The problem with Rimworld

[NoImageAvailable]

This is something that occurred to me recently: for a supposed story generator Rimworld really doesn't produce that many interesting stories, certainly nothing of the caliber that is regularly produced by Dwarf Fortress. So why is that? When looking at DF, the most memorable stories are produced simply by the mechanics interacting in weird unexpected ways to create disasters of epic proportions. When someone forgets to build elephant traps and is subsequently overrun by the murderous beasts only for the horde to be decimated by a breaking dam releasing lava all over the fortress and when the survivors struggle only to face a renewed attack by bloodthirsty wildlife, it is that kind of madness that makes the story entertaining and memorable.

Rimworld on the other hand uses the "Storyteller" concept, events are carefully tailored to the player and his capabilities, lest we upset the status quo. The events themselves reflect this and are mostly ineffectual and non-threatening. Raids are easily repelled using killboxes and standardized combat tactics, they never vary in anything but size, even sappers aren't all they're made out to be. Natural events are even less noteworthy. If the game didn't tell me about them I could probably go through an entire eclipse and not even notice, because they have barely any effect and if you have batteries and/or geothermal power they affect basically nothing at all. Solar flares could theoretically be problematic if they were to occur at the same time as a raid but that virtually never happens because the event engine forbids it.

Which leads me to my second problem, the predictability of it all. Even Randy is anything but random. Once a month a raid arrives like clockwork, every few weeks a bad event out of the list of possibilities is chosen to occur and so on. It happens with such regularity that the game loses any semblance of variety. Every game has the same events occur over and over at the same intervals making every colony essentially the same as the one before. Combined with the overall lack of threats the game becomes monotonous, repetitive and tedious. The feature is the base building but there are only so many nigh-identical sandcastles you can build before you wish an evil horde would come along and lay siege to one of them.

So how should one fix it? Simple, increase both the potential threat and the randomness of events. By letting events pose existential threats to a colony you heighten the tension, by increasing the randomness you allow for more variety and for threats to emerge dynamically. The colony that had 5 crop blights in 2 months and subsequently resorted to cannibalizing passing travelers to survive makes for a much better story than the colony that had blights on the 5th of each month and never faced any hardship whatsoever. Think about what events you remember more vividly, the one that sent two dozen insane boomrats against you and wiped out half your colony or the fifty that made the AC lose power for a few hours? Imagine if animal insanity could affect multiple species at random, imagine if it send all the wildlife on the map at you while an eclipse crippled your shooters and a solar flare took out your turrets. Imagine you struggle with your losses and have just about given up when a lucky string of travelers join your colony and help you back up.

There are a lot of people these days asking for more events to increase variety but I think we would be better off restructuring the way events happen so the current ones can be fun. What we need is significant events, something that has an impact and makes the player throw his hands in the air and proclaim "this changes everything!" and adapt his strategy. Currently none of the events force the player to sit down and rethink his plans. What they should do is force the player to change priorities, to adapt to constantly changing circumstances and to keep hoping, guessing what comes next. Even if it means your colony gets wiped out by man-eating elephantine monstrosities, sometimes seeing your colony burn and descend into madness is the best story of all.

Now this isn't some carefully crafted critique of the game and more of a rant based on something that crossed my mind today, so perhaps the arguments aren't as refined as they could be. Nevertheless I feel this is something that has to be said if we are to consider the future development of Rimworld.

[FMJ Penguin]

Good points.

DF had the luxury of massive populations and endless content that didn't actually need to be rendered. And a huge portion of DF was left to player imaginations which I think helped in no small way.

I'm not sure we'll see another game like df in my lifetime and really wouldn't expect that any current game would even come close in terms of history content. Then again, nobody has really tried as far as I'm aware.

Interesting post btw, makes you go hmmm 

[mumblemumble]

I do agree there needs to be more availability for immergent game play,  stuff which happens with x circumstances, and the possibility of it causing a chain.. Right now ,  short of big events,  you control your colony pretty fully. Small,  more quirky events might address this, like workplace injuries, "finding"  items buried in sand,  and maybe making the ai more likely to combine events. Raid and centipedes? Solar flare and appropriately small raid?

I also think more events,  big or small,  (Though especially small)  could be nice,  things like people injured during labor,  finding an abandoned weapon in the sand, hail storms, more complex interactions with factions, ect. 

[CheeseGromit]

I chalk this up to personal taste. Yes getting the colony decimated by a catastrophic or untimely sequence of events can make for a good story. After the first few times it happens, for me at least, it became more of an annoyance. I guess I like to be more in control of my gaming experience.

Still, I'm more than happy to mod the scale and frequency up events so will leave it up to Tynan to set the baseline.

[The13thRonin]

The problem with RimWorld is that it lacks variety...

In Dwarf Fortress there are over 100 different types of rock, minerals and gemstones. In RimWorld you have a little over 6 mine-able materials. Dwarf Fortress has over 50 different types of wood. RimWorld has one type of wood. RimWorld has less 'stuff' than Dwarf Fortress. It needs a huge fleshing out as far as materials are concerned... Copper isn't even in the game yet... You are building power-lines out of steel, also apparently solar panels don't need glass... They just capture the power of the sun using their magical steel properties .

When every story is the same story the story gets boring pretty quickly. And the story at the moment is:

1. Get steel.
2. Make killbox.
3. ?
4. Quit due to boredom.

[FMJ Penguin]

The problem with RimWorld is that it lacks variety...

In Dwarf Fortress there are over 100 different types of rock, minerals and gemstones. In RimWorld you have a little over 6 mine-able materials. Dwarf Fortress has over 50 different types of wood. RimWorld has one type of wood. RimWorld has less 'stuff' than Dwarf Fortress. It needs a huge fleshing out as far as materials are concerned... Copper isn't even in the game yet... You are building power-lines out of steel, also apparently solar panels don't need glass... They just capture the power of the sun using their magical steel properties .

When every story is the same story the story gets boring pretty quickly. And the story at the moment is:

1. Get steel.
2. Make killbox.
3. ?
4. Quit due to boredom.

I like peeps that don't pull punches 

Long as the foundation is good enough to make those additions easy through mods I don't think most of that is gonna be an issue in the long run honestly though. And Tynan has def put alot of effort into making the game mod friendly that's for sure.

But can't disagree with anyone in here really. Still have quite some time yet before it goes gold so guess we'll see.

Just to add to what you guys said, I'd like to see more events that don't murder you by default lolz.... you know something that adds flavor but not ALWAYS just pew pew. But we got husbandry in a big way so can't argue with that. Lotsa folks wanted that one.

[HallaK9]

This post made me register on the forums as I have been thinking about the same thing lately.  I think the key is not necessarily to have the game hit harder, or "moar rng", but more dependency between various game subsystems.

The individual components the game now has are pretty well polished, but the problem is the feeling that they happen in isolation from each other.  Events happen, but they rarely change gameplay dynamics.

At this point, the most important thing to change this would probably be to add social relations for pawns.  In reality, if you confined a dozen or so people in a confined space there would be no end to the drama.  Friendships, lust, jealousy, jockeying for status within the group and so forth.  That would mean that whatever happens to one colonist affects everyone, which in turn would be a major step in generating truly emergent, unpredictable stories.

If you think about what makes DF fun is that it has a ton of quite complex game systems that feed into each other - when everything goes haywire, it is possible to backtrack the causes and effects, and they make sense within the game universe.  On the other hand, the systems and dependencies are complex enough that they produce surprises for the player without resorting to (too overt) rng.

Rimworld certainly would benefit from "more of everything", but I don't think that at this time adding variety or for instance fleshing out the crafting game is really the crux of the issue.  More interdependecies is.

My suggestion is to add systems that affect everything, all of the time.  Social relations, water economy, waste economy and probably much more.  Physics too with all the fun that brings, but that likely is a huge undertaking best saved for much later.  More cowbell, while fun doesn't really solve the emergent story dearth.  The external shocks to your colony don't need to hit harder, they need to be more meaningful.  This meaning, again, would be attained by throwing the web of interdependencies in the colony off kilter and then let the palyer deal with the consequences.

[b0rsuk]

You worded it much better than I could. It seems to indicate Rimworld doesn't have enough emergence. I also blame the storyteller. It doesn't feel like events or systems interact with each other much. The feel isolated. Tynan himself has a slightly patronizing stance on this, he said something along the lines that you don't need real ecology, just animals and plants spawning as if there was ecology.

So how should one fix it? Simple, increase both the potential threat and the randomness of events. By letting events pose existential threats to a colony you heighten the tension, by increasing the randomness you allow for more variety and for threats to emerge dynamically. The colony that had 5 crop blights in 2 months and subsequently resorted to cannibalizing passing travelers to survive makes for a much better story than the colony that had blights on the 5th of each month and never faced any hardship whatsoever.

Good luck with that . Tynan has just made it impossible for mechanoids to arrive early in the game, because someone made a topic that "mechanoids are OP".  I'm afraid people who like Rimworld aren't the same that like DF. I play roguelikes and games like Nuclear Throne, Space Beast Terror Fright, Spelunky and Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on a Cursed Island (board game). I'm used to games which are sometimes just too hard. Such is life. There's always hope.

Come to think of it, have you EVER seen a siege during a manhunter pack ? I wonder what would happen ?

The animal taming system is a step in the right direction, though. I never cared about psychic ship sending a pulse making animals go mad. Now I might, but nowadays I'm so used to destroying psychic ship I usually destroy it before a pulse happens. Animals themselves help with this, once you destroy the guards animals help bashing the ship down. Suddenly leaving piles of food outside your rooms causes animals to stay longer in winter, and makes them easier to tame. And so on.

And there's a common pattern to events. Events hit stuff that is outside. Half the events don't do anything to a base under mountain.  Even when building outside, I learned to put buildings close together, to make them easy to defend from manhunter packs as well as toxic fallout. Sieges aren't a problem because I aggressively snipe them. Fire isn't a problem because I only build out of wood in early game, and Stonecutting is usually the first I research. You really have no tough and affordable construction material if you don't use Stonecutting. A hothouse made out of wood can be destroyed by a single mortar shell in winter. Steel is barely better, and it's needed for everything.

[NoImageAvailable]

The external shocks to your colony don't need to hit harder, they need to be more meaningful.  This meaning, again, would be attained by throwing the web of interdependencies in the colony off kilter and then let the palyer deal with the consequences.

We're essentially after the same thing here I think. The underlying problem as I see it is that colonies are static, they quickly reach the point where they can run on autopilot with minimal player input. What I want from events is they should upset the status quo in a way that forces a player reaction. In my rant I focused on the most immediate and easy ways to achieve this but increasing the interconnectedness and creating ripple effects is essentially just another way of increasing the impact of events, just as increasing frequency and extent is.

If a blight wipes out all your crops and upsets your grower colonist with the green thumb trait (there's an idea, make green thumb colonists get negative thoughts if crops are destroyed) to the point he goes on a psychotic break and that in turn sends all his friends on a spiral of depression to which the player has to react with increased beer production and leisure time for the affected colonists, the important things are that a) the status quo is upset in a significant way and b) the player has to react to it. If the status quo isn't significantly affected the event is meaningless to the player (looking at you, Alpha Beavers), if it doesn't necessitate a reaction it is just a thing that happens and doesn't engage him in the story (crop blights, solar flares, eclipses, etc.)

I agree that intermechanics interaction is an important step towards achieving more meaningful events and subsequently more emergent stories. I'm still disappointed with the joy mechanic, all it does is make you build a recreational room, put everyone on 10 hour shifts and forget it exists entirely. It never ties into gameplay in any meaningful way at all. I remember reading an article by Tynan on a gaming site where he talked about how games could spend so much time crafting complex simulations that the systems they crafted were meaningless because players were simply unable to comprehend them. In that I agree with him, there is a point where further simulation complexity becomes inefficient because players lose the ability to see the impact of events in the elaborate ripples. But I think Rimworld went too far in the opposite extreme. The "simulation" is barely existent and extremely barebones and the strings by which the event engine pulls at the world are so transparent that the result is a static, uninteresting gameworld. The supposed story generator actually generates the same story every time because it is clamped so tightly it has no other choice.

[b0rsuk]

Speaking of joy, maybe tolerance should build up faster ? You build a horseshoe pin straight away and can last a while with that, because now you have 'meditative' and 'gaming (dexterity)'. Then you build a table and some stools or chairs, you were going to get it anyway, and you're completely done now because they have a third source: 'social'. Really.

A telescope is cute, but completely unnecessary. I purchase it because I like the idea of my colonists interested in such things. I don't purchase TV. Billards table is also 'gaming (dexterity)', your 15 resource horseshoe pin took care of that. And the table is very expensive. The only thing it has going for it is extra room wealth. Chess table is better for training Construction (over 700 work if made out of stone) than for joy. I mean it works fine, but if you have the basic trio (meditative, social, dexterity) you're set.

At least meditative joy ties with some other systems slightly, because praying/meditating makes you build pretty rooms (sleeping colonists don't care), visiting graves makes them travel away, just like going for a walk which makes things a little less static too.

[Elixiar]

 This question must be the ultimate dread for Tynan.

I think everyone has contributed some excellent points.
In my opinion, I think maybe people are beginning to expect too much.
For me, the materials for emergent gameplay are already there, they are just not tied together.

Multiple events (as someone suggested) is really the way to go.
Colonist 1" tribals, a-around 150 incoming!"
Colonist 2" nothing to worry about, our point defence weapons should take care of this."
*lights go out and guns shut down*
Colonist 2" @.@ !!!"

Combining events together will create these emergent plays and events on a smaller scale would keep the game always active (celebrate birthdays, colonists become good friends."

I think the detachment is that everything affects the world state and not the colony in a personal way, also longer fallouts and crop blights would stop them being so trivial. At the moment if a crop blight happens in like, oh? Meh so what. What if there was an alien parasite that ruined all the frozen carcasses? Then we'd be in trouble. 'Crawlers' that live in caves in the mountains and can quickly mutilate an unsuspecting miner who happens to expose them.

Debris or meteor showers could be quite impactful (like crash landing mod). A destroyed engine part or damaged reactor falling into the colony could be devastating which brings my next point to the community.

Since their introduction I have never had any issue with the power of Mechanoids, if they did happen to fall early in the game when I was unprepared - oh well.

Is the nature of the game not to be about a group of people surviving hardship?
Now I can appreciate that not everyone likes the more rogue like gameplay and that's fine. The problem, is when the game as a whole becomes balanced around these player types. Another game/mode difficulty could be suggested which juggles balance changes or raid frequencies.

As you know, people are always more vocal about what they don't like than what they do.

Lastly, those who use a kill box are falling on their own sword in a way.
In 2 years of constant playing I have never used a kill box, I have also never got bored, and only very recently tried mods (no total conversions or packs though).

If your game formula is
1. Build hitbox.
2. Build colony to max.
3. Get bored from lack of threat.

That is not the games fault. An exploit it is sure. But not one you ultimately have to do.
Sometimes it's better to just let a colony rise and fall naturally than to just make the perfect home as obviously this will grow the game stale.

Yes, the game could use more events, big and small.
Yes, the impact of these events should be bigger.
And yes, social interaction would help greatly.

But the other half of 'the problem with Rimworld' is
'The problem with how people play and what they expect from Rimworld'
No matter how much Tynan adds to the game the second 'problem with' can only ever be changed by us.

[FMJ Penguin]

Lastly, those who use a kill box are falling on their own sword in a way.
In 2 years of constant playing I have never used a kill box, I have also never got bored, and only very recently tried mods (no total conversions or packs though).

If your game formula is
1. Build hitbox.
2. Build colony to max.
3. Get bored from lack of threat.

Very good point there. But that's just a built in tendency of people. What with all the tower defense games we're used to. Kinda hard to shake that off. Open ended colony builder, manager...... yeah, peeps will always abuse anything at their disposal as they should in survival games.

But yes I completely agree that not going all out with kill boxes and turrets in general and relying on colonists to defend is a lot more interesting and strategic for that matter. Then again, you can't rebuild your colonists in preparation for the next assault which will come eventually(excluding bionics of course).

Soooooo, what's the answer to that dilemma? Limit actual defensive measures? You can only build this many turrets, sandbags, etc......  I can hear the riots already lolz

Edit: Also I think you have a really good point with what you said here. " I think maybe people are beginning to expect too much."  I mean most of us aren't just playing the game for the first time. Gonna be rough to keep some of us interesting at all anymore... I know I've already been playing more than I care to admit sense early alpha days(granted on and off with couple month breaks here and there but still). 

[b0rsuk]

But colonies naturally evolve towards killboxes: it's best to limit the number of ways enemy can approach you. Then you only have to put turrets in two or so places. Non-sapper enemies aren't smart enough to destroy a wooden wall. You can't put turrets everywhere, and Rimworld has an abundance of colonists who literally can't shoot, or move, or both. Or they start with skill 1 and no passion. How much hunting do you need to train them to become tolerable ?
Anyway, walls (and digging in mountains) may be even more guilty than turrets for existence of killboxes. It's quite easy to build a wall around your entire open colony. One entrance on north, one on south, both guarded by turrets. Then you only really need to watch for sappers, and they're predictable.

Why would I not build a wall if it's effective at stopping enemies ? I'm not playing to lose.

I'm starting to think ability to Uninstall turrets could be great. Frantic preparations as enemies are approaching. Moving turrets is faster than moving 150 steel + 50 construction work for each.  And without a good builder, you stand no chance to actually prepare in time. Portable turrets could make truly open colonies more feasible.

Non-turret approaches - traps - tend to rely on walls and limiting paths for enemies, too.

I've found exactly one good use for sandbags: build cover close to wind turbines. Sandbags don't block them.

Another good point is that there aren't really many incentives to keep colonies in the open, or in the middle of map! There are occasional sieges and evil ships (stick). There are occasional drop pods (carrots). Neither demands response quick enough to sacrifice a good defensive position. There are no resources in the open to gather, no wild xerigium. Animals to tame, maybe. Rimworld's resource system very heavily relies on steel, which is available almost exclusively from hills, which lead to underground colonies. I've played a challenge game where I built the ship without mining a single tile of anything. It was very difficult. The game is not suited for that playstyle. Especially plasteel is dreadful. One square of compacted plasteel = 18 * 35 = 630 silver. Equivalent to 630 silver. Unless you get many mechanoid raids, a 10+ person ship will cost you about 32 000 silver if you never mine anything (steel or plasteel).

[skullywag]

Reading this thread then seeing this:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=15429.0
Made me laugh. It seems even whn the game does line the events up in an entertaining way some done find it that entertaining.

[FMJ Penguin]

chickens........, mans oldest foe. 

lolz that is pretty funny though.