How's the disease balance?

[Drahkon]

I think I've once lost a colonist to illness, and once a prisoner to infection, perhaps twice. Honestly I'd say at least in the cooler regions could use additional sicknesses, they show rather rarely as current. Preferably not in crazy numbers of colonists in a single event though, I've seen my entire screen spammed by plague letters before =). Perhaps make illness events stretch out over a week or so, instead of 1/3 the colony being well one hour and having the malaria the next.

If you care for them well they almost always make it, if you have pawns with plague go 12 hours untreated for a raid or something, not so much. Seems a fair balance but could stand to tune it up a little bit I'd say.

[Coenmcj]

Glitterworld medicine is so advanced that it doesn't take an ameutur doctor any effort at all to cure a patient? So far, all treatments using glitterworld tech has not failed and succes chance is at 100% even in the worst of hands.

At the current time Glitterworld Medicine is only obtainable through the dev menu or through Modifications and is therefore not subject to balancing.

[Pathing]

Currently, the infection change is too low for me to conclude anything from core mod.
When infection change is high, the time that colonists need to spend to die from disease seem to be well balanced even though it is still really really hard to get any infection.
My only opinion about disease is there should have been antibiotic packs for each disease to speed up immunity development progress.

[Zilch]

Infection is scarier than disease, unless it is sleeping sickness.
That sucks hardcore. Especially if it wipes out your main doctors.
Things like malaria / plague sound scary, but pawns heal quick.
Disease chance is pretty high in jungle, usually someone sick, get a couple of days where everyone is fine now and then though.

I'd say lower the disease chance, but buff the danger.

[MikhailBoho]

I definitely get diseases more frequently in the jungle biome. I had three separate waves of sleeping sickness and two waves of malaria in a roughly two year period. I feel as if right now, the diseases are well balanced with just a bit of added challenge. If anything they could be a bit more aggressive. Maybe I'm just really on top of their treatments, but I've never actually lost a colonist to anything but infection. (1/6 prisoners are lost to infection, mostly because I refuse to waste medicine on them)

Out of curiosity, does medicine speed up the recovery time for diseases? I forbid use of most of my medicine when I notice someone is diseased because the positives of using it isn't all that obvious.

[REMworlder]

I actually didn't mind the initial iteration of disease in the game. Going somewhere new often exposes you to a bunch of new diseases; why we get vaccinations when we cross borders. Think of all the known and unknown diseases the jungle on an entirely new planet you just crashed onto might carry. Disease has played an almost unfathomably huge role in human history, and I'd expect even a diminished effect to be still be significant in RimWorlds.

*Anyways*


I kind of enjoyed the initial version of disease since it forced me to triage and plan ahead for things like cooking and medicine stocks. Planning for disease forced me to make some cool guns versus butter (or medicine) decisions.

Lately I haven't had any problems with disease. Since I haven't played much jungle this patch, I played six month into a jungle colony on hardest Cassandra. Not one case of sickness aside from a few battle infections, though I know a single anecdotal lack of cases isn't statistically significant. I don't recall sickness affecting me much in other biomes I've spent a lot more time playing on, but I've been predominantly on tundra.

Infection can be a pain, but can be mitigated with cryptosleep and amputations in worse case scenarios. Players don't even need medicine to bandage wounds and stop infections, so in that way smart triage management and base design can allow players to bypass infection threats entirely.

With the introduction of herbal and glitterworld medicines and cryptosleep sarcophagi being more common, players have many more tools than they did in alpha 7. I'd be totally excited to see more illness, or expanded disease systems with X new mechanics.

[Draecesstra]

i played about 4 colonies to the 4th year. every disease i always just ignored, they went once a day to bed to get medicine and thats it. i never had anyone die by disease, they should be harder, at least, some types of disease should force the colonist to bed. right now, i dont feel like it impacts the game at all. (NOT played jungle!, just borean forest, tundra, temperate)

[The-MathMog]

I think that diseases are at a pretty good point. I don't see them too often, but they do happen often enough, for it to actually make a difference.
For some diseases I don't mind seing them even more often actually

More variation to the diseases would also be cool. And here im only talking like: How often they happen, some requirering only a few treatments, but where if you don't get the treatment, they are very deadly. And more long lasting diseases where missing a few might not make too much of a difference, but maybe slows down your colonist for several months.

Having diseases, where when they happen, you think "Ohh god damnit"! And some where it's just "Ohh well". Would be nice

[Arenji]

I understand the desire for spreading disease, and it makes sense. I just can't think of a way to make gameplay around that.

If you're gonna add a problem into a game, you also have to add a solution. Spreading disease is easy to code. But how do players fight it? Quarantine? Special doctor garments? All this adds a lot of complexity.

I was surprised that diseases don't spread. I'm also surprised that according to an earlier comment, those suffering (say) Malaria only have to go to bed for their treatments. I figured they would get worse if they weren't in bed all the time. Isn't this how it works?

Anyway, in terms of a game mechanic for diseases spreading, I'd say if you spend any time in the same room as an infected pawn, you have a chance to catch the disease also (after a certain delay). This gives an incentive to quarantine infected colonists in rooms away from the general flow of traffic. It also means doctors are prone to catching the diseases they're trying to treat though putting colonists in proper hospital beds could also significantly reduce the risk.

EDIT: Temperature of the rooms could also speed up or slow down the impact of a disease, depending on the type of infection.

I was once a member of a convent of nuns where a visitor brought in a nasty vomiting bug. The infirmarian caught it, spread it to half the community, then the deputy infirmarian had to take over. She caught it and spread it to the other half of the community. In the end only a couple of nuns escaped without ill effects.

Actually this game would make a good monastery simulator with a few mods

[MikhailBoho]

Year 3 in a jungle biome, August 5th. 6 of my 13 colonists just contracted Malaria. I like this.

[Anduin1357]

I would seriously hope that raiders went and sent biological bombs in their mortars.
That and infection spreading through a person's body & limbs instead of just a descriptive minor, major...

[Leird]

I really like the system as is. But then again i mostly play Tundra so i only very rarely get diseases, and when i do it's mostly the flue, which makes alot of sense!

But i do get alot of infections from wounds, but my people almost always survive, haven't had to amputate anything yet. But it would make sense that people might have a bigger chance of getting sick when they have an infection, as their immunesystem is already taking a beating.

[giannikampa]

In my experience of  the game diseases are quite good. Not that bad at all, as a negative event, like already said before.
Now we are talking about it I can say that they have so many unexpressed potentials i'd suggest to elaborate/implement in the next future, i mean, it would be very good imo to have more problematic diseases (involving doctor's skill, duration of the treatement, medicine cost,  colonist efficency while sick, chance of spreading and whatsoever) rather than just a bigger mechanoid group assaulting because of the mid-late game.

[Shinzy]

Are there too many infections?

Do others have opinions on this? I did tune infections up after A7.

I play on desert so I don't really know of diseases but I can tell you've upped the chance of infections I've noticed about 100% chance to get infection on injured limb (it feels like 100% =P)

I've lost 3 colonists and about 80% of all my prisoners =P
first two colonists I died because of lack of medicine the last one died because I had to do some serious juggling with treatments (almost each of my colonists had a infection after a battle) so it was bit hectic, really have to enroll every scrub to medic duty to deal with it
(and it is kinda fun reminds me of trying to keep everyone sane in that 'moody' alpha)

[Amaror]

I usually play in tundra and didn't get many sicknesses. I do got quite a few infections and noticed that if i didn't have my colonists in bed 24/7 during an infection they will usually die from it, so i can't really agree with people stating that it's fine to have them run around and get treated once in a while.
My main issue with medicine and sicknesses at the moment is that it's not apparent how and if medicine helps at all with sickness. This is something that the player should get told, not something he has to guess.