Ending / Endgame / Neverending Colonies

[MAKAIROSI]

I'd like to start off with the fact that i have only played a very early version - i don't even remember if it was alpha or beta (but my bets are on alpha). However i have read about all the major changes since then and i am patiently waiting for the opportunity to have a neverending colony - i.e. multiple generations.

However the reason behind many people wanting multiple generations (apart from the fact it's pure realism) is, i guess, because they want to keep on playing - although the game is advertised for survival and escape, not establishing a village or city. I too get attached and want to stay there and be some kind of significant power on that new planet. Obviously this goes against what would happen in reality, for example some people may have families back home and want to escape as soon as possible etc.

So, you survived, you escaped, and...well that's it. And it's actually pretty easier than making a dominant colony with defenses etc. And it only makes sense that making and launching a missile into space is much much harder than actually creating a dominant village-like power. I understand that these guys aren't random and they're supposed to come from a technologically advanced civilization (i.e future humans) but if it's this easy to make a spaceship able of interstellar travel, i can only imagine it's extremely easier to make a simple sniper rifle, or a marble statue - which basically means it should take much less work. Obviously what i'm saying is that the ending should come much later, so the spaceship should be much more difficult to make.

So this would call for the "neverending colony". When you're heading towards this new endgame that i'm suggesting, you will have built so much and explored the game in such depth among multiple generations that you would be cool with it to end. Or keep on playing forever - that's your choice.

Before i go to more specific suggestions i have to mention some things that don't make sense to me. This is supposed to be an alien planet, right? Even if it was picked automatically by a computer so that it has "Earth's standards" it still doesn't explain how everyone is cool with breathing without any masks, modifications or special equipment. The planet even has squirells if i remember correctly or boars. I mean, it really only has but a few alien animals ("cantaloupes"? do i remember correctly? It was some camel-like animal) and all of them are actually Earth-like. I know i'm stretching it a bit here but it was a real let-down that i thought i'd visit something alien but it's basically Earth. Now that i think about it, it would be cool if it was actually Earth and it was revealed that it's Earth's past. Anyway, another thing that didn't make sense was that although you're trying to escape the planet and you can signal incoming ships to trade with them you cannot ask for help. That's the first thing anyone does anywhere if he's cast-away, signal for help.

Now, what i would adore would be to actually survive, in a very difficult and "grim" sense. It's called rimworld, which i suppose it means it's really really far away, which would mean that no trade ships go there on purpose. So i'd say, no trade-ships, at all, just debris or random events like hunters or thieves or killers escaping justice. Or even malfunctioning trade-ships which you can loot or come to some agreement with them - but always within the "noone will hear you here, we're in rimworld now" motif.

I understand all these would probably call for a "rimworld II" however i'd like the devs to consider it at least food for thought.

So now let's go on to list these and others into groups:

1. The colony needs to be able to be kept throughout a neverending game. The answer to this is simple, and everyone has said it, the people need to have children. You could make the children able to do other tasks rather than work, like caring for animals or gathering herbs or carrying medicine or flipping switches. You would need a teacher profession i guess but let's make it simple, it could be something like the coding used in animal training. For a child to be able to become a fully functional member of the colony, you would need to "train" him in "language" or "mathematics" or even just label it as "education" and be done with it altogether.

2. The game should be more about survival and less about escape (escaping should of course be the ending trigger but it needs to be much more difficult to achieve). When it starts it's grim and scary, that feeling should be preserved. Soon enough it becomes kinda "i wanted to start a colony here guys, i did it on purpose, i'm not shipwrecked at all" which should come (if ever) when you reach the endgame (and your village has become more like a space station)

3. There should be no comm-links and trading with passing ships, otherwise you could just escape this way. No talking with the outside world, we're stranded here, and we're alone, and we have to deal with this world's problems now, and its natives. As if noone has any idea this world even exists (let alone trade with it).

4. The planet needs some more "alienation", right now it's so similar to Earth it's as if it almost is, in fact, Earth. In fact it should be so alien that there is a hazard in everything (air, water, food, predator-type animals)

5. Diseases/illnesses that last forever - these should all be treatable towards the endgame. Like many suggested, if you have cataract you could get an eye implant or a bionic eye. That of course should happen towards the end, let's say third generation.

6. You should be able to send people on missions outside your colony. Contact a tribe or mine for resources (or find water, why not) or whatever.

7. On the subject of water, being close to a river should have some advantages. In snowy grounds you have to melt the snow, or in grounds away from the sea you have to build wells. When you're next to a river you could build a dam for electricity, get water straight from the river, or even "fish" whatever alien fish-life you'll find.

8. Please oh please dig deeper into the mech civilization you encounter. Their parts could hold some secrets or they may have their own story, it was really fascinating when they showed up but that was it, you kill them and you get metal. I really think this is a great idea.

I will finish this list here because i don't want it to become unreadable (maybe it is now) and i sincerely hope this becomes food for thought since i think this game has a *huge* potential to become one of the greatest sci-fi/colony/survival sims out there. Also, i didn't double-check what i wrote so i apologise for any typos or grammatical errors. Anyway. Feel free to discuss.

[levgre]

"3. There should be no comm-links and trading with passing ships, otherwise you could just escape this way. No talking with the outside world, we're stranded here, and we're alone, and we have to deal with this world's problems now, and its natives. As if noone has any idea this world even exists (let alone trade with it)."

That is such a big change that it may be better for a different scenario/game mode.  Different types of worlds at different distances from trade routes and civilizations, just like different types of biomes.

Although it can make sense that passing ships aren't a route of rescue.  Those ships can't necessarily enter the atmosphere of a planet (like Star Destroyers in Star Wars), or it's simply too expensive a detour to be in their interest.

[keylocke]

nah, you can sell prisoners to trade ships, so getting people into the ships isn't really a problem.

but countless people have already made "meta-reasons" why colonists aren't allowed to escape via trade ships. but i think the main reason is the gameplay.

---

trade ships was used in the early alpha when there were no land caravans going on (land caravans was one of the many things they said would never be added. coz of "reasons" like it doesn't really add anything to the game and that it would just be easily exploited and that it would be too complex, etc..)

but now that there are land caravans, i've played a couple of times without building the comms console and it's perfectly plausible to continue playing without it..

ie : when i need to become friendly with hostile factions, all i do is just capture and release one of them (usually after i peg-legged and dentured them).

there are also enough visitors and traders dropping by that "call for reinforcements" option is totally unnecessary..

so yea, even without space traders, the game is still playable. (this was impossible in the older alphas)

[MAKAIROSI]

@levgre - i agree, it could be a different scenario. It could just be a different game difficulty "normal" and "alien" or "known planet" and "unknown planet" (so that you get the non-tradeship factor normally).

Even if it was too expensive for them to come rescue the colonists they could still transfer the signal. It could take years but in the end they would get rescued by someone. Again, it ruins the feeling of being stranded and surviving on an alien planet, which is so cool an idea! And still, if you want to keep the tradeships, then it should be an endgame option, and even then it should be hard for them to actually hear you.

I'm not just talking about realism here, i'm talking about the "survivalist" feelings you get while playing the game. Imagine, "this war of mine" for example, if the traders were helicopters from another country that can transfer people (prisoners), instead of a runner surviving just like you. (If you haven't played it, it's a game where you try to survive inside a war, i'm not getting into much detail, but i wanted to make the analogy). The feeling must be that of survival and outside help greatly reduces that.

@keylocke

signalling tribes or other peoples' colonies is fine, although i think there should only be native tribes with no such tech (unless they buy it from you, or you give it for free so you can communicate). It's fine because you're still stranded. Maybe you can meet with a tech team that has set up a bio-dome there as an experiment and when you ask them to go with them they would answer that it can't happen due to the fact it's set up to hold a maximum of people which has already been reached - this way you can explain why you can't join other colonists who have already established their colonies and are surviving better than you.

Maybe after establishing the first colony you can choose four people and some resources to set up another colony and expand on that planet, and the endgame would come when you actually successfully set up four of those (thus you can commence a space program). Imagine if you could develop a colony near a river for water, near a mountain for mining, in an open space for food etc and can trade between these colonies (or ask for reinforcements or food or minerals etc.) while you're playing the current one (i'm not saying being able to manage all colonies at once of course. That would be immensely difficult and it would go away from this feeling that i'm trying to enhance.)

And i've seen mods of this game (images and such) which expand to cyber-techs etc. and i think these should be implemented too, you should be able to reach a level of tech where you can't yet go out of the planet but you can have advanced weapons or implants. Imagine, we have now 3d printers, virtual reality, etc, but we're still miles away from actually travelling through the galaxy like this game's escape plan suggests. let alone using just minerals found in an alien planet, right?

I mean you would have to be really lucky to get stranded on a random planet and that planet happens to be like this, with wood, steel, boars, fertile soil and drinkable water. Which is close enough to a sun to utilize solar power, has winds that won't damage wind turbines, a sequence of day and night that is really similar to ours etc. Actually if you pose this question to an astrophysicist: "you get lost in space, with a damaged ship, and your ship calculates which is the nearest planet which is better suited for human life and sends you there before exploding. What's the chance of that planet being so and so?" he would probably say (and i'm guessing here) that the chance is one in a quadrillion (actually i think it's a lot lot smaller). But i'm still not saying they should re-design the entire game, of course not, they could just say "..and by some miracle it so happens that the nearest planet is actually similar to Earth" but then shouldn't that planet have at least some alien features? At least alien plant life (not trees) and animals (not boars, squirrels and deer). And the natives could be bipedal, generally with functions similar to humans but they are aliens, they have their own language, their own society rules, they are organisms better suited to that environment than humans, so capturing a prisoner and actually converting one should be a lot more interesting.

Again i'm throwing ideas here, i'm not trying to bring the end of the world

It's just that i love the sci-fi element of the idea for this game, but the actual game is not really that sci-fi.

[Kegereneku]

Shameless advertising for my threads :    
[Story] Write an ending ! (endless included)

[Vaporisor]

Wow, lotsa words here and too little time to read it all.  One bit did catch my attention however and it was talk about radio for pickup, etc vs the building of a spacecraft.  Need to keep in mind what a rimworld is.  They are habitable planets of old where colonists landed, but those are one way trips.  Some stayed tribal, some digressed and others evolved and fell to ruin.

Trade ships are not so interstellar.  The journeys can last decades potentially.  Cannot just hitch a ride if it is just going between colonies on the planet or system planets.  Interplanetary, if it occurs needs the sarcophagi.  Cannot pick you up if no cryptosleep capabilities.

Spacers might be nothing more than some people living in orbit by trade.

Most assuredly others have stories of escape pods to developed planets, or dead planets but the story of the game isnt about those.  Is about surviving on the rim ^.^

[SuperCaffeineDude]

Yeah the sense of isolation isn't really strong, and there being so many trade ships and friendly natives (that wont adopt your motley crew for reasons) there's really no reason to leave other than the arbitrarily increasing raids. The apparent ease of sending slaves to passing ships does kind of hurt the lore a tad, I mean it'd be pretty cool if you could buy passage off a world, after all the ship building aspect isn't where the meat's at, and I don't think a game called Rim World has to be Flight of the Phoenix.

Something I think could easily be improved is the fauna and flora, compared to... the devil-strand mushrooms, muffaloes, wargs, and hive insects... the squirrels, deer, elephants, monkeys, cows, etc... really feel way too familiar. The farm animals I understand, but that some ancient space fairing race thought to bring endangered animals and common game to a largely inaccessible and inhospitable planet... meh. I fully understand that these are not alien creatures, but some visible evolution/artificial-mutations and changes in name would add a lot of character to the planet.

Fishing, yeah no one would disagree I guess, but how to simulate it

I really like the idea you almost hinted at where you might require resources to research items, so for instance to research creating a minigun you need to take apart an unusable mech minigun and the like.

The expeditions are commonly requested, I guess there's a lot of problems introduced if you expect to command your attacks and the like but yes that would be do awesome, the simplest implementation might just literally sending out colonists on quests to gather/trade/battle whilst you wait at home, whether people would leave colonist fates to rng though depends on if the benefits outweigh the risks. Risks levels might be calculated by tile distance, colonists, weapons, supplies, tiletype, etc...
(You send dudes out on an attack, 1 dude is lost, he is presumed dead, his lover mourns and moves on to another man, the man returns a year later with a random injury and starts a social fight, and it ends in tears)

I'm a sucker for the stories that arise from the human and survival elements in this game over the base defense elements, so anything that adds to this is awesome in my eyes. (like having a starving young colonist kill her husky)

[MAKAIROSI]

@SuperCaffeineDude

Like i said, i wasn't talking about hard things, that would need a lot of time and coding to be implemented like a brand new social structure or whatever. I am talking about simple things. For example what you said: "the simplest implementation might just literally sending out colonists on quests to gather/trade/battle whilst you wait at home"

So "fishing" would just be equivalent to "mining fish corpses from the river". So a person with hunting as his top priority, if he doesn't have a target, he would just fish. That's really simple and actually perfect.

But even then i don't care so much about fishing, i am just saying this for the sake of the argument. What i care about is the feeling of survival *and* on an alien planet. Right now it feels like survival in the early game but soon becomes "build your own trade station and defend it", while the "alien" aspect is just lost straight away, from the first tree you cut down, or the first deer you hunt down. Also, the grass is green, the water is blue, the dirt is brown. Even in some locations on Earth for example the water is green, or black, or red. Why is it so hard to paint water a different colour than blue, or grass a different colour than green?

I understand where you're coming from when you say "research miniguns from the mech race" and i agree. However i wanted to go a bit more futuristic there, i wanted to research not just an Earthly minigun but like a mecha-gun, which would be an extremely advanced technology in the hands of, well, primitives. I had one of their ships crash on my colony and it took a long time and ingenuity to kill them off and...i got really nothing. I was hoping i could get a data disk, or a weird weapon, or a tech to build something "out of this world" (for example a positive drone).

When i play such games i try to imagine what i would do in any given situation. So if i killed a deadly robot would i smelt it? Or would i examine his arm to see if i can make it into a weapon? Or his exterior into a make-shift armor? I mean it took a ton of damage to punch a hole in it, so why shouldn't i wear the thing in battles against bows?

Yeah, i love this kind of stories that you're talking about (starving colonist kills her husky) and i think that's what this game is supposed to be about. I literally spent ages micromanaging a chicken farm so that i always keep one male and many females for eggs and kill the surplus chicken for meat and...that type of micromanagement is not survival. I would go as far as to say remove all the chicken, they don't belong to rimworld. Bring fricken instead, who are hermaphrodite, are born adults from eggs and look like worms with legs.

It's an alien planet! Anything goes! Seriously imagine you can just put in a-ny-thing and it's still going to count as plausible. So why chicken? I mean of course you can help your imagination using Earthly creatures (the wormlike things would have, in essence, the same role as chicken) but from then on you're limitless! And it would need less coding, and it would be less of a hussle for the player to micromanage it. For example, now, the chicken farm seriously needs some kind of automation to be counted as a valuable asset to your colony. Otherwise it's just too much work. This automation needs more coding which would have been avoided if instead of Earthly creatures you had alien ones.

Away chicken! Bring fricken!!

[Boston]

It is an alien world...... that was rather explicitly terraformed with Terran (aka Earth)-derived plants and animals, for future human colonization.

Per canon, there are no "alien" species in the Rimworld universe. All animals are genetically-modified versions of Earth animals. Wargs are up-muscled wolves, muffalo are literally yaks with a reskin, etc etc etc. There are creatures that seem "alien", like Thrumbos, but they are just Earth-derived animals that have evolved due to planetary isolation and environmental pressures.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pIZyKif0bFbBWten4drrm7kfSSfvBoJPgG9-ywfN8j8/pub

[SuperCaffeineDude]

I guess fishing might be similar to a pawn harvesting crops MAKAIROSI, with a failure state based on skill, I guess the problem with that might be determining the number of fish in a body of water and re-population. And yeah I agree studying artifacts and mechs really plays well into the lore of the game.

As mentioned Boston I've seen the fiction, I feel where we differ is what derived might look like, aesthetically and contextually.

The wargs are awesome byproducts of human military organizations, the hives probably accidentally or intentionally seeded by spacers, the muffalo could have been livestock evolved feral, but comparatively the endangered elephants/rhinos/etc just seem like a waste of limited cargo space. So if the elephants are there to be harvested for ivory then why not give them an extra set of tusks and a new name is the gist of what I'm saying.

If we look at the history of how we've guided evolution... warping our pets, livestock and crops to the point of being relatively unrecognizable from their ancestors with modern tech, it kind of seems like within the timescale and on alien worlds (where human biology itself is meant to become skewed) there really should be a little more divergence between classic Terra fauna/flora and NewWorld fauna/flora.

So yes this would be entirely reskins, flavor-text and name changes. It could be mechanical as just MAKAIROSI suggested (hermaphrodite hens, or even giant spiders that weave silk), or it could be that instead of chickens, some ancient Glitterworld somewhere modified worms to make caviar. Personally I like the idea that traditional Terra lifeforms, and superior glitterworld mutants have to be bought from traders, and in the meantime you make-do.

[MAKAIROSI]

@Boston

First of all i read the document you provided and i didn't see any mentions of the fact that the rimworlds were terraformed with anything Terran (hail starcraft right?) for human colonization, but then again maybe i missed it. However if that's the case, and that's actually in the lore of this universe, then i'm in the wrong and that's it. I just thought it would be far more interesting otherwise and would actually need the same amount of coding - or even less in some cases. Like in my "fricken" example, instead of mimicking life on Earth, you could just put anything and call it alive. Many sci fi movies feature Earthlike aliens anyway. If you take for example the game "startopia" which features a lot of aliens, most of them resemble human beings (actually i think all of them are) but they're still alien. You don't need to explain the entire biological system of an alien to make one. You can just answer these questions: genders? predators or passive creatures? fast or slow? tough or fragile? Intelligent/trainable? (and you can add stuff here to be more specific) and then pick an image that suits what you wrote et voila, you have an alien tribe. And i'm not talking about winged, one eyed, six armed, intelligent insectoids with bonuses to mellee combat and flight abilities or a hive mind. I'm talking about purple rastafarians with a farming culture (see farmers in startopia, you'll get what i mean).

Again, if no aliens exist per canon, i'm in the wrong. I'm saying all this to underline how easy it would be to make it so much more interesting for sci fi lovers (which this game is aimed at). Actually don't even mind what i say, imagine if you start a thread asking players to describe an easy-to-make alien, how many valid answers would you get. And you would only need two or three tribes, two more advanced cultures, and, well, replacing deer and elephants and chicken (i've already solved the last one). See where i'm getting at?

@SuperCaffeineDude

The easiest way to implement fishing so you can avoid all of what you said would be to just get x amount of meat per x amount of time. Let's say fishing could be the ineffective method of providing meat. You will obviously never have more than one or two people fishing so population won't ever be a problem. And if you have more than, say, ten people in your colony you will not be able to feed them this way - you will still need to slaughter large meat-providing animals.

We completely agree on the "alien" issue. An elephant with two sets of tusks is still an elephant by all means but an alien one. What really struck me badly was the deer. Here i am, stranded on this rim world and i'm thinking quick, i have to make a shelter, quick, we have no time it's an unknown world with unknown dangers, i have to find food, let's look at the map: deer. Even in fallout, which is on Earth itself, you have mutant cows. Just a cow with two heads. That, in rimworld, would be "alien". It wouldn't be alien, of course, by any sci-fi standards (since it evolved similarly to a cow from Earth then they would both have a common ancestor, which means they both come from Earth) but still, it wouldn't be a normal, ordinary, mundane cow.

Actually, now that i mentioned fallout, imagine if noone was affected by radioactivity and the canon was "well, noone was affected". Wouldn't that be a shame? Wouldn't you then say "dude, why didn't they put this in, it would be awesome!" - and they did, even in fallout 1 and 2, and it is a huge pain (since everyone from those tribes was modelled to look like a burnt, mutated human (in some cases even in 3d) *and* it wasn't really needed, the story in those two would be the same if you just had humans.) but they did it because it added so much to the feeling of the world.

But still. I had no idea this was supposed to be like Earth, i thought it was meant to be an unknown, alien planet. So wait, there are no aliens, anywhere? I mean, other planets must have alien civilizations right? Or is it just humans in the entire universe that this game takes place in?

Anyway, like i said in my first post, this is all food for thought.

[CabbageFoot]

I think that i'm done using orbital trading, first of all it doesn't make sense to use large amount of fuel to go from planet to planet and solar system to solar system trading a few silver worth of goods at a time, the only way that might make sense is if they have extreme surplus and could trade is massive bulk. Secondly trading for high end gear both in this game and in Gnomoria kind of wrecks the progression. Secondly, it's contrary to the premise of the game, your'e supposed to be stuck and there's space truck drivers flying by your planet constantly. My immersion guys... I like the idea of the wold being a closed echo system, and perhaps ultimately escaping it becomes a "new game+" where you get a special save file with all the colonists that escaped and have to land on a new planet (because AI always goes rogue ;b), and have to start all over again but with the characters that you hand picked for the voyage. Maybe you don't get all of them right away. Maybe you get a few at first, and more afterwards. Maybe the ones afterward have a chance to have a grave injury when they land or even just be dead and you can yell "NO!!! <insert colonist name> DIDNT MAKE IT!", but that's fine because with time come change and not all things are guaranteed, someone will have to take his/her place. This would also be greatly enhanced with generational code for colonists, we already have it for pets, but a more complicated code would be needed for child colonists.

Speaking of grave injuries, I would love for 3D printers to be in the game for hip replacement. I mean come on... There should be no injury in this game you can't fix given a combination of skill, research, and resources. There needs to be an end game goal for colonists suffering from shattered hip syndrome. I would accept bionic hips as a solution ;b

[Jorlem]

Although it can make sense that passing ships aren't a route of rescue.  Those ships can't necessarily enter the atmosphere of a planet (like Star Destroyers in Star Wars), or it's simply too expensive a detour to be in their interest.

Minor point of order: Star Destroyers are built on the surface of planets, and are shown entering the atmosphere of planets multiple times in Rebels.

[MAKAIROSI]

@CabbageFoot

What you say in the beginning is exactly what i'm saying. New game+ is a cool idea, at least as an option, it should be there. But i'd love to see the endgame so far away that, you know, you *won*. When i played it felt like you could win in mid-game.

[Boston]

Although it can make sense that passing ships aren't a route of rescue.  Those ships can't necessarily enter the atmosphere of a planet (like Star Destroyers in Star Wars), or it's simply too expensive a detour to be in their interest.

Minor point of order: Star Destroyers are built on the surface of planets, and are shown entering the atmosphere of planets multiple times in Rebels.

Star Wars doesn't use even kinda-sorta realistic physics.