RimWorld: A sci fi colony SIM driven by an intelligent AI storyteller

Rimworld is one of my favorite games ever.

Wanna lead a team of misogynistic cannibals? You can. Wanna be a mad scientist that extracts the brain of his prisoners to create deadly robots? You can. Wanna build a village of drug-friendly pacifists? You can.

What's fantastic about this game is how many things are optional. You don't have to care about climbing the ladder of the empire if you don't want to. You don't need to build the space ship. You don't need to go to war with your neighbors.

Two big "flaws". The AI can sometimes throw at you problems that are too hard, like enemies to strong as it not always estimate correctly your strength, which brings me to the biggest flaw of the game: combat.

Your characters can literally throw themselves into enemy fire and need a lot of micromanagement for combat. Worse, the combat model is such that a guy in a power armor can be defeated by tribesmen with bows and arrows, that's because projectiles and armor isn't really simulated entirely.

An extension called "combat extended" attempts to remedy this, but I find it has its own problems.

That's me being pedantic, the game is incredible, go for if the idea of building your own base and story is attractive to you.

It might be a feature but it shouldn't be. I can't believe the amount of people that are ok for seemingly perpetual firefighting. Maybe they've never worked a job where they had to do that (figuratively or literally), because it is fucking tiresome. (This is my same complaint with the new X-COMs, stop presenting me with shit sandwich choices all the time!)

> or go digging inside mountains if you don't want bugs.

The alternative here is to get constantly shelled by invaders because all your shit is outside. I hope you have some reinforced barrels handy!

> I want to see _you_ survive in an environment with tattered clothes, saying a friend (or pet) dying, and yes, eating raw meat without a table.

Evidently none of the colonists were ever involved in scouting... everyone knows that losing your shit is the fastest way to die in a survival situation. Much as there is a "Low expectations" buff that blunts these effects at the beginning, there needs to be "I've Learned To Live With It" or "Shrugs Shoulders" buff that takes over as the game gets going on.

Also if the dude really hates raw meat that much, he should go build himself a campfire... nothing outs useless fatalism faster than not being able to do basic things for oneself. Someone teach these offworlders some fuckin self-care!

I too gave up on this game, even though I really wanted to like it. I like the idea of it.

In my limited experience in gaming, we were reminded to periodically ask about game mechanics: "But does this make the game more fun?"

Simulating realism is cool, but reality is full of boring or unpleasant stuff. Why suffer that extra? "Oh no, it seems you cut your finger while making dinner. Now you have an infection! And since you didn't eat dinner, you are now faint and must lie down. You need a doctor! Oh no, you _were_ the doctor!"

> Finishing the game is a bonus.

I have put 600 hours into the game. I have never completed it without cheating, and then only to see what the end looked like - which did not inspire me to change my approach to the game.

The joy of Rimworld is in the failure, or in succeeding for a time against the odds. Maybe the author could provide options to make the game easier, to attract another segment of the game market, but the way it currently works is much more attractive to myself.

I found Oxygen Not Included engrossing, but I had to cut myself off when I realized I kept spending each evening in the same mental state as when I firefight production outages.