To be fair this is the kind of game that is fun to suck at.
Oh yeah, no doubt. It’s just…
This is a game type that really, really appeals to me intellectually. I want to love them. I do kind of love them, but not in quite the right way. When I sit down to play, they never quite click with me. I usually get my money’s worth. Eventually. Even if it takes a couple years worth of intermittent attempts to build up enough total hours to justify the cost.
A good example would be Prison Architect, which I picked up in Early Access and haven’t even touched since it had its full release. I’ve been squinting at it lately in my Steam library and can feel another attempt coming on.
I always feel like I’m juuuuuuuuust barely short of the line between “I suck at this game because I don’t get it” and “I suck at this game because it’s hard, but losing is fun.”
Oxygen Not Included has also been calling me with its siren song.
I’ve got about 90 hours in the game thus far, having purchased a couple months ago. It is, to my way of thinking, already a very complete game and I’d be perfectly happy if they never added a thing (keeping in mind there are a lot of mods for it for freshness). But a new (still Alpha) version is just around the corner (currently in opt-in testing) that adds and tweaks.
To me, it isn’t about loving the colonists; it’s free-form problem-solving at it’s best. If you like Prison Architect, you’ll love this. Heck, even if you’re a Minecraft fan and enjoy designing/building, this should scratch that itch.
That said, getting attached to your colonists is a happy side-effect. But remember:
- never allow a pyro to join your colony
You’ll want some mods as well. At the very least, pick up the one that lets you specify what colonists and equipment you want on your RimWorld. Search the Workshop for Prepare Carefully and it’ll be near the top.
I’ve been playing this the past week or so, having heard about it on here. It is great fun, despite being quite administrative - there are so many amusing, random variables.
I deliberately re-rolled the starting colonists until I had three cannibals, who get on well with their shared tastes, and never go hungry. The only problem is that none of the potential new colonists (prisoners, refugees or wanderers) have been cannibal - so they just don’t fit in, and their stay is inevitably short-lived.
But delicious.
Indeed. Just this morning, I successfully fought off a raid. Usually I try to capture all the enemy wounded, but my people were occupied evacuating their own.
Sadly, the wounded pirates were burned alive in the firestorm started by their own molotovs.
Well, this thread made me pick up Prison Architect again. I’m getting pretty good at facilitating shower murders, but I’m still not great at running prisons.
I still have that sitting in my Library. I love the developer’s other games, but I just can’t get in to that one - I’ve made it maybe halfway through the tutorial.
Yeah, I skipped the tutorial altogether and have just been pulling videos/wikis when I run into trouble. The game’s been out long enough that there’s plenty of help out there.
So far all of my colonies have ended…badly:
- Everyone went berserk or died
- Everyone ate each other
- Overrun by rampaging muffalos
- Carried off by pirate slavers
- Killed by long term effects of exposure to chemical cloud
- Froze/starved during long winter
- Ended up with a group of colonists completely incapable of cleaning…with predictable results
- Overrun with berserk escaped prisoners and insane colonists so had last surviving sane colonist burn it down with a Molotov
Well, a few hours with Prison Architect combined with this thread (and the fact that I’m weak) led to my buying the game yesterday.
Surprisingly, I found it much more approachable than others of its type. I loaded up the Prepare Carefully mod and kitted out a “lone survivor” with lots of items and skills so that I could sandbox my way around.
Stuff went well. I had a fully stocked meat locker, a few wind turbines, and a solid defensive parameter. A herd of invasive beaver had given me enough leather to prep winter clothing. Two other folks had joined my colony and they had their own little bedrooms.
And then I learned a Very Important Lesson about pyromaniacs.
Goddamnit, Kimmy.
The only thing pyromaniacs are good for are making snazzy hats.
I picked up Oxygen Not Included. Having more fun with that than RimWorld.
Update:
I started a new game in an arid mountainous region and have Dwarf Fortressed my way into it. Temperature and power was an issue until I figured stuff out. On the whole, the mountain seems to regulate temperature pretty effectively - I’m pretty much immune to heatwaves.
Being dug into a mountain makes defense pretty easy now that I have automated turrets. The only time I had any real trouble was when a raider managed to explode one of the turrets, knocking out a nearby defender. I’ve layered my defenses so that shouldn’t happen again.
I’m about ready to start a “real” game without cheating via Prepare Carefully. The biggest problem I’m seeing is that travel on the world map is pretty unintuitive and seems to take a really long time. Transport pods are pretty far up the tech tree and require a ton of resources especially when you take the chemfuel into account. But said travel seems to be how you move things along in terms of getting lots of resources and equipment.
For the past several months I’ve seen a friend on Steam pop into Rimworld. I checked her profile and saw 1500 hours played … well, that’s an endorsement.
I picked it up this past weekend and have sunk about 40 hours in so far, and I’m very glad I’ve spent countless hours in Dwarf Fortress and other similar games. I haven’t won yet, mostly because every time I get to midgame I decide to quit and start a new colony, but this has definitely been worth the $30.
If anybody is still playing this, Ludeon dropped a surprise DLC (the first!).
Rimworld Royalty DLC looks to add a whole lot of changes, and I’ll be trying it out this weekend!
I still play regularly. But, I’m mostly a peaceful builder. I don’t mind building basic defenses, but when it gets to the point where there are mortars and whatnot, I stop having fun.
From what I can tell this DLC is oriented towards additional weapons and combat abilities, so I’m not as hyped as I’d otherwise be.
I had been playing the 1.1 beta, and there weren’t a lot of obvious changes besides a few more animals and some cleaned-up UI. I had hoped for more building/management additions.
Mr. Colibri, your agonizer, please.
So far I like it a lot. I tend to mostly do peaceful stuff, but just the new quests are fun.
"Take in three guinea pigs and host them for four days. The guinea pigs are injured and may not be able to walk. Oh, and they have been implicated in the death of a child, so the people of the Enclave of the Boar will be hunting them. Expect an attack one day after accepting this quest, with additional attacks every 18 hours.
The attacks will consist of:
1 Town Councilman
Or the equivalent."
Lol, so you nurse the guinea pigs back to health and protect them from the attackers, then a shuttle shows up, and you load them on it and then get your reward from cargo pods.
The nobility thing is interesting as well. You get a quest (With Phoebe as storyteller, anyway) to save some idiot noble from whatever animal he pissed off while out on a stroll… A duck, goose, rabbit, what have you… And that gives you enough Royal Favor to become a yeoman, which gives you access to the psycasting abilities. They aren’t necessarily all combat oriented, as you can get things like Painblock (shut down the target’s pain receptors) which could be useful even in a peaceful colony. As your pawn’s title increases, they have higher and higher expectations-. As an Esquire, they require a throne room (minimum area of 24 squares, floored, with a throne and two braziers… Which must be lit) as well as a nice bedroom (floored, minimum of double bed, size of somewhere around 24 squares also I think). They also will not eat raw food or nutrient paste, and want clothes befitting their station.
It can turn into a full-time job keeping them happy. My current colony’s noble was not pleased, because I accidentally scored her more favor than I intended… So suddenly she needed stuff I literally couldn’t provide, because I started as a lost tribe, and didn’t know how to make furniture or clothes. She flew into a murderous rage, twice, and beat two colonists to death with her psyfocus staff.
Good times.