RimWorld Review / Difficulty based on time

[A1win]

I started playing RimWorld on July 10, 2015, and I've been streaming all of my games on Twitch; the first week or so without voice commentary, only talking on chat, and then about a week with voice—the first time I've ever done that! Now I've had a break of nearly a week, because I can't come up with ways to make the game more challenging without breaking its balance. I'm a 'powergamer' by heart, which means that in pretty much every game I play, I play 'to win'; not because I enjoy winning, but because that way the gameplay and the mechanics of the game reveal themselves to me in their purest form. I'm also a game designer, which is why these things are so important to me.

In the beginning, RimWorld is really hard, but it isn't hard to get into. Every game, I learned something new about the game and made it a bit further than the last time. The game is hard for the same reason why roguelikes are hard: There's a lot of information that you need to know, and you just don't know it. You need to learn it the hard way (or read it up on the Internet, which I restrained from doing at all). If done right, this kind of gameplay is a very fun experience, like solving a mystery, or doing science in a different universe where it doesn't take the combined effort of all humankind and millennias of research to make progress. RimWorld does it right, which makes it one of the best games that I've played. However, now that I've beaten all of the challenges built into the game that interest me (random characters, flat desert, cold ice sheet), I have no more motivation to keep playing!

The game is too easy. Extreme is only extreme in the beginning where one must micromanage every colonist to give a start to a colony. As the colony grows, the need for micromanagement decreases, and that, right there, already indicates that the game is too easy: While you don't need to micromanage, you still can micromanage, and every bit of extra micromanagement you do just makes everything easier. Of course, one could make the game harder by letting it run at maximum speed all the time, never pausing, but that is not the kind of challenge I want from a singleplayer simulation game. If that was the kind of game I wanted to play, I'd be playing StarCraft II, not RimWorld.

The moment I realized that colony wealth directly affects the size of raids, I experienced a sense of disappointment, but because I still hadn't figured out everything else about the game, I didn't let it bother me for a while. The game still had its challenges: how to deal with an evil ship, how to place turrets for optimal defense; oh, enemies don't even attack powered turrets, and so on. However, as soon as I learned how to deal with pretty much any threat that Randy can throw at me (double sieges, Evil Ship + Toxic Fallout, mechanoids dropping on my base), I started to think of ways to optimize even further, and of course, one of the things to optimize is to actually minimize colony wealth and maximize its defenses. That would otherwise be fine, except... I don't want to minimize the wealth of my colony—in fact, that's the opposite of what I want to do! I don't want to be punished for building a big colony. I want to be punished for not building a big colony fast enough.

The bottom line is: I want a secondary difficulty setting on top of the existing one that lets me change how much raid difficulty (i.e. raid size) is based on colony wealth as opposed to elapsed time since the start of the game. In one extreme, the default, raid difficulty is 100% based on wealth (like it is now), and in the other, 100% based on elapsed time. Even just these two choices would be enough, but nothing prevents also having in-between options. How much the raid difficulty is increased based on time should then depend on the actual Difficulty setting, so that on Extreme, it escalates pretty quickly (but within reason, of course). To make things easier on the CPU, instead of indefinitely increasing raid size, the raids could become harder in other ways, such as by introducing tougher enemy types.

In the end, if this isn't something that's going to be in the base game, I'd love to see a mod that does it!