Rimworld

Phoebe Chill, second-to-hardest difficulty (blood and dust?), Naked Brutality start, reloads enabled.

You can learn how to trivialize most singular raids/events on youtube, so I like that Phoebe gives me "perfect storms" so that I have to make sacrifices or be very creative with how I solve problems, but generally my colony doesn't get completely wiped out, but it also gives me the breaks necessary to prepare for the bad events.

Can't imagine playing with no reloads. Managing even a medium-scale battle of any complexity is such a slog in this game, and way too often I will play through a battle and only realize after the fact I've completely forgotten about another corner of the map where everything's burning to the ground and half my colony is dead because I didn't have fire at will on or something.

Naked Brutality feels like the best story to me. I like to just run with whatever pawn gets generated first and I try to work with their strengths and find friends that can help asap. Not very good for your own ideology though. Normally I end up adopting whatever ideology my social pawn is.

The only right way to play is the one that's fun to you 👍

I also play to build a successful colony; but I use Randy Random on a normal difficulty because it's less predictable and thus more fun and challenging to get a good colony going and staying alive.

I generally play the same.

I don’t want to lose hours of work because we died in a raid and my last pawn got captured. That’s not fun for me.

I don’t know much about Rimworld but it seems like easier settings are more of a storyteller style-the game doesn’t force you to set aside the narrative you’re crafting. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Just play the way you want.

For the record I play without raids until I get major security and advanced weapons established.

I tend to play Randy on Medium-Hard, there was a storyteller for VFE-Vikings I miss that would give you less negative events if you raided regularly so would see less raids, but if you turtled up you'd get more negative stuff, used it to force myself to regularly send caravans and I really like playing that way.

I'd play harder but I find it really annoying to get mechanoid raids when I'm barely preindustrial, my partner found a mod that limits the global tech level to match and I'm really tempted to start a new run with it. She tends to run with randy on losing is fun, she's much better at getting things going than I am.

I also play with no/weak raids, phoebe chillax, dev enabled, etc.

But I have soooooooo many mods that add complexity and decor and stuff, and my goal is to build up an incredible resort of happy people for the wandering visitor groups that come through, and end up with everyone being allies (if convertible - dart guns to capture enemies for release reputation are glorious). I usually end up with 80+ people before the lag hits too hard to keep going (let’s hear it for move speed enhancers!!! rimrails is my favorite by far.)

So I have massive numbers of recreation buildings and stuff, and my base ends up so huge and complicated with multiple floors, absolutely giant freezers, and everything just everywhere so that it crashes and lags to hell and I start over with a new map. I need a better gpu..

I have never once completed a main objective, whether from vanilla or the DLC or even mod objectives. I’ve made some tiny amounts of progress toward them (like the one where you sell your base 3x, I’ve sold it once) but never actually done anything with completing them. Someday I might! But probably not. Win conditions don’t interest me in a sandbox game. Haven’t done any main objectives in oxygen not included, either.

The options exist because all modes of play are legitimate. You don't need to confess that any more than you need to confess that sometimes you eat food.

I tend to play easier settings too, with lots of mods. One of those mods lets me use the coms console to insult other factions and get them to send a raid, so I still get plenty of fighting in. But it's honestly a coin toss when a mech cluster drops in whether I'm going to actually deal with it legitimately or just grumble about how I can't be arsed and nuke it from orbit.

If it's not difficult, I lose interest because my reality is based on misery. Lol that sounds so edgelord and lame, but it is my rationale. The challenge creates the drama, the drama creates the interest. Like naming your XCom soldiers back in the day. NOOOOO the bastards got Hicks! NOOOOO!

People who want games to be hardcore just gave a fetish for suffering or something.

Games should be about having fun, and if the world wasn't contaminated with toxic competitiveness, I'm pretty sure almost no one would enjoy hardcore games. But it's always been about competition, even the old arcade games were all about the high scores, and it's shit.

Rimworld strives as a story generator, not as a stupid minmaxing frame-by-frame micromanagement hell

I play on standard. I up the starting settlers to 6 but make them all drop naked in tundra biome for a neat survival from nothing scenario. Adds the risk of temp issues and colonist more immediate needs, but balances itself with more hands to do jobs to meet them. I also try to balance the ratio of men to women as much as I can to increase likelihood of kids to help the colony grow organically earlier. This post has made me have to fire up a new rimworld game now.

I play the same, still lose quite a bit lol

Wait, you can turn friendly fire off?

Medium difficulty, Casandra. But the second a raid starts I'm saving. I have saves like 'pre-fight' 'pre-deal' 'pre-venture'. I'll try to get out of every situation without losing a pawn because I don't have many. At worst I use the auto saves to back up by a day and hope for an easier event but I try not to do that too much.

I'm not looking for a hardcore experience I'm looking to just keep myself stimulated enough to stay awake between work and bedtime.

I play it with chill mode. Try new things. Unlock some ideas in my brain. Reroll. I kind of wish I could figure out how to keep the world persistent like in Dwarf Fortress, starting new colonies when I get new ideas. I always think “this is the time I am going to clear out all other factions.”

Though the first time in vanilla that I launched the ship it was with two babies on it, because the parents were dead and they wouldn’t stop crying. 😂🤷‍♀️

It depends for me, sometimes I want to build a colony, other times I want to see the world burn. In most games I only care about the starting pawns, while the rest can die. I do not play ironman though as sometimes the pawns finds doors that should be closed, opened

Often, I do end up changing the settings to harder midgame, as when you have "everything". Changing the equilibrium some feels like a more fun challenge

I play medium as if iron Man is enabled--it isn't, but I generally only reload if something terrible happens due to a stupid mistake or I want to try/test something. Basically, I want to win, but I want there to be risk. I always play the whole way through the final mission. Sometimes I intend to continue on past that, but I never do. I don't enjoy the infestation event and played a couple of times with it forcibly disabled, but now I simply don't leave under-mountain areas cleared.

I have about a dozen mods installed, but nothing extravagant. Just a few for QoL and several inconsequential extras like additional hair styles and music.

I often disable dev mode and play on one of the middle difficulties because I like the stories it creates.

Playing higher difficulties just makes the game less fun for me.

I tend to play on easy mode now.

If I am being honest, I 'think' there's a part of Rimworld's gameplay that I like and another section I don't like as much, so now I find myself setting up mods and special difficulty modifiers to work towards whatever this other gameplay style is.

Also it doesn't help that many mods (though quite cool) are semi-unbalanced and raids are based on your colony's financial status - Which leads to the default difficulty settings being way overdone.

I play in mostlythe same way, just with phoebe on adventure story to get a bit of use out of any defenses and weapons

Playing in the medium range (Cassandra) is hardcore enough for me.

Same, I even use dev mode to knock down enemies if I can't be bothered with a raid at that time. I don't want them turned off or anything, I just want to deal with them when it's convenient for me. I do turn off things like solar flares though, that's no fun.

I like to hoard stuff and build extravagant buildings out of money. The usual place it ends up is with half of the colony operating a giant silver hotel, restaurant (/drug den) & casino with the Hospitality mods, and all of that bankrolls a facility that turns my colonists into superhumans one by one with bionics & implants from various mods, which usually snowballs as they start researching and crafting more parts faster and faster for the next set of colonists. At that point I generally get bored and drop the game for a few months before doing it all again.

i play about the same way. want to build things and become way too attached to the little blob shaped people. if that wasnt a way we're 'allowed' to play the game it wouldn't have been included as a way to play the game.

I like to play a colony for about a week. I want to get just into late game with a challenge then collapse. If it is too easy for me, then late game just drags out forever. If it is too hard then I don't get the same fun from mid game. I really like the thrill of starting a new colony, but just past the slog of early game. Starting around hour 3-5 it starts to hit a lot of fun up till about hour 25-30 or so. I want a good mid game with a bit of struggle, but not constant verge of death.

For mods I play with some basic quality of life add ons, but nothing extensive. The expansions have taken care of most of what I was adding in the past. I like dev mode for the one extra speed, but don't normally cheat with it. I do keep iron man mode on.

So, medium? Medium-hard? But definitely not hard or extreme.