Does game gets harder if you recruit more people?

[Nemerlight]

Or game gets gradually harder regardless how many you have in your base?

[Brad_ODDY]

its all down to a dice roll essentially, you can increase the chance by having high social skill pawns and better prison conditions but is a matter of chance

[thecarlocarlone]

Game gets "harder" the more wealth you have in your colony.
This means items, structures and such.
I think colonists get counted since people have a price.

That's all I know

[BlackSmokeDMax]

Originally posted by Nemerlight:

Or game gets gradually harder regardless how many you have in your base?

A bit of both.

[Zane87]

Raids, manhunter packs, infestations and other assault like events do use a point system to decide the severity of those events.

Those points are based on several factors including time, storyteller difficulty, some randomness, incident type ect ect but the most important in general is wealth.
The wealth of everything you own in your colony, be it floors, weapons, Art, animals and yes, pawns. More pawns = higher wealth.

More pawns = more soldiers to shoot at whatever the incidents throw at you and handle them better in general, so it is a bit of a balance there.

What I can tell you is that having too many pawns without proper infrastructure and organization will increase difficulty of incidents without you being able to handle them better.
On the other hand, having majestic rooms, great infrastructure and wealthy throne rooms is great and all, but 5 highly trained and equipped soldiers still will struggle against 50-100 tribals.

So, to answer the question, yes more pawns can make the game more difficult, but only if you don't also make sure they are organized, equipped and trained well. Getting the balance right is a big part of Rimworld.

[johan.wittens]

Depends on the story teller you chose. If you choose phoebe or cassandra, your game will gradually get more and more difficult. But even then almost always the raids or events will be at the level you're at. And when you choose "randy random", you never know what you're gonna get. But even then the level of raids is adapted to the level of your colony. The difference is other events can randomly pop up, overlap, and make things very difficult if you choose him. Getting the flu while already having gut worms, getting food poisoning on top of that because your kitchen was dirty because you were sick, and then a raid descending on you when you're resting in your bed recovering is not that uncommon if you choose randy... Anything can happen if you choose him. :)

The difficulty of raids though, is always decided roughly by how many colonists you have, your tech level, and wealth level. Even when playing with randy.
- If you have a few colonists and low tech level, the raids will also only have a few people in them and will be pretty easy. The raiders will have clubs, knives or bad guns.
- If you have a lot of colonists, raids will also have more people in them, but weapons will mostly still be pretty bad.
- If your tech level gets higher, so does the tech level of the people raiding you. Their weapons improve, their tactics get better, etc.
- At the highest tech levels, quite difficult mechanoid raids start.
- And if your colony gets wealthier, raids seem to become more frequent as others try to steal your wealth.

In game, it makes sense: a small colony is less likely to draw attention and provoke large raids, a big colony is more likely to draw attention and to get attacked.

I almost always play with only one or two colonists, and i always notice that during most of the game, raids are very small consisting of only one or two colonists. Only as your tech level goes up, so do raids become more and more difficult and the number of raiders increases. But due to your tech it's then also easier to defeat them...

It all depends on what you choose to do and how you choose to play. The game is well balanced and quite fun. Rany random just throws some randomness into the mix.

[Lyrin]

In addition to what everyone else has said if you go above a certain number of pawns it basically flips a switch where now the game is going to try really, REALLY hard to kill your colonists. That number is 18 for Cassandra/Phoebe and 50 for Randy.

And a bit more about Randy: He still does base his events off the same type of baseline as the other storytellers. His range for the randomness factor is a lot higher though in how good/bad an event is. He also I think either has no cooldowns on how frequently events of the same type (raides for instance) can occur or they're much, much shorter.

[Zalzany]

There is a colonist number for each story teller, and difculty. Once you get over x amount of colonists the story teller will actively throw events trying to kill off people to get it back to the ideal number its decided you can have. Have a one over is not that bad but like 4 over yeah its gonna start throwing diseasses and things your way possibly back to back with raids or infestations.

And like others said you colony value influences how hard those events are, but I think it does a diffculty multiplyer if you over the idea number as well forgot all the details people use to have all the data in alpha days. And there is mods to remove or tweak the soft cap

[Astasia]

For the most part as long as you aren't recruiting all pacifists then having more colonists should not make the game more difficult. The amount of extra scaling a colonist adds is pretty trivial compared to the amount of defense they add, give them a weapon, put them in cover, and they make the game easier rather than harder. It's the same deal with turrets and traps, these have a wealth value and adding a bunch technically increases scaling, but the amount of scaling they add doesn't come close to the amount of usefulness they have in making threats easier to deal with.

The exception might be dealing with disease events, those scale based on population and you will need a lot more meds for each disease event with larger colonies.

Originally posted by Scooty Puff Sr.:

In addition to what everyone else has said if you go above a certain number of pawns it basically flips a switch where now the game is going to try really, REALLY hard to kill your colonists. That number is 18 for Cassandra/Phoebe and 50 for Randy.

This is a popular bit of misinformation and also based on old beta numbers. There used to be a population critical value that people thought meant bad things would happen, but that's not what it meant. Once you get above a certain population the game mostly stops giving you free colonist join events, that's pretty much the only effect that has. Those numbers are also very different now and Randy pretty much ignores them.

[Raelic]

I feel like the bigger your colony the more bloody the wounds are too. Maybe that's just me getting bad luck.

[Lyrin]

Originally posted by Astasia:

This is a popular bit of misinformation and also based on old beta numbers. There used to be a population critical value that people thought meant bad things would happen, but that's not what it meant. Once you get above a certain population the game mostly stops giving you free colonist join events, that's pretty much the only effect that has. Those numbers are also very different now and Randy pretty much ignores them.

Ah, I see! Thanks for the clarification.

[Nemerlight]

This game is brutal. Things were going fairly well but then some got food poisoning, i got raided by army of robots that murdered most of my people and few that survived were gunned down by my cook who went berserk and started shooting everyone. Time to restart i guess

[D.Cub3d]

Originally posted by Raelic:

I feel like the bigger your colony the more bloody the wounds are too. Maybe that's just me getting bad luck.

It's likely due to your expansion increasing your colony wealth which in turn increases the potency of raids and subsequently combat/medical situations.

Also the raider unit types have a value for weapons and a value for outfits that they can buy equipment with. If I recall correctly these can increase when your wealth does to help keep weaker factions to be more on par with your technological advancements. If this is in fact the case then this would also be a big factor in this perception as the weapons are better and they would cause more severe injuries.

Oh and to answer the OPs question, yes but not in a linear way. Pawns have a value iirc, based on their stats, likely age and other variables. Then there is the equipment you need to make for them, when these add up across multiple pawns, it can contribute to wealth increase (depending on your base and your gear, it could be substantial or minuscule comparatively). Which is the seemingly main factor in determining raids and possibly events (not sure on events, but raids is a for sure).

[SpookySunday]

So higher wealth increases the severity of incidents (raids etc.).
Is this correlation linear? Or is there an asymptotic approximation?
Same question for the time. Linear? Threshold?

EDIT: Just read the answer by Transflux. Thx. So not linear then.
The question about approximation remains. I'm just curious. :)

[bulbatrs]

each new pawn increases raid strength proportional to your current wealth. very often you will get into situation where one extra recruit makes significant raid strength increase. while it's nice that they deal damage, but getting extra 3 centrapids drop on your head because you just got an extra slave or pawn can be painful.

[Zane87]

Originally posted by bulbatrs:

each new pawn increases raid strength proportional to your current wealth. very often you will get into situation where one extra recruit makes significant raid strength increase. while it's nice that they deal damage, but getting extra 3 centrapids drop on your head because you just got an extra slave or pawn can be painful.

The pawn value is approximately 3000-3500, so that's not that much and should never actually increase the raid difficulty that much.

As long as your infrastructure can support new pawns without issues (mood, food, space okay) then they basically always increase your chances in raids, not decrease.

But RNG is RNG and rimworld can royally screw you the moment you think you got everything well under control ^^