late-game monsters are the same as the level 1 monsters except for a palette swap. But having cycled through other monsters still feels like progress.

RimWorld lets the player decorate bedrooms, buy guns, orchestrate complex production lines, heal maimed colonists, train pets, install air conditioning - all sorts of goals to strive for, achieve, and feel good about. The problem with wealth-based raid scaling is that every accomplishment is poisoned by a feeling of helplessness. The colony is endangered because all threats get bigger. How can the player prepare against "all threats get bigger"?

But the player can prepare against specific, telegraphed dangers. I like the themed, motivated raid idea. Specific, well-communicated player accomplishments should unlock larger sizes of different raid types, which try to push the player back on that accomplishment.
- Thieves scale by how much carryable loot you have. And they try to steal it.
- Tribals scale by how much electricity you are using. And they try to destroy it.
- Mechanoids scale by how many Advanced Components you have or are using. And they try to destroy them.
- Infestations scale by how many excavated mountain tiles you are occupying. And they try to push you off of them.
- Slavers scale by the value of your colonists. And they try to kidnap them.
- Maddened herbivores eat your grain, carnivores eat your animals, boomrats burn your furniture.
Threats feel more actionable if they are specific. If I know that my Alpaca ranch is going to attract swarms of maddened wolves, I can prepare for wolves. Which feels much better than a vague knowledge that everything will become more dangerous.

I also like that a motivated raid has limited (but painful) consequences for opting out. Currently, fighting a raid to the death feels mandatory.

the current system is also boring, as ultimately there is no sense of progression, and that most strategic choices are meaningless besides a very specific set of ones that lower your wealth. In fact it is almost worse in the sense that early game outcomes are dominated by combat choices, late game is dominated by considerations like "how do I destroy all these weapons that sell for 20% price but count for full market value" and "corpse disposal party", since your colonists will break at any simultaneous sight of rotting and regular corpses.

I like to discuss optimizing economy, but the conclusion is that none of it really matters. Play well, or play badly in this regard, arguably the latter is better.

Same concept with mood management. Everything you know about making space efficient bedrooms that pawns like goes out the window when you realize that it means nothing in the face of "make sure you don't go up an expectations tier"

PS there is absolutely progression in Diablo, the difference in efficiency of geared and ungeared character is immense.

Year 5 cas/merci/commit/noob biome

Something like 22v160 sapper tribal raid this time, 18k fun points.

Was running 1 fps during the clash, crashed when I hit them with 20+ kill triple rocket launcher. And game was already throwing errors at 10+ kill mortar shots.

So I guess this is the end, as playing incredibly laggy raids has become increasingly unenjoyable. My play was strictly suboptimal (if I was sane and playing optimally, I would not play wealth farmville and opt to make all my pawns 10k+ value bionic/archotech machines, and I would have tactically done some wealth reduction thingies, but I was interested in testing the very limits of my defensive setups).

If there's anything I regret, its that my computer reached the end of its sanity before seeing a 15k+ mech drop pod. This was something I was definitely curious to evaluate performance against...maybe will try some dev mode tests later.

Overall, I would say that my defensive setups performed above expectation, with zero hostile sharp wounds sustained in all of year 2-4, but my play against apocalypse level 15k+ point sapper raids needs a bit of tightening, as those ended up significantly messier. Even then, throughout these 5 years, I never got downed during a raid (there was the infamous muffalo punching adventure of year 2 to see how much my raid points would drop, which led to 4 downs, but that doesn't really count does it?), which I guess is ok.

However, Jet remains traumatized from the scyther drop of year 2 destroying his masterwork bed (never replaced).

My tentative feedback at the 10-20k point raid is consider alternate unit types with higher point values.

Some personal statistics for this run -

Times shot at by a charge lance over 5 years: 1 (1 more than is acceptable..UNCLEAN)
Record centipedes killed in a minute: 15+ (maybe I will post video this super-doombox, but it is classified for now )
Manhunter elephants killed by solo pawn in single encounter: 20+
Number of mental breaks directly due to post-sapper raid corpse littering: 6 (out of maybe ~10 total) - this is the true weapon of the tribal, the ability to inflict 20 mood points worth of damage with nothing more but their dead bodies !!! A hypothetical raid type of 100% nude tribals that are all sappers that just try to punch things in your base would be frightening indeed. I would take a psychic ship over that.
Crematoria built: 0 (100% purely organic means of corpse disposal)
Turrets built: 0

PS. @greep walling better than me. Triple walling net neutral vs. sappers at the end of the day.

As our attempts to find out what the patch actually changed - the effects of treatment quality against malaria seems to have been reduced pretty significantly.

I haven't posted graphs because my scummy overpriced ISP(anyone in the US, UK or AU will agree) has me speed limited at the moment, but fun points capped at 1000 early on, population was at 49 until friendly chat was removed after which quickly grew to 65, wealth passed 3M, mood hovered between 60 and 70.

Fun points now capped at 2000. It makes quite a bit of difference if you hit the 'lategame' early (at day 90! that is pretty impressive. It took me 160 and that's with a friendly biome)

It does strike me as amusing that corpse disposal is one of THE primary challenges in lategame merciless. Tribal sappers are particularly obnoxious regarding this, being walking mood suicide bombs - unless you have a gigantic swarm of haulers there's no way you are clearing those before they rot, and the blood, all the blood...my poor bionic leg cleaner can't keep up!




-18 from observing various corpses in various states of decay, -15 hideous environment, aint no joke.

Just some notes about quality of life thingies -

Allow force hauling stuff outside a colonist's restricted zone.

Also, would be nice to have toggleable setting if colonist is about to attack something while undrafted. It is kind of annoying to see your colonist walked 30+ tiles outside his restrict zone to attempt to solo beat 10 insects to death.

cassandra/merci / noob biome/ COMMITTED/ year 5 / too many / vanilla

240x bug infestation. Whenever I pan over to the main battlefield, screen almost freezes. I feel like having spiders die on down would help performance somewhat. Though it would still be problematic - I could tell when insects had aggro'd by a 5-second long freeze.


Woke at dawn to do battle, slaughtered insects for 10 hr straight, many walls destroyed, friendlies called.

Spoils of war:

And all this for what? Next infestation of 300 insects, which my computer will of course struggle with.

The march to 20k continues:



Get me off this planet.

The final holdout of "progression without stronger raids" is research. So I have a feeling we'll see that loophole close.

Honestly the animals dropping meat is only a problem because the corpses are not taxed appropriately by the wealth IRS that decides how many centipedes to pod into your base. This should be remedied.

On related note, one of the decisive parts of year 1 is how many BAR / mid-tier weapon raids are sent, since such weapons are very nice to have for the month 3-6 special threat encounters. However, I think this sort of dubious progression goes against the spirit of the game. As Mssrs. dearmad and polder point out, why should a raid be a boon?

However, its not easy to solve this problem. The most apparent idea to affix a tainted designation to weapons as well (I noticed that the tainted malus was increased in this patch, probably in response to people killing prisoners in power armor to lower their wealth value!!! great job.) However this would remove a large skilltesting component of later game raids, since tainted destroys market value. This skilltesting component is the decision of whether to burn the weapons or smelt them at obscene time cost for scraps of steel, since a 75-100 man pirate raid can easily drop 50k of weapons that cannot be liquidated at anywhere near accepted market values, so if you don't want IRS to punish you, you better come up with a solution.

I would instead suggest that any non-colonist downing / death immediately downgrades all items worn by two quality levels. This would also promote ethically sourced clothing and weapons, which require fabrication tables, research (see below), etc. Otherwise you're kind of cheating the wealth control system. Yeah I said it.

Alternatively, you could just make tainted modifier only affect sell value and not market value (I can't take credit for this one, my brain is not big enough)

Furthermore, in line with eradication of most traditional progression metrics, I would point out that research points are fundamentally not taxed by the raid algorithm. They have infinite utility/wealth ratio! I suggest that research points also are included in the raid point calculation. This would have the benefit of also challenging tribals more for their research, reflecting historically typical troubles of a society attempting to industrialize.

But the tainted pelts and meat should be worth 10x what regular meat is worth and never rot or degrade. And nobody actually buys it.

Very good. I think this would further promote fire utilization, which is one of the three skills that fundamentally distinguishes mediocre and great players.

Legs allow you to safely make plays that you can't otherwise, especially when caravan events do things like attempt to storytell you with 11v3 ambushes.

It's potentially the difference between running out the clock for reinforcements and getting clubbed to death in a small map lacking requisite features for force multiplying.

Also allows you to be much more aggressive vs melee only threats.

You have to go completely conduitless afaik to dodge the zzt event.

This is what I used to do in b18, but I think the efficiency gain from conduit setups + certain techs that require a very 'disorganized' base outweigh it.

There is a slight efficiency issue that I'd like to get input on.

Drug consumption itself gains recreation, so there is a bit of a bad feeling if you set drug consumption to occur at any recreation level. It feels like you are missing out on efficiency. That said, often with forced recreation time there won't be that many situations where pawn is simultaneously low mood + low rec to trigger drug consumption (if you set a mood requirement). And ultimately, I'd rather a pawn take drug than risk most mental break.

How do you people deal with this? Rec threshold for drug use or not?