devtrackers.gg
Take these as examples of good ideology setups that feel unique in a good way:
Tunneler/Darkness: These guys basically get a buff to their defense (better accuracy than their opponents) and overall happiness in a mountain base, but the flip side is if they have to travel out to kill a mechanoid cluster with an annoying machine then they're at a downside since they can't utilize their darkness eyesight. The pack also added a couple items to make cave life more consistent, such as growing mushrooms, liking insect meat and dark lights. This is a colony type that now feels very unique compared to your standard colony.
Raider/Slaver: Picking this makes the game generate more raid locations and you get additional quests informing you about raid opportunities. In my experience the raid locations tend to spawn within 1 day of travel distance too, so even if you don't like making caravans, they require minimal effort here. So you raid, pillage, murder, extract skulls from the dead for sweet new decor that boosts mood, then bring back the survivors to become slaves, adding a new dimension to your colony. This also unlocks quite a few unique social events, such as the knife fight one.
And then there are some that just seem bad or poorly supported:
Nature dudes/Tree huggers: They get an incredibly modest buff to being around trees in my experience (+1 to +3) that pales compared to other mood buffs other ideologies add, but cut down a damned tree and everyone flips their sh*t and burns down the countryside. Strangely, despite being adverse to disturbing nature in any way, they do not seem more tolerant to a lack of structures, and suffer the same debuffs as anyone else for eating without a table or sleeping outside. It's also just downright unrealistic at times to adhere to their principles: even just building a structure in a forest or jungle will likely require you to mine or chop trees. If you take the ideology in something like Arid Shrubland, then it's more tolerable, but now the ideology just doesn't feel as unique or impactful since you're also surrendering the few buffs you had.
It just feels like this ideology blatantly contradicts some of the most basic colonist desires, making it a headache and rather inconsistent to play from a roleplay perspective. It feels like they should either not be bothered by eating without a table or sleeping outside, OR they should automatically start with Guaranlan seeds so they can immediately start on one of their more viable wood routes.
Body purist: These are already bottom-tier, and now they have their own ideology. Is it worth it now? Do they have something going for them that transhumanists lack...?
From what I can tell, no. Their big claim to fame is getting a medical specialist, so their doctors are awesome. Problem is that there's plenty of opportunities for a battle to result in an instant amputation, in which case the body purists are still sh*t out of luck. It reminds me of trying to do a Holy Nation roleplay in Kenshi: fun, but quickly goes sour if your best soldiers lose their limbs, because there's simply no replacing them. It feels like this is a missed opportunity to give them some sort of ability to regenerate limbs or some sort of answer to the problem of irreplaceable body parts. I don't think giving this specific ideology a medicine that can regenerate limbs would be OP since yeah, it'd be unlocked only with the ideology. The bitter irony is Luciferium can do this, but they likewise tend to shun drugs because they damage the body lol.
And some just seem redundant when they could've been more:
High Life: This gives a mood boost to drug usage.....but the problem with drug users was never their mood! They're the last colonist type to ever need a mood boost. If anything, they need the medical specialists or some special resistance to drug usage. The reason people hate Chemical Fascination is because those pawns flip out when they don't get their way and otherwise seem like they're trying to die from an overdose. Adding on more mood boosts for smoking smokeleaf hardly feels worth the consequence of making everyone in the colony Chemically Interested. It feels like giving them better drug resistances would've been the far more interesting choice, as it'd make spamming of the hard drugs more viable.
Animal Rancher/Animal Friend: This could be paranoia on my part, but I feel like this playstyle is immediately sabotaged by the wealth-difficulty relationship of the game. Yeah, you can have a ton of animals, but they spike your colony value and you end up with heavy raids. I tried one of these, had a nice farm going, and sure enough the first raid I got after I had a decent animal count was simply too much to handle.
Anyone else feel the same? I mean it's a fantastic base system to build upon and improve, but for the moment, either I'm missing something or there's only a handful of playstyles that feel dramatically different/actively catered to whilst the rest are either situational (example: cannibal has far more value in tundra/ice sheet, less purpose for other areas) or even contradictory to the systems in place.
External link →