Colony Council and Military Positions

[Harry_Dicks]

This is a repost that I typed up earlier, but figured it might gain some more traction or support here. The idea is for addition to vanilla gameplay or a mod:

How cool would it be if there was another mod for a sort of "cabinet" or "council" positions you could appoint pawns too? For example make someone be the head jailer/warden, who gets a boost to prisoner recruit chance, or has an aura to make prisoners work quick (if you use prison labor mods). You could have your head of security/military, who gives an aura of increased accuracy/melee dodge/cooldown reduction. A director of agriculture who has an aura that increases plant harvest speed or yield. A foreman who's aura increases construction speed.

These leaders could even level up their leadership skill overtime, or some of the skills that they have progress over time. Also, the skills or buffs they have don't have to be just auras. For example, your foreman (head of construction), the higher his construction skill, the less chance colony wide you have of pawns failing in a construction. The higher medical skill for your chief doctor could increase colony wide immunity gain speed, or increase medical tend quality. Again, these can individual auras/buffs/skills could all level up incrementally. You could also give these guys active and/or individual skills. Your head of security could have, say, a 20 second buff that makes any pawns downed in a radius of 20 tiles from them have only a 40% chance of dying, 35% next level, 30% after that, or keep increasing the radius, or decreasing cooldown, etc.

Something that these head of departments could do would be to "research policies" that take this pawn awhile to unlock at their "manager desk." Possibly have some trade offs too to keep things interesting. An example: your chief warden spends X amount of time unlocking the "prisoner privileges  policy." This would make prisoners say 10% easier to recruit, but 5-10% more likely to stage a breakout, and they would have a 50% chance to spawn a shank for their breakout attempt. I'm sure you could think of a hundred different policies or things like this to unlock. The policies could be all individual, that you could start any of them at any time, or they could be locked behind technology levels, or behind the "leadership level" of whatever type of leader you have for that department. You could even have a custom policy unlock "tree" like how dubwise does. The more I think about this, the more I think you could really take this thing in so many different directions if someone wanted to, or expand upon it in so many different ways. You could also have a limit on policies per position. Say you have 10 different medical policies, but could only have 3 active at a time. They still take time to research/activate, to prevent abuse of constantly swapping policies in and out.

After reading the following by SpaceDorf, talking about removing the character limit on nicknames, I've been inspired further

I prefer to run military camps myself so I would like to use the nickname field to assign ranks and squad as well.
Most of the times this does not work, which is sad, because I prefer to use squad assignment to know who to sent on caravans and who not.

How cool would it be, if you could have one of your council positions be sort of like an officer, or secretary of defense, a non-violet, strategic command position. But now for your military pawns that you actually fight with, you also have a captain of the guard (also a council position), and under him you could have a couple sergeants, and each sergeant could have 4-5 pawns they "command" each, only while drafted. The captain and sergeants could have their own unique combat buffs, but the sergeants buffs only apply to pawns in their "squad." That way you could form squads based on pawns that are friends with each other, or dream up whatever dramatic situation you want, and the pawns could respond to it. Make a divorced husband and wife (who hate each other) be in the same squad, or one of them directly under the other's command, and they are prone to social fight or have a mood malice. Similar to how pawns feel when they are not the master of a bonded animal. I feel like this could help vanilla's social system, which I find is rather lacking (IMHO there really isn't much point to it beyond marriage, and even that just gives a one time buff, then what? why not have something that keeps going forever, is persistent.)

Also, you would only gain a new sergeant "slot" in your military hierarchy every X amount of pawns. You could freely swap around pawns into different "slots" as soldiers, sergeants, captain of the guard, or whatever else there is. Maybe if you do swap positions around it comes with a sharp hit to mood that lasts a long time, if someone gets dramatically demoted over a short period of time. Captain of the guard just got booted entirely from the military? That's going to be a huge dent to mood and maybe combat ability COLONY WIDE. Soldier was promoted to his squad's sergeant? Nice mood boost for a quadrum sounds cool. This would make you really think about your promotions and swapping positions before you do it. Do you think your soldiers in need of healing can hold off a raid with even more temporary debuffs, so that you can have that awesome new captain of the guard come fall? Same stuff could apply to swapping the council positions, could your starving colony make it through the cold winter while you get a new head engineer?

Something else, maybe the pawns can only "rank up" in the soldier "slot" the longer they stay there in that specific squad, which will make all the better stories of a couple combat buddies who've been through it all, together since the beginning. If you swap a pawn to another soldier slot in a different squad, their rank resets and they have to start from scratch, or something. Maybe have it so it plays with the social system and moods a lot more. +8 mood for being in a squad for more than 2 years, or +15 to a relationship with a squadmate. Give some negative moods and social traits for swapping squads. That could make it very, very interesting if say you've got two long time lovers in the same squad, but then they split up, and it is causing a huge amount of mood debuff for the two of them. But could you risk swapping them to different squads at this time? Would you be able to survive the penalties? Or could you survive the penalties of them social fighting or having mental breaks all the time?

Going back to the council idea, maybe all of your pawns colony wide will get pissed if you have someone as the colony leader, and they stage a revolt, a colony wide social fight (and possibly deadly for the overthrown leaders, too!) The incumbent leaders could have their friends take their side and be loyalists, while their enemies form the heart of the coup. For an optional extreme difficulty, when a revolt happens, you have to choose one side to control. The opposing side actual goes hostile and you actually lose those pawns, their names become red. That way whoever you manage to capture alive you could throw into your prison, to have to try and re-recruit them, or make that swanky new fedora.

One more thing, you could have the colonists icons at the top of the screen grouped together by squad. Alpha squad, or red squad, or whatever. Draft them all with ONE BUTTON! Oh man I definitely think vanilla RimWorld at least needs to have a way to let you draft all of you "military" pawns at once, and have them all selected, or start heading to their default battlestation. It always sucked having to go through 30 pawns, click, drafting, and then moving them, one by one!

I suppose the two main ideas could be together, or separate, but I don't think they would even really have to even be too complicated either. Just a new main tab at the bottom you could call Positions, Military, Council, or whatever. Whoever you assign to whatever position could just be granted their buff through the health tab, until you remove or upgrade it. The mod Colony Leadership already has something very similar in that you designate a dictator, or your colony has two democratically elected leaders, and these pawns gain a buff to their skills, and also gain an aura buffing nearby pawns. They have a new "bar" in the Needs tab that is called Leadership. I haven't played too much with it yet, but I think they level up their "leader" skill over time, or by teaching, and as that increases, so do the bonuses.

[Harry_Dicks]

122 views and 0 replies. Maybe this isn't such a great idea. I figured it wasn't too broad, and I should elaborate on it, and not have too many things that don't go together because that makes it harder to discuss.

Well, any criticism of the idea, then? Does it sound just too big, crazy, and complicated? Am I retarded? I think the answer to at least one, or all of those questions could be a resounding, "YES!"

[knainoa]

seems a little too big and complex to me, just based on the other mods ive seen.

[Jibbles]

They're not bad ideas.  It's just such a big change and I'm not sure how most people would react to it especially if it was in vanilla.  Plus the whole policy thing...  Some players feel we need policies for things such as food/medical etc.  It kind of gets overloaded when we have all these policies for the things you listed.  I'm not entirely sure how many players actually use the the current ones for drugs and outfits but I've seen several posts how they're unaware that you could use them in that way.  So whether to include in vanilla it may be too much for new players to grasp without frustration.

I think it would be neat to have therapy for issues like drugs, marriages, poor moods etc.  I haven't given much thought to leaders and ranks but I think it would be interesting to tinker with as a mod. 

I haven't used defensive positions yet but we should definitely be able to assign pawns in groups to easily draft in vanilla.