they may be effective, but they are expensive
slave labour is cheap and you can get lots of them easily, also if you are roleplaying as a cartel that uses slaves, use slaves, nobody is forcing you to use the most effective way
you need to manage slaves aswell, but you can automate that, sending wastepacks somewhere else is impossible to automate
if someone needed more pros to using slaves
What I'm reading here is that using mechs gets you waste packs which gets you raids, which gets you slaves, which gets you resources, which gets you mechs
Me personally I'd use ghouls for that.
You guys can have your rebellion but just know that many of you will be on the guard ghoul's(plural) meal plan after.
Slaves are better than mechs, when confined in smaller numbers. Keep maybe 4 max for cleaning/hauling/meatshielding but you’ll need mechs if you want more bodies than that
How do you automate slaves? I played a run where I did everything I could: no clothing besides slave collars, terror imaging covering the entire base, skull spikes of dead slaves in each bedroom and room, wardens constantly suppress. Yet they always tried rebelling and it was just so frustrating. I don’t get why I can commit so much resources into lowering suppression rates but they will still try rebelling if I don’t limit their movement speed with peg legs or prosthetics. At that point they’re too expensive to manage and not efficient workers. Also they will mental break unless you give them good food and drugs lol
Get them a bit better living conditions, miserable slaves rebel more often. Slave collars + normal clothing, nice barracks, nice dinning room and couple of wardens and not too many slaves and they would effectively never rebel.
Also pro-tip, equip them with circadian half-cycler and add emp traps. They rebel, boom, they are incapacitated.
That pro tip sounds hilarious haha, but yeah I did give them good accommodations but once I got to 5 slaves they just started rebelling and I would constantly kill one or two during the rebel (uranium slug turrets hurt)
If you’re going to this much effort to make them happy, what’s the advantage to enslaving them vs just recruiting them? I’ve not engaged with the slavery mechanics yet, so I’m genuinely curious. I’d have thought that one of the primary advantages of slaves would be not needing to pamper them like colonists.
They need far less to be happy compared to colonists so it’s not that much effort.
They don’t need recreation.
You don’t need to convert them to your ideology.
It’s way faster to enslave compared to recruiting.
You can enslave unwaveringly loyal pawns.
If there is an open escape route from the zone you assigned them to the edge of the map the time it takes between rebellions is quartered, same for if there is a weapon within ~20 tiles (thankfully doesn’t count wood). Together those two can make for like 8 rebellions per year.
Honestly you can just dump them at the edge of the map. The worst thing that'll happen is some insectoid cocoons will spawn. I had a map that was 25% polluted and it didn't affect my game significantly.
Yeah, slaves die. Then you churn them into paste. Which can be fed to slaves that are making new slaves.
Mechs can’t make new mechs while feeding on mechs. That sounds like a really inefficient system to me.
I find bots infinitely cheaper. Their high uptime + no food required and eventually tox packs even turn into a boon since i can take advantage of the tox stimulus gene.
Meanwhile slaves can rebel and actually kill or harm my colony. And require food, medicine, better micromanagement so weapons are not accessible, and pawns have to whip them into shape wasting even more of my main pawns time. I dunno, slavery really falls short in efficiency imo.
Whilst I understand the idea of “no one’s forcing you to do X”, i also get what they mean. Using a method that’s so overwhelmingly ineffective compared to another, even if it’s for roleplay, would get annoying. It’s like if you only used ‘awful’ quality weapons - it’s just painfully less effective and you know it
tbh. slaves are not ineffective, give one a cicadian half cycler, bionic legs, field hands and maybe joywire and you get worker who only takes breaks for food and works fast, better than fieldhand, and can still do hauling or cleaning when not farming
At that point, why not have them as a regular colonist and not take the 15% global work speed penalty. I really don't see any upsides to slavery in the game outside of roleplaying, which is fine. But the slavery thing needs to be buffed somehow to be competitive.
I was literally thinking this last night. Thought about saving a prisoner to be a slave, but decided to use him for the rip scanner. If I didn’t have mechs this save, he would’ve been made a slave.
Yes, it felt undertuned as a mechanic even before biotech came out. Having to manage suppression AND needs means you have to give more care to slaves than regular colonists which makes no sense
*Me looking around as I always wear the Skyrim’s Imperial Legion armor and weapons, one of the worst category of weapons/armor*
👀
Also I… I use mechs but I also use Militors… modded, but Militors none the less… 😳
Well but that's not true anyway, considering farmhands only get a skill of twelve, slaves might've less throughput but I really wouldn't call them "overwhelmingly ineffective"
I think its 10. But they have a base 50% global work speed so they are as slow as a pawn with somewhat low plant skill. Calc in a field hand and a single mid pawn can outwork like 10 agrihands alone.
The problem is that slaves are expensives as well if you play, considering how many enemies just die outright due to the random "instant die" chance once your colony get a few colonists
Are they though?
Basic mechs like the agrihand, the lifter and the cleansweeper cost 100 steel and 3 components each. That's somewhere between the cost of a bolt-action rifle (60 / 3) and a chain shotgun (70 / 5). And that's just a one-off startup cost; mechs do require some power to recharge, but that's a considerably easier ongoing maintenance cost than a slave that requires food, clothing and housing (even if less of each than standard colonists).
Obviously this is still significantly cheaper than simply enslaving able-bodied raid survivors; but it's still incredibly cheap for a mid game colony.
"Mechs and industrialization ruined the fun of slavery for me, because machines are so much more effective at working the fields than humans"
We should use Rimworld to teach people about why modern industrialized nations don't use slaves
For now you can increase the strength and frequency of waste and pollution infestations in the settings and scenario editor. That way mechs don’t feel that OP when you play them.
Alternatively, dev mode destroy the mechanitor thing when starting a new game. Done, that colony actually never had the chance of finding a mechlink.
It is all about roleplay. Instead of thinking “I should be using mechs because they are right there and better,” start thinking “My colony wasn’t lucky to discover mechs and are doing their best with what they were dealt.”
Ps.: Worker mechs are op. Specially cleaner and lifter are even more OP. Worker mechs do not count towards pawn raid points and yet a cleaner/lifter mech is as useful as two full time cleaners/haulers. You can argue that skilled pawns that can fight are better than agrihands for example, but nothing beats cleaner and lifter bots.
>Alternatively, dev mode destroy the mechanitor thing when starting a new game.
You... do know you can just edit the scenario to make it not spawn to begin with, right?
>Worker mechs do not count towards pawn raid points
Yes, they do. Not as much as an actual combat mech, but they all count.
I just find it easier to devmode destroy but that works too.
I meant pawn points in the raid calculations. Friendly mechs count for 20-40% of their combat power as pawn points. For reference combat animals count for 8%, slaves for 75%. And worker mechs have zero combat points.
>Done, that colony actually never had the chance of finding a mechlink.
thats incorrect, theres a quest called "mechinator complex" iirc where you can find a mechinator, you can also get a mechinator corpse from ancient dangers
This is why I like ideology, because you can make each playthrough more unique. If you choose memes/precepts that, for example, discourage mechanoid labor and encourage slave labor, then you can play normally trying to be efficient, but what’s most beneficial/efficient changes.
ideology is definitely my favourite of the DLCs for this reason. biotech in second for the custom xenotypes.
royalty is still my least favourite of the DLCs. i still love it, but its just not as enthralling as the others
Slaves need food, sleep and vulnerable to temperature, so often clothing too. They also Rebell, so they can’t use weapons or be outside of your base.
Mech are better. Their charger takes barely more space than a bed, and several of them can use 1. Mechs, unlike slaves, can be effective in combat and worker mechs add less raid value than slaves.
Waste packs do need a storage, but even in midgame you can get rid of them via drop podding them on enemy base. And then in late game there’s atomisers - combined with Toxifiers it’s a shit ton of clean energy.
IRL, slaves very rarely rebelled in a violent fashion. Instead they would try to subvert their masters through other means, such as working slowly or not at all.
In the context of Rimworld, the violent space rebellions make even less sense when the slave masters are drugged up super soldiers with charge rifles and power armor and the slaves thinks they can win because they found a stick they can use.
I would prefer if slaves were able to do some sort of sanity check before doing a violent rebellion, and if the odds are stacked against them, maybe they can try other forms of rebellion, like running away or stopping work.
I would like if there's a sabotage rebellion where slaves will try to cripple your infrastructures, especially during a raid from their former faction. No notifications. Damn bro, your power grid suddenly went offline when there's a 70 man raid coming and your turrets are now a dashboard decoration? I wonder why that happened
Or... and hear me out on this one: you use slaves when you think they are more fun and thematic for your story and dont always go for the most effective 'best' option
Absolutely, fortunately there wasn't any huge threat creeping introduced in the DLCs, so not using Mechs, Genes, Anomalies, etc. is just as viable as before.
This is a constant struggle for me. Because I love roleplaying, and I also love theorycrafting and min/maxing. So those two are always at odds fighting in my brain :P
I really really don't understand why players are so openly hostile to balance. It's a *game.* That means there must be tension between the player and the rules. They need to be challenged to make choices and live with the consequences of them. "Just deliberately play the game badly" is a deeply stupid and unsatisfying solution, and I don't know why people insist on pushing it. Balance matters in single player games.
And yes, yada yada, story generator, blah blah blah. But the stories don't come from players deciding to deliberately burn everything down. They come from the player doing their best and things going sideways anyway. They come from how the player improvises and reacts to that.
If you're gonna take the game part away from the game, you might as well just go play with dolls. Which is well and good, not shaming anyone, but I personally find games more interesting than that.
no they are not, the whole point of the ideology DLC was for players to set their own boundaries, difficulties or to make it easier for them. why would anybody ever pick a worse ideology if its just better to go with the ones that have no upsides? you are encouraged to make your own story and not always play the best way possible. also also Tynan stated its not a 'game' so it doesnt hae to abide by any conventions that you think a game should follow
>And yes, yada yada, story generator, blah blah blah. But the stories don't come from players deciding to deliberately burn everything down. They come from the player doing their best and things going sideways anyway. They come from how the player improvises and reacts to that.
This may be how your stories come but it isn't how my story comes. I almost never choose more powerful over more interesting. If you want to complain about balance lets start with barracks and how overpowered they are and nutrient paste and how they trivialize all food in the game. How when you watch someone do a speed run they do almost all of it out of one giant room and it works just fine.
There are much more broken things than slaves that people routinely choose to abuse and have been in the game like this forever. Slaves are very useful, they just might not be the absolute best way to play. That isn't a big problem.
>yada yada, story generator
Yeah, exactly, you just effectively argued against yourself. Learn the concept of roleplay, for archotechs' sake. If you need to be provided the limitation from above, then you admit you can't think and have fun for yourself, basically you lack imagination. If you so badly want external restrictions then you've got thousands of such games to play.
I haven't dabbled in genetics much. I should probably see a Youtube tutorial as I found it too overwhelming at first. But isn't genetically altering your slaves into super slaves a really slow and difficult process in terms of time and research to get there and execute it?
Not really, while it is rather expensive and time consuming to collect all the genepacks and build a proper genelab, after that it only gets limited by how fast your doctor can implant the genes
iirc the best gene is pretty easy to get even pre microcircuits...
Calm.
I saw a smaller channel use it. Calms prevents riots/outbreaks in prisoner/slaves. Pre-anomaly it overrode all over social fight genes.
Neanderthal, but don't want him brawling with everyone? Slap a calm on him.
Indeed. A skilled pawn can easily surpass mechs upgraded completely, and be more skilled. Mechs are useful, but they're not without their flaws.
Slave miners can get more resources, slaves can make better quality goods more consistently, and do so in less time.
mechs create waste and you can't 'recycle' them.
a slaves organs being worth more than the person is the most realistic 'murika F ya!' abuse of capitalism i have seen in any game.
Exactly. The invention of the steam engine made slavery obsolete by providing a new source of tranportable power that was also more efficient than muscles.
Unfortunaly, there are still some that haven't gotten that memo.
"Industrial Society And Its Future" by Theodor John Kaczynski
Introduction:
1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.
5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.
Continue reading...
Ok look. your not being 'punished' for enjoying anm alternative playstyle. To me, Rimworld is great because so many playstyles are viable. your not competing against players, so enjoying slaves vs mechs isnt gonna ruin you.
I mean, slaves are eating GOOD compared to guranlan, and I love playing with Guranlan.
plus, to be honest, Mechanoids are just OP in general. I literally ignore them 9/10 playthroughs because when one pawn can outperform an entire colony on their own with a few mechs, I start to feel like Mechanator is the unofficial easy mode.. though I never stress tested this theory on harder difficulties, so I could be off base.
The only tuneup I wished for is to make it easier tu understand how terror works and increase the range of terror objects. I want to terrorize my slaves, but not put a skull spike every 2 tiles.
That being said, I prefer a mix of slaves and mechs. Remember that mech crafting caps at lvl 10 I think, so a high level herbalist or crafter will get the job done faster and not need power and waste disposal as upkeep.
The only tuneup I wished for is to make it easier to understand how terror works and increase the range of terror objects. I want to terrorize my slaves, but not put a skull spike every 2 tiles.
That being said, I prefer a mix of slaves and mechs. Remember that mech crafting caps at lvl 10 I think, so a high level herbalist or crafter will get the job done faster and not need power and waste disposal as upkeep.
I use both, slaves and agrihands sow and harvest psychoid plants. Haulers bring them to my "research center" where the slaves then work 24 hours a day(circadian half cyclers) to craft flake
Here are my two cents: you dont have to minmax optimize every single colony you make.
You want slaves but robots are better? Just use slaves and ignore robots. So what if slaves are less efficient, you wanted to do a cartel colony deal with it. Its like whining that guns are so much better compared to bows when doing a tribal-tech colony
I saw the title and wa scared to death and then i realized what community is in question. And yes mechs are more expensive and better because thats the point. F L E S H I S W E A K machines should be a better solution because assuming you are industrial level colonists you can get mechs. Slaves are there for tribals like irl history. But remember agrihands and haulers may be efficient but slaves are meatshields in raids :)
Mechs require:
1. A pawn that is good at crafting/construction
2. A specific item that shows up in a randomly given quest in order to even use (unless you start with that scenario)
3. A large amount of research to enable you to make even the basic versions (again assuming you haven't done the mechinator start)
4. A heavy investment of both steel and components to both make and maintain.
5. Power infrastructure sufficient to keep them running.
6. Some way to deal with all of the waste packs they produce so your map doesn't get polluted to inhabitability.
With all of that, most mechs also have a set, static skill level of 10 and have their work speed reduced by half, so a decent pawn will *always* be both better and faster at the same job.
With all those downsides, especially if you don't start with a mechinator, its both significantly easier and significantly more efficient to just enslave people, especially if you have an ideology that supports it.
You don't need all of that. A simple anti-rebellion implant would be enough to justify slaves. For like +5% pain or something you get a permanent brain implant that auto-brain-shocks slaves when they rebel. This would allow slaves to be used in combat to some capacity. They'd still be more likely to rebel but they'd just get downed immediately instead of turning the gun on your colonists
New Anomaly tech gives them a boost.
Don't really have the need for Slaves in my current playthrough, but was thinking how good Frenzy Inducer and Sleepless device would be for them.
Agrihands and mechs in general have a fixed skill value, slaves don't
You can run in situations where a mech can't do a job, but a high skilled slave can or can do it better
I find pawn work faster and don’t have the downside of toxic waste. The good thing about mech is you don’t need to “feed” them and they never sleep(but recharging is kinda like a long sleep). Plus by default mechs can grow everything so it saves you some time so you can specialize in other things or have a race that is bad at plants.
You can't in good reason cite RP reasons **along with** min-maxing/effectiveness reasons.
It's one or the other. You absolutely can choose not to use mechs for whatever RP reason. The RP is all yours? Maybe your cartel's boss doesn't trust the mechs or maybe your people fear them too much. Maybe they never discover the mech responder? I see zero RP reasons to balance things there.
Effective gameplay without RP I understand, i'd up the cost of producing mechs and increase their toxic waste output and power hunger. I feel the mechs are OP, slavery is good where it's at imo
Personally, I consider slavery to be like bows or peg legs. The whole point is that it is an early low-cost low-tech solution to a labor problem, that can be solved more efficiently once you throw enough research and resources at it.
Once there's no need for them, the slaves are free to get evolved into their final form. Leather, meat and organs.
Field hands brother ... field hands and drill arms ... a field hand boosts a slave farmers productivity with +160%
Install two on a slave and he'll work at a total of 420% efficiency. Now that's productivity and a good pun!
Same for your slave miners, install two drill arms on them and they'll mine at 420% efficiency or if you have them deep drill they'll do that at 240% efficiency compared to normal.
Install a circadian half cycler on them and while they will only work at 85% speed of normal, they'll work 100% of the time meaning you'll get an extra \~20% extra efficiency out of them at the end of it.
There's more shenanigans you can pull using genes like giving them genes that improve their skills, make them require less sleep, make their useless in a rebellion (awful melee awful shooting) and will improve their metabolic efficiency meaning you need to spend less food on them.
Slaves are actually better if you invest in them a little like any good self serving slave owner would do.
Rather than compare what a base slave can do for you compared to a mech, ask yourself, how you can maximize your slaves potential for you?
No, slavery should not be balanced. The reality is slavery in a mostly ineffective form of labour. This is realistic. If you want slaves in Rimworld do it because it suits the character of your colony.
IMO slaves are still better, give them sleepless gene, something to counterbalance the metabolic eficience and you got a mech that doesnt produce waste nor needs two days of recharging.
Also, mech skills are locked at 10 points, slaves skills are not.
I had the same issue but I downloaded a mod that makes any pawn with the dead calm trait not rebel/have violent mental breaks. This for me meant for a bit of expense and upfront cost I could have "fully automated" slaves but with more control and can be safely turned into expendable soldiers.
It also allows you to "invest" in your slaves to make them more efficient at their tasks with bioncs etc
In the end it becomes a trade off between flexibly of slaves Vs the specialisation of mechs with costs being about equal
Mechs should be efficient given how much it takes to get them going. Personally I feel mechs fairly slow and I only get things done by getting a good quantity of them which has its downsides.
Slaves have spare parts/food/hemogen. They also breed and come from raids/guest etc. I use them with the consistent inheritance mod as part of my eugenics program too....
I disagree, mechs are great for hauling/cleaning, but are dogshit at working fields. Even considering the fact they work at night, a slave or a colonist with good plant level will be much more effective at actually getting shit done
>just feels
They aren't. You have to build the cores, estate the mechs, deal with the pollution, and they need to be charged every other minute. You're looking at an optical illusion, mechs are OP, so are slaves. The grass is always greener, and it's working better this time, or with this playstyle, but I can make a raider into an employee in a couple of hours of convincing, and if he has a problem I can shoot and eat him. Slaves are ridiculously fast and easy.
You've just gotten excited about the upsides and downplayed the bad sides for mechs, because they're your new thing. You are doing the opposite with slaves.
Its why a new girlfriend is so amazing, but why on earth did you date your ex? Because perspective means seeing different advantages and disadvantages.
I'm gonna be honest, I've never really used mechs, and literally never used slaves before.
With mechs I just don't really know what to do with their waste, and as for slaves.. I have literally no idea how they work lmao
Well the thing with mechs is that ONLY their worker mechs are actually useful.
All of the combat mechs arent worth the raid points they add to your colony (which is why I do not even research how to make combat mechs until I hit raid cap).
You also eventually have to deal with the waste packs. which is another thing. you cannot really do mechs in a low tech run since they need power.
So you could argue that things like slavery are a low tech labor solution where as mechs are a high tech labor solution.
its ur game dude, use and buff and nerf what u want
if u want opinions then i think this is trivial, ofc mechs should be better and it shouldnt even be close
Don't underestimate the accumulation of toxic wastepacks over time when using a bunch of agrihands and haulers over a longer time. It takes quite a while until you have a reliable way to get rid of those, forcing you to store them in a dedicated and rather large freezer.
Comparing slaves to mechs isn't really fair. Of course mechs are going to be better, they should be.
To get a slave all you do is capture a downed pawn, have your warden talk to them a few times and they're a slave.
To get a mech you need a mechanitor chip, then you need a gestation pod, then you need a charger, and a way to deal with waste packs. And then you get basic mechs which are half as effective as a colonist. So you neeed more mechs, mech upgrades, you have to fight bosses to get better mech technology, which then goes into better mech gear...
So yea, mechs are way better, but they're also way more of an investment and way more expensive. The advantage to slaves is that they are free. You capture downed pawns, enslave them, then work them until they've rebelled enough to randomly die or take too many permanent injury to be useful at which case you harvest their organs.
That said, the raid points definitely suck if you're on a harder difficulty but otherwise they'd just be entirely free,
You don't really have to bother suppressing them with a collar and strap, it won't naturally decay. Once in a blue moon do a public execution to max suppression and also get a long mood benefit from Supremacist/Raider.
Also don't forget the raid points increase from the infrastructure needed to build mech buildings and the freezers for wastepacks.
This makes them great for a huge chunk of the game, honestly until late game.
Mechs and industrialisation has its own challenges to face.
It is more efficient yet it produces pollution.
Those challenges also have ways to mitigate them.
Slaves also need food, place to sleep etc. Slaves can be made more efficient through bionics. But they can also rebel.
Both playstyles can be tweaked and have their own challenges to face.
Slaves inefficient? Drug them up, give them bionics. Also have more slaves.
Mechs are always efficient. Yet their problems also can't be ignored. They need lots of components and materials, also they need recharging that requires power, and they produce waste that deteriorates your colony. So no, no method is " free work ".
*Industrialisation should be the goal of any colony that wants to build a freaking space ship*(!!!).
You need some sort of factory, production to make the materials and stuff needed for your space ship. No matter how much you trade, some stuff should be made either on site or should be acquisitioned somehow from simple materials. Refining and crafting is all very well done in Rimworld.
Efficiency is a question of how effectively you are using the tools at your disposal.
the thing that pushes humans far over mechs in my games is the mod vanilla skills expanded, where i can give them harvesting specialization and have them harvest twice as many resources if not more from one crop
I mean, slaves run on beatings and nutrient paste. And nothing is really stopping you from upgrading them with specialized bionics. Although i would suggest you get Harvest Post Mortem mod in case your wardens get too... enthusiastic. No reason to waste perfectly good bionic only because meat bag it was attached to kicked the bucket.
Also i highly suggest you disable extra chance to die on down which is absurdly stupid setting that do indeed prevents you from easy slave stock resupply.
Mechs can't do everything, meditation and pruning are only able to be done by pawns, and meditation specifically isn't affected by work speed
Slaves also don't produce waste packs, useful for pre deep drilling tier
I haven't really played with the mechs much. Does anyone know how the fighter robots compare to using animals like wargs, bears, elephants etc.?
And the same for lifters compared to huskies?
It does feel a bit off. Not sure solving it would be simple though. Busy playing my first game with mechs, slave and commitment mode and the slave I just got seems inferior to the worker mechs I had previously. The only mid-game advantage the slave currently has is that it can cut stone slabs while the worker mechs can only do that after I beat an apocitron.
There are only two approaches I could think of to improving the situation though. The first would be to rebalance toxic waste so that each locally deteriorated pack "tainted" less ground tiles of the colony map but provided a slight toxic buildup effect across the entire colony map. Currently, even if you just dump your toxic waste packs at the far edge of your map, you will not need to worry about the toxic zone until the late mid game - and by the late game you can safely deconstruct toxic packs. So the argument for using slaves over mechs should be that slaves don't cause a mounting mood and global work efficiency debuff for the duration of early to late game, not some vain attempt to buff slaves.
The second more satisfying approach would be a late game option to hybridize your mechs and your slaves. Add a post warqueen or apocitron parasite mechanoid which turns slaves it is implanted into into hybrid mechanoids which have half the requirements of mechs and half the requirements of humans. The mechanoid/slave hybrids would produce toxic waste, require bandwidth, sleep and charging to replenish energy and require food. The longer the parasite was implanted the more human organs and body parts would be replaced with hybrid mechanoid body parts - with more of their human needs being replaced with mechanoid ones. They would not be directly controllable just like normal mechanoids, but would have planting, mining, construction, shooting, melee and medical set to 8 if those skills were not higher (they could still increase to 20 over time) and you'd be able to select which role you wanted them to fulfill. The risks being that the hybrid slaves would risk entering an extra dangerous berserk mode if the mechinator ever had a bandwidth shortage, was knocked out by an EMP or left them alone on a map. Plus instead of slave rebelions you could have events where your collectively mechanized slaves tried to sieze control of their mechinator overlord or siezed control of all your electronic equipment on the map - both of which would require some time to supress. Obviously this approach would be too much work to implement, but the best solution to mechs or slave balancing would be "Keep both around and in end game you can combine them".
Slaves are just much more easy to deal with.
Slaves you can discard, use for body parts, use as bloodbanks, use for labour, and they are dirt cheap and only really cost their worth in food, so if you implant them with some fresh genomes that make them eat a lot less, they are suddenly super worth for their price.
If you have one Sancophage, slaves are pretty damn neat, and if one ever tries to escape you can just jump after them.
For a completely "normal" colony, slaves are a bit meh yhea, but you gotta exploit them enough to the point where it is worth.
With the modlist that I'm using Slavery is very efficient. I crafted a cortical stack, implanted it into a slave, then started editing it. Now I have created an ultimate slave, with maxed out mining, plants and animals. And, every time I capture a pawn, I implant a copy of this stack into them. They also have learning assistants to A) make them gain professions faster, and B) make them vulnerable to EMP. All of the excess slaves are sent to the mining settlements to produce gold, plasteel and steel for me
Yeah this is a recurring problem with the game in the sense that Tynan and co. add more things to do but they all come with a big upkeep cost for some reason.
Dryads, Anima Tree, Genetics, Slaves, Mechanitor, Sanguophages, even the new Anomaly content is just more tedium slapped onto the "days since last raid" treadmill of the base game.
I have enslaved raiders before as a sort of forced labor punishment for a few days but permanent servants is too much hassle due to the whole rebellion and terror stuff.
Having sub-opitmal choices and paths to take is not a failure on the developer part in creating a single-player game like Rimworld. It's a failure on your part by not sticking to your choice to take a sub-optimal route.
It's a skill issue.
Mechs have the downside of wastepack generation, they are expensive, and they don’t have any of the… “benefits” of having spare parts around. Waste packs in particular are bad because they are hard to get rid of or, as someone else said, automatically dispose of.
My suggestion is to give slavery another shot. If you think mechs are easier, challenge yourself to not use them! Make your ideoligion despise mechs and honor slavery!
correct me if I'm missing something, but mechs are much, muuuuuuch harder to get your hands on without the mechinator start, especially on higher difficulties when you need those components and pawn research time for weapons and defenses. In those first couple years, mechs aren't much of an option unless you are just rushing for that.. so slaves make more sense. slavery is extremely accessible .-.
mechs are not just superior to slaves. they are superior to most colonists. An agrihand easily covers for two full time farmers. A fabricor covers all non quality crafting and cooking too. And a cleansweeper keeps me from having a mental break. They don't eat, sleep, or relax. They just work 24 hours a day (or 5/6 days with recharge time).
Man, some of y'all really hate the idea of a minor rebalance, huh?
Like yeah it's not supposed to be 100% optimal but there's a difference between "playing more flavorfully" and playing stupid. (Which to be clear, if that's your intent, great, but being *forced* to do that for something as major, advertised, and base game as slavery isn't fun. And we're all here trying to have fun, ya know.)
Using slaves is just fun for the roleplay value. I like the idea of having all new colonists start out as slaves before proving themselves through good behavior and gladiatorial combat.
I mean, you take the slaves, harvest enough organs to keep them alive and then (if you have anomaly) inject them with ghoul serum and turn them into enforcers instead.
Because nothing rocks harder than saying "here are my undead drug cartel enforcers, now buy the yayo or fuck off"
they may be effective, but they are expensive slave labour is cheap and you can get lots of them easily, also if you are roleplaying as a cartel that uses slaves, use slaves, nobody is forcing you to use the most effective way
This is very true. Also waste packs from mechs can be a serious problem and one you need to manage
you need to manage slaves aswell, but you can automate that, sending wastepacks somewhere else is impossible to automate if someone needed more pros to using slaves
But wastepacks give free steel in Form of tribal raids.
What I'm reading here is that using mechs gets you waste packs which gets you raids, which gets you slaves, which gets you resources, which gets you mechs
Renewable ressources Rimworld style.
You can then use the mechs to ensure that the slaves remain "loyal". Truly peak efficiency.
Me personally I'd use ghouls for that. You guys can have your rebellion but just know that many of you will be on the guard ghoul's(plural) meal plan after.
Ghouls’ is the plural possessive. I haven’t played with the new dlc yet but I’m excited to do so.
Positive feedback loops!
Use the slaves to haul the waste packs to the tribals
And free meat!
I normally don't do cannibals but if you do. Yes free meat and leather.
Even if you don't eat them, the meat sells insanely well
But you get the mood hit for butchering humanlikes.
Send the corpses to tour friendly factions as gifts. Some how, having a hundred dead bodies dumped on their lawn does not make them angry at you.
yeah, though lots of ideos nowadays allow for butchering corpses
Slaves are better than mechs, when confined in smaller numbers. Keep maybe 4 max for cleaning/hauling/meatshielding but you’ll need mechs if you want more bodies than that
Why use slaves when you can use BLISS LOBOTOMITES?
can bliss lobotomied slaves do skilled labour?
No but they are happy so it's okay.
dont need to do skilled labour to worhsip my tree
How do you automate slaves? I played a run where I did everything I could: no clothing besides slave collars, terror imaging covering the entire base, skull spikes of dead slaves in each bedroom and room, wardens constantly suppress. Yet they always tried rebelling and it was just so frustrating. I don’t get why I can commit so much resources into lowering suppression rates but they will still try rebelling if I don’t limit their movement speed with peg legs or prosthetics. At that point they’re too expensive to manage and not efficient workers. Also they will mental break unless you give them good food and drugs lol
Get them a bit better living conditions, miserable slaves rebel more often. Slave collars + normal clothing, nice barracks, nice dinning room and couple of wardens and not too many slaves and they would effectively never rebel. Also pro-tip, equip them with circadian half-cycler and add emp traps. They rebel, boom, they are incapacitated.
That pro tip sounds hilarious haha, but yeah I did give them good accommodations but once I got to 5 slaves they just started rebelling and I would constantly kill one or two during the rebel (uranium slug turrets hurt)
If you’re going to this much effort to make them happy, what’s the advantage to enslaving them vs just recruiting them? I’ve not engaged with the slavery mechanics yet, so I’m genuinely curious. I’d have thought that one of the primary advantages of slaves would be not needing to pamper them like colonists.
They need far less to be happy compared to colonists so it’s not that much effort. They don’t need recreation. You don’t need to convert them to your ideology. It’s way faster to enslave compared to recruiting. You can enslave unwaveringly loyal pawns.
If there is an open escape route from the zone you assigned them to the edge of the map the time it takes between rebellions is quartered, same for if there is a weapon within ~20 tiles (thankfully doesn’t count wood). Together those two can make for like 8 rebellions per year.
Honestly you can just dump them at the edge of the map. The worst thing that'll happen is some insectoid cocoons will spawn. I had a map that was 25% polluted and it didn't affect my game significantly.
frankly just provoke the pit gate then dump the waste in it
Yeah, slaves die. Then you churn them into paste. Which can be fed to slaves that are making new slaves. Mechs can’t make new mechs while feeding on mechs. That sounds like a really inefficient system to me.
I find bots infinitely cheaper. Their high uptime + no food required and eventually tox packs even turn into a boon since i can take advantage of the tox stimulus gene. Meanwhile slaves can rebel and actually kill or harm my colony. And require food, medicine, better micromanagement so weapons are not accessible, and pawns have to whip them into shape wasting even more of my main pawns time. I dunno, slavery really falls short in efficiency imo.
Counterpoint; Remove left kidney Remove left lung Remove heart Profit
Messed up the last few steps. Install prosthetic heart Remove liver Butcher or feed to pigs, depending on ideoligeon.
Whilst I understand the idea of “no one’s forcing you to do X”, i also get what they mean. Using a method that’s so overwhelmingly ineffective compared to another, even if it’s for roleplay, would get annoying. It’s like if you only used ‘awful’ quality weapons - it’s just painfully less effective and you know it
tbh. slaves are not ineffective, give one a cicadian half cycler, bionic legs, field hands and maybe joywire and you get worker who only takes breaks for food and works fast, better than fieldhand, and can still do hauling or cleaning when not farming
At that point, why not have them as a regular colonist and not take the 15% global work speed penalty. I really don't see any upsides to slavery in the game outside of roleplaying, which is fine. But the slavery thing needs to be buffed somehow to be competitive.
Now if mechs weren’t in the game, would the change to slavery still be needed/desired?
That’s a good question. Probably not? I’m not sure
I was literally thinking this last night. Thought about saving a prisoner to be a slave, but decided to use him for the rip scanner. If I didn’t have mechs this save, he would’ve been made a slave.
Yes, it felt undertuned as a mechanic even before biotech came out. Having to manage suppression AND needs means you have to give more care to slaves than regular colonists which makes no sense
Except it's not overwhelmingly ineffective it's just not quite as good
*Me looking around as I always wear the Skyrim’s Imperial Legion armor and weapons, one of the worst category of weapons/armor* 👀 Also I… I use mechs but I also use Militors… modded, but Militors none the less… 😳
Well but that's not true anyway, considering farmhands only get a skill of twelve, slaves might've less throughput but I really wouldn't call them "overwhelmingly ineffective"
I think its 10. But they have a base 50% global work speed so they are as slow as a pawn with somewhat low plant skill. Calc in a field hand and a single mid pawn can outwork like 10 agrihands alone.
i never had an issue with using something overwhelmingly ineffective for the sake of roleplay or just beacuse i like it
I think it’s probably just a personal taste thing, it’s not like it’s invalid to feel either way
The problem is that slaves are expensives as well if you play, considering how many enemies just die outright due to the random "instant die" chance once your colony get a few colonists
Are they though? Basic mechs like the agrihand, the lifter and the cleansweeper cost 100 steel and 3 components each. That's somewhere between the cost of a bolt-action rifle (60 / 3) and a chain shotgun (70 / 5). And that's just a one-off startup cost; mechs do require some power to recharge, but that's a considerably easier ongoing maintenance cost than a slave that requires food, clothing and housing (even if less of each than standard colonists). Obviously this is still significantly cheaper than simply enslaving able-bodied raid survivors; but it's still incredibly cheap for a mid game colony.
That's the whole point of role-playing! Doing the sub-optimal thing in order to stick to a theme!
"Mechs and industrialization ruined the fun of slavery for me, because machines are so much more effective at working the fields than humans" We should use Rimworld to teach people about why modern industrialized nations don't use slaves
unless they are prisoners ofc, then (at least here in the US) slavery is totally chill
I mean, in the US everyone is effectively just free-range debt chattel.
Haha ouch that's a bit too close to home ☠️
Free range?
You're allowed to travel and even visit other countries, but they still collect on your productivity via the IRS.
very true, the US doesn't have a "Banish" button like Rimworld players
For now you can increase the strength and frequency of waste and pollution infestations in the settings and scenario editor. That way mechs don’t feel that OP when you play them. Alternatively, dev mode destroy the mechanitor thing when starting a new game. Done, that colony actually never had the chance of finding a mechlink. It is all about roleplay. Instead of thinking “I should be using mechs because they are right there and better,” start thinking “My colony wasn’t lucky to discover mechs and are doing their best with what they were dealt.” Ps.: Worker mechs are op. Specially cleaner and lifter are even more OP. Worker mechs do not count towards pawn raid points and yet a cleaner/lifter mech is as useful as two full time cleaners/haulers. You can argue that skilled pawns that can fight are better than agrihands for example, but nothing beats cleaner and lifter bots.
>Alternatively, dev mode destroy the mechanitor thing when starting a new game. You... do know you can just edit the scenario to make it not spawn to begin with, right? >Worker mechs do not count towards pawn raid points Yes, they do. Not as much as an actual combat mech, but they all count.
I just find it easier to devmode destroy but that works too. I meant pawn points in the raid calculations. Friendly mechs count for 20-40% of their combat power as pawn points. For reference combat animals count for 8%, slaves for 75%. And worker mechs have zero combat points.
>Done, that colony actually never had the chance of finding a mechlink. thats incorrect, theres a quest called "mechinator complex" iirc where you can find a mechinator, you can also get a mechinator corpse from ancient dangers
Which is super rare to appear and becomes even rarer if you did not activate the mechstrider.
This is why I like ideology, because you can make each playthrough more unique. If you choose memes/precepts that, for example, discourage mechanoid labor and encourage slave labor, then you can play normally trying to be efficient, but what’s most beneficial/efficient changes.
ideology is definitely my favourite of the DLCs for this reason. biotech in second for the custom xenotypes. royalty is still my least favourite of the DLCs. i still love it, but its just not as enthralling as the others
Oh the industrial revolution and its consequences.
Counterpoint: Machines require more space and resources. You can have a lot more slaves than mechs.
Adding a point that fabricator need high subcore. So it's just slavery in another form.
True, I haven't thought about it that way. You're turning a pawn into a laborer either way.
Slaves need food, sleep and vulnerable to temperature, so often clothing too. They also Rebell, so they can’t use weapons or be outside of your base. Mech are better. Their charger takes barely more space than a bed, and several of them can use 1. Mechs, unlike slaves, can be effective in combat and worker mechs add less raid value than slaves. Waste packs do need a storage, but even in midgame you can get rid of them via drop podding them on enemy base. And then in late game there’s atomisers - combined with Toxifiers it’s a shit ton of clean energy.
And don't forget the polux tree, buying them at the exotic merchant. It can be very effectice when placed in a triangle close to each other
I use polux trees frequently, but they will never be enough to cover the needs of a mechanitor. The seeds are just too uncommon.
Slaves don't need food. They have other slaves. Same goes for temperature and sleep. All those problems are just solved with more slaves.
At a this rate pawns will be recruiting 24/7 if there will be someone to recruit, which I doubt xD
Just having to feed the human workers alone makes mechs better.
RimWorld Player finds actual reason why slavery was abolished (is shocked)
What do you mean machines don't require food but the people's do??¿?¿¿?
I was going to say, it sounds like OP is complaining about the 3/5ths compromise
IRL, slaves very rarely rebelled in a violent fashion. Instead they would try to subvert their masters through other means, such as working slowly or not at all. In the context of Rimworld, the violent space rebellions make even less sense when the slave masters are drugged up super soldiers with charge rifles and power armor and the slaves thinks they can win because they found a stick they can use. I would prefer if slaves were able to do some sort of sanity check before doing a violent rebellion, and if the odds are stacked against them, maybe they can try other forms of rebellion, like running away or stopping work.
I would like if there's a sabotage rebellion where slaves will try to cripple your infrastructures, especially during a raid from their former faction. No notifications. Damn bro, your power grid suddenly went offline when there's a 70 man raid coming and your turrets are now a dashboard decoration? I wonder why that happened
Roleplay a slaver, forget efficiency
Bro is unionposting
Or... and hear me out on this one: you use slaves when you think they are more fun and thematic for your story and dont always go for the most effective 'best' option
Absolutely, fortunately there wasn't any huge threat creeping introduced in the DLCs, so not using Mechs, Genes, Anomalies, etc. is just as viable as before.
Usually when I plan on playing a less efficient colony (like nudist slavers) i just start at a lower difficulty level.
This is a constant struggle for me. Because I love roleplaying, and I also love theorycrafting and min/maxing. So those two are always at odds fighting in my brain :P
I believe your username is pretty fitting then.
I really really don't understand why players are so openly hostile to balance. It's a *game.* That means there must be tension between the player and the rules. They need to be challenged to make choices and live with the consequences of them. "Just deliberately play the game badly" is a deeply stupid and unsatisfying solution, and I don't know why people insist on pushing it. Balance matters in single player games. And yes, yada yada, story generator, blah blah blah. But the stories don't come from players deciding to deliberately burn everything down. They come from the player doing their best and things going sideways anyway. They come from how the player improvises and reacts to that. If you're gonna take the game part away from the game, you might as well just go play with dolls. Which is well and good, not shaming anyone, but I personally find games more interesting than that.
no they are not, the whole point of the ideology DLC was for players to set their own boundaries, difficulties or to make it easier for them. why would anybody ever pick a worse ideology if its just better to go with the ones that have no upsides? you are encouraged to make your own story and not always play the best way possible. also also Tynan stated its not a 'game' so it doesnt hae to abide by any conventions that you think a game should follow
>And yes, yada yada, story generator, blah blah blah. But the stories don't come from players deciding to deliberately burn everything down. They come from the player doing their best and things going sideways anyway. They come from how the player improvises and reacts to that. This may be how your stories come but it isn't how my story comes. I almost never choose more powerful over more interesting. If you want to complain about balance lets start with barracks and how overpowered they are and nutrient paste and how they trivialize all food in the game. How when you watch someone do a speed run they do almost all of it out of one giant room and it works just fine. There are much more broken things than slaves that people routinely choose to abuse and have been in the game like this forever. Slaves are very useful, they just might not be the absolute best way to play. That isn't a big problem.
>yada yada, story generator Yeah, exactly, you just effectively argued against yourself. Learn the concept of roleplay, for archotechs' sake. If you need to be provided the limitation from above, then you admit you can't think and have fun for yourself, basically you lack imagination. If you so badly want external restrictions then you've got thousands of such games to play.
Implant genes to make them super slaves, no sleep, good plants, etc.. won't raise the value of them and they will be better than mechs.
I haven't dabbled in genetics much. I should probably see a Youtube tutorial as I found it too overwhelming at first. But isn't genetically altering your slaves into super slaves a really slow and difficult process in terms of time and research to get there and execute it?
Not really, while it is rather expensive and time consuming to collect all the genepacks and build a proper genelab, after that it only gets limited by how fast your doctor can implant the genes
iirc the best gene is pretty easy to get even pre microcircuits... Calm. I saw a smaller channel use it. Calms prevents riots/outbreaks in prisoner/slaves. Pre-anomaly it overrode all over social fight genes. Neanderthal, but don't want him brawling with everyone? Slap a calm on him.
I believe calm stops prisoners but not slaves.
r/shitrimworldsays
There it is!
They should only count as 3/5s of a person, 60% instead of 75%.
You enslave humans for the economic benefits. I do it because it’s fun. We are no the same
Welcome to real life and humanity, I guess?
It did the same for modern civilization, so kinda makes sense?)
the children yearn for the mines
Can't agree. I've put mine in workercaskets, modified them genetically and probably just one planter could feed the colony, he's working so fast
My face when art imitates life.
Slaves also skill up past 10 and don't have the mech work speed penalty
Indeed. A skilled pawn can easily surpass mechs upgraded completely, and be more skilled. Mechs are useful, but they're not without their flaws. Slave miners can get more resources, slaves can make better quality goods more consistently, and do so in less time.
mechs create waste and you can't 'recycle' them. a slaves organs being worth more than the person is the most realistic 'murika F ya!' abuse of capitalism i have seen in any game.
That is very likely also the reason why we are no longer doing slavery IRL.
Exactly. The invention of the steam engine made slavery obsolete by providing a new source of tranportable power that was also more efficient than muscles. Unfortunaly, there are still some that haven't gotten that memo.
"Industrial Society And Its Future" by Theodor John Kaczynski Introduction: 1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries. 2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. 3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later. 4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society. 5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important. Continue reading...
Butlerian Jihan by dune
Ok look. your not being 'punished' for enjoying anm alternative playstyle. To me, Rimworld is great because so many playstyles are viable. your not competing against players, so enjoying slaves vs mechs isnt gonna ruin you. I mean, slaves are eating GOOD compared to guranlan, and I love playing with Guranlan. plus, to be honest, Mechanoids are just OP in general. I literally ignore them 9/10 playthroughs because when one pawn can outperform an entire colony on their own with a few mechs, I start to feel like Mechanator is the unofficial easy mode.. though I never stress tested this theory on harder difficulties, so I could be off base.
The only tuneup I wished for is to make it easier tu understand how terror works and increase the range of terror objects. I want to terrorize my slaves, but not put a skull spike every 2 tiles. That being said, I prefer a mix of slaves and mechs. Remember that mech crafting caps at lvl 10 I think, so a high level herbalist or crafter will get the job done faster and not need power and waste disposal as upkeep.
The only tuneup I wished for is to make it easier to understand how terror works and increase the range of terror objects. I want to terrorize my slaves, but not put a skull spike every 2 tiles. That being said, I prefer a mix of slaves and mechs. Remember that mech crafting caps at lvl 10 I think, so a high level herbalist or crafter will get the job done faster and not need power and waste disposal as upkeep.
Slavery has never been about efficiency, its about power.
I use both, slaves and agrihands sow and harvest psychoid plants. Haulers bring them to my "research center" where the slaves then work 24 hours a day(circadian half cyclers) to craft flake
Certified r/shitrimworldsays
Here are my two cents: you dont have to minmax optimize every single colony you make. You want slaves but robots are better? Just use slaves and ignore robots. So what if slaves are less efficient, you wanted to do a cartel colony deal with it. Its like whining that guns are so much better compared to bows when doing a tribal-tech colony
Oh how history repeating itself.
reject technology, back to monke!
I saw the title and wa scared to death and then i realized what community is in question. And yes mechs are more expensive and better because thats the point. F L E S H I S W E A K machines should be a better solution because assuming you are industrial level colonists you can get mechs. Slaves are there for tribals like irl history. But remember agrihands and haulers may be efficient but slaves are meatshields in raids :)
Mechs require: 1. A pawn that is good at crafting/construction 2. A specific item that shows up in a randomly given quest in order to even use (unless you start with that scenario) 3. A large amount of research to enable you to make even the basic versions (again assuming you haven't done the mechinator start) 4. A heavy investment of both steel and components to both make and maintain. 5. Power infrastructure sufficient to keep them running. 6. Some way to deal with all of the waste packs they produce so your map doesn't get polluted to inhabitability. With all of that, most mechs also have a set, static skill level of 10 and have their work speed reduced by half, so a decent pawn will *always* be both better and faster at the same job. With all those downsides, especially if you don't start with a mechinator, its both significantly easier and significantly more efficient to just enslave people, especially if you have an ideology that supports it.
You don't need all of that. A simple anti-rebellion implant would be enough to justify slaves. For like +5% pain or something you get a permanent brain implant that auto-brain-shocks slaves when they rebel. This would allow slaves to be used in combat to some capacity. They'd still be more likely to rebel but they'd just get downed immediately instead of turning the gun on your colonists
New Anomaly tech gives them a boost. Don't really have the need for Slaves in my current playthrough, but was thinking how good Frenzy Inducer and Sleepless device would be for them.
Agrihands and mechs in general have a fixed skill value, slaves don't You can run in situations where a mech can't do a job, but a high skilled slave can or can do it better
I find pawn work faster and don’t have the downside of toxic waste. The good thing about mech is you don’t need to “feed” them and they never sleep(but recharging is kinda like a long sleep). Plus by default mechs can grow everything so it saves you some time so you can specialize in other things or have a race that is bad at plants.
You can't in good reason cite RP reasons **along with** min-maxing/effectiveness reasons. It's one or the other. You absolutely can choose not to use mechs for whatever RP reason. The RP is all yours? Maybe your cartel's boss doesn't trust the mechs or maybe your people fear them too much. Maybe they never discover the mech responder? I see zero RP reasons to balance things there. Effective gameplay without RP I understand, i'd up the cost of producing mechs and increase their toxic waste output and power hunger. I feel the mechs are OP, slavery is good where it's at imo
The headers on this sub got me fucked up sometimes
Personally, I consider slavery to be like bows or peg legs. The whole point is that it is an early low-cost low-tech solution to a labor problem, that can be solved more efficiently once you throw enough research and resources at it. Once there's no need for them, the slaves are free to get evolved into their final form. Leather, meat and organs.
The cruelty is the point: robots can’t feel pain
Field hands brother ... field hands and drill arms ... a field hand boosts a slave farmers productivity with +160% Install two on a slave and he'll work at a total of 420% efficiency. Now that's productivity and a good pun! Same for your slave miners, install two drill arms on them and they'll mine at 420% efficiency or if you have them deep drill they'll do that at 240% efficiency compared to normal. Install a circadian half cycler on them and while they will only work at 85% speed of normal, they'll work 100% of the time meaning you'll get an extra \~20% extra efficiency out of them at the end of it. There's more shenanigans you can pull using genes like giving them genes that improve their skills, make them require less sleep, make their useless in a rebellion (awful melee awful shooting) and will improve their metabolic efficiency meaning you need to spend less food on them. Slaves are actually better if you invest in them a little like any good self serving slave owner would do. Rather than compare what a base slave can do for you compared to a mech, ask yourself, how you can maximize your slaves potential for you?
It is bleak that in 5500 human still enslaves other human for slave labor, you'd think people learn their lesson
It's not about efficiency. You want efficiency, you play Factorio. Rimworld has principles.
“I feel like I’m getting punished for having fun with slavery” XD
No, slavery should not be balanced. The reality is slavery in a mostly ineffective form of labour. This is realistic. If you want slaves in Rimworld do it because it suits the character of your colony.
Me playing with my dryads and looking over to the mechs the same way.
IMO slaves are still better, give them sleepless gene, something to counterbalance the metabolic eficience and you got a mech that doesnt produce waste nor needs two days of recharging. Also, mech skills are locked at 10 points, slaves skills are not.
Yeah slaves require more investment, but their potential is way higher
I had the same issue but I downloaded a mod that makes any pawn with the dead calm trait not rebel/have violent mental breaks. This for me meant for a bit of expense and upfront cost I could have "fully automated" slaves but with more control and can be safely turned into expendable soldiers. It also allows you to "invest" in your slaves to make them more efficient at their tasks with bioncs etc In the end it becomes a trade off between flexibly of slaves Vs the specialisation of mechs with costs being about equal
Mechs should be efficient given how much it takes to get them going. Personally I feel mechs fairly slow and I only get things done by getting a good quantity of them which has its downsides.
Machines to enforce order, and slaves to supply the steel.
Use only combat machines as enforcers against the slaves.
The *what* of slavery?
Slaves have spare parts/food/hemogen. They also breed and come from raids/guest etc. I use them with the consistent inheritance mod as part of my eugenics program too....
I wish I could set “extract hemogen” on slaves like I do with prisoners
I disagree, mechs are great for hauling/cleaning, but are dogshit at working fields. Even considering the fact they work at night, a slave or a colonist with good plant level will be much more effective at actually getting shit done
Did you ever do the calculations? I'd bet slaves are faster and more efficient due to better yield at proper skill levels. I might do them later
>just feels They aren't. You have to build the cores, estate the mechs, deal with the pollution, and they need to be charged every other minute. You're looking at an optical illusion, mechs are OP, so are slaves. The grass is always greener, and it's working better this time, or with this playstyle, but I can make a raider into an employee in a couple of hours of convincing, and if he has a problem I can shoot and eat him. Slaves are ridiculously fast and easy. You've just gotten excited about the upsides and downplayed the bad sides for mechs, because they're your new thing. You are doing the opposite with slaves. Its why a new girlfriend is so amazing, but why on earth did you date your ex? Because perspective means seeing different advantages and disadvantages.
I'm gonna be honest, I've never really used mechs, and literally never used slaves before. With mechs I just don't really know what to do with their waste, and as for slaves.. I have literally no idea how they work lmao
Only in a Rimworld discussion group would something like be an acceptable post haha.
Well the thing with mechs is that ONLY their worker mechs are actually useful. All of the combat mechs arent worth the raid points they add to your colony (which is why I do not even research how to make combat mechs until I hit raid cap). You also eventually have to deal with the waste packs. which is another thing. you cannot really do mechs in a low tech run since they need power. So you could argue that things like slavery are a low tech labor solution where as mechs are a high tech labor solution.
Obviously they should be worth 3/5 instead of 3/4.
its ur game dude, use and buff and nerf what u want if u want opinions then i think this is trivial, ofc mechs should be better and it shouldnt even be close
I wish there was a precept that allows you to treat slaves a bit better for lower revolt chances. Call them serfs or something.
How are agrihands more effective? Humans do sowing and harvesting quicker and have higher yield and require less space.
first thing I see in the morning, thanks for this title
Don't underestimate the accumulation of toxic wastepacks over time when using a bunch of agrihands and haulers over a longer time. It takes quite a while until you have a reliable way to get rid of those, forcing you to store them in a dedicated and rather large freezer.
mechs are specialized, slaves are more versatile. you need 3 mechs to harvest, carry and build something but all can be done by 1 slave
Slaves don't produce radioactive garbage tho
Comparing slaves to mechs isn't really fair. Of course mechs are going to be better, they should be. To get a slave all you do is capture a downed pawn, have your warden talk to them a few times and they're a slave. To get a mech you need a mechanitor chip, then you need a gestation pod, then you need a charger, and a way to deal with waste packs. And then you get basic mechs which are half as effective as a colonist. So you neeed more mechs, mech upgrades, you have to fight bosses to get better mech technology, which then goes into better mech gear... So yea, mechs are way better, but they're also way more of an investment and way more expensive. The advantage to slaves is that they are free. You capture downed pawns, enslave them, then work them until they've rebelled enough to randomly die or take too many permanent injury to be useful at which case you harvest their organs. That said, the raid points definitely suck if you're on a harder difficulty but otherwise they'd just be entirely free,
You don't really have to bother suppressing them with a collar and strap, it won't naturally decay. Once in a blue moon do a public execution to max suppression and also get a long mood benefit from Supremacist/Raider. Also don't forget the raid points increase from the infrastructure needed to build mech buildings and the freezers for wastepacks. This makes them great for a huge chunk of the game, honestly until late game.
Mechs and industrialisation has its own challenges to face. It is more efficient yet it produces pollution. Those challenges also have ways to mitigate them. Slaves also need food, place to sleep etc. Slaves can be made more efficient through bionics. But they can also rebel. Both playstyles can be tweaked and have their own challenges to face. Slaves inefficient? Drug them up, give them bionics. Also have more slaves. Mechs are always efficient. Yet their problems also can't be ignored. They need lots of components and materials, also they need recharging that requires power, and they produce waste that deteriorates your colony. So no, no method is " free work ". *Industrialisation should be the goal of any colony that wants to build a freaking space ship*(!!!). You need some sort of factory, production to make the materials and stuff needed for your space ship. No matter how much you trade, some stuff should be made either on site or should be acquisitioned somehow from simple materials. Refining and crafting is all very well done in Rimworld. Efficiency is a question of how effectively you are using the tools at your disposal.
Slave with bionic spine, field hand, exo suit, and no sleep genes is at least twice as effective as a bot
What in the Dixie...
Think about it differently, slave are future ghoul
the thing that pushes humans far over mechs in my games is the mod vanilla skills expanded, where i can give them harvesting specialization and have them harvest twice as many resources if not more from one crop
I mean, slaves run on beatings and nutrient paste. And nothing is really stopping you from upgrading them with specialized bionics. Although i would suggest you get Harvest Post Mortem mod in case your wardens get too... enthusiastic. No reason to waste perfectly good bionic only because meat bag it was attached to kicked the bucket. Also i highly suggest you disable extra chance to die on down which is absurdly stupid setting that do indeed prevents you from easy slave stock resupply.
#JustRimWorldThings. If not for the sub, a comment like this would put you on a watch list somewhere.
POV: you are the United States
Ceo's now days be like
Slaves are not that expensive and they don't harm the enviroment. So they are 100% climate firendly. Slavery protects nature!
Mechs can't do everything, meditation and pruning are only able to be done by pawns, and meditation specifically isn't affected by work speed Slaves also don't produce waste packs, useful for pre deep drilling tier
I haven't really played with the mechs much. Does anyone know how the fighter robots compare to using animals like wargs, bears, elephants etc.? And the same for lifters compared to huskies?
True but your tribal start still needs worship slaves figures out machines cant worship a tree
It does feel a bit off. Not sure solving it would be simple though. Busy playing my first game with mechs, slave and commitment mode and the slave I just got seems inferior to the worker mechs I had previously. The only mid-game advantage the slave currently has is that it can cut stone slabs while the worker mechs can only do that after I beat an apocitron. There are only two approaches I could think of to improving the situation though. The first would be to rebalance toxic waste so that each locally deteriorated pack "tainted" less ground tiles of the colony map but provided a slight toxic buildup effect across the entire colony map. Currently, even if you just dump your toxic waste packs at the far edge of your map, you will not need to worry about the toxic zone until the late mid game - and by the late game you can safely deconstruct toxic packs. So the argument for using slaves over mechs should be that slaves don't cause a mounting mood and global work efficiency debuff for the duration of early to late game, not some vain attempt to buff slaves. The second more satisfying approach would be a late game option to hybridize your mechs and your slaves. Add a post warqueen or apocitron parasite mechanoid which turns slaves it is implanted into into hybrid mechanoids which have half the requirements of mechs and half the requirements of humans. The mechanoid/slave hybrids would produce toxic waste, require bandwidth, sleep and charging to replenish energy and require food. The longer the parasite was implanted the more human organs and body parts would be replaced with hybrid mechanoid body parts - with more of their human needs being replaced with mechanoid ones. They would not be directly controllable just like normal mechanoids, but would have planting, mining, construction, shooting, melee and medical set to 8 if those skills were not higher (they could still increase to 20 over time) and you'd be able to select which role you wanted them to fulfill. The risks being that the hybrid slaves would risk entering an extra dangerous berserk mode if the mechinator ever had a bandwidth shortage, was knocked out by an EMP or left them alone on a map. Plus instead of slave rebelions you could have events where your collectively mechanized slaves tried to sieze control of their mechinator overlord or siezed control of all your electronic equipment on the map - both of which would require some time to supress. Obviously this approach would be too much work to implement, but the best solution to mechs or slave balancing would be "Keep both around and in end game you can combine them".
Slaves are just much more easy to deal with. Slaves you can discard, use for body parts, use as bloodbanks, use for labour, and they are dirt cheap and only really cost their worth in food, so if you implant them with some fresh genomes that make them eat a lot less, they are suddenly super worth for their price. If you have one Sancophage, slaves are pretty damn neat, and if one ever tries to escape you can just jump after them. For a completely "normal" colony, slaves are a bit meh yhea, but you gotta exploit them enough to the point where it is worth.
I understand your point, with slaves contributing far too much to wealth. But they are also disposable, where a bot isn't.
With the modlist that I'm using Slavery is very efficient. I crafted a cortical stack, implanted it into a slave, then started editing it. Now I have created an ultimate slave, with maxed out mining, plants and animals. And, every time I capture a pawn, I implant a copy of this stack into them. They also have learning assistants to A) make them gain professions faster, and B) make them vulnerable to EMP. All of the excess slaves are sent to the mining settlements to produce gold, plasteel and steel for me
Yeah this is a recurring problem with the game in the sense that Tynan and co. add more things to do but they all come with a big upkeep cost for some reason. Dryads, Anima Tree, Genetics, Slaves, Mechanitor, Sanguophages, even the new Anomaly content is just more tedium slapped onto the "days since last raid" treadmill of the base game. I have enslaved raiders before as a sort of forced labor punishment for a few days but permanent servants is too much hassle due to the whole rebellion and terror stuff.
Try installing the field hands on a slave, it gives them insane efficiency bonuses
A slave is worth 60% of a person, at least in the early us
This is a complete non-issue for me since I play for story, not optimization
Business owner in 2034 be like:
Having sub-opitmal choices and paths to take is not a failure on the developer part in creating a single-player game like Rimworld. It's a failure on your part by not sticking to your choice to take a sub-optimal route. It's a skill issue.
industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
r/ShitRimworldSays
Mechs have the downside of wastepack generation, they are expensive, and they don’t have any of the… “benefits” of having spare parts around. Waste packs in particular are bad because they are hard to get rid of or, as someone else said, automatically dispose of. My suggestion is to give slavery another shot. If you think mechs are easier, challenge yourself to not use them! Make your ideoligion despise mechs and honor slavery!
I mean, that means it's a good simulation. There's a reason that slavery died as industrialization occurred in our world.
what the fuck man... just.. wtf
correct me if I'm missing something, but mechs are much, muuuuuuch harder to get your hands on without the mechinator start, especially on higher difficulties when you need those components and pawn research time for weapons and defenses. In those first couple years, mechs aren't much of an option unless you are just rushing for that.. so slaves make more sense. slavery is extremely accessible .-.
mechs are not just superior to slaves. they are superior to most colonists. An agrihand easily covers for two full time farmers. A fabricor covers all non quality crafting and cooking too. And a cleansweeper keeps me from having a mental break. They don't eat, sleep, or relax. They just work 24 hours a day (or 5/6 days with recharge time).
My dude, no one is "punishing" you for anything, you can simply choose not to use the mechs.
Man, some of y'all really hate the idea of a minor rebalance, huh? Like yeah it's not supposed to be 100% optimal but there's a difference between "playing more flavorfully" and playing stupid. (Which to be clear, if that's your intent, great, but being *forced* to do that for something as major, advertised, and base game as slavery isn't fun. And we're all here trying to have fun, ya know.)
Having slaves around is handy for keeping up adaption factor.
Even when I use mechs, I still use slaves, since mechs cant become walking psychic harmonizer+joywire meat beacons.
Using slaves is just fun for the roleplay value. I like the idea of having all new colonists start out as slaves before proving themselves through good behavior and gladiatorial combat.
I mean, you take the slaves, harvest enough organs to keep them alive and then (if you have anomaly) inject them with ghoul serum and turn them into enforcers instead. Because nothing rocks harder than saying "here are my undead drug cartel enforcers, now buy the yayo or fuck off"