Plague unbeatable early game?

[LordMunchkin]

I have to tell you I've never ever lost a guy to plague, even with tribal start.

I dunno what the hell you guys are doing wrong. I stick them in bed and never let them get out, treat them always with a good doctor, even with herbal meds.. that's it! never lost a pawn

You need a good doctor and for them to stay in bed. However, it's still random. I've had young people die in bed with a good doctor many times. Usually, they have immunity in the 90's so they were close to surviving but died. Old people just die. You need good medicine which as tribal is luck based (will I have the money to buy medicine, will I get a trader who sells medicine before the plague hits). And this all assuming a best case scenario. Unless I specifically try for a good doctor (reload), I will probably not get one. Some of my colonists may be old. Some may be mentally ill or have other chronic illnesses. I remember one time, my doctor went on a drinking binge while his friends were dying of the plague! 

Plagues are uncommon enough such that I've only ever lost a game to it once, and that was in a challenge scenario.  It's not like A13 (A14?) games where heat waves killed tribes, without a single way to counter it.

That's funny because the last five times I played tribal (admittedly on desert and arid shrubland so the disease chance may have been higher), I got plague in the first year to year and a half. RNG will be RNG 

Plague survival is far too random for my tastes atm imho. 

[Limdood]

That's funny because the last five times I played tribal (admittedly on desert and arid shrubland so the disease chance may have been higher), I got plague in the first year to year and a half. RNG will be RNG 

Plague survival is far too random for my tastes atm imho. 

Its PLAGUE!  it SHOULD be near impossible to survive without advanced medicine...look at what the black plague did to medieval Europe...

Within a year to year-and-a-half, you should DEFINITELY be able to grab some penoxycyline.  For crash survivors, you have starting silver to visit a nearby outlander town, for tribals, it might take a tad longer, but pemmican sells AMAZINGLY well.  harvest all the berries/agave you can and kill some early animals and have 1 pawn carry as much pemmican as he can to an outlander town while the rest continue building, harvesting, and hunting.  having the chance to pick up some machine pistols, survival rifles, LMGs, or assault rifles early on the tribals is also amazing.

[LordMunchkin]

Its PLAGUE!  it SHOULD be near impossible to survive without advanced medicine...look at what the black plague did to medieval Europe...

Within a year to year-and-a-half, you should DEFINITELY be able to grab some penoxycyline.  For crash survivors, you have starting silver to visit a nearby outlander town, for tribals, it might take a tad longer, but pemmican sells AMAZINGLY well.  harvest all the berries/agave you can and kill some early animals and have 1 pawn carry as much pemmican as he can to an outlander town while the rest continue building, harvesting, and hunting.  having the chance to pick up some machine pistols, survival rifles, LMGs, or assault rifles early on the tribals is also amazing.

Yes but unlike medieval europe, my pawns aren't having a bushel of children. Instead we have to rely on immigration which can trade joe the crafter for andrew the pop deva. Or their tribal versions (joe the weaver for andrew the scavenger) though thankfully tribal backgrounds are less painful in general simply because there are less terrible ones. In addition, plague was a rare enough event in the classical and medieval world. Society simply couldn't losing a third of its population on such a massive scale and neither can most colonies (RNG will somehow spare my most useless no dumb labor colonists from the plague).

As for grinding for wealth, you can't really do that because of the RNG. If you become too wealthy too quickly as a tribal without regards to your tech, you will screw yourself (have fun fighting a 6 or 7 mechanoids with bows and arrows). And that assumes the traders will even have the drugs and medicine or that the pawn isn't ambushed. Or that those raiders with guns don't destroy your weak tribals (requires some good tactics but a bullet to head can end even the best tactics).

I guess what I'm getting is that plague makes playing tribal depend too much on luck and it was already pretty luck based before (though that could be compensated for with good strategy).

[Limdood]

you don't have bushels of children, true, but you have access to modern medicine...thru trade.

I never mentioned grinding for wealth.  I mentioned using starting silver OR farming up just enough pemmican to afford about 5 or so Penoxycyline (and if you get more, and buy some basic firearms, then you've GOT the guns to fight on equal grounds)

Settling near enough to an outlander town IS an option you know.  landing adjacent to one means your TOTAL travel time to and from the town is...1 hex.  Ambushes are incredibly rare as well...yes they happen, maybe even in multiples, but its basically a "roguelike" game based on RNG events...It's going to happen sometimes. 

SO...you can gamble on not getting a horrible illness until your tech advances (worked so well for the Native Americans and smallpox...) or you can risk a miniscule-to-moderate trek to an outlander town, which is almost guaranteed to have penoxycyline.

Could the plague numbers or herbal meds use some SLIGHT tweaking to make it slightly less deadly?  I suppose so, but I hope it doesn't go back to A15, where disease was a slight inconvenience...just stick the pawn in bed for a few days and you were fine.

[Boston]

Congratulations, people, you are know discovering that the number 1 killer of humanity in all time is...... disease.

Not war. Not starvation. Disease. Usually, the ones that are, by modern standards, pretty easy to treat, like diarrhea (both from drinking bad water and eating undercooked food), infections, and vector-borne illnesses, of which plague is the latter.

Now, of course, diseases shouldn't be one of the, to be frank, stupid "events" that Rimworld loves so much, when things appear randomly out the blue. Instead, other diseases should be like infections, where they are dependent on the environmental conditions.

Have a poorly-skilled cook? Get food poisoning (already in-game) and suffer from diarrhea, the main danger of which is rapid dehydration.
Have a wound that is poorly cleaned? Develop an infection (already in-game)
Live in filth (aka "dirty" surroundings)? Living among various disease-bearing critters (fleas, ticks, rats, etc) spreads plague among your people.

All of the above can be actively fought not just reacted to.

[Shurp]

Ummm, but you forget one other important fact: the number one cause of fatal disease is malnutrition.  For most of human history people lived on the edge of starvation.  Healthy well fed people with functional immune systems don't die from ordinary infections from a foot injury (tetanus a notable exception).  And even an infection as dangerous as the bubonic plague only kills about 50% of *un*treated victims.  With modern medical treatment that drops to 10%.

Rimworld plague is far more dangerous than real-world plague, and should be reworked so that it is usually (70%) survivable with just herbal medicine, and nearly always with ordinary medicine.

[makapse]

Malaria is even more misrepresented in game than plague is. I have personally got malaria 10 times while i was under 15 and only once did i actually need medical help to survive(108F is not a joking point at 10). Malaria is considered a fatal disease only because of the number of people it kills, not its kill/infection rate. Malaria should not generally kill a under 40 person even without medication if he gets bed rest. The way i see it, the starting point of the immunity should be a random variable between 30 and 50% for a disease that starts at 40% severity and working while sick with these killer diseases should make their progression rapid.

[Zhentar]

I think it would be more interesting to play if the diseases stayed as hard or harder to beat to 100% as they are now - but there should be intermediate consequences aside from death. E.g. flu starts causing lung infections or scarring, plague starts causing gangrenous extremities. So there could be significant (even permanent) consequences to "losing" without simply killing the pawns.

[Stormfox]

Boston is on the right track up there - if such a severe problem was somehow preventable or at least foreseeable, it would be something else. I just had another outbreak in my colony (roughly a year old at that time). Cassandras constant barrage of bad events, raids every 3-4 days and the usual crap, my (good) medicine stocks were pretty low. I HAD some penoxyline, but did not know you had to administer that as an operation instead of it being used automatically like other meds.

Luckily, the plague hit directly after a hard save.

Results: The initial version was very harsh by itself. 6 of 12 guys were infected. I had 5 beds in my hospital, 3 of which where medical beds with a vitals monitor attached to all five of them and sterile floor with a doormat installed. All 6 of them were sent to bed and had bed rest set to 1 basically at once. All of them were treated - first with the remaining normal meds, later with herbals since nothing else was left.

All of them died, even the one in the excellent quality medical bed with good treatments and a vitals monitor.


I then reloaded my hard save - and lo and behold, the plague still hit, and exactly the same 6 guys (which implies that bad events get "preloaded" quite some time before they happen and are part of your savegame, which is strange in itself - I made a few tests and could even reproduce that effect when switchting to Pheobe Peaceful).

I tried again to see if it was actually possible to survive - same result, all died. Then I remembered that I should have penoxyline, and found out why it was not applied.

I reloaded again, got the plague again (on the usual six guys), and this time applied penoxyline in addition to the usual treatment. The barely survived, by a few percent.

Diseases need a major rebalance, fast.

[Zhentar]

The diseases all start at zero percent severity; they just need to reach a level of severity where they have symptoms before it is revealed to the player. You can see it by switching on dev mode and checking the option to show all hediffs on the health info pane.

If you still have that hard save, would you be willing to share it? I'd be interested in playing around with it and seeing how the numbers turned out that way.

[Sola]

"I've gotten plague in the first year and a half in nearly every game."

A year and a half is a very long time.  If you're in a tropical forest, this is not unrealistically far above average.  By the time you have reached this point, have you really not encountered a single trader offering medicine/glitterworld meds, medical bed, or penoxyciline?  That, I'd chalk up to horrible RNG.

[GarettZriwin]

Year and half is indeed a lot of time, usually I had base already set up and colonists with good+ M16, power armor and power helmet on every of them...

[LordMunchkin]

"I've gotten plague in the first year and a half in nearly every game."

A year and a half is a very long time.  If you're in a tropical forest, this is not unrealistically far above average.  By the time you have reached this point, have you really not encountered a single trader offering medicine/glitterworld meds, medical bed, or penoxyciline?  That, I'd chalk up to horrible RNG.

It's more complicated than that. It's also doctors getting ill (one time I had two good doctors and both got sick), researchers getting sick (stalling my research), people being old (even with good meds they died), not having enough money (this goes back to trying to avoid getting too rich too quickly as tribal), or just the timing of the plague (2/3 tribe was suffering from severe injuries from mechanoids when the plague hit so my one healer was overloaded). In one hilarious instance my pyromaniac set fire to my medicine (not tribal but still hilarious)! In addition, getting good medicine does not guarantee survival either. I've gotten regular medicine, kept my people in bed, treated them with a good doctor ASAP, and still had the majority of them die (usually with immunity in the 90s so they almost made it).

Really, it's at the point where I consider plague a greater threat than mechanoids, raiders, infestations, or all the horrific creatures from the mods I use. I'd rather have my colonists fight deep ones with knives than have them get the plague! 

[Boston]

Ummm, but you forget one other important fact: the number one cause of fatal disease is malnutrition.  For most of human history people lived on the edge of starvation.  Healthy well fed people with functional immune systems don't die from ordinary infections from a foot injury (tetanus a notable exception).  And even an infection as dangerous as the bubonic plague only kills about 50% of *un*treated victims.  With modern medical treatment that drops to 10%.

Rimworld plague is far more dangerous than real-world plague, and should be reworked so that it is usually (70%) survivable with just herbal medicine, and nearly always with ordinary medicine.

No, without treatment (read, modern antibiotics) plagues can vary in lethality from around 30% (bubonic, on the low end) to damn-near 100% (septicemic and pneumonic ).

For the entirety of human existence, the only time that human deaths via warfare overtook the level of human death via disease was the US Civil War, with the development of "modern" military weaponry. And, even then, hundreds of thousands of people died of diseases, like diarrhea, because they didn't know that they should probably drink from the river upstream of where they shit.

People die from sepsis all the time, Shurp, even in the modern day.

As for malnutrition ..... all it really does is weaken the immune system. You don't get sick from "just" malnutrition, it just makes it easier.

Finally, "most people" through human history didn't actually live on the edge of starvation 24/7. While modern food surpluses weren't possible, they, on average, still generally ate pretty well on average. There were good years and bad years. Hell, the Icelandic Norse ate on average 10,000kCal a day. In Iceland.

[LordMunchkin]

No, without treatment (read, modern antibiotics) plagues can vary in lethality from around 30% (bubonic, on the low end) to damn-near 100% (septicemic and pneumonic ).

For the entirety of human existence, the only time that human deaths via warfare overtook the level of human death via disease was the US Civil War, with the development of "modern" military weaponry. And, even then, hundreds of thousands of people died of diseases, like diarrhea, because they didn't know that they should probably drink from the river upstream of where they shit.

People die from sepsis all the time, Shurp, even in the modern day.

As for malnutrition ..... all it really does is weaken the immune system. You don't get sick from "just" malnutrition, it just makes it easier.

Finally, "most people" through human history didn't actually live on the edge of starvation 24/7. While modern food surpluses weren't possible, they, on average, still generally ate pretty well on average. There were good years and bad years. Hell, the Icelandic Norse ate on average 10,000kCal a day. In Iceland.

Malnutrition doesn't just stem from low kCal. It's also from not eating enough of the right thing or eating too much of it. A lot of chronic diseases from the classical/medieval era stemmed from this.