I don't understand how people can play with few pawns

[VoiD]

In all my games I end up with a massive colony, often right in the middle of the map with several bunkers covering every direction, and wide corridors to fight anything that happens to bypass the trip to the fort.

But I don't really understand how some people can live with something like 6 pawns, in a regular base you'd need

1~2 dedicated cook(s)
1 stonecutter
2 crafters for components/bionics/power armors, random ♥♥♥♥ to sell (like noble clothing for the empire), make it 3 crafters if you're using a mod like CE to keep all your ammo for every weapon replenished
1+ artist(s) crafting small statues with rare materials or giant wooden ones for profit
1 guy making drugs and medicine all day
1~2 researchers
1~2 scanners for more materials
1~2 dedicated miners to keep up with construction and crafting materials demand
1~2 for plants (more if you're doing hydro rice)
1 to keep animals trained and to milk dem cows
1~3 builders to keep building those thick stone walls around your base, and any expansion you might need
1~3 cleaners (haulers if you don't have one guy that doesn't sleep maintaining 4 gauranlen trees, or an army of dogs/spiders)

Also, if you have noble(s) you'll probably have to waste a lot of time meditating all day, so even if they don't have bad character traits and can still do work, they most likely won't be doing much, if any real work.

And those 13~21 guys are just the bare minimun to keep a base running and work their own dedicated jobs, you'll still need some competent soldiers to handle the maxxed out invasions, specially at higher difficulty, so any pawn that doesn't have tough+some decent skills and full bionics don't even count, most likely you'd need about 6+ real warriors to protect your base on top of that list.

They can also be useful as medics and caravaneers.

How can people live with less than that?

[whatamidoing]

Originally posted by VoiD:

How can people live with less than that?

Pretty easily. Fewer people means less work to be done.

[Winterbloom]

My researcher is always my medic, and a noncombatant, My crafters are also my stonecutter, my cook is also my planter, but i tend to have everyone allowed to cut plants.. Things run pretty smoothly with my 6 people, because I dont overload their work. Job priorities are crutial too, my researcher is priority 2, with medic 1.

[failsafe]

Less people = less food needed (less farming / tending / cooking) but also less cleaning.

In my current colony I have 10 people and 1 slave... I thought that I will recruit him, but recently decided to sell him. I know that later a lot of sht will happen, so it wouldn't be bad to have 20 shooters, but... I think less is better ;-P.

[brian_va]

if you have fewer people, you need fewer people to run the colony. you'll also need fewer raw materials, so some of that list you put up can be shortened as its not necessary any longer.

skill sets and allocation becomes more meaningful than taking the brute force approach, but thats kind of the point of lower numbers; quality over quantity. yes, a high level crafter or other skilled pawn dying in a raid hurts more, but that is the trade off.

try it.

[VoiD]

I get the less people = less work part, but it doesn't really work.

Less people = less efficiency, more often than not, when an artist leaves his crafting table to do anything for any reason that's time not crafting a new piece of art, worth money to be traded for valuable goods you can't just find anywhere, like archontech and luciferium supplies, same for the guy sewing, if they ever share jobs with anything else, for any reason, that means you're losing money.

Miners too, the moment you get up you're not mining, and when you have 2 drill arms that also means whatever else you're doing it's going to be slower than usual and really not worth the time spent, also, getting up to go anywhere, to do anything means more travel time to and from the drill, which means even more time wasted, so, by having less people, you end up just not accomplishing much of anything in a day.

Scanners and researchers are the same, any second not spent sitting in front of their equipment all day means one more second to reach the desired technologies you want, and it adds up, so it can end up costing a few extra years to get the techs you want, or to scan for the materials you really needed.

The buildiers and stonecutters I can sort of understand sharing jobs as you might get to a point where you're not really building anything else (though I don't see a reason for it, if you got your base ready make a turret, if you already got a turret then make another turret, then make another miner to get more steel to make yet another turret, and another, and some mines too, then another turret.) but everyone else seem like they will cripple the colony by ever getting up to do anything else.

Also, I forgot the drugs part, if you're doing them you might need 1~3 drugmakers too, though you could replace a cloth crafter with them instead since they have similar roles: producing value for trade, all day, every day.

But yeah, if you're "lucky" the workers might also be the soldiers, sometimes you can find some people with neat traits+tough that can fight.

Also, less people = more people moving around which usually means a massive ammount of dirt being spread everywhere unless you fill the entire map with concrete and/or don't use animals, so it might mean more work depending on what you're doing.

Also, I probably should have mentioned it but I usually play on Losing is fun, or a harder custom difficulty, so the colony often gets to the cap of raid points by midgame so keeping things smaller just seem like crippling myself for no drop in difficulty of any kind. It's doable in vanilla, specially with psycasts and stuff, but in CE getting overwhelmed can be pretty bad.

[VoiD]

Originally posted by brian_va:

if you have fewer people, you need fewer people to run the colony. you'll also need fewer raw materials, so some of that list you put up can be shortened as its not necessary any longer.

skill sets and allocation becomes more meaningful than taking the brute force approach, but thats kind of the point of lower numbers; quality over quantity. yes, a high level crafter or other skilled pawn dying in a raid hurts more, but that is the trade off.

try it.

I don't see how there can be any quality to that approach really, I mean, there's no way an artist/farmer that can't take the production specialist OR the plant specialist role, or have 2 planting arms bionics can outperform a dedicated lvl 20 (because he never does anything else) artist with production specially cranking legendary statues several times a day.

I mean, just by having both jobs that's at LEAST a 50% drop in productivity for both, as you should be farming all day AND crafting all day, but that's also ignoring the travel time between fields and the crafting station which probably take even longer than the actual jobs, and then there's the sleeping/eating time inbetween, there are only so many hours in a day.

Edit: Also, it's nearly impossible to find some decent pawns, like an industrious very neurotic artist so you can really invest in him, finding a very neurotic industrious artist AND planter would be even harder, plus you'd still be missing on the proper augments and specialist roles, there would be a drastic quality drop for both roles.

[whatamidoing]

I guess most people aren't focused on seeing line go up as fast as possible.

[brian_va]

Originally posted by VoiD:

I mean, just by having both jobs that's at LEAST a 50% drop in productivity for both, as you should be farming all day AND crafting all day,

my point was that by staying smaller, there is less of a need for every task to be constantly worked

[failsafe]

If you have 10 people, with two marriages included, you have 8 rooms to cover = 8 sculptures. Another one for dining room, one or two here and there... and that is it.

Same with furniture -> at some point you easily swap old, poor furniture to new good or excellent, furnish few spare rooms... and that is it, nothing more to do.

At some point you have like 10k stored food, 2-3k stored metal, triple as much weapons as you need and you don't ever research anymore (unless you are beelining for long term goals).

With colony located in mountainous area, with one or two entry points to my base, I manage to defend it with less pawns than attackers count. 2 sniper riffles plus 5 assault riffles do the job.

With toooo much food stored, when I have a crucial problem I just stop farming and move my farmer to different tasks. Also, I have so many animals around - for example 20 tamed turtles, just walking around my base - that I don't believe a starvation could be a problem. I sell chockolate surplus, I sell beer surplus, I sell medicines surplus, I sell clothes surplus. The only things I lack are plasteel and components... but I'm not quite sure if I could have more of them with 30 pawns.

[VoiD]

Originally posted by failsafe:

The only things I lack are plasteel and components... but I'm not quite sure if I could have more of them with 30 pawns.

Well yes, when you can call 2~3 caravans every time they are off cooldown and send some caravans of your own to every city around you to empty their stocks by selling hundreds of masterwork corsettes and legendary/masterwork uranium/silver/jade small statues, or huge wooden/stell statues you can really enhance your component production. Also purchase tons of archotech parts, make Luciferium an almost infinite supply or even buy some extra steel/plasteel if needed too.

Also, having 2 extra pawns sitting all day on long and short range scanners for more components and easier access to steel, so the double drill arms luciferium circadian half-cycler nuclear stomach mining specialist industrious jogger neurotic guy can sit there all day and night mining.

Also, do keep in mind a pawn like that can completely drain out a steel vein in a couple of days, so scanning gotta be done really fast too to be worth having him

Edit: Oh, also, caravans are the only source for consumables, in vanilla they really are broken, a single shield deployable can often trivialize an entire raid, but even shock and insanity lances can be very useful.

In CE they aren't as powerful, but they are still quite useful, having a stock of doomsday rocket launchers to handle some specially tricky clusters might not be a bad idea either.

[Astasia]

With a colony of ~10:

-My cook rarely needs to cook and is usually spending most of their time on other tasks.
-My miner is only mining when I'm low on a resource and spends most of their time on other tasks. Unless I am on a mountain map and they need to dig out rooms for expansion.
-I don't make art to sell, if I have an artist they just make a few sculptures at a time for boosting room impressiveness.
-I've never crafted medicine in this game, I think ever.
-I don't craft any drugs.
-My growers don't need to grow much and spend most of their time on other tasks.
-I usually don't do anything with animals.
-I might have 1-2 full time researchers, but they are also my scanners and they don't need to do that full time because when they find something it takes a while to harvest and the resources I get from it last a while. They also tend to be my doctors since they are always in the base.
-I tend to have 1 full time crafter that does components and equipment.
-I tend to have 1-2 skilled builders, but they aren't always needed and spend a lot of their time on other tasks.

All of the above references to "other tasks" tends to be hauling, cleaning, and stonecutting. Once I get to around 8 colonists that's a pretty comfortable point and I can get everything I need to done. I'll usually still recruit very well traited and passioned pawns I come across, but I'm in no rush at that point and it might take years before I hit 12-14 pop, and I'm rarely ever above that.

The thing with RimWorld, is the faster you grow and gather resources the harder the game gets and the more colonists you need to deal with it. If you take your time and expand slowly and only gather the resources you need right now, the game is a lot slower paced and you can get away with a handful of eventually very well geared colonists. The game adapts to what you are doing, allowing you to play the way you want.

[ACS36]

Past the 8-12 range, your pawns start to feel less unique and less like individuals. Honestly, the game becomes very boring when your colony becomes massive.

[P&P_plays]

its a different way to play the game. it works, just like a massive colony does, and a medium sized colony, and any other type of colony you can think of

[arti_llery]

A lot of it depends on what you are doing with the colony, also.

Like with Hospitality, I spend more time getting food and stuff built to host people. It helps with getting additional pawns, and you can make some decent money/items doing it.

Planning defenses for raids is easy enough, and getting turrets asap helps with only having 1 or 2 people early on. And steel traps everywhere! Have watched a raid run down an outer wall and pretty much killed themselves trying to walk along it.

Big thing is to plan out an idea of what you want the colony to do, patience helps when you're low on workers.

High amount of workers requires a lot more work to be done to keep them fed, clothed, and armed.

[Half Phased]

Yeah, there’s a lot of chaff that can be cut away there.

1 cook can be all that’s necessary, if you’re running a small colony. Especially if you’re using nutrient paste.
You don’t need a dedicated stone cutter.
Scanners are researchers, and as other have stated, they’re not exactly needed all the time.
You don’t exactly need a full time artist, particularly if you’re not looking to farm wealth that way.
You only need one full time builder, with others pitching in to help in the event of a disaster that needs fixing immediately.
A single cleaner can be enough to run a colony.
And crafters… again it depends on how much you’re actually looking to craft… and how quickly. 1-2 crafters can produce bionics and armour to keep a small colony going quite easily. Most players don’t bother with CE as it’s garbage if you’re looking to play with other mods, so you can cut away some of your crafting there. And if you don’t rush for bionics for everyone, you don’t need as many. Not everyone needs to be a bionic super soldier.

4 colonist by themselves can be sustainable. 6 is just about the right amount to do anything, if you can get people who can wear enough hats.