My balance and gameplay feedback after several no-pause challenge campaigns

[xwynns]

After 300 hours of vanilla Rimworld + QoL mods I'm finally moving on to modded campaigns, so I wanted to post my observations and thoughts about the vanilla game before I forget them.  I've been playing No-Pause campaigns exclusively for probably the last 250 hours of those 300 and some interesting things have stood out.

My three biggest issues:

• AI Broke.   I experienced a pirate raid on my home colony where I had left some tamed animals but had taken all the pawns out on a caravan.  As a result I was forced to watch the game on 1.0 speed while a bunch of pirates went around burning my tamed animals that refused to fight back.  While the game didn't technically break I was removed from any ability to play it for an extended period of time.  Fortunately friendly fire is tuned SO high that the pirates actually managed to kill more than half of themselves, by themselves, and ran away (lol). I would expect the AI to simply steal stuff and run if they find no enemy human pawns.
• Friendly Fire.  I think this is tuned way too high by default.  While I didn't notice it too much playing a typical campaign camping in one base until the end of the game, when I changed over to a direct confrontation nomadic campaign where I was always fighting face to face and using lots of animals to tank hits I noticed that nearly 50% of all the wounds I incurred in most battles were the result of friendly fire.  While I love friendly fire in every game and always turn it on, what it boils down to in most games is reduced dps while you wait to take a clean shot and not 200% more wounds on your own guys because you keep shooting them in the back as fast as you possibly can.  It was particularly egregious when I would hit my downed pawns or animals 20 tiles away from the moving and standing enemy target.
  I put a 20 second highlight at the end of every one of my episodes during my outro and because of this I happened to notice that most every raid and caravan ambush lasted about 20 seconds after the first shot, but then the next 5 minutes or more were spent tending wounds (no pause), which is my next issue.
• Wound Tending.  The current vanilla setup for this completely breaks down under stress.  It was mostly fine with a little player intervention in a walled up base with defenses, but once the player chooses to engage in consistent combat, the players time spent fighting (fun) to time spent recovering (not fun) is about 1:15 or higher.  This almost broke my will to play the game until I was able to sort it out via a myriad of mods such as Patient Sanity, Priority Treatment, and Fluffy's Worktab.  A typical direct engagement in my year 3-4 Nomadic Tribe game would see about 25-30 wounded animals and 2-6 wounded pawns.  Without those mods or without pausing to micromanage everyone constantly each of those fights would have resulted in the death of my colony all while watching the AI try to do completely unrealistic things while everyone and everything died around them. 
  

So it's no secret that the optimal way to play the game is spamming a ton of defenses and never getting hit.  However I feel this can be fixed to at least some degree by offering a reward for directly fighting enemies (their loot which could be destroyed by turrets/traps otherwise, offering "defeated enemy" status buffs, etc) and reducing the huge penalties for direct engagements (wound recovery micro, friendly fire wounds).  For the latter I think something similar to the Worktab mod should eventually make its way into the game.  In my animal heavy scenario I really needed tending to animals as a higher priority than most other medical tasks but that wasn't necessary in normal colony scenarios so that ability to open up and rearrange the sub-tasks would add quite a bit of replayability to the vanilla game in a variaty of scenarios.

Other random thoughts:

• The emergent narrative potential in this game is vastly higher than nearly every game I've ever played, which is awesome, I love it and I want more of it
• The tribal aspect of the game is actually extremely enjoyable and I wish it were more fleshed out.  Coming from someone who's favorite TV series of all time is Firefly, I thought I'd enjoy the modern/western aspect more by comparison, but I didn't.
• I'd love to see some professional UX sooner rather than later.
• I think caravan formation could be fixed by making it a regular hauling job and removing the need for animals to hit waypoints (very important when lots of animals).  This way the gameplay stays the same during the process, rather than throwing out the normal gameplay in favor of the current race against time that is forming a caravan.
• Lots of animals may be tanking framerate more than it should.  I can easily maintain 60 fps late game without animals, but then with 75-100 tamed animals I'm barely able to break 20 fps. [email protected] and 1080ti@2050mhz but playing at 4k.
• I feel like the game only offers about 3.5 years of events but the typical game lasts about 5 years.  The last 1.5 years are too repetitive.

That's it for now, I'm sure I had a lot more to say but I want to go start a new campaign right now.  Sorry if this post was mostly negative, it's a list of things I'd like to see improved while the things that are great (most of them) don't need any attention.  Easily one of my favorite games of all time.

[brucethemoose]

+1 to pretty much all that, I've had similar issues even though I pause all the time.

So basically this, right?:

-Pet AI needs better fight or flight
-Friendly fire probability needs some tuning
-Integrate Patient Sanity and Priority Treatment mods.


From the devs' perspective, those are pretty reasonable feature requests, as far as I can tell. Big QoL improvements from relatively easy additions.

[Seeker89]

hmm... what is a No-Pause campaign?

[Sola]

100% agree that friendly fire needs to be turned down.  16 shooting with a rifle hitting a downed pawn instead of the enemy standing in an adjacent square is just infuriating.

Neutral on other points.

"no pause campaign" is a player-imposed restriction.  He simply does not pause the game.

[pdxsean]

Although I am not so bold as to play without pausing, I have been with no turrets or traps since A16, and I definitely disagree with OP's characterization that playing in a manner where you get involved in combat means taking ridiculous amounts of damage and/or friendly fire. I suspect this is a matter more due to the lack of pausing, because if you pause the game and plan out the moves of your pawns it is pretty easy to avoid serious injury from friendly fire, and the amount of normal injuries didn't seem to be unreasonable. That is, maybe 1/3 or so of my pawns might be injured in a fight and most of them would be out of bed and running around in a day or less. This on Cassandra Extreme.

Most recently I played a tribal challenge with melee only - again no turrets/traps - and while I did die fairly early from an alien ship, the dozen or so battles I fought with raiders went fairly well and the injuries weren't out of control. They were definitely high, but I was playing melee only on extreme difficulty so they should be. 

I do really admire the ability of OP to play the game the way he does - and I am glad to see YouTube is rewarding him considerably for it - but honestly that is not the way the game is meant to be played. Judging the game based on an extreme way of playing is really unreasonable, no more than it would be to judge the base game if you had a dozen mods, or whatever else would introduce aritificial changes into the format. The game is designed with pausing in mind.

[b0rsuk]

So it's no secret that the optimal way to play the game is spamming a ton of defenses and never getting hit.  However I feel this can be fixed to at least some degree by offering a reward for directly fighting enemies (their loot which could be destroyed by turrets/traps otherwise, offering "defeated enemy" status buffs, etc) and reducing the huge penalties for direct engagements (wound recovery micro, friendly fire wounds).

I also think there need to be some rewards, because at the moment there seem to be only penalties. Yes, you save a bunch of steel, lots of power and components but what are you going to use them on ?  If on equipment, you need research, good crafters and time to make anything worthwhile, and those pieces suffer from attrition more than turrets which can be repaired infinitely for free as long as they're not outright destroyed.

Making turrets damage loot more sounds contrived to me. Yet another form of dead man apparel. Something more convincing would be fame. Famous marksman, famous brawler, undefeated duelist. People who do well in combat, or even those who keep their courage where bullets are flying, would receive social bonus - among themselves, in the colony, and in contacts with other factions. Pirates may start offering deals and joint raids. Some may offer to join you out of respect. A renowned artist from another colony goes to you for protection and safety. You get more weapon traders, they know you can use that stuff. Caravan raid may scatter when they recognize a fearsome shooter among guards. Manhunter animal may become intimidated and leave. And then there's sexual attraction to alpha pawn.

Would make for better stories than "we can't use their weapons because our turrets blasted them much worse than our weapons would."

[Topper]

so your games are really short..or you never get up to pee? ew ew ew

I'm pretty happy with FF now that hunting doesnt hit your own people. Getting shot is really not a big deal unless you are super unlucky. I do tend to hit my own people more often than the enemy.

[hoffmale]

I do tend to hit my own people more often than the enemy.

Maybe try to shoot at your own people, you might hit more enemies this way

Seriously though, the combat system right now is only about fighting mechanics and possible loot/prisoners. If you can abuse the mechanics for your best advantage, many fights can almost be made trivial (even without turrets), but if you don't abuse them you are pretty much guaranteed a lot of injuries and maybe deaths. And the current rewards for fighting (loot = mostly worthless, prisoners = organ donors or take ages to recruit) don't really feel that rewarding (unless you make a cannibalistic sea ice colony...), so there is no real incentive to not abuse the mechanics. After all, a dead or injured pawn drags the whole colony down, either because they need a lot of care while not working (maybe for forever) or because they need to be cleaned up and give huge mood debuffs...

Then again, there's much story telling potential in those fights, but currently they aren't really used or used in a non-satisfactory manner (at least from a players point of view). If used correctly, it might make taking risks in a fight more rewarding.

E.g. a trigger happy guy might randomly channel his inner Rambo and go on a killing spree (at least without much intentional friendly fire) while being less susceptible for injuries for an short amount of time, or a spouse might go crazy instantly once his/her partner dies trying to get as many of the killers as possible. At the same time, a wimp or a first-timer might throw up because they can't take in all the bloodshed... And of course, same for the attackers! What a campfire story would a Rambo-mode pirate make, taking the whole team (or a good sniper shot) to take that monster down... Additionally, grudges and feuds could be introduced, giving a bit more long term motivation against a certain enemy faction.

There are so many story hooks that could be used (better), it's kinda sad that currently fighting is mostly about nearly worthless loot (with the chance of a better weapon) and avoiding injuries/deaths at all costs...