My problems with the game after 400+ hours

[Rotkäppchen]

I hate the difficulty of the game. To me all of the difficulties are shifted up one from what they should be. Base builder, for instance, could and probably should be medium.

I think when he made the game, he ended up making too many negative events and scenarios. For instance, getting your clock cleaned by a bunch of animals just because you wanted to hunt is pretty silly. To my knowledge, animals never simultaneously decide to go on an all-out rampage against an entire human settlement despite them shooting back. I think you'd be hard pressed to find an animal that won't be afraid of you after you fire a gun. So, my premise is that getting attacked by a bunch of animals is BS and shouldn't be nearly as big of a part of the game or a factor in the overall difficulty of the game.

Then of course you've got limbs falling off all over the place. Recently after I've fired up the game and played for a while, haven't lost any limbs so maybe he toned it down a little. Still though, actually losing an appendage is pretty rare. So now you have the bad combo of way too many fearless animals attacking simultaneously + getting permanent damage to your colonists.

Those two things are by far the most annoying part of the game. The idea that you only exist because the animals let you live, and at any moment, at the drop of a hat, they could all decide to attack you at the same time and possibly wipe out your entire colony.

Also it bothers me that I've never "beaten" the game. I've gotten several colonies to be pretty successful, I consider a success being when I hit 12 colonists. But building the ship? Well I've built some of it but it's like he makes it so hard to do it that it would take all the fun out of the game in order to win. Want that cool bionic arm? Well too bad, that plasteel and components need to go to the ship. So here's a prosthetic one that's semi decent, but you obviously just sacrificed fun to "win." In fact, it's so hard I actually gave up doing it. I play on medium with Randy as the storyteller, so that way it's just a super random experience, which I do enjoy to an extent. Still, after 400 hours don't you think I should have at least 1 real victory under my belt?

You for real want me to fire up this insanely expensive and time-consuming ship, attracting even more danger than we do already even though we aren't doing anything to anybody...and quite a while of that, I can finally go. I mean yeah maybe I'm just not that good at the game but I like to actually have fun with the game. I try new things that I think might be good, and then in the next game I use what worked and stop using what didn't work. Still the idea that I could "win" probably helps the game be fun. Otherwise they would just be surviving for no real reason.

Also the last gripes involve crafting, and what you can't craft. Things like the medicine that use neutromine or something like that. Yeah you can't actually manufacture that. Just gotta trade for it or hope it comes on a cargo pod. Ok.... Herbal medicine is the best thing I've found. All you gotta do is pull it out of the ground and it's good to go. That with some hospital beds and you have pretty good medical care given the situation! Also you can't make advanced components without first having advanced components to make the fabricator in the first place. Because they want you to trade? Ok.... I think the game would be more satisfying if you could just make whatever if you put enough time and resources into it, but whatever dude!

Oh, and about caravans...I have done them and managed to get some success out of them, but overall I've found that they aren't worth it. In fact, NONE of the "events" are worth doing. You want me to split up my group, therefore reducing security of the main base, for WHAT?? A bunch of random crap I don't need? UHHHH NO THANKS!!

But of course, caravans are dangerous so you need to send soldiers along with good gear and a good weapon if you want to be successful. So then you are just hoping you don't need them at the home base, or everything you've been working for can be completely destroyed. Who cares what you get with the caravan if they can't come back to a decent colony? The only way I'd leave the base is if you have such overwhelming firepower that you can actually spare some soldiers. Maybe soldiers you don't really like very much because it's a borderline suicide mission every time. Or wait, I could just wait for a trader to come to me and get what I need that way................ Ok!

It's a great game, there's nothing else like it which is why I keep playing it, but there are some things about it that are really just starting to grind my gears!

[Silky Rough]

Before I played this game I asked whether I could "relax". I was told no. I bought it anyway and have loved every single bit of the escalating danger. Go figure.

What I learned, and I think most would agree - is that there is no such thing as building to impunity - and THAT is what makes Rimworld so damn good.

ED: And then I read your review on Frostpunk, which you also didn't like because it was "too hard" - where you said "Spend your 30 on Rimworld and don't look back!". And here you are..... Frostpunk anyone?

[Rotkäppchen]

I feel that some games are hard for the wrong reasons.

And yes, you SHOULD spend your money on rimworld and not look back. That is rock-solid advice! Frostpunk sucks!

[Silky Rough]

Originally posted by Vampir:

I feel that some games are hard for the wrong reasons.

And yes, you SHOULD spend your money on rimworld and not look back. That is rock-solid advice! Frostpunk sucks!

I own both. Found both games tough for different reasons. Regardless of the reasons, they're *meant* to be hard so it seems an odd thing to argue against what they're good at.

Yeah, Rimworld has a lot of "unfair" RNG, but it's only unfair when you lose - which is what it's about. If we could win every time just because "X", may as well play... something else.

Thing I found with Rimworld is if you're not losing at Rimworld, then you're not playing Rimworld.

(btw, I got a gold armor (excellent) suit yesterday from a "caravan mission" - worth $18k. So yes, they ARE worth it.)

Anyway, at 400 hours, you still got your monies worth so no harm done I guess. :)

[AlP]

Despite your 400 hours, you are still learning the game. There are plenty of things you are obviously unaware of, more efficient ways to manage your colony and how to deal with the challenges.

[LIMP BISQUICK]

I think what's strange is that after 400+ hours you have trouble dealing with animals. I get the complaint of a group turning aggro too often. Learn from your mistakes and if you still don't know what to do about them then look into mods or tutorials. They should only be threatening in rare circumstances since they are normally quite easy to deal with.

Neutromine is cheap since it's easy to make money. Or just buy normal meds. While herbals are great and all, normal meds are too good to pass up IMO. I am disappointed with the lack of use of glittermeds tho.. Sure surgery, but you can do just fine without them. Think those could have came in handy for injuries such as scars etc.

Agreed, events aren't really worth doing. They're not bad if a player is interested in doing things like that I guess.

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by Vampir:

I hate the difficulty of the game. To me all of the difficulties are shifted up one from what they should be. Base builder, for instance, could and probably should be medium.
...

You've got some valid complaints. I want to acknowledge that, first.

Next, it's entirely necessary to know whether or not you're judging the game in its vanilla state or whether or not you've modded the game. Modding is fine, but it can produce results that are very different from a vanilla experience. Rapid "Wealth" accumulation is one of those things that sneaks up on you and ends up sending raids you can't handle, for instance.

Dangerous "Predator" animals should be hunted by a group of Pawns as soon as they appear. No exceptions. Other animals... Well, that all depends on your storyteller/difficulty and if you have the weapons/skills to do so. ALL animals that don't have the possibility of Animal Revenge should be hunted, too, at your leisure.

Caravan missions are a mix. Sometimes they're just too stupid to worry about and, at others, they're basically giving you an "I Win" button.

Some mods can make a heavy impact on event frequency/raids/etc. Sometimes, it's hard to tell. A mod that gives you a special turret might sound great, until you realize that Turret is valued at fifty-bajillion monies and your chance of getting raided just shot through the roof.

Storytellers are your real difficulty setting and none of them are particularly "friendly." Base Builder with Phoebe is probably the easiest - Phoebe won't throw certain events at you. Cassandra, on the other hand, will eventually try to murder you to death... Randy? Heck, he can be pretty nice. Or not. He's going to send whatever he feels like at you and then roll some dice to see if it's at half-strength or one-and-a-half strength...

Habits - Bad habits die a hard death, if ever.

Do you find yourself building your base in the same way, with just some minor differences, and then you end up getting everyone killed to death? Do you always progress in the same way and then find that all your colonists are never going to wake up again? Is food a problem no matter how many seeds you plant? Do you always have pawns die on a caravan because you didn't send something they eventually needed? And, why do tons of raiders show up every time you fill your colony with silver statues?

Rimworld will not forgive you for not changing bad habits. It just won't. Now, that doesn't mean that you're "doing something wrong" with whatever it is that you're doing, but it does mean that you obviously need to do something differently. So, do that...

This is a great game. You deserve to enjoy playing it. How can we help you to do that?

Post a pic of your base and the like. Talk about where Rimworld touched you and maybe we can figure out how to keep that from happening in your next playthrough? :)

PS - The community can be caustic sometimes, but most posters here are decent enough folks who sometimes find themselves actually enjoying helping others.

[Rotkäppchen]

It seems like my whole idea of "difficult for the wrong reasons" is always lost on people. Say for instance, if you're playing a game of ping pong and you lose but it was a fair game. It was hard but only because your opponent was playing well. That would be difficulty in the right place. But then let's say you lost to some 10 year old because your side of the table was insanely slippery and made everything really hard; but not because you suck and ping pong.

But yes Rimworld is pretty unforgiving playing on, to clarify, Medium difficulty, commitment mode, Randy as the storyteller, and vanilla with no mods. I do that on purpose to test the game. All the challenges added to the game tend to add up, more than I think Tynan really intended. Sure lots of challenges should exist but when you start adding some little 1 percent or so chance of something bad happening, eventually those percentages start to add up. I meant to say that in my first paragraph but I digressed.

I've played a lot of rimworld and I've been attacked by a lot of different animals. Most of the time the attacks are not that bad, but sometimes they actually overpower your guys for whatever reason. Every game I focus on security because I know how dangerous the world is. Like I've already explained, I find the idea of these animal attacks to be silly. They are the oil on your side of the ping pong table.

What should be, if you still want difficulty, is that you could have more raiders. I can somewhat believe that people would want to ransack a settlement for the resources, but what do animals really have to gain? They are just fully-berzerk suicidal kamakazes for no reason! That's just silliness and has no basis in things that have ever happened in real life.

The problem with animal attacks used to be worse years ago than it is now. I think distance and animal skill is now a factor, or more of a factor now than it was. So yeah now it's not quite as bad. Though when I came back to the game recently, I think I sent somebody out to hunt with a revolver which I guess is my bad. For a game that thinks hunting with a revolver is a thing that should happen, it punishes you pretty hard for doing it! I guess you gotta stick to the bolt action, assault rifle, and sniper rifle for hunting. So you need the right hunter with the right weapon to hunt safely...ok, but then what if you're desperate for food and need to hunt NOW? Then you gotta basically roll the dice. That time I gambled and lost, and the herd of wild boars decimated all my colonists and ruined what would have been a really cool colony. So now that colony isn't gonna happen, because: Hog Attack..............Ok.

How can you help me? That's a good question! Probably by agreeing with me, and if you aren't a dev you can keep bringing it up as a problem from time to time, and eventually a dev will see it (I guess it's just Tynan himself?) and hopefully he'll see it the way I see it and change the game. Then the game will be better and more enjoyable. So yeah that's how you can help make the game better.

Do I really need to post pictures? I've been taking pictures of my bases for a pretty long time. Maybe you guys can find them if you dig through my profile somehow. If not maybe I can do something to share them, I dunno honestly.

[AlP]

You have no screenshots set to public viewing.

And it's not really "difficult for the wrong reasons", it's only difficult for you. Lots of people play it on even higher difficulties with no issues. That's because you don't know how the game works very well.

For example, you should not try to hunt boars in a pack. If you are desperate for food, try foraging some berry bushes. If you must hunt, try a rat, hare or a turkey instead of boar packs.

Boars are literally the best combat animal in the game. Your expectation of easily hunting them is the problem here.

[Rotkäppchen]

Originally posted by AlP:

You have no screenshots set to public viewing.

And it's not really "difficult for the wrong reasons", it's only difficult for you. Lots of people play it on even higher difficulties with no issues. That's because you don't know how the game works very well.

For example, you should not try to hunt boars in a pack. If you are desperate for food, try foraging some berry bushes. If you must hunt, try a rat, hare or a turkey instead of boar packs.

Boars are literally the best combat animal in the game. Your expectation of easily hunting them is the problem here.

I guess I find the whole idea of hunting in this game so absurd that I lack the motivation to try to solve the problem. I actually do understand how the game works. As I already said, your safety when hunting is a function of having range and animal skill.

If you're able to believe that hunting is done in the way it's done in the game and actually take it seriously, well...whatever dude! But that's not me. Yeah I'm stubborn in some ways, but if your whole hunting concept is gonna be as silly as it is in this game, please don't make me uber-metagame it into oblivion to dance around problems. I refuse to hunt rats and hares when there's actually deer and wild boars on the map. That's just stupid. The only time I'd do that is if they were the only things around and I was insanely desperate for food.

The idea that animals are gonna hang around in totally unified packs and let you shoot at them is so absurd it's not even funny. Heck you can literally shoot them and their behavior won't change at all. They'll just bleed and walk around the map like nothing is happening. You for real want me to take THAT seriously? Sorry, but...I'm just not going to and you can't make me! :P

[AlP]

So the problem is that the game doesn't adapt itself to your ideas.

[Silky Rough]

Originally posted by Vampir:

It seems like my whole idea of "difficult for the wrong reasons" is always lost on people.

Not lost on me at all.

I'm more inclined to think your complaints are for the wrong reasons - and that's made it unnecessarily difficult.

eg: Advanced components (AC). Your complaint is that to make the bench you need to have AC. Knowing you must is all you need here. Goes with any elements you cannot make. Scarcity is what makes their use something you need to plan for and be clever about. Pay the wealth penalty for early accumulation or play just-in-time.

eg: Unless I've confused your complaint "A bunch of random crap I don't need?" then it's something I disagree with you about. You're usually told what the reward items are and from that you decide whether it's worth it. You don't simply go regardless. (I've had a few events pay handsomely but the known rewards are the trigger.)

eg: I've never, ever split my base when I wasn't ready to split my base so doing so - and lamenting the results - doesn't make sense. I only split and start doing events/rescues etc. when I can.

eg: Not beating the Rim is an expected outcome - the fun is in trying. See my comment re: if X action won the game, there'd be no need to actually play. Do X, win.

eg: Like most games of this ilk, it's guns or butter. Here though, if you're accumulating "in case of catastrophe" Rimworld will punish you for it.

eg: You can dial up Rimworld to play soft so you can't bemoan the game when you play it on hard. I'd expect that would be the standard response about expecting dev intervention.

Turn hard off and/or stop making butter.

[Devi]

My issue with these threads is, i never see the other side of this discussion. Every thread i find another person saying a game is to hard.you know what? The ones thinking its to easy stop playing it and leave.
And you know, this hard games have a huge fan base and define genres. Rimworld even got difficulty levels. Tune it down? Why you instead ask for less hard events? The worst event a colony has to face is the player getting bored and wiping their save file.

[Rotkäppchen]

See it even happened again! It's not that it's too hard, it's that it's hard for the wrong reasons. I mean I beat Dark souls 1. That game was just hard, and I knew that and kept playing it until I beat it.

Seems like this is gonna be a thread where people keep coming on here just to bust my balls and say "THE GAME NOT WRONG, YOU WRONG. THE GAME NOT HARD, YOU BAD." So that's great, but it's the wonderful world we live in.

If you're saying that rimworld isn't actually meant to be beat, well...That explains a lot! I thought it was supposed to be beatable on medium at least 25% of the time or so, if you played it right, but apparently not. The other issue I have with the "win" is that you have to sacrifice having fun with cool technology for not having fun just to end the game. Does that even make sense? Not really. I play to play, not to not play. Lol.

What would I do instead? 2 ideas: A: You could set up a beacon that constantly sends distress signals and would eventually get you picked up if you lived long enough. B: Just count the days you've had all your colonists up. Just like The Long Dark! Just gotta survive as long as possible. I could dig that, may not be for everybody though.

About caravans and crafting things...those are really not the biggest problems in the world. I think there's some silliness with them but eh, I can live with them. I guess my biggest problem is the way hunting works. There's just always that chance (at least there used to be) that all the animals would attack you like crazy. And it's also too silly for me to respect how it works, apparently.

[Silky Rough]

Originally posted by Vampir:

See it even happened again! It's not that it's too hard, it's that it's hard for the wrong reasons. I mean I beat Dark souls 1. That game was just hard, and I knew that and kept playing it until I beat it.

Seems like this is gonna be a thread where people keep coming on here just to bust my balls and say "THE GAME NOT WRONG, YOU WRONG. THE GAME NOT HARD, YOU BAD." So that's great, but it's the wonderful world we live in.

If you're saying that rimworld isn't actually meant to be beat, well...That explains a lot! I thought it was supposed to be beatable on medium at least 25% of the time or so, if you played it right, but apparently not. The other issue I have with the "win" is that you have to sacrifice having fun with cool technology for not having fun just to end the game. Does that even make sense? Not really. I play to play, not to not play. Lol.

What would I do instead? 2 ideas: A: You could set up a beacon that constantly sends distress signals and would eventually get you picked up if you lived long enough. B: Just count the days you've had all your colonists up. Just like The Long Dark! Just gotta survive as long as possible. I could dig that, may not be for everybody though.

About caravans and crafting things...those are really not the biggest problems in the world. I think there's some silliness with them but eh, I can live with them. I guess my biggest problem is the way hunting works. There's just always that chance (at least there used to be) that all the animals would attack you like crazy. And it's also too silly for me to respect how it works, apparently.

I've not said or meant the game is too hard for you, I said your complaints it is hard are for the wrong reasons. The distinction is quite obvious.

Nor have I said it "isn't meant to be beat", I said not beating it is to be expected. If what you want is to "beat" it, turn it down so you can.... or keep playing it expecting you won't. Again, the distinction is worth noting.

tl;dr - You're complaining it's hard for the wrong reasons - while creating the very reasons that makes it hard. We're pointing at the reasons, you're pointing at the consequences.

I get this may be a little philosophical... but it's kind of odd to be lamenting about something you can change... in a multitude of ways.

[LIMP BISQUICK]

Originally posted by Vampir:

See it even happened again! It's not that it's too hard, it's that it's hard for the wrong reasons.

I see what you're saying and actually agree with other mechanics not mentioned but hunting isn't one of them IMO. You can grow crops. You can farm animals. You can buy food. You can hunt animals that are less likely to attack. You have options to almost completely avoid that threat. And yeah, maybe it is lame how often a pack of animals will turn around & attack tho it's a risk reward type system. Draft your pawn to hunt those kind of animals if you need to. Those random stone buildings spread across the map, slap some stone doors for pawns to retreat. Hunting animals, beating Rimworld. it's all quite doable.