Not all sides have equal pawns, we test which ones are most likely to give you the pawns you want. / francisjohn Credits song - Dan Lebowitz - Surrender
Very much this. The Outlanders use militias, the Pirates are a bunch of disparate raiders and theives, the Tribals just draft everyone and charge. But what makes the Empire special is that they specialize. I just wish Tynan would flesh out enemy outposts and bases so we could “collect” the Empires best and brightest as well. And also so that enemy colonies actually feel like colonies and not just obstacles.
It could also be an asimov reference. All of their tech lasts for generations so less people learn how to make them. Eventually they become a tribal culture coasting on inherited tech and wealth until they inevitably collapse.
makes a lot of sense, would be a interesting detail if when you invade a empire city you find a lot of good crafters, builders and so on with good soldiers protecting them
If he really was interested in "improving Rimworld", I think he would start by getting rid of nonsensical things like pawns going on murderous sprees because they "ate without a table" (when there was one right in front of them, which they chose not to use), or replace the shooting accuracy code with something that actually made sense, or understand that a "cold snap" in a temperate forest simply _cannot_ lower the temperature by 40 degrees in four hours, because of basic physics. Rimworld is basically an attempt to do Dwarf Fortress with Prison Architect graphics, but with mechanics and AI coded by a chimp on cocaine. I hope Francis will do some videos on Dwarf Fortress once the "Steam" version with the updated graphics and UI is released. The level of simulation (of both the physical world and the personality of the characters) is just on a totally different level from Rimworld (or ONI).
@@RFC-3514 (I'm being sarcastic and silly here) I think crashing down on an alien world might have weird weather patterns, magnetic fields, and gravitational forces, that could very well cause wacky stuff to happen to the environment as well as the mental state of a person. I've watched my wife have a complete and total melt down because the toilet paper was hung the wrong direction. I'm not sure what eating without a table might do to someone's psyche.
@@RFC-3514 i really love dwarf fortress and prefer it. In my opinion it is difficult to compare DF and rimworld. Rimworld is A Game with the Intention to play your colony/ pawns and nothing else. DF is a world-simulation where you can play many fortress / heros or even don't play at all and just Dive into the worlds Story. Yeah, DF and Rimworld are both kind of fruit, but more like apples and bananas... I thinj
Hey, you're totally forgetting the Empire has different 'classes' of pawns. If you call in a laborer team as an Acolyte, you can capture all of them, then immediately send some goodies over to the empire to placate them, while keeping 4-8 pawns. Actually scratch that, I just spawned in ~80 'Laborers' on a test map, and only 3 had a construction skill of 5 or higher, and about 10 had passions or double passions in construction. While I didn't look at the rest of their stats, they were generally all around shitty pawns. They ain't sending their best.
"How is the Empire still around?" Empire tax collector arrives and the village gives them a bunch of stuff to stay on their good side. They are a protection racket. Which is why they have focused on combat more than even pirates. Don't need to make anything when you can just go door to door and everyone gives you stuff.
...Maybe? The problem here is that the empire is ultratech. The next most advanced factions are all industrial. Nobody's giving them the spacer and ultratech stuff they wield. However, they do also wield industrial and even medieval tech, so maybe that's what the others give them?
10:14 The explanation I come up with for that it's since it's a way more organized society they only send specialized warriors to raid you while smart people stay in the empire. Makes perfect sense to me.
Makes sense, the Empire can choose who to send into battle cause they are the biggest faction on the planet. They probably have fully organized militaries. The death acidifiers make sense too as you don't want the enemy to gain your tech. So in other words, would make a great final challenge to beat instead of the usual "build/find space ship" or "royal escape" ;)
Great bit of data crunching, Francis! 1. Backstories vary by faction Skill points are increased by backstories, and each faction has a different set of backstories (imperials have three: common, fighter, and royalty), so that explains the skill spreads. When you get an imperial caravan it's full of commoners. When you get a raid... watch out! Tribals don't have backstories like "child star" so there are fewer social points. Backstories seem to have been written more thematically than mechanically, so there are some gaps, and I guess it was harder to think of multiple backstories that would increase construction, animals, and planting skills. 2. Never noticed the lack of constructors Wow, that's interesting. I've never had a problem with a lack of constructors, actually. I always get someone with a passion or double passion at the start and baring unfortunate incidents, looked for passioned pawns that get downed, and never have a problem finding enough. I think this is related to colony expansion rate, though: in this playthrough you need a lot of constructors because you're growing fast. In tribal wizards it was helpful to get walls up fast. But in a more typical playthrough I think it's less of a problem. In my current "big growth" colony (35 pawns, year 5, 500% timed mode) I have too many constructors and have to find busy work for them. 3. Craft all the time! If you have the time, check out the economics of crafting. It's not as obvious as art or drugs, but it's a deeply powerful engine. Don't sell leathers -start a haberdashery! By midgame your best crafters can pump out three excellent devilstrand top hats a day, at 442 silver a piece! Guinea pig is worth nearly as much, with the added benefit of meat and a distraction force, and if you can get a breeding pair, chinchilla fur is worth more! All of this is in service to producing the best armor and weapons on the rim, and being able to whip up bionics as quickly as you can get the plasteel. On top of that, crafters are easy to keep happy and inspired (few darkness/wet/ate without a table debuffs, it's easy to get the comfortable and gorgeous environment buffs, etc.) and a big busy workshop results in a lot of marriages.
You know, this video really highlights that the early-game quest to shelter an enemy of the empire is just a huge trap. It also makes even clearer (because it's already pretty clear) that there's no reason outside of a challenge playthrough to not ally with them.
"The empire are the dumbest but have the best tech" The in universe canon is that the empire despite being incredibly advanced has come to a screeching halt in terms of development, its a stagnant collective of displaced nobility who send highly skilled trained soldiers to do their dirty work, if you could somehow convince empire nobility to come and attack you directly you might find better traits but you'll have to deal with highly trained kill squads.
And, to make matters worse for them, there's literally nothing they could have done about it. The empire is ultratech, which means their technology is the absolute best that humans can comprehend. This means it would have been fundamentally impossible for them to not stagnate.
You manually transcribed the numbers over from the game onto a spreadsheet? Dear Lord, Francis, you Mad-lad. :O Thank you! Thank you so much for putting that much effort into your videos.
@@Conqueror933 I did a bit of programming back in the day. So I am familiar with the concepts of variables, IF, OR, calling functions etc. But that was a long time ago and learned in C++. You forget how much you need to figure out. Like how do I open the xml file in Python, write out the results etc. I would love to dig into it but I would do something stupid like spend a week learning it all and not making any videos.
@@FrancisJohnYT or you make a 3 episode short series about how you learn it :P theres worse things to waste your time on^^ maybe when you need another break from rimworld some time
I don't play rimworld but the fact that I'm really early and its francis john I'm watching it anyways Edit after watching: Damn now I want rimworld, especially with all these good tutorials you're making on it
It's worth the buy, don't forget dlc, many many people report thousands of play hours, can confirm. One thing worth noting is that it never goes on sale, more reason to buy it now 'cause inflation :D
Keep in mind these are the raiders, if you look at the empire backstories they are just really specialized while other factions are well versed. In fact the empire has some of the strongest backstories BUT they are at the cost of other skills entirely, like hauling and cleaning.
I wish I could give multiple thumbs up for several of this creator’s videos. I am an older retired man in my mid seventies and one of my grandsons introduced me to this great game several months ago. I live alone so I have a lot of time invested into this game. I recently discovered mods that add even more realism to this unbelievably complex and excellent game. I wish you all the very best of health and happiness to you and your families!
Excellent analysis Francis, very interesting that there is a difference in skills between factions ... I spotted some of those, like plants and melee on Savage Tribals, but not in this depth. Thank you!
My current game I had only one constructor with any passion or skill (a starting pawn) for a long time. I think I had ten pawns before I captured one with a minor passion for construction (and a skill of 2), which by then felt like I’d just found the best pawn ever. Took forever to get anything done, base is a shambles - pawns sleeping in makeshift barracks, no hospital, have only just completed walls and killbox... and it’s the end of the second winter. On anything more than medium difficulty they’d be dead already. So painful. (Will soon be much better though: as soon as the second constructor was recruited Randy gifted me with two more! Thanks, Randy!)
Empire probably has the lowest intelligence skill because the only people you see are soldiers, so it makes sense for them to be just people who follow commands and kill good. These stats actually show quite a bit about the lore of Rimworld!!
*@ Francis John* 10:03 The Empire is "bad" at so many things, because they are well established enough that they can send out dedicated soldiers to do the fighting, while letting all the scientists, farmers, builders & such, behind to do the rest of the tasks that need to be done within the Empire. (lore reason)
I noticed this recently trying to get a good start on vanilla. Trying to play as a tribe and I can't find anyone who can do social. I wanted all 5 to have a natural meditation focus, but I had to use the war chief val bc I couldn't even roll a social better than ten. One thing I noticed is you can get a much different skill profile on a group when you look at pawns under 20. At that age they don't have an adulthood background so the skills and passions pan out different, especially for tribals. It means you start with lower top skills, but it's worth looking at I was kinda surprised.
Also, I think it is good to add the natural focus type present only in tribes, depending what you want, it is good to consider this extra trait on them when "hiring"
Natural focus is one of my favourite types, it effectively means you can generate lots of wizards. But in this I just wanted to see if I could up my odds of getting a good constructor.
That was actually a very interesting breakdown. I honestly just assumed those stats were completely random for all the enemies, but nope, apparently there are definite patterns here. I think the reason Empire appears so bad at everything else is because (thematically) in their society people tend to specialize at their job. So, when they send troops to attack you - those are the people that have specialized in combat. All the doctors, artists, crafters, etc. are back at the home city, just chilling. In my current game (which is modded) I started with a pawn that's good at construction (I think 6 or 7 to start with) and she married a bloke who was even a bit better and has an interest in it. So, all their kids, 5 so far, all have high starting construction skill, with 2 having an interest, and 2 having a passion - so I'm good for builders :D On the flip side, I'm still lacking a proper doctor, and mining - forget about it. Nobody is interested in mining and highest skill is 5 (maybe 6 now), and it's a map with large hills, so yeah :)
@@FrancisJohnYT I use the Children, school and learning mod so they're born 14 years of age (the birth must be an absolute nightmare :D ) and start working right away. In my current game I haven't even bothered with schooling - they learn on the job!
the thought is: tribals are in the age of humans where they started to culture land. and the cities are a little ahead where they already breed and kettle herds.
One thing worth mentioning is that Empire usually has different kinds of pawns in trade caravan and different in raid unit, might be the case for other factions as well (not 100% sure, but they have different gear at least). Also while angering empire might have the most disadvantages, and are best allies, if you use the cheesy heatstroke killbox like you in your playthrough, but don't have a challenge going on to recruit everyone, you can bypass the acidifiers and tainted clothes and get yourself the most valuable raid loot in the game, armor sets for tone of silver for days, also more bionic parts than any other factions, plus you can send everyone home after that and get so much goodwill they are neutral again. Also you can check settlements or request trade caravans for slaves, which gives some more opportunities for new desirable recruits.
Alright so you gotta try this FJ. I had a royal tribute collector come in, I gave them A LOT of gold and wondered if I could cheese it but I couldn't setup the sauna so what I did was use berserk pulse on 3 of my thumbros and skipped them right to where the collector was and they killed them. However even though the person you could trade with died, I suffered absolutely no faction relations whatsoever. Just thought that was interesting.
This is why you should have also included passion for construction in the stats because even a low starting skill at construction will grow pretty fast if you have passion. Your stats here have shown me why I value passion in construction so much. I guess I had made this conclusion subconsciously that I always seem to need passionate constructors if I will get any good builders at all.
10:13 - No clue if canon, but an explanation could be they were the OG pirates on the Rim. Another explanation is the classical shattered empire / enlightenment stagnation of technology.
Yeah construction can be a real pain in the bottom dollar, but that said even if they have a minor passion for it leveling them up in it is usually pretty simple. If your trying to level up more construction people then I advise smoothing surfaces. Uncheck construction for your main construction people and smooth every surface you can. The funniest part is if you smooth all the mountain edges on a map it will sometimes cause the raiders to split up and start attacking random walls. The other thing I tested for awhile when I first started playing this game was turning off my main constructor and just building and tearing down the same ten wall spaces with my back up construction guy. Easier to do with stone but it can be done with wood if you are in a heavily wooded area. The higher the work number the faster it tends to work. If you use mods you can set quality builder up on cheap furniture and just allow the builder to go nuts by setting the quality you want super high. This also works really well with a spare base tile. If you play with multiple base tiles settings you can also send them out and claim a second tile and just smooth surfaces there as well for awhile and then just abandon it when you are done after a couple of days. You usually have a couple of days before the first raid shows up. And if you are not taking anything back besides food it's rather cost effective. I try to average construction people in my colony at a one per three or one per four colonist in my runs. One in four on heavy mountain tiles, and one to three every where else. But even when I run nearly mod free in vanilla the one single mod I will always take in is Zero Skill Decay. Because I think it's a ridiculous feature at the rate skill decay happens. It's way to high. If my crafter is making components all day he shouldn't be loosing crafting skill. Same with my intellectual character who is stuck in the lab all day. It would be one thing if they actually were not using those skills constantly. It a whole other when it declines faster then you can actually tick it up even at full steam. Your better off taking two constructors and a doctor in from the start, or one construction, one miner, and one doctor depending on the tile. Being able to repair walls faster then they can knock them down is vital. And you can always set the doctor to haul building materials in the meanwhile. I usually look for a doctor with plant skills. Your video's are always very insightful though.
This was really good - i would have liked a little bit more detail - like: "empire shooters on average are between 12-15 where as ancients are between 10-11" or something with more detail
Planting actually becomes really important the more pawns you have. The more pawns, the more food is needed, the more planting/hunting/foraging is needed; of which is really nice if they can plant and harvest really quickly.
~ two or three pawns with the planter arms can service 8x24 hydroponics + 5 sunlamp devilstrand spots + 60-ish coca trees + 33x33 field of haygrass. Getting all that hauled into storage is a different matter.
Yeah when you get to the point where you can make hydroponics and have the power to use sun lamps, farming becomes much easier. I remember I used 1 sunlamp circle of rice hydros and I was able to feed 15 colonists with fine meals (as long as I had enough meat ofc but that was easy).
@@genericytprofile852 - Problem I have with vanilla hydroponics is you can't hydro devilstrand, or I'd play more on the colder maps in vanilla. It's fine with vanilla expanded mods and the advanced hydroponics, that can grow anything.
I'm pretty sure the Empire is the best at melee and shooting but the worst at everything else is probably because while the others likely use conscripts the Empire has the money to hire soldiers
Really nice analysis, when recruiting i am looking for passions rather than actual stats. Now i wonder how random / not-randomly those are assinged between the factions. Good Job, thanks : )
Passions and high levels are correlated, it's not perfect but that is why I ended up counting stats above 8. I tried counting passions and it was far to time consuming.
With the new Biotech DLC, I've found that I need more than 1 doctor since it helps to have another for when they give birth or have to attend a birth. Maybe even several births at once. As for construction, more often than not you can spam Constructoid mechanoids even if they're a bit slow on building. Once you have enough of them, they work decently well.
The empire don't need to do anything, they keep the boot firmly on the neck and get their tribute. I'm sure they keep their best and brightest sequestered in think tanks far away from prying eyes.
i never thought of it that way: it's smart by the devs to make construction less common so it's harder to play. not shooting not melee, construction and medical as bottlenecks.
I’ve always dedicated a few pawns to construction and prevent anyone else from doing any of it. Seems to help level them up faster I look for passions and focus them a ton
This is why passions matter so much though. A pawn who has 3 in construction and a burning passion will mess up a few walls, but it'll be at 12 in no time.
Did not have an easy way of counting up the passions. I did some checking and higher stats led to more passions so while they are not equivalent they are close enough to know what races are more likely to produce them.
use the zoning and build chairs trick to level up on construction quickly. So you create a zone for your pawn in that zone there is a stockpile of food, a table a chair and a bed and a lot of lumber and just have them build chairs all day long. The chairs can be sold or used decontruct any bad ones.
On the other hand. Construction is super easy to skill up even without passions. You simply send out people to smooth walls or floors. They can't fail those tasks and the XP is time based. Leaving them in dark rooms for it means you have to assign less tasks for more construction skill points
Training skills is pretty handy for just about all of them. The problem is having the time to dedicate a pawn to training. At least a crafter making pants and shirts is helping the colony. I am running a hire everyone game and need to expand constantly, the lack of constructors is painful.
My recent play has 5 good builders and 5 good gardeners. Some of those are good doctors and crafters too. Just goes to show how different each play can be, and how efficiently you can tune your colony depending on your colonists skills. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty but mid-late game has been an absolute breeze, almost boring.
This video clears up all of my assumptions about the game, this is why I chase a class in alpha genes thats a cat good at construction. But from a vanilla perspective, Biotech fixed a lot of these issues with Xenotypes like Genie Imp and Hussars and even High mates are more likely to show up with Construction high
"Maybe they're abrasive? Who cares. Maybe they do questionable things with animals? Whatever, in their spare time, as long as it doesn't interfere with their constructions." Lol. Take my like, damnit!
Spends too much of my day in excel, sit down for lunch, ooh graphs! what have you done to me Francis ! Also pirates' do a lot of digging for buried treasure ;)
i do not min/max enough. most times i put all pawns on construction...similar to putting all pawns on cleaning (after one notices the base is a complete trash heap). putting all or most pawns on construction builds their skill and builds depth in the team. yes you will have botched jobs and loss of resources...though long term you will have, say half of you pawns at least competent at construction. (not recommended for extreme difficulty or extreme challenges). P.S. stay away from pawns that do questionable things to animals! (8:32) Francis John 2021 Quote "maybe they do questionable things with animals...what-ever"! ROFLMFAO i laughed so hard i cried
Construction is rare for balancing, from the start of any colony you’re gonna have to build, regardless if you have a decent constructor or not. The idea, is that from the beginning you’ll be training one or two pawns in construction anyhow. This is also for balancing, you will likely have a capable pawn by just the fact that you have to construct. What I’m saying here is, your best constructors are the ones you’ve trained and not the ones you’ve recruited.
That is true, but knowing what I now know I'm going to be keeping an eye out for a starter pawn with a passion in construction. Unless they have crippling negatives a builder passion is worth more than just about anything else start wise.
The Empire has the best tech and the worst intellectual ... because they're smart enough to not send their researchers on assaults. Their smarty pants pawns (along with their agriculture pawns, artsy pawns, etc) all stay home, while the shooty and smashy pawns go out on raids. Also, regarding constructions... perhaps the reason it's so rare is that the devs just assume that everyone's gonna grind up a bit of constructing skill naturally. Building all the walls, benches, torches, tables, chairs, etc for your starter base will surely get a few pawns up into the 8-10 range. They may not be pumping out Masterwork Beds, but they can stand up a wall without stapling their thumb. Once you get that 1 or 2 good pawns with good construction, they can supply all of the furniture (or anything that carries a quality modifier)
9:05 my favorite part! Pirates are the best at cooking of all the human factions (Tribals, Pirates, Civilized cities, Empire and Ancient) because SEA SHANTIES IN KITCHEN🎵🎶🎵🎶 that's a good reason. Let us add it to my head cannon. Reason to join the Pirates: Best Mining & Sea Shanties at the kitchen! Yo won't find that kind of thing anywhere else😏😏😉😉
Another great analysis! As an aside, it’s honestly quite disappointing that the empire is almost a “must ally” settlement as there could be so much great storytelling in some intra-empire conflicts with dueling nobles or empire outcasts fighting the system. You either side with them and get their tech/perks of royalty, or you make them an enemy and get biocoded weapons and acidified bodies.
Francis, I would like to make a suggestion for a mod. Gain Skill Passions. It adds a 10% chance (adjustable in the settings) upon gaining a level that your pawn will also gain a passion in that skill. This could be considered OP since they permanently gain a passion, but if you look at the cost, I think the price is very fair. It costs: 1. Wasted time and resources on botched constructions/crafts, taming fails/revenge, food poisoning, lower resource yields, etc 2. Extra time since they are low level 3. 65% reduced XP, so it takes a long time for them to gain a level 4. No mood boost since they are not doing what they like 5. You are taking them away from whatever else they would be doing in the colony, so that they can learn that skill. On average, your pawn would have to gain 7 levels (at 65% reduced XP) to have a 50% chance to gain a passion in that skill, and 15 levels for an 80% chance. However, if you are willing to put in a HUGE amount of time and effort, you can turn a worthless pawn into a normal one, or a good pawn into a great one. If you use this mod, you would have the option to put someone into construction even if they have no passion for it, and eventually they might learn to like that type of work, just like in real life. This opens up more possibilities for custom designed pawns such as recruiting a jogger, and forcing them to do animal or plant work even if they don't like it, so that they will eventually become useful to the colony. Also, this mod has no effect on any of your other pawns because you will normally only assign tasks to someone with a passion in that skill, so they are never gaining levels in any other skill anyway. Also, there is an option to lower, or turn off the chance of them gaining a burning passion in any skill if you want to not make it TOO OP. There is a way you could exploit this mod by putting EVERYONE in your colony on Construction for example, and either force SOMEONE in the colony to get a passion for it, or also eventually EVERYONE would get a passion for it. I do not play this way. It only kicks in if you force someone to do a TON of work at something they are not good at for a LONG time, and I only use it on maybe 1/20 pawns I recruit in order to get what I need. Using this mod has really made the game more enjoyable for me since I can now hire a pawn with the traits I want, even if they do not have the passions I need, because given enough time and hard work, I can eventually mold them into the pawn I need them to be.
If I was going with a smaller playthrough it would make sense to cross skill the pawns. But we are hiring everyone, by the time we hit 100 pawns it should be possible to have a lot of specialists. Also I'm trying to remove mods as I go for performance reasons.
@@FrancisJohnYT if you consider removing mods for performance, consider outing achtung! first. It actually eat a bit of chunk of your pc process, from personal experience
7:03 - I think you kind of answered your own question there. Because you "constantly need construction", that is something nearly all your pawns will get some training on, every day, unlike shooting or melee or medical, etc., which most pawns will go for days or years without using. So it kind of makes sense for construction to start out a bit lower, considering everyone will be getting regular increases to it. Your own colony's stats at 10:49 show that, after a fairly short amount of play time, construction is already _not_ your lowest overall skill. In fact, one of your pawns has 14, which is the highest value in the whole list, and two have 9. Which means that 25% of your pawns are already above (your arbitrary threshold of) 8. Now, I wonder if the lower "starting" value for construction is deliberate (as in, the RNG aims for a lower number when creating new pawns) or if it's just a consequence of how few starting stories have construction bonuses, versus how many have bonuses to other skills.
I started the game without rerolling the starting pawns and had no constructor. I got lucky and found one in a tomb pretty early on, they are the monstrous 14. If I had not of found them imagine how weak my line up would look. The massive variance can be explained by their backstories, different sides have different backstories. I don't think this is many that includes construction for some reason.
@@FrancisJohnYT - If you hadn't found that one, your two 9s would have had even more practice, so they'd probably both be 10 or 11 by now. I doubt making construction start out lower was totally deliberate (because very little in this game seems to have gone through any deliberation :P), but IMO it works out fine in the long run, because every pawn can get some construction practice every day (whereas most other activities are performed more rarely). It _is_ a bit annoying at the start, though, especially because the early game is always very similar in different playthroughs (unless you go for base vs. nomad, for example). I normally use Prepare Carefully to give myself 3 decent "generalist" pawns, where at least one is a decent constructor (6 to 8) and one is a decent miner (same), just to speed up the boring parts of early game.
@@RFC-3514 I have made many a non passioned pawn into a builder the issues is they learn at 35% speed. So much time and productivity wasted. On a normal playthrough of the game you can slow down and grind it up, on a hire everyone game you can't wait. I need the farms, walls, rooms and infrastructure now.
@@FrancisJohnYT - Well, the issue there is the "passion" flag, not so much the starting level. Anyway, like I said, I just use Prepare Carefully to speed up the early game a bit by making sure I have at least one decent builder and one decent miner. That part of the game is always very similar and a bit boring, and I don't see much point in dragging it out. You can just reroll the starting characters instead, but the result is the same and it takes longer.
to support the idea that the empire has either a standing army or a stratified society with a warrior class (hence the high combat and weak other stats), maybe try attacking an empire settlement and capture some of them, to see if they spawn different pawns back home? they probably don't, that would be Dwarf Fortress levels of absurd attention to detail, but it would be interesting if that were the case
The differences would stem from their backgrounds, I'm pretty sure settlements are generated the same way. Also I'm not sure how I could get my hands on 500+ settlement pawns :)
You don't start out thinking that is going to happen. For me it's like going do a youtube rabbit hole. I wanted to know how to improve my odds of getting a good constructor. So you look online can't find anything and then you have to figure out how you test it in game. Fast forward a few hours and your piling data into a spreadsheet so you can keep it all sorted.
Francis, I think you need the Increased Stack mod, which allows for larger piles of stuff. You can specify the max amount in the mods folder. less need for storage :)
Oh but it's so much fun trying to stay ahead of all the trash we collect. Also looking at our food we are going to need to stockpile literally thousands of potatoes. Our fridges will be epic.
You might want to compare a few world seed as it affect what kind of pawn you'll get, written in the seed description iirc. You might also wanna consider passion when counting these, Because i think both are related closer than you think. When you use prepare carefully mod to configure pawn, each skill and passion use assignment points used in the mod to limit customization for more balanced play (with passion cost more than skill point)
To count passions would have been Ideal. I tried counting passions, but I ended up with crossed eyes. 500 pawns each to be counted 12 times for each skill. Then do that 5 times as it's once for each side. Tribal, City, Ancients, Empire and Pirates. The percentage of pawns that had a passion in something corelated strongly with high skill so I used that as a short hand as it made it far faster to count them all up.
At least construction is one of the easiest skills to train up, after only medical (arguably shooting too). A stone chess table is like 700 work, so you can grind an absolute ton of xp making a single chess table and it only costs like 70 stone so it is very cheap.
It's more the time commitment. You can train any stat given enough time it's just when you want to expand rapidly you can't stop and build 50 chess tables before you get started. Slows the early game down a lot.
great video and very informative. just a quick question about your method: did you spawn these as raids on your home tile? or how did you generate your counts? I don't know the mechanics of spawning very well, but it is possible that the "raider" tag attached to a pawn has the potential to reduce different stats in favor of shooting and melee (ie construction). It may be worth going to another tile and generating an ambush as well as generating camps/cities to attack to see if the distribution changes at all. its very anecdotal, but I wouldn't send my best builders on a raid. Also IMO passions are more important that initial stats as they define the pawn past the first few seasons. did you notice a distribution of passions associated with established skill level? or are they just random pawn attributes like the backstory elements and whatnot? It also may take some real digging, but are the backstory elements what are causing the skewed point distribution? IE it seems like when the pawns are generated they pull from a table of backstories based on faction; does that weigh heavily on their final stats? or does the code just assign skill points based on some table somewhere. fascinating rabbit hole you have found.
I tried counting passions first but it was to time consuming, I found high skills correlated with more passions. For example among 500 empire troops 81 had plant passion, 142 crafting passion and 404 had shooting passion!! Since it was easier to count up high skill I went that way. Their is no difference in pawn generation between Attacks, defence and ambush, it is all called from a sides file. The empire is the only faction that have multiple sides, it's so they can have royalty, fighters and labourers. The stats on their labourers still suck. The labourers are for permit call downs.
@@FrancisJohnYT good to know. Thanks for doing the leg-work on gathering all that data. So the short is there are no "farmable" construction workers. Next question: are there any tricks to build construction skills on the sub-par pawns we get? I know the "smooth floor/wall" bill has a ton of work if you are willing to have a pawn waste some time, but I don't know how efficient it is.
Great! 👍 One more question: Do you think the storyteller / difficulty is a thing? 500% -> more points in fighting? Phoebi- more points in Social?!? Whatever...
its probably cause of the very limited pawn backstories of the empire which are all literally a soldiers upbringing and its surprising but I've already gotten four very passionate artistic pawns at the empire itself because of the propagandist background... they also have a passion for shooting, melee and social on top of art
top info, i thought there would be trends to different skills but never tested. Wonder if traits work the same? i seem to get many undergrounder tribals
I assume a lot of it would come down to backstories, traits would stem from that. Tribals, cities and Empire have different pools of traits so I'm sure their is patterns.
AFAIK traits have a probability weight (kind is more likely than abrasive, which is more likely than undergrounder, etc.) but are otherwise random except for prohibited conflicts, like slow learner + fast learner. That said, it does always seem like that great grower is an undergrounder or the brawler is a body purist...
Well, you could have factored in a cookbox oven pillbox design.. if you knock you the empire you dont trigger the death acidifier and you could get their gear or guns (if not biocoded of course)
@@eddyvluggen For mining, i usually just train someone who only does fighting at a deep drill. I usually don't really care about mining, since I don't like underground bases (too buggy for me). Another problem is that builders are constantly building, meaning they never have time to do any other task. Also, those with good mining, shooting and building at the same time usually have addictions, chemical fascination, bad back and are 90 year olds. I just don't think it's worth it to search for one pawn with mining and building, I'd rather have one that can defend themselves.
@@packediceisthebestminecraf9007 - mining - line up a bunch of mining sites outside your base, 1 guy with two drill arms can core out a plasteel spot in a day without wake-up or work frenzy. He can hit up two or three gold deposits in a day if they're close enough together. Even better if you send him out in a drop pod and he can farskip back to base.
The Empire must just not have any farmers / gardeners lol edit: this video also explains why I always end up with one person who gets treated as royalty purely because they are the best (and sometimes only) builder.
I don't think I've ever had a problem with constructers in my hundreds of hours of rimworld. To be fair I'll give all of my pawns the construction job even if they're 0 skill no passion. I let them grind away so by the time my colony is fully matured they're all at least somewhat passable builders while the good ones do the furniture.
Tried that first, gave me crossed eyes. High level skills correlate pretty close to passions and are much faster to count up. For example among 503 empire troops 81 plant passions 142 crafting 404 shooting
I don't know if it would really effect anything but, what about the refugees and the drop pod crashes. I got a decent constructor from the start but I think I have technically 3 constructors(one is my cook) I'm pretty sure at least one was a refugee. My really good crafter was that weird paralytic aphasia drop pod crash. I have seen some duds so I don't know if I was just really lucky. I vaguely remember a decent constructor I had to let go. My problem is I have 1 planter and I want to get into drug production but I can't because I have too many animals and people. I don't think I'm really strong enough to attack anyone but after seeing this I'm a little more confident.
![[TH] GEN vs SEN | FPX vs TH - VALORANT Champions 2024 DAY 1](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VcyH-0LAlhs/mqdefault.jpg)
The Empire doesn't send their intellectuals and miners out to attack you, of course - they keep them at home where they're safe.
Very much this. The Outlanders use militias, the Pirates are a bunch of disparate raiders and theives, the Tribals just draft everyone and charge. But what makes the Empire special is that they specialize.
I just wish Tynan would flesh out enemy outposts and bases so we could “collect” the Empires best and brightest as well. And also so that enemy colonies actually feel like colonies and not just obstacles.
It could also be an asimov reference. All of their tech lasts for generations so less people learn how to make them. Eventually they become a tribal culture coasting on inherited tech and wealth until they inevitably collapse.
makes a lot of sense, would be a interesting detail if when you invade a empire city you find a lot of good crafters, builders and so on with good soldiers protecting them
Have to look for stellarch and other empire high ranks traits to check it.
Point me at their home, I want all their constructors :)
Somewhere in a quiet office, Tynan Sylvester is madly taking notes on Francis John's videos to learn how to improve Rimworld.
If he really was interested in "improving Rimworld", I think he would start by getting rid of nonsensical things like pawns going on murderous sprees because they "ate without a table" (when there was one right in front of them, which they chose not to use), or replace the shooting accuracy code with something that actually made sense, or understand that a "cold snap" in a temperate forest simply _cannot_ lower the temperature by 40 degrees in four hours, because of basic physics.
Rimworld is basically an attempt to do Dwarf Fortress with Prison Architect graphics, but with mechanics and AI coded by a chimp on cocaine.
I hope Francis will do some videos on Dwarf Fortress once the "Steam" version with the updated graphics and UI is released. The level of simulation (of both the physical world and the personality of the characters) is just on a totally different level from Rimworld (or ONI).
@@RFC-3514 pepee poopoo i love dwarf fortress pepee poopoo and I cannot shut up about it pepee poopoo
@@RFC-3514 (I'm being sarcastic and silly here) I think crashing down on an alien world might have weird weather patterns, magnetic fields, and gravitational forces, that could very well cause wacky stuff to happen to the environment as well as the mental state of a person. I've watched my wife have a complete and total melt down because the toilet paper was hung the wrong direction. I'm not sure what eating without a table might do to someone's psyche.
@@RFC-3514 i really love dwarf fortress and prefer it. In my opinion it is difficult to compare DF and rimworld. Rimworld is A Game with the Intention to play your colony/ pawns and nothing else. DF is a world-simulation where you can play many fortress / heros or even don't play at all and just Dive into the worlds Story.
Yeah, DF and Rimworld are both kind of fruit, but more like apples and bananas... I thinj
@@peepeepoopoocheck7076 really? Necessary?
2:49 Obviously from digging and looking for treasure. Duh. 😆
So obvious, dammit.
I assumed it was so they could sapper into your mountain base better.
@@Sangheili67 Nonsense. It's clearly for hiding treasure and rum. They're pirates.
Hey, you're totally forgetting the Empire has different 'classes' of pawns. If you call in a laborer team as an Acolyte, you can capture all of them, then immediately send some goodies over to the empire to placate them, while keeping 4-8 pawns.
Actually scratch that, I just spawned in ~80 'Laborers' on a test map, and only 3 had a construction skill of 5 or higher, and about 10 had passions or double passions in construction. While I didn't look at the rest of their stats, they were generally all around shitty pawns. They ain't sending their best.
Yeah, just tested that as well. If they have any good constructors they are hiding them.
They are probably sending them as interns to you so they can gain experience and build monuments faster when they get sent home
"How is the Empire still around?"
Empire tax collector arrives and the village gives them a bunch of stuff to stay on their good side. They are a protection racket. Which is why they have focused on combat more than even pirates. Don't need to make anything when you can just go door to door and everyone gives you stuff.
...Maybe? The problem here is that the empire is ultratech. The next most advanced factions are all industrial. Nobody's giving them the spacer and ultratech stuff they wield. However, they do also wield industrial and even medieval tech, so maybe that's what the others give them?
10:14 The explanation I come up with for that it's since it's a way more organized society they only send specialized warriors to raid you while smart people stay in the empire. Makes perfect sense to me.
Check out the backstories for empire soldiers, they're pretty much guaranteed to have minimum shooting 10.
Unlike other factions imperials have three backstories (commoner, fighter, and royal), so yes, that's right.
9:23 "No green thumbs among the Empire"
Well that explains the quest where they request some help with their harvests 😅
More Rimworld, less Dyson Sphere. I have spoken.
Makes sense, the Empire can choose who to send into battle cause they are the biggest faction on the planet. They probably have fully organized militaries. The death acidifiers make sense too as you don't want the enemy to gain your tech.
So in other words, would make a great final challenge to beat instead of the usual "build/find space ship" or "royal escape" ;)
Great bit of data crunching, Francis!
1. Backstories vary by faction
Skill points are increased by backstories, and each faction has a different set of backstories (imperials have three: common, fighter, and royalty), so that explains the skill spreads. When you get an imperial caravan it's full of commoners. When you get a raid... watch out! Tribals don't have backstories like "child star" so there are fewer social points. Backstories seem to have been written more thematically than mechanically, so there are some gaps, and I guess it was harder to think of multiple backstories that would increase construction, animals, and planting skills.
2. Never noticed the lack of constructors
Wow, that's interesting. I've never had a problem with a lack of constructors, actually. I always get someone with a passion or double passion at the start and baring unfortunate incidents, looked for passioned pawns that get downed, and never have a problem finding enough. I think this is related to colony expansion rate, though: in this playthrough you need a lot of constructors because you're growing fast. In tribal wizards it was helpful to get walls up fast. But in a more typical playthrough I think it's less of a problem. In my current "big growth" colony (35 pawns, year 5, 500% timed mode) I have too many constructors and have to find busy work for them.
3. Craft all the time!
If you have the time, check out the economics of crafting. It's not as obvious as art or drugs, but it's a deeply powerful engine. Don't sell leathers -start a haberdashery! By midgame your best crafters can pump out three excellent devilstrand top hats a day, at 442 silver a piece! Guinea pig is worth nearly as much, with the added benefit of meat and a distraction force, and if you can get a breeding pair, chinchilla fur is worth more! All of this is in service to producing the best armor and weapons on the rim, and being able to whip up bionics as quickly as you can get the plasteel. On top of that, crafters are easy to keep happy and inspired (few darkness/wet/ate without a table debuffs, it's easy to get the comfortable and gorgeous environment buffs, etc.) and a big busy workshop results in a lot of marriages.
Right now we are a little short of crafters but as the colony grows we will craft everything into something before selling it.
Me: how many hours did it take you to do this amazing tutorial?
John Francis: Yes.
You know, this video really highlights that the early-game quest to shelter an enemy of the empire is just a huge trap.
It also makes even clearer (because it's already pretty clear) that there's no reason outside of a challenge playthrough to not ally with them.
Found the bootlicker
This is why the memory/fast learner traits are so powerful, they can fill in for anything.
"The empire are the dumbest but have the best tech"
The in universe canon is that the empire despite being incredibly advanced has come to a screeching halt in terms of development, its a stagnant collective of displaced nobility who send highly skilled trained soldiers to do their dirty work, if you could somehow convince empire nobility to come and attack you directly you might find better traits but you'll have to deal with highly trained kill squads.
And, to make matters worse for them, there's literally nothing they could have done about it. The empire is ultratech, which means their technology is the absolute best that humans can comprehend. This means it would have been fundamentally impossible for them to not stagnate.
You manually transcribed the numbers over from the game onto a spreadsheet?
Dear Lord, Francis, you Mad-lad. :O
Thank you! Thank you so much for putting that much effort into your videos.
I first tried extracting them from the save game files, I decided learning how to program in python would have taken longer.
@@FrancisJohnYT learning python can prolly be done in a month or 2, learning how to program is a different matter entirely xD takes years^^
@@Conqueror933 I did a bit of programming back in the day. So I am familiar with the concepts of variables, IF, OR, calling functions etc. But that was a long time ago and learned in C++. You forget how much you need to figure out.
Like how do I open the xml file in Python, write out the results etc.
I would love to dig into it but I would do something stupid like spend a week learning it all and not making any videos.
@@FrancisJohnYT or you make a 3 episode short series about how you learn it :P
theres worse things to waste your time on^^
maybe when you need another break from rimworld some time
Thanks for that huge amount of statistic work Francis. It makes sense now why I usually get stuck with only one or two constructors.
I don't play rimworld but the fact that I'm really early and its francis john I'm watching it anyways
Edit after watching: Damn now I want rimworld, especially with all these good tutorials you're making on it
Do it, be one. Join the dark side and commit warcrimes.
One of the best games of the last decade.
I have over 1000hrs played and currently a mod list of over 200, it's a rabbit hole for sure
Only get it if you can handle 2-3 hours of sleep a night :)
It's worth the buy, don't forget dlc, many many people report thousands of play hours, can confirm. One thing worth noting is that it never goes on sale, more reason to buy it now 'cause inflation :D
Keep in mind these are the raiders, if you look at the empire backstories they are just really specialized while other factions are well versed. In fact the empire has some of the strongest backstories BUT they are at the cost of other skills entirely, like hauling and cleaning.
I'm gobsmacked about this. This must've taken a long time to compile - thanks again mate!!!
I love how Francis distills and reveals the core mechanics of every game he plays. Channel name should be Genius Francis John.
Or FJRigsEverything 😉
I mean yeah if you look at the 'about' tab on his channel it describes him perfectly XD
Genius Francumbo
or Dr. Francis John
I just wanted to know where I could find a good constructor, I kind of spiralled from there.
Aaaand it’s another great day on the rim.
Thank you for answering questions I didn’t know I had. ♥️
I wish I could give multiple thumbs up for several of this creator’s videos. I am an older retired man in my mid seventies and one of my grandsons introduced me to this great game several months ago. I live alone so I have a lot of time invested into this game. I recently discovered mods that add even more realism to this unbelievably complex and excellent game. I wish you all the very best of health and happiness to you and your families!
This makes so much sense now. In a colony of 10+, I only have 2 passionate constructors that I started with spending time to reroll at start.
Excellent analysis Francis, very interesting that there is a difference in skills between factions ... I spotted some of those, like plants and melee on Savage Tribals, but not in this depth. Thank you!
My current game I had only one constructor with any passion or skill (a starting pawn) for a long time. I think I had ten pawns before I captured one with a minor passion for construction (and a skill of 2), which by then felt like I’d just found the best pawn ever. Took forever to get anything done, base is a shambles - pawns sleeping in makeshift barracks, no hospital, have only just completed walls and killbox... and it’s the end of the second winter. On anything more than medium difficulty they’d be dead already. So painful. (Will soon be much better though: as soon as the second constructor was recruited Randy gifted me with two more! Thanks, Randy!)
Empire probably has the lowest intelligence skill because the only people you see are soldiers, so it makes sense for them to be just people who follow commands and kill good. These stats actually show quite a bit about the lore of Rimworld!!
i love these data crunching kind of videos, its always interesting to me.
*@ Francis John*
10:03 The Empire is "bad" at so many things, because they are well established enough that they can send out dedicated soldiers to do the fighting, while letting all the scientists, farmers, builders & such, behind to do the rest of the tasks that need to be done within the Empire. (lore reason)
I love this, because not only did I not know this, I didn't even know that these differences existed. Thank you!
The pirates have the best miners because of all the sappers digging around your defenses.
I noticed this recently trying to get a good start on vanilla. Trying to play as a tribe and I can't find anyone who can do social. I wanted all 5 to have a natural meditation focus, but I had to use the war chief val bc I couldn't even roll a social better than ten. One thing I noticed is you can get a much different skill profile on a group when you look at pawns under 20. At that age they don't have an adulthood background so the skills and passions pan out different, especially for tribals. It means you start with lower top skills, but it's worth looking at I was kinda surprised.
Also, I think it is good to add the natural focus type present only in tribes, depending what you want, it is good to consider this extra trait on them when "hiring"
Natural focus is one of my favourite types, it effectively means you can generate lots of wizards. But in this I just wanted to see if I could up my odds of getting a good constructor.
That was actually a very interesting breakdown. I honestly just assumed those stats were completely random for all the enemies, but nope, apparently there are definite patterns here.
I think the reason Empire appears so bad at everything else is because (thematically) in their society people tend to specialize at their job. So, when they send troops to attack you - those are the people that have specialized in combat. All the doctors, artists, crafters, etc. are back at the home city, just chilling.
In my current game (which is modded) I started with a pawn that's good at construction (I think 6 or 7 to start with) and she married a bloke who was even a bit better and has an interest in it. So, all their kids, 5 so far, all have high starting construction skill, with 2 having an interest, and 2 having a passion - so I'm good for builders :D
On the flip side, I'm still lacking a proper doctor, and mining - forget about it. Nobody is interested in mining and highest skill is 5 (maybe 6 now), and it's a map with large hills, so yeah :)
How long does it take kids to mature enough to work? I mean if it's 16 in game years that is a huge commitment to a save.
@@FrancisJohnYT I use the Children, school and learning mod so they're born 14 years of age (the birth must be an absolute nightmare :D ) and start working right away. In my current game I haven't even bothered with schooling - they learn on the job!
the thought is: tribals are in the age of humans where they started to culture land. and the cities are a little ahead where they already breed and kettle herds.
One thing worth mentioning is that Empire usually has different kinds of pawns in trade caravan and different in raid unit, might be the case for other factions as well (not 100% sure, but they have different gear at least). Also while angering empire might have the most disadvantages, and are best allies, if you use the cheesy heatstroke killbox like you in your playthrough, but don't have a challenge going on to recruit everyone, you can bypass the acidifiers and tainted clothes and get yourself the most valuable raid loot in the game, armor sets for tone of silver for days, also more bionic parts than any other factions, plus you can send everyone home after that and get so much goodwill they are neutral again. Also you can check settlements or request trade caravans for slaves, which gives some more opportunities for new desirable recruits.
Alright so you gotta try this FJ. I had a royal tribute collector come in, I gave them A LOT of gold and wondered if I could cheese it but I couldn't setup the sauna so what I did was use berserk pulse on 3 of my thumbros and skipped them right to where the collector was and they killed them. However even though the person you could trade with died, I suffered absolutely no faction relations whatsoever. Just thought that was interesting.
That sounds wonderfully broken, we have to try it.
I was sitting down to lunch and saw this was available, so thanks for burrito-time entertainment.
This is why you should have also included passion for construction in the stats because even a low starting skill at construction will grow pretty fast if you have passion. Your stats here have shown me why I value passion in construction so much. I guess I had made this conclusion subconsciously that I always seem to need passionate constructors if I will get any good builders at all.
I have a bit of a bias going in as I to was always short of constructors with passion.
10:13 - No clue if canon, but an explanation could be they were the OG pirates on the Rim. Another explanation is the classical shattered empire / enlightenment stagnation of technology.
Yeah construction can be a real pain in the bottom dollar, but that said even if they have a minor passion for it leveling them up in it is usually pretty simple.
If your trying to level up more construction people then I advise smoothing surfaces. Uncheck construction for your main construction people and smooth every surface you can. The funniest part is if you smooth all the mountain edges on a map it will sometimes cause the raiders to split up and start attacking random walls.
The other thing I tested for awhile when I first started playing this game was turning off my main constructor and just building and tearing down the same ten wall spaces with my back up construction guy. Easier to do with stone but it can be done with wood if you are in a heavily wooded area. The higher the work number the faster it tends to work.
If you use mods you can set quality builder up on cheap furniture and just allow the builder to go nuts by setting the quality you want super high. This also works really well with a spare base tile.
If you play with multiple base tiles settings you can also send them out and claim a second tile and just smooth surfaces there as well for awhile and then just abandon it when you are done after a couple of days. You usually have a couple of days before the first raid shows up. And if you are not taking anything back besides food it's rather cost effective.
I try to average construction people in my colony at a one per three or one per four colonist in my runs. One in four on heavy mountain tiles, and one to three every where else.
But even when I run nearly mod free in vanilla the one single mod I will always take in is Zero Skill Decay. Because I think it's a ridiculous feature at the rate skill decay happens. It's way to high. If my crafter is making components all day he shouldn't be loosing crafting skill. Same with my intellectual character who is stuck in the lab all day. It would be one thing if they actually were not using those skills constantly. It a whole other when it declines faster then you can actually tick it up even at full steam.
Your better off taking two constructors and a doctor in from the start, or one construction, one miner, and one doctor depending on the tile. Being able to repair walls faster then they can knock them down is vital. And you can always set the doctor to haul building materials in the meanwhile. I usually look for a doctor with plant skills.
Your video's are always very insightful though.
This was really good - i would have liked a little bit more detail - like: "empire shooters on average are between 12-15 where as ancients are between 10-11" or something with more detail
Planting actually becomes really important the more pawns you have. The more pawns, the more food is needed, the more planting/hunting/foraging is needed; of which is really nice if they can plant and harvest really quickly.
~ two or three pawns with the planter arms can service 8x24 hydroponics + 5 sunlamp devilstrand spots + 60-ish coca trees + 33x33 field of haygrass. Getting all that hauled into storage is a different matter.
Yeah when you get to the point where you can make hydroponics and have the power to use sun lamps, farming becomes much easier. I remember I used 1 sunlamp circle of rice hydros and I was able to feed 15 colonists with fine meals (as long as I had enough meat ofc but that was easy).
@@genericytprofile852 - Problem I have with vanilla hydroponics is you can't hydro devilstrand, or I'd play more on the colder maps in vanilla. It's fine with vanilla expanded mods and the advanced hydroponics, that can grow anything.
I'm pretty sure the Empire is the best at melee and shooting but the worst at everything else is probably because while the others likely use conscripts the Empire has the money to hire soldiers
Mercenaries get paid. Soldiers are "sold to die".
Thanks for this
Really nice analysis, when recruiting i am looking for passions rather than actual stats. Now i wonder how random / not-randomly those are assinged between the factions.
Good Job, thanks : )
Passions and high levels are correlated, it's not perfect but that is why I ended up counting stats above 8.
I tried counting passions and it was far to time consuming.
With the new Biotech DLC, I've found that I need more than 1 doctor since it helps to have another for when they give birth or have to attend a birth. Maybe even several births at once.
As for construction, more often than not you can spam Constructoid mechanoids even if they're a bit slow on building. Once you have enough of them, they work decently well.
Mr. John, you can see the skill requirements on the Rimworld Wiki Raiders page or the faction page for each faction.
The empire don't need to do anything, they keep the boot firmly on the neck and get their tribute. I'm sure they keep their best and brightest sequestered in think tanks far away from prying eyes.
i never thought of it that way: it's smart by the devs to make construction less common so it's harder to play. not shooting not melee, construction and medical as bottlenecks.
it's like playing dwarf fortress without a miner haha.
I'll say it again. Francis vs the Empire
@Francis John I think the pirates are good for mining because most of them are sappers. I think.
I’ve always dedicated a few pawns to construction and prevent anyone else from doing any of it. Seems to help level them up faster
I look for passions and focus them a ton
This is why passions matter so much though. A pawn who has 3 in construction and a burning passion will mess up a few walls, but it'll be at 12 in no time.
Did not have an easy way of counting up the passions. I did some checking and higher stats led to more passions so while they are not equivalent they are close enough to know what races are more likely to produce them.
use the zoning and build chairs trick to level up on construction quickly. So you create a zone for your pawn in that zone there is a stockpile of food, a table a chair and a bed and a lot of lumber and just have them build chairs all day long. The chairs can be sold or used decontruct any bad ones.
Going to have to give that a go on a normal playthrough, though I think I will use stone chess tables, they look to take forever to build.
Best information ever
On the other hand. Construction is super easy to skill up even without passions. You simply send out people to smooth walls or floors. They can't fail those tasks and the XP is time based. Leaving them in dark rooms for it means you have to assign less tasks for more construction skill points
Training skills is pretty handy for just about all of them. The problem is having the time to dedicate a pawn to training. At least a crafter making pants and shirts is helping the colony. I am running a hire everyone game and need to expand constantly, the lack of constructors is painful.
I probably already wrote this comment, but Francis John confirmed comrade.
huh, you learn something new every day.
This explains Why I always do my colonies with one or two constructors, never hit me how they're so rare, Thanks Francis
My recent play has 5 good builders and 5 good gardeners. Some of those are good doctors and crafters too. Just goes to show how different each play can be, and how efficiently you can tune your colony depending on your colonists skills. I'm playing on the hardest difficulty but mid-late game has been an absolute breeze, almost boring.
This video clears up all of my assumptions about the game, this is why I chase a class in alpha genes thats a cat good at construction. But from a vanilla perspective, Biotech fixed a lot of these issues with Xenotypes like Genie Imp and Hussars and even High mates are more likely to show up with Construction high
Interesting topic!
"Maybe they're abrasive? Who cares. Maybe they do questionable things with animals? Whatever, in their spare time, as long as it doesn't interfere with their constructions." Lol. Take my like, damnit!
Spends too much of my day in excel, sit down for lunch, ooh graphs! what have you done to me Francis !
Also pirates' do a lot of digging for buried treasure ;)
i do not min/max enough. most times i put all pawns on construction...similar to putting all pawns on cleaning (after one notices the base is a complete trash heap). putting all or most pawns on construction builds their skill and builds depth in the team. yes you will have botched jobs and loss of resources...though long term you will have, say half of you pawns at least competent at construction. (not recommended for extreme difficulty or extreme challenges).
P.S. stay away from pawns that do questionable things to animals! (8:32)
Francis John 2021 Quote "maybe they do questionable things with animals...what-ever"! ROFLMFAO
i laughed so hard i cried
Your accuracy and data generation is impressive. A well deserved thumbs up. :)
Seems pirates need a good mining to be a good sappers.
Construction is rare for balancing, from the start of any colony you’re gonna have to build, regardless if you have a decent constructor or not. The idea, is that from the beginning you’ll be training one or two pawns in construction anyhow. This is also for balancing, you will likely have a capable pawn by just the fact that you have to construct. What I’m saying here is, your best constructors are the ones you’ve trained and not the ones you’ve recruited.
That is true, but knowing what I now know I'm going to be keeping an eye out for a starter pawn with a passion in construction. Unless they have crippling negatives a builder passion is worth more than just about anything else start wise.
@@FrancisJohnYT yeah having that strayer constructed is really crucial for getting things down
The Empire has the best tech and the worst intellectual ... because they're smart enough to not send their researchers on assaults. Their smarty pants pawns (along with their agriculture pawns, artsy pawns, etc) all stay home, while the shooty and smashy pawns go out on raids.
Also, regarding constructions... perhaps the reason it's so rare is that the devs just assume that everyone's gonna grind up a bit of constructing skill naturally. Building all the walls, benches, torches, tables, chairs, etc for your starter base will surely get a few pawns up into the 8-10 range. They may not be pumping out Masterwork Beds, but they can stand up a wall without stapling their thumb. Once you get that 1 or 2 good pawns with good construction, they can supply all of the furniture (or anything that carries a quality modifier)
Tynan, sweating in silence, knowing pawn generation is all RNG
9:05 my favorite part! Pirates are the best at cooking of all the human factions (Tribals, Pirates, Civilized cities, Empire and Ancient) because SEA SHANTIES IN KITCHEN🎵🎶🎵🎶 that's a good reason. Let us add it to my head cannon.
Reason to join the Pirates: Best Mining & Sea Shanties at the kitchen! Yo won't find that kind of thing anywhere else😏😏😉😉
Another great analysis!
As an aside, it’s honestly quite disappointing that the empire is almost a “must ally” settlement as there could be so much great storytelling in some intra-empire conflicts with dueling nobles or empire outcasts fighting the system. You either side with them and get their tech/perks of royalty, or you make them an enemy and get biocoded weapons and acidified bodies.
I know, I was hoping they would have great pawns you would want to recruit. But they is no good motivation to fight them.
The empire likely has specialists for everything which means you're only seeing the soldiers...
Francis, I would like to make a suggestion for a mod. Gain Skill Passions. It adds a 10% chance (adjustable in the settings) upon gaining a level that your pawn will also gain a passion in that skill.
This could be considered OP since they permanently gain a passion, but if you look at the cost, I think the price is very fair. It costs:
1. Wasted time and resources on botched constructions/crafts, taming fails/revenge, food poisoning, lower resource yields, etc
2. Extra time since they are low level
3. 65% reduced XP, so it takes a long time for them to gain a level
4. No mood boost since they are not doing what they like
5. You are taking them away from whatever else they would be doing in the colony, so that they can learn that skill.
On average, your pawn would have to gain 7 levels (at 65% reduced XP) to have a 50% chance to gain a passion in that skill, and 15 levels for an 80% chance. However, if you are willing to put in a HUGE amount of time and effort, you can turn a worthless pawn into a normal one, or a good pawn into a great one.
If you use this mod, you would have the option to put someone into construction even if they have no passion for it, and eventually they might learn to like that type of work, just like in real life. This opens up more possibilities for custom designed pawns such as recruiting a jogger, and forcing them to do animal or plant work even if they don't like it, so that they will eventually become useful to the colony.
Also, this mod has no effect on any of your other pawns because you will normally only assign tasks to someone with a passion in that skill, so they are never gaining levels in any other skill anyway. Also, there is an option to lower, or turn off the chance of them gaining a burning passion in any skill if you want to not make it TOO OP.
There is a way you could exploit this mod by putting EVERYONE in your colony on Construction for example, and either force SOMEONE in the colony to get a passion for it, or also eventually EVERYONE would get a passion for it. I do not play this way. It only kicks in if you force someone to do a TON of work at something they are not good at for a LONG time, and I only use it on maybe 1/20 pawns I recruit in order to get what I need.
Using this mod has really made the game more enjoyable for me since I can now hire a pawn with the traits I want, even if they do not have the passions I need, because given enough time and hard work, I can eventually mold them into the pawn I need them to be.
If I was going with a smaller playthrough it would make sense to cross skill the pawns. But we are hiring everyone, by the time we hit 100 pawns it should be possible to have a lot of specialists. Also I'm trying to remove mods as I go for performance reasons.
@@FrancisJohnYT if you consider removing mods for performance, consider outing achtung! first. It actually eat a bit of chunk of your pc process, from personal experience
@@RaiNAgara For now I like the ability to drag pawns in a line, but the moment the game starts to slow down it's gone.
7:03 - I think you kind of answered your own question there. Because you "constantly need construction", that is something nearly all your pawns will get some training on, every day, unlike shooting or melee or medical, etc., which most pawns will go for days or years without using. So it kind of makes sense for construction to start out a bit lower, considering everyone will be getting regular increases to it.
Your own colony's stats at 10:49 show that, after a fairly short amount of play time, construction is already _not_ your lowest overall skill. In fact, one of your pawns has 14, which is the highest value in the whole list, and two have 9. Which means that 25% of your pawns are already above (your arbitrary threshold of) 8.
Now, I wonder if the lower "starting" value for construction is deliberate (as in, the RNG aims for a lower number when creating new pawns) or if it's just a consequence of how few starting stories have construction bonuses, versus how many have bonuses to other skills.
I started the game without rerolling the starting pawns and had no constructor. I got lucky and found one in a tomb pretty early on, they are the monstrous 14. If I had not of found them imagine how weak my line up would look.
The massive variance can be explained by their backstories, different sides have different backstories. I don't think this is many that includes construction for some reason.
@@FrancisJohnYT - If you hadn't found that one, your two 9s would have had even more practice, so they'd probably both be 10 or 11 by now.
I doubt making construction start out lower was totally deliberate (because very little in this game seems to have gone through any deliberation :P), but IMO it works out fine in the long run, because every pawn can get some construction practice every day (whereas most other activities are performed more rarely).
It _is_ a bit annoying at the start, though, especially because the early game is always very similar in different playthroughs (unless you go for base vs. nomad, for example). I normally use Prepare Carefully to give myself 3 decent "generalist" pawns, where at least one is a decent constructor (6 to 8) and one is a decent miner (same), just to speed up the boring parts of early game.
@@RFC-3514 I have made many a non passioned pawn into a builder the issues is they learn at 35% speed. So much time and productivity wasted. On a normal playthrough of the game you can slow down and grind it up, on a hire everyone game you can't wait. I need the farms, walls, rooms and infrastructure now.
@@FrancisJohnYT - Well, the issue there is the "passion" flag, not so much the starting level.
Anyway, like I said, I just use Prepare Carefully to speed up the early game a bit by making sure I have at least one decent builder and one decent miner. That part of the game is always very similar and a bit boring, and I don't see much point in dragging it out. You can just reroll the starting characters instead, but the result is the same and it takes longer.
to support the idea that the empire has either a standing army or a stratified society with a warrior class (hence the high combat and weak other stats), maybe try attacking an empire settlement and capture some of them, to see if they spawn different pawns back home?
they probably don't, that would be Dwarf Fortress levels of absurd attention to detail, but it would be interesting if that were the case
The differences would stem from their backgrounds, I'm pretty sure settlements are generated the same way.
Also I'm not sure how I could get my hands on 500+ settlement pawns :)
wow nice content
do you enjoy collecting data like that?
the end cut looked horrofyingly painful, good job going through all that
jeesh
You don't start out thinking that is going to happen.
For me it's like going do a youtube rabbit hole. I wanted to know how to improve my odds of getting a good constructor. So you look online can't find anything and then you have to figure out how you test it in game. Fast forward a few hours and your piling data into a spreadsheet so you can keep it all sorted.
Francis, I think you need the Increased Stack mod, which allows for larger piles of stuff. You can specify the max amount in the mods folder. less need for storage :)
Oh but it's so much fun trying to stay ahead of all the trash we collect. Also looking at our food we are going to need to stockpile literally thousands of potatoes. Our fridges will be epic.
You might want to compare a few world seed as it affect what kind of pawn you'll get, written in the seed description iirc.
You might also wanna consider passion when counting these, Because i think both are related closer than you think.
When you use prepare carefully mod to configure pawn, each skill and passion use assignment points used in the mod to limit customization for more balanced play (with passion cost more than skill point)
The higher a pawn's skill the higher the chance of a passion, and any skill 10 or higher will have a guaranteed passion.
To count passions would have been Ideal.
I tried counting passions, but I ended up with crossed eyes. 500 pawns each to be counted 12 times for each skill. Then do that 5 times as it's once for each side. Tribal, City, Ancients, Empire and Pirates.
The percentage of pawns that had a passion in something corelated strongly with high skill so I used that as a short hand as it made it far faster to count them all up.
Guess this means those constructors are getting the best armor and helmets, eh? Maybe jump packs so they can jet to safety quickly when the pods drop.
Pretty much, they are very valuable resources. Would still prioritize that 15+ crafter but they are right after that.
Rimword is one of the only games where you use graphs
When it comes to construction, it doesn't take very long for passion to surpass skill in importance.
10:20 Rule by might, enslave others to do everything else.
At least construction is one of the easiest skills to train up, after only medical (arguably shooting too). A stone chess table is like 700 work, so you can grind an absolute ton of xp making a single chess table and it only costs like 70 stone so it is very cheap.
It's more the time commitment. You can train any stat given enough time it's just when you want to expand rapidly you can't stop and build 50 chess tables before you get started. Slows the early game down a lot.
the pirates have great miners, maybe it is to increase the chance of getting a good miner in sapper raids?
Naw, it's all do to that buried treasure the pirates are always searching for.
great video and very informative. just a quick question about your method: did you spawn these as raids on your home tile? or how did you generate your counts?
I don't know the mechanics of spawning very well, but it is possible that the "raider" tag attached to a pawn has the potential to reduce different stats in favor of shooting and melee (ie construction). It may be worth going to another tile and generating an ambush as well as generating camps/cities to attack to see if the distribution changes at all. its very anecdotal, but I wouldn't send my best builders on a raid.
Also IMO passions are more important that initial stats as they define the pawn past the first few seasons. did you notice a distribution of passions associated with established skill level? or are they just random pawn attributes like the backstory elements and whatnot? It also may take some real digging, but are the backstory elements what are causing the skewed point distribution? IE it seems like when the pawns are generated they pull from a table of backstories based on faction; does that weigh heavily on their final stats? or does the code just assign skill points based on some table somewhere. fascinating rabbit hole you have found.
I tried counting passions first but it was to time consuming, I found high skills correlated with more passions. For example among 500 empire troops 81 had plant passion, 142 crafting passion and 404 had shooting passion!!
Since it was easier to count up high skill I went that way. Their is no difference in pawn generation between Attacks, defence and ambush, it is all called from a sides file.
The empire is the only faction that have multiple sides, it's so they can have royalty, fighters and labourers. The stats on their labourers still suck. The labourers are for permit call downs.
@@FrancisJohnYT good to know. Thanks for doing the leg-work on gathering all that data. So the short is there are no "farmable" construction workers.
Next question: are there any tricks to build construction skills on the sub-par pawns we get? I know the "smooth floor/wall" bill has a ton of work if you are willing to have a pawn waste some time, but I don't know how efficient it is.
simple they are advanced to have a warrier cast that they send to kill their enemies.
Great! 👍
One more question:
Do you think the storyteller / difficulty is a thing? 500% -> more points in fighting? Phoebi- more points in Social?!? Whatever...
As far as I'm aware difficulty only affects the size of the raids not the quality of the enemies.
its probably cause of the very limited pawn backstories of the empire which are all literally a soldiers upbringing and its surprising but I've already gotten four very passionate artistic pawns at the empire itself because of the propagandist background... they also have a passion for shooting, melee and social on top of art
top info, i thought there would be trends to different skills but never tested. Wonder if traits work the same? i seem to get many undergrounder tribals
I assume a lot of it would come down to backstories, traits would stem from that. Tribals, cities and Empire have different pools of traits so I'm sure their is patterns.
AFAIK traits have a probability weight (kind is more likely than abrasive, which is more likely than undergrounder, etc.) but are otherwise random except for prohibited conflicts, like slow learner + fast learner. That said, it does always seem like that great grower is an undergrounder or the brawler is a body purist...
Hmm never really thought about the skill sets for the different factions, really only thought that it affected weapons and armor and amount and stuff
It's mostly caused by backstories, tribal and pirates have violent ones and city sides have more labour and soft skills ones.
Well, you could have factored in a cookbox oven pillbox design.. if you knock you the empire you dont trigger the death acidifier and you could get their gear or guns (if not biocoded of course)
That could works but it's very risky, dealing with Empire sappers really hurts.
This is exactly why I always make sure to have a really good builder from the start.
@@eddyvluggen For mining, i usually just train someone who only does fighting at a deep drill. I usually don't really care about mining, since I don't like underground bases (too buggy for me).
Another problem is that builders are constantly building, meaning they never have time to do any other task.
Also, those with good mining, shooting and building at the same time usually have addictions, chemical fascination, bad back and are 90 year olds. I just don't think it's worth it to search for one pawn with mining and building, I'd rather have one that can defend themselves.
@@packediceisthebestminecraf9007 - mining - line up a bunch of mining sites outside your base, 1 guy with two drill arms can core out a plasteel spot in a day without wake-up or work frenzy. He can hit up two or three gold deposits in a day if they're close enough together. Even better if you send him out in a drop pod and he can farskip back to base.
@@ahmataevo I was talking about starting pawns. After a while, even someone without passion will become a high level miner.
@@eddyvluggen I do actually. I usually get 2 diggers and a researcher, unless I'm on an asteroid where ranching is necessary from the beginning.
maybe the pirates have the strongest mining because they were prisoners that were sent out to mining colonies and escaped to become pirates?
sseppel in the comments figured it out, digging for pirate treasure obviously :)
The Empire must just not have any farmers / gardeners lol
edit: this video also explains why I always end up with one person who gets treated as royalty purely because they are the best (and sometimes only) builder.
I don't think I've ever had a problem with constructers in my hundreds of hours of rimworld. To be fair I'll give all of my pawns the construction job even if they're 0 skill no passion. I let them grind away so by the time my colony is fully matured they're all at least somewhat passable builders while the good ones do the furniture.
did you manually count all the pawns? I can't imagine how much time that must've took. Kudos
with how rare constructors are the enemy cities are not going to be sending them on raids
Appreciate you running the numbers, but I really think passion distribution would be more useful than starting skill level.
Tried that first, gave me crossed eyes. High level skills correlate pretty close to passions and are much faster to count up.
For example among 503 empire troops
81 plant passions
142 crafting
404 shooting
I don't know if it would really effect anything but, what about the refugees and the drop pod crashes. I got a decent constructor from the start but I think I have technically 3 constructors(one is my cook) I'm pretty sure at least one was a refugee. My really good crafter was that weird paralytic aphasia drop pod crash. I have seen some duds so I don't know if I was just really lucky. I vaguely remember a decent constructor I had to let go. My problem is I have 1 planter and I want to get into drug production but I can't because I have too many animals and people. I don't think I'm really strong enough to attack anyone but after seeing this I'm a little more confident.