[1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game

[NiftyAxolotl]

So if it gets mangled by manhunters, you ll curse you day and rage quit

Well, why didn't you intervene to protect it? Why should caravans visit you if you don't offer protection?

Also, only that caravan owner would blacklist you. Others would still come, but fewer.

[Madman666]

Well, why didn't you intervene to protect it? Why should caravans visit you if you don't offer protection?

Also, only that caravan owner would blacklist you. Others would still come, but fewer.

Cause i don't wanna have several cripples on my hands, when i can sit home and don't do anything? Caravan should provide its own protection, same way player hosted caravans do. You get weapons, armor, your shit together and go risk yourself. And if anything eats your face off the only one who is to blame is you and storyteller. Not the owner of the world tile you happened to be standing on.

[IronicGolem]

It makes sense in the way they avoid going to dangerous areas, but the fact that they can go hostile to you personally is a bit wonky.
If they had two stats - the current relationship/goodwill and a "Willingness to Visit", them dying to something you didn't instigate could just lower the second one, but not the first.

That still poses the question of "how did they know they made it to your colony and didn't just get ambushed by pirates on the way to it", but, whatever. Maybe radios exist invisibly.

[zizard]

An idea I had about stealing caravan stuff is that the faction will count items dropped on your map as debt and make you repay an equivalent silver value before they will send anything.

[5thHorseman]

That still poses the question of "how did they know they made it to your colony and didn't just get ambushed by pirates on the way to it", but, whatever. Maybe radios exist invisibly.

No they're pretty implicit. You get calls from refugees and captured ex-colony members all the time. And your colonists know what happens to colonists on caravan up to the very moment they lose consciousness. No reason the same can't be said of the other factions.

Regarding the OP, amusingly the only thing I do is limit my wealth to lower raid sizes and I think that's a perfectly reasonable strategy both on my part and on the part of the raiders.

Oh and I don't use combat/hauling animals but that's merely because they count too much in my opinion, not because I don't think they should count at all.

Another thing I do that is not listed is, I am really nice to everybody but the tribals. I treat them like garbage so more raids are from them.

[Greep]

I think a lot of people piss off tribals heh.  In b18 before tribal sappers it's just what you did if you were munchkining.  Choosing between fighting 10 centipedes or 50 tribals I'll take the horde any day.

Also: youc an fix combat animals if you like by just downloading raidlimiter linked in the above.  It allows you to lower the influence on raid sizes of combat animals.

[NiftyAxolotl]

For profit centers, I am stuck on the Supply/Demand solution. It allows anything the player makes to be profitable to start, but prevents it from scaling forever. Rather than juggling efficiency curve balance on all the different production lines a player might think of, you can just nerf the concept of "Specialized Mass Production". Here's the simplest implementation I can think of that won't drown the player in information:
- For each type of item, add a status Supply Level: Glut, Normal, Shortage. These cause sell/buy price multipliers on the item.
- Whenever the player buys something, there is a chance for the Supply Level to move towards Shortage, depending on the value of the trade.
- Whenever the player sells something, there is a chance for the Supply Level to move towards Glut, depending on the value of the trade.
- Supply Levels revert to Normal over time. Any Supply Level change has a player notification.

[Squiggle]

For caravaning, it would seem that there are two scenarios right? You murdering them and you letting them be murdered? I'm not sure I fully understand the exploit (not having done it myself) but coming from a common sense perspective the penalties should be different for both, but also price you pay to regain the faction goodwill should be astronomical. It seems to me like there needs to be a second stat "trust" or something that is different than the current "goodwill" or relations. Trust goes down with negative experiences, and increases from positive experiences and modifies the effect of gifting / changes to goodwill. Say trust is 0 to 2.0, starting at 1.0 (neutral), after a caravan dies in your lands your trust goes down, for example to 0.25 so your gift increases goodwill by 0.25 times the usual amount? The gift would increase trust too. If you really wanted it to work well, it would set a new trust target, but then only slowly change the trust as time goes by (i.e. your trust will go up to 0.4 after the gift, but only actually reaches that amount after a week, etc). Trust should be easy to lose and hard and slow to gain thus you could have good relations with someone that you don't trust. They have treated you well enough recently, but you expect betrayal - their positive actions are discounted.

Also really like NiftyAxolotl's suggestions for a supply/demand economy, that should be in vanilla for sure.

[5thHorseman]

I'm not sure I fully understand the exploit (not having done it myself)

It's pretty simple. Instead of trading with them, murder them. They drop everything in their stores on the ground. For more fun and profit, do so with the weapons you bought from them. You can buy stuff first because when they die, they drop their silver too.

I've never done it either, but I've benefited from them fighting mechanoids for me before.

[Greep]

If a supply/demand economy hasn't been added, and if it doesn't look too hard, I'll add it here.  That being said I'd be surprised a mod like that hasn't been done.  Wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel here.  DLL mods aren't as common though so maybe it hasn't.

[lperkins2]

So I've been thinking for a while on the caravan issue (ever since I had a combat supplier carrying a couple thousand mortar rounds get offed).  I think I have a solution to the problem that would work, but would be somewhat fiddly to implement. 

The problem is that the caravan's faction takes the loss of the caravan without complaint or reaction.  Sure, if it looks like you caused the demise of the caravan, they'll attack you for a while, but that does them no good, and usually isn't a big deal to you, and usually, you can engineer the situation so they don't even blame you. 

The solution isn't to have the faction get more angry with you or attack, since that would just introduce a host of other problems.  The solution is to have the faction send an asset retrieval team to gather the dropped supplies. 

The idea is the faction should send basically a nearly empty caravan, with their top-tier combat units to gather everything.  They aren't hostile to you, but will dig their way in if needed.  They don't have to get exactly what was dropped, just similar cash value of stuff.  Which is where it gets fiddly.  Telling what value of stuff got dropped by the caravan is easy, the hard part is telling how much of what got dropped got destroyed, by fire or by just sitting out rotting, or by grenades, or what have you.  A flag saying something was dropped by such and such a faction might be the way to do it, or simply an estimate based on relative faction power and the circumstances that caused the caravan animal to expire (killed by lightning strike vs heart attack). 

Particularly weak factions (tribals) may even hire a professional team to come in, so you can't just kill tribal traders without recourse.  Which also opens the door to some extra events, like raiders showing up to grab the caravan gear, possibly at the same time as the retrieval team, or the colony getting offered a chance to go retrieve stuff on behalf of one of their allies.

Unfortunately, monodevelop isn't really suited to this kind of task, so I've not looked at the game code enough to know how much could be reused and adapted, but it may be as simple as adapting the 'caravan packing' logic to order the item stacks packed up.  Any that get moved should still get packed, and anything that gets destroyed could automatically get ignored.  Depending on how it works, your colonists might even help with the packing.

[Sundogs]

I've been looking for this mod for two years. I'm sure I'll use Raid Size Limiter as well, for a different run. Thank you!

[rook14]

No matter how I read it, I get the vibe of Easy Merciless difficulty. T_T

[Ruisuki]

I don't like timers in general as a concept Despite my frequent gripe about raids and all that, i am actually reasonably content with raids rising with wealth. What i don't like a lot in 1.0 is that i need to turn my whole base into one friggin killbox and permanently cram everyone into a tin can, which looks like more of a penal colony of uber strict regime, than a city. And i guess i still don't particularly like world events scale with colony map wealth, cause its stupid. Otherwise - quite fine with it actually.

what did 1.0 change to have you building smaller bases?

[5thHorseman]

what did 1.0 change to have you building smaller bases?

Colony wealth and number of pawns are two big factors in raid sizes, so it's always a good idea to not keep expensive junk you're not or are barely using (including rooms and machines and silver floors and that masterwork jade chess table), and instead make sure anything really expensive is there to defend the rest of your stuff.

Some think this is less reasonable than others