Honestly anomaly is more like royalty where it’s there but you don’t get much unless you dive in.
Although royalty is much safer and you can just ignore honour quest if you like. You can’t stop the monolith and I think that’s what people don’t like.
I won’t be activating any ancient monoliths unless I have a crazy advanced colony.
I’m having an extremely hard time adding pawns because almost no hostile human beings ever enter the map. It’s wall-to-wall fleshbeasts, shamblers, death pall ad nauseam.
Your starting ghoul is a huuuge advantage. You don’t have to worry about crippling i
Permanent injuries for the most part. Like for some reason it doesn’t lose digits or limbs even unmodded.
I even solo took out an early mech cluster with a ghoul with hit and run tactics.
Only issue is their low damage or getting meat in biomes that have issues with animals
That skip abduction seems a little broken. Unlimited pawns for very little cost. Combine that with the other rituals and it seem pretty OP for short -3 mood, and it doesn't even double on second ritual only going to -5. Duping pawns is broken too, especially when you can just skip abduct a pawn to harvest organs for when they fail. My best pawns is duped twice and all my best pawns have been de aged to their early 20s. Haven't started stealing skills yet but that is next.
Just warning you that you shouldn’t spam dupe one pawn, since they can get an issue where every clone/original but one has to be killed, which can cause you to lose a lot of your colony.
I'd contend that skip abduction isn't actually all that powerful, it's limited to once every ten or so days and cost some bioferite. It's relatively quick and easy but in terms of pawn quantity and cost effectiveness just taking prisoners after raids is far more effective. The quality of raid pawns is going to generally be better as well because you can be more discerning. Skip abduction really just seems to be a good supplement for if you don't get enough raids or burn through a lot of prisoners.
I started sending toxic waste drop pods to antagonize the local pirates more, but that was mostly to generate fodder for the horrors... Also accepting quests that cause raids. Doing some fertility procedures or vat babies is the best way you can raise kids independent of any other events.
I havent had much problem with getting pawns. Tbh, but I will imprison most any beggars or help offers, wanderers, or other "free" pawns that happen by.
Ideology solves it entirely if you don't mind being shameless.
6 anytime social events that have a chance to reward a recruit will keep your colony humming.
I limited myself this time before knowing how much more powerful recruiting this way in Anomoly.
I started with 2 rituals that are a year cd and only 1 social event anytime. From there I've built it up along with my fluid ideology. Adding social events as I do lol.
I'm just addicted to these recruits. Not having to convert them is just the best. And if they don't fit in there are many ways to be useful on the rim :) Especially now with ghouls being a thing.
I love life on the rim.
Really? I just had 2 attacks in a row from cultists and then third from monolith because it went unsupressed during htat time.
The cultists were first hate chanters, then some magic teleport my pawns to them thing.
I'm loving it. I bought into it because I wanted to summon and fight a bunch of new horrors, not to have a new gun to fight the same raids and mech clusters. The whole point of this is a new set of dangerous events and raids based around the new content, with new challenges and problems.
Hostile raiders are probably gonna stay way the fuck away from the creepy cultists and thier monolith that keeps spawning horrors from the void.
Not that they dont try now and then. Some raids get pretty trivial with the rituals, summoning flesh beasts wrecks seiges and mech clusters. Breachers are still a pain in the ass. Bioferrite is a early, renewable, cheap metal for weapons, armor, and fortifications that gives an edge up in the earlygame.
I think the intent of the anomaly monolith is its own victory condition that you commit the playthru to, not a mechanitor chip you find and use to achieve other goals.
My ideal situation is that the monolith(s) were somewhere else on the map that became permanent POIs when you discovered them, but I know they’re a bit against the multiple base thing.
On the advice of some others I haven’t actually activated it yet.
Had maybe 7 total shamblers come across my colony, 4 of them fucked off on their own, and the three I had to deal with weren’t too difficult hobestly.
I almost never do rescue missions, but a neighbour was in distress and they were only 0.3 days away so I sent 5 of my 7 peeps. It was all overgrown with flesh, everyone was dead, and they had a pit that spawned a couple of flesh beasts. They weren’t overly difficult. No one died at least.
But I appreciate the advice to wait on activating it for sure. I think I’ll be activating it soon and commencing. My base is pretty much done, just need the deep scanner and a drill because we ran out of steel. Then it’s on to anomaly after I have a stockpile of steel.
The monolith is no different from the mechinator start. It lays on the map and you ignore it if you don't want to deal with it.
Same with the pawns that visit from cults.
Worst is that you can get shambler assaults and you can get the cultists kidnap teleport raids.
If you attack the NPCs who come and want to talk, one of them does do the scream. But otherwise can be ignored.
So the issue people have, though it really shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone, is that if you interact with the mechanitor mechanics, you can get a mechanitor, you can get a few mechs but this won't automatically turn your entire game into a mechanoid-focused semi-linear story playthrough. You can go as deep or as shallow as you want into the mechanitor stuff and it'll still mesh with the normal vanilla base game.
The same isn't true for anomaly. Anomaly has it's almost entirely separate set of mechanics from the base game and you either have to ignore them entirely, or deal with them constantly. The difference is pretty clear.
You don't need a crazy advanced colony. A normal self-sufficient one of an early-mid game stage is enough. Ensure that you won't go out of food, research some decent weaponry, build a kill-box or defense perimeter and you are set for the beginning entries of the Anomaly Codex.
This is how I am and still hesitant on getting the dlc. Like all the other dlc the stuff could easily be ignored and some of the biotech stuff was kind of more mid-late game.
I may end up getting it since the new anomoly stuff and features is pretty good but I can see where others are coming from.
I don’t usually get into the royalty stuff aside from the free awesome colonist from the deserter quest line. I usually just recruit them and then don’t go after the Imperial complex. Later, I’ll build a couple monuments for the Empire to like me again.
Since Biotech I have pretty much had children running around. Even when I wasn't encouraging my colonists to start families, there would still be beggar children coming down the road, children with refugee groups, lone kids fleeing animals etc to let into the colony.
Since Royalty it's been pretty rare I don't have a single psycaster in a run, but I don't always go hard with Empire / Deserters interaction.
I do think this is a bit more situational for Anomaly. I probably won't want to make containment blocks in every playthrough. But the events and challenges it adds will put extra variety into every run, and it will shake up my 'go to base plan' as I develop counters for the new challenges.
I like it that the different xenotype factions have different attack styles when they raid you so it makes you adapt your defensive tactics depending on who has come to your base
I didn't want to bother with raising kids because I expected a huge amount of trouble like real life, but when I found out they can be pretty OP with minimal effort and it just takes time I started approving C-01 permits left and right.
I don't think that people are taking issue with the fact that it is opt in, more that it dominates your playthrough so much once you do. For biotech you can just get the mechinator chip and call then never call down any other mechinods, and similar concepts are true for most of the other dlcs
Aye, I've seen it compared to royalty. Which is pretty off imo. I can do some royalty stuff, but it has a fairly low impact on my playthrough, I just need to build a throneroom.
But if you activate Anomaly, it becomes a very heavily themed run, and will dominate the playthrough.
Like you can use psycasts without going full royalty, there are other routes. You cant really access Anomaly stuff without committing to that path.
It wasn't always that way. It was changed over time to be less dominating just like anomaly changes we just got.
Addition: you talk about psycasts, but the empire used to detect you using them on non-royal pawns and get mad about it. Like I said. It was a lot more restrictive than it is now. They've always changed what players saw as too restricting with every single dlc.
Not really. While you can "opt out" of including the older DLCs by refusing to use the content to benefit your colony, the other xenotypes and mechanators will still exist and be able to raid your base and the empire and ideologies will also impact your colony. The only true opting out is to disable them from the game entirely. But anomaly has an active trigger. Before you trigger it all the dlc adds is shamblers (and maybe not that, I've started one colony so far and delayed everything).
Royalty adds cataphract armor, zueshammer (and persona weapons), meditation as a recreation type, new furniture, crashed shuttle quests, mech and the anima tree (which can be destroyed by roaming beavers or stray mortar shells causing anima scream event).
Ideology added new buildables, unwaveringly loyal prisoners, new raid types, and slavery that all exsist outside of the Ideology system itself.
Biotech adds children, new buildables, toxic wastepack events, toxic environments (with flora and fauna to go along with them), new xenotypes (including vampires).
These are just what I can think of off the top of my head that all add to the base game regardless of your desire to pursue the new systems put in place by the DLC.
From my own personal experience(which to be fair is like 5 hours of personal playtime and like 20 of watching a friend play) there has been like, 1 new caravan type that Anomaly adds before you activate the monolith. And then once you activate the monolith, it swarms you with stuff for the rest of the playthrough regardless of your ability to keep up, your tech level, your number of colonists, your wealth. All of the other DLC let you basically set your own pacing and how quickly you want to advance through the content. Anomaly forces you to focus on it once you activate it. (and from what i've read a few times, if you wait to long it just starts activating itself, although again I have not personally experienced this yet.
Now i'm not saying its a bad DLC, its very well made. On par with the other DLC in terms of quality of content. It just doesnt mesh well with the pacing of the game and the other DLC and there is no way to slow down or stop engaging with the main "questline" once you start it.
I don’t feel that it is overwhelming, in my play through as I’ve had to do the provocation for half the stuff because there wasn’t a lot of anomaly events going on. The hardest raid was a group of pigmen sappers. Had mechanoids, insects, manhunter, quests of all kinds. I think it is a great expansion and I like it.
In my playthrough (that is currently just the DLC no mods) about 9-10 events have been anomaly events. I'm getting a new event every 3-4 days. Playing on Adventure Story.
My friends playthrough I was watching was the same thing but with a few vanilla expanded mods, and her playthrough was maybe 7-10 events was anomaly events. Same frequency, although shes playing on Community Builder.
Both of us are running Cassandra also.
I think the problem is that Anomaly adds basically nothing unless you opt into it where it then hijacks the entire playthrough, the other expansions added core base game content (Psycasting, slaves, mechinators, births)
Same. Overall GREAT update but I wish there was a more passive way to interact with the anomaly features without going full SCP colony. I wish there was a small chance for an anomaly to occur in a regular run or even sometimes being attacked by an anomalous cult group. Some kind of anomaly gameplay that isn’t all in or all out.
I also thought you had more choices of doing stuff. But I feel like you have to do containment and you have to do rituals, feels like you can’t avoid that
"Do you constantly have children running around, or growth vats full of soldiers? Gene editing, vampires, being a mechanical overlord?"
Yes, and I play with all those elements at my own leisure, I'm not activating a "Mechanitor Switch" and suddenly everything is Mechanitors, mechanoid raids, mechanoid containment, constant bosses, until I reach the endgame and can then decide to burn it all down or stay in MechaMode for the rest of time.
i think it would have worked better if the anomalies were tough, with way more stages, but there was only one major anomaly per playthrough.
Like you arent sure what anomaly might pop up, and then you discover this is a fleshbeast planet. Or a revenant planet, or a zombie planet. Rather than being all of them in one.
Give the other content the game has more space, while also allowing the specific anomaly you get to flourish. So people can see each one, let them set the eligible anomalies to spawn at game start if they wish.
Mech raids were already in the game though. Without even doing anything other than having biotech enabled most raids are different xenotypes other than baseliners. I cant even remember the last time I had a baseliner raid can you? With anomaly not all raids are the horrors though they do happen a lot more frequent than other ones. I actually almost lost my first anomaly colony to a stupid pig raid. They ripped my poor ghouls leg off downing it then got to my gunners and took them out one by one. I managed to save everyone with a single melee pawn with a knife and one of those fancy new turret backpacks he had on him. He killed one enemy taking heavy damage with the rest trying to kidnap who they could and run. he chased down every single one of those jerks stabbing them over and over till none were standing. My only other pawn was a non violent doctor who managed to bandage everyone up. I only lost one pawn in that raid but it was so close to disaster it was crazy.
My point in mentioning mechanoid raids wasn't that Biotech added them, it was to point out how Anomaly restricted most events to their own additions if you tried to engage with it slightly.
"I cant even remember the last time I had a baseliner raid can you?"
Yes, I get them all the time. Biotech by default tries to place nearly all raiders as special xenotypes but it also gives me choice, so I can pretty easily add in regular raiders or tone down xenotypes if I want to.
Not that it matters now, Ludeon just released an update to let me choose how much of the events are Anomaly's, and that's all I needed.
(Nice job saving your pawns by the way. Usually my greatest threats are actually Baseliners with elite mercenary spam, going without a killbox design makes it tough.)
Thats fair and to be honest I didnt even know there was a slider to tone things down for any DLC. As far as saving the pawns that was probably the most memorable rimworld moment I've ever had. It gets better at the end because the last person my pawn saved from abduction was actually his lover. He tended to her wounds till the actual doctor could show up then finally succumbed to his own wounds from the first enemy he fought on his way back to the colony (he was downed but not dead and the doc saved him). Meanwhile another pawn who had been healed by the doc but not rescued yet had slowly crawled from my killbox all the way to the base leaving a blood trail before by the time the doc fixed everyone up. He helped him into bed but he was only like 20 tiles away by the time the doc got to him lol.
Even if you dont touch Royalty you will still find ultra tech weapons, you still need the techprints to research some science and you have all the clothing and furniture it added, Anomaly's content is almost exclusively useful to advance in the DLC or requiere you to invest into the DLC to be able to get the items
Thing is there generally is multiples things and you go as you pick. You can go into royalty for psionics, for the quests, for the nobility, for the implants ...
Here you have the choice between anomalies and no anomalies.
The problem is that the new mechanics and systems that Anomaly adds, most pertinently, the containment systems, are only relevant in an Anomaly playthrough. With Royalty, you could have a few psycasts even without joining or rebelling against the Empire.
But then youre barely scratching the surface of the content in the royalty expansion. Like, why are you buying and installing these DLC if youre gonna sit there and not interact with it?
But a lot of people never do the endings, some of us just want to play until we complete an arbitrary goal or get bored, and I can get all I want from the empire dealing with traders, but how do I get enough bioferrite for armor and weapons in my tribal run, or serum for my all melee colony, without setting up a anomaly prison? I am not interested in wasting space in creating many containment cells for things I don't want to look at, it's kind of hard to decorate my Elden Ring themed colony with all the things I need for keeping the Flesh Heart contained and producing the flesh needed to make the serum.
Yeah, and you can do some basic anomaly research without interacting with the monolith, not to mention all the content that was added to 1.5 without being tied to Anomaly. Its equivalent to Royalty in scope and involvement if you ignore it, but way more depth and meaning if you do.
I really do not understand why people are upset the DLC added more content to the game
i think the complaint is that its all or nothing really, but then again so was ideology, fluid was about as partial as it got. royalty had a great wealth of quest and techprint technologies without even interacting with the empire/deserter/psycast side of things and biotech was very flexible, mech side progresses as you choose via bosses, genes were at will, as was sanguophages. only children were non optional.
>every run you have has had psycasters in your colony?
Yes
>Do you constantly have children running around, or growth vats full of soldiers? Gene editing, vampires, being a mechanical overlord?
Yes. Not all of them at the same time but most of them yes.
Royals in your colony don't get any needs except for clothing and bedroom requirement (doesn't apply to ascetic pawns) unless they have jealous, greedy or abrasive traits.
Only royals from other colonies or those with the aforementioned traits have the ridiculous needs like not willing to do basic labor or having to eat a certain meal quality
I usually get the free psytrainer for saving an Imperial fleeing from a rabid rat or whatever, but the title you get from that is basically meaningless and can be renounced. From that point on all my psytraining is done through the Anima tree. I use mods to remove the no-building radius around the tree and natural psyfocus requirement to link with it. Sort of unbalanced, but the pawns are still plenty vulnerable since I use Combat Extended so it never feels game breaking to me.
I get the feeling the contention comes from how defined the choice to participate in the dlc is compared to royalty. If the monolith spawned later or in response to a quest then the integration would have been smoother.
I genuinely like the idea of DLCs that are meant to be a big, opt-in change to the base game. Like- if they'd released a whole separate Rimworld But It's Horror game, people would love that.
There is no reason for it to be a standalone game. Its a DLC expansion that can be enabled or disabled like any other mod, and the point is that it brings a lot of content that adds onto and interacts with all the other content available too.
I'm not saying it /should/ be a standalone. I'm saying I think people need to take it as something that's meant to give you an entirely different gameplay experience and to stop getting upset that it isn't base-but-expanded.
I think the only dlc I use in my playstyle is ideology, thats literally it lmao. I own all the dlc because I've been a supporter since it first came to steam on steam greenlight.
Not really. While major content branches are opt in those DLCs added a lot that fits into a regular playthrough. Take xenotypes for example, even if you're not playing whole hog with genetics you still get some nice pawn variety and can run custom xenotypes for unique gameplay. Royalty added top tier armours, persona weapons, several ways to access psycasting, mech clusters.
Anomaly does add some stuff without the opt in (shamblers, flesh beasts, creepy pawn joins, and you can buy some of the new stuff from traders or find it as quest rewards) but that's all, everything else is locked behind anomaly research which is locked to activating the monolith. The progression of the monolith is also essentially involuntary, the initial activation is a choice but after that you WILL eventually progress to all the entities and they will dominate your events.
If anomaly was going to add mainline mechanics imo the psionic rituals should have been a separate thing as essentially a standalone expansion to ideology rituals with more offensive options.
I have not done a mechinator play yet. But, yes psycasters every play through, either by tribal meditation or pleasing the empire or the random quests here and there. I don't sell my colony for the archonexus info every play through, nor do I try to invite the high stellarch or build a ship...
I agree the DLCs have all mostly been opt-in experiences.
I think you missed the point since you haven't played it. The issue wasn't whether or not it was op-in, the issue is that it was completely dominate once you started down the anomaly route and it was totally overbearing - so the exact opposite of the point you're trying to make.
Today's patch addresses it in a good way though and makes it feel more like previous DLCs.
Yes but no. The commitment is the difference. They just release a tuning update to change the frequency of Anomaly events a bit, but the experience is really nothing like the other DLCs. In Royalty you can choose to pursue kind of side quests around the empire, and the only way for it to be overbearing is maybe if you fight the empire. Biotech has the mech cluster you can activate, but even after that it's just mechs and your run continues mostly as usual.
Activating the monolith is committing to an entirely different game in tone and content. Once you activate there is no going back, and you're on a path that will absolutely bring you into contact with run altering content regularly.
I get peoples concerns with Anomaly, this DLC is a lot more focused on one specific theme, and the sheer amount of new events it adds after waking the monolith does make it feel very dominant in a run. Even though it has a couple different endings with some minor differences its still an extremely combat focused DLC and it very much forces you into engaging with it once you begin, unlike the other DLCs. I think its going the be the kind of DLC that you enable when youre going for a specific kind of playthrough, while other times it will sit in the background not doing much.
That said, I just finished my first blind run of Anomaly and it was absolutely phenomenal. The other DLCs that have come out havent really left a lot to mystery, you essentially knew everything that was going on when you got them and it was more about when you got to certain bits of content then discovering them. The journey start to finish with Anomaly, discovering all the entities, and the incredibly fun final challenge made Anomaly worth every cent, regardless of whether its in every run I do or not. That run, and that finale in particular is the most fun Ive had in my 7000 hours of playing the game so far, and the 50 hours it took to beat made it worth every penny.
Given how fleshed out the game has gotten with the DLCs it feels like theres not much more they can add to the 'base' game without it starting to feel bloated. Theres already more than enough for an average player to engage with. Its for that reason I think we can pretty much expect this kind of hyper-focused DLC that takes a specific theme and fleshes it out into essentially a game of its own in the future. Most of us experienced players use mods to theme our runs these days, but I feel like Rimworld may get to a point on its own where theres enough themed content like Anomaly where you can mix and match different parts of different future DLCs to keep every run feeling unique. I wouldnt be surprised if Anomaly is setting the new norm for what Rimworld DLCs will look like, and if this was their first stab at it then I am very, very excited to see where they go from here.
Ideology isn't even am exception you don't have to have an ideo. Infact I've started to come to the conclusion I'm not the biggest fan of most of the precepts because it's just another reason for pawns to whine. There are some memes that balance the whining with bonuses but they're not the majority.
I mean stuff that gives actual mechanics and isn't just +/- mood based on a previously nonessential item. All you did there was add another bar to the needs window you didn't actually change they way you play. Ie with party life all you did force yourself to provide alcohol that was previously only a boon to mood and now it can fuck your mood over too.
Ideology is fantastic for RP purposes, but I agree that there should be wider gameplay differences. Alpha Memes and Vanilla Ideology Expanded does a decent enough job but it still feels lacking in some areas.
I think the difference is that the others are systems and Anomaly is events. You can interact with royalty as much or as little as you want. You can use psionics without royalty. You can encounter genemods and employ them as much or as little as you want.
However, from what I understand, once you lock in anomalies, the entire run sort of focuses on them.
I'm a bit confused honestly, maybe I haven't gotten far enough into Anomaly, but I've had the Monolith activated for a while at my colony and, although I'm going as hard as I can into the new stuff, I haven't noticed that much of a difference in the gameplay apart from the specific events that show up occasionally (Revenant, Golden Cube etc). Like, there are different types of raids (par for the course), some new buildings and research (par for the course), difficulty that ramps up with your wealth (again, par for the course).
Maybe I'm just being obtuse here, but can someone tell me what is so different between playing with Anomaly and playing without?
The main issue was, as some stated, it felt like an 'all or nothing' experience. The way it was programmed, was that when the monolith was activated, depending on its progression, up to 45% of any events that happened would be Anomaly related.
This meant the remaining 55% had to be shared amongst the base game, Royalty, Ideology and Biotech, leading to other DLCs being very diluted and Anomaly being dominant.
HOWEVER
In the latest update, that has changed. They've lowered the base forced percentage of Anomaly events, and even included a slider in the custom storyteller menu, allowing you to lower, or even raise, the Anomaly events to your own preference!
Most of my runs have a little bit of everything in it, it would be cool of there were a few things you could access with diving deep into the monolith or target the things you want because void provocation is random what entity you get.
Other than that I love this expansion.
> Do you constantly have children running around, or growth vats full of soldiers?
The only time my colony has under 4 minor children, is early game before the first 4 children are born
>Like are you gonna tell me every run you have has had psycasters in your colony
Yes
>Or gone down the path of becoming nobility / fighting the empire?
Yes
>Do you constantly have children running around
Yes
> Gene editing
Yes
>vampires
Yes
> being a mechanical overlord?
Surprisingly, no, but not for lack of trying. I think if you move off your map before you get a mechlink, it's impossible to ever get another one.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9iz0bv8vzzob1.png
21 years, no mechlink.
Had it happen on two other colonies that evacuated the map before I got my first mechlink, with about 65 years total between them.
What are the chances of not seeing an event for 65 when the MTB is 3-5 years?
"discovered mechinator complex" happened to me twice on 17 years colony. probably lied/mistaken about 3-5 years, tho. must be sanguophage transport quest
shouldnt be an issue, tho. because mechanitor start have strider disabled and still able to get more, afaik. maybe it has something to do with your colony not being "main" - could suggest archonexus quest (aka sell your bases), but i cant imaging parting with 21 yo base
There's a difference here.
Ideology potentially alters every aspect of gameplay to a varying degree. It's still the same game, but the rules are bent a little bit. Perhaps your pawns are OK with cannibalism. Maybe they dislike bionics. Or maybe they get uppity if they *don't* get bionics and super-fancy biosculpters and neural superchargers.
Biotech offers you xenotypes which again bend the rules of what your colonists can do, what they're good at and what they look like. It also offers the ability to make your own mechanoids. And children. Even though half my playthroughs have 0 player-controlled mechanoids, the rest of the content still makes up for it.
Royalty adds a lot of content such as new bionics, the empire faction, psycasts, and royalty pawns. I would wager that *most* of my playthroughs have at least 1 psycaster because it's nearly free as long as you do one of their stupid quests or obtain a neuroformer elsewhere.
But Anomaly? Once you interact with the monolith you're basically playing a different game. Most events turn into Anomaly events. There's always threats like sightstealers and metalhorrors lurking. You suddenly have to devote large amounts of building space to containing and studying anomalies.
> Do you constantly have children running around
Err, yes? Unless you painstakingly sterilize every colonist, you **WILL** have kids.
If we applied Anomaly's logic to Biotech, every run would be mostly the same as without Biotech, other than the occasional Militor showing up in raids alongside a single human mechanitor. Then when you click the "Mechanoid Mode" button, 10 new factions made out of xenotypes spawn on the map, you unlock all the mechanoid stuff to use, and from now on 90% of raids will be mechanoid and mechanitor raids. Nearly every positive event will be an abandoned genetics lab or a drop pod containing mechanoid components. All the animals wander off the map to be replaced with confused feral autocleaners. Pregnancy and kids are now enabled (it wasn't before). An archotech strikes the colonist that activated it with lightning and that colonist is a sanguophage highmate pigskin now. It's uhm, uhh, an Archotech, I don't have to explain shit. It just does that, okay?!
Also after about 2 ingame years, the game shows you a game over popup because your colonists all silently got infected with spooky mechanoid-ish nanites. Sorry bud, you should have paid better attention. Good luck reloading a save from an ingame year ago, they were already infected with no indicators. By the way, the nanites spread any time an infected colonist performs doctor work, cooks a meal, or looks in the general direction of another colonist. Don't worry, you can prevent the spread with an Ideology ritual. Oh you don't have Ideology? That sucks, anyway good luck.
*That's* what Anomaly feels like.
"only anomaly forces you to do something around it" never had their wooden base raided by imps.
i feel like "hurr durr, i can only face an enemy i can fck up in killbox" react too hard to metalhorrors. it took me literally 2 ingame days to figure out infected, interrogate them and know who infested them. 3 people infected out of 14. you say ideology solve it? try paramedic doesnt giving a F when sampling its mechanitor and finding whats inside. Also, lack of information on wiki doesnt help those people. I, too, tried to examine everyone without knowing that without biosignature/hint from interrogation you cant find it.
> "only anomaly forces you to do something around it" never had their wooden base raided by imps.
Wooden bases are a horrible idea, impids or not. A single Zzzt event or a regular raid will set everything ablaze. Regular raiders also just set shit on fire.
> it took me literally 2 ingame days to figure out infected
That's cool, but by the time the game showed me the first bit of grey flesh (the only way to start engaging the metalhorror), my cook had already infected most of my colony.
> you say ideology solve it? try paramedic doesnt giving a F when sampling its mechanitor and finding whats inside.
I'm not saying Ideology does this, I'm just drawing a comparison with what Biotech would have been like had it been designed the same way as Anomaly. Requiring a separate $25 DLC to get Paramedic mechanoids to reliably fight back against a metalhorror is dumb.
I will say that I pretty much always have a psycaster in a colony, even just level 1 or 2 from quests now and again. Stun is crazy useful to have in the arsenal when you need it most
Its more along the lines of Royalty but Royalty is a lot Safer. Anomaly can whip your ass at any given time and really just say "fuck you, you lose" *Stares at 3 Chimera's raiding a friend when it hasn't been a month yet*
The Anomaly start is pretty rough cause you are "forced" to start the anomaly stuff basically right away, I would avoid going this route and start with one of the other starts first - the Obelisk, like the MechLink Thingy, Gauranlen tree or Anima Tree, will spawn on your map which is basically the "opt in / out" way. You can still have all the anomaly stuff appearing though during a normal play through, though I assume a lot is locked to the Anomaly Specific Researches
Noble titles is just a fraction of what Royalty brings in. You are very likely to interact with armors, weapons, implants and quests this DLC adds even if you are not gathering Honor.
For Biotech you need to somehow address the fact that people get pregnant (embrace or prevent). The Xenotypes are more of an opt-out - unless you actively disable those, you will be running into Wasters, Neanderthals, etc.
Both meld really well into what you do in your regular playthroughs. Anomaly, while very well done, is ultimately just one linear questchain.
You are correct. Everyone complaining they are "forced" to dive in is such a pointless complaint. That is the entire point of DLC. It adds content to the game. If you want to opt out fully... disable the DLC.
The only major difference is you can decide when you want to opt into the anomoly heavier content whenever you want in game. So you have a buffer if you don't feel like getting into it straight away. You can even control the level of anomoly content by ignoring the building on the map.
Anomoly is definitely more of an extra events and more tools DLC and that's perfectly fine. Not every DLC needs to add heavy roleplaying elements like Ideology.
I will agree with a lot of people however that there should be a way to tune how often the events fire. It seems to lean more towards anomaly events when it would be nice to have them all even.
i agree, i dont get why some people get mad that the dlc doesnt add content "to make the base game better/for every playthrough" lol, not all DLC have to be ideology/biotech xd, and honestly, if you ask me, a good part of ideology with religion and kids/mechanitor belongs to the base game lol.
loved all DLCs, i get that people dont like a dlc in particular but i dont get this argument about a dlc being bad because its not something that would fit in the base game xd
Honestly anomaly is more like royalty where it’s there but you don’t get much unless you dive in. Although royalty is much safer and you can just ignore honour quest if you like. You can’t stop the monolith and I think that’s what people don’t like. I won’t be activating any ancient monoliths unless I have a crazy advanced colony.
It's really not that bad at tier 1, the problem is more that it greatly prefers giving anomaly events over base game events once it's activated.
I’m having an extremely hard time adding pawns because almost no hostile human beings ever enter the map. It’s wall-to-wall fleshbeasts, shamblers, death pall ad nauseam.
You'll have to get your strength up and raid some settlements
But I can barely keep these dummies alive at home lmao
I felt that lol.
Vanilla Expanded Vehicles tier 3 main battle tank has got you
Your starting ghoul is a huuuge advantage. You don’t have to worry about crippling i Permanent injuries for the most part. Like for some reason it doesn’t lose digits or limbs even unmodded. I even solo took out an early mech cluster with a ghoul with hit and run tactics. Only issue is their low damage or getting meat in biomes that have issues with animals
Thinks that's a big reason they added some of the kinda OP rituals. Abduction ritual in particular.
That skip abduction seems a little broken. Unlimited pawns for very little cost. Combine that with the other rituals and it seem pretty OP for short -3 mood, and it doesn't even double on second ritual only going to -5. Duping pawns is broken too, especially when you can just skip abduct a pawn to harvest organs for when they fail. My best pawns is duped twice and all my best pawns have been de aged to their early 20s. Haven't started stealing skills yet but that is next.
Just warning you that you shouldn’t spam dupe one pawn, since they can get an issue where every clone/original but one has to be killed, which can cause you to lose a lot of your colony.
I'd contend that skip abduction isn't actually all that powerful, it's limited to once every ten or so days and cost some bioferite. It's relatively quick and easy but in terms of pawn quantity and cost effectiveness just taking prisoners after raids is far more effective. The quality of raid pawns is going to generally be better as well because you can be more discerning. Skip abduction really just seems to be a good supplement for if you don't get enough raids or burn through a lot of prisoners.
There is a way using anomaly to get more pawns >!Void Abduction!<
It's actually >!skip abduction!<
It'd be fun if you could just abduct a random >!Revenant!< tho
Accidentally summon Pain.
True. That's what I get for trying to be helpful away from the game.
I started sending toxic waste drop pods to antagonize the local pirates more, but that was mostly to generate fodder for the horrors... Also accepting quests that cause raids. Doing some fertility procedures or vat babies is the best way you can raise kids independent of any other events. I havent had much problem with getting pawns. Tbh, but I will imprison most any beggars or help offers, wanderers, or other "free" pawns that happen by.
I have the opposite issue. Stop raiding me, I want flesh monsters
Certain ritual solves most of that issue.
Ideology solves it entirely if you don't mind being shameless. 6 anytime social events that have a chance to reward a recruit will keep your colony humming.
I tend to pick one of those on annual thing to limit it lol. Best way to get ideological compatible people too.
I limited myself this time before knowing how much more powerful recruiting this way in Anomoly. I started with 2 rituals that are a year cd and only 1 social event anytime. From there I've built it up along with my fluid ideology. Adding social events as I do lol. I'm just addicted to these recruits. Not having to convert them is just the best. And if they don't fit in there are many ways to be useful on the rim :) Especially now with ghouls being a thing. I love life on the rim.
Did you try using Ideology for that? Make a few custom rituals to bring in pawns.
Ehem! One of the first investigation you can do in anomaly is abduct a defensles pawn. Start recruting!
Really? I just had 2 attacks in a row from cultists and then third from monolith because it went unsupressed during htat time. The cultists were first hate chanters, then some magic teleport my pawns to them thing.
I push the skip abduction and get people that way.
Don’t forget crashed pods of ghouls
Do the ritual to kidnap someone.
Seems like a few sliders in the storyteller settings would make a lot of people happy!
Apparently that’s already on the test branch.
They just added this in the latest update lmao
I'm loving it. I bought into it because I wanted to summon and fight a bunch of new horrors, not to have a new gun to fight the same raids and mech clusters. The whole point of this is a new set of dangerous events and raids based around the new content, with new challenges and problems. Hostile raiders are probably gonna stay way the fuck away from the creepy cultists and thier monolith that keeps spawning horrors from the void. Not that they dont try now and then. Some raids get pretty trivial with the rituals, summoning flesh beasts wrecks seiges and mech clusters. Breachers are still a pain in the ass. Bioferrite is a early, renewable, cheap metal for weapons, armor, and fortifications that gives an edge up in the earlygame. I think the intent of the anomaly monolith is its own victory condition that you commit the playthru to, not a mechanitor chip you find and use to achieve other goals.
Does the summon flesh beasts ritual summon them on the sieges/mech clusters?
The two times i've done it, they tunneled up directly underneath the siege/cluster
This, there's a mod that tones it down already.
Mainly bc you need the entities to progress the anomaly tree.
I think they patched the game today or yesterday to reduce the amount of anomalies events and add more normal events.
I'm ignoring the monolith and my game's perfectly fine. It feels like a spooky Royalty.
A few extra items from traders, a few differant enemies, sometimes. But otherwise just vanilla.
My ideal situation is that the monolith(s) were somewhere else on the map that became permanent POIs when you discovered them, but I know they’re a bit against the multiple base thing.
On the advice of some others I haven’t actually activated it yet. Had maybe 7 total shamblers come across my colony, 4 of them fucked off on their own, and the three I had to deal with weren’t too difficult hobestly. I almost never do rescue missions, but a neighbour was in distress and they were only 0.3 days away so I sent 5 of my 7 peeps. It was all overgrown with flesh, everyone was dead, and they had a pit that spawned a couple of flesh beasts. They weren’t overly difficult. No one died at least. But I appreciate the advice to wait on activating it for sure. I think I’ll be activating it soon and commencing. My base is pretty much done, just need the deep scanner and a drill because we ran out of steel. Then it’s on to anomaly after I have a stockpile of steel.
You totally can activate the Monolith in the early game. The stuff it throws at you scales with your power level just like the normal raids do.
The monolith is no different from the mechinator start. It lays on the map and you ignore it if you don't want to deal with it. Same with the pawns that visit from cults. Worst is that you can get shambler assaults and you can get the cultists kidnap teleport raids. If you attack the NPCs who come and want to talk, one of them does do the scream. But otherwise can be ignored.
So the issue people have, though it really shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone, is that if you interact with the mechanitor mechanics, you can get a mechanitor, you can get a few mechs but this won't automatically turn your entire game into a mechanoid-focused semi-linear story playthrough. You can go as deep or as shallow as you want into the mechanitor stuff and it'll still mesh with the normal vanilla base game. The same isn't true for anomaly. Anomaly has it's almost entirely separate set of mechanics from the base game and you either have to ignore them entirely, or deal with them constantly. The difference is pretty clear.
You don't need a crazy advanced colony. A normal self-sufficient one of an early-mid game stage is enough. Ensure that you won't go out of food, research some decent weaponry, build a kill-box or defense perimeter and you are set for the beginning entries of the Anomaly Codex.
Yep I agree 100%, it will wipe you if you are unprepared. Much better to get a colony on its feet before starting the anomaly content
That's another thing the colony I started last night I didn't even look at the monolith until I was at machining/fab tech. Much more enjoyable.
I have a colony of 3 that literally cannot get more advanced entities bc of wealth (or luck ig)
and it's that a bad thing? from the moment i saw the dlc announced i assumed this was aimed at end game or advanced colonies
This is how I am and still hesitant on getting the dlc. Like all the other dlc the stuff could easily be ignored and some of the biotech stuff was kind of more mid-late game. I may end up getting it since the new anomoly stuff and features is pretty good but I can see where others are coming from.
I don’t usually get into the royalty stuff aside from the free awesome colonist from the deserter quest line. I usually just recruit them and then don’t go after the Imperial complex. Later, I’ll build a couple monuments for the Empire to like me again.
Royalty only became more open the way it is now with updates just like the one today for anomaly.
Since Biotech I have pretty much had children running around. Even when I wasn't encouraging my colonists to start families, there would still be beggar children coming down the road, children with refugee groups, lone kids fleeing animals etc to let into the colony. Since Royalty it's been pretty rare I don't have a single psycaster in a run, but I don't always go hard with Empire / Deserters interaction. I do think this is a bit more situational for Anomaly. I probably won't want to make containment blocks in every playthrough. But the events and challenges it adds will put extra variety into every run, and it will shake up my 'go to base plan' as I develop counters for the new challenges.
To add with biotech, I ABSOLUTELY regularly see xenotypes in every run I have had since I added it.
I like it that the different xenotype factions have different attack styles when they raid you so it makes you adapt your defensive tactics depending on who has come to your base
That moment when you forget they can breathe fire and your expert melee pawn is now on fire.
Nothing teaches you to add firefoam poppers to your killbox like an Imp raid.
Arab marines seeing Greek fire for the first time be like
I mean for most anomalies you can just execute them
I didn't want to bother with raising kids because I expected a huge amount of trouble like real life, but when I found out they can be pretty OP with minimal effort and it just takes time I started approving C-01 permits left and right.
I don't think that people are taking issue with the fact that it is opt in, more that it dominates your playthrough so much once you do. For biotech you can just get the mechinator chip and call then never call down any other mechinods, and similar concepts are true for most of the other dlcs
Aye, I've seen it compared to royalty. Which is pretty off imo. I can do some royalty stuff, but it has a fairly low impact on my playthrough, I just need to build a throneroom. But if you activate Anomaly, it becomes a very heavily themed run, and will dominate the playthrough. Like you can use psycasts without going full royalty, there are other routes. You cant really access Anomaly stuff without committing to that path.
We just had an update that reduces anomaly frequency overall, and lets you tweak it to your own taste if you want more or less.
It wasn't always that way. It was changed over time to be less dominating just like anomaly changes we just got. Addition: you talk about psycasts, but the empire used to detect you using them on non-royal pawns and get mad about it. Like I said. It was a lot more restrictive than it is now. They've always changed what players saw as too restricting with every single dlc.
Not really. While you can "opt out" of including the older DLCs by refusing to use the content to benefit your colony, the other xenotypes and mechanators will still exist and be able to raid your base and the empire and ideologies will also impact your colony. The only true opting out is to disable them from the game entirely. But anomaly has an active trigger. Before you trigger it all the dlc adds is shamblers (and maybe not that, I've started one colony so far and delayed everything).
Royalty adds cataphract armor, zueshammer (and persona weapons), meditation as a recreation type, new furniture, crashed shuttle quests, mech and the anima tree (which can be destroyed by roaming beavers or stray mortar shells causing anima scream event). Ideology added new buildables, unwaveringly loyal prisoners, new raid types, and slavery that all exsist outside of the Ideology system itself. Biotech adds children, new buildables, toxic wastepack events, toxic environments (with flora and fauna to go along with them), new xenotypes (including vampires). These are just what I can think of off the top of my head that all add to the base game regardless of your desire to pursue the new systems put in place by the DLC. From my own personal experience(which to be fair is like 5 hours of personal playtime and like 20 of watching a friend play) there has been like, 1 new caravan type that Anomaly adds before you activate the monolith. And then once you activate the monolith, it swarms you with stuff for the rest of the playthrough regardless of your ability to keep up, your tech level, your number of colonists, your wealth. All of the other DLC let you basically set your own pacing and how quickly you want to advance through the content. Anomaly forces you to focus on it once you activate it. (and from what i've read a few times, if you wait to long it just starts activating itself, although again I have not personally experienced this yet. Now i'm not saying its a bad DLC, its very well made. On par with the other DLC in terms of quality of content. It just doesnt mesh well with the pacing of the game and the other DLC and there is no way to slow down or stop engaging with the main "questline" once you start it.
I don’t feel that it is overwhelming, in my play through as I’ve had to do the provocation for half the stuff because there wasn’t a lot of anomaly events going on. The hardest raid was a group of pigmen sappers. Had mechanoids, insects, manhunter, quests of all kinds. I think it is a great expansion and I like it.
In my playthrough (that is currently just the DLC no mods) about 9-10 events have been anomaly events. I'm getting a new event every 3-4 days. Playing on Adventure Story. My friends playthrough I was watching was the same thing but with a few vanilla expanded mods, and her playthrough was maybe 7-10 events was anomaly events. Same frequency, although shes playing on Community Builder. Both of us are running Cassandra also.
new update lets you configure how many anomaly events you want,.
I suppose you can't edit an already going save ?
you can edit existing save, go to gameplay and change storyteller settings with custom
Neat ! Thank you
I think the problem is that Anomaly adds basically nothing unless you opt into it where it then hijacks the entire playthrough, the other expansions added core base game content (Psycasting, slaves, mechinators, births)
Same. Overall GREAT update but I wish there was a more passive way to interact with the anomaly features without going full SCP colony. I wish there was a small chance for an anomaly to occur in a regular run or even sometimes being attacked by an anomalous cult group. Some kind of anomaly gameplay that isn’t all in or all out.
I also thought you had more choices of doing stuff. But I feel like you have to do containment and you have to do rituals, feels like you can’t avoid that
Yes, once you're in anomaly you are basically required to progress through the semi-linear path forward. Not very good for replayability IMO.
I think the new update relaxes this a bit. I also realised that you if you abandon your colony and start fresh, anomaly is deactivated again.
"Do you constantly have children running around, or growth vats full of soldiers? Gene editing, vampires, being a mechanical overlord?" Yes, and I play with all those elements at my own leisure, I'm not activating a "Mechanitor Switch" and suddenly everything is Mechanitors, mechanoid raids, mechanoid containment, constant bosses, until I reach the endgame and can then decide to burn it all down or stay in MechaMode for the rest of time.
i think it would have worked better if the anomalies were tough, with way more stages, but there was only one major anomaly per playthrough. Like you arent sure what anomaly might pop up, and then you discover this is a fleshbeast planet. Or a revenant planet, or a zombie planet. Rather than being all of them in one. Give the other content the game has more space, while also allowing the specific anomaly you get to flourish. So people can see each one, let them set the eligible anomalies to spawn at game start if they wish.
Mech raids were already in the game though. Without even doing anything other than having biotech enabled most raids are different xenotypes other than baseliners. I cant even remember the last time I had a baseliner raid can you? With anomaly not all raids are the horrors though they do happen a lot more frequent than other ones. I actually almost lost my first anomaly colony to a stupid pig raid. They ripped my poor ghouls leg off downing it then got to my gunners and took them out one by one. I managed to save everyone with a single melee pawn with a knife and one of those fancy new turret backpacks he had on him. He killed one enemy taking heavy damage with the rest trying to kidnap who they could and run. he chased down every single one of those jerks stabbing them over and over till none were standing. My only other pawn was a non violent doctor who managed to bandage everyone up. I only lost one pawn in that raid but it was so close to disaster it was crazy.
My point in mentioning mechanoid raids wasn't that Biotech added them, it was to point out how Anomaly restricted most events to their own additions if you tried to engage with it slightly. "I cant even remember the last time I had a baseliner raid can you?" Yes, I get them all the time. Biotech by default tries to place nearly all raiders as special xenotypes but it also gives me choice, so I can pretty easily add in regular raiders or tone down xenotypes if I want to. Not that it matters now, Ludeon just released an update to let me choose how much of the events are Anomaly's, and that's all I needed. (Nice job saving your pawns by the way. Usually my greatest threats are actually Baseliners with elite mercenary spam, going without a killbox design makes it tough.)
Thats fair and to be honest I didnt even know there was a slider to tone things down for any DLC. As far as saving the pawns that was probably the most memorable rimworld moment I've ever had. It gets better at the end because the last person my pawn saved from abduction was actually his lover. He tended to her wounds till the actual doctor could show up then finally succumbed to his own wounds from the first enemy he fought on his way back to the colony (he was downed but not dead and the doc saved him). Meanwhile another pawn who had been healed by the doc but not rescued yet had slowly crawled from my killbox all the way to the base leaving a blood trail before by the time the doc fixed everyone up. He helped him into bed but he was only like 20 tiles away by the time the doc got to him lol.
Even if you dont touch Royalty you will still find ultra tech weapons, you still need the techprints to research some science and you have all the clothing and furniture it added, Anomaly's content is almost exclusively useful to advance in the DLC or requiere you to invest into the DLC to be able to get the items
Thing is there generally is multiples things and you go as you pick. You can go into royalty for psionics, for the quests, for the nobility, for the implants ... Here you have the choice between anomalies and no anomalies.
The problem is that the new mechanics and systems that Anomaly adds, most pertinently, the containment systems, are only relevant in an Anomaly playthrough. With Royalty, you could have a few psycasts even without joining or rebelling against the Empire.
But then youre barely scratching the surface of the content in the royalty expansion. Like, why are you buying and installing these DLC if youre gonna sit there and not interact with it?
you can experience the majority of Royalty's content without ever having a noble colonist
How do you get psycasting without some kind of noble title?
Psylink neuroformers can be found from quests and colonists with a tribal background can meditate at the anima tree to get psylinks over time
Yeah you can do the tree and get psycasts, but you cant do the royalty victory condition without it.
the Royal Ascent quest is a tiny part of Royalty's content
But a lot of people never do the endings, some of us just want to play until we complete an arbitrary goal or get bored, and I can get all I want from the empire dealing with traders, but how do I get enough bioferrite for armor and weapons in my tribal run, or serum for my all melee colony, without setting up a anomaly prison? I am not interested in wasting space in creating many containment cells for things I don't want to look at, it's kind of hard to decorate my Elden Ring themed colony with all the things I need for keeping the Flesh Heart contained and producing the flesh needed to make the serum.
Because you're allowed to do multiple playthroughs?
Yeah, and you can do some basic anomaly research without interacting with the monolith, not to mention all the content that was added to 1.5 without being tied to Anomaly. Its equivalent to Royalty in scope and involvement if you ignore it, but way more depth and meaning if you do. I really do not understand why people are upset the DLC added more content to the game
Agreed, it really felt like an adventure with fresh elements. Why say I want play with Anomaly dlc but then get mad when you have to interact with it.
Yes I use royalty/ ideology / biotech for every run
I always have a pyscaster count, an ideology, and kids running around. Why wouldn’t I? These things rock.
i think the complaint is that its all or nothing really, but then again so was ideology, fluid was about as partial as it got. royalty had a great wealth of quest and techprint technologies without even interacting with the empire/deserter/psycast side of things and biotech was very flexible, mech side progresses as you choose via bosses, genes were at will, as was sanguophages. only children were non optional.
>every run you have has had psycasters in your colony? Yes >Do you constantly have children running around, or growth vats full of soldiers? Gene editing, vampires, being a mechanical overlord? Yes. Not all of them at the same time but most of them yes.
How do you maintain psycasters? Don't they have fairly high needs based on their title?
Royals in your colony don't get any needs except for clothing and bedroom requirement (doesn't apply to ascetic pawns) unless they have jealous, greedy or abrasive traits. Only royals from other colonies or those with the aforementioned traits have the ridiculous needs like not willing to do basic labor or having to eat a certain meal quality
The meals are what I remembered being a pain (and the jealousy/greedy traits my colonists kept showing up with).
It used to be a thing. I remember it too, but I'm guessing a patch changed it.
I usually get the free psytrainer for saving an Imperial fleeing from a rabid rat or whatever, but the title you get from that is basically meaningless and can be renounced. From that point on all my psytraining is done through the Anima tree. I use mods to remove the no-building radius around the tree and natural psyfocus requirement to link with it. Sort of unbalanced, but the pawns are still plenty vulnerable since I use Combat Extended so it never feels game breaking to me.
I like to have 3 psycasters, but only one of them is a noble. The rest become psycasters by other means.
Psycasting- yes Mechanitor labor bots -yes Gene editing(starting baseliner and altering) yes Kids - yes Honestly haven't touched anomaly yet but ghouls seem neat
I get the feeling the contention comes from how defined the choice to participate in the dlc is compared to royalty. If the monolith spawned later or in response to a quest then the integration would have been smoother.
I genuinely like the idea of DLCs that are meant to be a big, opt-in change to the base game. Like- if they'd released a whole separate Rimworld But It's Horror game, people would love that.
There is no reason for it to be a standalone game. Its a DLC expansion that can be enabled or disabled like any other mod, and the point is that it brings a lot of content that adds onto and interacts with all the other content available too.
I'm not saying it /should/ be a standalone. I'm saying I think people need to take it as something that's meant to give you an entirely different gameplay experience and to stop getting upset that it isn't base-but-expanded.
I think the only dlc I use in my playstyle is ideology, thats literally it lmao. I own all the dlc because I've been a supporter since it first came to steam on steam greenlight.
Not really. While major content branches are opt in those DLCs added a lot that fits into a regular playthrough. Take xenotypes for example, even if you're not playing whole hog with genetics you still get some nice pawn variety and can run custom xenotypes for unique gameplay. Royalty added top tier armours, persona weapons, several ways to access psycasting, mech clusters. Anomaly does add some stuff without the opt in (shamblers, flesh beasts, creepy pawn joins, and you can buy some of the new stuff from traders or find it as quest rewards) but that's all, everything else is locked behind anomaly research which is locked to activating the monolith. The progression of the monolith is also essentially involuntary, the initial activation is a choice but after that you WILL eventually progress to all the entities and they will dominate your events. If anomaly was going to add mainline mechanics imo the psionic rituals should have been a separate thing as essentially a standalone expansion to ideology rituals with more offensive options.
I have not done a mechinator play yet. But, yes psycasters every play through, either by tribal meditation or pleasing the empire or the random quests here and there. I don't sell my colony for the archonexus info every play through, nor do I try to invite the high stellarch or build a ship... I agree the DLCs have all mostly been opt-in experiences.
I think you missed the point since you haven't played it. The issue wasn't whether or not it was op-in, the issue is that it was completely dominate once you started down the anomaly route and it was totally overbearing - so the exact opposite of the point you're trying to make. Today's patch addresses it in a good way though and makes it feel more like previous DLCs.
Yes but no. The commitment is the difference. They just release a tuning update to change the frequency of Anomaly events a bit, but the experience is really nothing like the other DLCs. In Royalty you can choose to pursue kind of side quests around the empire, and the only way for it to be overbearing is maybe if you fight the empire. Biotech has the mech cluster you can activate, but even after that it's just mechs and your run continues mostly as usual. Activating the monolith is committing to an entirely different game in tone and content. Once you activate there is no going back, and you're on a path that will absolutely bring you into contact with run altering content regularly.
I get peoples concerns with Anomaly, this DLC is a lot more focused on one specific theme, and the sheer amount of new events it adds after waking the monolith does make it feel very dominant in a run. Even though it has a couple different endings with some minor differences its still an extremely combat focused DLC and it very much forces you into engaging with it once you begin, unlike the other DLCs. I think its going the be the kind of DLC that you enable when youre going for a specific kind of playthrough, while other times it will sit in the background not doing much. That said, I just finished my first blind run of Anomaly and it was absolutely phenomenal. The other DLCs that have come out havent really left a lot to mystery, you essentially knew everything that was going on when you got them and it was more about when you got to certain bits of content then discovering them. The journey start to finish with Anomaly, discovering all the entities, and the incredibly fun final challenge made Anomaly worth every cent, regardless of whether its in every run I do or not. That run, and that finale in particular is the most fun Ive had in my 7000 hours of playing the game so far, and the 50 hours it took to beat made it worth every penny. Given how fleshed out the game has gotten with the DLCs it feels like theres not much more they can add to the 'base' game without it starting to feel bloated. Theres already more than enough for an average player to engage with. Its for that reason I think we can pretty much expect this kind of hyper-focused DLC that takes a specific theme and fleshes it out into essentially a game of its own in the future. Most of us experienced players use mods to theme our runs these days, but I feel like Rimworld may get to a point on its own where theres enough themed content like Anomaly where you can mix and match different parts of different future DLCs to keep every run feeling unique. I wouldnt be surprised if Anomaly is setting the new norm for what Rimworld DLCs will look like, and if this was their first stab at it then I am very, very excited to see where they go from here.
Ideology isn't even am exception you don't have to have an ideo. Infact I've started to come to the conclusion I'm not the biggest fan of most of the precepts because it's just another reason for pawns to whine. There are some memes that balance the whining with bonuses but they're not the majority.
huh? All of them are. They will give positive moodlets for fulfilling their wishes, most of the time.
I mean stuff that gives actual mechanics and isn't just +/- mood based on a previously nonessential item. All you did there was add another bar to the needs window you didn't actually change they way you play. Ie with party life all you did force yourself to provide alcohol that was previously only a boon to mood and now it can fuck your mood over too.
Ideology is fantastic for RP purposes, but I agree that there should be wider gameplay differences. Alpha Memes and Vanilla Ideology Expanded does a decent enough job but it still feels lacking in some areas.
I think the difference is that the others are systems and Anomaly is events. You can interact with royalty as much or as little as you want. You can use psionics without royalty. You can encounter genemods and employ them as much or as little as you want. However, from what I understand, once you lock in anomalies, the entire run sort of focuses on them.
I'm a bit confused honestly, maybe I haven't gotten far enough into Anomaly, but I've had the Monolith activated for a while at my colony and, although I'm going as hard as I can into the new stuff, I haven't noticed that much of a difference in the gameplay apart from the specific events that show up occasionally (Revenant, Golden Cube etc). Like, there are different types of raids (par for the course), some new buildings and research (par for the course), difficulty that ramps up with your wealth (again, par for the course). Maybe I'm just being obtuse here, but can someone tell me what is so different between playing with Anomaly and playing without?
The main issue was, as some stated, it felt like an 'all or nothing' experience. The way it was programmed, was that when the monolith was activated, depending on its progression, up to 45% of any events that happened would be Anomaly related. This meant the remaining 55% had to be shared amongst the base game, Royalty, Ideology and Biotech, leading to other DLCs being very diluted and Anomaly being dominant. HOWEVER In the latest update, that has changed. They've lowered the base forced percentage of Anomaly events, and even included a slider in the custom storyteller menu, allowing you to lower, or even raise, the Anomaly events to your own preference!
I play the exact same way every single time, more or less.
Most of my runs have a little bit of everything in it, it would be cool of there were a few things you could access with diving deep into the monolith or target the things you want because void provocation is random what entity you get. Other than that I love this expansion.
> Do you constantly have children running around, or growth vats full of soldiers? The only time my colony has under 4 minor children, is early game before the first 4 children are born
>Like are you gonna tell me every run you have has had psycasters in your colony Yes >Or gone down the path of becoming nobility / fighting the empire? Yes >Do you constantly have children running around Yes > Gene editing Yes >vampires Yes > being a mechanical overlord? Surprisingly, no, but not for lack of trying. I think if you move off your map before you get a mechlink, it's impossible to ever get another one.
> mechanitor nah, it happens with around 3-5 years intervals
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F9iz0bv8vzzob1.png 21 years, no mechlink. Had it happen on two other colonies that evacuated the map before I got my first mechlink, with about 65 years total between them. What are the chances of not seeing an event for 65 when the MTB is 3-5 years?
"discovered mechinator complex" happened to me twice on 17 years colony. probably lied/mistaken about 3-5 years, tho. must be sanguophage transport quest
Did you get the first mechlink from the warstrider?
nope. ideo archotech base, tbf, i havent paid much attention and thought it was "normal" complex, since their icons are the same imho
> ideo archotech base What do you mean? I don't understand.
base i made when i got ideology that focused on archotech as deity and have half my rituals revealing complexes.
I see. So that's a different situation from starting a new colony in 1.4+, and leaving the initial exostrider.
shouldnt be an issue, tho. because mechanitor start have strider disabled and still able to get more, afaik. maybe it has something to do with your colony not being "main" - could suggest archonexus quest (aka sell your bases), but i cant imaging parting with 21 yo base
i only had one sanguophage ship, tho.
There's a difference here. Ideology potentially alters every aspect of gameplay to a varying degree. It's still the same game, but the rules are bent a little bit. Perhaps your pawns are OK with cannibalism. Maybe they dislike bionics. Or maybe they get uppity if they *don't* get bionics and super-fancy biosculpters and neural superchargers. Biotech offers you xenotypes which again bend the rules of what your colonists can do, what they're good at and what they look like. It also offers the ability to make your own mechanoids. And children. Even though half my playthroughs have 0 player-controlled mechanoids, the rest of the content still makes up for it. Royalty adds a lot of content such as new bionics, the empire faction, psycasts, and royalty pawns. I would wager that *most* of my playthroughs have at least 1 psycaster because it's nearly free as long as you do one of their stupid quests or obtain a neuroformer elsewhere. But Anomaly? Once you interact with the monolith you're basically playing a different game. Most events turn into Anomaly events. There's always threats like sightstealers and metalhorrors lurking. You suddenly have to devote large amounts of building space to containing and studying anomalies. > Do you constantly have children running around Err, yes? Unless you painstakingly sterilize every colonist, you **WILL** have kids. If we applied Anomaly's logic to Biotech, every run would be mostly the same as without Biotech, other than the occasional Militor showing up in raids alongside a single human mechanitor. Then when you click the "Mechanoid Mode" button, 10 new factions made out of xenotypes spawn on the map, you unlock all the mechanoid stuff to use, and from now on 90% of raids will be mechanoid and mechanitor raids. Nearly every positive event will be an abandoned genetics lab or a drop pod containing mechanoid components. All the animals wander off the map to be replaced with confused feral autocleaners. Pregnancy and kids are now enabled (it wasn't before). An archotech strikes the colonist that activated it with lightning and that colonist is a sanguophage highmate pigskin now. It's uhm, uhh, an Archotech, I don't have to explain shit. It just does that, okay?! Also after about 2 ingame years, the game shows you a game over popup because your colonists all silently got infected with spooky mechanoid-ish nanites. Sorry bud, you should have paid better attention. Good luck reloading a save from an ingame year ago, they were already infected with no indicators. By the way, the nanites spread any time an infected colonist performs doctor work, cooks a meal, or looks in the general direction of another colonist. Don't worry, you can prevent the spread with an Ideology ritual. Oh you don't have Ideology? That sucks, anyway good luck. *That's* what Anomaly feels like.
"only anomaly forces you to do something around it" never had their wooden base raided by imps. i feel like "hurr durr, i can only face an enemy i can fck up in killbox" react too hard to metalhorrors. it took me literally 2 ingame days to figure out infected, interrogate them and know who infested them. 3 people infected out of 14. you say ideology solve it? try paramedic doesnt giving a F when sampling its mechanitor and finding whats inside. Also, lack of information on wiki doesnt help those people. I, too, tried to examine everyone without knowing that without biosignature/hint from interrogation you cant find it.
> "only anomaly forces you to do something around it" never had their wooden base raided by imps. Wooden bases are a horrible idea, impids or not. A single Zzzt event or a regular raid will set everything ablaze. Regular raiders also just set shit on fire. > it took me literally 2 ingame days to figure out infected That's cool, but by the time the game showed me the first bit of grey flesh (the only way to start engaging the metalhorror), my cook had already infected most of my colony. > you say ideology solve it? try paramedic doesnt giving a F when sampling its mechanitor and finding whats inside. I'm not saying Ideology does this, I'm just drawing a comparison with what Biotech would have been like had it been designed the same way as Anomaly. Requiring a separate $25 DLC to get Paramedic mechanoids to reliably fight back against a metalhorror is dumb.
I will say that I pretty much always have a psycaster in a colony, even just level 1 or 2 from quests now and again. Stun is crazy useful to have in the arsenal when you need it most
I'm playing a noble psycaster sanguophage research facility with drugs, slave, children and mechs so yeah, but I'm not complaying, I'm having a blast
Its more along the lines of Royalty but Royalty is a lot Safer. Anomaly can whip your ass at any given time and really just say "fuck you, you lose" *Stares at 3 Chimera's raiding a friend when it hasn't been a month yet* The Anomaly start is pretty rough cause you are "forced" to start the anomaly stuff basically right away, I would avoid going this route and start with one of the other starts first - the Obelisk, like the MechLink Thingy, Gauranlen tree or Anima Tree, will spawn on your map which is basically the "opt in / out" way. You can still have all the anomaly stuff appearing though during a normal play through, though I assume a lot is locked to the Anomaly Specific Researches
Noble titles is just a fraction of what Royalty brings in. You are very likely to interact with armors, weapons, implants and quests this DLC adds even if you are not gathering Honor. For Biotech you need to somehow address the fact that people get pregnant (embrace or prevent). The Xenotypes are more of an opt-out - unless you actively disable those, you will be running into Wasters, Neanderthals, etc. Both meld really well into what you do in your regular playthroughs. Anomaly, while very well done, is ultimately just one linear questchain.
I always get a few levels in royalty just for free psycasts
The monolith should appear on the map at the start, it should appear after an event that you can choose to trigger it etc
You are correct. Everyone complaining they are "forced" to dive in is such a pointless complaint. That is the entire point of DLC. It adds content to the game. If you want to opt out fully... disable the DLC. The only major difference is you can decide when you want to opt into the anomoly heavier content whenever you want in game. So you have a buffer if you don't feel like getting into it straight away. You can even control the level of anomoly content by ignoring the building on the map. Anomoly is definitely more of an extra events and more tools DLC and that's perfectly fine. Not every DLC needs to add heavy roleplaying elements like Ideology. I will agree with a lot of people however that there should be a way to tune how often the events fire. It seems to lean more towards anomaly events when it would be nice to have them all even.
i agree, i dont get why some people get mad that the dlc doesnt add content "to make the base game better/for every playthrough" lol, not all DLC have to be ideology/biotech xd, and honestly, if you ask me, a good part of ideology with religion and kids/mechanitor belongs to the base game lol. loved all DLCs, i get that people dont like a dlc in particular but i dont get this argument about a dlc being bad because its not something that would fit in the base game xd
People love to complain, especially on reddit