does Ideologies make it easier to get OP?

[tools guy-kun]

tldr; thinking about getting Ideologies for the sake of rituals for easy colonists farming and whatever bonuses it may offer, but if there's a workshop mod that can do similar things without feeling TOO cheaty and would save me $20, I would highly appreciate you sharing them.
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some videos I've seen that date back a year or so ago show that Ideologies can make it real easy (through rituals) to attract more colonists and the like, which can allow you to have more bodies to harvest organs from, have slaves, etc.

unsure how I feel about spending $20 for this DLC, but I know that I like to have fun in my games and part of that fun is getting kind of OP.

thinking about getting it for the sake of rituals for easy colonists farming, but if there's a workshop mod that can do similar things without feeling TOO cheaty and would save me $20, I would highly appreciate you sharing them.

Edit: thank you everyone for the answers. It was really helpful. For now, I’m going to focus on getting a better hang of the game. Then I’ll buy this DLC, if not any of the other two.

[Steelfleece]

Yes, Ideology can make your colony OP. Using the right memes and precepts can make them enjoy human flesh, living underground, always be in better moods, so on. It makes the game a little too easy when you do, though, especially combined with mods that add even more memes/precepts.

[brian_va]

if ALL you want is more people, spawn them in via dev mode and save a few bucks, but some of the other stuff you mentioned really isn't available outside the dlc.

as for making it OP, it can swing both ways depending on how you set it up. you can make it so that your ideology is really catered to your specific game, something like making cannibalism acceptable making a food source that has no mood penalty like it normally would. but you can swing it the other way, and make it so the rules are so tight that everyone is constantly on edge from the mood hits. it really all depends on how you want to play.

if you really want to get OP, look into the gene stuff from biotech, it can get quite ridiculous.

[Astasia]

I would not consider "easy recruits" a major feature of Ideology.

You can set a ritual to have a 50% chance on success to spawn a random recruit. You can have like 4-6 of these rituals on 30 day cooldowns, and it's generally about a 50% chance for success or less earlier in the game. So it's like, maybe one pawn per quadrum on average if you spam all these rituals as often as possible. If you capture every downed enemy that is typically significantly faster recruitment.

There are also better options for ritual rewards, like fully recharging everyone's psyfocus, getting +20 goodwill with a neighbor, or discovering an ancient complex to loot.

A real cheese way to get a ton of bad recruits is Royalty refugee quests, just down them all from heatstroke and then capture and recruit them, these quests often give you like 5-15+ refugees.

[brian_va]

you can also just build a burn box to down entire human raids and capture them all, or most anyways. there's plenty of guides on youtube

plus you can breed an army with biotech.

[MadArtillery]

Ideology is incredibly busted and unbalanced if you want it to be. It's actually absurd, they made zero effort to balance it in the slightest.

[꧁<̴Iитєrnєт KIllєd Тнє TV Ѕтαr☆]

The DLC is worth it, its super fun

[Steelfleece]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Ideology is incredibly busted and unbalanced if you want it to be. It's actually absurd, they made zero effort to balance it in the slightest.

It's as balanced as the player makes it. If you want to go balls to the wall overpowered, it isn't like dev mode didn't already exist. If you want to challenge yourself, that's certainly an option too. I think most players eventually gravitate toward the latter as the former can be boring.

Like most games where real world money and prestige aren't on the line, it's about the fun more than just winning.

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by Steelfleece:

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Ideology is incredibly busted and unbalanced if you want it to be. It's actually absurd, they made zero effort to balance it in the slightest.

It's as balanced as the player makes it. If you want to go balls to the wall overpowered, it isn't like dev mode didn't already exist. If you want to challenge yourself, that's certainly an option too. I think most players eventually gravitate toward the latter as the former can be boring.

Like most games where real world money and prestige aren't on the line, it's about the fun more than just winning.

I tend to dislike systems where things are just blatantly worse then other options. Having to choose not to use a system optimally is frustrating to me personally so never been overly fond of the system. When half the options are hard mode with no redeeming qualities it just feels poorly thought out. Much prefer how biotech was handled. Not everything is equally good but everything can have a place and a use in some way.

[Veylox]

I'd say ideology makes the game harder overall. There are parts of it that can make you overpowered (custom cannibalism, corpses don't care, production specialists, tunnelers etc), but you have to be very precise about how you combine them and it usually involves just going custom.

"Regular" ideologies just tend to complicate things. Regular cannibalism is god-awful for example, even though custom cannibalism is overpowered.

Recruiting is especially harder with ideology. Sure you get the rituals, but if you want to use them often enough you're required to go custom, then you have to roll a positive ritual, THEN you have to win a coin toss to get a pawn IF the ritual was positive, THEN you're rolling a pawn and hoping it isn't a jalous greedy depressive incapable of violence guy. So really ideology recruitment is straight-up worse than the vanilla method of "click through every raiders, pick one you like", especially since the prison > recruit method doesn't really work in ideology, since now you have to go through the whole conversion process first (which is longer than recruiting) if you don't want your pawn to go mad from having a different ideology.

So yeah, ideology when you're taking optimal options has a few neat tools that trivialize some of the most annoying mechanics in the game (looking at you "observed corpse"), but overall it's a rather difficult DLC, and it's especially bad with recruitment.

[Chibi Life]

Do a Cannibalism nudist colony on a tundra with nature primacy and animal personhood. I'll wait for you to come back and tell me how easy Ideology will make your game lol.

[tools guy-kun]

Originally posted by Chibi Life:

Do a Cannibalism nudist colony on a tundra with nature primacy and animal personhood. I'll wait for you to come back and tell me how easy Ideology will make your game lol.

Is it possible to enjoy the DLC without doing that?

[Dr. Uncredible]

The Ideology dlc is a brilliant, sure, you -can- make it overpowered, but that option is always yours in this game.
You pick your own difficulty, after all, you allready have the choice to only play the lowest difficulty Phoebe, you have the choice to only ever settle in permanent summer temperate forest mountains with insect turned off, you have the choice to re-load after every setback.

Anything deviating from that is you choosing to raise the difficulty for yourself.
And so it is with ideologies, you take some good traits, you take some bad traits, from what makes sense for your plans for the playthrough.
I´ve plaid raiders who are uncaring about Death and Tattered Clothes, but can´t research or craft well and fight to the death over who gets to lead the colony,
I´ve plaid scientists who are wimpy and spoiled, but research well and get happier the more genetic monstrosities are around.

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by tools guy-kun:

Originally posted by Chibi Life:

Do a Cannibalism nudist colony on a tundra with nature primacy and animal personhood. I'll wait for you to come back and tell me how easy Ideology will make your game lol.

Is it possible to enjoy the DLC without doing that?

Consider that as about the dumbest scenario you could do for the hell of it. I don't know why someone decided to go trolling but it is the internet. Ideologies are incredibly customizable, even in odd areas as it adds the ability to set a modifier to research speed in ideology even. Fluid ideolgies can be changed periodically as well by earning development points from things like rituals or executions to fix mistakes or act as an organic changing culture.

Ideologies can be as milktoast or as extreme as you want them to be. A single meme of individualism and you pretty much just have standard rimworld but the ability to stack a bunch of rituals to freely max out relations with your closest faction without effort allowing infinite consequence free call ins or drown in recruits from recruiting rituals. Something like tunneller can even just hot drop in food for free with rituals as different memes have different outputs you can select for rituals as the rewards are always customizable. Weirdly some memes litterally do nothing but add restrictions to precepts you can choose, nudity being a prime offender despite being rated a high impact meme adding litterally nothing and being a a waste of a slot in every way as litterally everything it does can be done without it while offering no additional bonuses.

There is some limited biotech compatability too as 20% better mechs is a precepts, it does slightly weaken global workspeed but a colony doesn't need to be all one ideology so just having an ideology solely for your mechanitor and running another ideology alongside it for everyone else can be quite powerful as well. Dipping into other ideologies specialists, precepts, and mood modifiers in one colony can be quite nice and you get all the extra ideologies rituals as well on top of whatever one you created. Doing that in my current colony with 2 mechanitors both with a mechanitor ideology and the rest being relatively milktoast ideologies from other factions. Raider factions tend to have very good ideoliges as secondaries making good militaries and it's extremly easy to keep raiders in a bunch of positive mood buffs thanks to the work sites that come with the ideology dlc for raiders to raid. Wonderful source of components and steel along with tons of mood buffs with the right ideology for the job.

Quite good for flavour but mechanically all over the place and inconsistent. Stuff like crafting specialists and shooting specialist along with all the absurd ritual stuff can make it absurd power wise while other parts of it litterally don't even fulfil their own supposed function. It probably has the most severely mixed opinions on it of any dlc due to it's inconsistency. A lot of people misunderstand it too as some sort of all or nothing thing instead of leeching off the powers of captured ideologies.

[brian_va]

Originally posted by tools guy-kun:

Originally posted by Chibi Life:

Do a Cannibalism nudist colony on a tundra with nature primacy and animal personhood. I'll wait for you to come back and tell me how easy Ideology will make your game lol.

Is it possible to enjoy the DLC without doing that?

yes, thats basically an example of doing something just because you can.

[tools guy-kun]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Originally posted by tools guy-kun:

Is it possible to enjoy the DLC without doing that?

Helpful response, but decided to cut for space.

Originally posted by brian_va:

Originally posted by tools guy-kun:

Is it possible to enjoy the DLC without doing that?

yes, thats basically an example of doing something just because you can.

Thank you both. I understand that what the other poster has suggested I’d do to answer my own question was also a mere choice. The purpose of my question to them was to... “nitpick” at their idea of that being the only deciding factor of what my expectations should be with the DLC, given the other responses above sharing the different possibilities that could come from one’s experience.

Although, I did get some humor and perhaps some inspiration from it to try something different when I feel like breaking out of my comfort zone in my playstyle.