So, what does >actually< affect the raid difficulty?

[CaptainPOCK]

I keep coming back to Rimworld for casual playthroughs. Over time, and thanks to advice from other players in the past, I’ve tried adjusting my playstyle to one I’m not particularly fond of. This includes building death chambers, focusing on technology rather than preservation. I even lowered the difficulty to "Colony Builder", which is easier than what I’m usually comfortable with in games of this type.

Yet, I still face the issue of overwhelming events and raids. In the beginning, everything is manageable, but as time goes on, the difficulty spikes exponentially. For example, small raids of two enemies armed with clubs evolve into raids of twelve enemies equipped with a variety of guns. All that while my own progress went from bows to fancier bows.

I have read that raids become more difficult as time goes on, which makes partial sense, but also colony wealth, where I would assume that stockpiling resources - especially high-value resources - also contribute to the raid size and difficulty.

What does actually contribute to the event and raid difficulty?

[MadArtillery]

Raids do not get more difficult over time. How many colonists you have and how much wealth you have are the things that primarily effect it. Ive gone very, very long times with identical raids as I tend to be picky with how much I allow to stockpile up. If you can build a structure out of something structures only count as half which is nice. Essentially if it's on your map, even just your floor, it'll increase raid size.

Do try to keep your crafter happy as can be. One early crafting inspiration dropping a masterwork mace onto a strong melee pawn can leave even a nudist soloing base defense against 10 dudes through the power of instankills. I generally play on blood and dust or losing is fun and especially early game a single piece of actually good gear can carry a run very hard. Generally that's my whole strategy every run, gear up to hell and back and win through a small group of very elite powerhouses.

Early game with small raids like 15 people it's pretty easy to follow a simple but effective mantra. Shoot melee enemies, melee ranged enemies. Makes a world of difference, don't get into a gunfight with larger numbers of you can just jump them like a pack of muggers. Don't play into the enemies strength.

[XelNigma]

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raid_points

The short version is that wealth, which is the value of your pawns, tamed animals, items and buildings, is the main factor.

Unless your going out of your way to stockpile a lot of silver from selling drugs or body parts the difficulty should progress at a manageable rate.

Besides managing wealth, learning how to do combat is also important. just because some people show up with guns doesnt mean your sol. Proper use of cover and positioning can net you the win still.

Some tip I would give is dont try to fight at max range. Lure them in close then ambush them. Shots up close are far more likly to land and if you have 5 or so people jump out and fire on the same guy, you might just bring him down in the first volley.
Another thing with gunners is that they cant shoot if engaged in melee combat.
So when you do jump out having a melee guy jump onto them before they can run behind cover will not only stop them from shooting back but also prevent them from moving letting your archers have easer shots.

Use walls as cover, you can even stand in open doorways and shoot down the road while using the wall as cover. Things like sandbag, rocks, and trees give very poor cover. Dont use them if you can help it.
But also dont try to engage combat at long range. Because they always out number you, they will have more bullets going your way then you have going out so trading 5% shot chances back and forth means you will eventually lose from just volume.
If you find your self doing that, just have your pawns break LOS until they get closer.

[Wraith_Magus]

This mod shows you the way things are being scored on your map: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2562730174

There are two major factors at play: colony wealth and number of pawns/colonists on the map.

Basically, you get a number of "raid points" based upon the total value of goods in your colony. This is then multiplied by the number of colonists on your map. From what I've seen with the visible raid points mod, this means that if you have 20 total colonists, but send 2 out on a caravan, the colony wealth is the same, but you face only 1/10th the number of forces because it's only 1/10th your colonists.

The best way to manage the degree of threat I've found is to get rid of excess wealth when you can. Trade or even give away things like excess art objects that have high value. (If you get allied with a faction because you gave them lots of expensive gifts, they'll send a force to help you when you're raided, which is a non-colony-wealth means of increasing your defenses.) I also try to get rid of excess build-ups of non-essential high-value goods like excessive stores of fabrics or clothing, and spend silver when it's sitting in huge piles that do nothing for the colony. Try to put all of your high-wealth objects into a couple specific rooms like a combined rec room/dining room so you don't have to inflate the value of several rooms. Animals also have a lot of value, so trimming down your herds except for animals that can actively fight (like wargs and bears) can bring your colony wealth down. You generally want to put as high a ratio of your wealth into things that actually defend the colony (like weapons, turrets, and colonist augmentations) as possible.

If you absolutely can't stand doing that, there are mods that just flat-out disable sieges that use mortars and such to try to make it more possible to play an "AFK turtle mode" game.

[CaptainPOCK]

I'm definitely going to try all of this out. The main problem I have with my playthroughs is how quickly they become almost impossible to manage. Early on, it's pretty chill, eventually it hits the sweet spot (not too much losses, not too difficult) and eventually it becomes too punishing. I'll try to use the tips as good as I can, keeping my resources to a "what I need" rather than "what I might need" and also trying to use melee more. So far, I've only been using ranged for the most part, unless one of my pawns was exceptionally good at melee.

I was also pretty certain I read something about the time also playing a role (the longer you play, the harder the raids become), but maybe it was a false article.

[Veylox]

Originally posted by CaptainPOCK:

I'm definitely going to try all of this out. The main problem I have with my playthroughs is how quickly they become almost impossible to manage. Early on, it's pretty chill, eventually it hits the sweet spot (not too much losses, not too difficult) and eventually it becomes too punishing. I'll try to use the tips as good as I can, keeping my resources to a "what I need" rather than "what I might need" and also trying to use melee more. So far, I've only been using ranged for the most part, unless one of my pawns was exceptionally good at melee.

I was also pretty certain I read something about the time also playing a role (the longer you play, the harder the raids become), but maybe it was a false article.

It's definitely possible, you're simply not taking your defenses seriously. It's a byproduct of playing in easy difficulties, you're chilling for too long so you assume it's fine not focusing on armament and defense. Except it's not, and you get wiped once the raids start being serious.

Anytime you play rimworld, you should have three main concerns first ; mood, food, and raid defense. If you fail to keep those in check, it doesn't matter what you're doing with your colony because it's all gonna burn down anyway.

During the early to midgame you need a clear progression towards being able to sustain and defend yourself, everything else is irrelevant. It usually involves, after the usual planting of crops and drugs ;

1) Getting a lot of pawns
2) Getting proper weapons
3) Building proper defenses (circling walls or killboxes)

As long as you use the wealth you generate to build up your defenses instead of buying random stuff, you don't actually need to limit yourself, you don't need to stay poor forever just to avoid raids, just get rich and destroy raids with overwhelming weaponry. Let's say a top quality charge rifle costs 5k silver. If you have 5K silver lying around, maybe one more raider is gonna appear and make things more difficult. But if you trade your 5k silver for a top quality charge rifle, you're gonna shred through that additional raider plus whoever else comes with him.

The biggest improvement to your runs is probably to learn how to fight/protect yourself.

3 colonists may fail to kill a single animal when you don't know what you're doing, yet a single colonist can solo a 100-man raid if you play your cards right. Learning about defensive structures and the different defense methods is key

[Dr. Uncredible]

Originally posted by CaptainPOCK:

I'm definitely going to try all of this out. The main problem I have with my playthroughs is how quickly they become almost impossible to manage. Early on, it's pretty chill, eventually it hits the sweet spot (not too much losses, not too difficult) and eventually it becomes too punishing. I'll try to use the tips as good as I can, keeping my resources to a "what I need" rather than "what I might need" and also trying to use melee more. So far, I've only been using ranged for the most part, unless one of my pawns was exceptionally good at melee.

I was also pretty certain I read something about the time also playing a role (the longer you play, the harder the raids become), but maybe it was a false article.

Yeah, the resources thing is actually really important, I play the game to relax and as such play on fairly forgiving mid difficulties, and as such it´s VERY easy to start hoarding just massive amounts of stuff, because you can.
Food is really bad for this, it´s so easy to fill your fridge to the brim with ingredients, because it provides a feeling of control, maybe start piling up luxury foods because the resources are available and what else are you supposed to do with it?

And yes, time is also a factor, but resource hoarding is by far the easiest to combat. ^^

[Astasia]

"Articles" that state time is a factor are either outdated or misunderstanding the adaption mechanic. Time used to be a factor during the alpha versions, but that was changed by release. The wiki link above goes over adaption, but basically if you suffer losses (colonists violently downed or killed) the game softens up raids for a bit and gradually returns them back up to normal. There is an element of time involved there with the game gradually raising the difficulty back up after losses, some have misinterpreted that as adaption "making the game harder over time" when in reality it's purpose is to make the game easier when you need it to be. In alpha it worked similar but IIRC there was no cap on adaption, so the game would just get harder and harder if you kept winning without issues, but it would still drop down if you suffered losses.

A couple things that tend to catch people off-guard with scaling are the intro raids, and Phoebe. At the start of the game the first few raids are "intro raids" and significantly scaled down, this can mask your "actual" scaling and make the game feel like it's ramping pretty hard. Like you start the game at say 100, but the first raid might be 25, then 50, then 100, or roughly along those lines, even though nothing has significantly changed on your end. Phoebe doesn't hit any harder than Casandra, but the large gaps between her raids means they can seem to jump in difficulty a lot more. Casandra might be like 50-75-100-125, while Phoebe might be 50---125, that can blindside you if you aren't familiar with wealth/population scaling.

[Dr. Uncredible]

Welp.
I trust Astasia more than myself on this game.
Ignore what I said about time in favor of their text, the stuff about food I stand by though!

[Garatgh Deloi]

Originally posted by CaptainPOCK:

I was also pretty certain I read something about the time also playing a role (the longer you play, the harder the raids become), but maybe it was a false article.

There is a scenario setting you can activate for that unless I am mistaken (raid strength being based on a timer rather wealth), but it's not the default.

But when it comes to the default wealth dependent raids, do keep in mind that everything on the map counts. Including corpses and items dropped by previous raiders (so you have to gather them or/and burn them regularly). Basically any clutter on the map or your storages contribute to the wealth rating. The more pawns you have also makes a huge difference (this includes animals, slaves and mech's, they are just worth less "pawn points" then regular pawns).

[Wraith_Magus]

Originally posted by Garatgh Deloi:

The more pawns you have also makes a huge difference (this includes animals, slaves and mech's, they are just worth less "pawn points" then regular pawns).

At least according to the visible raid points mod, they don't count pen animals or other things that can't fight as part of the pawns on map multiplier (but they do count as colony wealth.) That is, a warg will count as both colony wealth and as a combatant that adds to the pawn multiplier, but a llama is just colony wealth. (With that said, wargs are relatively low-value enough that outside of late-game super-raids that require crazy killboxes made to fry hundreds of enemies at once with heat that they pay for themselves by eating bullets and raiders for more valuable pawns. I definitely recommend getting bears and wargs if you can.)

[VoiD]

This is going to sound obvious, and maybe it is for experienced people, but as a newcomer I was hearing all about wealth, being scared of increasing it.

But the problem isn't wealth itself, it's as people call it, wealth that can't be used in your defense.

If you focus on the things you actually need there's no problem in massively growing your wealth very quickly, it's only a problem when you keep harvesting & gathering junk you don't need, trading is also excelent as you can get rid of all the things you don't need to get more of what you do, bionic parts of all kinds, some extra medkits, more advanced armors of a higher quality are all very much having in your base.

The same deal goes for pawns, having a bunch of wimpy characters full of scars that will probably die in a single hit in actual combat really isn't all that useful, and they do increase raid sizes, specially if you start enhancing them, this is why I often say I never, accept any pawns without tough in my colonies as I don't consider regular pawns to be "wealth that can protect itself", I can make some exceptions, like creepy joiners with amazing special skills, maybe a vampire, but more often than not the bad pawns end up getting released, or turned into hats, or slaves.

Raiders walking into a base fully commited to only having the best combat oriented pawns & wealth would quickly regret their decision if they were sentient.

My go-to pawn types are, in the following order:
-Anything with Tough, all other traits are nearly irrelevant
-Top tier armors (you don't deal any damage if you're dead), if you can't get some early power armors high quality (human supremacy ideology can help with this) devistrand/thrumbo clothes with vests are good enough
-Top tier weapons (not as important, I was killing centipedes with excelent bioferrite swords in my last run with extreme ease)
-Bionics (at least legs, arms, stone skin and one eye for everybody)
-Genetic enhancements for relevant jobs/prefered combat style, Robust is mandatory, but melee enhancements are also OP, but getting genes can take some time
-Luciferium (Optional, it's very, very good, and totally worth it, but if you let it run out your run is over)

Throw in a couple of serums and you should have a squad of pawns that often fully deflect incoming hits, and those they can't most likely won't be doing more than 1~3 damage each anyway, none of them will ever, ever die, at worst they will collapse from pain getting covered in bruisers & wounds if they get shot by an entire army for too long. If you set them up correctly and quickly enough you should be able to walk up to raids & invaders and just murder them in the open field microing your units, I almost don't even look at cover tbh.

There are a few exceptions, of course, if you can get a psychic sensitive vampire pawn with tough and all of that junk, give him a blinding ritual, a bunch of bioferrite/eltex junk and an eltex staff you could, very easyly, use him to solo multiple max size raids back to back by teleporting around and casting AoE berserk, you know he will never die anyway.

I also often get some working pawns with very good skills, like industrious neurotic workers for mines, crafting, etc... But if they are valuable, and they don't have tough, they never, ever get anywhere near combat, I treat them like the children, just draft them during raids and hide them in a room. I don't trust anyone who can die from a single, unlucky stray shot.

PS: You can also use tough genetically enhanced bionic ghouls with power claws too, add a couple of serums and they are going to turn into complete murdering machines, not quite as powerful as a regular pawn, of course, as they can't wear proper armor and use certain abilities, but they are worth it.

Of course, this is all for a more hardcore run so you don't need to do all of it to try and get perfect killing machines, but if you try and get just a few of them done it should make things much easier.

Also, don't be too scared of trading, try to settle close (keep in mind terrain type affects travel time) to a few towns so you can trade with them early, get rid of undesirable wealth and get more useful things. Later on you can just send drop pods with goods and a psycaster to trade in nearby towns for you then teleport back to base instantly.

Edit: The thing about these damage reductions is that they are very misleading, a simple 50% reduction doesn't just make your pawn 2x more resistant, it's several times over in practice.

Imagine you got shot by a charge lance, 30 damage, you're unlucky and it hit your head piercing armor, which it does often, that's 30 damage to a 25 HP body part, your head was pulverized.

Now imagine that pawn was tough, you took 15 damage instead, your head still has 10 HP left and you're still alive. So it takes 2 headshots to kill someone.

Except each shot has a charge up time, they can miss, they can not fully pierce armor, etc...

Still, imagine it's a super sniper with 100% chance to hit and your pawn is literally naked, you still need to fire twice.

One shot took 1.7s base, then there's a 2.7s cooldown, so you're already surviving more than 2x longer.

Each shot has a % chance to hit each body part, headshots are 15%, so you need to get hit in the head twice, that would be 15% of 15%, 2,25% chance, so the odds of being hit, twice, in the head, to have the same "sudden death" mechanic went down from 15% to 2.25%.

Of course, there are other body parts but the same idea applies, you'd need to get hit twice in the same body part, most likely, to have a random sudden death on a tough pawn.

Then you add all the other layers of protection and it starts getting less & less likely.

To put it in practical terms, before i started using nothing but tough pawns I'd probably lose 6+ pawns every run to these unlucky shots, let's just say I've never had a tough pawn dying suddenly, ever, for any reason, even being digested by one of the new anomaly monsters only took one of his arms, leg, and a kidney, but he crawled out alive.

The only way I've ever seen them dying is when the fighting is so intense I can't reach them to heal/coagulate their wounds in time, so they slowly bleed out while the colony is fighting.

[CaptainPOCK]

That is so much good advice... I'll definitely try my best to utilize that. I really hope this will improve my overall experience. A big thanks to all of you in advance :)

[endymionologist]

It should be noted that you aren't wrong about it *feeling* like it advances difficulty over time. Population growth and the fact that buried raider corpses count as wealth can make it seem like no amount of wealth control is enough; likewise it's hard to remember that the $ value of an individual pawn increases continually as they gain skill and only notably decreases when they're maimed.
One thing that I don't think anyone else has mentioned: there is a way you can use stockpiled wealth for defense, and that is to let raiders steal it. Storing some of your silver and gold in the open air outside your main gate will lead to raiders breaking off their assaults in favor of theft, but allies and visitors will never steal it and it doesn't burn.

[Anonymous Dragon]

I think it mainly depends on storyteller settings and wealth. If you click on the book at the bottom, you can see your wealth which takes the form of items, creatures, and buildings I believe.

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by endymionologist:

It should be noted that you aren't wrong about it *feeling* like it advances difficulty over time. Population growth and the fact that buried raider corpses count as wealth can make it seem like no amount of wealth control is enough; likewise it's hard to remember that the $ value of an individual pawn increases continually as they gain skill and only notably decreases when they're maimed.
One thing that I don't think anyone else has mentioned: there is a way you can use stockpiled wealth for defense, and that is to let raiders steal it. Storing some of your silver and gold in the open air outside your main gate will lead to raiders breaking off their assaults in favor of theft, but allies and visitors will never steal it and it doesn't burn.

People bury raiders? In graves? I throw them in a marsh or water usually.

Void is 100% on the money with finding a ratio between wealth and wealth that can defend itself. You can never go wrong increasing the second, letting the first get out of control is death. Don't feel like you need to mass recruit either. I like my high difficulties but I also hate large colonies, past 10 people my fun starts decreasing pretty rapidly. Really bloody good pawns are worth their weight in plasteel. Rather then big colonies I raise kids to be badasses, and gear everyone to the best I can under the principal if it ain't excellent why the hell are you using it. Though guns have a unique quirk of only dealing more damage per bullet at masterwork and legendary so getting masterwork guns is huuuuge.

I do second everyone stating the importance of armour. My first ever successful colony involved a legendary plasteel plate inspiration craft on a whim and the tough pawn wearing it was so durable he carried my immense noobie ineptitude.

Oh and for using melee, make sure they are on attack instead of flee as a default undrafted response and you can undraft melee colonists in fights so they move between targets on their own. Saves a lot of tedius micro. It's in one of the menus on the bottom but I always forget where even after 2k hours using it literally every run.