Raids aren't really immersive or interesting. Here's why.

[The Blind One]

First of all, the enemy doesn't actually raid you, they vandalize and try to assault your base but no actual raiding really takes place. It's an afterthought at most.

Lemme explain,

The whole premise in the lore is that raiders don't farm or produce their own food, so their goal shouldn't be too assault your base in suicidal waves. Their goal is to simply steal your food, animals and easily taken possessions that they can sell off. This would make raiders narratively consistent as well as immersive and more unique to deal with rather than a tower defense style gameplay that it portrays now.

The point of a (historical) raid is to steal wealth and wear you down while not getting into any engagements that can lead to death or heavy injury of the raid party involved. Low risk, high reward ventures or actions that hurt your opponent but do not harm themselves. This is why animals, penned animals in particular, should be the primary focus of early raiders together with raiding your food stores and torching your fields to wear you down while possibly kidnapping colonists who are caught off-guard and unprotected from the strength of the colony.

Actually assaulting your base or engaging your colonists directly should not be the objective of early raiders. This will make a lot more sense as well when you get raided with just 1, 2 or 3 guys in the early game when you yourself have 3 or 5 colonists. They don't stand a chance so why are they suiciding against your defenses? They ignore your penned animals entirely as well.

What ends up happening is that you as the player will just draft all your pawns and wait for the enemy to attack your well defended position despite the enemy being numerically inferior and being less well armed. It is an entirely pointless raid. In fact it is just a suicidal act that feels like AI stupidity.

This shouldn't happen. Instead the raiders should focus on the least defended animals or possessions it can see and try to steal as many of them as possible and try to run before getting engaged with your colonists in a fight. This forces you as the player not to sit in your defended positions but instead forces you to move out and try to intercept the raider before he can steal your animals or possessions. Keeping guard animals near penned animals also becomes much more valuable as stalling mechanics to prevent raiders from taking your animals.

This is a completely different type of raid mechanic imho. Instead of waiting the raiders out, you're forced to engage them in the open or try to hide your animals in safe spaces. It makes you proactive rather than reactive in gameplay in dealing with raiders.

Raiders then should start out raiding your colony, only touching the outskirts and probing your defenses where possible but not try to engage in any real dangerous fights. You should be able to easily fend them off by just hitting them a bit or scaring them off when your intercepting force is larger than their band of raiders is. Their goal is not to get themselves killed but test your defenses. A few hits should cause them to retreat in this early period of the game.

Then when your colony wealth grows much larger, THEN, raiders should turn into base assaults where they will try and get some of that sweet loot you got by organizing larger war bands that can possibly overwhelm your defenses.

These larger war bands would then be formed at actual existing or newly built settlements of raider / pirate / tribals, etc that are in range of the player home base for an assault operation. So it becomes important for the player to preemptively destroy them or suffer a build up of enemy raiders that can possibly overwhelm your homebase if left unchecked.

The player now has to actively act against raiders while also making narratively consistent in that they raid you for food and wealth rather than try to outright destroy your colony for the lulz.

Anyway this is just my opinion since I'm getting a bit bored by random raider factions showing up and suiciding against my defenses while ignoring all the free stuff that is easily taken that they need to survive lol.

[psychotron666420]

That's crazy bro...

[Kevin905niveK]

Sounds like you want to make a mod. I say go for it. That being said they do most certainly take stuff from your colony and also kidnap colonists.

[Fallow]

I like this. It reminds me of a post on a Dungens and Dragons forum I read once about making realistic cultures for the orcs and goblins in the campain.

One point was that some raiding tribes could have certain rules about how they handle their raids. For example stealing lifestock or raiding food stores is okay but killing isn't. If someone is killed during the raid then it becomes a serious matter and thats when they start demanding restitution or sending actual warriors at the offender.

This could run into problems with settlers who are always willing to deal lethal force to 'cattle rustlers' and will shoot raiders on sight... which ticks off the tribe and triggers a blood feud and so on.

For Rimworld, perhaps the first few raids would focus on stealing wealth or damaging crops to test the waters. If the the colony captures one of those first raiders, the tribe then sends a message to them either to pay a ransom to get them back, demand their return (with a bigger raid sent with the intent to rescue the captive), or to just verify they are being kept in decent conditions or something.

If the colony kills the raider, the tribe could demand their body be returned, demand payment as restitution, or send a much bigger raid as retribution.


Then again, their could be lone raiders who were exiled or otherwise don't have their tribe or settlement looking out for them.

[Buzzkill]

Raiders do steal your stuff after they done enough pillaging. And siege attacks can do damage before they start an attack. It's just not as indepth as you want it.

[whatamidoing]

If they can't path to your colonists and you leave enough valuable stuff somewhere they can grab it, they usually will.

[tiagocc0]

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ tried to steal my resurrector mech serum, they did end up stealing two armors

[tiagocc0]

Originally posted by whatamidoing:

If they can't path to your colonists and you leave enough valuable stuff somewhere they can grab it, they usually will.

or get your downed pawns

[The Blind One]

Originally posted by Fallow:

For Rimworld, perhaps the first few raids would focus on stealing wealth or damaging crops to test the waters. If the the colony captures one of those first raiders, the tribe then sends a message to them either to pay a ransom to get them back, demand their return (with a bigger raid sent with the intent to rescue the captive), or to just verify they are being kept in decent conditions or something.

If the colony kills the raider, the tribe could demand their body be returned, demand payment as restitution, or send a much bigger raid as retribution.


Then again, their could be lone raiders who were exiled or otherwise don't have their tribe or settlement looking out for them.

Yes exactly!

This opens the door to much more interesting faction interaction and diplomacy rather than just shipping a bunch of yayo to an enemy faction to get them to ally to you instantly despite the hundreds of deaths between your two factions.

Capturing / treating enemy raiders rather than straight up killing them and then releasing or selling them back to the faction should give you either some silver or really good reputation bonuses and even possibly allow you to open up negotiations to have them stop raiding you (at least for a while).

Executing them while giving you good mood bonuses with your own colonists would come at the cost of decreased reputation and more hostility and escalation with the opposing faction, deepening on their hatred of you.

It's such a shame that despite the base building complexity the faction interaction is extremely shallow to non-existent. Enemy raids are really simple in how they operate both mechanically as well as narratively. Yes there's a bunch of different tactics that they can use, drop pod, breach, sappers, siege, but there's no real reason for any of those in terms of story, they just happen by random generation.

I'd much more prefer an immersive interaction with these factions where even these factions that are hostile have quests and related events to them that form the narrative world building backbone around your colony.

Like Fallow mentioned, the lone exile or refugee from an enemy factions may be turned into a colonist or returned for cease fire and reputation bonuses. A raider faction may not have enough medical supplies so ask you to send some or even desperately ask you for food since they are not farmers and winter has come.

Ideally hostile factions should start by simple raids to probe defenses and steal animals, food and occasionally burn down a farm field to mess with you but not assaults on your base or colonists themselves. Violently retaliating against these raiders and killing them would escalate the situation.

Sappers that instead of tunneling towards a colonists assigned bedroom tunnel towards your storeroom or fridge instead and once inside, steal as much as they can and run away again. They're not out to fight you, they're out to rob you lol

Sieges would be attempts to slowly drive you out of your base and get you to surrender a significant amount of wealth or gold in exchange for them leaving you alone for a while. The goal is not to destroy your base but to extort wealth and money out of it periodically when you are weak. You as the player then have the choice. Do I cave in and not risk a fight by paying them off for now or do I try to assault them and drive them off?

There's a lot of options left unexplored that can lead to fun and immersive gameplay and diplomacy that is left untapped in this game. The standard senseless suicide raid gets old really quickly imho.

P.S
Yes I am aware that you can leave gold and silver for them to take but you have to go out of your way to put that stuff in an easily taken position for this too happen. At no point does the raiding party ever simply ask you to pay X in wealth to leave. They are programmed to simply vandalize some of your property for no reason other then to path towards your base and get into an engagement. Oh that chair? Imma smash it for the lulz.

Then when the raid isn't going well or they have succeeded in mostly beating your defenses after they've lost 20 or 30 pawns, THEN they decide to leave and kidnap some of your pawns ... uhmmm ok? How is that sustainable though? You lost 30 pawns in order to kidnap 2 guys?

Wait why are you ignoring all the food in my fridge? Don't you need to raid me for food? Oh well I guess you'd rather have a crafter pawn that won't be doing any crafting in your colony because you have no crafting resources of your own according to the story but I guess you need to kidnap that guy to mess with my gameplay experience. So immersive. So much fun.

[Steelfleece]

I always figured Rim World was Mad Max without the cars. It explains why so many raiders come with scars when even a little medical attention would have sufficed; their idea of dealing with injuries during a raid is chrome spraypaint to the face.

[The Blind One]

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

I always figured Rim World was Mad Max without the cars. It explains why so many raiders come with scars when even a little medical attention would have sufficed; their idea of dealing with injuries during a raid is chrome spraypaint to the face.

But its not though. Or at least it kinda depends.

There's tribals of varying hostility and development levels as well as actually advanced settler communities with civil outlanders being the best example, not to mention the broken empire settlements across the map who possess advanced technology even the player can't produce such as monoswords. Only the pirates are really Mad Max without the cars but they aren't the majority of people on the rim. If they were, I'd have agreed with you.

The number of raids and the willingness to sacrifice entire towns worth of pawns to obtain a single kidnap or steal a few pieces of armor / gold from your well defended base does not justify the cost.

I think the narrative immersion as well as gameplay variety and enjoyability would go a long way if it weren't focused so much on defeating suicidal raiders but allowed for more in depth and interesting diplomacy and faction interaction where escalation and de-escalation are important considerations in dealing with factions around you.

[Monty]

Originally posted by The Blind One:

So immersive. So much fun.

It is up to the player to create the narrative.

One day the sky above your town is lit up by fire and several drop pods are spotted landing some distance away. Not wanting to send anyone useful, you send Jim-Bob to investigate as punishment for smashing the stockpile of medicine and setting fire to the chemfuel storage.

Jim-Bob does not return.

After a few days it occurs to you to send a small group to find out what happened to Jim-Bob and maybe find out about those drop pods. The group spot Jim-Bob's rotting corpse near some hastily constructed buildings and decide for to take some revenge and maybe some loot.

The small group does not return.

Another group is sent and one of them returns badly injured and tells you about the fields of psychoid, mining operations, large construction projects and crazy people wearing human leather hats. This is a threat that needs to be dealt with. A message needs to be sent that no one can just drop in a build their own settlement and muscle in on the flake trade. This is more than raiding for resources, it is time for war.

Edit: I am all for extra diplomacy options to be added to the game. It is hard work getting all those raider corpses loaded on a caravan to return to sender for some rep gains.

[Astasia]

All raids in RimWorld other than mechanoid raids have the primary objective of stealing wealth or colonists. They don't know where your wealth is, it's generally inside rooms they can't see or immediately get to. If they can't see anything of enough value they start breaking items they can't carry with them and attacking walls trying to find that wealth. If they see your colonists nearby they will try to fight them. Doing damage or fighting colonists is not their main goal though. If they do find that wealth they will stop everything else and try to grab that wealth and run off the map, if they haven't found the wealth but they see downed colonists they could nab they will do that instead. If they can't get to your wealth or any downed colonists they will bash stuff for a while trying to find it or draw you out and eventually give up and leave.

If you leave piles of gold around the edges of your map most raids will walk in, see that gold right away, take it and leave. You never really at any point have to actually fight human raiders, you could do a pacifist run and just have your colonists hide during raids and then repair any damage after, because the raiders are not after your colonists or trying to raze your base.

[Krankus Wrexus]

Originally posted by Astasia:

All raids in RimWorld other than mechanoid raids have the primary objective of stealing wealth or colonists. They don't know where your wealth is, it's generally inside rooms they can't see or immediately get to. If they can't see anything of enough value they start breaking items they can't carry with them and attacking walls trying to find that wealth. If they see your colonists nearby they will try to fight them. Doing damage or fighting colonists is not their main goal though. If they do find that wealth they will stop everything else and try to grab that wealth and run off the map, if they haven't found the wealth but they see downed colonists they could nab they will do that instead. If they can't get to your wealth or any downed colonists they will bash stuff for a while trying to find it or draw you out and eventually give up and leave.

If you leave piles of gold around the edges of your map most raids will walk in, see that gold right away, take it and leave. You never really at any point have to actually fight human raiders, you could do a pacifist run and just have your colonists hide during raids and then repair any damage after, because the raiders are not after your colonists or trying to raze your base.

I did notice that they sometimes just try to loot and then leave

[Lord Freedom]

Originally posted by Astasia:

All raids in RimWorld other than mechanoid raids have the primary objective of stealing wealth or colonists. They don't know where your wealth is, it's generally inside rooms they can't see or immediately get to. If they can't see anything of enough value they start breaking items they can't carry with them and attacking walls trying to find that wealth. If they see your colonists nearby they will try to fight them. Doing damage or fighting colonists is not their main goal though. If they do find that wealth they will stop everything else and try to grab that wealth and run off the map, if they haven't found the wealth but they see downed colonists they could nab they will do that instead. If they can't get to your wealth or any downed colonists they will bash stuff for a while trying to find it or draw you out and eventually give up and leave.

If you leave piles of gold around the edges of your map most raids will walk in, see that gold right away, take it and leave. You never really at any point have to actually fight human raiders, you could do a pacifist run and just have your colonists hide during raids and then repair any damage after, because the raiders are not after your colonists or trying to raze your base.

This is the correct response.

OP, I'm not sure why you aren't experiencing it on your end, but raiders absolutely try to steal my wealth and will disengage combat to escape with it.

[Steelfleece]

I had a raid once that was 4 vikings. One of them immediately keeled over from health complications, leading the rest to steal what they could and run. In this case, they each picked up an old vase from a ruin near the map edge, and then ran off leaving their disabled friend.

I think a bear or something got him. I dunno, he was on the other side of the map and it was snowing, there were bears and stuff out there and chocolate in here. I didn't tell him to come raiding.