RimWorld the sci-fi colony sim Catch-All

Thanks for that, GB. Always great reading AAR's from this game.

I also suffered a total wipeout in my colony last night, mostly due to a heatwave sending temperatures up to 55C. Two of my colonists lost it and did the 'wandering aimlessly around with no clothes on' thing, which meant I couldn't hide them in the freezer to cool down. One then collapsed from hunger, lying outside in the baking heat. Then a raider party showed up, with only my two remaining controllable colonists left - One had a shooting skill of 2 and a pistol, the other had a knife, but liked to flee at the slightest hint of trouble. One was killed by the raiders, and the other incapacitated.

The raiders changed their mind on attacking the colony, though, and decided that abducting the incapacitated colonist would suffice them for now. Around that time Mrs Naked Wanderer, lying outside in the soaring heat, not had malnutrition, and subsequently died from heatstroke, leaving me with a single colonist, who was useful for just about nothing.

I deliberately made him attack some boomalopes, which exploded on death, sending him up in flames. Rather than running away, though, he decided to lie down to try and recover from all the stress - right in the middle of the ensuing boomalope fire.

Ah well, I like starting a new colony anyway

I'm really starting to love this game now that I've got a rudimentary grasp of the mechanics. It makes gameplay sessions feel more deliberate & focused.

Though I do think I messed up my walk-in food freezer setup though. I noticed that since my common room with dining table was on the opposite side of my compound, my lazy colonists were just eating their meals in the actual cooler where the prepared meals are stored. They would go on to get mood debuffs because they didn't eat at a table. So I figured I'd created another common room adjacent to the freezer/storage area.

Took some fiddling around, where I first had a simple door connecting the two rooms. That didn't work as the freezer room kept losing cool air with people tromping back and forth, leaving the separating door open more often than not. (But hey, at least they're now sitting at the table to eat.) Then I did a redesign creating another one of those vacuum hallways I mentioned earlier upthread. It should work in theory, but in spite of this my cooler room is still hovering well above freezing temp., putting my entire food supply in jeopardy.

I think I'm going to install a second AC unit in the room and see if that helps. If not I might have to just wall off my 2nd common room and relocate it somewhere else close to the food storage area.

Other than that, things are going well. I think it's cause I'm playing on Baby Mode (Chillax @ Base Builder difficulty). What difficulty are you guys playing on? If my current team bites it, I think I'm going to bump up the difficulty a bit to get more random events and such.

You can change the difficulty and Storyteller mid-game without having to restart.

I started on Classic/BaseBuilder, but my new colony is Classic/Rough. I do not see it getting very far...

Good call. Maybe I'll pump up the volume for a bit more challenge.

Speaking of which, yeah...I need this soundtrack in my life.

$8 for 30 tracks seems more than fair.

Aaron D. wrote:

I'm really starting to love this game now that I've got a rudimentary grasp of the mechanics. It makes gameplay sessions feel more deliberate & focused.

Though I do think I messed up my walk-in food freezer setup though. I noticed that since my common room with dining table was on the opposite side of my compound, my lazy colonists were just eating their meals in the actual cooler where the prepared meals are stored. They would go on to get mood debuffs because they didn't eat at a table. So I figured I'd created another common room adjacent to the freezer/storage area.

What I do is keep a small (1x2 or 4x4) storage space in the dining area for meals and give it priority. The food will be eaten before spoilage. If you have chairs for everyone then they will eat at a table.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/cPTsKio.jpg)

omni wrote:

You can change the difficulty and Storyteller mid-game without having to restart.

I started on Classic/BaseBuilder, but my new colony is Classic/Rough. I do not see it getting very far...

I did that first game on classic/rough.

I've started a new one on the same settings. I've allowed myself to pick whatever location I like on the planet but not reroll characters.

Gosh, this game strikes just the right balance between complexity, accessibility, fun, and challenge.

My second game is going better than the first. I ended up with two females in their 20's/30's and a 78-year-old male teacher. The teacher repeatedly hit on the women. They shot him down every single time. All the rejection piled up and depressed the teacher to the point where he cracked. He was also a pyromaniac, so when he got depressed he set fire to pretty much anything flammable: walls, furniture, tables, electric coolers. The women managed to hold the base together, but it made for a few sleepless nights.

Fortunately the teacher got an infected foot from a knife fight with a raider. I "overlooked" the infection and it worsened pretty quickly. A couple of days later and teacher was no longer a problem. The women still haven't buried him.

A few days later the husband of one of the women crash landed on the planet. He wasn't ready to join the colony immediately, was pretty messed up from the crash landing, and had generally awful skills. When a trading caravan came by stocked with food and medicine, we decided trading the guy into slavery was a good option. Whether his wife will get through the subsequent depression is a little bit of a question mark. Sometimes life involves hard choices. Deal with it.

You say fun, but you play distopian monster ruler

What they need to implement now is to allow the woman to marry the corpse to get over her depression

Did I go too far?

Chris Remo of Idle Thumbs fame is doing a RW series on YouTube.

Yea!

I was going pretty well in my second game until I ran into raiders with frag grenades. Note to self: Don't bunch up.

That left me with one colonist, but we had one prisoner and then a space pod crash landing gave us yet another prisoner. One of the prisoners just joined our cause, so now the colony has two settlers in it. If I can get the other one to join before the next raid, I think I might survive a bit longer.

Flintheart Glomgold wrote:

What they need to implement now is to allow the woman to marry the corpse to get over her depression

Did I go too far?

In my first game one of the women in the settlement used a raider corpse as a stargazing pillow. Makes you wonder.

I've been reading most of the posts here about this game. Is this more of a story generator where weird things happen (mostly based on the situation you set up), or is there a real strategy game here?

Oh it's a real strategy/base-builder game. If just so happens that the 'challenge' is not from some zerg'ing enemy, but in 'random' events and the knock on effects of that. A lot of it is luck what the 'storyteller' throws at you and when.

I had a series of unfortunate events in my game last night that just spiralled downwards to destruction. It could quite easily have gone the other way. Some people I've spoken to don't like the fact that 'random' events can have such a large impact on a playthrough, but I actually quite like that in this game. Best advise would be to watch a youtube let's play or some twitch streams of people playing, then you can see how much strategy there is to it for youself. I've been watching Blitzkriegsler's Let's Play on youtube, for an example.

Hmmm, I generally don't like feeling like luck plays a huge part in my success or failure. I'm OK with some luck though, where the player needs to mitigate the odds.

Do you know what the best part about this game is?

When you have a bug invasion and you wall them in and hook up several freezers on -200 C and watch them slowly slow down, get frostbite, go into a coma, and die. Free bug meat!

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/5oZPoWt.jpg)

Just wanted to give a shout out to two mods I've enjoyed. One is called Colony Manager, which adds a "Manager" job similar to what's in Dwarf Fortress and allows you to set thresholds for certain gathering and crafting jobs. The "Manager" pawn will then assign tasks needed to build the items.

The other one (made by the same author) is Work Tab, which overhauls the Work tab to allow for sorting, bulk priority changes, and some other nice additions.

robc wrote:

Hmmm, I generally don't like feeling like luck plays a huge part in my success or failure. I'm OK with some luck though, where the player needs to mitigate the odds.

Yeah, I feel like most of my failures have been due to my own lack of preparation. I mean, it's kind of random what the game throws at you, but even partway through a second game I've got a pretty good idea what's coming and what I need to be ready for. I'm sure good players can consistently have success.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/lDAM3CV.jpg)

Note to self, don't send a melee-focused character up against a wild pack of alphabeavers.

Woof.

I get a sit-rep warning that my northern zone is being ravaged by these super-elite beavers and btw I may want to do something before my entire forest areas are wiped out. So it was an all-hands alarm call. I think there were maybe 8 or so of these monsters just cutting through the trees like they were tissue paper.

Guess I was overzealous with the recruiting duties as poor Jung got wrecked trying to go in hand-to-hand style. After he was K.O.'ed and in shock, I had another team member carry him back to a hospital bed for R&R duty. But ding-dong Jung soon after decided he'd get himself something to eat and only made it half-way to the canteen before passing out cold with severe blood loss. Guess he didn't notice the trail of blood following after him.

It was time to take things seriously at that point. I assigned two colonists to give him around the clock medical attention & treatment.

Countless med-packs later, Jung is back up on his feet and attending to his specialized cooking duties. I really did start to question the number of med-kits I was burning through just to keep him stabilized, but then I remembered what a fine cook he was. Mmmm....muffalo-shepard's pie!

The rest of the colony will soon be kicking it Danial Boone style in their new fall-fashion sensation, beaver pelts.

I've been playing this off and on for the past six months or so, quite a bit since the Steam release. My worlds all have a couple things in common. First, I'm usually able to correct the problem(s) that caused my prior colony/colonies to meet a horrible demise. Second, something new always happens that causes a different type of horrible demise. Third, losing is fun.

I usually perish before my colony reaches the end of the first year (playing Classic/Rough). It used to frustrate me, but now I kind of enjoy watching my options get narrowed as people are injured, crops are blighted, manhunters or toxic fallout keep us indoors/dashing from building to building, and the raiders are more dangerous and more frequent.

Things I learned in my last playthrough: Turkeys will eat your crops. This is especially bad when you also experience a blight and an early fall freeze and you head into winter with no stored harvests and no medicine, and you haven't researched hydroponics yet, and don't really have the energy infrastructure for the day lamp anyway, and your best cook has their spine shattered in a raid and you have to euthanize them because they'll never move or manipulate anything ever again, and people get sad and have mental breaks when raids are happening and they wander right into the waiting knives and clubs of the enemy, and...

I watch both Blitzkriegsler and Quill18 for YouTube playthroughs. I linked both Alpha 13 Let's Plays and new Steam release Alpha 14 series (and then edited because formatting is hard, apparently).

sithload wrote:

I've been playing this off and on for the past six months or so, quite a bit since the Steam release. My worlds all have a couple things in common. First, I'm usually able to correct the problem(s) that caused my prior colony/colonies to meet a horrible demise. Second, something new always happens that causes a different type of horrible demise. Third, losing is fun.

I usually perish before my colony reaches the end of the first year (playing Classic/Rough). It used to frustrate me, but now I kind of enjoy watching my options get narrowed as people are injured, crops are blighted, manhunters or toxic fallout keep us indoors/dashing from building to building, and the raiders are more dangerous and more frequent.

Things I learned in my last playthrough: Turkeys will eat your crops. This is especially bad when you also experience a blight and an early fall freeze and you head into winter with no stored harvests and no medicine, and you haven't researched hydroponics yet, and don't really have the energy infrastructure for the day lamp anyway, and your best cook has their spine shattered in a raid and you have to euthanize them because they'll never move or manipulate anything ever again, and people get sad and have mental breaks when raids are happening and they wander right into the waiting knives and clubs of the enemy, and...

Yeah, I've concentrated on not letting the stuff that killed me in the first game kill me in this second game. For the most part I've succeeded, but now a whole batch of other unexpected stuff is messing with me. And it's definitely entertaining to watch, in a spectacular train crash kind of way.

An hour in and I have no idea what I'm doing. I've got a lazy politician who won't do most physical labor, and an 85 year old sniper who spends half his time cloudgazing. I've got him hunting, but the meat's going to spoil soon if I can't get my cooler up and running. No idea where I'm going to get more steel.

There's usually a bunch of steel on the ground roughly where you land, but starts as forbidden in terms of hauling. After that, there's quite often compacted steel visible on the edge of hills, look for darker patches.

Yeah, I snarfed up all the steel laying around. I'm about to start sending out mining parties, but I hadn't known what to look for. Really, I probably just need to focus more on resource gathering in general.

The compacted steel veins can take a while to spot, and there aren't all that many of them on the map I'm playing on now. Not sure if that's typical. I wonder if I should have selected a more mountainous starting location.

Really? I usually can't move for the stuff, but then I tend to play on mountainous maps, for the time being.

I tried to do a Solo Survivor run and literally as soon as I built a hut to live in a new person joined but had a 'hideous' stat that makes my people less happy to be around her. Gee thanks.

Also had a really cool event, nuclear fallout. A bomb went off somewhere on the planet and so I had to lock up all my people inside the base. Almost starved to death...almost had to eat the dog.

Random thing I'm wondering...

Does water even matter? I've put my first two settlements near water, but it doesn't seem to factor into gameplay much at all.

omni wrote:

Really? I usually can't move for the stuff, but then I tend to play on mountainous maps, for the time being.

My current area is really flat, with only a few mountains for mining. I remember wondering if it was a mistake to pick such a flat area when I started the game. Apparently the answer is "yes".

I'm also wondering if a mountainous area would be easier to defend. My base is open on four sides, which means that I'm building defenses to cover attacks from any side. If I had mountains on two or three sides, I think it might be easier to build a defense?

b12n11w00t wrote:

I tried to do a Solo Survivor run and literally as soon as I built a hut to live in a new person joined but had a 'hideous' stat that makes my people less happy to be around her. Gee thanks.

Also had a really cool event, nuclear fallout. A bomb went off somewhere on the planet and so I had to lock up all my people inside the base. Almost starved to death...almost had to eat the dog.

This game reminds me of Crusader Kings 2 in that losing can be highly entertaining, almost more so than winning.

Mountainous is certainly easier to defend, I'd say. Whether that takes something out of it for different players.. I guess you could focus on mass-producing something else that you do have access to, and then trading it for steel whenever you get the option. I know there is some form of 'orbital trading', but I'm nowhere near that advanced.