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[Chiefwaffles]

[snip]

To the contrary, I've never quite understood the appeal of killboxes and turning your colony into glorified tower defense. Maybe I'm just a more hardcore "losing is fun" type enjoyer but that just seems boring to me. Rimworld is actually probably my favorite colony builder for the changes Tynan makes to shake up the defense meta, since it feels like real people are trying to outwit me and gank me and not just run non-stop into my traps.

If that's your piece of cake I think there's plenty of mods probably to make raids more casual

It’s less about wanting raids to be casual and more about wanting them to feel more like a (sometimes very) challenging part of the game and its setting that I can beat. Not like it feeling that there’s someone (ironically this is one of the points of the storytellers) behind the game actively trying to “beat” me.

Eh. Honestly, the raids aren’t a big deal (and regardless are a design philosophy I fully respect) My real problem with Rimworld — although I easily love it — is wealth. Having game difficulty scale with how well you’re doing and how much stuff you have is very much a good thing, but the wealth system is annoying.
Makes a lot of upwards progression feel a bit like a punishment, and introduces the annoyingly gamey system of actively watching and having to manage your wealth if you want to live more.

I will say that I hate the change to mortars. It feels like a gamey hamfisted fix to a problem that wasn't really a problem, and now we have the weird situation where we can make spaceships and high tech armor and stuff but... not mortar barrels?

Right?? As… dubiously useful as mortars are in 1.2, they’re fun. Shelling it out with enemies. Nailing that perfect shot. And so on. Now they’ll just be another gamey powerup.
At least Tynan confirmed a setting to keep 1.2 mortars.

[Mephansteras]

I can appreciate that, at least. Being able to switch various things on and off to suit your playstyle is something I wish games did more often.

[Damiac]

Yeah, I wish more devs had the confidence in their ideas to allow players to opt out of big changes like that.  Although I also understand the urge to make players play "The right way" as the designer of the game. 

I just lost my best doctor/planter/crafter to a scyther from a crashed ship part. Stabbed him right through the heart, through the flak jacket. Ouch.  Luckily, I just so happened to train up a secondary doctor to install a kidney in the now deceased main doctor, so at least everyone won't die if malaria strikes. 

However, it's kicked off a bit of a despair spiral.  So my pawns are breaking left and right. Everything is dirty, and I somehow missed an infection that has progressed too far, in another pawns chest.

I think this colony is in trouble. If I had made some explosive mortar shells this all could have been avoided. Having to engage mechs in the open is never good...

[Dostoevsky]

Eh. Honestly, the raids aren’t a big deal (and regardless are a design philosophy I fully respect) My real problem with Rimworld — although I easily love it — is wealth. Having game difficulty scale with how well you’re doing and how much stuff you have is very much a good thing, but the wealth system is annoying.
Makes a lot of upwards progression feel a bit like a punishment, and introduces the annoyingly gamey system of actively watching and having to manage your wealth if you want to live more.

I'll flag the rather poorly-named "prepare for combat" and "combat readiness check" mods, which allow one to customize what percentage of what wealth source is factored into threat calculations. Despite having more control over the values, to me it makes it feel much less gamey because you can worry less about certain thing (e.g. whether or not certain animals are trained for combat).

[Lidku]

I've never quite understood the appeal of killboxes and turning your colony into glorified tower defense. Maybe I'm just a more hardcore "losing is fun" type enjoyer but that just seems boring to me. Rimworld is actually probably my favorite colony builder for the changes Tynan makes to shake up the defense meta, since it feels like real people are trying to outwit me and gank me and not just run non-stop into my traps.

I share the exact same sentiment as you. I avidly HATE terror defense games. Those type of games have always been boring to me. Just keep flopping a few stuff, a new but unimportant enemy appears that you easily kill off, no real overarching story, rinse & repeat. With this new feature of allowing raiders to actually act like intelligent hostiles, with the new mechanic of being able to dig inside of it (like how many sieges went down in history to gain access to the site), things will get more interesting. Now you have to be on your toes, pay attention, and don't think one area with over-concentrated defenses will be enough anymore.

I never really used Mortars before, so I can't comment on that aspect.

With the wealth-based mechanic of having sieges & raids tied to it... I don't understand the complaint toward it. It makes sense that on a largely lawless Rimworld planet, groups that are hostile to you or inherently criminal, will be attracted to raid your base for wealth. And as you progress, you should be challenged of course, with the fact of getting more successful... It is not gamey at all, but rather realistic.

What other type of system would be implemented do you think would be in place either? Even Dwarf Fortress has the wealth-based raid & siege attraction mechanic.

[Great Order]

I count quite a few mods being rolled into the game as features which is great, anything that lowers my mod count is awesome. The ideology expansion sounds great, in theory. It will depend on how much depth this adds. If it's just "Your pawns aren't mad about eating people because you clicked the yes cannibal button" then this will be sad.

It might be like that, I hope not, but if it is I'd probably not go all out tryhard with it.

I'm also looking forward to things like what appear to be gladiator combat between prisoners. Add cannibalism to the mix and get some sacred cannibal fight-to-the-death stuff going on.

[scriver]

"...And then, we eat the winner."
"But what do you do with the loser?"
"Oh, we eat him too. He just tastes less good."

[lemon10]

What other type of system would be implemented do you think would be in place either? Even Dwarf Fortress has the wealth-based raid & siege attraction mechanic.

Wealth is poorly implemented in a lot of ways in rimworld since it makes certain things a trap from a pure gameplay perspective.
Notably good pawns have significantly more value than worse ones so for fighting off raids so having three trash dudes you can just throw away leads to enemies of the same strength.

This applies even more to prosthetics, where sure, you can make an advanced bionic supersoldier... but he's worth the same as ten normal dudes which results in progressively larger raids the more prosthetics you get and thus make prothetics actually detriments for combat since ten trash pieces of cannon fodder are far far better for killing enemies or (assuming you have the attention to spare) running your economy.

With this new feature of allowing raiders to actually act like intelligent hostiles, with the new mechanic of being able to dig inside of it (like how many sieges went down in history to gain access to the site), things will get more interesting. Now you have to be on your toes, pay attention, and don't think one area with over-concentrated defenses will be enough anymore.

Raiders were already able to dig, the only real change here is that this gives raiders special weapons to it with instead of one dude just randomly having a super blowtorch that can cut through a dozen tiles of mountain in a day.
This is a cool and logical change but really it doesn't matter that much.

Well, except for mechanites that is which couldn't dig through stuff and are now going to be an even bigger pain in the ass.

[Dostoevsky]

I share the exact same sentiment as you. I avidly HATE terror defense games. Those type of games have always been boring to me. Just keep flopping a few stuff, a new but unimportant enemy appears that you easily kill off, no real overarching story, rinse & repeat. With this new feature of allowing raiders to actually act like intelligent hostiles, with the new mechanic of being able to dig inside of it (like how many sieges went down in history to gain access to the site), things will get more interesting. Now you have to be on your toes, pay attention, and don't think one area with over-concentrated defenses will be enough anymore.

Don't believe it's updated to 1.3 yet, but there is at least one mod (Enemy Self Preservation) that makes individual enemies flee at a certain pain threshold instead of always fighting to the death. (The precise threshold can be changed, and wimps will always flee after one injury.) This does of course make raids easier, but it seems fairly realistic to me and so is a nice way to be a bit less worried about extreme wealth. There's also No One Left Behind, which has attackers rescue fallen comrades as they leave (a chance, at least - depends on various factors).

With the wealth-based mechanic of having sieges & raids tied to it... I don't understand the complaint toward it. It makes sense that on a largely lawless Rimworld planet, groups that are hostile to you or inherently criminal, will be attracted to raid your base for wealth. And as you progress, you should be challenged of course, with the fact of getting more successful... It is not gamey at all, but rather realistic.

What other type of system would be implemented do you think would be in place either? Even Dwarf Fortress has the wealth-based raid & siege attraction mechanic.

I agree the concept itself is realistic. However, the way wealth is valued in Rimworld doesn't always make sense in practice, especially from a raider's perspective.

[Egan_BW]

Well, realistically raiders would choose to attack based on what they know and some kind of risk/reward ratio. So having a bunch of gold-crafters out in a field would lead to more raids than a bunch of outwardly intimidating defenses, or perhaps a settlement with a reputation for strong retaliation. Of course, more defenses would imply that you have some good stuff inside, thus probably attracting attention from the heavier kinds of bandits, who have a greater ability to defeat defenders yet also need a juicier prize to justify expanding the effort. :p

[Broseph Stalin]

Personally I don't build colonies unless I've disabled raids, I build doom fortresses. It's cool to send colonists to take cover by walls of structures and have a firefight in the thoroughfares of your growing settlement but it's just not viable when every three days 40 guys are going to come try to step on your neck.

  I think a good tool might be raiding enemy bases slowing down or limiting the tactics available for raiders. It would give you more of a reason to play offense if you knew that you were keeping the pirates on the defensive.

[Blue_Dwarf]

The problem is that you can't build defenses that scale with the attackers in a way that's practical when tunneling enemies are a thing. You get damage sponge enemies that require a bunch of concentrated fire to kill, but they can and do attack where you don't have concentrated fire.

[Vivalas]

It’s less about wanting raids to be casual and more about wanting them to feel more like a (sometimes very) challenging part of the game and its setting that I can beat. Not like it feeling that there’s someone (ironically this is one of the points of the storytellers) behind the game actively trying to “beat” me.

Eh. Honestly, the raids aren’t a big deal (and regardless are a design philosophy I fully respect) My real problem with Rimworld — although I easily love it — is wealth. Having game difficulty scale with how well you’re doing and how much stuff you have is very much a good thing, but the wealth system is annoying.
Makes a lot of upwards progression feel a bit like a punishment, and introduces the annoyingly gamey system of actively watching and having to manage your wealth if you want to live more.

I will say that I hate the change to mortars. It feels like a gamey hamfisted fix to a problem that wasn't really a problem, and now we have the weird situation where we can make spaceships and high tech armor and stuff but... not mortar barrels?

Right?? As… dubiously useful as mortars are in 1.2, they’re fun. Shelling it out with enemies. Nailing that perfect shot. And so on. Now they’ll just be another gamey powerup.
At least Tynan confirmed a setting to keep 1.2 mortars.

I agree with this, having difficulty scale with wealth is both good and bad. Having the player always have a relevant challenge is a good thing, but it can also lead to oddities. I recall one thread about some dude hoarding piles of herbal medicines, and then after they all got destroyed in a fire, raid difficulty dropped significantly. Wealth isn't always the best indication of preparedness-- marginal utility and all that. Medicine is good to have but after you have a stack of say, 100, quickly becomes redundant and doesn't actually increase your ability to resist a raid. So some other metric to determine how prepared you actually are (number of colonists, weapons, turrets, etc.) could enhance that aspect of the game.

As for the mortars I don't really know. I admit I only ever play CE so I'm not familiar with any vanilla mortar changes, and maybe my experience with CE also skews my interpretation of the difficulty of the base game.

The problem is that you can't build defenses that scale with the attackers in a way that's practical when tunneling enemies are a thing. You get damage sponge enemies that require a bunch of concentrated fire to kill, but they can and do attack where you don't have concentrated fire.

The solution to this is defense-in-depth, which is how I tend to build my colonies in mind with now. Instead of one defensive perimeter you concentrate all your fire with, the idea is to layer defenses so they support each other while forward troops can fall back into the further back positions. All of my colonies also have a central redoubt-- a bunker of last resort everyone can congregate in a worst-case raid, and I don't think it ever gets used.

YMMV and also I don't think you're supposed to have every raid go perfectly-- if that's your cup of tea I respect that, and losing some people you really like sucks some times, but in the end I think it makes Rimworld a better game that death can be so sudden and immediate.

[Dostoevsky]

I agree with this, having difficulty scale with wealth is both good and bad. Having the player always have a relevant challenge is a good thing, but it can also lead to oddities. I recall one thread about some dude hoarding piles of herbal medicines, and then after they all got destroyed in a fire, raid difficulty dropped significantly. Wealth isn't always the best indication of preparedness-- marginal utility and all that. Medicine is good to have but after you have a stack of say, 100, quickly becomes redundant and doesn't actually increase your ability to resist a raid. So some other metric to determine how prepared you actually are (number of colonists, weapons, turrets, etc.) could enhance that aspect of the game.

The mods I mentioned earlier do have options for weighing wealth from different types of objects differently, including non-pacifist colonists, weaponry, etc.

And agree that the occasional colonist death can help keep things interesting.

Anyways, mainly popped over to flag the new newsbit on the upcoming DLC. While not explicitly stated, there looks to be substantial evidence that multiple ideoligions can be within a single colony (and that tolerance of other ideologies is not a given), which is good.

[Great Order]

"...And then, we eat the winner."
"But what do you do with the loser?"
"Oh, we eat him too. He just tastes less good."

Oh please, if they've died from being beaten to death it just means they come pre-tenderised.