Late Game Faction Warfare

[Xerdun]

- His faction ideas are cool. I also would prefer more factions, but only those with a certain range can be contacted/interacted with (again to avoid performance issues). It should be possible to elimate a troublesome faction, or later in the game encounter an even bigger more dangerous faction. Fog of war could certainly work to achieve this.

There also does need to be late game crisis or faction threat. Either a large dangerous faction, a mechanoid threat, large nomadic horde, Glitter world faction, etc. something. Currently end game is just underwhelming.

Thank you for your kind words, completely agree, rather than being able to see all factions from the get go, you should only be able to contact those in your vicinity. To encounter new factions you'd have to explore, set up outposts and, potentially, unlock research, such as scanners and primitive balloons? Just a thought - going off on a tangent with that one! On world gen, all faction bases should be shown, however, perhaps you shouldn't be able to see how they're affiliated and factions should be generated after selecting a location?

Love the idea of a late game threat that sweeps across the land - that'd be awesome to see. Think of all the new potential incidents too.

It doesn't seem like any of these suggestions are going to be seen for A18, but we can hope for A19... or maybe Tynan will surprise us?

[CookieWizard]

Great ideas!

It would make a ton of sense for Outlander and tribal factions to group their settlements together, and have raiders scattered about, without any real centralized government. Seeing the various caravans moving around would be great, as well as a fog of war to reward traveling further out from your settlement. I feel like manhunters and ambushes could still run off the system they currently use now, no need to model and track them, only to hide it from the player. The military outposts could also serve to push back fog of war, using it almost like a lightening post. Agricultural and mining outposts wouldn't serve this purpose well so they wouldn't be able to push it back as far. New items could be built to help push it back, like radar or detector or something.

The outpost system might be heavy on processing power, but I would love to see it happen. I think agricultural and military outposts would be most useful, mining would be great but you would eventually exhaust the resource in the area (kind of like real life). The smaller map size used during attacks on outposts currently would probably be best for those, easier on the system. I use the campsite mod now, and have often though about leaving the camps permanently. I've only ever have 1 camp at a time, but didn't notice any lag in processing.

Faction relations sounds amazing, I would love to engage in geopolitics with tribals and raiders. I think adding a faction trait system would make this much deeper. Traits like religious/atheistic, peaceful/warmongering, tribal/high tech, cannibal/vegetarian etc. This would help form a basis for which factions would gravitate towards cooperation with each other. A High-tech atheistic society would be unlikely to get along with hyper-religious tribals for example. Nothing too complex, just something to give them a reason to love/hate each other to start.

You mentioned vassals, setting up a system for this would be great. When a settlement has been defeated the player can choose to wipe it out, take it over  (populating it with some of their own colonists), or assimilate it into their own faction. An assimilated colony would operate as a standard npc colony, they would send caravans of tribute to the players main settlement. The player wouldn't actually look into the colony, it would run autonomously. This would help reduce the burden on the processors.

Sorry, went on a little rant there.

Aside from just having Rimworld better optimized one way of solving the outpost issue is just making it completely automated. You make an outpost, send people there, and at most make a few decisions here and there. After all, this is an outpost not a fully fledged settlement so I think such a system would work.

[OmG_PotatoeZ]

Game called NEO Scavenger, has a similar exploration style, could base it off that maybe.

[Xerdun]

Really hoping this, or similar faction functionality will be the focus for B19. Now we've moved into Beta though, I fear that there's going to be a reduction in new features with more emphasis on expanding existing systems

An upgrade to how factions interact would be a very welcome addition to the game though, as all the new storytelling and world gen benefits seem to be building up to that

One of the simplest ways would be to just automate as much as possible, have it running in the background, but direct faction interaction seems to me like the best reason to make use of all the awesome new world features. Even with the new rewards, I don't feel compelled to leave the base or explore. But if there was a feeling of conquest or risk / reward in an empire of taking out / weakening a rival, I'd be more inclined to explore

Here's another idea - what about raiding opportunities? Rather than attacking an enemy settlement solely to destroy it, there's greater functionality to capture slaves or steal valuables?