Difference between rough and savage?

[Uncle Nastyfingers]

Does savage require powergaming and cheese to succeed?

[Astasia]

Basically savage is 55% more/stronger enemies than rough. There are some other minor 5-10% penalties to things like resource harvesting and research speed, but they aren't really noticeable. If you've played rough a bit that should give you an indication of what it requires. Without mods it's not something you can relax through and casually play, you need to actually use the game mechanics to survive, that may be what you consider "powergaming" I don't know. You don't really need to start cheesing things until you kick it up to the last difficulty, which is 120% more enemies than rough and includes some more noticeable 20-30% penalties to other areas of the game.

[Grishnerf]

if you know the basic mechanics, u get used to it
and it is not really hard anymore. you know how to avoid the most common threats, so
you rarely have any tantrum spirals on pawns.

but the beauty about a sandbox game is you can define your own rules/difficulty.

try hardest difficulty any map any seed etc just without a proper trap-Corridor/killbox/any turrets.

for me, that little change made all my games much more fun and difficult.

or you cant use firearms etc
possibilities are endless, so is the difficulty.
even powergamer can use hardcore sk mod or other mods and limit themselfs to have a challenge.

it is as hard/easy as you want it to be.

[Immortalits]

killboxing and mountain basing is just making the game super boring, it's much more fun to make a base in the middle of the map on a flatland :)
this way, even normal is challanging, I've experienced multipple pincer and full surrounding tactics from raiders (full surround was from a drop pod raid).
Altho rivers make enemies stupid, they chose idiotic paths and if the map is not large enough for them, your uranium slug turrets and sniper colonists can kill all of the attackers before they arrive at their 'attacker position'

[Soul]

Are there any mods that make the game harder? I hate setting artificial rules to make the game more challenging. Does the SK mod achieve this? I'm about to finish my first game - just cranked it to max difficulty with Cassandra, and after only losing like 2-3 times (for learning the basics of the game obviously), it is now a joke. Granted I started on a mountainous tile on the easy biome, but still. I feel like enemies should start digging through the mountain or something to make it more challenging.

[snuggleform]

I'll throw in my 2 cents; I'm currently playing through savage.

I would say it's pretty tough, in particular large centipede raids and sappers from awkward angles can cost you quite a bit of men. I honestly savescum if I lose too many men (maybe one day I won't savescum but I'm still learning).

A couple things I have learned are: armor is really quite important, even though it decreases your movespeed you just don't really want to get into extended entanglements without it. And it takes too long to equip to respond to awkward sapper angles/drop pods. While early in the game you can live without armor, I would try to make everyone wear something like plasteel plate armor (has a ton of hitpoints so it takes decades to deteriorate) and go with bionic legs to offset the movespeed penalty. You don't want to be caught with your pants down so to speak.

The second thing I learned is that I honestly don't think animals are worth it. The upkeep on training them is a massive consumption of manpower and space that could otherwise be used making profit so you can buy more turrets/bionics/better armor. If you use animals, make sure you are using them because you are desperate for a meatshield (train release on them) or are DESPERATE to go caravaning. I mean really desperate, because you can just use pod launchers to gift faction bases with crap like extra meat or random bits of leather and call in their traders vs going out there with your own caravan.

These two things are beyond the basics of stuff like walling in your base properly, and making sure you have the right weapons for the right situations (mortars counter siege, chain shotguns should carry you against anything other than centipedes until you can get a lot of miniguns for the last stages of the game).

Oh another thing I learned is sniper kiting is less good than it looks on paper. The problem is one you basically need bionic legs to be able to kite things other than centipedes, and against centipedes it takes so darn long to kill them that your guys run out of mood/food and they start going on mental breaks in the middle of battle which is really really bad (especially true against psychic shps). You want to end fights quickly before your food/mood breaks down. Although you CAN in theory try to use stuff like psychite tea and other drugs to prep before battle, it gets super super tedious micromanaging drugs and also just having drugs around is annoying because people binge on them and get addicted and stuff like that.

[AquaX]

Animals is a hit or miss depending on how your world is created. If you have all potential ally bases close to yours, it is better and easier to just mass caravan and travel to each base and trade compared to just gifting them, call a caravan and wait 4 days for them to appear w potentially not having what you want.

A few animals is viewed as top tier due to their design. Muffalos are the highest because the females can provide milk, wool, decent caravan capacity, can just eat grass, massive bullet sponges.

Next are elephant. They have the highest carry capacity for caravan and can dish out heavy dmg.

Then it’s dogs,pigs,wargs. They are mostly used for hauling around stuff to reduce pawn time.

[Immortalits]

Originally posted by wsc150:

I'll throw in my 2 cents; I'm currently playing through savage.

I would say it's pretty tough, in particular large centipede raids and sappers from awkward angles can cost you quite a bit of men. I honestly savescum if I lose too many men (maybe one day I won't savescum but I'm still learning).

A couple things I have learned are: armor is really quite important, even though it decreases your movespeed you just don't really want to get into extended entanglements without it. And it takes too long to equip to respond to awkward sapper angles/drop pods. While early in the game you can live without armor, I would try to make everyone wear something like plasteel plate armor (has a ton of hitpoints so it takes decades to deteriorate) and go with bionic legs to offset the movespeed penalty. You don't want to be caught with your pants down so to speak.

The second thing I learned is that I honestly don't think animals are worth it. The upkeep on training them is a massive consumption of manpower and space that could otherwise be used making profit so you can buy more turrets/bionics/better armor. If you use animals, make sure you are using them because you are desperate for a meatshield (train release on them) or are DESPERATE to go caravaning. I mean really desperate, because you can just use pod launchers to gift faction bases with crap like extra meat or random bits of leather and call in their traders vs going out there with your own caravan.

These two things are beyond the basics of stuff like walling in your base properly, and making sure you have the right weapons for the right situations (mortars counter siege, chain shotguns should carry you against anything other than centipedes until you can get a lot of miniguns for the last stages of the game).

Oh another thing I learned is sniper kiting is less good than it looks on paper. The problem is one you basically need bionic legs to be able to kite things other than centipedes, and against centipedes it takes so darn long to kill them that your guys run out of mood/food and they start going on mental breaks in the middle of battle which is really really bad (especially true against psychic shps). You want to end fights quickly before your food/mood breaks down. Although you CAN in theory try to use stuff like psychite tea and other drugs to prep before battle, it gets super super tedious micromanaging drugs and also just having drugs around is annoying because people binge on them and get addicted and stuff like that.

If you realy fight like this, then you're doign something wrong... altho I'm playing only on normal/rough, I'm limiting myself to 10 people and I'm still happily countering incoming raids of 5+ centipedes and ~10 scyters (mele + sniper) or 20-30 man pirate raids with mediocre weaponry or 40-50 tribals.. and I'm playing on flatland and have only 16 uranium slug turret spread around my base evenly, so around 4, maybe sometimes 6-7 can be used together or all of them, when I got a full sourrunding raid (happened only once so far, others were mostly single big rush or pincer attacks).

Psionic ship just crashed next to my base not too long ago, 4 turret and my colonists all gathered behind the sandbags... other than a single rocket hitting the backline, that didn't dealt too big damage, even tho most of my colonists only wear flak armors (+jacket and pants), I have only lost a single kidney.
I have used mountain base once, but that was so boring to hole up there and even my automated defenses were able to deal with the attackers with minimal firepower support... sieges are just a rush from my side, nothing else, compared to my colonists, they're just a ragtag group of criminals vs an elite commando.

[kevinshow]

Originally posted by Soul:

Are there any mods that make the game harder? I hate setting artificial rules to make the game more challenging. Does the SK mod achieve this? I'm about to finish my first game - just cranked it to max difficulty with Cassandra, and after only losing like 2-3 times (for learning the basics of the game obviously), it is now a joke. Granted I started on a mountainous tile on the easy biome, but still. I feel like enemies should start digging through the mountain or something to make it more challenging.

The raiders do start digging and you get different kinds or raider attacks also. I'm surprised you said you are on max difficulty and feel like the game isn't challenging enough. Perhaps it is the storyteller. Many people seem to like Randy rather than the other two.

It's true that sometimes the game became challenging just because of the sheer number of raiders it throws at you. No matter how many colonists or defenses you have, 100s of raiders will hurt your base and your guys a lot, if you aren't prepared for them. But that is also the joy of what some people look forward to.

[Immortalits]

Also, animals are great, muffalo provide free gold... erm... silver with their milk and whool, they bread super fast, they have fine quality both whool and leather, so good for midgame clothing for minimal armor (jackets, pants and T-shirts, maybe parka).
For my 10 people, around 15-20 mufaflo provide so much milk, I'm not even able to use it up for creating food, I have to deliberately sell tons of food just to use up the milk by refilling food stocks or straight up sell it... 2+ silver each... it worths more than steel and they give you 12 each milking, they're equal to a gold mine, and then when they reach the 20+ number, they start to bread so fast, that the most work you have with them is either to use all of them as meat shields on raids or deliberately slaughter them just to not eat all the gras on the map and not overpopulate the map... and 20+ just takes up a small room.
After that, you can go for more lategame meat shields if you need in form of some rhino or elephant, which are relatively easy to tame, at least compared to a thrumbo and then you can breed them too... rhino also have good leather, when they too start to overpopulate... it's actually the 4th best material in the game to create clothing (Hyperweave - 2.0 multi for sharp and thrumbofur -2.08 multi for sharp are both best, thrumbo a bit better vs sharp, but hyper gives much better blunt protection, but most incoming damage is sharp, then devilstrand with 1,4 multiplier and rhino leather with 1,27 multi on sharp).
So animals are definitely usefull, only their initial training and your colonists animal handling skill training needs some meaningfull resources, but after you've finished with that, it's easy to keep up everything.

[snuggleform]

I can handle 30 scythers with no injuries but I had to face 20 centipedes with 18 colonists and it wasn't good. No, I am not doing something wrong. I had everyone use sniper/charge rifles and at first I thought it was going well because I wasn't taking any damage while slowly sniping them down, but then my guys started losing sanity and had mental breaks so they would break off from my group and get shot/killed. Also, some centipedes ignored my colonists and were slowly trashing my base which wasn't good either. (cassandra savage)

[Myriad]

I believe the difficulty affects other things such as mood and trade prices etc. I can't confirm that, so if anyone else can then great!

I'm playing Savage, and I notice mood is harder to manage than my previous games. I also notice the buffs from parties, etc, aren't as high. I could be delusional, but those things stood out to me.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Myriad:

I believe the difficulty affects other things such as mood and trade prices etc. I can't confirm that, so if anyone else can then great!

I'm playing Savage, and I notice mood is harder to manage than my previous games. I also notice the buffs from parties, etc, aren't as high. I could be delusional, but those things stood out to me.

Yes, but it's not super major.

	<DifficultyDef>
		<defName>Extreme</defName>
		<label>merciless</label>
		<description>Apply mastery of every RimWorld skill for just a chance to survive a harrowing trial against a merciless, unfair world.\n\nRecommended for: Experienced players who want to face a brutal, unfair challenge where even great skill may not prevent death.\n\nThis level is about dealing with losses, because preventing them is impossible. You'll spend a lot of time fighting wounded and recovering, and you'll need to sacrifice people and things you love. Unfair challenges and capricious death may come at any time.</description>
		<drawColor>(1,0.2,0.2)</drawColor>
		<isExtreme>true</isExtreme>
		<difficulty>5</difficulty>
		<threatScale>2.2</threatScale>
		<adaptationEffectFactor>0.4</adaptationEffectFactor>
		<colonistMoodOffset>-10</colonistMoodOffset>
		<tradePriceFactorLoss>0.20</tradePriceFactorLoss>
		<cropYieldFactor>0.8</cropYieldFactor>
		<mineYieldFactor>0.8</mineYieldFactor>
		<researchSpeedFactor>0.9</researchSpeedFactor>
		<diseaseIntervalFactor>0.9</diseaseIntervalFactor>
		<enemyReproductionRateFactor>1</enemyReproductionRateFactor>
		<playerPawnInfectionChanceFactor>1.1</playerPawnInfectionChanceFactor>
		<deepDrillInfestationChanceFactor>1.3</deepDrillInfestationChanceFactor>
		<foodPoisonChanceFactor>1.2</foodPoisonChanceFactor>
		<maintenanceCostFactor>1</maintenanceCostFactor>
		<enemyDeathOnDownedChanceFactor>1</enemyDeathOnDownedChanceFactor>
		<adaptationGrowthRateFactorOverZero>1</adaptationGrowthRateFactorOverZero>
		<raidBeaconThreatCountFactor>1.2</raidBeaconThreatCountFactor>
	</DifficultyDef>

Rough is normal and has no bonuses or penalties, easier difficulties are kind of the reverse of savage and merciless with slight bonuses to things. I'm not going to paste the entire difficulty file here because it's too long. You can look at it yourself if you are interested:

*\Steam\steamapps\common\RimWorld\Mods\Core\Defs\Misc\DifficultyDefs

[Dr@g0n]

savage ruins the experience for me personally 4/5 games ive tried it on. I suppose i could find a good set of mods for just that difficulty like the call of clthua mods and the more crazy of mods. but rough is perfect for me.

[Myriad]

Ok so there's a few things that are worse off. I knew it felt different lol.

Originally posted by Dr@g0n:

savage ruins the experience for me personally 4/5 games ive tried it on. I suppose i could find a good set of mods for just that difficulty like the call of clthua mods and the more crazy of mods. but rough is perfect for me.

I think I might go back to Rough after this game. The wealth of my colony usually screws me over. I end up with a large beautiful interior, because I go all out with these things, but usually have less than 20 pawns. Then get raided with 80 or more raiders. Umm... yeah.

I have an infestation going on right at this minute that consists of:
52 Megaspiders
37 Spelopedes
44 Megascarabs
45 Hives.

Fun times!

[Grishnerf]

you can change difficulty in options while playing. no need to start over.