Is playing on 300x300+ truly bad?

[Drazzii]

I've seen some topics regarding this with versions prior to B19, but I'm wondering if anything changed - and what reasons there are at all - to not play the largest map sizes. Sure the warning says there will be AI issues and so on but I have not seen anything out of the ordinary.

Is there really anything major that can break or change, or are the potential issues under the hood that either don't impact much, or have I just not seen them?

[Elendil]

I play cassandra merciless and In my experience it's definitely playable, but you need to be careful sometimes. Especially with hunting. For example I have lost a pawn because I carelessly hunted a rhino that I didn't notice was in the corner of the map. The whole herd went mad, and even though my pawn had 7 hours to live, I coudn't get him in time.

You have to micro your pawns a lot. Mining can be a problem. Miners will make the journey to the edge of the map only to strike steel twice and turn back to play horseshoes. Hungry pawns will go hunting only to head back to eat after taking one shot. Without babysitting your pawns you can easily lose days of time completing tasks that should have taken much less time, because your workers constantly turn back to socialize/watch TV etc.

Early sieges can be quite a bit harder to deal with. Psychic ships in the corner of the map are a potential problem. I often opt for mass mortars when I can afford it for those reasons.

Enemy AI can have trouble on large maps too. For example having an outer wall with one opening can cause enemies to path to that opening even though the journey takes literally half a day. Though this can arguably be done on smaller maps as well, large maps allow for more extremes.

I would not recommend a large map to a new player for those reasons, but If you know what you're doing and you are reasonably careful with where you mine, hunt etc. it's fine.

[Canute]

Previously with the 32 bit Rimworld you could run out of memory on large maps, special when you use mod that add extra stuff.

But with B19 the 64 bit Rimworld got released, so this problem got solved.

Beside the difficult of travel on your large map and the result of bad AI scripts, nothing speak against it to play on large maps.
There is even a mod for custom map size (500x500).

[b0rsuk]

It puts more emphasis on mortars, makes Psychic ships deadlier, Poison ships much less so. The effect of slow on walk time is magnified too. Raids arrive later overall because they have more space to cover. You may not have time to respond against sieges unless you have your own mortars.

[Nafensoriel]

When playing on large maps.. Step 1 is outlining a default area so your colonists don't go randomly off into the bush 10 miles out only to die to a damned rabbit attack. I usually like 5x my eventual "base" plan so there is enough room for hunting.

[5thHorseman]

I've not played on a large map since the change in floor wealth, but it's possible that you could get larger raids in the early game from having more real estate on which to have floors spawn at the game start.

After playing a few large maps in early 0.19 development (back when it was 1.0) I decided that - at least for my play style - they're not really a benefit and yeah, sometimes they're actually quite a detriment. I think the default map size is a little too small for me and the very next one up is the sweet spot.

[Bolgfred]

Unless it's true what my preposters said, I never had any issue on large maps with pathfinding, AI and other stuff, the game is warning of.
By this I'd say it's definitly not truly bad.


...but It's worth mentioning that CPU/RAM-Problems can happen more likely as it's bigger when it's bigger.