RimWorld - Damned Colonists in Space

[a cut of domestic sheep prime]

The problem is that rimworld isn’t really geared to that kind of expansion. And I suspect too many colonists will grind the game to a halt eventually. A few large invasions seemed to be enough to do this and I have an i7.

 

[thesecret1]

I wish there was a way to enlarge the map after you have nowhere left to expand. Like joining the neighbouring tile to the current one or something – even though the game claims there's "plenty of space", I always find myself constrained by late midgame.

 

[Zombra]

I wish there was a way to enlarge the map after you have nowhere left to expand. Like joining the neighbouring tile to the current one or something – even though the game claims there's "plenty of space", I always find myself constrained by late midgame.

Do you play at crazy maximum map size?

 

[thesecret1]

Do you play at crazy maximum map size?

It said that picking that results in the game shitting itself, pathing breaking, etc., so no. I picked the biggest "working" one.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I honestly don't know how anyone deals with the fucking raids. It's infuriating. The only way to avoid casualties is some metagaming cubed killbox copied exactly from a guide to avoid being zerg rushed to death by triple your colony in raiders. Then you get a seige raid and die horribly anyways. Maybe I just need to mod the difficulty out of the game like everyone else seems to do. "LOL game so easy I just use my cyborg ninjas in space marine armour and they kill everything just fine plz make raids harder thx" "The raids are easy to deal with you just need to burn all your possessions and put all your colonists in a coma every 60 days and then let them walk in through a field of 30 traps but rotate them after every raid so they forget the placement"

Meanwhile I'm trying to play a tribal start and get a raid of 12 dudes with assault rifles vs my 6 with revolvers while I'm fighting two rhinos at once outside my base.

 

[Zombra]

What kind of lunatic difficulty do you play on Damned Registrations?

 

[Fedora Master]

Medium Randy seems to be the most """balanced""", one step higher and you do indeed get 12-man raids within the first months.

 

[thesecret1]

Maybe he fell for the Phoebe or Cassandra trap option instead of always rolling with Randy like everyone else

 

[Damned Registrations]

Randy tends to be bullshit in an entirely different way, like killing your crops before you can harvest them for an entire year and then giving everyone sleeping sickness during a raid during a flash storm during a heat wave.

But to answer the question, that was indeed casandra, 66th day, just after I'd hit industrial and started to research electricity. Wiped my whole colony out except for one of the shittiest members. But hey, at least the man in black showed up to help! He has passion in social and guns and nothing else and is ALSO armed with a revolver. That'll show 'em. Unless he dies to the pets that went manhunter when their master died before the next raid with 15 people with sniper rifles, grenades, and incendiary launchers.

 

[thesecret1]

That sounds like Cassandra difficulty, alright.

 

[Zombra]

Damned Registrations I didn't ask which storyteller you used; I asked what difficulty setting you play on. Cassandra is not a difficulty level.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Thats just medium.

 

[Zombra]

Thats just medium.

That does sound fucked up.

 

[Nutria]

The only way to avoid casualties is some metagaming cubed killbox

To me this is one part of the game that's really intuitive. You deal with raiders like you would in real life. You channelize them, trick them into going into a kill zone that you've designed ahead of time. You ambush them there, start shooting, and they run for cover. But you've already anticipated where they'll go for cover and you've got traps prepared in exactly those places.

Someone told me once about a situation like this in real life. The opposing army opens fire on their patrol. They take cover in a crater nearby. Buried under the crater is an artillery shell wired to detonate on command. The point of the ambush wasn't to kill them, it was to get them into that crater where they could be blown up. This is the kind of thinking that will get you ahead in both Rimworld and the real world.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Yes. Intuitive. Except they randomly attack chunks of wall for no reason instead of trying to get inside, have magical perfect knowledge of the entire layout of your settlement, have access to an infinite supply of explosives, and being behind cover is actually less important than simply being spaced out. Also you need a mod if you want to be able to shoot through a wall that someone can't simply walk through and stab you. Also they'd rather shoot at livestock then help their dying allies.

In real life I'd have a wall to shoot from the top of with heavy manned turrets and it'd be too strong to break down in 20 seconds of hitting it with the butt of a pistol.

You can certainly make effective traps in Rimworld, but they're by no means intuitive.

 

[Matalarata]

traps

Bears. That's the answer to all your problems. Start taming bears asap and have them multiply. Drown humanoid raids in bears.

It looks like a joke, but bears are incredibly tanky, omnivores (no problems feeding them, even in large numbers, you can use corpses or vegs) and intelligent enough to haul, as such they have a pretty nice utility even outside of combat. They also have very high strength and are able to haul even massive loads.


Use your bear swarm as a panic button while you're learning the ropes. As you go you'll understand that there are dozens of effective methods to defend from raids (or any other threat, really) even in vanilla, some are just harder to pull off, crazier or situational.

 

[Nutria]

The game has been updated so many times that I don't know if this still works, but in my experience what's really crucial that you may not have realized is that you don't wall off your whole base. You need to give them a route that they think they can enter through. But this is where you plant the mines and traps, where you put up sandbags for your guys to fight from.

Toward the end of the game, you do get sappers and the guys who drop in from the sky. For the former, I'd advise having a few mortars to beat them at their own game. But I think both should be manageable at that point unless you're on a high difficulty level.

 

[Zombra]

The game has been updated so many times that I don't know if this still works, but in my experience what's really crucial that you may not have realized is that you don't wall off your whole base. You need to give them a route that they think they can enter through. But this is where you plant the mines and traps, where you put up sandbags for your guys to fight from.

In my recent experience, you have to really build thick everywhere else if you want enemies to always approach from a single direction. Just having walls around your colony won't cut it - if they want to attack from the east, you better have a way to deploy your guys to the east. Even a basic raid will just knock a hole in the wall.

 

[Johannes]

Imgo a good way to limit the size of raids coming is to control the amount of wealth you have. The richer the colony, the bigger the raids - it even makes sense.

And every time you trade, you're actually losing wealth in absolute terms, even though you're getting something more worthwhile for you from it. So try to have as small a stockpile of stuff you don't need at all times - if it's not helping your base keep functional and strong, get rid of it.

Also those single-use uberweapons you can get from ancient ruins, quests and trade, will turn most any raid around quite easy - so just try to make sure you get some of those. And if the enemy has a guy with these things, a psychic lance to take them out is great.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The richer the colony, the bigger the raids - it even makes sense.

Not really though. It would make sense if there was more to easily steal. But if my colony has 5000 granite blocks and a big cooler full of raw corn, it doesn't make sense that more raiders come to attack it than a colony with two guys with sticks defending a small pile of silver. It's even worse if your wealth is in the form of things like skilled colonists, their equipment, walls, floors, buildings, etc. And even if you're talking about stuff they could steal, it doesn't make sense that the pirates know about my stash of medicine or my awesome dining hall full of marble statues. It'd make more sense if it was related to how much you trade, since you can't really hide the fact your colony traded half a dozen masterwork golden turd statues for a huge pile of slaves and weapons.

Ultimately the dumb thing is that your base is so difficult to defend in the first place. Walls should be basically indestructible, you should be able to shoot through arrow slits that give 95% cover instead of like, 50% cover, and people should go down after taking a gunshot instead of charging through 12 revolver wounds to start firing back point plank from behind the same cover you're using. The only decent advantage you have as a defender are turrets and they fucking explode, assuming they don't get turned off before the raid by bullshit.

 

[Zombra]

Walls should be basically indestructible, you should be able to shoot through arrow slits that give 95% cover instead of like, 50% cover, and people should go down after taking a gunshot instead of charging through 12 revolver wounds to start firing back point plank from behind the same cover you're using.

Should, should, should. What you're really saying is "gameplay should be piss easy". Which I disagree with.

 

[Johannes]

The richer the colony, the bigger the raids - it even makes sense.

Not really though. It would make sense if there was more to easily steal. But if my colony has 5000 granite blocks and a big cooler full of raw corn, it doesn't make sense that more raiders come to attack it than a colony with two guys with sticks defending a small pile of silver. It's even worse if your wealth is in the form of things like skilled colonists, their equipment, walls, floors, buildings, etc. And even if you're talking about stuff they could steal, it doesn't make sense that the pirates know about my stash of medicine or my awesome dining hall full of marble statues. It'd make more sense if it was related to how much you trade, since you can't really hide the fact your colony traded half a dozen masterwork golden turd statues for a huge pile of slaves and weapons.

Ultimately the dumb thing is that your base is so difficult to defend in the first place. Walls should be basically indestructible, you should be able to shoot through arrow slits that give 95% cover instead of like, 50% cover, and people should go down after taking a gunshot instead of charging through 12 revolver wounds to start firing back point plank from behind the same cover you're using. The only decent advantage you have as a defender are turrets and they fucking explode, assuming they don't get turned off before the raid by bullshit.

lrn2play

 

[Damned Registrations]

What I'm saying is that defending from raids shouldn't be tedious bullshit where you're constantly repairing walls, rebuilding traps, kiting people around the map for 5 minutes, or making pawns walk in and out of doors while toggling 'hold door' 30 times to fuck with the AI. Nor should you be doing stupid metagamey shit like burning down your food stockpile or all the clothes you made while training a craftsman.

The difficult part should be becoming as wealthy and skilled as fast as you can to outpace the raids.

 

[Zombra]

What I'm saying is that defending from raids shouldn't be tedious bullshit where you're constantly repairing walls, rebuilding traps, kiting people around the map for 5 minutes, or making pawns walk in and out of doors while toggling 'hold door' 30 times to fuck with the AI. Nor should you be doing stupid metagamey shit like burning down your food stockpile or all the clothes you made while training a craftsman.

I don't disagree. Weirdly, some of us play and enjoy the game without resorting to any of this silliness. It still surprises me that the game hits you so much harder on Medium than it hits me. Seriously, you might consider a lower difficulty; based on your description above I wonder if you're using a mod or something that throws the difficulty off.

The difficult part should be becoming as wealthy and skilled as fast as you can to outpace the raids.

So completely throw out the pacing mechanisms built in and just make it a completely unforgiving race against the clock? All efficiency, no fun allowed, use every exploit possible or you lose? That is absolutely not what this game "should be". There are a million wargames about dull number stacking already.

 

[Damned Registrations]

All efficiency, no fun allowed, use every exploit possible or you lose?

This is how I see the game as it is. Spend half your wealth on a giant cool statue? Fuck no, you'll lose! Give everyone nice bedrooms? Better not, you need to have more guns! Recruit a colonist that lights shit on fire or is hooked on expensive drugs? That's suicidal, better only recruit people that can do everything and have no flaws.

If the goal is to become wealthy, there's a lot of paths you can take, like hunting, farming, high quality crafts, mining rare resources, etc. If the goal is to have a high ratio of guns to wealth, there's really only one way to do it.