Largest map - What's the issue exactly?

[chiyz]

Hi there,

I could not find answer on my question anywhere so I hope you guys could help me. Well I was wondering what is the exact problem with largest maps? I can see that those are consuming like 1GB of memory, but it's not an issue, raiders are taking long walk before reaching the settlement, but I don't see the issue here as well. Are there script crashing or something? Is game unstable with this map? In what kind of meaning, I was always afraid of playing on largest maps, because of it.

Looking forward for your comments!

[the_red_kraken]

I suppose it takes longer to rescue transport pod crashes. Im not sure if raids taking longer to reach you makes the game relatively easier or not. Your map having more material does make it a bit easier I guess.

[Shurp]

On cold maps, forcing enemies to trudge to the snow to reach your base gives you a huge amount of time to prepare.  And they may be in poor shape from the cold by the time they get there.  So it definitely makes it easier.  And it could possibly break pathfinding optimizations.

On the flip side, if you have a siege event, it can take a painfully long time for your pawns to get out there to shoot at them if you don't want to artillery duel.  So that can hurt you.  And drop pod events tend to spawn at the edges and so can become hard to retrieve.

I don't think it will cause any hard breaks but I think it's unnecessary to play on any map larger than 300x300 (large).  I don't like the default 250x250 because if I don't put my base in the exact center of the map it becomes noticeably closer to one side than the other, which in turn has a significant effect on how quickly raiders reach you.

[Canute]

Since the 64 bit Rimworld are out, there isn't any memory reason against large maps.

But be aware that Rimworld still don't got very optimized and don't have multicore/thread support.
So your colony on larger maps will run sooner slower then on smaller maps.
Just because of that many things more that need to be calculated/simulated.

[vzoxz0]

The main reason for "large" maps being problematic is balancing it with AI pathing.

Basically the bigger the map is the more retarded your AI gets.

[5thHorseman]

I also recall on animal-sparse maps, animals spawn on the edges and never really make it all the way to the interior, making hunting trips a bit troublesome. Though I think you can mitigate that with piles of bait.

[Yoshida Keiji]

The most notorious problem with the larger map on game-breaking topic is that you can literally have a full grown Infestation on a map border as your natural guardians which has a pro and a con. It will kill all incoming raids from that side... as well as all friendly caravans. As long as you are smart enough to keep them away from your base. The Insectoids AI is directed to chase your pawns all across the map if you keep attacking them on their sleep, but if you keep them at their original spawn point, they will gradually retreat back home. So you can "pull" them from one border to the opposed on a 400x400, which will most likely have a catastrophic result, or just leave them there far away. AI, in general, still cannot distinguish your "real" base versus a "fake" base which also help mitigate insectoids attack on revenge.

So you can safely exploit this AI problem, which is a prime bonus for "permanent" residency players who never launch the SpaceShip and face raids of 500 enemies. If you have an equal amount of insectoids in your map, you will be able to cheese a whole game, specially if the opposing side of the map is also a sea shore, leaving only two sides with open borders, not to mention if you are on a mountainous terrain.

[ctgill]

Largest maps for me have always been derailed around the 5-6 colonist mark due to just slowing down due to progression. I play mostly 3x speed then pause to build / then resume. 3x speed on larger sizes I certainly feel the slow down I believe bottlenecking off my i5.

Smaller maps however certainly feel claustrophobic when you hit the 8-10 colonist point.

Planning for the distance to map edge though by increasing colonist walkspeed through a scenario to 150% or more I feel is an adequate counter to some of the points made in this thread about the distance being too good for defenses. However if calculating pawn movement at high speeds is causing my slow down like I suspect, this also seems like it wouldn't help. Just a thought from reading the other posts here on this.

[5thHorseman]

You could draw an area out around your base and restrict your colonists to that instead of making them "unrestricted." That would solve the pathing issue while still giving you all the benefits of raids sucking