Sim-ple relationships system

Started by Hypolite, October 12, 2013, 05:52:18 PM

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Hypolite

Right now colonists in RimWorld have a quite detailed system of feelings towards the environment. What they eat, what they see, where they sleep, what they are walking on, all that have an influence on both their moods, love and fear. There is also a basic relationship system where colonists would quickly chat when their are close from each other, improving their mood.

I would like to improve and extend that system to generate more tension/relief in the game by spicing things up between colonists. I'm basing myself off The Sims for that matter, with a zodiac sign-based relation wheel. Each sign would have a different feel towards each other. Colonists with compatible signs would greatly benefit from chat, while opposed signs colonists chat could degenerate in hand to hand fights.

On top of that system, I would like to suggest the idea Demonantis dubbed Social Economy. Basically, keeping track of how much each colonist worked in the past day/week, and provoke fights between beasts of burden and lazy asses.

The goal would be to force the player to separate incompatible colonists and to equilibrate the work load between the survivors. Of course, a Noble or an Assassin would be harder to find a job, but they are so good in the few tasks they agree to do... Locking away a violent colonist for him to cool off would become a viable thing to do, but the warden should be compatible with the prisoner, or else...

The system can be improved further by adding love/jealousy/hate, but it becomes a complex module to implement. Also a working tavern could help ease the mood, but drunk people aren't always the smartest when it comes to relationships...

All the presented ideas look pretty simple to include in the game as it is now. What do you think?

British

In order to "separate incompatible colonists", we'll either need to be able to define work zones for each colonist (or each type of work), or... I don't know, draft one of them ? Lock him up ?
That has to be defined first, I'd say.

Instead of having (in)compatible signs, we might want to use the existing traits first (with improvements and proper implementation), and add a bunch that are opposites.
That would probably easier than adding a whole new system of interactions.

Hypolite

Well, not sleeping in the same room is a start. After that, it can be not assigning them the same task to prevent them to work at the same location. In the most extreme cases, building an outpost could be necessary.

I agree with you on the traits, they can provide with a lot of alteration to somewhat static system.

salt1219

that's a interesting idea, maybe scale down the negative effects so you don't have to micromanage.
it would give their social system a lot more complexity

British

Quote from: Hypolite on October 12, 2013, 06:13:07 PM
Well, not sleeping in the same room is a start. After that, it can be not assigning them the same task to prevent them to work at the same location. In the most extreme cases, building an outpost could be necessary.
They'll ultimately have to cross paths: going to eat, walking the place... and they won't stay on the same task forever, unless you assign one (or both) at only one task.
But even then, won't they start patrolling the home zone when their tasks are fulfilled ?

Regarding the outpost, same problem: how do we assign one to stay there ?

Hypolite

Well, the only thing you can assign now are beds. Not directly, not easily, but you can. You just have to turn a colonist bed into a prisoner bed to deassign it. He then will take another unowned bed.

Spike

My initial reaction is that this is something that I would not like.  My second reaction is to think of the movie "Flight of the Phoenix", which is about a group of airplane passengers who crash in the desert, and rebuild the plane into something that can actually fly.  Good movie, which was remade in 2004.  (I know the original was pretty good, can't recall about the remake.)  There was a bit of tension between characters that helped to drive the story.

I think this is something that might be nice, but I would prefer if it could be a pre-game toggle option, if that would be possible.

Pheanox

I would definitely like to see this system in the Relationships module if/when it is added.  A sims style setting that of course isn't as robust as The Sims (since this is more than just a relationship sim).

The idea of being able to organize always makes me happy, as well.  Being able to assign jobs or areas of work to different people would be amazing.  Heck, being able to set patrol routes for your people that can't do anything but shoot would be nice.  Might be a bit too micro-managey for some but I actually like micro-management, as long as it isn't required.

The zodiac system would make things more interesting without going too crazy in to compatibility and such, though if we do that, I for one would like to know which zodiac signs are supposedly in opposition to each other, because I really don't know my signs.

Finjinimo

I think the idea of more complex relationships is good, I don't really like the idea of it being zodiac based though.

Perhaps it could be interesting if everyone had a core ideology or personality trait.

Each ideology might have an opposite that they take a dislike to. Not to the point that it would break your colony, just to the point where it might lower efficiency. So the average player won't find their colony falling apart because a 'Sagittarius' or whatever turned up. But someone min/maxing would be better able to tailor their experience.

So something like:

Hard Worker vs Lazy-bones
Introvert vs Extrovert
Serious vs Larrikin

Or perhaps your colonists are simply happier if there is someone around who is similar to them. So if you have a colony of extroverts and one introvert, the introvert might be a little unhappy until you can find him another introvert to be friends with.

I would prefer something like that to something based on star-signs.

Hypolite

The zodiac system is a simpler traits system, actually. So it could be expanded to traits, it would just be more work to define what traits are opposed since there's already a lot of traits.

nomadseifer

Zodiac is definitely too arbitrary, in my opinion, to be used as a means for making colonists relate to each other.  If they must have a deeper level of compatibility/incompatibility, it should be based on their current traits that have something to do with the way they contribute to the colony. 




Love of an Idea is love of god - FLLW

SpaceEatingTrex

Quote from: nomadseifer on October 13, 2013, 05:57:31 PM
Zodiac is definitely too arbitrary, in my opinion, to be used as a means for making colonists relate to each other.  If they must have a deeper level of compatibility/incompatibility, it should be based on their current traits that have something to do with the way they contribute to the colony.
Quote from: Hypolite on October 13, 2013, 05:22:03 PM
The zodiac system is a simpler traits system, actually. So it could be expanded to traits, it would just be more work to define what traits are opposed since there's already a lot of traits.

As has been previously mentioned in this thread, I think if the social system of RimWorld is going to be expanded then it would be better to leverage pre-exisiting mechanics to serve more purpose than to introduce new mechanics like a Zodiac system. Traits seem to be a good attribute for influencing how the colonists interact with each other.

However, like Hypolite said there are a lot of plan traits and handling some kind of relationship matrix between all of them might be a lot of work. It's possible a number of the planned traits aren't significantly different than each other and could be combined, which would make it easier. In addition, we could always choose some subset of traits to have a major social impact, with others having a minor one or none at all.

It seems like the outcome most posts about this have focused on is fighting. If we do implement a more in-depth relationship system, what other outcomes could there be besides fighting and not fighting?

Hypolite

The opposite of fights would be friendships and love, which would improve the mood of concerned colonists without you having to build expensive decoration items.