23 hours in - Observations and feedback

[Sera]

So first of all, I want to say that I'm enjoying this a ton and already looking forward to diving in again. There are still a lot of things I don't fully understand, so my settlements always end up collapsing under its own weight but I'm slowly starting to understand how to pace myself. I thought I'd write down what I've learned so far, as well as leave some feedback for the developers.

I want to stress that this is not a guide in any way, and more than likely will just end up being me rambling about my own observations.

With that said, here's what I've gathered so far.

1 -Needs
As always with games like this, the supply line is crucial to your citizens (or rather, ratizens). Figuring out an optimal setup so your ratizens don't need to travel across the map for food, sleep or other needs is the backbone of your ratropolis.
However, this is easier said than done, and in the beginning your choice of sourcers are rather limited, and they all come with their own issues.

For example, if you happen upon a decent chunk of mud near your spawn, congratulations: You have what you need to set up a controlled area of planting for gatherers and potentially even loggers. With the help of a Silviculturist you'll barely even notice the -20% growth rate those plant boxes have. I don't know how many boxes the gatherer can collect from and transport the objects from before the first batch regrows, so to make sure they don't end up in an infinite loop ending up with hundreds of grass but no wheat I'd try alternating between wheat, grass and flowers if you want to make oil. Then again, it might be simpler to just make separate areas for separate resources, but wheat (or food in general) will always be needed no matter what work is being done, so I'd try having a local supply of it.

Okay, but what if you don't have access to mud?
Rabbit hutches will be a nice source of milk, but they require large amounts of grass to be operational, and if you want to breed the rabbits for meat then you'll also need a supply of wheat.
You could of course try farming grass and wheat with their respective fields, however they require a pretty large amount of water. Building a well will help collect rain water, however even with the summer's occasional storms it's bound to dry out fairly quick, so try to find some spiderweb so you can make dew catchers. But even with the combination of a decent sized well and four dew catchers I find that they can just barely run 3-4 fields.
Then again, that might be enough for a local source, but definitely not enough to supply an entire city through a central chest like I tried, haha.

I have not tried keeping bees for honey yet, so I'm unsure what resource they require to produce honey or wax (flowers, I'm guessing?), so I won't go into that, but feel free to leave your own opinion on them in the comments.

The fairly obvious TL;DR here is that every production area needs its own way to satisfy the ratizen's needs: Food, sleep, hygiene, and joy. Keep in mind the clown won't entertain themselves, so you'll either need a network troupe of clowns to work together or just plop down two tents per area.

2 - Logistics
Now this is where everything usually comes crashing down. As the city gets bigger, supply lines get longer, and as you employ more ratizens to fill whatever workstation you've just researched you end up with a lack of workers to haul and build for you. I'm guessing my playstyle of "Got to have everything" ends up biting me in the butt. Of course you can get the haulers, but they really can only handle one supply at a time: Trying to make them ferry two or three things across the city just isn't effective, and supplies will always be short *somewhere*. Now if they're hauling luxuries like oil or bags, that's fine. Since it takes a while for luxury goods to be produced and consumed, your hauler will have some extra time while they're waiting. However, if you've set up a botanic garden with grass, food and flowers, there's just way too much input for them to carry. Pick one of those resources, and set up a new hauler for the other one. However, remember that the collectors need to eat too, so if you want to haul wheat to another area, make sure the production is high enough to where there will still be a stockpile left over, or make sure they have a different food source like meat or milk.

That said, make sure you have some unemployed rats going around building, hauling and mining. Even if your queen is fully capable of doing those things, she is only one rat and honestly the less you have to deal with the clunkiness of scrolling through several items on the floor to get to the blueprints you want to build, the better.

3 - Economics and taxes
Now I do *not* have the perfect answer for this. My go to legislations are pretty simple:
One civil tax, every day, collecting 15% of a ratizen's total wealth if they have more than 3-400 gold. This ensures that you get your money back from that moneygrubbing clown. Additionally, many people suggest bumping up the cost of using the bathroom to 50 gold and it works alright.

Next, to make sure they have enough gold to eat, use the bathroom and pay the dang clown, add a welfare tax that gives each ratizen with a wealth of below 100-150 a subsidiary of 3-400 pia every day. This combined with the above tax will make the money redistribute where needed, not excluding your own pockets.

Now like I said, this is not a perfect setup, and your clown will rightfully feel robbed, so don't expect any happiness boost for fair taxes. If you didn't listen earlier and they're the sole entertainer around the district, their happiness can easily fall below the revolt treshold. Expect them to burn down a bathroom or two. Honk honk.

Additional feedback and what's missing
These are all smaller points that don't require their own section, so here goes:

The smithing minigame: This one is just plain too difficult. WASD simply is too easy to get jumbled up in your head when the keys come flying at the speed and frequency they do. I tried using a controller since I thought it'd be easier, but that simply switched every input prompt to a big L with a direction that you're not going to be able to register quick enough. Combined with the fact that some items have a partially randomized sequence means you won't even be able to memorize the pattern. At least the materials aren't consumed if you fail so you can try over and over and eventually succeed through trial and error I suppose.
Now, the difficulty has been adressed before and the devs have stated that they'll try to have it adjusted with the next patch, but I figured I'd give my two cents on it anyway.
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Bringing up the clowns again, if someone has figured out a good setup for the entertainers please let me know.
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In an attempt to speed up the logistics a bit I built a minecart track that ran under my city. However, your ratizen's path seems to be based on elevation, and not on effeciency. I.e. if you're producing grass at one end of the town and want to transport it to your weaver at the other end of the town, your hauler will still make that trek on foot rather than climb down the two squares of ladder and ride all the way over there in a fraction of the time. The only solution I found to this was to genuinely wall the weaver, leaving a hole in the floor the only route in. While this isn't too bad of a solution, it'd be better if the rat simply had the proper AI to calculate the shortest route to their destination.
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Guards could do with a simpler way of directing them than having separate boards for each squad: Maybe allow for more than one squad on the same board?
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Adding to the above, being able to assign more than one rat to a workstation would help a lot: For instance, what if you could assign two clowns to the same stage and have them work in shifts? That'd make the scheduling legislation more user friendly, I think.
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More of a bug: I deleted the first storage you start with because I intended to move the hub further to the west, and suddenly the game didn't register any materials. Didn't matter if I picked them up or placed them in the new storage unit, the game insisted I had no materials, and even mining new ones didn't help. For the time being, don't delete your chest for any reason. Better to have a hauler slowly move it bit by bit and then leave it as a landmark for where your city began I guess :P

Anyways, rant over. Sorry for the long post, but I hope it was useful somehow.
Feel free to share some of your own strategies or solutions below!

[heyjude42]

Most excellent info! Thanks so much for taking the trouble to write all this down - I have crashed and burned quite a few times already and was looking for better ideas. Cheers :)

[Sera]

Originally posted by heyjude42:

Most excellent info! Thanks so much for taking the trouble to write all this down - I have crashed and burned quite a few times already and was looking for better ideas. Cheers :)

Happy to help! After a testing run I can confirm that taking it slow and setting up a proper food supply is the way. I'm at around 600 food from gatherers, hunters and butchers before the first winter, and with the settlement tight enough to where two clowns on each end of town can take care of the population and eachother. With the settlement mostly self-sustained I can focus on expanding and adding new districts :D

[Flavalicious]

I agree with most of the post. Ill say on normal difficulty the games still pretty damn hard lol. Im a vet rimworld enjoyer, love these sort of games and even im having a hard time juggling economics and survival.

My current game i couldnt find webs forever. So water was an issue. So it set back alot of my production on other stuff as i had to keep exploring for it. Ended up ramping up the enemy numbers. Then i had to switch over and get soldiers in large quantities. And by this point my rats are pissed they dont have nice stuff. So i cant leave my base and go look for the metals i need because a revolt is going to happen. But i cant stop the revolt because i need resources i have to go and find. And by the time i cripple the revolt, the next plague rat wave is inbound. And the cycle repeats lol.

The sim management side versus the hero character exploration is at odds with each other a bit. Im loving the game but its a taxing juggling of so many systems in such a fast repeating cycle

I suspect your on the money about expansion speed. I think this games a slower burn then it appears. Letting in new rats in large quantites in the lower game seems to snowball the issues quickly. But the game definitely presents fast expansion as being the playstyle

[Sera]

Putting a major focus on making sure there are food sources seems to work out nicely for me so far. As I'm expanding I'm finding new resources naturally, like bees, fungus or fish. Was also lucky enough to find a spider den relatively close underground, so now I have a renewable source of water for my baker as well. With bread being 3 times as effective at feeding ratizens than straight up wheat the food issue is pretty much solved for a few years ^^b

[Myrkana]

The fact that the zombies can tunnel into your base randomly just feels bad. It makes it so your base has to be a jumbled mess of barricades and buildings to account for that.

[nasiru]

I just cant get my rats joy up at all. I'm at 3 circuses and 1 music thingy (with law to allow all classes to use) and 2 arenas. I'm still chugging forward at day 81 (64 rats) with riots and dying rats. And 17 TOILETS scattered throughout. I had somewhat success with grain farms until all the water gone and/or the 2 water building was too slow to supply them all. I think the invasion appearing and tunneling everywhere even after I found those cursed graves and had hallway made so they could spawn without the tunneling but digging deeper just got me more graves with clear route (with spike traps) and tunneling invasion.

My injured rats seems to lose their previous job as well when manually picked up and put into bed too.

[Flavalicious]

Originally posted by nasiru:

I just cant get my rats joy up at all. I'm at 3 circuses and 1 music thingy (with law to allow all classes to use) and 2 arenas. I'm still chugging forward at day 81 (64 rats) with riots and dying rats. And 17 TOILETS scattered throughout. I had somewhat success with grain farms until all the water gone and/or the 2 water building was too slow to supply them all. I think the invasion appearing and tunneling everywhere even after I found those cursed graves and had hallway made so they could spawn without the tunneling but digging deeper just got me more graves with clear route (with spike traps) and tunneling invasion.

My injured rats seems to lose their previous job as well when manually picked up and put into bed too.

Did you crank up the range on those pleasure service buildings? I just discovered today they are set default to range 19, which was only like 1/4 of my base, and I THINK its based off of where they are "housed". So if your like me and building large bedding rooms, not enough of the service buildings may be in range. But yea overall im in the same spot as you, the mid game scaling is rough. I went from almost 300 food to no food in about 30 mins of playtime once i crossed 70 population. I cant find berries, fungus or more salt anywhere lol.

Rats lose their job if they revolt, supposed to be punishment i guess. Other rats you put in bed from other issues should retain their jobs.

[Myrkana]

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

Originally posted by nasiru:

I just cant get my rats joy up at all. I'm at 3 circuses and 1 music thingy (with law to allow all classes to use) and 2 arenas. I'm still chugging forward at day 81 (64 rats) with riots and dying rats. And 17 TOILETS scattered throughout. I had somewhat success with grain farms until all the water gone and/or the 2 water building was too slow to supply them all. I think the invasion appearing and tunneling everywhere even after I found those cursed graves and had hallway made so they could spawn without the tunneling but digging deeper just got me more graves with clear route (with spike traps) and tunneling invasion.

My injured rats seems to lose their previous job as well when manually picked up and put into bed too.

Did you crank up the range on those pleasure service buildings? I just discovered today they are set default to range 19, which was only like 1/4 of my base, and I THINK its based off of where they are "housed". So if your like me and building large bedding rooms, not enough of the service buildings may be in range. But yea overall im in the same spot as you, the mid game scaling is rough. I went from almost 300 food to no food in about 30 mins of playtime once i crossed 70 population. I cant find berries, fungus or more salt anywhere lol.

Rats lose their job if they revolt, supposed to be punishment i guess. Other rats you put in bed from other issues should retain their jobs.

They have a range? WHY? That seems rather dumb to have them only affect a certain range. The explains some of my issues them. I put all 3 of my circus' next to each other. Ill have to check toilets then, because they need hygeine but I have plenty of hygeine stuff spread out.

[Flavalicious]

Originally posted by Myrkana:

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

Did you crank up the range on those pleasure service buildings? I just discovered today they are set default to range 19, which was only like 1/4 of my base, and I THINK its based off of where they are "housed". So if your like me and building large bedding rooms, not enough of the service buildings may be in range. But yea overall im in the same spot as you, the mid game scaling is rough. I went from almost 300 food to no food in about 30 mins of playtime once i crossed 70 population. I cant find berries, fungus or more salt anywhere lol.

Rats lose their job if they revolt, supposed to be punishment i guess. Other rats you put in bed from other issues should retain their jobs.

They have a range? WHY? That seems rather dumb to have them only affect a certain range. The explains some of my issues them. I put all 3 of my circus' next to each other. Ill have to check toilets then, because they need hygeine but I have plenty of hygeine stuff spread out.

lol yea. My hygiene stats are solid, something like 10 rats out of 70 need it and they are mostly long distance movers. The joy though is a real pain in the ass to keep up, but noticing the range tab definitely helped to some degree. I even tried setting up schedules to try and rotate rats into work shifts in the hopes they would spread out the building use a bit, but because there can only be 1 worker, they cant be there long enough for it to matter and it caused tons of issues so i deleted the work shift policy. lol

I noticed putting a bunch of smaller storage chests around helped speed up their return to the buildings, helped production a bit. Could give that a shot too

[Myrkana]

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

Originally posted by Myrkana:

They have a range? WHY? That seems rather dumb to have them only affect a certain range. The explains some of my issues them. I put all 3 of my circus' next to each other. Ill have to check toilets then, because they need hygeine but I have plenty of hygeine stuff spread out.

lol yea. My hygiene stats are solid, something like 10 rats out of 70 need it and they are mostly long distance movers. The joy though is a real pain in the ass to keep up, but noticing the range tab definitely helped to some degree. I even tried setting up schedules to try and rotate rats into work shifts in the hopes they would spread out the building use a bit, but because there can only be 1 worker, they cant be there long enough for it to matter and it caused tons of issues so i deleted the work shift policy. lol

I noticed putting a bunch of smaller storage chests around helped speed up their return to the buildings, helped production a bit. Could give that a shot too

yea, I put storage buildings every other level so that they dont have to climb more than 1 floor up or down to store anything. Exception being my forge area I started building before I abandoned my last save lol

[nasiru]

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

Did you crank up the range on those pleasure service buildings? I just discovered today they are set default to range 19, which was only like 1/4 of my base, and I THINK its based off of where they are "housed". So if your like me and building large bedding rooms, not enough of the service buildings may be in range. But yea overall im in the same spot as you, the mid game scaling is rough. I went from almost 300 food to no food in about 30 mins of playtime once i crossed 70 population. I cant find berries, fungus or more salt anywhere lol.

Rats lose their job if they revolt, supposed to be punishment i guess. Other rats you put in bed from other issues should retain their jobs.

I just took a look at the range. Seems like they are covering most of them at default 19, I just upped them to 23. Pretty weird since its like half of my population is lacking in joy and hygiene. In the mean time I just lost 12 rats. Any idea if the cemetery will slowly empty itself out? I'm at 5 cemeteries so far and bodies stay there indefinitely. I did cremate some but too much of a hassle just for 1 corpse.

[一ノ瀬うるは]

My issue with the game so far is also considering the fact that goods like oil for example, its a very long process to make them (I have 2 grinders working around the clock), and my plan was for having the massage rooms using them only since the effect is better than the normal rats using it on themself. But whenever a new batch of oils is finished, all the rats rushed to get the oil right away and said massage rooms never get to utilize it at all. I know theres law to change the behavior of the rats but I just cant seem to find any proper setting for either the law or storage box setting so that only the massage rooms can pick up oil only

[Flavalicious]

Originally posted by 一ノ瀬うるは:

My issue with the game so far is also considering the fact that goods like oil for example, its a very long process to make them (I have 2 grinders working around the clock), and my plan was for having the massage rooms using them only since the effect is better than the normal rats using it on themself. But whenever a new batch of oils is finished, all the rats rushed to get the oil right away and said massage rooms never get to utilize it at all. I know theres law to change the behavior of the rats but I just cant seem to find any proper setting for either the law or storage box setting so that only the massage rooms can pick up oil only

Yea its a bit unclear how your supposed to maintain never ending stock piles of limited spawned resources. I actually had my massage table running around the clock until my oil supply ran dry. You can farm flowers easily, but something like salt once its been mined its gone (unless theres an animal you can grind into salt that i dont know about lol)

[一ノ瀬うるは]

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

Originally posted by 一ノ瀬うるは:

My issue with the game so far is also considering the fact that goods like oil for example, its a very long process to make them (I have 2 grinders working around the clock), and my plan was for having the massage rooms using them only since the effect is better than the normal rats using it on themself. But whenever a new batch of oils is finished, all the rats rushed to get the oil right away and said massage rooms never get to utilize it at all. I know theres law to change the behavior of the rats but I just cant seem to find any proper setting for either the law or storage box setting so that only the massage rooms can pick up oil only

Yea its a bit unclear how your supposed to maintain never ending stock piles of limited spawned resources. I actually had my massage table running around the clock until my oil supply ran dry. You can farm flowers easily, but something like salt once its been mined its gone (unless theres an animal you can grind into salt that i dont know about lol)

Its kinda upsetting me that I have plenty of other goods like food and build materials, all that planning for a solid self sustain system and yet im still suffering from overall low happiness (50 at most) because of the problem I mentioned above. Imo the storage setting should let us decide which facilities that are allowed to take specific goods only, rn its just either allowing or banning the usage of it completely, which defeated the purpose

[Flavalicious]

Originally posted by 一ノ瀬うるは:

Originally posted by Flavalicious:

Yea its a bit unclear how your supposed to maintain never ending stock piles of limited spawned resources. I actually had my massage table running around the clock until my oil supply ran dry. You can farm flowers easily, but something like salt once its been mined its gone (unless theres an animal you can grind into salt that i dont know about lol)

Its kinda upsetting me that I have plenty of other goods like food and build materials, all that planning for a solid self sustain system and yet im still suffering from overall low happiness (50 at most) because of the problem I mentioned above. Imo the storage setting should let us decide which facilities that are allowed to take specific goods only, rn its just either allowing or banning the usage of it completely, which defeated the purpose

Interestingly when i loaded my save after the patch i went all the way down to only 10 rats wanting joy, and my happiness hit almost 60%. Then over the next 10-15 minutes it went back to hell lol.

Makes me think theres a priorities issue stopping them from getting what they need