Do you guys still play with Ideology?

[phlux]

I find myself more and more playing without Ideology.
It's so easy to get overpowered with it and it introduces alot of micromanagement some times.
It would be neat to have the option to just get a random new meme or percept when you develop your fluit ideology because i can't bring myself to intentionally make it harder for me by not picking a useful meme but as i said, it get's overpowered real quick.

I like to avoid my own urge for optimization in rimworld by just randomizing pretty much everything, pawns, starting location, ideology everything and just try to deal with it.
But i also like to play with a fluid ideology because it feels more natural to me and you don't get overwhelmed at the start if you have a demanding ideology roll.
That's why randomizing a fixed ideology really goes wrong most of the time and it's either really easy or really hard. And on the other hand the randomizing of the fluid ideology seems kind of broken. Like it picks multible memes at the start where i'm supposed to only be able to pick one etc.

So i like Ideologies in general but it's hard to integrate it into my playstyle and it spirals out of control pretty quickly in one or the other direction rarely staying balanced.
I talked with a few friends about it and found out that they pretty much all deactivate Ideology when starting a new colony now so I wonder how is it with you people?

[Kangaroo Salesman]

Yeah why wouldn't i? I make silly ideoligions and i survive 50% of the time. XD

[Tam]

Hell yeah i love gladiator duels with fire/acid spews.

[Veylox]

Yeah, I can't play without cannibals / don't care about corpses for the life of me, it's just too annoying for no reason that pawns spiral into depression for seeing a corpse even though they're the ones who just murdered it and they felt fine about it.

I don't abuse all the way, research speed is silly, but cannibalism basically became vanilla gameplay to me, I always start with a custom fluid that has it and build from here

If you want some variety there's a vanilla expanded that adds a lot of memes, some utterly broken some actually nice that give the game a spin

But yeah, once you find your comfort zone with ideology it's hard to change, most memes are boring and not developped enough to justify using them

[Cellar_Cat]

Yes... I also play on custom difficulty and with a lot of mods that indirectly affect difficulty by adding stuff though so it's not really a concern I have.

[Astasia]

Ideology is still my favorite DLC and I couldn't ever imagine playing the game without it in the future. I don't like how the fluid ideology system turned out though, so I just make static ideologies at game start. It's interesting to hear you say it doesn't integrate with your playstyle when one of the major points of the Ideology system is to adjust things to fit your playstyle. I would say stop trying to avoid "optimizing" things, pick what you like/want, then use the custom difficulty slider to tune the game so the challenge fits what you created.

RimWorld is not some inherently perfectly balanced game where adding anything to it tips the scale over and breaks the game, you have a lot of room to roughly adjust things with ideologies and mods and difficulty settings while still keeping things fun.

[failsafe]

Ideology seems bit problematic for new players, since it just adds few more layers to the game. But it feels very natural later on. For me Ideology is the only DLC I want. I may sound strange, but I never considered last DLC interesting, if Im ever to choose another addition to the game then it would be Royalty... but so far I would say that Ideology is what this game really needed!

[Defektiv]

I don't love it all the time but I always play with it. It adds some more variety and a few more obstacles in the path of acquiring and integrating pawns. The only thing that makes this game easier to me is getting through early game alive and sane. Most of the ideology stuff does not help with that directly and can even hurt you if you do not engage with it right in the beginning. The advantages it does provide in abundance is end game and dealing with massive raids and world map exploration, something that was very much missing in the game before. I hear people say all the time that Transhumanist are overpowered but they still require similar upkeep mechanics as Sanguophage and do not even have innate abilities. Plus most can still use bionics regardless. You can get WAY more overpowered using Biotech, like 10x more powerful or more.

[Veylox]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Ideology is still my favorite DLC and I couldn't ever imagine playing the game without it in the future. I don't like how the fluid ideology system turned out though, so I just make static ideologies at game start. It's interesting to hear you say it doesn't integrate with your playstyle when one of the major points of the Ideology system is to adjust things to fit your playstyle. I would say stop trying to avoid "optimizing" things, pick what you like/want, then use the custom difficulty slider to tune the game so the challenge fits what you created.

RimWorld is not some inherently perfectly balanced game where adding anything to it tips the scale over and breaks the game, you have a lot of room to roughly adjust things with ideologies and mods and difficulty settings while still keeping things fun.

One of the problems I have with ideology is that instead of integrating with a playstyle, it tends to simply disable all other playstyles, without enhancing the only one that's left.

Let's say you want to play ranchers, you effectively lock yourself out of all the non-ranching gameplay elements, but you don't have anything more to do in the ranching department than if you didn't have ideology

There's some RP to it but it's kinda lacking gameplay-wise

[Astasia]

In the case of ranching, being "locked out" of farming means you are more likely to do something like ranch thrumbos for late game clothes, instead of just planting devilstrand which is otherwise "good enough." There are a number of options for any given thing, some are more efficient than others, and ideologies can kind of "force" you down paths that are normally less efficient that you might ignore most games, keeping that content relevant and expanding replayability. I honestly don't ranch at all in like 90% of my runs, it's just not as convenient as farming, so the ranching meme is a good excuse to do something I normally wouldn't do. That is in essence adding content for me.

If you are the type of player that does everything everyway in every playthrough and enjoys playing that way, then ya I can see ideology feeling perhaps limiting to you. If you are the type of person that tries everything once or twice but then typically uses the most efficient or convenient strategy from then on, ideology changes what is most efficient or convenient enough to allow you to mix up each playthrough without it feeling like you are wasting time. That to me is absolutely huge, especially with all the modded meme/precept options.

[Defektiv]

You can still have different people of different ideologies in your colony. And you can even modify through vanilla means ways to keep them from converting each other too. You can play with fluid ideologies or even play with ideology but without committing to any specific ideology. You are never locked in to anything specific, just given themes you can commit to if you want to.

[Steelfleece]

I'm at the point with Ideology where it's pretty much a basic part of the game to me. Playing without it would be like stripping out all the QoL mods too. ...Which isn't a bad idea to do every so often, playing pure vanilla to refresh what the game is like for new players.

[ichifish]

I was never excited by the "be stoners! be evil! be naked! be blind!" options in ideology, so for me the DLC was usually more of nudge in a certain direction and some fun extra mechanics rather than a complete reshaping of the experience.

I kept the Ideology stuff simple in my first couple of Biotech runs (just set and forget), and I'll probably do that going forward, making it fade into the background.

The DLC is as impactful as Royalty and on my recent "pure vanilla" run I missed it (but not as much as psycasts), but I find the other choices I make (biome, restrictions I set, etc.) end up being more salient.

[Robo]

The elephant in the room is that you're using ideology to achieve the best possible outcome for your colony. You have to add cons to introduce balance into your ideology without making it too difficult to points where most of the game is locked away from you. If your ideology is 100% geared to your playstyle without it being 80% or less, then you will 9/10 not be forced to use strategies to overcome obstacles which further reduces fun.

Overall, the game will try to challenge you and introduce conflict, but there's a limit where the game can no longer do anymore since your colonists mood are maxed out because of their ideology and etc.

[Vermillion Cardinal]

As long as the end result is a happy colony, I've never been overly bothered by how stringently a mod or DLC is balanced as I'm not playing to challenge myself on 500% Randy runs. As such, yes, I'm still playing with Ideology and taking advantage of whatever precepts I prefer to have, within reason (no stacking literally every single good one, for sure).

That said, I prefer no-restrictions flexibility for my core colonists so I've always run a saved generic capitalist ideology with minimal impact memes (usually Individualist with Cultured from VE Ideology). My Diversity: Exalted precept however sees me welcome practically anyone provided they are useful, aren't too hard to accommodate at the time they turn up, and don't swap my colony's ideology with theirs.

[Narrowmind]

Of course.