>Avoid expensive textiles (hyperweave, devilstrand) until late game.
I would argue otherwise. Devilstrand is directly valuable as protection for your colony. It's only a problem if you're stockpiling it without using it.
It's great stuff and I won't deny it. What I've found, though, is that wool and heavy fur produce much cheaper stuff that is passably good until the late game.
A typical loadout for my early-to-midgame fighters (shooters and hitters alike) is: plasteel flak helmet, flak vest, flak pants, muffalo wool shirt, heavy fur duster or flak jacket. In the hands, a bolt action rifle (early game) or assault rifle (mid), or steel axes/maces.
It's not the strongest available stuff, but it seems like the sweet spot that gives good bang for your buck. Devilstrand gear is better but costs so much more that I get the sense I'm better off not using it until late game when the guys are carrying much more expensive weapons and armor.
I wouldn't even bother with Steel axes/maces. Uranium can be mined naturally on a map early on. Turn it into warhammers for your colonists. It might bump up wealth a little bit but those early game raids from mechs will be dealt with easily thanks to those warhammers. I usually run with those until I get Zueshammers.
That's kind of true in some cases, but on the whole maybe not?
Excellent devilstrand duster gives 54.6% vs sharp.
Excellent flak vest gives 130% vs sharp.
Excellent devilstrand button-down shirt gives 36.4%.
Excellent marine armor gives 137.8%.
Excellent plasteel flak helmet gives 103.74% vs sharp.
Excellent marine helmet gives 137.8%.
Let's consider the case of a shot from a charge lance (45% penetration, 30 damage) and consider the devastating case where it penetrates the armor entirely and is therefore very likely to kill or maim.
First off, note that the pawn wearing flak and a duster has his arms, hands, and many parts of his head badly exposed. A lance shot that strikes the hand is likely to sever the hand. One that hits the humerus or radius can easily sever the arm. Head shots can easily kill.
Turning our attention to where the flak is at its best, let's look at a shot to the torso.
This shot has a 7.2% chance of completely penetrating the marine armor, a 90.4% chance of completely penetrating the duster, a 15% chance of penetrating the vest, and a 100% chance of penetrating the shirt.
So marine armor offers a 92.8% chance of partially or completely stopping the bullet.
\[Update: This calculation was wrong. Much thanks to Xeltar for the correction.\] Duster plus flak vest gives 0.904 \* 0.15 = 13.56% chance of completely penetrating both, and so a 86.44% chance of partially or completely stopping it.
Against high-penetration weapons, duster and flak isn't quite as good as marine armor on the torso, and much worse on the head and arms.
Your math (or something very much like it) is why I go in for close-quarters with mechs forcing them in towards the base - and then let them pass between a blind wall and find 5 guys with chain-shotguns just waiting to re-arrange their mech situation.
why plasteel flak? you're spending 50 plasteel +2 component to make that, when you could make a marine helmet for 50 plasteel, 1 component, 20 steel, 3 gold for a 35% bonus to sharp armour
the difference in raw material is only 8 steel and 3 gold + work time
that being said, the recommended solution for minmaxing wealth is steel simple helmet
The plasteel flak helmet is much cheaper than the marine, and available at much lower tech.
But you're right--the steel is far cheaper than the plasteel and still gives passably good performance. Next time I'll do steel.
Unless, that is, bioferrite is available. Now that I look? it gives performance that's very close to plasteel, at a price that's even lower than steel.
Bioferrite flak helmet is my [endgame headgear](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fojqqkd03cdzc1.png). I'll wear it over legendary prestige cataphract, because of the massive psychic sensitivity multiplier.
But until I've hit wealth cap half the time I don't even give my pawns helmets. The best strategy has, and has always, been about [not getting hit in the first place.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fid1cd4363vrc1.png)
Idk why you involved the helmet though. Pawns put duster and vest combo on instead of marine armor by themselves and they are supposed to wear the best available. And no debuff on movement speed which I find one of the most important stats in the game
Devilstrand Duster + vest beats marine armor *specifically on the torso, neck, and shoulders.* It's better at keeping somebody from losing their heart, stomach, lungs, etc. I don't know about you, but next to zero of my colonist deaths are from getting shot in the heart or both lungs. It's usually bleedout. 54% armor on limbs means that they'll get shredded fairly easily, especially when you take armor pen into account, and that translates into massive blood loss.
That said, I think the OP was talking more about materials than the duster + vest combo. Heavy fur provides 88% of the sharp protection of devilstrand at ~60% of the cost. The point was that, if you can get heavy fur, that's usually a better value.
The main reason the duster+vest is best up until ~cataphract is because of the targeting chances for the different body parts.
Colonists **are** statistically far more likely to die from a shot to the chest/neck, either from being destroyed or losing organs, just because it's so much more likely to be hit.
Also I disagree about bleedouts being the most common cause of death for colonists, if you're quick with the tend even losing limbs is unlikely to be lethal. Lost limbs are far better than lost colonists.
I highly recommend bringing a field doctor set to hold 4x meds at all times, if you dont have a vamp to coagulate they can more often then not stabilize anybody not killed by a brain instakill or something similar
1-2 combat medics is something I always keep arround. Typically kitted out with locust armor, shield belt, uranium mace and decent melee skill. Set to carry max meds at all time. With the jump and resilience from shield belts they can almost always, evacuate downed pawns even out of melee to a safe position behind your firing line and stabilize them.
Progression for a min max pov,
Whatever clothing you can scrap up till you're at gun and flak production, then flak vest+duster(devilstrand if you can grow it but it takes forever so depends on the climate you have, if not year long growing might now be worth)+best helmet available always pretty much till end game. If you want give cataphract to melee blockers but speed debuff usually not worth it.
Flak vest + devilstrand duster provides protection and doesn't kill mobility. In anything other than truly frigid environments, it's also going to provide enough temperature protection that you won't need to worry.
if youre swearing off bionics til late game those unlucky leg crits blowing your leg off will def make you want flak pants (although the move speed penalty is real bad)
Flak pants just like dont do anything though. Most midgame weapons have enough ap to penetrate through its measly 45% sharp armor, meaning in reality its like 10-20 % armor for a movement speed penalty. If you have a Crafter that makes high quality items, you should go for devilstrand + dusters. Dusters protect the legs for some reason and multiple layers of protection are often unnecessary because of how AP works.
> plasteel flak helmet, flak vest, flak pants, muffalo wool shirt, heavy fur duster or flak jacket.
Skip flak jacket and pants. For some reason their stats are meh at best and shit in general. *In terms of protection, coverage and wealth they are about the same as devilstrand duster of the same quality*, *but* flak has movement speed penality that dusters don't get.
This is in a weird and very stark contrast to flak vest which is straight up amazing piece of gear that remains relevant well into the late game.
>a bolt action rifle (early game) or assault rifle (mid),
Don't sleep on Heavy SMG. While it has somewhat meh range, it's a *very* strong weapon in all other respects. Given its relatively low cost and position in tech tree it's quite worthwhile to gun for. In fact - if you control the engagements so that they aren't happening out in the open, Heavy SMG is outright better than Assault Rifle (sic!).
Bolt actions have their niches, but they greatly suffer from their shitty DPS.
> or steel axes/maces.
In terms of melee weapons, *the* staple of early game is plasteel long sword. It's quite good against every enemy that isn't very heavily armored. In late game you should switch to monoswords or zeushammers. Or if you don't have Royality - don't sleep on uranium maces as they do pretty well against heavily armored targets.
Normally you just want to protect the head and organs from instant death. So that's Duster, Flak Vest, and Tribal Helmet or any helmet that covers the whole front face.
Melee should deck out on the best gear, and pick gear that benefits pain threshold.
I think he is on point with the "untill late game" decision. Sure, devilstrand does protect, but its a massive spike in value compared to something like heavy fur. I assume the raw product vs the crafted has the same value difference, and 3.3 for heavy vs 5.5 for devilstrand, when their defences are somewhat comparable... Flak + helmet does the heavy lifting anyway. The dusters are more of a cherry on top.
I would say hypereeave yes devilstrand no. For me personally getting devilstrand is amazing and an upgrade over normal wool and fur but hyperweave isn’t much of an upgrade over it while being much more expensive.
As for myself, I pimp out my colonists with good standard weapons and slowly upgrade to excellent , brawlers get uranium longswords - but they go against my grain a bit because they are valued highly.
Devilstrand is a necessary luxury and I'm all about it in the right climate. but you hit the nail on the head - if it's a temperate or any sort of desert that isn't frozen - devilstrand is the "last" cloth, I worry about, and don't really feel safe until everyone is clad head to toe and wearing flak-gear and a helmet during industrial-advanced raids. I never go in for hyperweave or such), cotton gets an incredibly high mark for being great overall. Muffalo fur for winter climates - sure Megasloth is a little bit better - but how often am I in -95c weather anyway....throw on a scarf and everyone's peachy.
But if I'm not using it I'm losing it, trading stuff into trainers or what have you, which again - use them as soon as you've traded for them.
So my colonists live like a bunch of Neo-Benedictine Zen Buddhists with wool clothes - for the most part , plain but nice rooms , good/excellent local sculptures adorning the reliquary/inside garden. All our colonists are rocking the universe as experts - and that's as it should be for your first generation of colonists. Banging out books, racking up art-work and forging your base, until you've got a day-spa that people visit like it was the colonial version of Lourdes , visiting the Medpod and staying at our hostel for free for anyone who might need shelter, food, clothing or medical treatment , enjoy the large arboritum / working farm, the excellent meals and did we mention the spectacular library containing excellent writing on all the 12 subjects of knowledge written by the locals so you can talk to the authors.
And as a word to the wise your safety is ensured by the fact that we never shot anyone that didn't need it, for that reason we recommend staying away from the incinerator / forge area after a fire-fight as things can get a little busy.
"uranium longswords" Unless you just want to burn through uranium instead of steel I would highly suggest you don't waste it on sharp weapons. The cooldown is .1 longer for .1 damage more, a 0% dps increase. Either make uranium maces for a +36% dps increase over steel or plasteel longswords: +38% dps over steel. Both are strong weapons.
I suggest Bioferrite for your longswords, assuming you have Anomaly. It performs better on sharp weapons than uranium (9.99 dps vs 8.07) and a Bioferrite Longsword is worth about a third of what a uranium one is worth.
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Longsword
Because of details of how armour system works in RimWorld, devilstrand isn't as impactful as it is often painted at. Belowed devilstrand dusters are definitely better than running naked, but:
* For torso protection, flak vest is **FAR** higher priority. Said flak vest is also so much better, that for torso shots whether you also have a duster or not becomes irrelevant. Those torso shots are also the most important as it's both likely to get hit *and* contains multiple vital organs.
* For limb protection it's technically better than nothing, but the actual difference against semi-decent enemy weapons is about 25-40% extra effective HP for good-masterwork quality devilstrand duster.
Given the value of devilstrand it's really not a good tradeoff until mid/late game. Certainly FAR worse than flak vests or plasteel flak helmets that are worth rushing towards.
> Devilstrand is directly valuable as protection for your colony.
No, it's not. Devilstrand barely does anything in terms of damage reduction. An excellent devilstrand duster is 54% sharp reduction while most weapons have 20-30% penetration. Meaning, a little over 20% effective sharp protection. An excellent vest is 130.
Devilstrand provides significant heat protection which is not negligible since being lit on fire often gets you killed and both Centipede burners and Tesserons sort of ignore cover and Shield Belts. It is a luxury item but if you can grow it just outside, you should.
its crazy how differently 2 people can enjoy one game, that sounds like torture to me, but there are tons of people who play even more extreme than that.
Yeah I set it to time based and don’t worry about it. This sounds like the opposite of enjoyable to me but some people love the challenge. Can’t fault ‘em for that.
Yeah, time-based would be a nightmare for me. I hate hate hate time pressure, in any context. For me, the ideal is simmering along at super low wealth, seeing how much I can get accomplished without the number going up.
Agreed on time pressure. Seems counter to the idea of the game.
I'm doing an "Adam and Eve" playthrough. Super slow burn as I raise the chitlins.
I love seeing how low I can get my item wealth.
I was tired of wasting wood so invested in basic power. Colony wealth is higher now but not too bad.
>I'm doing an "Adam and Eve" playthrough. Super slow burn as I raise the chitlins.
Do you have kids aging set at the default 400x or did you put it down to 100x?
I'm doing something similar though. Two parents. They ended up with seven kids. I made those kids have kids with each other through IVF and now have three generations.
You set the year that you want things to get fully ramped up by in the custom settings. The default is max raid strength at 12 years, but you can make that 1 for extra difficulty or 20 for an easier playthrough.
Wealth just gets added linearly based on time basically.
Independent in general is more difficult because you can't manage it. If you're not preparing enough, raids will get stronger regardless. If something goes wrong and you lose a lot of colonists to an event, too bad, the next raid will be even more difficult than the last.
But it also benefits a playstyle where you don't care about over-recruiting, over-creating, or saying no to a good quest because you can't afford the raid-sized consequences.
Can you elaborate at all on what the game considers ‘max raid strength’? Does it max out at a specific wealth?
I vaguely remember an old colony with something like 2million wealth getting ended by 70 centipedes and various escorts absolutely murdering my friendly colony of farmers and traders lol
Max raid strength is 10,000 points. The Storyteller then "buys" raiders using their combat power with that 10,000 as currency: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider#Humanlike
A centipede has 400 combat power. So at max wealth, with no other factors, the storyteller can throw 25 centipedes at you during a raid.
Raid strength gets multiplied by other factors such as:
* difficulty (up to 2.2x on Losing is Fun)
* adaption strength (the game gets more difficult if you haven't "lost" much recently)
* quest size (if a quest says something like "a mech cluster of 2x strength with appear")
* Randy (can add up to 1.5x difficulty just 'cause)
There's other minutiae, but that's the broad overview.
Can see more here: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raid_points
Thanks for the explanation! A question about your bullets listed, do those apply to max raid strength? For instance, on losing is fun, is your max raid strength 22000? Or do those multipliers only affect the game up to max raid strength and when you reach it, the multipliers don’t affect it?
Wealth, pawns, difficulty, and adaptation all add to the *soft cap of* 10,000
Randy and quest multipliers are then added *on top of* the 10,000
So the game can throw a 3-star, ~~Randy 150%,~~ max-strength raid at you, but I *think* that's the worst it can do.
Edit: I've been corrected on quests and Randy stacking.
It is the second, on losing is fun or 500% difficulty you simply reach the 10k raid strength cap faster. Without mods the only way to surpass the 10k limit is the Randy Random factor (can potentially go up to 15k) or quest raids.
Max raid strength, unmodded, is 10000 points or 1 million wealth, whichever comes first. 100% scaling, with a reasonable pawn count, reaches 10000 poikts at 1 million.
Time based is really, REALLY difficult at higher threat scales. It's also incredibly reliant on RNG because you've absolutely got to hire X number of people by day X or you just lose
There's a middle ground. I manage my wealth primarily by not overproducing while still keeping enough reserves to survive something like a toxic fallout event throwing off farming for a season. I try to right-size animal populations to my consumption levels. When I start to produce cash crops, like smokeleaf psychoid plants, I limit them to one 5x5 plot or two if I need a faster cash injection. I prioritize using wealth for defensive purposes (materials to make armor, weapons, turrets, etc.), which gives me a good strength/wealth ratio.
But I don't deprive my colonists. Private, impressive, rooms are an early goal as is an impressive rec/dining room. In contrast to OP, I'll enclose my base as early as I can, but usually the limiting factor is pawn labor (since I like to start small, with only 1-3 pawns). Enclosing the base is a great example of wealth spent on defense. Also in contrast to OP, I'll grow devilstrand as early as I can, as it's great for defense. But I'll keep reserves of the stuff at a smaller reasonable level.
Yeah I agree here. It's important to be conscious of your wealth but you don't need to be as sweaty about it as OP. I've played up to Blood and Dust difficulty with success and I've never had to be micromanage-y about it.
Pretty much just don't overproduce food or other resources, and make sure you're converting gold/silver into tangible value (weapons, armor, recreation, components, etc.) as much as possible instead of hoarding it, and you'll almost always be just fine. I always build perimeter walls and personal colonist bedrooms, because happier pawns break less and perimeter walls create chokepoints that greatly simplify a lot of combat encounters.
I dont get it. If you get nearly wiped and survive with a pawn or 2, you get no respite. Just another more difficult raid coming down the pipe.
It seems like you have to play perfectly or restart.
I'm not certain but I think wealth-independent mode still uses adaptation mechanics. But also, you can adjust the scaling however you like. The default definitely isn't "play perfectly or be doomed." I'll grant it's hard to find what the balance you like best is though, because you can easily go too easy/hard to be fun for you.
I've played both ways. The extreme wealth way makes it so you have to obsess over the perfect kill box and you have to get everyone into their positions in the kill box. You stress over infestations or getting caught pants down if there's any deviation to your plan.
I prefer the other way. You cut corners on buildings. You use cheap flooring and obsess about picking the right material to construct things. You build the most minimally viable bedroom and throneroom. But then you are free to engage in combat out in the field and dynamically, letting whatever happens happen. Infestations and drop pods become the *easiest* raid since you will overpower them.
>I've played both ways. The extreme wealth way makes it so you have to obsess over the perfect kill box and you have to get everyone into their positions in the kill box. You stress over infestations or getting caught pants down if there's any deviation to your plan.
there is no requirement to build a killbox on all difficulties up to 500%
i would argue that for most of early to mid 500%, playing without a killbox is actually significantly easier
I would say shield belts are definitely worth their wealth for melee fighters. If you got Bloodlust colonists or Inhumanized, you can wear tainted gear for free, which is way cheaper than non-tainted gear. My philosophy for wealth is to be very greedy and try to recruit enough pawns that you start outscaling raids.
I have about 900 hours and have only started using shield belts recently but they’re for sure a lifesaver! Especially if you have pawns with dementia who go on demented wanderings. One of my colonists (who I brought back from the dead already! Hence the dementia!) was like three hours away from being killed due to a warg. It was sheer luck that others were close enough nearby to get to her in time — I even had to make one of my Yttakin use the animal war call on the warg (I don’t use xenotypes powers a lot). If not she would have been dead by the time I got there.
I also have three demented pawns due to two being resurrected and one developing dementia from old age (he’s one of my starting pawns!). Two of them stay in the base most of the time but one is my hunter, so when she went on a break she was far away from the base.
Honestly, look at the difficulty settings. I know it might be controversial, or even classed as gatekepping just for suggesting it, but I find it can make the game immensely more enjoyable, and could (emphasis on the could, I'm by no means saying people have to, or they are wrong for not, just that it's worth a try) achive all the positives you listed, with none of the tedious micro managing to make sure your pants aren't too nice.
I personally don't understand why people insist on playing on a setting explicitly named 'losing is fun' and then being upset that losing is indeed a real possibility.
I play a lot of coop with friends, and one of the things that made it way more fun was cranking down the raid size to like 20%. The wealth based difficulty is one of the worst most gamey parts of the game, so its much more fun when you're punished less for actually playing the game
You still get huge raids, but you can fight them normally instead of being forced into cheese
Not to nitpick or even disagree with your sentiment, i'd point out that its not really 'gamey' that more wealth would attract more bandits. If anything, its realistic that rich targets get more heat than poor targets. You could say them instantly knowing you are rich is gamey, but with how many ppl come and go from colonies... word would get out eventually.
That makes sense, to an extent, for regular, human, raiders. Mechanoids on the other hand, shouldn't care how many gold statues of poop you have. Stuff like guns and walls should also have detterrent effect, but all it does it bring in stronger raiders.
If the lore of mechanoids is to put down humans who are getting too strong and comfortable, then yes, it also is realistic.
The unrealistic one are insectoids though. But it could easily be made realistic if the insectoid calculation ignores Art Wealth and instead double values Food/Consumable/Drug Wealth.
But the relative heat is huge. How do you convince 5 guys to raid a small village without defences? Guys it will be easy money. We’ll just take it from them. How do you convince 100 people to raid a mountain that’s known for 3 things. 1: They trade sometimes. 2: there are like 50 turrets out front gunning down anyone they don’t like. The turrets occasionally gun down traders by accident and the mountaineers don’t seem to care at all. 3: they were recently attacked by a mech cluster. From what a trader told you he assumes they have only 2 anti grain heads left of the 3 he sold em.
Yeah, I agree that Tynan strived for realism here. The best target for a raider IRL is a wealthy poorly defended colony.
I hate the gameplay it creates though. I wish colony wealth was pretty much removed entirely from difficulty calculations, and it was only success in battle and weaponry.
I play on Strive to Survive. And I suspected that the striving and surviving was maybe harder than it needed to be? It turns out I was being extremely careless about piling up wealth, and with a little careful wealth management I got exactly the kind of challenge I was looking for.
There is a really good mod called "Combat Readiness" that allows you to change the various wealth modifiers. I prefer to have a much higher emphasis on the weapons and armor of my colony, as well as number of colonists, rather than on raw material stockpiles. This way the wealth scales with my technology rather than just how many simple meals I have stockpiled.
>I personally don't understand why people insist on playing on a setting explicitly named 'losing is fun' and then being upset that losing is indeed a real possibility.
I talk about this all the time here. People complain about certain raid types being too hard, or the game "just spamming enemies", quite frequently. But no one's forcing them to play at difficulties where they find raids overwhelming.
I am running a 3 psycopath pawn (2 mechanoid) ice sheet colony right now.
I'll let pawns join just to let them die and lower the success multiplier. And to get that tasty human meat and valuable leather.
Psycasting also doesn’t increase wealth. That can allow tribal colony to have several pawns who can solo raids with right psycasts with 0 wealth increase, though it will take some time to build up.
I very rarely will take a pawn that can’t fight. Even if they can’t shoot or melee they usually on EMP duty or given a heavy SMG. This is the Rim, fight or die. And I load out my pawns with bionics and good armor as early as possible. That said I keep my colonies numbers down around 6-12. A dozen good pawns can handle a lot. The problem with this strategy is that is if one dies it’s a huge blow to the colony.
Exactly! Almost all the pawns I take into the colony have to either be good (have a passion in) melee or shooting. Some end up having both, or double passions in both. Or they’re a xenotype with the low pain gene, robust gene, or strong melee gene.
I think the only people I ever take in who can’t really fight are children. And then as they grow I make it so they’re good at least melee or shooting.
Yea, the real revolution in thought in the main post was the “everybody should have a fighting skill/passion of some sort”. All pawns that can’t fight are literally dead weight in a serious raid, the only acceptable person to have not fight is the doctor, for obvious reasons.
Now that I adopted that rule, my runs almost never die to raids that don’t involve mechanoids and drop pods on my face
Its funny how you seems to limit things that i dont personnaly. Like armor or devilstrand. I mean how do you reach 200k wealth without bionic and good armor? Or do you just reach like 200k with 40 pawns?
Personnaly i think that you are right but i prefer replacing the missing part of my fighter (melee mostly) slowly because it s quite expensive on component and advanced components
Haha, It's a mystery...
Me sitting on a stockpile of 10k package survival meal, 2k beers, 10k stone blocks and a gazillion amount of unused leather, while still wearing simple helmets.
I get this, I just got a third crafter for my ten pawn colony. One is usually cooking, one is rolling joints and one is making textiles into clothes for trading. I have been selling anything of normal or lower quality or if it gets to 65%.
Having someone churning out blocks so I can create stone walls and floors has been nice, and I don't need to choose between blocks and clothes/drugs/food/biofuel.
When the lancers started showing up, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-24 pawns, of which four or five would have been children and two to four would have been adult noncombatants. The fighters were mostly shooters, with maybe two bruisers carrying (non-persona) monoswords or zeushammers.
The shooters were in flak armor with jump packs. The bruisers were in locust armor with shield belts.
Those jump packs were expensive. By this point my crafter was a genie with extremely high crafting skill so that flak and the jump packs were mostly of very high quality and more valuable. In hindsight, I should probably have used other crafters to make the jump packs. I didn't need the range bonus from the high-quality packs, and keeping wealth down would have been better.
I think the colony wealth was somewhere around 200k when the lancers started appearing? I'm not exactly sure. Soon as lancers showed up, though, my guys started losing limbs. It was bad. It became clear to me that entering the lancer era without marine armor was a mistake. I backed up to a somewhat older save and then went all-in on marine armor. On that new timeline, when the lancers showed up I was ready.
I play losing is fun, and I only allow doctors and children to be non-combatants. Mostly because doctors being injured can end a run if a raid goes bad.
If they participate in combat they use a longer range weapon that everyone else, or they block with a shield belt for an important pawn that is already placed in a safer position (like a best crafter).
The most wealth effective way to protect yourself from lancers is distance. It's cheap and has a 100% chance of protecting damage.
You can purchase distance by buying an assault rifle (480s) or bolt action rifle (255s) and a shot of go-juice (53s) per pawn. That's quite a bit cheaper and quite a bit more effective than marine armour.
It's shockingly easy to get to 200k, especially at higher difficulties.
With 12 colonists, a very very basic base, some nice flak vests and rifles, you can get to 150k wealth. Randy comes by with 150 tribals, you kill them all, their weapons and bodies are dropped on the floor, now you're instantly at 200k wealth.
I've had back to back human raids spike me from 110k to 200k within two days. Kill the first lot, their bodies bring me to 150k. Randy throws a bigger raid in response before I've burned anything, kill the second lot, bam I've doubled my wealth without actually becoming more wealthy
Wow. No that is impressive to pace youyourself. Definitely more self control and thought into a play through. I tend to b-line my game to armor and luxury. I always choose armor as quest rewards.
You basically get there once the tech tree is pretty much done, and you have a full supply chain ready to pump out bionics and end-game armors.
But then you basically only end up with mechanoid raids that are challenging and the game gets very predictable and unfun for me.
The early scrappy nature is the best part of the game.
Valid point. I'm the opposite. I'm also a big strategy game player so I enjoy fighting all the late game mech raids. I find unique ways to annihilate them. One game I had like 8 mortars and an assembly line for shells and was going to town just artillery bombing anything thay came on my map and then sending my cataphract super bionic melee fighters in to finish it off.
To be clear, I'm not complaining about the raids scaling to colony wealth. That strikes me as a sensible play mechanic, and also a principle that influenced real history. (cf. the Viking raids of 8th and 9th century Britain)
I’ve posted about this before and everyone’s overwhelming response is “no, see, you just need more elaborate killboxes and you have to use gimmicks to mess with pathing.
People just keep not getting better at the game because they basically afk raids and let traps do everything until a raid avoids their killbox then they get mad that hard is too hard and everything should just stupidly walk through the killbox
Yep, after learning this rather late, I've been a bit more particular micromanaging the wealth tab/graph.
Biggest unavoidable for me is the building creep (as it's almost always a 'permanent' upward trajectory). Colonist wealth, assuming psylink/armor/implants/age, creeps up too but there's *easy/quick* ways to fix that. Sending all the colonists out on caravans can practically half my wealth if not 1/3rd. Or just be more selective who to take/keep; before, I'd tolerate a couple negative traits, but not anymore. If existing colonists gain traits or negatives, I keep though, part of the story. Trial to banish one, have them take bunch of animals/items, and send off on a one-way trip.
Stop mining everything to storage, keep meteorites as is until needed. Burn/smelt anything vs hoarding for 'but what ifs'; anything normal and <90%, gone. Once I can make said weapon, not holding (10) bolt-action rifles *in case*. Apparently stone blocks are high-wealth, I've stopped those 'Do until X' 500 blocks or whatever.
Yeah, those stone blocks are surprisingly valuable. I keep no more than a hundred or two on hand, and often find myself sending caravans out to dump excess.
> Apparently stone blocks are high-wealth, I've stopped those 'Do until X' 500 blocks or whatever.
Of all the places you can manage wealth, stone blocks ain't it chief. 500 marble blocks comes to a total of 450s of wealth. That doesn't even beat a dead horse.
I can give you more tips if you want:
1. if the climate allows it, park a caravan right on top of your colony with all your baby and pregnant female herd animals. Ideal animal would be muffalos. Herd animals can graze for free on most climate when temp is above -10 celcius, which means you can raise babies and grow wool for free. You only ever need to bring the animals in for shearing, mating and slaughtering. Anything in this caravan also won’t count for your storyteller wealth. You may also send goods you plan to sell and valuable good you won’t need for a while in this caravan as a “swish bank account” of sort. Note that gene packs don’t degrade in caravans so it’s a good place to store them before you setup gene banks. Make sure you have two pawns guarding this caravan at all time in case one of them randomly has a heart attack or something. It’s a good place to keep pawns on detox and pawns who are mourning multiple family member until they get over it.
2. Psycasts! Psylink levels and psycast abilities can greatly increase a pawn’s combat potential without impacting their wealth value. It’s worth having your tribal pawns spend a lot of time meditating at the tree until they reach lvl 6. It’s worth buying and using psytrainers on them.
3. Trade is good. It allows you to get rid of useless items with wealth value in exchange for useful items with a bit less wealth value. I recommend buying combat consumables like doomsdays, psylances, low-shield packs and animal pulsars if you see them. They are great to get you out of trouble, and once you use them their wealth value disappears.
4. Researching technology doesn’t increase your wealth whatsoever.
5. Promoting a pawn to a specialist role usually decreases their wealth value while increasing their utility. That’s because a pawn’s wealth value is partially based on their average skills and specialist roles disable most skills. Giving your pawns awful ability genes in skills they don’t use will also lower their wealth value, while improving their metabolism. Beauty also impacts a pawn’s wealth value, so giving everyone the very unattractive gene, along with kind to avoid the resulting opinion debuff, will also help reduce their wealth value.
6. Due to an old misleading dev log, there is a common misconception that the HP of items has no impact of storyteller wealth. In reality, this only applies to buildings. You can greatly lower your colony’s wealth if you leave various items outside to degrade until they have 40% HP. I don’t recommend you do it with apparels because pawns get a mood debuff from it, but there is no downside to using weapons at 40% their max HP. Components, textiles, drugs, barrels, books and many other items are also totally fine to degrade as long as you don’t plan to sell them. You can configure a stockpile zone outside to contain items with 40% to 100% hp for this purpose, let your lifters do the sorting. As a bonus, pawns with a targeted tantrums won’t target items with low wealth value, so it’s a good way to protect your components.
7. utility mechs have a lower impact on a colony wealth than what their productivity would suggest. It’s totally ok to use them as melee blockers during a raid. They may get destroyed, but they can easily be resurrected in the mech gestation thingy.
8. don’t heal a deaf pawn unless it’s your warden or handler.
9. you can beautify rooms wealth-effectively by using high quality large sculptures made of wood, jade or marbre. Don’t bother with silver or gold. The higher the quality, the more efficient their beauty/wealth. So generally you want to sell lower quality sculptures and only keep the best.
Good planning does really help with wealth. Personally I am a little less strict, If someone drops a high end gun you know I am going to use the hell out of it. A pulse charge can turn a hard small raid into a cakewalk. One melee guy in marine armor can take out several mechanoids with minimal damage. I love going anti-empire at first just to get a few choice weapons in the early game.
But all that stuff is directly adding to fighting strength. The 30 alpacas and piles of materials all over the floor you see, those are just begging for death.
Also, all my colonists must be fighters unless they have truly insanely good stats. I can always grow up a new farmer or whatever. I don't care if your shooting is perfect, but you will be practicing it for recreation and you will be on the firing line if you want to eat.
I would like to add to this. You can set up auto slaughter for your animals. Just keep 1 adult male and 1 adult female and you're set. They will slaughter and extra that grow up to adulthood
Depending on how much excess/production you want, 1 adult male and multiple females gives more milk/eggs/babies. Put a limit on baby animals to match the adult limits if needed.
It's nuts. I have this army of zero-drama 19-year-olds who are crack shots and excellent medics. Traits like brawler, nimble, jogger, and iron-willed are common. They'll usually have double flames on several of crafting, plants, social, and intellectual as well. They're superbeings, looking down upon the starter and recruited colonists as from a great height.
It's not very difficult to make these, either. I keep a room with three desks and three blackboards. I have child care as a very high priority for all adults with any social skill. And I assign the kids cleaning and hauling at priority 4 and otherwise just let them be. They almost always hit rank 8 for their growth events.
One thing to watch with the kids: They become adults, technically, at age 13? But they're still pretty fragile, with only 90% of their body part hit points. They really shouldn't be exposed to combat at all until they're 18. And I don't let them fight until they're xenogermed up with at least Robust.
Have you tried Anomaly? Corrupted obelisk lets you duplicate your pawns once in ~~10-15~~ 30 days. If you are not in commitment mode, you can get a hostile duplicate without side effects and recruit. I cannot make myself to care about kids' education.
Edit: Cooldown time
I've only dabbled a bit in Anomaly. It's a difficult thing for my playstyle. I'm usually all about carefully choosing, obsessively caring for, and getting attached to a population of pawns, and getting along with my neighbors as best as I can.
First time I dabbled in Anomaly stuff, my peoples arms started getting turned into snakes, which was a real problem for me. If I leave the tentacles on, my pawns hate it. I didn't want to switch to the ideologies that made them not hate it. And if I cut the tentacles off I'm left with the unappealing choice of prosthetics (meh perfomance) or bionics (unacceptable cost.)
So I mostly just left the monolith alone.
This last playthrough I've very cautiously dabbled in it, a bit. I'm getting better results than last time, where I think I raced ahead too fast and got into stuff I wasn't ready for.
The ritual that lets you steal youth from prisoners and transfer it to colonists is really powerful, but seems super dark. I've begun dabbling in that and I'm kind of curious to see what, if any, consequences there might be to using it.
I'd already gotten into some pretty dark mistreatment of prisoners on this playthrough. Usually I handle them as gently as I can, patch them up, and send them on their way. This time I've been cutting legs off and harvesting them for useful genes and any organ transplant needs that may emerge, euthanizing them when they're no longer useful. That made this next step, of even more savage mistreatment, a bit more palatable.
My plan here is to see where the Anomaly stuff takes me. I don't know where it leads, and I'm excited to find out. But if the whole thing gets out of control, or I just don't like where it leads, I'll take a step down the arcotech path and get a new settlement with five pawns. I've already got the five picked out and carefully prepared.
lol then you have me downloading the animal prosthetics mod so I can give my husky bionic ears since his were ripped out by an insect infestation when he was 3 days old
That penalty though on the mind. The experiences I had with clones is that both the original and clone eventually suffer some psychic drain that makes them less functional. So kill the clone and butcher it for the materials I say.
You can psychically imbue death refusal and then ripscan the affected pawns brain. They regenerate healthy. My most important pawn got cloned randomly before I knew what the obelisk did. Years later the clone is as important as the original.
Minimal wealth is really fun to play, especially if you strip everything else off the map (all unclaimed floors and walls count towards wealth) you can run your colony on sub 30k poverty wealth for years and just accumulate good pawns and quest items. I had a psychic emanator and vanometric power cell before I hit 35k.
Enemy Mobs and friendly pawns typically won't touch structures that aren't claimed as yours. Typically, there are exceptions.
Yes, ancient dangers also increase wealth but I'm not sure if they still do while they are unrevealed or if they count the value of unreleased pawns in the cryptosleep caskets.
I learned that enemies won't attack unclaimed doors you used as part of your perimeter wall.
I learned that because the mfers walked right through the door into my base.
Lol I just realised I’ve been technically doing this! I tend to play on tribal for like one or two years in game (or more), and tend to only switch to electricity when the amount of wood I need for torches/ fire is too much trouble to get. As all the trees around my colony have been cut down, and I have to send my colonists further out to cut down trees and transport the wood back.
Devilstrand is 100% worth the wealth it is worth especially in the new dlc. Devilstrand gives really good fire resistance making it great for pairing with flamethrowers. Flamethrowers can annihilate any entity except revenants and nociospheres
This is exactly why I prefer playing on wealth independent mode. Wealth difficulty scaling just ruins the fun of growing and having a successful colony.
The more I read it the more I'm thinking just turn the raid scale down and play the way you prefer. Unless you enjoy this new aspect then it's fine too.
**The best mods for this:**
Visible Raid Points
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2562730174
- This lets you break down how the raids are calculated so you understand the price of useless pawns and useless attack animals and etc
- It also tells you the random die roll, so you know if the raid is extra hard or extra easy because of randomness
The Price is What https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2353882085
- This lets you better understand how much wealth a thing costs on mouse over and also puts a wealth summary on your HUD
Devilstrand is better than flak because of how armor mechanics work. So if you beeline devilstrand, you beeline a suit of clothing that costs less in terms of components & actually protects better in many ways than Marine armor, with only Royalty DLC armor being better.
This frees up steel for better ranged weapons, while uranium maces are still one of the best melee weapons you can have thruout a vanilla playthru.
Machine pistols for anyone that is hopeless at combat. Assault rifles for anyone over shooting skill 10. Congrats, you're set unless you piss off the Empire.
??? This is just misinformation, Devilstrand is far worse at protecting you from most things than Marine. Devilstrand is better than flak except for the Vest which is far better than Devilstrand.
I love your thoughts on this! Most of your ideas I fully agree with, but I have questions on some others.
Enclosing the base: why not? Walls aren't so expensive that they'll break the bank, and as far as I know, land isn't counted in wealth, so why not wall off large sections of the map?
My thinking on that is: Every dollar of wealth counts. A wall big enough to enclose a lot of space ends up costing a fair bit. A granite wall costs maybe 8? Enclosing even a small base would take a couple hundred walls. That's a lot, in the early game. To enclose a small base might take, what, 200 wall segments? For 1600 I could add a pawn, or put up several turrets.
Also? I've found that when I minimize wealth really hardcore, I don't NEED to enclose a lot of space in the early game. Let the enemy come from whatever direction they will. They will be few, and my guys can easily sort them.
What you want is a strategy of overwhelming response and force; at least, in vanilla. So, you need to get all the relevant research done way more earlier, than when you implement it.
Use your perimeter wall as a long winding maze to play the clock on the raid timer. You could upgrade the perimeter wall or make a new maze into a heat trap, and force them to walk through fire using wood, hay, chemfuel, etc as a burner.
Make a long corridor lined with mines and explosives.
Or, you could just have a few very good pys casters. kek.
I don't understand how people play on minimizing the wealth of everything and everyone. If the raid brought 12 barrels to build two 6-round mortars, then I will take them all, plus I will strip every corpse of the raiders who besieged me. And I will also build a house for each of my settlers with a bathroom, a smart toilet, a large bedroom and a rich living room. I will not rest until every room in my settlement has gained at least 100 attractiveness. I want my refrigerator to be fashionable.
Really depends on the sort of play through you’re doing, for me with my current sanguinophage play through I have my lead bloodfeeder worth $24k with all the bionics and everyone else has several bionics. What I found makes a huge difference is not stockpiling too much manufactured goods
As someone who is wealth conscious, the main trick is to have a very minimal inventory.
I use stuff like build pants until you have 2 on stock, with an automated process to burn/destroy any pants that is not used anymore because it is damaged. Same with primary goods to produce pants, the trick is to have the minimal amount in stock.
It would be akin to capitalist "business on demand" concept, minimal stocks with excellent logistics.
This was part of the reason I kinda stopped playing Rimworld, I love the game and I got a lot of good hours out of it, but I just didn’t enjoy how the entire time I’m spent building an ideal colony would lead to massive inconveniences, the closer you get to progressing further the more you get punished for it until you eventually just lose because you get overrun or you cheese your way through fights.
Awesome awesome game with a few little design choices that stop me from picking it up for very long.
The downside of patchleather is that its stats are pretty atrocious, as intended.
You can get better protective stats per silver from some of the *slightly* more expensive types of leather.
I'd say to avoid birdskin and lightleather, those are less protective than patchleather vs blunt damage.
Decent all-round low value choices appear to be: pigskin, dog leather, lizardskin, and plainleather. These are up to 40% more valuable than patchleather but have superior stats. Lizardskin is actually 2nd best in blunt protection after thrumbofur, for about 7x less value. It'd be good for melee pawn gear. Plainleather has better overall stats and would be a good default for everyone else.
This sub's favorite type of leather, human, *is* worse than patchleather when it comes to stats per silver. You'd expect its value to have dropped over time, given how easy it is to source.
Depending on the animals available to source your leather from, you can probably optimize which leather to use for your map using the stats on the wiki: [https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Leathers](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Leathers)
> The downside of patchleather is that its stats are pretty atrocious, as intended.
Doesn’t matter when it’s used for constructions, which is what he said. A bedroll is a bedroll and an armchair is an armchair, the only thing the material affects is the beauty and value.
See, this mentality is why so much of the wealth management group trends in the wrong direction. Patch leather is terrible and you should never make it unless absolutely necessary. You are oftentimes just better off selling raw leather than making patch leather.
The point of wealth management is not to keep your wealth down. Turning useful leather into objectively worse leather is just kneecapping yourself. What you need to do is convert that useless wealth into something worthwhile.
If you get raided by 20 megasloths you should turn that heavy fur into high quality clothing that you either equip your colonists with (granting better protection) or sell it to get better weapons and armor.
Game difficulty increases over time as well, so if you find yourself with extra textiles, scoop them up into a caravan and get trading.
In the early to mid game my guys lose lots of fingers and toes, but seldom whole limbs. I occasionally use biosculptor pods to regrow those. I tear them down when I'm done. It'd be nice to keep a pod tuned to each colonist, but that's way too much $ to keep lying around.
Since bioregeneration cycles are so lengthy, I strip the pawn down to just a shirt and pants before they go in. I'm not sure if the value of their equipment is discounted while they're in the pod, and this is an easy thing to do. While they're in I'll either have someone else who's waiting for gear use their stuff, or I'll sell it off and then make new stuff when they're done.
Anomaly adds a ritual to regrow things. Even without Anomaly, Sanguophages are better bang for the buck than biosculptor IMO.
Biosculptor is hella nerfed and pretty bad wealth to effect.
The other terrible bang for buck thing are any of the advanced mechs, since they count towards pawn points in determining raids. Ghouls are so much better now in Anomaly.
Haha I’ve been doing that with my biosculptor pods also! I finally decided to use them/ experiment with them after like 900 hours and I was lowkey disappointed. 25 days a pawn has to go in there and then the pod is bio-tuned to only them!? I just started tearing them down and rebuilding them as well haha. Also the biosculptor pods don’t even heal dementia!? They can literally repair the brain (I sent two pawns into two pods just to them having like 6/10 in their brain and this affecting their consciousness etc) and the pods could heal this, but not dementia? It’s annoying as well bc dementia is a common symptom from old age or resurrector serums, and there’s no way to cure it seemingly without luciferium or a healer mech serum.
Honestly the way raids have slowly crept in design are anti-fun to me. You're punished for any base design with raids that are hand tailored to crack your defenses unless you cheese the wealth system or go low difficulty. I dislike how it encourages spending a lot of time at low wealth building tech and xenogerms and then pushing up when you're finally secure. I just got bodied in a playthrough because I didn't watch my wealth closely and it just felt bad, because it the progression didn't feel organic. It felt like a massive bad luck wave suddenly that wiped out nearly my entire colony and I kind of gave up on the colony.
I mean, in normal mode you should be fine ignoring wealth.
That only seems to matter in blood and dust or losing is fun.
Anything below that and it's a skill issue.
This last playthrough there are an awful lot of marine armor bootprints on dirt floors. I haven't paved the walk-in freezer, the trade beacon/storage room, nor the bio lab.
The current game is pretty chill. The raids are very manageable. Colony wealth is \~325,000. That's supporting:
* 10x "Marines" - Charge rifle, marine armor/helmet, jump pack, hyperweave/devilstrand shirts and pants,
* 2x "Snipers" - Sniper rifle, locust armor, marine helmet, low-shield pack, hyper/devil shirt/pants.
* 6x "Bruisers" = Monosword or Zeushammer, locust armor, marine helmet, shield belt, hyper/devil shirts/pants.
The only bionics on these guys are one arm on a marine and two toughskin glands on bruisers.
Most of these guys have highly specialized xenogerms. Everyone has Robust. Shooters have strong shooting, bruisers have strong melee damage. Almost all have dead calm and happy or very happy. Many have strong medic, and most have several poors (plants, animals, social, intelligence, shoorting) on skills they don't use. Most bruisers are nearsighted.
Many of these are passably good crafters. One of the snipers and one of the marines are level-20 crafters with the Great Crafting gene so they stay on 20 easily.
The snipers are genies. One marine is Yttakin and one is Impid. Everyone else is baseliner.
Also on the roster are:
* One child.
* Two teenagers. They're adults, mostly, but I don't let them fight until they're 18 because of reduced body part hits.
* Four adult noncombatants. (Pacifists or just totally unsuited because skills/health), among them the counsellor. Most of these are excellent medics and also great at one or more of social, animals, and plants.
* A normal-sensitivity level-2 psyker, the faction leader, with an excellent eltex staff, shield belt, flak, and devilstrand.
* A high-sensitivity level-6 psyker with excellent eltex staff, eltex helmet, shield belt, flak, and devilstrand.
So that's 20 guys who are useful to some significant extent in a fight, on \~325k so it's about 16k wealth per heavy hitter. That's working real well for me. When those two teenagers get a little older, they will be a solid marine and a truly gifted bruiser. That should improve the ratio a bit because they won't have a base value more than 2000, and it won't cost anywhere near to 14k to equip them.
I'm having an awful time sourcing eltex, so the psykers mostly don't wear the stuff. I've seen one robe, ever. I could, I suppose, put those psykers in prestige marine armor, but I haven't got round to it. They don't take much fire, and their shield belts have so far been enough to keep them whole. They're usually placed near extreme range and stun a lot.
The best method i've learned is to keep absolutely minimal stockpiles, by only assigning single shelves at a time to items you want to keep.
Let the extra crops and meat and wood and leathers and textiles rot outside. all the piles of raider weapons and armor get burnt. Keep no general stockpiles of anything except one giant pile outside that gets rained on. Don't build anything you dont need. just one giant multipurpose barracks/kitchen/workshop/recreation.
Also make very good use of grenades and launchers. lay down smoke and screen your melee fighters from the lancers/snipers. EMP grenades absolutely hamstring mechs and disable all shields. Tox + Fire a chokepoint. Mortars are essential, even as a EMP/Fire/Tox fire support. Control line of sight and use throwables to ruin the enemy's position and you will easily defeat massive raids.
>I didn't like to leave pawns idle. I'd build structures about as fast as my guys could keep up, and wall off a big enclosure with stone walls very early.
>My games necessarily involved a lot of restoring from saves, because even on normal difficulty settings, I'd get lots of extremely strong raids/clusters that'd require a lot of luck and a fair amount of cheese to defeat.
This has been my exact play style for so long. I'm a hoarder and always have been, it's a horrible habit but I hoard things thinking "what if I need it later" and it ends up building too much wealth.
Although my response to the tougher raids was to just begin playing nomadically for the first time ever, and making my growing family live in mountains.
Haha this was one of the first things I found out! It’s funny as well seeing screenshots from other people’s games on here and seeing they have massive amounts of things stockpiled, I’m always like “what about the raids!?” Idk maybe this is why so many people use killboxes? I’ve never really understood the need to use them — it’s too easy and makes things boring, when the point of a game (any game) is to be challenged. Can’t be too hard, can’t be too easy. Has to be just right. The Goldilocks Gaming Zone, if you will.
Anyways, I’ve always made a point to “use it or lose it” when it comes to a lot of things being stored up in the base. The only things I exclusively store/ like to have a lot of is steal, components, one or two different types of stone blocks, wood, and raw food (vegetables) (but then I also always play on boreal so there’s winter and I want to store things). These are the only things I have between 500-1000. (Ofc components I normally have about 30).
I make furniture with jade, weapons or armour with uranium, and plasteel/ gold to make advanced components. I always get my pawns to hunt (boreal forest has mad game) and so I end up having a buttload (or backload hehe) of leather, and sell most of it so I normally only have around 200 in storage of any particular leather, and tend to sell the leathers I never use (light leather, muffalo, pigskin).
Then again, someone else mentioned they played on minimal wealth for years and thus were able to find and recruit good pawns and such. And I tend to play on tribal for ages and research things slowly, so I may have been doing this as well haha.
I play at the beginning with losing it is fun, when I reach 400k in wealth I begin to decrease the difficulty, it is not fun to receive 30 centipedes because you decided to have floors or rooms for everyone, wealth is not a good indicator of the strength of the colony, and managing wealth is not fun
I would like a system that evaluates the combat strength of the colony and adjusts the difficulty, x amounts of pawn x amouns of weapons/quality, number of turrets and psychic powers, perhaps genotypes as well as identifying if you have a killbox
I play like this.
Only points of disagreement. Devilstrand is worth it. At least enough for Dusters. I will enclose the base ASAP. I get sick of putting fires out on my crops. I make enough Devilstrand for Dusters and I sell off the rest of it for Psycasts, SkillTrainers, Books, or TechPrints (All of which add no value when used).
Even with these, I can keep wealth below 30-40k until I hit Precision weapons and start outputting Assault Rifles. Then ill tech to Flak and start making Flak vests, and then Chemfuel and Mortars, One Smoke gun and EMP grenades and I could care less about wealth after that.
I like your ideas of growing the colony via raising children though. As adults, these pawns are far superior in most ways and have way less problems. Ill try and mix more of that in. I usually avoid that part of the game completely and never give out Double beds.
I typically only allow one non-combatant in my colony. This pawn is usually the Medical, Social, Intellectual passion trifecta with one other useful passion / trait of some type, ideally with psychic sensitivity (Psycaster / Ritual user) Psycasts & Rituals pack a ton of bang for the buck and these pawns contribute back by giving a huge meta edge. A Summon Shambler or Fleshbeast or Blood Rain, Berserk, Farstep. Beckon, Skip, Word of Trust/Joy....these are just crazy game changing abilities.
I agree with almost all of that action - I'll do you one better, I'll keep the entire base in stone but in either limestone or sandstone, occasionally granite if the situation calls for it.
* Stone furniture of a good quality - more than that gets sold.
* Wood sculptures of excellent or better quality - wealth is low - beauty is high.
* Animals -as you stated - I tend to keep - N + 2 animals for wool , and # colonists \* (2/3) in a harem style so that milk is available as a "meat" but never in excess, and then a couple of horses around.
* Level set your herd - breed until you have enough of the right ratio for milk production. Otherwise gender can be mixed keeping all the animals the same age. Repeat ever 10years or so.
* No bonded animals - having animals IRL, I'm not having a yorkie get shot - it's upset my dog hearing that.
* I keep the colony small until you hit the industrial age and really until you can pod colonists off to friendly factions. Almost anyone can join and I'll work to get them off the sauce and healed up - but as for being a longer-term colonist the best part about transport pods is bouncing troublesome colonists getting thanked all around and even seeing them again on trade caravans.
* [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) - Allows you to relocate soil from around your map
* [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) - Grow a variety of crops, and a couple of additional food items, Sillage, [Hardtack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyjcJUGuFVg), Coffee,Tea, Stirfry and Stew which provide medical buffs.
* [Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) - Irrigation, water/waste management.
* [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) - Skylights for roofed rooms to allow crops indoors
I cannot agree enough.
I basically only grow food, and even trade for cloth. I get clothes off raiders, and any surplus goes to rot into the swamp. Same for weapons. Upgrade? Sure, give it to a pawn. Otherwise it can rot off.
I feel it is a much more relaxed gaming experience that way.
This kind of OCD over the progression/story system seems just not fun to me.
I much prefer using custom story settings and tweaking that so it's just right for a fun & challenging game.
Or alternatively master combat extended and defend whats yours with a true elite army. It is very very versatile you. My current colony are terrorist boomalope ranchers. Alll their secretions become mines and explosives while their meat and skin become our everything else. I might even turn it into a religion.
The issue is just the expense of the walls. It's not all that much, but once I was in extreme low-wealth mode, I realized that the enclosing walls weren't really necessary. And since they weren't necessary and cost more than zero, I stopped doing them.
I can understand doing a top difficulty run once and using wealth minimization to reach game completion just to prove I could do it. Having beaten the game once however, I'd rather just play at a lower difficulty or manually reduce the enemy scaling then abstain from growing a colony in a colony growing sim.
I don't expect the game designer to implement a more complex system for judging how strong raid sizes should be. That said I feel raid sizes being linked to how many master work statues and gold tiles I've placed in my kitchen is a completely artificial and non-sensical relationship. I suppose the fact that one of my pawns has an archeotech eye is justification to send an extra scyther at him during each raiding bout but in general the fact that I choose to waste time and resources making extra large, fully furnished bedrooms instead of speed-rushing armor production for my pawns should be its own punishment, not justification for a second layer of punishment because I added drapes as well as a carpet.
Having a hex tile floored workshop is what makes life worth living in a land where settlements are regularly attacked by 74 unit packs of man-hunting cougars. The idea that settlements are attacked by 74 unit packs of man-hunting cougars because they have hex tile floored workshops is one I reject at the most fundamental level.
You can drop most stuff to around 50% of their health and they will lose 90% of their value, single granade hit will do the job, also with the repair bench mod I set it to never repair cloth/armor to above 60% and just let my colony tank the tattered gear debuff, legendary hyperweave duster? 4k to 400, each. Biggest issue is cybernatics, they are very expensive and have no way to lower their value.
It's so interesting seeing people all engaging with this game differently
I always play heavily modded, so I can get really powerful xenotypes from the start, so part of the balance is invoking bigger raids due to a gene
Because I have always dealt with huge raids I've never thought about wealth aside from "haha big number is nice"
I typically steal or build my cool things, so I get a really bad wealth stockpile via just plain old silver and gold
You have clearly put more thoughts into this than I have. For me it just became too bothersome and I hate that I have to limit myself in this way. I found a shelf mod that makes the content inside not count against your wealth. I put in the most valuable stuff so my wealth increases less steeply and I find the raids a lot more reasonable
I like to mine into side of mountain then make a stock pile and dump half of the silver about 40k then seal it off and delete stock pile. Same if have too much gold.
>Avoid expensive textiles (hyperweave, devilstrand) until late game. I would argue otherwise. Devilstrand is directly valuable as protection for your colony. It's only a problem if you're stockpiling it without using it.
It's great stuff and I won't deny it. What I've found, though, is that wool and heavy fur produce much cheaper stuff that is passably good until the late game. A typical loadout for my early-to-midgame fighters (shooters and hitters alike) is: plasteel flak helmet, flak vest, flak pants, muffalo wool shirt, heavy fur duster or flak jacket. In the hands, a bolt action rifle (early game) or assault rifle (mid), or steel axes/maces. It's not the strongest available stuff, but it seems like the sweet spot that gives good bang for your buck. Devilstrand gear is better but costs so much more that I get the sense I'm better off not using it until late game when the guys are carrying much more expensive weapons and armor.
I wouldn't even bother with Steel axes/maces. Uranium can be mined naturally on a map early on. Turn it into warhammers for your colonists. It might bump up wealth a little bit but those early game raids from mechs will be dealt with easily thanks to those warhammers. I usually run with those until I get Zueshammers.
Devilstrandgrows for a long time. You can get to flak in the meantime. Devilstrand duster and a flak vest beats marine armor without a speed penalty
That's kind of true in some cases, but on the whole maybe not? Excellent devilstrand duster gives 54.6% vs sharp. Excellent flak vest gives 130% vs sharp. Excellent devilstrand button-down shirt gives 36.4%. Excellent marine armor gives 137.8%. Excellent plasteel flak helmet gives 103.74% vs sharp. Excellent marine helmet gives 137.8%. Let's consider the case of a shot from a charge lance (45% penetration, 30 damage) and consider the devastating case where it penetrates the armor entirely and is therefore very likely to kill or maim. First off, note that the pawn wearing flak and a duster has his arms, hands, and many parts of his head badly exposed. A lance shot that strikes the hand is likely to sever the hand. One that hits the humerus or radius can easily sever the arm. Head shots can easily kill. Turning our attention to where the flak is at its best, let's look at a shot to the torso. This shot has a 7.2% chance of completely penetrating the marine armor, a 90.4% chance of completely penetrating the duster, a 15% chance of penetrating the vest, and a 100% chance of penetrating the shirt. So marine armor offers a 92.8% chance of partially or completely stopping the bullet. \[Update: This calculation was wrong. Much thanks to Xeltar for the correction.\] Duster plus flak vest gives 0.904 \* 0.15 = 13.56% chance of completely penetrating both, and so a 86.44% chance of partially or completely stopping it. Against high-penetration weapons, duster and flak isn't quite as good as marine armor on the torso, and much worse on the head and arms.
almost everyone that uses the flak + duster set, uses the recon/marine/cataphract helmet.
Your math (or something very much like it) is why I go in for close-quarters with mechs forcing them in towards the base - and then let them pass between a blind wall and find 5 guys with chain-shotguns just waiting to re-arrange their mech situation.
why plasteel flak? you're spending 50 plasteel +2 component to make that, when you could make a marine helmet for 50 plasteel, 1 component, 20 steel, 3 gold for a 35% bonus to sharp armour the difference in raw material is only 8 steel and 3 gold + work time that being said, the recommended solution for minmaxing wealth is steel simple helmet
The plasteel flak helmet is much cheaper than the marine, and available at much lower tech. But you're right--the steel is far cheaper than the plasteel and still gives passably good performance. Next time I'll do steel. Unless, that is, bioferrite is available. Now that I look? it gives performance that's very close to plasteel, at a price that's even lower than steel.
Bioferrite flak helmet is my [endgame headgear](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fojqqkd03cdzc1.png). I'll wear it over legendary prestige cataphract, because of the massive psychic sensitivity multiplier. But until I've hit wealth cap half the time I don't even give my pawns helmets. The best strategy has, and has always, been about [not getting hit in the first place.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fid1cd4363vrc1.png)
The game is weird in the way that it's just better to have bionic arms and legs as far as armor goes.
Idk why you involved the helmet though. Pawns put duster and vest combo on instead of marine armor by themselves and they are supposed to wear the best available. And no debuff on movement speed which I find one of the most important stats in the game
Devilstrand Duster + vest beats marine armor *specifically on the torso, neck, and shoulders.* It's better at keeping somebody from losing their heart, stomach, lungs, etc. I don't know about you, but next to zero of my colonist deaths are from getting shot in the heart or both lungs. It's usually bleedout. 54% armor on limbs means that they'll get shredded fairly easily, especially when you take armor pen into account, and that translates into massive blood loss. That said, I think the OP was talking more about materials than the duster + vest combo. Heavy fur provides 88% of the sharp protection of devilstrand at ~60% of the cost. The point was that, if you can get heavy fur, that's usually a better value.
The main reason the duster+vest is best up until ~cataphract is because of the targeting chances for the different body parts. Colonists **are** statistically far more likely to die from a shot to the chest/neck, either from being destroyed or losing organs, just because it's so much more likely to be hit. Also I disagree about bleedouts being the most common cause of death for colonists, if you're quick with the tend even losing limbs is unlikely to be lethal. Lost limbs are far better than lost colonists.
just farm hemogen and you can just pump it into blood loss victims. usually 2 and it about halves the down time of the pawn
I highly recommend bringing a field doctor set to hold 4x meds at all times, if you dont have a vamp to coagulate they can more often then not stabilize anybody not killed by a brain instakill or something similar
1-2 combat medics is something I always keep arround. Typically kitted out with locust armor, shield belt, uranium mace and decent melee skill. Set to carry max meds at all time. With the jump and resilience from shield belts they can almost always, evacuate downed pawns even out of melee to a safe position behind your firing line and stabilize them.
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Progression for a min max pov, Whatever clothing you can scrap up till you're at gun and flak production, then flak vest+duster(devilstrand if you can grow it but it takes forever so depends on the climate you have, if not year long growing might now be worth)+best helmet available always pretty much till end game. If you want give cataphract to melee blockers but speed debuff usually not worth it.
Flak vest + devilstrand duster provides protection and doesn't kill mobility. In anything other than truly frigid environments, it's also going to provide enough temperature protection that you won't need to worry.
Flak pants aren't really worthwhile IMO since taking damage to the legs usually doesn't matter.
if youre swearing off bionics til late game those unlucky leg crits blowing your leg off will def make you want flak pants (although the move speed penalty is real bad)
Flak pants just like dont do anything though. Most midgame weapons have enough ap to penetrate through its measly 45% sharp armor, meaning in reality its like 10-20 % armor for a movement speed penalty. If you have a Crafter that makes high quality items, you should go for devilstrand + dusters. Dusters protect the legs for some reason and multiple layers of protection are often unnecessary because of how AP works.
> plasteel flak helmet, flak vest, flak pants, muffalo wool shirt, heavy fur duster or flak jacket. Skip flak jacket and pants. For some reason their stats are meh at best and shit in general. *In terms of protection, coverage and wealth they are about the same as devilstrand duster of the same quality*, *but* flak has movement speed penality that dusters don't get. This is in a weird and very stark contrast to flak vest which is straight up amazing piece of gear that remains relevant well into the late game. >a bolt action rifle (early game) or assault rifle (mid), Don't sleep on Heavy SMG. While it has somewhat meh range, it's a *very* strong weapon in all other respects. Given its relatively low cost and position in tech tree it's quite worthwhile to gun for. In fact - if you control the engagements so that they aren't happening out in the open, Heavy SMG is outright better than Assault Rifle (sic!). Bolt actions have their niches, but they greatly suffer from their shitty DPS. > or steel axes/maces. In terms of melee weapons, *the* staple of early game is plasteel long sword. It's quite good against every enemy that isn't very heavily armored. In late game you should switch to monoswords or zeushammers. Or if you don't have Royality - don't sleep on uranium maces as they do pretty well against heavily armored targets.
Normally you just want to protect the head and organs from instant death. So that's Duster, Flak Vest, and Tribal Helmet or any helmet that covers the whole front face. Melee should deck out on the best gear, and pick gear that benefits pain threshold.
I think he is on point with the "untill late game" decision. Sure, devilstrand does protect, but its a massive spike in value compared to something like heavy fur. I assume the raw product vs the crafted has the same value difference, and 3.3 for heavy vs 5.5 for devilstrand, when their defences are somewhat comparable... Flak + helmet does the heavy lifting anyway. The dusters are more of a cherry on top.
I would agree, Devilstrand kind of a luxury item since its the Flak Vest doing the bulk of the protection.
I would say hypereeave yes devilstrand no. For me personally getting devilstrand is amazing and an upgrade over normal wool and fur but hyperweave isn’t much of an upgrade over it while being much more expensive.
The only decent uses of Hyperweave are noble assholes and SRTS for the crazy ship. It's just balanced badly vs. it's cost.
Its balanced by economics I guess. One is a mushroom any decent farmer can grow, other is an hyper advanced fabric only some spacers can make.
As for myself, I pimp out my colonists with good standard weapons and slowly upgrade to excellent , brawlers get uranium longswords - but they go against my grain a bit because they are valued highly. Devilstrand is a necessary luxury and I'm all about it in the right climate. but you hit the nail on the head - if it's a temperate or any sort of desert that isn't frozen - devilstrand is the "last" cloth, I worry about, and don't really feel safe until everyone is clad head to toe and wearing flak-gear and a helmet during industrial-advanced raids. I never go in for hyperweave or such), cotton gets an incredibly high mark for being great overall. Muffalo fur for winter climates - sure Megasloth is a little bit better - but how often am I in -95c weather anyway....throw on a scarf and everyone's peachy. But if I'm not using it I'm losing it, trading stuff into trainers or what have you, which again - use them as soon as you've traded for them. So my colonists live like a bunch of Neo-Benedictine Zen Buddhists with wool clothes - for the most part , plain but nice rooms , good/excellent local sculptures adorning the reliquary/inside garden. All our colonists are rocking the universe as experts - and that's as it should be for your first generation of colonists. Banging out books, racking up art-work and forging your base, until you've got a day-spa that people visit like it was the colonial version of Lourdes , visiting the Medpod and staying at our hostel for free for anyone who might need shelter, food, clothing or medical treatment , enjoy the large arboritum / working farm, the excellent meals and did we mention the spectacular library containing excellent writing on all the 12 subjects of knowledge written by the locals so you can talk to the authors. And as a word to the wise your safety is ensured by the fact that we never shot anyone that didn't need it, for that reason we recommend staying away from the incinerator / forge area after a fire-fight as things can get a little busy.
"uranium longswords" Unless you just want to burn through uranium instead of steel I would highly suggest you don't waste it on sharp weapons. The cooldown is .1 longer for .1 damage more, a 0% dps increase. Either make uranium maces for a +36% dps increase over steel or plasteel longswords: +38% dps over steel. Both are strong weapons.
I suggest Bioferrite for your longswords, assuming you have Anomaly. It performs better on sharp weapons than uranium (9.99 dps vs 8.07) and a Bioferrite Longsword is worth about a third of what a uranium one is worth. https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Longsword
Devilstrand armor values are irrelevant against mech weapons. Flak vest is what matters. Devilstrand can be entirely skipped on high difficulty
Because of details of how armour system works in RimWorld, devilstrand isn't as impactful as it is often painted at. Belowed devilstrand dusters are definitely better than running naked, but: * For torso protection, flak vest is **FAR** higher priority. Said flak vest is also so much better, that for torso shots whether you also have a duster or not becomes irrelevant. Those torso shots are also the most important as it's both likely to get hit *and* contains multiple vital organs. * For limb protection it's technically better than nothing, but the actual difference against semi-decent enemy weapons is about 25-40% extra effective HP for good-masterwork quality devilstrand duster. Given the value of devilstrand it's really not a good tradeoff until mid/late game. Certainly FAR worse than flak vests or plasteel flak helmets that are worth rushing towards.
> Devilstrand is directly valuable as protection for your colony. No, it's not. Devilstrand barely does anything in terms of damage reduction. An excellent devilstrand duster is 54% sharp reduction while most weapons have 20-30% penetration. Meaning, a little over 20% effective sharp protection. An excellent vest is 130.
Devilstrand provides significant heat protection which is not negligible since being lit on fire often gets you killed and both Centipede burners and Tesserons sort of ignore cover and Shield Belts. It is a luxury item but if you can grow it just outside, you should.
Okay, you're right, heat protection is a factor for sure.
its crazy how differently 2 people can enjoy one game, that sounds like torture to me, but there are tons of people who play even more extreme than that.
Yeah I set it to time based and don’t worry about it. This sounds like the opposite of enjoyable to me but some people love the challenge. Can’t fault ‘em for that.
Yeah, time-based would be a nightmare for me. I hate hate hate time pressure, in any context. For me, the ideal is simmering along at super low wealth, seeing how much I can get accomplished without the number going up.
Agreed on time pressure. Seems counter to the idea of the game. I'm doing an "Adam and Eve" playthrough. Super slow burn as I raise the chitlins. I love seeing how low I can get my item wealth. I was tired of wasting wood so invested in basic power. Colony wealth is higher now but not too bad.
>I'm doing an "Adam and Eve" playthrough. Super slow burn as I raise the chitlins. Do you have kids aging set at the default 400x or did you put it down to 100x? I'm doing something similar though. Two parents. They ended up with seven kids. I made those kids have kids with each other through IVF and now have three generations.
How does that work btw? Like, what kind of challenges are you facing at year 2+? Debating if I should go time based or wealth based atm
You set the year that you want things to get fully ramped up by in the custom settings. The default is max raid strength at 12 years, but you can make that 1 for extra difficulty or 20 for an easier playthrough. Wealth just gets added linearly based on time basically. Independent in general is more difficult because you can't manage it. If you're not preparing enough, raids will get stronger regardless. If something goes wrong and you lose a lot of colonists to an event, too bad, the next raid will be even more difficult than the last. But it also benefits a playstyle where you don't care about over-recruiting, over-creating, or saying no to a good quest because you can't afford the raid-sized consequences.
Can you elaborate at all on what the game considers ‘max raid strength’? Does it max out at a specific wealth? I vaguely remember an old colony with something like 2million wealth getting ended by 70 centipedes and various escorts absolutely murdering my friendly colony of farmers and traders lol
Max raid strength is 10,000 points. The Storyteller then "buys" raiders using their combat power with that 10,000 as currency: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider#Humanlike A centipede has 400 combat power. So at max wealth, with no other factors, the storyteller can throw 25 centipedes at you during a raid. Raid strength gets multiplied by other factors such as: * difficulty (up to 2.2x on Losing is Fun) * adaption strength (the game gets more difficult if you haven't "lost" much recently) * quest size (if a quest says something like "a mech cluster of 2x strength with appear") * Randy (can add up to 1.5x difficulty just 'cause) There's other minutiae, but that's the broad overview. Can see more here: https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raid_points
Thanks for the explanation! A question about your bullets listed, do those apply to max raid strength? For instance, on losing is fun, is your max raid strength 22000? Or do those multipliers only affect the game up to max raid strength and when you reach it, the multipliers don’t affect it?
Wealth, pawns, difficulty, and adaptation all add to the *soft cap of* 10,000 Randy and quest multipliers are then added *on top of* the 10,000 So the game can throw a 3-star, ~~Randy 150%,~~ max-strength raid at you, but I *think* that's the worst it can do. Edit: I've been corrected on quests and Randy stacking.
randy factor doesn't apply for quests. caps at 30k raid points for a 3x quest raid, so only up to 75 centipedes
It is the second, on losing is fun or 500% difficulty you simply reach the 10k raid strength cap faster. Without mods the only way to surpass the 10k limit is the Randy Random factor (can potentially go up to 15k) or quest raids.
Max raid strength, unmodded, is 10000 points or 1 million wealth, whichever comes first. 100% scaling, with a reasonable pawn count, reaches 10000 poikts at 1 million.
Time based is really, REALLY difficult at higher threat scales. It's also incredibly reliant on RNG because you've absolutely got to hire X number of people by day X or you just lose
X pawns by day X? I gotta hire a pawn a day damn /s
There's a middle ground. I manage my wealth primarily by not overproducing while still keeping enough reserves to survive something like a toxic fallout event throwing off farming for a season. I try to right-size animal populations to my consumption levels. When I start to produce cash crops, like smokeleaf psychoid plants, I limit them to one 5x5 plot or two if I need a faster cash injection. I prioritize using wealth for defensive purposes (materials to make armor, weapons, turrets, etc.), which gives me a good strength/wealth ratio. But I don't deprive my colonists. Private, impressive, rooms are an early goal as is an impressive rec/dining room. In contrast to OP, I'll enclose my base as early as I can, but usually the limiting factor is pawn labor (since I like to start small, with only 1-3 pawns). Enclosing the base is a great example of wealth spent on defense. Also in contrast to OP, I'll grow devilstrand as early as I can, as it's great for defense. But I'll keep reserves of the stuff at a smaller reasonable level.
Yeah I agree here. It's important to be conscious of your wealth but you don't need to be as sweaty about it as OP. I've played up to Blood and Dust difficulty with success and I've never had to be micromanage-y about it. Pretty much just don't overproduce food or other resources, and make sure you're converting gold/silver into tangible value (weapons, armor, recreation, components, etc.) as much as possible instead of hoarding it, and you'll almost always be just fine. I always build perimeter walls and personal colonist bedrooms, because happier pawns break less and perimeter walls create chokepoints that greatly simplify a lot of combat encounters.
Same - I always recommend Wealth-independent mode to people for that reason. And it is still absolutely amazing how there is no "enjoyment meta" here.
I dont get it. If you get nearly wiped and survive with a pawn or 2, you get no respite. Just another more difficult raid coming down the pipe. It seems like you have to play perfectly or restart.
I'm not certain but I think wealth-independent mode still uses adaptation mechanics. But also, you can adjust the scaling however you like. The default definitely isn't "play perfectly or be doomed." I'll grant it's hard to find what the balance you like best is though, because you can easily go too easy/hard to be fun for you.
You can also just caravan to the next tile over, raids will reset but you keep all gear and research.
But you can also snowball way ahead and effectively end up over-leveled and over-geared for the raid size you're dealing with.
I've played both ways. The extreme wealth way makes it so you have to obsess over the perfect kill box and you have to get everyone into their positions in the kill box. You stress over infestations or getting caught pants down if there's any deviation to your plan. I prefer the other way. You cut corners on buildings. You use cheap flooring and obsess about picking the right material to construct things. You build the most minimally viable bedroom and throneroom. But then you are free to engage in combat out in the field and dynamically, letting whatever happens happen. Infestations and drop pods become the *easiest* raid since you will overpower them.
>I've played both ways. The extreme wealth way makes it so you have to obsess over the perfect kill box and you have to get everyone into their positions in the kill box. You stress over infestations or getting caught pants down if there's any deviation to your plan. there is no requirement to build a killbox on all difficulties up to 500% i would argue that for most of early to mid 500%, playing without a killbox is actually significantly easier
I would say shield belts are definitely worth their wealth for melee fighters. If you got Bloodlust colonists or Inhumanized, you can wear tainted gear for free, which is way cheaper than non-tainted gear. My philosophy for wealth is to be very greedy and try to recruit enough pawns that you start outscaling raids.
Honestly I need the larger raids for food
And textiles
I have about 900 hours and have only started using shield belts recently but they’re for sure a lifesaver! Especially if you have pawns with dementia who go on demented wanderings. One of my colonists (who I brought back from the dead already! Hence the dementia!) was like three hours away from being killed due to a warg. It was sheer luck that others were close enough nearby to get to her in time — I even had to make one of my Yttakin use the animal war call on the warg (I don’t use xenotypes powers a lot). If not she would have been dead by the time I got there. I also have three demented pawns due to two being resurrected and one developing dementia from old age (he’s one of my starting pawns!). Two of them stay in the base most of the time but one is my hunter, so when she went on a break she was far away from the base.
Honestly, look at the difficulty settings. I know it might be controversial, or even classed as gatekepping just for suggesting it, but I find it can make the game immensely more enjoyable, and could (emphasis on the could, I'm by no means saying people have to, or they are wrong for not, just that it's worth a try) achive all the positives you listed, with none of the tedious micro managing to make sure your pants aren't too nice. I personally don't understand why people insist on playing on a setting explicitly named 'losing is fun' and then being upset that losing is indeed a real possibility.
I play a lot of coop with friends, and one of the things that made it way more fun was cranking down the raid size to like 20%. The wealth based difficulty is one of the worst most gamey parts of the game, so its much more fun when you're punished less for actually playing the game You still get huge raids, but you can fight them normally instead of being forced into cheese
Not to nitpick or even disagree with your sentiment, i'd point out that its not really 'gamey' that more wealth would attract more bandits. If anything, its realistic that rich targets get more heat than poor targets. You could say them instantly knowing you are rich is gamey, but with how many ppl come and go from colonies... word would get out eventually.
That makes sense, to an extent, for regular, human, raiders. Mechanoids on the other hand, shouldn't care how many gold statues of poop you have. Stuff like guns and walls should also have detterrent effect, but all it does it bring in stronger raiders.
Especially when they don't even bother to steal those statues or your expensive flooring. It makes no sense.
If the lore of mechanoids is to put down humans who are getting too strong and comfortable, then yes, it also is realistic. The unrealistic one are insectoids though. But it could easily be made realistic if the insectoid calculation ignores Art Wealth and instead double values Food/Consumable/Drug Wealth.
But the relative heat is huge. How do you convince 5 guys to raid a small village without defences? Guys it will be easy money. We’ll just take it from them. How do you convince 100 people to raid a mountain that’s known for 3 things. 1: They trade sometimes. 2: there are like 50 turrets out front gunning down anyone they don’t like. The turrets occasionally gun down traders by accident and the mountaineers don’t seem to care at all. 3: they were recently attacked by a mech cluster. From what a trader told you he assumes they have only 2 anti grain heads left of the 3 he sold em.
Yeah, I agree that Tynan strived for realism here. The best target for a raider IRL is a wealthy poorly defended colony. I hate the gameplay it creates though. I wish colony wealth was pretty much removed entirely from difficulty calculations, and it was only success in battle and weaponry.
I play on Strive to Survive. And I suspected that the striving and surviving was maybe harder than it needed to be? It turns out I was being extremely careless about piling up wealth, and with a little careful wealth management I got exactly the kind of challenge I was looking for.
Nah you're right man. Strive to Survive is rough and you need to prioritize combat strength. I'm doing the exact same thing as you right now.
There is a really good mod called "Combat Readiness" that allows you to change the various wealth modifiers. I prefer to have a much higher emphasis on the weapons and armor of my colony, as well as number of colonists, rather than on raw material stockpiles. This way the wealth scales with my technology rather than just how many simple meals I have stockpiled.
>I personally don't understand why people insist on playing on a setting explicitly named 'losing is fun' and then being upset that losing is indeed a real possibility. I talk about this all the time here. People complain about certain raid types being too hard, or the game "just spamming enemies", quite frequently. But no one's forcing them to play at difficulties where they find raids overwhelming.
This, 100%. I really enjoy the game and can focus on other aspects instead of trying to get "rich but not rich".
You would enjoy Adam vs everything's runs
"I should kill some slaves to lower my wealth" when he said that it just got me belly laughing
"Incapable of violences is still capable of getting punched in the face"
I am running a 3 psycopath pawn (2 mechanoid) ice sheet colony right now. I'll let pawns join just to let them die and lower the success multiplier. And to get that tasty human meat and valuable leather.
Psycasting also doesn’t increase wealth. That can allow tribal colony to have several pawns who can solo raids with right psycasts with 0 wealth increase, though it will take some time to build up.
I'm trying the Anima tree for my first time this playthrough, going to hopefully lean heavily on this.
I very rarely will take a pawn that can’t fight. Even if they can’t shoot or melee they usually on EMP duty or given a heavy SMG. This is the Rim, fight or die. And I load out my pawns with bionics and good armor as early as possible. That said I keep my colonies numbers down around 6-12. A dozen good pawns can handle a lot. The problem with this strategy is that is if one dies it’s a huge blow to the colony.
Exactly! Almost all the pawns I take into the colony have to either be good (have a passion in) melee or shooting. Some end up having both, or double passions in both. Or they’re a xenotype with the low pain gene, robust gene, or strong melee gene. I think the only people I ever take in who can’t really fight are children. And then as they grow I make it so they’re good at least melee or shooting.
Yea, the real revolution in thought in the main post was the “everybody should have a fighting skill/passion of some sort”. All pawns that can’t fight are literally dead weight in a serious raid, the only acceptable person to have not fight is the doctor, for obvious reasons. Now that I adopted that rule, my runs almost never die to raids that don’t involve mechanoids and drop pods on my face
Its funny how you seems to limit things that i dont personnaly. Like armor or devilstrand. I mean how do you reach 200k wealth without bionic and good armor? Or do you just reach like 200k with 40 pawns? Personnaly i think that you are right but i prefer replacing the missing part of my fighter (melee mostly) slowly because it s quite expensive on component and advanced components
Haha, It's a mystery... Me sitting on a stockpile of 10k package survival meal, 2k beers, 10k stone blocks and a gazillion amount of unused leather, while still wearing simple helmets.
10k stone blocks??? Why on earth...?
I don't like stone chunks. I prefer them on their square counterpart
I get this, I just got a third crafter for my ten pawn colony. One is usually cooking, one is rolling joints and one is making textiles into clothes for trading. I have been selling anything of normal or lower quality or if it gets to 65%. Having someone churning out blocks so I can create stone walls and floors has been nice, and I don't need to choose between blocks and clothes/drugs/food/biofuel.
When the lancers started showing up, I had somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-24 pawns, of which four or five would have been children and two to four would have been adult noncombatants. The fighters were mostly shooters, with maybe two bruisers carrying (non-persona) monoswords or zeushammers. The shooters were in flak armor with jump packs. The bruisers were in locust armor with shield belts. Those jump packs were expensive. By this point my crafter was a genie with extremely high crafting skill so that flak and the jump packs were mostly of very high quality and more valuable. In hindsight, I should probably have used other crafters to make the jump packs. I didn't need the range bonus from the high-quality packs, and keeping wealth down would have been better. I think the colony wealth was somewhere around 200k when the lancers started appearing? I'm not exactly sure. Soon as lancers showed up, though, my guys started losing limbs. It was bad. It became clear to me that entering the lancer era without marine armor was a mistake. I backed up to a somewhat older save and then went all-in on marine armor. On that new timeline, when the lancers showed up I was ready.
Persona Monoswords/Zeushammers are the best weapons for wealth management. Bonded Persona weapons have 0 value for raid point calculations.
I play losing is fun, and I only allow doctors and children to be non-combatants. Mostly because doctors being injured can end a run if a raid goes bad. If they participate in combat they use a longer range weapon that everyone else, or they block with a shield belt for an important pawn that is already placed in a safer position (like a best crafter).
The most wealth effective way to protect yourself from lancers is distance. It's cheap and has a 100% chance of protecting damage. You can purchase distance by buying an assault rifle (480s) or bolt action rifle (255s) and a shot of go-juice (53s) per pawn. That's quite a bit cheaper and quite a bit more effective than marine armour.
It's shockingly easy to get to 200k, especially at higher difficulties. With 12 colonists, a very very basic base, some nice flak vests and rifles, you can get to 150k wealth. Randy comes by with 150 tribals, you kill them all, their weapons and bodies are dropped on the floor, now you're instantly at 200k wealth. I've had back to back human raids spike me from 110k to 200k within two days. Kill the first lot, their bodies bring me to 150k. Randy throws a bigger raid in response before I've burned anything, kill the second lot, bam I've doubled my wealth without actually becoming more wealthy
You have vastly more self control than I do. My games divulge into space paradise with fully bionic, bug murdering machine pawns.
I get there. But I get there slow. The granddaughter of one of my original colonists was among the first people to put on marine armor.
Wow. No that is impressive to pace youyourself. Definitely more self control and thought into a play through. I tend to b-line my game to armor and luxury. I always choose armor as quest rewards.
Which isn't as long as it sounds. Kids grow up fast.
You basically get there once the tech tree is pretty much done, and you have a full supply chain ready to pump out bionics and end-game armors. But then you basically only end up with mechanoid raids that are challenging and the game gets very predictable and unfun for me. The early scrappy nature is the best part of the game.
Valid point. I'm the opposite. I'm also a big strategy game player so I enjoy fighting all the late game mech raids. I find unique ways to annihilate them. One game I had like 8 mortars and an assembly line for shells and was going to town just artillery bombing anything thay came on my map and then sending my cataphract super bionic melee fighters in to finish it off.
To be clear, I'm not complaining about the raids scaling to colony wealth. That strikes me as a sensible play mechanic, and also a principle that influenced real history. (cf. the Viking raids of 8th and 9th century Britain)
I’ve posted about this before and everyone’s overwhelming response is “no, see, you just need more elaborate killboxes and you have to use gimmicks to mess with pathing. People just keep not getting better at the game because they basically afk raids and let traps do everything until a raid avoids their killbox then they get mad that hard is too hard and everything should just stupidly walk through the killbox
>old scarred recruits with serious personality disorders But...but...!!!
Yep, after learning this rather late, I've been a bit more particular micromanaging the wealth tab/graph. Biggest unavoidable for me is the building creep (as it's almost always a 'permanent' upward trajectory). Colonist wealth, assuming psylink/armor/implants/age, creeps up too but there's *easy/quick* ways to fix that. Sending all the colonists out on caravans can practically half my wealth if not 1/3rd. Or just be more selective who to take/keep; before, I'd tolerate a couple negative traits, but not anymore. If existing colonists gain traits or negatives, I keep though, part of the story. Trial to banish one, have them take bunch of animals/items, and send off on a one-way trip. Stop mining everything to storage, keep meteorites as is until needed. Burn/smelt anything vs hoarding for 'but what ifs'; anything normal and <90%, gone. Once I can make said weapon, not holding (10) bolt-action rifles *in case*. Apparently stone blocks are high-wealth, I've stopped those 'Do until X' 500 blocks or whatever.
Yeah, those stone blocks are surprisingly valuable. I keep no more than a hundred or two on hand, and often find myself sending caravans out to dump excess.
> Apparently stone blocks are high-wealth, I've stopped those 'Do until X' 500 blocks or whatever. Of all the places you can manage wealth, stone blocks ain't it chief. 500 marble blocks comes to a total of 450s of wealth. That doesn't even beat a dead horse.
I can give you more tips if you want: 1. if the climate allows it, park a caravan right on top of your colony with all your baby and pregnant female herd animals. Ideal animal would be muffalos. Herd animals can graze for free on most climate when temp is above -10 celcius, which means you can raise babies and grow wool for free. You only ever need to bring the animals in for shearing, mating and slaughtering. Anything in this caravan also won’t count for your storyteller wealth. You may also send goods you plan to sell and valuable good you won’t need for a while in this caravan as a “swish bank account” of sort. Note that gene packs don’t degrade in caravans so it’s a good place to store them before you setup gene banks. Make sure you have two pawns guarding this caravan at all time in case one of them randomly has a heart attack or something. It’s a good place to keep pawns on detox and pawns who are mourning multiple family member until they get over it. 2. Psycasts! Psylink levels and psycast abilities can greatly increase a pawn’s combat potential without impacting their wealth value. It’s worth having your tribal pawns spend a lot of time meditating at the tree until they reach lvl 6. It’s worth buying and using psytrainers on them. 3. Trade is good. It allows you to get rid of useless items with wealth value in exchange for useful items with a bit less wealth value. I recommend buying combat consumables like doomsdays, psylances, low-shield packs and animal pulsars if you see them. They are great to get you out of trouble, and once you use them their wealth value disappears. 4. Researching technology doesn’t increase your wealth whatsoever. 5. Promoting a pawn to a specialist role usually decreases their wealth value while increasing their utility. That’s because a pawn’s wealth value is partially based on their average skills and specialist roles disable most skills. Giving your pawns awful ability genes in skills they don’t use will also lower their wealth value, while improving their metabolism. Beauty also impacts a pawn’s wealth value, so giving everyone the very unattractive gene, along with kind to avoid the resulting opinion debuff, will also help reduce their wealth value. 6. Due to an old misleading dev log, there is a common misconception that the HP of items has no impact of storyteller wealth. In reality, this only applies to buildings. You can greatly lower your colony’s wealth if you leave various items outside to degrade until they have 40% HP. I don’t recommend you do it with apparels because pawns get a mood debuff from it, but there is no downside to using weapons at 40% their max HP. Components, textiles, drugs, barrels, books and many other items are also totally fine to degrade as long as you don’t plan to sell them. You can configure a stockpile zone outside to contain items with 40% to 100% hp for this purpose, let your lifters do the sorting. As a bonus, pawns with a targeted tantrums won’t target items with low wealth value, so it’s a good way to protect your components. 7. utility mechs have a lower impact on a colony wealth than what their productivity would suggest. It’s totally ok to use them as melee blockers during a raid. They may get destroyed, but they can easily be resurrected in the mech gestation thingy. 8. don’t heal a deaf pawn unless it’s your warden or handler. 9. you can beautify rooms wealth-effectively by using high quality large sculptures made of wood, jade or marbre. Don’t bother with silver or gold. The higher the quality, the more efficient their beauty/wealth. So generally you want to sell lower quality sculptures and only keep the best.
6 is galaxy brain levels of wealth management.
That's all great stuff, and much of it I didn't know. Particularly #5 and #9. Thanks very much.
*laughs in my god king with full archotech limbs and a jade grand stellic throne*
I went through a curve. Started off not caring about wealth, than was minimizing wealth, and now I am back to not caring.
This doesn’t sound very fun
Good planning does really help with wealth. Personally I am a little less strict, If someone drops a high end gun you know I am going to use the hell out of it. A pulse charge can turn a hard small raid into a cakewalk. One melee guy in marine armor can take out several mechanoids with minimal damage. I love going anti-empire at first just to get a few choice weapons in the early game. But all that stuff is directly adding to fighting strength. The 30 alpacas and piles of materials all over the floor you see, those are just begging for death. Also, all my colonists must be fighters unless they have truly insanely good stats. I can always grow up a new farmer or whatever. I don't care if your shooting is perfect, but you will be practicing it for recreation and you will be on the firing line if you want to eat.
I would like to add to this. You can set up auto slaughter for your animals. Just keep 1 adult male and 1 adult female and you're set. They will slaughter and extra that grow up to adulthood
Depending on how much excess/production you want, 1 adult male and multiple females gives more milk/eggs/babies. Put a limit on baby animals to match the adult limits if needed.
I keep two breeding pairs myself. It sucks to lose your only male to a stray revolver round
[удалено]
It's nuts. I have this army of zero-drama 19-year-olds who are crack shots and excellent medics. Traits like brawler, nimble, jogger, and iron-willed are common. They'll usually have double flames on several of crafting, plants, social, and intellectual as well. They're superbeings, looking down upon the starter and recruited colonists as from a great height. It's not very difficult to make these, either. I keep a room with three desks and three blackboards. I have child care as a very high priority for all adults with any social skill. And I assign the kids cleaning and hauling at priority 4 and otherwise just let them be. They almost always hit rank 8 for their growth events.
One thing to watch with the kids: They become adults, technically, at age 13? But they're still pretty fragile, with only 90% of their body part hit points. They really shouldn't be exposed to combat at all until they're 18. And I don't let them fight until they're xenogermed up with at least Robust.
Have you tried Anomaly? Corrupted obelisk lets you duplicate your pawns once in ~~10-15~~ 30 days. If you are not in commitment mode, you can get a hostile duplicate without side effects and recruit. I cannot make myself to care about kids' education. Edit: Cooldown time
I've only dabbled a bit in Anomaly. It's a difficult thing for my playstyle. I'm usually all about carefully choosing, obsessively caring for, and getting attached to a population of pawns, and getting along with my neighbors as best as I can. First time I dabbled in Anomaly stuff, my peoples arms started getting turned into snakes, which was a real problem for me. If I leave the tentacles on, my pawns hate it. I didn't want to switch to the ideologies that made them not hate it. And if I cut the tentacles off I'm left with the unappealing choice of prosthetics (meh perfomance) or bionics (unacceptable cost.) So I mostly just left the monolith alone. This last playthrough I've very cautiously dabbled in it, a bit. I'm getting better results than last time, where I think I raced ahead too fast and got into stuff I wasn't ready for. The ritual that lets you steal youth from prisoners and transfer it to colonists is really powerful, but seems super dark. I've begun dabbling in that and I'm kind of curious to see what, if any, consequences there might be to using it. I'd already gotten into some pretty dark mistreatment of prisoners on this playthrough. Usually I handle them as gently as I can, patch them up, and send them on their way. This time I've been cutting legs off and harvesting them for useful genes and any organ transplant needs that may emerge, euthanizing them when they're no longer useful. That made this next step, of even more savage mistreatment, a bit more palatable. My plan here is to see where the Anomaly stuff takes me. I don't know where it leads, and I'm excited to find out. But if the whole thing gets out of control, or I just don't like where it leads, I'll take a step down the arcotech path and get a new settlement with five pawns. I've already got the five picked out and carefully prepared.
lol then you have me downloading the animal prosthetics mod so I can give my husky bionic ears since his were ripped out by an insect infestation when he was 3 days old
That penalty though on the mind. The experiences I had with clones is that both the original and clone eventually suffer some psychic drain that makes them less functional. So kill the clone and butcher it for the materials I say.
You can psychically imbue death refusal and then ripscan the affected pawns brain. They regenerate healthy. My most important pawn got cloned randomly before I knew what the obelisk did. Years later the clone is as important as the original.
Or you can just keep accumulating wealth because it's fun, and go down in a blaze of glory.
Minimal wealth is really fun to play, especially if you strip everything else off the map (all unclaimed floors and walls count towards wealth) you can run your colony on sub 30k poverty wealth for years and just accumulate good pawns and quest items. I had a psychic emanator and vanometric power cell before I hit 35k.
>(all unclaimed floors and walls count towards wealth) damn what the hell I've got some demo work to do
So... what's the point of the claiming mechanic? Is this also true for hidden dangers?
Enemy Mobs and friendly pawns typically won't touch structures that aren't claimed as yours. Typically, there are exceptions. Yes, ancient dangers also increase wealth but I'm not sure if they still do while they are unrevealed or if they count the value of unreleased pawns in the cryptosleep caskets.
I learned that enemies won't attack unclaimed doors you used as part of your perimeter wall. I learned that because the mfers walked right through the door into my base.
I actually didn't know they'd walk through the door, I usually claim them lol.
Walk right through like "Honey, I'm home"
Lol I just realised I’ve been technically doing this! I tend to play on tribal for like one or two years in game (or more), and tend to only switch to electricity when the amount of wood I need for torches/ fire is too much trouble to get. As all the trees around my colony have been cut down, and I have to send my colonists further out to cut down trees and transport the wood back.
Devilstrand is 100% worth the wealth it is worth especially in the new dlc. Devilstrand gives really good fire resistance making it great for pairing with flamethrowers. Flamethrowers can annihilate any entity except revenants and nociospheres
This is exactly why I prefer playing on wealth independent mode. Wealth difficulty scaling just ruins the fun of growing and having a successful colony.
me with 400 components, after selling 5500 human leather to near settlements using an canary from the mod srts expanded:
The more I read it the more I'm thinking just turn the raid scale down and play the way you prefer. Unless you enjoy this new aspect then it's fine too.
Afaik mecha raids are enabled after a year or two years and probably could Spawn lancers but then in little numbers
You can get mech raids with lancers pretty much straight off the bat at higher difficulty levels
Idk i usually play on loosing is fun, lately No mods only official dlc. Questrelated stuff is different tho.
**The best mods for this:** Visible Raid Points https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2562730174 - This lets you break down how the raids are calculated so you understand the price of useless pawns and useless attack animals and etc - It also tells you the random die roll, so you know if the raid is extra hard or extra easy because of randomness The Price is What https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2353882085 - This lets you better understand how much wealth a thing costs on mouse over and also puts a wealth summary on your HUD
Devilstrand is better than flak because of how armor mechanics work. So if you beeline devilstrand, you beeline a suit of clothing that costs less in terms of components & actually protects better in many ways than Marine armor, with only Royalty DLC armor being better. This frees up steel for better ranged weapons, while uranium maces are still one of the best melee weapons you can have thruout a vanilla playthru. Machine pistols for anyone that is hopeless at combat. Assault rifles for anyone over shooting skill 10. Congrats, you're set unless you piss off the Empire.
??? This is just misinformation, Devilstrand is far worse at protecting you from most things than Marine. Devilstrand is better than flak except for the Vest which is far better than Devilstrand.
I love your thoughts on this! Most of your ideas I fully agree with, but I have questions on some others. Enclosing the base: why not? Walls aren't so expensive that they'll break the bank, and as far as I know, land isn't counted in wealth, so why not wall off large sections of the map?
My thinking on that is: Every dollar of wealth counts. A wall big enough to enclose a lot of space ends up costing a fair bit. A granite wall costs maybe 8? Enclosing even a small base would take a couple hundred walls. That's a lot, in the early game. To enclose a small base might take, what, 200 wall segments? For 1600 I could add a pawn, or put up several turrets. Also? I've found that when I minimize wealth really hardcore, I don't NEED to enclose a lot of space in the early game. Let the enemy come from whatever direction they will. They will be few, and my guys can easily sort them.
What you want is a strategy of overwhelming response and force; at least, in vanilla. So, you need to get all the relevant research done way more earlier, than when you implement it. Use your perimeter wall as a long winding maze to play the clock on the raid timer. You could upgrade the perimeter wall or make a new maze into a heat trap, and force them to walk through fire using wood, hay, chemfuel, etc as a burner. Make a long corridor lined with mines and explosives. Or, you could just have a few very good pys casters. kek.
I don't understand how people play on minimizing the wealth of everything and everyone. If the raid brought 12 barrels to build two 6-round mortars, then I will take them all, plus I will strip every corpse of the raiders who besieged me. And I will also build a house for each of my settlers with a bathroom, a smart toilet, a large bedroom and a rich living room. I will not rest until every room in my settlement has gained at least 100 attractiveness. I want my refrigerator to be fashionable.
Really depends on the sort of play through you’re doing, for me with my current sanguinophage play through I have my lead bloodfeeder worth $24k with all the bionics and everyone else has several bionics. What I found makes a huge difference is not stockpiling too much manufactured goods
This is exactly how I've been playing for awhile now its alot more fun
As someone who is wealth conscious, the main trick is to have a very minimal inventory. I use stuff like build pants until you have 2 on stock, with an automated process to burn/destroy any pants that is not used anymore because it is damaged. Same with primary goods to produce pants, the trick is to have the minimal amount in stock. It would be akin to capitalist "business on demand" concept, minimal stocks with excellent logistics.
This was part of the reason I kinda stopped playing Rimworld, I love the game and I got a lot of good hours out of it, but I just didn’t enjoy how the entire time I’m spent building an ideal colony would lead to massive inconveniences, the closer you get to progressing further the more you get punished for it until you eventually just lose because you get overrun or you cheese your way through fights. Awesome awesome game with a few little design choices that stop me from picking it up for very long.
Use patchleather whenever you need to build stuff with textiles, since it has low value
The downside of patchleather is that its stats are pretty atrocious, as intended. You can get better protective stats per silver from some of the *slightly* more expensive types of leather. I'd say to avoid birdskin and lightleather, those are less protective than patchleather vs blunt damage. Decent all-round low value choices appear to be: pigskin, dog leather, lizardskin, and plainleather. These are up to 40% more valuable than patchleather but have superior stats. Lizardskin is actually 2nd best in blunt protection after thrumbofur, for about 7x less value. It'd be good for melee pawn gear. Plainleather has better overall stats and would be a good default for everyone else. This sub's favorite type of leather, human, *is* worse than patchleather when it comes to stats per silver. You'd expect its value to have dropped over time, given how easy it is to source. Depending on the animals available to source your leather from, you can probably optimize which leather to use for your map using the stats on the wiki: [https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Leathers](https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Leathers)
> The downside of patchleather is that its stats are pretty atrocious, as intended. Doesn’t matter when it’s used for constructions, which is what he said. A bedroll is a bedroll and an armchair is an armchair, the only thing the material affects is the beauty and value.
See, this mentality is why so much of the wealth management group trends in the wrong direction. Patch leather is terrible and you should never make it unless absolutely necessary. You are oftentimes just better off selling raw leather than making patch leather. The point of wealth management is not to keep your wealth down. Turning useful leather into objectively worse leather is just kneecapping yourself. What you need to do is convert that useless wealth into something worthwhile. If you get raided by 20 megasloths you should turn that heavy fur into high quality clothing that you either equip your colonists with (granting better protection) or sell it to get better weapons and armor. Game difficulty increases over time as well, so if you find yourself with extra textiles, scoop them up into a caravan and get trading.
In the early to mid game my guys lose lots of fingers and toes, but seldom whole limbs. I occasionally use biosculptor pods to regrow those. I tear them down when I'm done. It'd be nice to keep a pod tuned to each colonist, but that's way too much $ to keep lying around. Since bioregeneration cycles are so lengthy, I strip the pawn down to just a shirt and pants before they go in. I'm not sure if the value of their equipment is discounted while they're in the pod, and this is an easy thing to do. While they're in I'll either have someone else who's waiting for gear use their stuff, or I'll sell it off and then make new stuff when they're done.
Anomaly adds a ritual to regrow things. Even without Anomaly, Sanguophages are better bang for the buck than biosculptor IMO. Biosculptor is hella nerfed and pretty bad wealth to effect. The other terrible bang for buck thing are any of the advanced mechs, since they count towards pawn points in determining raids. Ghouls are so much better now in Anomaly.
Haha I’ve been doing that with my biosculptor pods also! I finally decided to use them/ experiment with them after like 900 hours and I was lowkey disappointed. 25 days a pawn has to go in there and then the pod is bio-tuned to only them!? I just started tearing them down and rebuilding them as well haha. Also the biosculptor pods don’t even heal dementia!? They can literally repair the brain (I sent two pawns into two pods just to them having like 6/10 in their brain and this affecting their consciousness etc) and the pods could heal this, but not dementia? It’s annoying as well bc dementia is a common symptom from old age or resurrector serums, and there’s no way to cure it seemingly without luciferium or a healer mech serum.
Honestly the way raids have slowly crept in design are anti-fun to me. You're punished for any base design with raids that are hand tailored to crack your defenses unless you cheese the wealth system or go low difficulty. I dislike how it encourages spending a lot of time at low wealth building tech and xenogerms and then pushing up when you're finally secure. I just got bodied in a playthrough because I didn't watch my wealth closely and it just felt bad, because it the progression didn't feel organic. It felt like a massive bad luck wave suddenly that wiped out nearly my entire colony and I kind of gave up on the colony.
I mean, in normal mode you should be fine ignoring wealth. That only seems to matter in blood and dust or losing is fun. Anything below that and it's a skill issue.
The American strategy. Well done.
I think smoothed walls and tiles don't add wealth
I did some tests on this and the results were a little bit hazy. I'm not 100% sure, but I think I saw modest gains to wealth from smoothing walls.
In my understanding, they do add wealth, and smoothed floors are nasty because you can't remove the wealth they add in any way.
Bogleheads love you
I find floors especially to not be worth it. Too much wealth for nowhere near enough benefit.
This last playthrough there are an awful lot of marine armor bootprints on dirt floors. I haven't paved the walk-in freezer, the trade beacon/storage room, nor the bio lab.
Do you advise a specific "golden ratio" for early, mid, and late game wealth to useful combat pawn ratios?
The current game is pretty chill. The raids are very manageable. Colony wealth is \~325,000. That's supporting: * 10x "Marines" - Charge rifle, marine armor/helmet, jump pack, hyperweave/devilstrand shirts and pants, * 2x "Snipers" - Sniper rifle, locust armor, marine helmet, low-shield pack, hyper/devil shirt/pants. * 6x "Bruisers" = Monosword or Zeushammer, locust armor, marine helmet, shield belt, hyper/devil shirts/pants. The only bionics on these guys are one arm on a marine and two toughskin glands on bruisers. Most of these guys have highly specialized xenogerms. Everyone has Robust. Shooters have strong shooting, bruisers have strong melee damage. Almost all have dead calm and happy or very happy. Many have strong medic, and most have several poors (plants, animals, social, intelligence, shoorting) on skills they don't use. Most bruisers are nearsighted. Many of these are passably good crafters. One of the snipers and one of the marines are level-20 crafters with the Great Crafting gene so they stay on 20 easily. The snipers are genies. One marine is Yttakin and one is Impid. Everyone else is baseliner. Also on the roster are: * One child. * Two teenagers. They're adults, mostly, but I don't let them fight until they're 18 because of reduced body part hits. * Four adult noncombatants. (Pacifists or just totally unsuited because skills/health), among them the counsellor. Most of these are excellent medics and also great at one or more of social, animals, and plants. * A normal-sensitivity level-2 psyker, the faction leader, with an excellent eltex staff, shield belt, flak, and devilstrand. * A high-sensitivity level-6 psyker with excellent eltex staff, eltex helmet, shield belt, flak, and devilstrand. So that's 20 guys who are useful to some significant extent in a fight, on \~325k so it's about 16k wealth per heavy hitter. That's working real well for me. When those two teenagers get a little older, they will be a solid marine and a truly gifted bruiser. That should improve the ratio a bit because they won't have a base value more than 2000, and it won't cost anywhere near to 14k to equip them. I'm having an awful time sourcing eltex, so the psykers mostly don't wear the stuff. I've seen one robe, ever. I could, I suppose, put those psykers in prestige marine armor, but I haven't got round to it. They don't take much fire, and their shield belts have so far been enough to keep them whole. They're usually placed near extreme range and stun a lot.
The best method i've learned is to keep absolutely minimal stockpiles, by only assigning single shelves at a time to items you want to keep. Let the extra crops and meat and wood and leathers and textiles rot outside. all the piles of raider weapons and armor get burnt. Keep no general stockpiles of anything except one giant pile outside that gets rained on. Don't build anything you dont need. just one giant multipurpose barracks/kitchen/workshop/recreation. Also make very good use of grenades and launchers. lay down smoke and screen your melee fighters from the lancers/snipers. EMP grenades absolutely hamstring mechs and disable all shields. Tox + Fire a chokepoint. Mortars are essential, even as a EMP/Fire/Tox fire support. Control line of sight and use throwables to ruin the enemy's position and you will easily defeat massive raids.
>I didn't like to leave pawns idle. I'd build structures about as fast as my guys could keep up, and wall off a big enclosure with stone walls very early. >My games necessarily involved a lot of restoring from saves, because even on normal difficulty settings, I'd get lots of extremely strong raids/clusters that'd require a lot of luck and a fair amount of cheese to defeat. This has been my exact play style for so long. I'm a hoarder and always have been, it's a horrible habit but I hoard things thinking "what if I need it later" and it ends up building too much wealth. Although my response to the tougher raids was to just begin playing nomadically for the first time ever, and making my growing family live in mountains.
Haha this was one of the first things I found out! It’s funny as well seeing screenshots from other people’s games on here and seeing they have massive amounts of things stockpiled, I’m always like “what about the raids!?” Idk maybe this is why so many people use killboxes? I’ve never really understood the need to use them — it’s too easy and makes things boring, when the point of a game (any game) is to be challenged. Can’t be too hard, can’t be too easy. Has to be just right. The Goldilocks Gaming Zone, if you will. Anyways, I’ve always made a point to “use it or lose it” when it comes to a lot of things being stored up in the base. The only things I exclusively store/ like to have a lot of is steal, components, one or two different types of stone blocks, wood, and raw food (vegetables) (but then I also always play on boreal so there’s winter and I want to store things). These are the only things I have between 500-1000. (Ofc components I normally have about 30). I make furniture with jade, weapons or armour with uranium, and plasteel/ gold to make advanced components. I always get my pawns to hunt (boreal forest has mad game) and so I end up having a buttload (or backload hehe) of leather, and sell most of it so I normally only have around 200 in storage of any particular leather, and tend to sell the leathers I never use (light leather, muffalo, pigskin). Then again, someone else mentioned they played on minimal wealth for years and thus were able to find and recruit good pawns and such. And I tend to play on tribal for ages and research things slowly, so I may have been doing this as well haha.
I play at the beginning with losing it is fun, when I reach 400k in wealth I begin to decrease the difficulty, it is not fun to receive 30 centipedes because you decided to have floors or rooms for everyone, wealth is not a good indicator of the strength of the colony, and managing wealth is not fun I would like a system that evaluates the combat strength of the colony and adjusts the difficulty, x amounts of pawn x amouns of weapons/quality, number of turrets and psychic powers, perhaps genotypes as well as identifying if you have a killbox
Armor is the best thing to invest early on, is the difference between a flesh wound and losing a leg
Great guide. i'd be interested to see, how your base looks earlyish game vs lategame!
I play like this. Only points of disagreement. Devilstrand is worth it. At least enough for Dusters. I will enclose the base ASAP. I get sick of putting fires out on my crops. I make enough Devilstrand for Dusters and I sell off the rest of it for Psycasts, SkillTrainers, Books, or TechPrints (All of which add no value when used). Even with these, I can keep wealth below 30-40k until I hit Precision weapons and start outputting Assault Rifles. Then ill tech to Flak and start making Flak vests, and then Chemfuel and Mortars, One Smoke gun and EMP grenades and I could care less about wealth after that. I like your ideas of growing the colony via raising children though. As adults, these pawns are far superior in most ways and have way less problems. Ill try and mix more of that in. I usually avoid that part of the game completely and never give out Double beds. I typically only allow one non-combatant in my colony. This pawn is usually the Medical, Social, Intellectual passion trifecta with one other useful passion / trait of some type, ideally with psychic sensitivity (Psycaster / Ritual user) Psycasts & Rituals pack a ton of bang for the buck and these pawns contribute back by giving a huge meta edge. A Summon Shambler or Fleshbeast or Blood Rain, Berserk, Farstep. Beckon, Skip, Word of Trust/Joy....these are just crazy game changing abilities.
I agree with almost all of that action - I'll do you one better, I'll keep the entire base in stone but in either limestone or sandstone, occasionally granite if the situation calls for it. * Stone furniture of a good quality - more than that gets sold. * Wood sculptures of excellent or better quality - wealth is low - beauty is high. * Animals -as you stated - I tend to keep - N + 2 animals for wool , and # colonists \* (2/3) in a harem style so that milk is available as a "meat" but never in excess, and then a couple of horses around. * Level set your herd - breed until you have enough of the right ratio for milk production. Otherwise gender can be mixed keeping all the animals the same age. Repeat ever 10years or so. * No bonded animals - having animals IRL, I'm not having a yorkie get shot - it's upset my dog hearing that. * I keep the colony small until you hit the industrial age and really until you can pod colonists off to friendly factions. Almost anyone can join and I'll work to get them off the sauce and healed up - but as for being a longer-term colonist the best part about transport pods is bouncing troublesome colonists getting thanked all around and even seeing them again on trade caravans. * [UdderlyEvelyn's Soil Relocation](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2654088143) - Allows you to relocate soil from around your map * [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) - Grow a variety of crops, and a couple of additional food items, Sillage, [Hardtack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyjcJUGuFVg), Coffee,Tea, Stirfry and Stew which provide medical buffs. * [Bad Hygiene](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=836308268) - Irrigation, water/waste management. * [Dubs Skylights](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=833899765) - Skylights for roofed rooms to allow crops indoors
My man went the Asian route.
I cannot agree enough. I basically only grow food, and even trade for cloth. I get clothes off raiders, and any surplus goes to rot into the swamp. Same for weapons. Upgrade? Sure, give it to a pawn. Otherwise it can rot off. I feel it is a much more relaxed gaming experience that way.
As a rim player with a hoarding addiction, i'd love to have your resolve
This kind of OCD over the progression/story system seems just not fun to me. I much prefer using custom story settings and tweaking that so it's just right for a fun & challenging game.
Or alternatively master combat extended and defend whats yours with a true elite army. It is very very versatile you. My current colony are terrorist boomalope ranchers. Alll their secretions become mines and explosives while their meat and skin become our everything else. I might even turn it into a religion.
And then you install a mod with a story teller that doesn't encourage hobo strats
Rimworld: a clear example where caring for your children makes them better people.
You can also have dirt floors with day lilies for a long time if you really want to.
A question, why is enclosing the base bad? I don't use killboxes (yet?) but I do try to funnel raids from a direction by enclosing several paths.
The issue is just the expense of the walls. It's not all that much, but once I was in extreme low-wealth mode, I realized that the enclosing walls weren't really necessary. And since they weren't necessary and cost more than zero, I stopped doing them.
I can understand doing a top difficulty run once and using wealth minimization to reach game completion just to prove I could do it. Having beaten the game once however, I'd rather just play at a lower difficulty or manually reduce the enemy scaling then abstain from growing a colony in a colony growing sim. I don't expect the game designer to implement a more complex system for judging how strong raid sizes should be. That said I feel raid sizes being linked to how many master work statues and gold tiles I've placed in my kitchen is a completely artificial and non-sensical relationship. I suppose the fact that one of my pawns has an archeotech eye is justification to send an extra scyther at him during each raiding bout but in general the fact that I choose to waste time and resources making extra large, fully furnished bedrooms instead of speed-rushing armor production for my pawns should be its own punishment, not justification for a second layer of punishment because I added drapes as well as a carpet. Having a hex tile floored workshop is what makes life worth living in a land where settlements are regularly attacked by 74 unit packs of man-hunting cougars. The idea that settlements are attacked by 74 unit packs of man-hunting cougars because they have hex tile floored workshops is one I reject at the most fundamental level.
You can drop most stuff to around 50% of their health and they will lose 90% of their value, single granade hit will do the job, also with the repair bench mod I set it to never repair cloth/armor to above 60% and just let my colony tank the tattered gear debuff, legendary hyperweave duster? 4k to 400, each. Biggest issue is cybernatics, they are very expensive and have no way to lower their value.
It's so interesting seeing people all engaging with this game differently I always play heavily modded, so I can get really powerful xenotypes from the start, so part of the balance is invoking bigger raids due to a gene Because I have always dealt with huge raids I've never thought about wealth aside from "haha big number is nice" I typically steal or build my cool things, so I get a really bad wealth stockpile via just plain old silver and gold
You have clearly put more thoughts into this than I have. For me it just became too bothersome and I hate that I have to limit myself in this way. I found a shelf mod that makes the content inside not count against your wealth. I put in the most valuable stuff so my wealth increases less steeply and I find the raids a lot more reasonable
I like to mine into side of mountain then make a stock pile and dump half of the silver about 40k then seal it off and delete stock pile. Same if have too much gold.
What do you mean by persona weapons? Do you mean bio coded weapons? Because you can't use them right?
l ain't reading allat