Playing with many different factions can lead to a faction (sometimes including my defeat objective to win the game) being wiped out before I can interact in any way with them.

A toggle-able option to prevent factions from being eliminated entirely (last settlement is invincible) unless directly from the player would be nice

delete faction from the list when they dont have any settlement or roaming agent

It would be nice with more setting presets, one for each map size.

If sieges took a bit longer, sorta like in Mount and Blade where the number slowly whittles down so that any allies or even the player could help fight off the siege. The only issue balance-wise with this would be all the free-loot if the player doesn't actually help out and just scavenges. Maybe some sort of participation threshold if you want the faction rep + and loot.

Originally posted by JDZ5:

If sieges took a bit longer, sorta like in Mount and Blade where the number slowly whittles down so that any allies or even the player could help fight off the siege. The only issue balance-wise with this would be all the free-loot if the player doesn't actually help out and just scavenges. Maybe some sort of participation threshold if you want the faction rep + and loot.

That sort of situation could be resolved by a reputation hit for being present on the map for X amount of time and not assisting the defenders. That said, this could be a legitimate path to wealth if you have to invest an espionage agent (can we send out agents yet?) in a given faction/settlement/area to relay information about the faction/s residing there. Making other uses of said agents equally valuable in other respects (advance notice of pending raids, size/kit value/average armour and weapon tech grade; locating/investigating rare resource caches, quest sites; eliminating opposing agents to prevent sabotage or information gathering during war, etc) combined with the potential rep hit for arriving before a battle is decisively won to scavenge the field would balance out the potential yield nicely.

And, of course, you have to get it all home... which, even with drop pods, can be a pain in the ass.

Please add compatibility with "ignorance is bliss" or create similar functionality within Rim War. :)

Rim War doesn't work to well if you are trying to do a zero to hero playthrough, where you have 0 research at the beginning, but a lot of spacer tech hostile factions among the lower tech ones. You may only get attacked by 1 pawn at a time, but even with only ~180 points, they still spawn in with high tech gear and armor, while I only have short bows. Though it is possible to take them out, it kinda ruins the fun of starting with no tech, if every time you get attacked, you get endgame weapons and clothing. By the time you research medieval tech, all your pawns carry fully automatic laser weapons :/

Option to give settlements away to other factions? Either your own or captured enemy outposts, gives silver and reputation boost.
Ability to assist other factions in base raids? Rimcities has the combined assault thing, where friendlies from that faction show up to help you attack a city.
Pointing allies to attack other faction bases for a reputation cost would be cool too. If they win you get the rep back and they take the faction, if they lose you take a hit. (maybe combine with the raid assistance)

Please consider adding something akin to a dropdown system to the ingame Rim War menu, when you're playing with mods that add a lot of factions the faction list per faction gets ridiculously huge, making it tank on FPS and in some cases it takes like 5 minutes to scroll down to the faction you want to ally/declare war on

@Karrotfield
I'll see what I can do to increase the performance on the faction menu

First of all, thank you for your work :) I genuinely believe your mod could completely change the nature of Rimworld. It scratches my itch for more "Faction management" gameplay in Rimworld quite nicely =)

- Probably asked before but it seems there's an incompatibility with RimThreaded. Seeing as I'd like to expand my own faction as much as possible making sure the game uses all cores of my computer seems essential. Maybe whoever's making RimWar Threaded should turn it into a comptability patch so that everything gets threaded ?

- A bit nitpicky but it would be nice if factions that are hostile to everyone (including modded ones) would always have a warlike personality (Warmonger, Agressive or Expansionnist). For example I have the Insectoids Vanilla Expanded faction in my current run, they got chosen as my rivals but they have the Merchant personality. I don't know if it's linked but they're slowly getting picked appart by their neighbours. When you think about it a faction that literally lies in constant open hostility towards EVERYONE would have some way of surviving - be it very strong defense or high rate of expansion.

- Not sure if that's even possible to do as a modder but it'd be great if there was a hotkey to show a line between a caravan / party / warband and its destination. It could be for example holding CTRL to show all destinations and showing the one of the party you're currently mousing over.

- Changing the victory condition from eliminating a rival to something more generic like reducing all enemy factions' power to less than half of your own (so that you could get closer to victory by making friends and so that you wouldn't have to hunt every enemy to extinction). The "Rival" trope is nice but when they get killed or at least very weakened by other AI factions it makes it a bit too easy I think.

- Raids / invasions that make more sense. What I've noticed in AI vs AI conflict is that a lot of raid / assault attempts tend to end with the attacking force getting wiped out and the defending settlement being unharmed. I don't think that makes a lot of sense : you wouldn't bother getting an army together and attacking if you weren't certain victory was likely because of the costs involved.

For the same reason it feels wierd to have a powerful enemy faction send one dude with a club using a drop pod just so that he can start clubbing my sheep to death. What's the point of that ? An alternative idea I'd propose for raids is to make it so that raiders usually offer you terms of surrender where you give them silver or certain items in exchange for "safety". Maybe even expand that to a vassalage system. That could be a good solution for very early game where it'd make sense for a powerful neighbour to just ask you for something instead of trying to kill everyone and risking lives in the process for no reason.

Invasions should only happen if the goal of the faction is to exterminate you for w/e reason or to take over your territory, and depending on the personality of the faction they should more or less always send a force that has good chances of winning (cautious -> very large force that is most likely to win if you don't find reinforcement, but presumably rarely happens / agressive -> smaller force whose odds are closer to 50 / 50 but very willing to retreat if you do put up a fight).

- I assume that AI reacts to enemy parties coming their way right as they leave their home settlement right ? I think it'd only be fair for players to also get a notification when an AI sends a party their way (especially hostile ones. Maybe only for parties above a certain combat power ?). Then all you have to do in the future is add some way of requesting assistance from nearby friendly factions / settlements (depending on how fine grained you want it to be) and the AI asking the same from eachother / you and you get a primitive ability to build a diplomatic web of inter-protection.

- I appreciate the different icons depending on how powerful a combat party is but I think it'd be more useful to set their icon depending on their purpose rather than their power (maybe power could be represented by opacity or size of the icon if that's even a thing). Not just for the player's own ability to see the intent of a force coming their way but also to have a better understanding of what's happening around the world.

- I'm not sure to what degree Rimworld modding allows you to do this but I'd love having the ability to form new settlements of my own faction without them being actual colonies I need to manage myself. Maybe it'd require creating a "Player owned" faction on top of the player's actual faction ? That way we'd be able to expand the same way AI factions can and increase our strength in a more "wide" way rather than a "tall" strictly technological way. Here's a short outline of how it could work :

=> You can still form regular caravans and that's how you always organize your "directly managed" forces and trade groups. However you can decide to form a Settler group which will have a certain about of Power depending on how many people you commit to it, the value of the items you give them and perhaps more complex stuff like whether the group possesses necessary skills, how much food they have, your tech level... It needs to somehow make sense and not allow exploits like creating a uber settler group by putting in one person and a bunch of expensive jewelry.

=> The settler group goes to whatever destination you set and forms a new settlement of your faction that you don't control directly like your own colonies. It then acts exactly the same as AI settlements except you are (optionally / partly) able to control them sending out other settler parties, warband parties, trading parties... Not sure whether that would create massive balance problems.

=> The reason a player would do that would be to grow their power without overclocking their brains (and CPUs) trying to settle a lot of actual colonies. To make it more fun than just clicking stuff on a map you could allow players to "take control" when a group fights for any reason and create a battle map dynamically just like when a normal caravan gets ambushed.


- Beyond that I'd have other suggestions like a deeper economic system and simulation of who and what is where and more incentives to expand than coloring the map. What if resource generation was changed to only appear on a few tiles but in very large quantities so that there'd be a strategy interest in controlling it ? What if trade caravans had to stop at intermediate destinations and perhaps pay a tax for safe passage (thus creating trade hubs) ? I mean you can go very far and the deeper you go with all that the more you change RimWorld into a 4X game from a colony management game.

But as a game dev myself I see that all that sounds... very complicated. Oh well, YOU'RE the one asking for suggestions =)

EDIT : One more thing - I'm not sure how much RimWorld tracks internally about where AI faction characters live, what's actually inside AI caravans, what's actually being produced by AI settlements... but if possible and if you're looking for a way to add some "personal" stuff into faction politics and emergent storytelling from that, you could take inspiration from Dwarf Fortress' "Historical Figure" system where people marked as such are "tracked" more precisely. In your case that could be done by tracking where they are at all times (whether in a party on the map or in a settlement) and thus naturally allow things like family members meetings or fighting or trying to kill the enemy faction leader / one of his lieutenants in a coherent manner. They could be designated over gameplay dynamically with a somewhat player centric system (Player-controlled character family members & pre-gen acquaintances) and completely new ones could be spawned at random when needed (warband captain distinguishing himself, settlement governors...). Then later if you want to add revolts and new factions forming you have an obvious pool of characters to draw from.

Im currious, would it be possible to support this mod: https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2175327693

make it so that when we have the empire mod enabled, the settlers become under our control and not a free state, that way we have colonies we can control when they form themselves

ability to attack traders

@Hoshi
Thanks for the feedback, a lot of good suggestions.

As far as the different units, most of them do have specific purposes. Settlers and Traders are pretty self-explanatory. Scouts are the only real multi-purpose units since they can perform raids or be created to attack other units on the map, they're also faster and have a lower cost than their heavy-weight counterpart, warbands.
Warbands are only generated by a settlement to attack another settlement, and typically the combat power of the warband is intended to have a better than average chance of defeating the opponent settlement. Warbands CAN sense and engage a caravan or other unit, if they're close enough, but their 'scan' range is smaller and they won't pursue another unit if it moves out of range.

Some of the options to be able to create and control a vassal state were just added with the recent Empire mod compatibility update. You can create units using one of your player colonies. You can also form an alliance with another faction which will give you limited options to create and direct units.

There are plans to add "resource" objects prior to the 1.0 release along with some other objective based objects, new units, and some stationary /functional objects.

I like the idea of creating specialty units or historical figures, I'd also like to include some form of espionage to increase the options the player has to engage the factions. Having key figures in each faction would improve the personality of espionage or other diplomacy actions.

Is it possible to add a "mute incoming notifications" in the setting ?
I turned on "Me VS all colony" in the setting. When I load into the game, I got million notifications. "xxx going on war, xxx is hostile" something like that. They used ddos to defeat my new colony.