Too formulaic, no true diversity --- Add diversity of colony style

[kenmtraveller]

HardCore SK has a great deal of what you're asking for here.  I would suggest you try it.

Ken

[Aerial]

Just adding my +1.  Resource diversity and technology diversity are both desperately needed in the vanilla game. 

[Lightzy]

Thank you guys for the support. Especially the guy that made an account especially to support wow haha

I'll try the mod you suggest (edit: there is no such mod on workshop), but I posted because I believe this is what the CORE game requires at this point in its development to become everything it's meant to be
It doesn't really need more adventurous stuff like caravans. Right now it just needs a lot more basic content that's added with the explicit purpose of rewarding the player for specializing in whatever it is he/she feels like. In effect, allowing more choice of radically different playthroughs.



And I don't think most of these suggestions are hard to implement.
In fact I think some of them are the very simplest things to implement. Just require some playtesting for balance, which everyone here, I think, is already, in effect, engaged in.

Adding more types of minerals, metals, animals, plants etc is so easy it's literally a graphic and a few basic entries to set it up. Mods have added thousands.

Dispersing these resources at world generation I think is also not very difficult. The game already does it, I think. With stone types and rarer stuff like jade and gold.

Just remove any colony-gen condition that mandates that the player have X mine-able metal/etc and put it all in world-gen. The player will decide where he wants to settle, whether a metal rich place or a place with good earth for growing stuff etc. Choice isn't taken from him, it is GIVEN to him, where before he had no real choice as everything is nearly the same. It is not a choice if it doesn't have rewards/penalties to consider.

Making colony health/happiness depend also on food variety is also rather straightforward, requiring you to make whatever you can where you are and trade (or send forage parties) to get what you can't.


Making crafting require more of various resources is also not a very big deal given the very few crafting items currently available. You don't even have to really test it. Just make items require whatever seems reasonable and tweak it as you go based on feedback. So your shield generator now costs X irridium crystals, Y something else etc to make. Done. It's as simple as changing a very simple xml entry I think.

Setting up a research tree with soft-excludes for specialization (or having science pawns themselves specialize in specific subjects) is a bigger project, but it would definitely add a lot.

And so on.

[Aerial]

Thank you guys for the support. Especially the guy that made an account especially to support wow haha

I'll try the mod you suggest, but I posted because I believe this is what the CORE game requires at this point in its development to become everything it's meant to be
It doesn't really need more adventurous stuff like caravans. Right now it just needs a lot more basic content that's added with the explicit purpose of rewarding the player for specializing in whatever it is he/she feels like. In effect, allowing more choice of radically different playthroughs.



And I don't think most of these suggestions are hard to implement.
In fact I think they're some of the very simplest things to implement. Just require some playtesting for balance, which everyone here, I think, is already, in effect, engaged in.

Adding more types of minerals, metals, animals, plants etc is so easy it's literally a graphic and a few basic entries to set it up. Mods have added thousands.

Dispersing these resources at world generation I think is also not very difficult. The game already does it, I think. With stone types and rarer stuff like jade and gold.

Just remove any colony-gen condition that mandates that the player have X mine-able metal/etc and put it all in world-gen. The player will decide where he wants to settle, whether a metal rich place or a place with good earth for growing stuff etc. Choice isn't taken from him, it is GIVEN to him, where before he had no real choice as everything is nearly the same. It is not a choice if it doesn't have rewards/penalties to consider.

Making colony health/happiness depend also on food variety is also rather straightforward, requiring you to make whatever you can where you are and trade (or send forage parties) to get what you can't.


Making crafting require more of various resources is also not a very big deal given the very few crafting items currently available. You don't even have to really test it. Just make items require whatever seems reasonable and tweak it as you go based on feedback. So your shield generator now costs X irridium crystals, Y something else etc to make. Done. It's as simple as changing a very simple xml entry I think.

Setting up a research tree with soft-excludes for specialization (or having science pawns themselves specialize in specific subjects) is a bigger project, but it would definitely add a lot.

And so on.

It may seem simple but the balancing required to add so many new dimensions to the economy and survival aspects would be huge.  Probably an entire release worth of development to even make a first pass at balancing it so that each play "path" remains viable (if variable in degree of difficulty). 

Consider:  you introduce a new material - iridium crystals - needed for the top half of a new technology tree.  They're only available in jungle biomes (or deep in mountainous maps, or whatever).  So, a player that settles elsewhere has to be able to trade for them.  Do they spontaneously "appear" in trade caravan inventories without regard to where the caravan is from?  Or does there have to be a settlement from that faction in the biome somewhere?  If the latter, how do you deal with a map that has no jungle biomes?  Or the only faction that might possess those crystals to trade being your enemy?  If they spontaneously appear in traders' inventories, how do you make the economy viable?  (Right now the Rimworld economy is pretty broken so the current system probably wouldn't work... RNG supply does not make for fun gameplay diversity most of the time.)  And that's just one new material for one new tech tree branch. 

TL;DR  I'm totally in favor of Tynan adding this kind of depth, but it's not a small or simple task.

[b0rsuk]

Adding more types of minerals, metals, animals, plants etc is so easy it's literally a graphic and a few basic entries to set it up. Mods have added thousands.

I hope not to see this in vanilla. There's slate, limestone, marble, granite, sandstone... so what ? You can make exactly the same things with them. Marble is a bit faster to work in. Difference between even slate and granite is quite small. Sappers will chew through either very quickly and you must intercept them immediately if you want to fight outside walls. Likewise, there are dozens of animals which all feel like a solution looking for a problem. I want to see animals and plants that make me care because they're beneficial or harmful.

Dispersing these resources at world generation I think is also not very difficult. The game already does it, I think. With stone types and rarer stuff like jade and gold.

By the way, current distribution is quite boring. Even resources that are not required for spaceship construction tend to appear on every single map, if not on surface then for deep drills. And there's no big fluctuation in amount of steel, plasteel or jade. You always find this much uranium or jade, never surprisingly large amount that lets you build a turret with it, for example. It's like someone uniformly peppered the planet with resources.

Just remove any colony-gen condition that mandates that the player have X mine-able metal/etc and put it all in world-gen. The player will decide where he wants to settle, whether a metal rich place or a place with good earth for growing stuff etc. Choice isn't taken from him, it is GIVEN to him, where before he had no real choice as everything is nearly the same. It is not a choice if it doesn't have rewards/penalties to consider.

So we largely agree. But note that Rimworld is not very flexible in terms what you can build your base with. Stone is the only viable wall material. Steel is essentially money, it's too precious to spend on most objects as it's needed for almost all devices. I played several self-imposed challenge games like "no mining" a few alphas ago, or "no growing food (use animals instead)". Such playthroughs feel radical, which says a lot how poor choice diversity in Rimworld really is. At least "no turrets" is viable. But can you imagine crashing without a builder What are you going to do, open an ancient danger room and pluck the opening with some shoddy wooden door just to have a room to sleep in ? 0 Construction settlers is doable, Construction disabled is not because you need a door to sleep inside. I also played a melee only colony for real, it was tribal, before dodging was added. Mechanoids and thrumbos can be meleed even before EMP grenades. Melee only colony makes you build exactly how you'd never build otherwise.

Making crafting require more of various resources is also not a very big deal given the very few crafting items currently available. You don't even have to really test it. Just make items require whatever seems reasonable and tweak it as you go based on feedback. So your shield generator now costs X irridium crystals, Y something else etc to make. Done. It's as simple as changing a very simple xml entry I think.

It might end up like synthread and hyperweave. These materials are almost never sold in their raw form, and when they are the amount is pitiful, even for people willing to pay an arm and leg for hyperweave apparel. I'm saying that such rare materials do exist in the game, but again they're found in prohibitively small amounts. Not even ancient danger rooms have them (they may have finished apparel though).

I would be interested in a a fabric that grants near 100% fire resistance. Make it need a rare resource that only exists on some maps.

[Jibbles]

You're oversimplifying this task a bit.  Sure, it's not hard to add new resources... plants, metals etc. but to give them an actual purpose to implement these new resources and balancing  gameplay throughout various biomes for different play styles would be challenging and consumes lots of time. I rather not be cluttered with resource options that pretty much serves the same purpose.

I do agree that there may need to be some more items that you can only acquire through trading and caravanning.  Building a ship for instance..we should be trading and caravanning to get these parts.. Your game could feel a bit more complete and interesting when you've traveled across the globe.

It doesn't really need more adventurous stuff like caravans.

It does... I don't know what makes you say that.  Caravanning isn't super interesting at the moment since it was just added and needs work.

To break up the research tree the way you suggested is just something I really need to see in a mod before agreeing to it.  I think in reality, people would develop a specific pattern in the research tree. Rimworld sort of does this already, it just doesn't take super long to research what you want IF you have pawn skilled high in research. It's a good thing IMO.  Some parts like weapons research could be expanded a bit though.

[Lightzy]

/quote]

Well, trade ships, simply, covers it logically.
But in gameplay terms, even now all land traders are randomized based on certain categories. So just make that thing more rare with traders (there's already a system for this, you just have to slot it in).

Of course a full fledged economy system would be interesting but not necessary for the sake of playthrough specialization options

And of course it's a whole release, maybe two or three, but I think it's the only thing the game really needs. Needs needs. Not just as ideas that'll be nice

[maculator]

Okay, I'll make it short:
Please add a slider for "combat threat <> enviromental threat"
This is what I'd wish for and what would make the game even greater!
Enemies force you to have a killbox and be combat oriented, but I really love toxic rain and vulcanic winters, would be nice to adjust the frequency of those to each other.
Because if you live in the last god forsaken valley with toxic rain and heatwaves 24/7 raiders would think twice before paying you a visit.

[Bozobub]

Look, caravans and multiple colonies won't save you, if the base game is, in the end, boring or tedious.  All they really do in that case, is multiply the ennui by some order of complexity (# of caravans/colonies at one time).  Umm..  Yeah, great, MORE boring busywork, if you're already bored -.-'.

But that's the crux of the biscuit, isn't it?  The game can only get more complex so fast, so you have to *choose* where to add new complexity very carefully.  And this goes double when you're trying not to knock existing mechanics out of whack; Tynan generally attempts to avoid screwing over the entire existing playerbase that way, "alpha" or not, which seems smart to me; people often get pissed when you present them with what is, for all purposes, an entirely different game.

(It's amusing to me, btw, that this delta-complexity limit applies to both the devs AND the players, within each game session =). )

There's only so many dev-hours in a day, so every moment spent, say, on caravans is one NOT spent on fine-tuning resource balances, and other less-glamorous (but essential) work.

Tl;dr?  Adding new mechanics always comes at a price in development of the rest of the game; programmers are human ^^'.

That's exactly why I like to see this type of thing done as a mod, rather than as...well, a list of "here's how to do your job" (I realize that's not your intent, but that's how it came across to me; I beg your pardon).  It gives the entire community a chance to test your assertion(s), and furthermore, Tynan (with permission, ofc) has included the function of many worthy mods directly into the game, so you have a decent chance of winning your point(s) in the absolute best way possible, while not slowing down the main trunk development one iota.

I still refuse to mod the game, myself, until 1.0 but that's just my silliness and no one else's fault xD.

[NiftyAxolotl]

Making colony health/happiness depend also on food variety

Hmm, a queue for each pawn listing the ingredients of recent nutrition. Mood penalty for an ingredient > 70%, buff for no ingredient above 20%?

I'd like to see a semi-official modpack that adds variety without extensively reworking the game. The "French Vanilla" modpack, I guess. The bar for being included in French Vanilla would be lower than for Tynan adopting the mod into Vanilla, since he wouldn't need to actually do anything with it.

Looking at my subscribed mods for things that allow an alternate playstyle without adding much content:
- Caveworld Flora: Reject the sky and become molepeople, subsisting on alien fungi growing inside a mountain!
- Basic Bridges (Fishing Add-On): If you can defend the river, there's seafood aplenty.
- Hardworking Animals: Invest enough in training animals, and it won't matter that your base is sprawling and inefficient.

[Jibbles]

Look, caravans and multiple colonies won't save you, if the base game is, in the end, boring or tedious.  All they really do in that case, is multiply the ennui by some order of complexity (# of caravans/colonies at one time).  Umm..  Yeah, great, MORE boring busywork, if you're already bored -.-'.

I don't care about multiple colonies, and would agree if they decide not to make adjustments to the game around it. If you think rimworld is boring as is then it's just not for you. If you truly think that way about caravans then you haven't put much thought into what all you could do with it.  I don't think the devs took the time to implement this new globe, add caravan features, map generations, random base generations just so we don't have much interactions with it.  If that's the end result, then I would think that they wasted some time.

[Bozobub]

You're entirely missing the point, I think, but *shrug* whatever.

[NiftyAxolotl]

But that's the crux of the biscuit, isn't it?  The game can only get more complex so fast, so you have to *choose* where to add new complexity very carefully.

This, this, a thousand times this!
Complexity-creep brings down whole companies. Devs have to respect it, and always look for how to add the most gameplay with the least new code, new assets, new UI elements, and new balance problems. And also: which current mechanics have proven to be more work than they're worth, and have to be cut.

...Where do you buy biscuits with cruxes in them?

[Jibbles]

You're entirely missing the point, I think, but *shrug* whatever.

haha maybe I am missing your point.  We could just be having a disagreement about caravanning though.  To me, your post sounded like caravans would only add more boring busywork in gameplay so it's not worth putting much time into this feature..  It needs to be worked on IMO. There are improvements that could spice up late gameplay without throwing everything out of whack. So I don't think it's something that should be tossed aside, especially if you want them to consider "fine-tuning resource balance."

I don't have any disagreements with them working on improvements for current base tile.  We don't have many reasons to leave the base though, which is why I encourage more features on global map since I think it would make gameplay less stagnant. 

[Bozobub]

...Where do you buy biscuits with cruxes in them?

Frank Zappa was known to have this knowledge, long thought lost to the ken of Man. 

Remember:  The poodle bites; the poodle chooses, but don't Freak Out =).