Ideas for Making Rimworld Better

[catter]

So, my ideas are going to be complex and simple, and they may have also been suggested before or put in B18 and 1.0, but I don't care because I am going to give a list of what I think could make this game more realistic and more interesting to play for people who aren't as fond of the game as I am.

Realism:

Many of the games functions are on par with realistic standards like health and mood. However, there are things missing from the game that makes it less realistic. What to add/subtract/manipulate:

Pain: The system for pain is good and all, but the pain needs to play a more vital role in how organic pawns act and react. To do this you need to make it so any organic life form (not mechanoids) react to higher levels of pain with inaction or frenzy. That requires a new status bar called "Pain" and each character has a different pain tolerance. Pain tolerance can be changed by traits, bionic enhancers, or brain damage and there are two important levels to look at when a pawn is in pain: how much pain will it take for a pawn to become uncomfortable and how much pain will make the pawn breakdown into inaction (not moving at all and most common) or into trying to get rid of the pain (done by going to sleep, stealing medicine or painkillers, binging on drugs, or dropping the mood just enough to have a heavy chance of a minor mental break).

Stamina: What I noticed was that all these pawns have super-human like stamina and strength when doing certain tasks. For example, a pawn doesn't run out of breath when carrying a slate chunk from one end of the map to the center. Based on scale, one square is as long as the average human (roughly 2 meters) and even if you play a medium sized map, that is still a long walk from the center to the edge of the the map. Now I would have trouble going even 20 meters with a large stone chunk to haul around, I don't have the kind of stamina displayed in the game (even though I wish I had it). To combat this, a new kind of health should be implemented: fitness. Fitness should rely on how your pawn started out, how much they work out by doing work, whether they are bionic or not, and how much they haven't worked (plus drugs don't help with fitness in the long run). Fitness should change on a daily basis depending on how much the pawn did a strenuous job or do the opposite. The higher the fitness, the more a pawn can do; on the flip-side, the lower the fitness the more resistant you are (resistant meaning that you will survive longer without food and without heating/cooling since the pawn would be fat). This would also change the body structure of some pawns, for example one could have started out thin and became average later. Fitness would also depend on traits that deal with metabolism and how hard a worker the pawn is. Also, there should be a section for pain, where if your pawn works too hard, it will feel pain as the fitness increases.

Metabolism Traits: With any normal human being, a meal takes time to digest. Some people digest faster and slower than others. This ends up with people who eat a lot and are still skinny and some people who eat a normal amount and become fat. This is all due to the metabolism of people. A faster metabolism makes you need a lot of calories, making it hard to get nutrients to build the body. A slower metabolism will take a small amount of calories and use the rest to build the body and fat. The metabolism also affects how long a drug will affect your body and how fast you deal with sickness. Faster makes the drug last for a shorter time and make sickness slower, but slower makes the drug last longer and the sickness faster.

Combat: The combat system in the game is good, but what it needs is what Combat Extended, Simple Sidearms, and Run and Gun provide. Those three mods implement a system that makes the combat more realistic than just "Shoot at this guy from here, ignore any and all shots coming at you. You can only carry one weapon though, however it has infinite ammo."

Interest Grabbing:

Many features of this game make it quite interesting to play and watch. However, some people think that it isn't good enough for reasons unknown. To try and fix this I made a list of ideas to make the game more interesting.

More futuristic weapons: What I have found most irritating is that there is a lack of futuristic weapons, like some sort of laser weapon or a Particle Projectile weapon. Heck, even a Gauss rifle would be cool to see. "Your lack of futuristic weapons disturbs me..."

Speaking: The game would be full of life if people would just talk, with sound. While a little empty speech bubble is good for knowing that a pawn is talking, but how about we make them say random things like: Chitchat: "Hello.", Deep Talk: "Surviving is hard, yea' know?", Slight: "Who cares what you think?", Insult: "You are a moron!", Kind Words: "You look nice today.", etc.. While the colonists may not say anything specific of themselves, they will say SOMETHING, bringing to life your little colony of people. You should also have raiders yell charge or just yell when they begin their assault on a base. Also "random comments" should be made by colonists like what animals do, but instead of making an animal noise they hum/whistle/mumble/make a comment about an overseer.

That's all I can think up right now, I may make another comment later. All I can say is at least take my very complex thoughts and ideas into consideration.

[Mosch6]

One thing what i realy miss: Ammo for all weapons (hand guns,bow and turrets at example).
You can craft the ammo on special work bench und the enemy use it too.

The second thing: All people must use tool or the can`t cut a tree or make mining or something else.

The third thing:The bows shot bullets? WTF?? Please fix this. With the sound is the same problem.

The fourth thing:Please more weapons and furniture.

Sorry for my bad english i am from Austria, this is not my native language.

[erdrik]

...
More futuristic weapons: What I have found most irritating is that there is a lack of futuristic weapons, like some sort of laser weapon or a Particle Projectile weapon. Heck, even a Gauss rifle would be cool to see. "Your lack of futuristic weapons disturbs me..."
...

Charge Rifle, Charge Blaster, Lancer are all futuristic weapons. While Im not opposed to a few more futuristic weapons(and traps), Their descriptions make it clear they are at least partially already futuristic energy based weaponry.

And:
Lancer description:
A pulse-charged rail-assisted lance weapon. It fires a single shot at high velocity, charging it with unstable energy as it leaves the acceleration rail.

Is that not essentially in the same class as a Gauss Rifle? At least to me, it is close enough to play the role of one...
The same goes for all the "pulse charged" weaponry in the game in regards to "Particle Projectile" weapons.

Though at least one laser weapon would be nice...

[catter]

Another idea, jokes... Pawns should be able to joke around. This social dynamic would require social skill and artistic skill. The equation would go like this:

Code Select Expand

(((Social skill)*(Artistic Skill))/2)*.05= % Chance joke is funny

If a joke is funny, it raises the mood of the pawn it was directed at. If it is bad, it acts like a slight to the one who told a joke since the person hearing the joke would be like,"What ever, your joke sucks."

[scorlew]

. . .

Though at least one laser weapon would be nice...

Oooh!  Especially if a miss carried on until it hit anything behind the target.  Fantastic damage if you hit your target.  Calamity if you miss.  Built in balance instead of a game changer.

[thewraithplayer]

One thing what i realy miss: Ammo for all weapons (hand guns,bow and turrets at example).
You can craft the ammo on special work bench und the enemy use it too.

I've thought that before, but that would slow the game down to a crawl with how Sh*ty everyone's aim is. I got bored one time and counted the shots from my colonist with a bolt action and level 8 shooting trying to hunt a camel, and it numbered around 60 misses! Early game would become a nightmare of having to micromanage hunting (draft a colonist and move them right next to the animal so they can't miss) and of running out of bullets by the time you have multiple person raids.

[erdrik]

One thing what i realy miss: Ammo for all weapons (hand guns,bow and turrets at example).
You can craft the ammo on special work bench und the enemy use it too.

I've thought that before, but that would slow the game down to a crawl with how Sh*ty everyone's aim is. I got bored one time and counted the shots from my colonist with a bolt action and level 8 shooting trying to hunt a camel, and it numbered around 60 misses! Early game would become a nightmare of having to micromanage hunting (draft a colonist and move them right next to the animal so they can't miss) and of running out of bullets by the time you have multiple person raids.

It would also require extra work modifying the inventory code and how pawns interact with their inventories to support carrying around clips of ammo to reload with. Otherwise they would end up having to march back to a stockpile in the middle of a fight to reload.

I think it could be done, but it would require a lot of extra programming work and re-balancing the entire combat system.

[catter]

It would also require extra work modifying the inventory code and how pawns interact with their inventories to support carrying around clips of ammo to reload with. Otherwise they would end up having to march back to a stockpile in the middle of a fight to reload.

I think it could be done, but it would require a lot of extra programming work and re-balancing the entire combat system.

Actually there is a few mods that make combat more realistic, if you read my first post fully. Combat Extended adds the capacity for ammo, and while that isn't practical when you use Simple Sidearms unless you have a backpack, it is still realistic. It also adds the ability for pawns to hide when they get shot at enough; and when in close combat, Simple Sidearms makes you drop any ranged weapon (which is also realistic, since you want to keep your enemy from shooting you at point-blank range) As for the third mod I suggested, Run and Gun, it is useful if an enemy wants to keep the enemies that are chasing him from chasing him since they might get scared and stop chasing.

[erdrik]

Actually there is a few mods that make combat more realistic, if you read my first post fully.

I did read your post fully. I am aware of such mods.
Those mods use extra programming to do those things.
They also drastically re-balance combat to accommodate their new weapons and other features or balances their new weapons specifically to vanilla.(as every major combat mod does) As a modder myself, your statement(though likely unintentionally so) is quite insulting to modders, as it suggests that if it is a mod it must not have taken a lot of work.

Im certain any combat mod takes lots of work to ensure it is balanced the way the modder wants.
Work that the devs would have to redo to ensure it is balance the way Tynan wants.