No trade ships anymore in A13?

[Shurp]

Trade ships come way less often than they should. At this rate I'm never going to get the AI core I need to build the ship.

You can get AI cores from fallen psychic ship parts.

(And by the time you're thinking about starting to build a ship, you can take on the mechanoids guarding it.)

[Boston]

Give it tme, sooner or later you will reach a point of no return so to speak. You will run out of supplies, there's no way around it. Your colony will grow, hence consumption will increase, be it food or resources.
Imagine now playing on a desert or an ice sheet, where growing zones are impossible to create.
Of course you can, as you said, maintain the flow of colonists and wealth but that leads to either boring stagnation or stalled death anyway, judging from the trailer of rimworld I don't suppose that was the idea. No to mention the difficulty and the storyteller.
The scarce appearing of trade ships is good imo, it prevents you from swimming in silver too quickly BUT it's not a good option RIGHT NOW when the land traders buy absolutely nothing.

The only solutiuon for this game to be playable in a long standing colonies is either increase the appearance of space traders OR which I think would be better, let the land caravans buy your stuff with a limited ammount of silver on their hands, as it is now, minus that one minor and obvious detail of not needing silver at all.

My colony grows when I want it to, and no other.  People wander in, and I don't need them? Or I get a refugee from space, and I don't want them? They die, quite simple. Animals wander it, and I can't support them? They get turned into chow. Dead enemies get left out for the bears and wolves.

As I have said, I have 6 colonists, and until I get a surplus in several magnitudes greater than what I consume, I don't expand.  I have yet to run out of resources, even playing on RR, with a growing season slightly over one season long (summer, basically). My colonists are fat, happy and healthy, granted with quite a bit of effort on their part, but the point remains.

If you are having problems playing in deserts and ice sheets: congratulations, you are now learning why those areas of the planet were 1) never highly settled by humanity, for good reason, and 2) those people who did live in those climates tended to be nomadic, or depend on resources that aren't in the vanilla game (sheep/other herd livestock and fish, mainly). Plonking yourself down in some of the most extreme areas on the planet and going " 2 HARD GUISE" is ....... foolish and amusing, at best. Most of human cultures lived in more hospitable regions of the globe for a reason, after all.

Of course, a LOT of these problems are a result of vanilla Rimworld (in my opinion, at least) sucking donkey balls, to be frank. The game is MUCH improved through the addition of mods, usually (again, in my opinion) those that add "realism" to the game.

For instance, I have mods installed that 1) give me a wider range of crops to grow, allowing for easily-accessible "fine meals", as well as letting me improve soil quality through the building of "raised beds" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised-bed_gardening) meaning that, with a little work, I can actually grow food at an acceptable level. 2) give me additional options for storage, as opposed to just throwing shit on the ground ( baskets/boxes for food, hampers for cloth/weavables, and pallets for everything else), 3) actual fortifications that allow my colonists ( with the help of rough/restrictive terrain and beds of stone chunks) to actually fight effectively ("force-multiplyers", and all that), as well as varioud decorative mods that let me prettify my settlement without resorting to silver/gold commodes and suchlike (rugs, finely-built furniture and animal skins)

As far as I am concerned, you guys should be glad the game doesn't track firearm ammunition. I, for one, would actually welcome that. Give me a reason to build training facilities, and to give my firearms to those actually skilled in their use.

[Shurp]

Ahhh, so you're playing with mods that reduce your dependence on components, then calling us whiners for complaining about the difficulty of playing without those mods.  Got it.

[Boston]

Ahhh, so you're playing with mods that reduce your dependence on components, then calling us whiners for complaining about the difficulty of playing without those mods.  Got it.

Nope, stock workstations, all in the vanilla game. All my mods do is slightly change how agriculture works, or add new crafting options.

The only things my colony has that actually need components are the wind turbine, the 2 solar panels, and the cooler. Everything else is either wood-powered or manual. The kitchen is a woodstove, or the fireplace. The tailoring station is manual, and the blacksmith bench is wood-powered. The butcher table is manual, too. I don't use turrets, so I don't have to worry about them.

You ...... do realize that those wood-powered/manual workstations were included for a reason, right? To decrease your dependence on components?

You people just got locked in your ways, and don't want to use them.

Is my way "harder", or just plain slower than using power for everything? Of course, never said it wasn't. But my logistics are simplified, which makes it all worth it. I don't "have to" worry about higher-tier research, finding gold or hoarding components.

[darkhooly]

I don't know how these mods you mentioned work exactly, but judging from what you wrote about food growing and fighting more effectively I imagine they make things simpler in terms of strict survival and raid repelling. Somehow I can't imagine playing Rimworld without turrets if you want to play a game of steady development instead of willingly challenging yourself. A message popping up, hinting to build security is not there just for kicks after all.

Wood powered stuff is not a really valid argument here, you play a forest biome, you have shitloads of wood at your disposal. My longest game was on tundra where there is a very limited number of trees. You run out of it faster than you blink and growing trees on your own without spamming the whole map with them won't get you far.

You're still very early in the game, at first the lack of traders didn't seem much of a big issue to me either, but years flew by and things changed drastically. Five years was all I've managed until I ended up with 0 on most important resources. Mods might buy you more time I guess.

We really need to insert a huge line between real life and game here. Those extreme biomes were added to make the game more challenging, troublesome but SURVIVALABLE. Without traders they are not.

A trading problem that doomed also other less harsh biomes, if not all of them.

[Limdood]

i play vanilla, currently in a boreal forest that gets to -40F in winter, 55F in summer.  I play with NO turrets, as a rule (recently started using one turret when i play, in the back corner of the prison, as an answer to the fact that prisoners can chase my colonists thru ANY doors - amusingly saved my prison from a bug attack once).

All my fighting is pawn powered.  I'm in a mountain, i use a bottleneck approach with deafalls, then a corridor with slots where my colonists can peek around a corner, still behind sandbags.  I still have component demand since i put an autodoor at the back of each one of the shooting slots, which lets me retreat individual pawns.  The drawback is that i still need a bunch of components (i also use autodoors for everything but bedrooms inside the base), but i rarely need to replace them, except for breakdowns, which happen a ton now.

I'm around day 190, 21 colonists, all reasearch done...i DID get gold early from a trader, knowing the multi needed 20.  Components aren't a dire bottleneck to me now, but even having done that research, expanding my powergrid is slow (lack of defensible arable land for greenhouses outdoors drove all my growing indoors to hydroponics) and my pawns make components at a snail's pace.

Components are a real issue:
to use turrets, which require components and DO go down fairly fast compared to their firepower (even plasteel), you need either a MASSIVE powergrid to support the 350 drain per turret, or you need a lot of backup batteries, both of which are quite component heavy. 

to avoid using turrets, you need to use autodoors to play peekaboo, which still have a powerdrain and need a sizeable powergrid.  Additionally, you need high end weapons to make each fighting pawn count as much as possible...this means carefully buying or stockpiling from pirates or, more likely, crafting them. 

TBH, i like components.  Tynan has already said the availability of gold/plasteel needs to be raised.  It feels like a good way to balance building the advanced weaponry.  The option to build power armor is great.  The 120 plasteel isn't even too steep a price.  The 18 components on the other hand is 540 steel plus a LOT of additional work.

[Mathenaut]

My colony grows when I want it to, and no other. 

Unless you crap out on gold/plasteel, in which case you're going nowhere. There's no wall of text large enough to exaggerate you way around a design oversight. Lucking out with RNG isn't skill, we all do well when everything goes our way.

[Shurp]

Speaking of bottleneck, after my last colony got wiped out by tribals, I started a new one.  After 6 months my half-completed multi-analyzer is sitting there waiting to be finished.  Got the 50 plasteel, don't have the 20 gold. 

But this time I have good walls, plenty of turrets, and a component stockpile, so I shouldn't get killed by raiders while waiting for gold to show up.  But I do have to sit and wait and stop increasing my colony's wealth... which is a bit dull.