Tynan - Let us develop ideology during Playthrough

Started by Lerin, July 21, 2021, 11:16:06 AM

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Lerin

Let us develop ideology during Playthrough.

I am crashlanded dude, i was not a cannibal before, even a junkie. But some mental breaks in the middle of desert, reshaped my mind, into ruthless cannibal, and there is point where my ideology started.

I didnt think about organ harvesting, but in new world my new wife got a lung cancer, i want live with her forever, and there is point when some values changed to "don't care, acceptable".

My tribal kicked me out naked, and left me for dead, i imprisoned them all. So now is point where, my raiding/slavery ideology start growing.


Tynan again, do not force us to make half of our story before start.

addeya

Its so disappointing that you have to create and configure your entire ideology before you even begin, and then cant change anything for the rest of the game. Its way too overwhelming and I hate to imagine what a new player would think when this is thrown at them.

Even worse is as soon as you start the game immediately your prompted and expected to fulfull various rituals etc. Which themselves depend on a list of other requirements, Such as specific attire, items, colonist roles and so on. Which of course you dont have because you have literally just started the game.

AileTheAlien

Yeah, this feels like the ideology stuff was only thought of in the context of players with  long-running games, or who know they want to re-start with a very specific play-style in mind. Everything else in the game is started from humble beginnings, so I would have thought that you can pick different pieces of your ideology over time. Having some system to keep track of what actions you've taken (e.g. eaten human meat) to unlock different options (e.g. tunneler or cannibalism) would be nice, but even just handing the player some points over time to spend on those different parts of an ideology would be better. For now, I'm using the dev-tools to add and remove things over time, and imagining that my four survivors had mental breaks and made a cult, but the current system is too restrictive to start a new colony.

Serenity

It's extremely disappointing that it's all static. Crusader Kings 3 is a good example of a game with dynamic religion and culture systems (culture in an upcoming patch). However it has the advantage of having currencies that need to be spent to make changes and drastic changes cost a lot more. If you allowed change at any time in Rimworld it would be heavily abused.

What could work in Rimworld is that people aren't happy with changes. So if you change something some of the colonists could be assigned to a kind of splinter faction and you need to convert them to the new ways. There just needs to be some cost so you don't do it constantly. Dynamic costs that are adjusted for the amount of deviation from the old ways would be very difficult to implement though given all the options.

Ideology also seems to suffer from the same design mistake as in Royalty where everything is frontloaded. Supposedly because testers complained when things were introduced later. So just as it doesn't make sense for the empire to immediately bother your new and poor colony, you are now expected to fulfill demands right away. Even when you can't. I don't understand why this can't be tied to the colonist expectation mood. At least as an option.

AileTheAlien

Royalty's not really front-loaded the same way that ideology is, though. The empire only offers you the opportunity to start gaining ranks, and it's not forced. Even if you take some ranks, you can renounce your title, and just lose any permits you gained like emergency food drop-offs. It starts pretty mild, with the large, elaborate throne-rooms only required as you climb the ladder. From day one, my colonists were complaining that they didn't have some religious altar (or something), and I'd realised I accidentally left one of the default options. I always play with dev-mode on, so I fixed it right away, but for players who think that's cheating, they need to restart.