Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.
These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.
The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.
It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.
Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,
If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.
As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.
You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.
Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).
There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),
You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.
You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.
In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.
My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.
Even without modding I have in the last couple of years found myself mainly in a cycle of playing the same emergent gameplay (were the game-space and/or game characters are random) games, one game at a time until I get bored then the next and the next until eventually I’m not bored of the earlier played games anymore and start it again.
These are mostly Indie titles like Factorio, Rimworld and even The Lone Dark in free mode.
The curated experience - which is what most of the AAA stuff is - just doesn’t have this infinite replayability.
Is Rimworld worth it? I’ve seen quite a lot of it, but it looks hard to get into (and it’s really expensive for an indie game).
It’s basically a survival management game where the skills of the peons you control are random and the terrain and broader world are procedurally generated.
Whilst the graphics are simple, the actual gameplay is solid and interesting with enough depth to keep you interested for many hours, The randomly generated per-game terrain and peons means that even though one can get bored after playing for tens of hours (maybe a bit over 100h), after a couple of months playing something else Rimworld is interesting again because whilst the game mechanics don’t change between games (hence to a point you do “crack the game”), the game space is different for every game hence the situation your colony finds itself in is different too,
If you like that survival and/or management games it’s well worth it if you can get it for 20 bucks or so.
As for the DLCs, I don’t think they actually add enough to be worth it.
Thanks for the review, that’s helpful! How much micromanagement does the game do? Does automation exist?
Important point with the DLCs, that’s really good to know!
You don’t control your peons, you mainly define zones were certain things should happen and the peons go and do it.
Zones can be for very low level explicit things (such as “cut all trees in this area” or “mine these iron nodes”) or broader activities (for example defining an area for cultivation of a specific plant, were the peons will automatically seed and sow, and you don’t even have to assigned specific peons to it).
There are a few single-action commands (say, toggle this machine ON/OFF) but again they’re not peon-specific (you just signal that the machine needs to be toggled ON or OFF and somebody will get around to do it),
You can force a specific peon to do a specific action just once, but it’s seldom used or useful.
You do normally control your peons directly for warfare, though.
In practice, you vaguely control who does which kind of things and with which priority via a control board where you define priorities per type of activity and per-peon, so basically a high-level management tool.
My impression is that there is a little bit of micromanagement but very little.