Rimworld: Another Excellent Game with the Ultimate Flaw.

[Edmon]

I really loved Rimworld as a game.

It's an excellent game that invokes that same feeling and fun factor that the many similar games before it invoked. Games like Theme Hospital, Theme Park, The Sims (If that's to your taste or not), Dungeon Keeper and even the old precursors to those games, old stuff no-one remembers like the baldies. These games all suffered from a problem we started calling "the Ultimate Flaw" on my game design course.

Of course, there are many recent games too, that have the ultimate flaw. Sadly, Rimworld is one of them. However, as responsive as the development is, maybe Rimworld can be the first to solve it.

The Ultimate flaw is a problem that as been present in every game of any type that has "pawns", resource processing and buildings. A problem that basically only games like Sim City have solved, by basically removing pawns entirely. I'm sure you'll agree that's no solution at all.

What is the problem?

Movement simply takes too long. By extension, player designs that minimize movement become ridiculously and needlessly optimal. Minimizing movement leads to unrealistic and entirely boring gameplay and it limits player freedom to the point that the game becomes something is "solved" rather than a sandbox. At increasing difficulty levels, the game creates situations where optimizing movement (and only movement) gives the necessary gains to succeed.

A rimworld example would be making meals.

It is, by far, most optimal to make meals by having the butcher table, cold room and kitchen surface all surround the exact same chair. so the pawn does not have to move from that position to do anything or get anything. It is orders of magnitude better than any other design, not just a little better.

Knowing this, you cannot in challenging settings, not engage in this same boring design if you want to maximize your time and resources. Which is incredibly dull.

Much like in Theme Park where placing all the ride entrances at the park entrance along one massive path that leads into the next ride forever, thus extracting wealth and processing visitors like meat in a sausage factory, is optimal. So too does Rimworld lead to the same boring and unrealistic designs. Forced on the player as the difficulty rises and it becomes ever more obvious the solution to all your problems is to have your pawns basically never move more than 10 tiles from where they got out of bed in the morning.

The solution is, in many ways quite simple.

Slow down time and increase the time it takes to do everything by the same ratio. Then, perhaps, offer production bonuses for actually making nice rooms.

For example. If time was 4x slower in our kitchen example, then movement as a problem is 4x less important. However, it still takes the same amount of daytime to complete the cooking/butchering/etc as it did before, as these things have been made to take 4x longer in real time.

Now, if a room is really attractive and is nice and warm (thus making a bad larder) and has lots of nice tools in it and maybe space around the kitchen unit. If production was say, 20-30% faster because of that, it might be worth having the larder in a separate room and the bonuses would make up for the extra movement to get items from the larder.

And THAT makes for interesting gameplay.

Honestly, I have gotten really bored of these types of games not because I don't love them, but because the Ultimate Problem means there is nothing interesting to solve in them design wise. Except perhaps how to design the defences. The production side of it is solved with one simple statement:

Which design involves the least movement.

Once you realise this is the ultimate solution to every challenge the game these types of games could possibly have, you grow bored of them incredibly quickly.

And that's a real shame.

I hope the development team will think on this. I hope this game becomes more than "How do I minimize pawn movement" like so many of the games before it.

[Harold3456]

I don't think I see this "ultimate" flaw as any kind of a flaw at all: efficient layout planning is key to any kind of city building. It isn't a "flaw", a by-product of the experience. It's part-and-parcel of the experience itself.

In the early game, I find that meal-making doesn't need to be too optimal at all. With 3 pawns, "make until you have 10" can keep you going for your entire early game. Late game, when you often have 10+ pawns + animals + prisoners, you obviously need to scale up your production accordingly, but I find doing so to be a rewarding part of the game.

My preferred build: One butcher table but two cook stoves, "DROP ON FLOOR" (<- subtle, but oh so helpful), autodoors between kitchen and freezer, and having your kitchen as close to your fields as possible. With two full-time cooks I can make 50 or so fine meals in one day, and then spend the rest of my time just replacing what was lost.

[Edmon]

I don't think I see this "ultimate" flaw as any kind of a flaw at all: efficient layout planning is key to any kind of city building. It isn't a "flaw", a by-product of the experience. It's part-and-parcel of the experience itself.

In the early game, I find that meal-making doesn't need to be too optimal at all. With 3 pawns, "make until you have 10" can keep you going for your entire early game. Late game, when you often have 10+ pawns + animals + prisoners, you obviously need to scale up your production accordingly, but I find doing so to be a rewarding part of the game.

My preferred build: One butcher table but two cook stoves, "DROP ON FLOOR" (<- subtle, but oh so helpful), autodoors between kitchen and freezer, and having your kitchen as close to your fields as possible. With two full-time cooks I can make 50 or so fine meals in one day, and then spend the rest of my time just replacing what was lost.

Any game where one, particular simple strategy is needlessly and utterly optimal is flawed. Yes, you can get enjoyment out of not doing that strategy, but it will always be in the back of your mind as being the optimal solution. When the game difficulty ramps up and the choices are between minimizing movement and losing, you minimize movement or you lose.

I don't know about you, but I want my game to have a bit more depth to it than one all-mighty strategy and a load of other ones you do because you can or you put the difficulty on easy and thus there is no challenge or anything to think about anyway.

While realism should never be an argument for gameplay, it's also incredibly silly for games to be like this. Realising what I am saying is true is a seminal point in any strategy gamers, gaming life. It's the moment where this type of game becomes so one dimensional that its mere presence sucks the 3D out of that generic cover based shooter you installed near it on your harddrive.

[Mudoken]

There will always be a more optimal way to do things in games like these. It's in their nature. If not that ultimatly means it doesnt matter at all how you do it. For Simcity it would be how to organize where to put which type of district and traffic optimization. Lots and lots of traffic optimization .

Also i dont play on the highest rimworld difficulty, only intense. But as far as i can tell efficency of movement is not nearly as important in rimworld as keeping your pawns mood up. Which you can do by having nice and big rooms. IMO thats alot more important then making the super short ways. Its enough if you have simple things like farms close to the freezer and kitchens next to the freezer. Your optimal suggestion sounds a little overkill outside of the start for extreme biomes like sea ice or something. But even there you just make small rooms because it needs to be done before everybody freezes xD.
My colonies die from all kinds of stupid events or raids, or mental breakdowns at bad moments and some faster logistics would not have saved most of my failed colonies...RIP my loyal pawns...

Also what do you get out of having the butcher table and stove share the chair? You cant use both at the same time with 2 pawns, you have to grab vegetables anyways so you will have stand up from there after butchering. damn often my pawns even walk past the freshly butchered meat to grab the meat furthest away from them xD. Also now that i think about it they prioritize cooking at the stove above butchering if you do have meat in the freezer. So without extra managing around that that does not seem very optimized. But well i just set butcher animals on forever so maybe thats just me being lazy. And worst of all the butcher table makes quite a mess, dirty surroundings make the pawn who cooks for hours non stop not like his surroundings. Unless you have a janitor priority pawn. Also I read somewhere that dirty next to the stove or freezer raises chances of food poisoning? Not sure if thats true. But it sounds logical.
And while im typing this i also realize that stuff like cleanliness and having light actually factor into work speed. So your suggestions on how to improve are already in the game, have been for a loooong time i think^^.

There are some ways to optimize your colony in Rimworld. But I highly doubt that super optimization walkways is the only way to make colonies survive on higher difficulties. Infact like i said i doubt that taking it to the extreme has much of an effect. Except maybe the start for Sea ice or extreme desert Colonies.

Outside of competitive games where you kinda have to work with metas and optimization you should not get annoyed by the fact that there is a "best" way to do things. If the possibility of optimized layouts completly stops you of trying new designs, being a bit creative with your layout or following a different theme just for the fun of it, then im not sure if games of this type are really for you. Well maybe not for you to put more than 200 hours in.
Rimworld has tons of replayability because you can build your bases differently and weird but still make it work. Not to make it harder or anything but because it can work unless its a complete mess. While your mathematicly perfect colonies that are more efficent then pro layouts in factorio could die at any moment because of the most random things. And that is why this game is so incredibly fun.

[Daimonin]

You have a good point about the issue of timing in many games, I recall I stopped playing the Sims games because I found it silly that there simply wasn't TIME in one day to work, have dinner, AND go to the toilet. Things just took way more time then they should have.

I think rimworld is a LOT better balanced as far as time for activities goes, though now I'm curious to check what kind of walking speed pawns have. I suspect it probably is a tad slower then it should be. Question on your proposed fix: Why increase day length and work time, rather then just increasing walk speed? The point is to have, by percentage, most of they day taken up by working rather then walking after all. Seems easier (even modable maybe?) to just say double the base move speed instead.

I suspect one of the issues, even if walk speed is currently "realistic" is that IRL, people optimize automatically.
Walking across the colony? Grab this stuff that needs to be carried over there.
Cleaning dirt of the floors? Go room by room instead of running back and forth between two distant rooms.
Cooking a bunch of meals? Prep the ingredients for the next meal (including retrieval) while the first is on the stove.
Since pawns in games rarely do that kind of optimization, the player has to micromanage or fine-tune things to ridiculous degrees, making time saving strategies such as "walk as little as possible" be way more important then they should be.

Another issue is with batch production, especially when it comes to cooking. Lots of mines around where I live, you think camp cooks painstakingly cook an individual dinner for each of the 20-30 people at camp? Fuck no, they make a huge batch that serves as dinner for everyone.
Just the option to cook 10 meals in one batch would do a lot to alleviate how valuable it is to have the stove in the freezer. EVEN if you extended the cook time to be an unreasonable 10x longer then 1 meal.

[Shurp]

There is more to Rimworld than cooking food, right?

For example, manufacturing parkas.  There it really doesn't matter how far away your cloth/leather/devilstrand stockpile is, because your pawn will be spending most of his time in front of the tailoring workbench.  Similarly for any other tasks that take a long time.

Killboxing with turrets is the most efficient base defense but there are alternatives.  Polar bears can be very effective.

Colonist bedroom quality matters significantly even though colonists don't spend much time in them.

Said "ultimate problem" is an ultimate problem only if you are obsessed with cooking... and even there you have tradeoffs.  Put the stove in the freezer and suffer the cold production penalty, or micromanage a stockpile next to the freezer and make sure to put the meat away back in the freezer before you go to bed?  Either way it is an annoyance, yes, but it's hardly the only issue in the game or even the most significant.

[Edmon]

Question on your proposed fix: Why increase day length and work time, rather then just increasing walk speed? The point is to have, by percentage, most of they day taken up by working rather then walking after all. Seems easier (even modable maybe?) to just say double the base move speed instead.

There is nothing wrong with the feeling of the movement or the speed at which combat unfolds in real time. Making the pawns faster would change the balance in these aspects of the game, which are fine. The issue is one of time as per the in-game clock, rather than one of real time (in real time, movement seems fine, slightly too fast even).

I suspect one of the issues, even if walk speed is currently "realistic" is that IRL, people optimize automatically.
Walking across the colony? Grab this stuff that needs to be carried over there.
Cleaning dirt of the floors? Go room by room instead of running back and forth between two distant rooms.
Cooking a bunch of meals? Prep the ingredients for the next meal (including retrieval) while the first is on the stove.
Since pawns in games rarely do that kind of optimization, the player has to micromanage or fine-tune things to ridiculous degrees, making time saving strategies such as "walk as little as possible" be way more important then they should be.

Another issue is with batch production, especially when it comes to cooking. Lots of mines around where I live, you think camp cooks painstakingly cook an individual dinner for each of the 20-30 people at camp? Fuck no, they make a huge batch that serves as dinner for everyone.
Just the option to cook 10 meals in one batch would do a lot to alleviate how valuable it is to have the stove in the freezer. EVEN if you extended the cook time to be an unreasonable 10x longer then 1 meal.

Lets not get too obsessed with my cooking example, even if it is a good example. This issue applies to nearly every aspect of the game, with the exception of Combat which is fine, although one could argue that 20/30 minutes of "In game time" passing in combat between single shots is another example of "In game time" being too fast, even if it is fine in real time.

[Listen1]

The overall complaint of the OP, seems to be "The Waiting game". The movement, the time to produce and how to make the it optimal so that you waste as little time as possible to be as effective as possible. And after you do that, there's nothing more to do other than start again.

Once you realise this is the ultimate solution to every challenge the game these types of games could possibly have, you grow bored of them incredibly quickly.
And that's a real shame.

This is true, but I don't think you can design around it. It's a human thing that after doing something for a long time, you grow more efficient and slowly your interest curve diminishes. That dosen't apply only to games, it applies to Studies, relationships, workplaces, hobbies, exercise, and pretty much everything.

The solution I found to this "flaw" is, maybe you shouldn't shoot for maximum efficiency, maybe you should try to find the most interesting way to play. Something like "The Cannibal Challange", "The no Stonecutting", "The Drunken Crew", "The You can only attack with rabbits" and others like that.

I honestly think that the problem you are presenting, cannot be fixed with design, unless you do a billion skinner boxes or try to add systems that encourage the player to do things different everytime. But, there will be always be a point where you lose interest in this kinds of game.

[Edmon]

The overall complaint of the OP, seems to be "The Waiting game". The movement, the time to produce and how to make the it optimal so that you waste as little time as possible to be as effective as possible. And after you do that, there's nothing more to do other than start again.

Once you realise this is the ultimate solution to every challenge the game these types of games could possibly have, you grow bored of them incredibly quickly.
And that's a real shame.

This is true, but I don't think you can design around it. It's a human thing that after doing something for a long time, you grow more efficient and slowly your interest curve diminishes. That dosen't apply only to games, it applies to Studies, relationships, workplaces, hobbies, exercise, and pretty much everything.

The solution I found to this "flaw" is, maybe you shouldn't shoot for maximum efficiency, maybe you should try to find the most interesting way to play. Something like "The Cannibal Challange", "The no Stonecutting", "The Drunken Crew", "The You can only attack with rabbits" and others like that.

I honestly think that the problem you are presenting, cannot be fixed with design, unless you do a billion skinner boxes or try to add systems that encourage the player to do things different everytime. But, there will be always be a point where you lose interest in this kinds of game.

The problem is that movement "costs" too much, thus killing any other design or strategy that doesn't involve minimizing movement. There are tons of interesting strategies and designs that are or could be possible, but since the cost of movement is so high, making large interesting rooms isn't just non-optimal, it's incredibly self-harming.

This is the flaw that needs fixing.

None of the things you suggest fixes the issue. Sure, I can play a game with "no stonecutting", but I will still minimize movement.

[Listen1]

The problem is that movement "costs" too much, thus killing any other design or strategy that doesn't involve minimizing movement. There are tons of interesting strategies and designs that are or could be possible, but since the cost of movement is so high, making large interesting rooms isn't just non-optimal, it's incredibly self-harming.

This is the flaw that needs fixing.

None of the things you suggest fixes the issue. Sure, I can play a game with "no stonecutting", but I will still minimize movement.

Sorry, but I really don't see the movement time as a problem. I tought that the problem was the "Waiting Game".

I hope someone can help you, Maybe you could ask for a modder to help you to increase pawn speed/day lenght/time of tasks. Maybe if that turns the game more engaging, you can even submit a report to Tynan so that he can take a look.

[Edmon]

Sorry, but I really don't see the movement time as a problem.

It takes approximately 30 real time seconds to move 10 tiles (approximate 10-15m?) into cover and fire a single round from a rifle.

In real time, this feels totally fine.

But in game time, nearly an entire HOUR of the day will have passed.

And you don't think that's a problem? In that same amount of time, a pawn positioned at a workbench for 30 seconds could have prepared 3-5 meals. Which, for an hour of in game time, seems not to be unreasonable.

The in game time cost of movement is absurd and this is an issue that has absolutely plagued games of this type since games of this type crawled out of the brains of nerds and manifested themselves as code and passion.

This is why it's the Ultimate Flaw. The issue is in the seminal DNA of this type of game and how serious it is for a particular game directly relates to how enjoyable it tends to be.

15 years later, people are still playing Sim City 4 because it does not have this problem and thus solving the in game problems always requires a unique and diverse approach.

Not true of literally all of the other games I've listed and many more. A focus on moving pawns from A to B needs to not be the all consuming primary consideration of the game, if it is to reach for more strategic dimension than a Mobius strip.

[Murdo]

When you create a scenario, change the percentages... you can increase walking speed, decrease building/mining/crafting speed, and there may even be something there for cleaning. It lets you handle more mundane tasks around the base without being too OP, and avoids the infuriating feeling of watching it take days to transfer items from one stockpile to another.

Another option is to modify the floor terrain defs so that movement on constructed tiles is dramatically better than slogging around the rest of the map. There are, or used to be, a mod or two that did this... but pushing the walking speed of constructed tiles above 100% apparently caused issues with bionics bonuses. I don't know if the same would hold true if you downgraded the walking speed of natural terrains and then used the scenario modifier to raise the global walking speed.

[RemingtonRyder]

I think the problem that Edmon is describing is compounded by the sometimes wonky pathfinding.

Oh yes, let's go through several trees on our way to the end of a path. That'll be way faster than going around them.

Which leads again to the player having to compensate for the deficiency in a powergamey way.

For example, if you're constantly annoyed by saplings popping up on paths, but you can't actually put flooring down (marshy soil) then something you can do is make a growing zone lining the sides of the path (I used dandelions). Not only does it block anything else from growing there, but there's a one-tile automatic clearance next to growing zones.

I'm not saying that pathfinding is a problem that will go away overnight (if at all) but give us the tools to make it less annoying. Instead of putting down a growing zone to keep a path clear, you could salt the marshy soil, then nothing will grow there for a while. Can we have some salt over here?

[Bozobub]

Um...  Yeah.  Edmon, your strategy *IS NOT* actually optimal.  Other reasons have been given above, but a BIG one is the simple fact that a dirty kitchen (with a butchering table in it) will cause food poisoning quite often.

I've had no problems building reasonably efficient kitchen/butchering/fridge/freezer setups at all, since I first learned how to play on A15 or A16 (I think A15).  A won game = plenty efficient, in my book =).  Some people DO prefer to micro-optimize every step, but you simply don't necessarily need to, not even on the hardest difficulties.  Can it make the game easier, in some ways?  Sure.  But you ALSO have to spend the time and brain-sweat on optimizing with progressively smaller returns; most (non-OCD) people have a cutoff where the game stops being fun, due to excess micromagement doldrums .

Tl;dr?  Yes, there are arguably "best" solutions to many in-game problems, but that doesn't make them fun, or even necessary much of the time ("killboxes" are a perfect example).  And this is also true for almost any kind of game, to boot, so..?

[Sbilko]

I agree with the author of this thread, because I had experienced it in past and it is true: I once made a base where pawns had to walk to do their job or eat, and althought there was a room for everything (eating, researching, kitchen, freezer, beds, etc.) the colony was unproductive because pawns had to walk so much to that place. And it was ultimately an unsuccessful colony.