devtrackers.gg
Royalty DLC was the most unexpected, but best Rimworld updates we have had. (Including shift queue, psychite tea.) The rebalance changes, quest changes, and bug/quirk fixes have helped a lot. Despite this, there are some flaws about how the player interacts with the Empire. Notes on each interaction.
Quests/Royal favor and title/pyscast progression. The most fleshed out part of the DLC. No glaring issues. Good job with this. Throne room sharing was the best rebalance. Not sure if the colonist lend quests have been fixed to account for multiple player settlements. Sometimes they can ask for more pawns then what you have at settlement, even with a high faction population. These quests should be tweaked so the player can decide how many to send, and scale rewards appropriately. It could be like tiers, and reach a reward tier by sending enough people.
Imperial traders. They are very good early to mid game, but meh extreme late game. They are good source of advanced components, glitterworld medicine, techprints, armor, bionics, and the occasional link weapon. Extreme late game they don’t have enough items you can’t produce yourself. Trader needs pysfocus apparel added to their inventory, and more pystrainers. Post 5 years they should have a greater chance for both archotech body parts and psychic emanator.
Trading with imperial settlements. Imperial settlements never have pysfocus apparel either. If you want it, you actually have to trade with outlander factions. I think that’s weird. Item pool should have more pystrainers than outlander factions too. Psychic based faction should occasionally have psychic emanators.
Raiding imperial settlements. The in game settlements don’t match the lore, and match the generation of pirate/outlander settlements. This breaks immersion, and it’s boring. As the most advanced faction, they should have largest base, the most complicated base, and the best-defended base.
To fix this:
- Increase the size of generated empire settlements.
- Empire settlements always have praetor and accompanying requirements.
- Empire should have a workshop led by an esquire, and room(s) that meet esquire requirements. * Give the Empire a variant of each: auto charge blaster turrets, minislug turrets, and empire drop beacons. (Like mech drop beacons but for the empire troops.) Not player obtainable/useable.
- Empire settlements get 5 mortars, manned by people. 1.1 mortar nerfs make a single mortar laughably bad.
- Give empire settlements 3-5 Yeoman pawns. More chances to rip out their implants.
- Loot is worth the above. Should be a source of psychic amplifiers.
Continuing:
- It is always better to side with the empire. This is because the player gives up a lot to be an enemy of the empire, and has very little to gain.
The player losses:
- Chance for royal tile progression.
- Opportunity royalty ascent quest
- Access to psychic amplifiers
- Trading for glitterworld medicine
- Calling royal aid.
Specifically, the loss of royal aid and chance title progression is a huge loss compared to the gains from being an enemy of the empire. (See below.) Moreover, giving gold and prisoners to the empire for titles and then sacking the title is the best way to get psychic amplifiers. Even the “free” usage of psycasts/blade link is almost pointless, since the player just lost best way to acquire them. It is senseless to turn on the empire late game when you can support the royal needs, and you give up the ability to use royal aid. Note you don’t lose already acquired titles if you become an enemy of the empire.
- Limited direct gains from being an enemy of the empire.
The player gains:
- “Free” use of psycasts without the title
- “Free” use of blade link weapons
- Colonist from the deserter quest.
To incentivize the player to kill the empire outside of memes, enemies of the empire get a higher frequency of imperial deserters quests. Sometimes these colonists will be free, with no raid. These deserters can be former titleholders with physic amplifiers. Bonus points for silly backstories. Like being discovered as a cannibal, and this adds the cannibal trait to imperial pawn we already have encountered. Now that’s a story. Maybe third backstory for these pawns, because this is a major shift in their adult life. Maybe psychic pawns that kill another psychic pawn get an entropy bonus. This would serve as another incentive to kill the empire, and target those pawns.
Continuing2:
Lack of bandit camp opportunity quest. I haven’t had one since I started a save with Royalty DLC. Other vanilla quests have showed up. Also it has been more difficult to acquire special items like infinite chemreactor, psychic emanator, vanometric powercell etc. Would love if we could pay faction leaders for an item stash for those like we can do with the AI core. Other vanilla quests have occurred as normal. Not sure if these changes are intended.
Stellarch still on the planet and giving quests after the player successfully completely the royalty ascent quest. I thought he as supposed to go to the stars with the colonists.
Trading with royal tribute collector. It is possible to overpay the minimum amount of gold necessary for an integer amount of royal favor. It is a lot of clicking to maximize the amount of royal favor with a pile of gold. Royal favor numbers should be apparent.
Do NPC pawns with psycasts use them in battle? I have not had any opportunities to see this. Not sure the status of this in game. I understand that this would be time consuming to implement. (This is coming from pathetic Ue4 C++ hobbyist.) Though this varies with the Utility AI framework you are using.
It is worth it save scum to re-roll which psychic ability we want when we level up an amplifier. Be nice to let us choose, rather than “force” us picky players to reroll a lot. Some of us want to give our pawns every psychic ability possible.
Enemy faction bosses/leaders should have the ability to do psycasts. Would explain why the empire hates them.
Great work as always. Don’t want this post seem to like I hate the DLC. I love it and it is worth it. Additionally, some of Rimworld’s doctor quirks are caused by a far away doctor relieving a nearby doctor from his duties. Was able to see this happen on my save by being vigilant for it. Its particularly apparent when the nearby doctor has rest or hunger needs.
Unrelated notes:
Pawns are having trouble stocking up on wake up. They go into pill loops, where they grab a pill and drop it, then try again. I need to do more thorough testing before I can begin to submit a wall of text that would give Tynan a way to fix the issue. For now I just put my wake up stash in an accessible location.
2x1 tables shouldn’t be marked as gather spots be default. I like putting in 2x1 in prisons and in the field so my colonists have somewhere to eat. It is annoying to have to uncheck this box, so my colonists don’t try to some far away table to socialize, fail to fill recreation, and walk all the back to the hub to work.
Shelves shouldn’t have weapons selected by default. It is beneficial to build shelves to avoid beauty penalties, and movement speed penalties.
Drafted pawns should have their box in the upper area of the screen highlighted in orange, so we can easily see who is drafted at a glance. Would help for large colonies. We all have left a pawn drafted standing in the rain at one point.