Unprocessed materials should not increase size of raids

[FTR]

Firstly let me apologise for my shitty english but I will try to explain my thoughts the best I can.

The idea is that unprocessed materials should not count towards wealth that contributes to the raids size. My reasoning is that, no matter how much plasteel or steel you have laying around in your stockpile, it will NOT help against raid attacks in any way, shape or form. It will only help once it's already made into something useful, like a wall or a turret. Then why does it count towards size of raids? Is having 10000 plasteel in my warehouse or 500 survival meals means I can defend any better than when I have 1000/100 ? Of course not. But it does lead to MUCH larger and stronger attacks. Raids are - mostly - instant or nearly instant, so there would be no way to instantly reduce your wealth by for example dismantling turrets to avoid attacks. Once raid starts, it's already too late for that.

It leads to the situation in which many players - unaware of how wealth system works - just stockpile insane amount of materials, because frankly, why wouldn't they? The randomness of this game (even with other storytellers than randy) means you always need some materials stockpiled in case you randomly get screwed up, for example by droppods or infestation spawning at the worst possible place in your base. As someone who loves to be in control as much as possible and say f*ck you to rngesus, I usually keep supplies for every possible scenario, even the unlikely ones. The randomness and inability to mitigate some of the bad events before they happen is why you must stockpile stuff. For example there is no way to redirect dropping mechs into different parts of your base. You know what would solve this? Some kind of expensive (counting towards wealth) kind of roof that you would only build on the most crucial parts of your base and which could not be broken through by mechs. Same goes for infestations but with some special kind of floor perhaps. Right now people are freezing their bases or in my case, build empty rooms deep into the mountain and heat them up to "redirect" infestations away from important rooms and frankly, both solutions are so incredibly cheesy and gamey but there is really no other way.

I played rimworld a lot myself and I watched others play it and the end result is always the same - people who decide to go big or set any other goal than rushing the ship and leaving the planet - will inevitable get bombarded by enormous raids and either get frustrated by tediousness of having to deal with that every few days and abandon the colony and start all over, or die. Ironically if you play "to win", the game is actually easier. Just go for the bare minimum of everything you need, "trick" the game into thinking you are poorer than you actually are and leave asap. Perfect example of that playstyle would be Pete Complete Ice sheet challenge on youtube.

Raids size should be based on wealth of built defences, number of pawns - which should be way more relevant in counting raid size than any other factor, wealth of stored weaponry and armors (that includes psychic weapons). Things like walls, raw materials (steel, plasteel), bricks, food - but not meals, uninstalled furniture, perhaps even hydroponics (hydroponics by themselves are useless, they are only useful when being used) and some installed furniture should not count towards wealth.

I just really hope wealth system will be looked into at some point because it works alright in early to mid game, but in late game and high wealth the game just throws so much shit at you it stops being fun or even possible to survive. Strategies to handle small raids are completely different than large raids, and personally I find it much less fun with the latter. And just let me clarify by large raids I mean 100+ mechs (including at least 30 centipedes), 60+ bug hives etc. I feel like late game gets less attention because only small percentage of players reaches it. Most people either stay in early to mid game or if they reach late game, they make it easy with mods.

I kinda feel bad for writing this post because I feel like I am a peasant telling a rocket scientist how to build rockets, but this is merely my opinion as someone who loves to minmax, someone who loves to take his time playing a game and someone who goes for quantity over quality when playing games. Rimworld is one of the few games that punishes you for loving it so much you would never want to leave it like it tells you to (via spaceship).

[lt_halle]

I mean if you're talking about minmaxing, it's actually inefficient to overmine materials unless you have miners with lots of downtime.

The problem with your suggestion, IMO, is twofold.

1) It's not logical. Mineral wealth is still wealth. If you were told that there was an outpost with a quest reward of 2000 plasteel and it only had a defense of like 4 guys and a turret, you would obviously go after it. This is the same for raiders - they are hearing about this small lightly defended base stocked with tons and tons of valuable materials, and are looking to exploit that.

2) It encourages weird heuristics for optimal play. Most optimal play in this game is about minimizing colony wealth at all times. With your proposed change (assuming silver would still be accounted for in colony wealth), the meta would probably turn into essentially buying up everything the player can in "non-taxed" assets where they wouldn't affect colony wealth, keeping only the bare minimum at any time in terms of food, medicine, etc., and then selling off anything else and converting that to steel too.

Plus, in general it'd be too hard to really make a clear distinction between what is and isn't a contributor to combat strength or whatever metric you wanna use for when something's wealth would be counted.

[FTR]

I mean if you're talking about minmaxing, it's actually inefficient to overmine materials unless you have miners with lots of downtime.

The problem with your suggestion, IMO, is twofold.

1) It's not logical. Mineral wealth is still wealth. If you were told that there was an outpost with a quest reward of 2000 plasteel and it only had a defense of like 4 guys and a turret, you would obviously go after it. This is the same for raiders - they are hearing about this small lightly defended base stocked with tons and tons of valuable materials, and are looking to exploit that.

2) It encourages weird heuristics for optimal play. Most optimal play in this game is about minimizing colony wealth at all times. With your proposed change (assuming silver would still be accounted for in colony wealth), the meta would probably turn into essentially buying up everything the player can in "non-taxed" assets where they wouldn't affect colony wealth, keeping only the bare minimum at any time in terms of food, medicine, etc., and then selling off anything else and converting that to steel too.

Plus, in general it'd be too hard to really make a clear distinction between what is and isn't a contributor to combat strength or whatever metric you wanna use for when something's wealth would be counted.

I also said in my post that stockpiling materials actually works against you in terms of raid size, but you gotta do it because of natural randomness of the game. And by minmaxing I meant that I am not the guy that will simply accept bad rng screwing me over, so I like to be prepared for every, even the worst possible event. That's true especially when you play on permadeath, you just gotta be prepared.

Raids size are determined by useless wealth not because it's "logical" or realistic in a way that you put it, but because game needed a way to scale raids and this was the simplest and most raw implementation of it because there is not that many factors to it, and those that exist are not balanced very well imho. You don't see it as much in early to mid game, but in late game it can be way easier to spot. Also I believe game was not designed to punish you for having "useless wealth" but instead this is just a design flaw. I think it was meant to simply scale raids to player overall "strength" so you won't face raids way stronger than you are. In reality it works properly only if you play a smaller colony. Generally in my opinion every wealth should be somewhat connected to number of pawns, because every action and resource goes through them.
And trying to bring any sort of logic and realism to it makes no sense in the first place because how raiders would know about our plasteel stockpile or the other way around, how would we know about their stockpiles and defences? This is not about logic but simply game balance and design.

Regarding to your 2) point. That's exactly right and I believe that's really bad game design. And what you said would be imo a perfect way. Keeping tons of raw, unprocessed materials doesn't matter as long as those materials are unprocessed. It's not like it takes an hour to create entire stockpile of food or medicine, those are usually things you need to have stockpiled in case something really bad happens, so you cannot just be like "hey imma keep raw materials to avoid wealth and just create it when I need it!", no it wouldn't work like that, because there would not be time for that once bad event happens and 10 of your colonists need good medicine RIGHT NOW. So as I said earlier raw materials have to go through pawns first to become useful.

And what would be a contributor to overall colony strength and what wouldn't is obviously a matter for discussion. To me it should be whatever is affecting your pawns mood like placed decor (not stockpiled decor), defensive structures, number of colonists and their quality and health (something that, I believe is not taken into account at all right now), comfort & beauty furniture, stockpiled meals (including food in the hoppers), drugs and medicine, weapons and armor, animals and their skills and health. Definitely not stockpiled pasteel, steel, plant matter, silver, raw food, uninstalled furniture, placed workbenches, uranium, wood, because none of those things contribute in any way to ongoing raid or your colonists mood.

Right now if you happen to have tons of plasteel in the storage because randy keeps throwing mechs at you, your colonists will think they live a very rich colony and will get very high expectations modifier, even if they still live in the wooden barn with shitty defences. Therefore randy will keep throwing even more useless wealth at you in form of mechs or raiders, increasing further raids even more and so on. If you cannot process that wealth fast enough (by either exchanging it for useful wealth or creating stuff) because you have 3 colonists, you are screwed and you have to, I don't know, destroy that wealth? This is the game design right now.
Of course it's very overblown and unrealistic example, but it's just to explain what I mean. It happens just on much smaller and less noticeable scale but the further you go into the late game the easier it is to spot because there is much more of everything and the raids keep scaling up.

[thethoam]

you are naked and alone but have 100k Gold in storage
tons of raiders comes to take ur gold
is that balanced? LOL
stop crying dude
its realistic anyway
more wealth = more jealous enemy

[FTR]

you are naked and alone but have 100k Gold in storage
tons of raiders comes to take ur gold
is that balanced? LOL
stop crying dude
its realistic anyway
more wealth = more jealous enemy

Such a constructive response if I ever saw one. You literally provide no arguments and tell me to stop crying so I assume you have none, well that just so convincing. For the record - my entire criticism is reasoning for writing here is to have discussion and think about ways to make a game better, it's not even remotely personal.

If you want to have a discussion, respond to my arguments, if not, then don't.