What difficulty is this game meant to be played on?

[That_Axe]

I found this post https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/53s4es/good_scenario_for_beginner/d7vuo8j/ according to this poster the game was balanced around playing on INTENSE. It's a 5 month old post, though so if this was true is it still true for current alpha?

[Beider]

I think this depends heavily on what you enjoy and what kind of start you have.
Lower difficulty = more time to build.
Higher difficulty = more raids and combat.

Since you can alter the start conditions and add mods there are other things that decide difficulty as well. For instance lately all I do is use the first pawn I get that can do everything (except medical, no medical is fine) and hit random start location once and play on that map (unless i get ice sheet) with that pawn. In addition I start as tribal with no items and have a mod that makes all research take longer (have it on 5x as long, but can set as high as you like). This in itself makes the game a lot more difficult, so if you try those start settings with the highest difficulty you will most likely lose every time. So I play on Rough mostly which I find challenging but not too hard. Also I try not to use killboxes or turrets as much.

To summarise, if you enjoy the building part of the game then playing on a lower difficulty can be more enjoyable than a high difficulty setting. Personally I find the highest difficulties can get tedious since you end up with raids almost every day so you have no time to actually get stuff done. Most of the time you don't even have time to burrow the corpses and haul the loot before the next raid comes. Yes it's hard but for me it isn't fun.

Edit: Forgot to mention, but for those who don't know you can switch storyteller and difficulty on the fly from the options menu. So if you don't like your current setting you don't have to restart, just change it.

[That_Axe]

Higher difficulty means more raids? I thought what it does is just make raids just bigger.

From what I understand the Storyteller AI is the one controlling how long raid intervals are? Maybe I misunderstood?

[Beider]

Higher difficulty means more raids? I thought what it does is just make raids just bigger.

From what I understand the Storyteller AI is the one controlling how long raid intervals are? Maybe I misunderstood?

Now I am not a 100% certain, but my impression was always that I felt I got more big threats when I played on higher difficulties. And more trivial events (solar flare, etc..) on lower difficulties. But I might be wrong, could just be observational bias on my part.

[Serenity]

Both more and larger. The game escalates sooner on higher difficulties

Also keep in mind that you can always change difficulty in an ongoing game. So if you enjoy building you can start easy and then go up once raids are no longer a challenge

[Stormfox]

The one you enjoy. <gasp>

[That_Axe]

The one you enjoy. <gasp>

I'm asking about which difficulty is this game being developed and balanced on. The default one, the standard one.

Difficulties(options) are mostly just some numbers getting some small tweaks. Sometimes they work, but most of the time it makes the gameplay.. A bit wonky.

An example would be Bioshock Infinite and its hardest difficulty. I played on it because I consider myself pretty good at FPS games. Turns out, it just turns enemies into bulletsponges. Not fun at all.

What difficulty is this game balanced on?

I hope I explained it well enough. I am not a native English speaker.

[Wanderer_joins]

As a beginner, Cassandra rough permadeath is the way i enjoyed Rimworld. Once you've grasped the mechanics, you can go extreme and progressively reduce your defense.

[MisterSpock]

Play it on harder difficulties when the lower one became to easy. I always play on extreme. Its not that hard, if you got a hang of the game.

Most difficulty is clima, not raidsize.

"Waht difficulty is the game made for":
Rough - but in my opinion extreme is a much better difficulty and much more balanced.

[XeoNovaDan]

Rough is RimWorld's equivalent of 'normal' difficulty, but it is still scaled down in some aspects, such as raid points only being 65% of what they normally would be. Technically, the most 'Neutral' difficulty in that regard would be Intense (equivalent of hard), as that has 100% threat scale.

Really, I'd say a combination of Rough and Intense.

[Zhentar]

On the flip side, 'Rough' is arguably neutral because it has a colonist mood offset of 0, while Intense has -3.

[makkenhoff]

It used to say in one of the descriptions, which one Rimworld was "meant" to be played on - however I'd like to point out Rimworld is in a constant state of development and thus balancing. What used to pass for "meant to be played on in A14" doesn't necessarily mean it was "meant to be played" on that same setting in A16.

[RemingtonRyder]

Maybe just try the game on different difficulties? There really isn't any one difficulty that you "should" play on. And if you feel like you're not being challenged enough, or too much, you can change in the middle of the game.

In other games, changing the difficulty while playing might be seen as cheating. Actually though, RimWorld is not so much a game as a story generator. If you can survive higher difficulties for a while, great, but you don't need to, the same way a movie or TV show doesn't need to have a struggle against adversity to be fun to watch.

[Greep]

It used to say in one of the descriptions, which one Rimworld was "meant" to be played on - however I'd like to point out Rimworld is in a constant state of development and thus balancing. What used to pass for "meant to be played on in A14" doesn't necessarily mean it was "meant to be played" on that same setting in A16.

Yup. that difficulty was rough I believe, although now there's 2 difficulties above rough rather than one. I think it's balanced for lower two-> casual, rough-> hardcore new players, intense-> experienced, extreme -> experienced challenge.  Extreme is only really plausible with somewhat cheesy tactics atm.

It's pretty sandboxy, though.  You can have a lot of fun at rough or lower on harder biomes.