Jay brought it to my attention that there are about 5-10 seconds or so of blackscreen in the video, I thought I'd caught them all but some slipped the net! Sony Vegas was having a field day refusing to render certain sections and I had to cut/crop to get it to work. On the plus side, its only ideology, so you're not missing anything!
This is a pretty nice insight on the DLC. I have to say I do be a bit biased cause Ideology is my absolute favorite of all the DLC and this video helps me explain why. It might be cause im a more atypical player but Ive found the most joy in playing Rimworld as a story generator rather than aiming to win a round of a colony builder. This was why I would find Royalty so lack luster. It felt too specific to a theme that would only be present in a few stories of mine. However with Ideology I was extremely excited. This was mainly cause I was not only looking at what it was, but what it COULD be. The framework was exactly what the game needed to realize so many different stories. As a PC player I loved having different mod packs for different styles of play and praised the DLC’s flexibility with them. This also goes for the other DLC now that Ludeon Studios is a bit more open to synergies between them. In addition we have the newer grander DLC’s that are Biotech and Anomaly so you better believe that Ideology will be a lovely nesting ground for them as well. I cant stop gushing about how much of a team player it is. Heck Ideology would even get me to eventually buy Royalty cause of how different precepts and memes could be thrown into the mix and/or slowly evolve in a colony, so im no longer concerned about a story becoming stagnant. TLDR; I have fun with Rimworld mainly as a Story Telling framework rather than a game to hyper optimize the best colony to survive and beat the game with. So Ideology is the best in my eyes cause its more so a Framework enhancer rather than “Fun new missions” like the other DLC. You’ll see a lot of what I mean if you’ve ever seen a Mr. Samuel Streamer playing the game.
I agree with you, I always cheat save whenever a pawn died because I just want to win or just don't want to be miserable with loosing skilled pawn. That's not the main purpose of this game being made, I think I just let all whatever it will be
3:03 listening on repeat at work in the background so I can finally understand the dlc I bought months ago because it interacts with anomaly and is required for some mods I've been looking at
If you're going to mod it, the VE Memes and Structures and Alpha Memes are practically auto-adds. With those 2 alone you'll easily get 10 times more functionality out of Ideology. Vanilla memes are alright, they're just very flat. It's the difference between someone saying 'I have a surprise for you' and it being a new soap in the bathroom vs VE and Alpha building an entirely new bathroom. You'll struggle to go back to unmodded Ideology once you've used them.
Is that a new microphone I hear?! Your format and style of narrative is of fantastic consistency, the rising overall quality of every video speaks for itself! Also at 2:18 - I couldn't agree more!! I've always felt like Ideology, while fun and providing a solid template for creative-writing nerds like myself to go buckwild in creating our own canon stories into the game, it always felt like the most barren of all the DLCs when it came to content. With that being said, while I enjoy it for what it was, Ideology wouldn't be as successful as it was if it wasn't for the modding community. Vanilla Expanded and Alphas Memes being some of the biggest contributors.
No new mic, just a few new tweaks on compression and slightly better recording setup. Still can't quite get rid of all the... Mouth noise... Eww... But it's getting there! Glad that people have noticed
Thanks for the video! You were a welcome recommendation in my feed this morning. This review does feel catered to playing in optimal ways. In my (limited) experience with RimWorld I have tried to lean in on the story generation aspect of the game. With that in mind, even base Ideology offers tons of roleplay value to your colony. Look forward to seeing your coverage of the other expansions!
I love this dlc. It's genuinely the most important dlc I'd you're into really role-playing a colony. But you're absolutely right about the first experience. It took me more than a few runs to really get my ideos to feel right. Frankly at this point I usually remove the more fiddly things like apparel requirements and despised weapons. And I always forget how bare the dlc is without alpha memes and vanilla expanded
I like ideology dlc I do feel when I remove a mod and now I do t have that cool meme and if wasn't for Samuel streamer "vanilla" series I won't know that vanilla blindsight was bad and you need a mod to make it cool, Atho making psylink neuro formers by the cost of two bionic eyes and a stabbing section is cool trick for a party
To answer your first question - yesterday. I just completed a Archonexus ending. Thing is, i'm late to the party and playing through the game adding one DLC each time. I have enjoyed Ideology better than Royalty btw because there i have to babysit a single pawn on top of usual Randy's nonsense, and here i can get all the pawns on the same wavelength much easier and just kill and cook a few special snowflakes that don't fit.
based takes tbh. thanks for being honest and not another shill channel o7 rimworld's the dlc cheeseburger meme, except the meat and vegetables are stolen from steam workshop and resold [and ideology is the big sliced onion that I like but some people don't]
Adeptus Mechanicus mentioned. It'll be interesting to see further how this game treats ideology crank-wise compared to other games that attempt to, like Stellaris.
Ah yes Ideology, the dlc that the more I play it the more I feel like I've been ripped off. Stuff like Nudism being nothing but symbol burning is such an insult. Every ideology can choose to be nude, that's not special. Running it or not running it is completely irrelevant in a nudist colony, "High Impact." How did this get past testing and then remain this way indefinitely? Darkness? Eclipse Beautiful and mining specialist, everything else can be taken by any ideology. "Forcing" fully accessible precepts just means so little in a choose your own adventure system, especially if they aren't actually attached to anything unique to the meme. It takes an already low variety list and cuts it down even more. There are interesting memes that show what potential the system had, it's a real shame how much of the meme roster is just, not that. I do have to wonder if the ideology system looked very different at some point in development and things like Nudism are relics of that. Great cross dlc content additions though. I do like dryads, slaves can be interesting, if only when you self ban recruiting prisoners primarily using biotech and events for recruitment, rituals are interesting, raidable camps are absolutely great. I really should try some ideology mods at some point, perhaps I'll try your suggestions in hopes for a more meaningful system.
You trashed my second favourite DLC and I agreed with everything you said. Lol My first time seeing that screen was mixed with an equal amount of curiosity and confusion, and I ended up picking up things I didn't understand that by the time I realized they were in play in my colony, it was too late. But yeah human primacy and transhumanist are now things I'm sick of picking. Why I do love this DLC though is because I'm control freak player and it grants a lot of passive mood buffs that can keep colonists in the green for months, High Life for example is a great match to transhumanist colonies, if you have bionics that contribute to consciousness, they're some fairly balanced ones and some extremely OP ones though. If not, the trick is to get them high at the end of a day and for a short period. I like placing the smokeleaf bongs in dining areas where a colonist will come in eat get high and leave and suffer a debuff for only an hour. Mods can be quite unbalanced the same, like having the need for a hospital can leave you in a permanent +10 for Huge Hospital, Pirate Camaraderie is active once they talk to each other and often times staying with each other for long periods grants a social bonus even with enemies
That pirate camaraderie buff is hilariously broken if you set it to most severe for 2 reasons. You can use temporary colonists to buff your own pawns opinions by 'accidentally' having them die whilst they stay with you, eventually this gives all of your pawns basically permanent +100 opinion, amazing for a VE empire run as royal gossip always succeeds. The downside of this? If anyone ever arrives to help you, pretty much *everyone* gets the 5x friend died mood debuff when they inevitably get smoked. The absolute rollercoaster of emotions are hilarious. Colonists go from having lovely conversations to slipping into a month long coma.
Maybe I'm mistaken, but doesn't ideology allow you to do all the war crime things without having negative buffs? Before eating people and executing people gave a negative mood buff didn't it? And ideology allows your people to be happy about eating people or executing anyone for any reason. I dno it's been a long time since I've played without any dlc.
It does, with the issue being for a lot of vanilla ideology stuff, there is very little downside to doing it, outside of potentially upsetting guests or visitors who are on your tile. You'd expect news of the cannibal cult to maybe scare off any visitor quests altogether, to give you a penalty for being able to eat raiders and sell their skin, but nope... It's why so many of the memes feel pointless after 1 use and others are pretty much a no brainer for almost every colony, there isn't enough variety in the vanilla toolkit to make dramatically different colonies without a bunch of extra modded memes in to fill the gaps.
Glad I'm not the only who thinks Ideology is like this. Now, I don't think Ideo is a bad DLC per se, the fact I can roleplay as hippie cannibal Buddhists that worship rats is pretty fucking awesome. But I DEFINITELY think that the game needed a major update like Royalty got when they introduced new meditation types, reworked Favor into Honor, and so on. Slavery is probably the best implementation of the system, much better than any mods. Overall, it's still a good DLC, but maybe not the greatest.
Not gonna lie, this DLC is just bad. I tried a few different runs. Being Cannibal makes the game a lot easier, so is stuff like rough living or pain worship. You can get some flavor for some themed runs, like Vaultdwellers. After a while in got mods like "Rituals can't fail" where the worst possible outcome is just the smallest positive. Then I got stuff like 5x conversion speed and 90% faster cooldown on abilties. And then I just played with the System Inactive, and suddenly Rimworld was so much fun again. The Balance is just all over the place. You can pick any weapon, ANY weapon and then go on a 5 step quest to get a legendary version of it. You are putting a lot of time and effort into building temples and churches to get a -5 mood debuff handed to you unless you reload 10 times. Ritual outcomes often make no sense at all (burn that flag down to find an abandond lab!) Also, with the system inactiv you can just choose whatever style you want. I am keeping the like 3 buffing machines it adds. And... if you have the Character Editor mod, you can edit the invisible default Belief everyone has and still get your strange marriage systems and overpowered Weapons
It sounds like you modded all of the challenge out of Ideology. Of course it’s boring running a colony where everything is acceptable and you can’t fail a ritual. I really like ideology because it adds mechanical incentives for certain play styles. I almost never do slavery because I’m not about that… but if my ideology demands slaves…
8:12 Ok, time to do something new and experience more of what the game offers. Just gonna pick a couple of memes annnnnd.... I've recreated the Cult Mechanicus again....
I bought the Ideology DLC a long time ago when it was on sale and never actually enabled it. I cannot believe the whole starting setup menu! It takes me so long as it is to get started because I have the mod Prepare Carefully and I get decision paralysis when I have to many choices and yet I want to have complete control...sigh. This breakdown hasn't really shown me anything that makes me think that I want to actually enable it. Sure, it's nice to be able to set somethings up so that you can avoid certain debuffs or to encourage others and having more clothing options is cute if you never plan on fighting enemies...but yeah, I don't see anything mind blowing. SIDE NOTE: I bought Royalty on sale at the same time, and I just recently enabled it. I'm not too impressed with it either, seems to add more annoyances than anything else. I never remember to use the psychic abilities that I acquire. However, the upside is the additional quests that cause you to interact with random pawns on your base and cool things to research. I detest the room size requirements that force you to make large sprawling bases that ultimately make your pawns less effective since they have to walk too far for everything. Also, the food requirements for some pawns is annoying as well.
Might want to swap out Prepare Carefully for a different mod, it's got some pretty major problems that can wreck a long term colony. Just make sure if you do take it out, it isn't mid run as that'll cause even more issues! Good alternatives that aren't as destructive as Prepare Carefully are Character Editor and Pawn Editor. Yes, Prepare Carefully is a little easier to use, but if you're playing colonies that often run over 3 years it'll be making your game absolutely crawl and there is *no* way to fix it once it's started to happen!
Prepare carefully creates pawns outside of the games parameters. So normally the game runs something called GC, or garbage collection, which clears out pawns that it generated that aren't really needed anymore, old traders, visitors, raiders that ran away, you get the idea. Prepare carefully stops this happening. So as raids get bigger and colonies live longer, you go from a couple of hundred pawns sitting around in memory to thousands. It makes everything slower and will eventually end in the grey screen bug, that'll kill the colony it happened on basically. If you've always used prepare carefully, you'll likely think the slowdown when you've played for a while is normal, I did. Then when I took prepare carefully off and used something else the same sized colonies were still able to run at 3x speed, compared to prepare carefully which stopped the speed buttons doing anything after about 3 or 4 years in a colony. Some people experience no obvious issues, but they're always in the background. If you ever submit a bug report about another mod and share your modlist, if it has prepare carefully, it'll be the first thing they tell you to get rid of.
@@MysteriousFawx Wow! That is very interesting. I haven't noticed any issues yet, but then I am usually playing and doing something else so maybe I am just distracted. Plus, I don't think I have ever had more that 15 pawns at any given time, so it could be that I haven't been pushing my colonies to the limit yet. I have only been playing Rimworld for less than a year. That said, are their any mods like prepare carefully that you recommend?
Pawn editor and character editor both do very similar things, they just have a different interface. They also don't cause generation issues. I'd say give them a try, one at a time of course, and see which one you prefer. Just make sure you finish up any colonies you're playing before removing prepare carefully. It doesn't like being removed mid game, that will 100% make the grey screen error pop up.
Mmmm... not necessarily. When I do breakdowns and coverage I do as much as I can to try and avoid going into straight up $ value, because what may be expensive for some is nothing to others, equally what I may have gotten 500 hours of playtime out of, others might only get 10, but we could still be just as happy with how much we got out of it in that time you know? So whilst I do acknowledge upfront in these videos that Rimworld is a game that has a price point that is isn't super accessible for everyone, I don't believe cost should be a metric to review something by, it's just too user specific. That is something people can come to their own conclusion around, not something that should be dictated to them. I try my best to review towards helping them forming that conclusion. If that means for you, this is a $5 DLC, absolutely fine. But I wouldn't personally say my issues with the DLC are around it's price point, that isn't a metric that I'm using to review it.
@@MysteriousFawx Valid. I should probably specify that the comment isn't intended to be hostile or angry or anything. It's difficult to convey that when speaking negatively in text format. Personally, I'm quite poor. So monetary value is something that I look at quite closely. The reason I specify that this should probably be a $5-$10 DLC is looking at what that $25s can get you. That is the full price of a decent indie game that's being blown on a DLC that's, frankly, the one you should get last if I were to make an ordered list of which DLCs to buy for rimworld. In fact, you could probably get two decent indie games for that price depending on your tastes. That's also the money it would take someone to feed themselves for the week, or at least a couple days if they were really that desperate. For a person like me, I have to save up for about a month before I can spend that much money on gaming. Just looking at the content the DLC adds, the content is roughly equivalent to one of the VE Factions mods. And even then, it honestly comes up short. It also doesn't help the case that, once again, Tynan's taken a handful of popular mods, filed off their serial numbers, changed them up just a bit, and then released them as something "new" for the cost of a game. For that cost, I would expect something more along the lines of the entire VE mod catalogue in terms of content. I say that as someone that actually quite likes the DLC's ideas as well. Personally I also think the modding potential for the systems it adds is great, and am looking forward to what the community cooks up for it. This is also, actually a DLC that doesn't feel like it should have just been an update like the other three were as what it does add is radically different from the rest of the game. It's one of those things where I WANT to like this DLC, but the price point is a major black mark.
No worries, I didn't take it as a negative comment, I was just hoping that wasn't the takeaway about my opinion of the DLC. If it's the conclusion you'd come to, absolutely fine. Personally the pricing of the Rimworld DLC's doesn't work out that way for me, because of the sheer mileage I get from the game. It's why discussion around pricing is so subjective. I could indeed get 2 decent indie games for that price, but I'd be unlikely to get anywhere near 1000 hours out of those 2 decent indie games, I've managed to get almost 3x that out of Rimworld (and counting) so the price is easy to justify. As for Tynan releasing mods as official content, a large part of the discussion that people normally skip over is that the content he includes is then always supported. You no longer have mods that break, stop being updated or have conflicts with other things you want to use. Features that might have originated from mods being added into basegame makes for a more stable experience overall and gives mod makers a break from being shouted at on the Steam Workshop. Freeing up their time to work on other projects rather than needing to support something they made 3 years ago with every new patch or release.
@@MysteriousFawx here's a better way to frame the pricing thing: would you play more rimworld because of these DLCs, or do you get these DLCs because you play rimworld so much? Being able to buy a couple decent indie games gives you the opportunity for variety. As far as I can tell, the only reason to get half or more of the DLCs is because they're needed for mods. Also, on the topic of "it means always being supported", that's not an excuse. Which is why it's not brought up. It's irrelevant to the conversation. However, I'll counter that point: a great many mods are now going to require the DLC in question, and because they're basically just an old mod, those old mods are likely going to stop being supported. Meaning that the dlc in question becomes a pay gate for future mods related to the content you liked. I love tons of different races. So much so that I wish there was a way to disable baseliner (I don't know of one atm, correct me if there is one). However, after biotech released, how many new races were released using the mods biotech was taken from without requiring biotech? How many of these mods stopped being supported, or were swapped over to biotech?
I play more rimworld because of these DLC's, when you're putting 1000's of hours into a game, new content is always a welcome thing. I wouldn't say its irrelevant to the conversation to mention any content incorporated into basegame will always be supported, we're literally talking right now about how a base game patch has broken mods that still haven't been updated weeks after launch, not because they require Anomaly, because the mod makers just haven't updated them to 1.5. None of the old mods should need the new DLC to work, as they were never designed to use any of its features. So unless they incorporate them it won't change anything. They just need to be updated to work with 1.5, a free patch, not paid content, which is the strange thing people seem to be getting angry over. Yes, new mods released that want to integrate with Anomaly will require it as DLC, but the vast majority of mods work just fine with basegame. Looking at the top mods for just this week, so many need nothing but other workshop items like Harmony. For disabling the baseliner, you want to use something called Xenotype Spawn Control and yank it out of all the factions it's included in. You'll see the other Xenotypes you've downloaded that way. I used to set the Republic factions from VE Classical to different specific races to differentiate them even more. As for HAR losing a lot of its support after Biotech, in my eyes, that wasn't a bad thing. HAR as a system is inherently janky and has a lot of conflicts, with so many of the races added into being wildly different in how well they're made and how well they were balanced. Everything being tied together with the genes from Biotech stops so many of the old errors that happened constantly. The missing body parts or being unable to operate on certain races without multiple mods to patch compatibility, strange conflicts caused because mod makers named something the same and it breaks references. Players can always roll back their game and use the older versions of mods if they really wanted to.
Annoyingly Ideology colours are different to floor/structure paints, they use different palettes and only a few of the colours are shared between them.
2:40 I play wih a lot of mods enabled but I honestly never really modded Ideology. Sure one or two mods might add a very small thing to ideology like the vehicles expanded add the driving memes, but I rarely use those. I play very few colonies, but those one very long, so I stick a lot to one or two presets and have yet to play all of them. Mods are really cool but ideology was never something I need to mod. it's just something to tailer your colonie with better, and 95% of ideas I have a totally accevable with the "vanilla" DLC. But I see how someone who play more different colonies with shorter times would benefit more from mods
A lot of my colonies have gone 4-5+ years. If you're not using VE/Alpha for new Memes it's a wealth of diversity you're missing out on. I didn't think I needed it until I used it, then you realise how flat 90% of the Vanilla memes are, you can achieve what most of them offer purely by swapping precepts, there isn't anything to set them apart or make a colony 'unique'. The few memes that are unique in vanilla are complete troll choices like Blindsight.
Medical specialist won't offset not being able to see sadly. The 'best' way to play blindsight is to constantly take on and off blindfolds, so you can buff you mood when needed, then take it off to work. Its just a broken meme without extra mods to restore sight depending on psycasting level (actual psysight)
What? Highlife is great. The issue is choosing to fulfill the requirements with smokeleaf (which is trash for anything but emergency mood management) instead of the superior options like psychite tea (or with Biotech, any drug you like because you can pound yayo like a 80's executive with the right genes)
The issue with highlife is the frequency that it requires. A hit every 0.75 days to keep them happy, which is fine if you've got the diversity to try and avoid addictions, splitting it across beer, smokes and tea maybe, but most of the time it just leads to massive tolerances on all pawns so the drugs they're taking do practically nothing. Biotech does fix it for sure, but I try to review these DLC's on the basis of what they alone offer. It's why I had to address the elephant in the room around the mods to 'fix' Ideology, as they won't be an option for everyone.
@@MysteriousFawx the mood change is incremental from +3 at the the original dose to -1 after 2 days. Only giving them psychite tea every two days and nothing else (which avoids tolerance build up and which player should consider doing anyway because of the mood and rest fall rate buffs) averages out to a net positive in mood without even considering the mood buff from the tea itself. And -1 is honestly negligible and not likely to cause issues while it's up. Add in other drugs to expand out your drug schedule at safe tolerance gains (beer 1/day, ambrosia 1/2 days, smokeleaf never/only when really unhappy) and you're keeping them very happy, with no productivity loss and no tolerance gain, even if Ideology is your only DLC.
@@MysteriousFawx TH-cam appears to have lost my first attempt at this comment so apologies if its a duplicate. The mood change is a gradual, incremental decrease from +3 at the the original dose and after 2 days its only down to -1 . Only giving them psychite tea every two days (which doesn't increase tolerance, and which player should consider doing anyway because of the buffs tea provides) averages out to a net positive in mood from the precept (so not including the mood from the tea). The mood penalty also only applies once expectations increase a bit so you have leeway to get drug production up and running. You could also just use beer from the start (safe at 1/day), never have the mood penalty at all, and have the extra mood buff up most of the time but it has more set up and tra had better buffs. After the early game, if you want to, you can even add in whichever other non-smokeleaf social drugs you didn't pick and schedule them for their safe dose rates to keep your pawns very happy And none of that requires anything but core and ideology, risks tolerance or addiction (on adults) or requires smokeleaf or hard drugs.
Still runs the massive issue of drugs in Rimworld that is, wealth. The crops aren't particularly fast so you'll need to get decent yields in (depending on summer/winter cycle anyway) to keep your colony happy. So avoiding addictions and raising tolerance, that's Hops, Smoke and Psych. Which in its raw form, not such an issue, albeit a bit space hungry. If you're making beer, that's space for barrels needed too. But any product sat around waiting to be used is just harder raids that you wouldn't have needed outside of high life, with the benefit of high life being....? If it reduced overdose chances or something I'm down, let pawns slam some harder drugs before combat with less risk to make up for the increased raid size. As it stands it's just easier to make drugs for normal recreation and not take a meme that forces them to need it. The upside of increased yield and production speed, with boosted sell prices actively encourages players to sit on a stack of drugs that makes them a bigger target. Won't be an issue on all difficulties, but the upside just isn't enough, same with most memes in Vanilla Ideology. It's why the few that are most beneficial always rise to the top.
I kinda disagree I feel like Royalty is basically a massive waste of time and money where as Ideology is allot of fun Though I do like to RP as I play so that might be why I feel this way. Also I don't think the game itself is playable without mods. at 17:36 the screen went black.
Jay brought it to my attention that there are about 5-10 seconds or so of blackscreen in the video, I thought I'd caught them all but some slipped the net! Sony Vegas was having a field day refusing to render certain sections and I had to cut/crop to get it to work. On the plus side, its only ideology, so you're not missing anything!
Just wanted to let you know, you're decidedly a "drop what Im doing and watch the new vid" creator.
I am not sure why I've watched two >30 min videos on DLCs that I already own, but here I am.
same 💀
This is a pretty nice insight on the DLC. I have to say I do be a bit biased cause Ideology is my absolute favorite of all the DLC and this video helps me explain why.
It might be cause im a more atypical player but Ive found the most joy in playing Rimworld as a story generator rather than aiming to win a round of a colony builder. This was why I would find Royalty so lack luster. It felt too specific to a theme that would only be present in a few stories of mine.
However with Ideology I was extremely excited. This was mainly cause I was not only looking at what it was, but what it COULD be. The framework was exactly what the game needed to realize so many different stories.
As a PC player I loved having different mod packs for different styles of play and praised the DLC’s flexibility with them. This also goes for the other DLC now that Ludeon Studios is a bit more open to synergies between them.
In addition we have the newer grander DLC’s that are Biotech and Anomaly so you better believe that Ideology will be a lovely nesting ground for them as well. I cant stop gushing about how much of a team player it is. Heck Ideology would even get me to eventually buy Royalty cause of how different precepts and memes could be thrown into the mix and/or slowly evolve in a colony, so im no longer concerned about a story becoming stagnant.
TLDR;
I have fun with Rimworld mainly as a Story Telling framework rather than a game to hyper optimize the best colony to survive and beat the game with. So Ideology is the best in my eyes cause its more so a Framework enhancer rather than “Fun new missions” like the other DLC. You’ll see a lot of what I mean if you’ve ever seen a Mr. Samuel Streamer playing the game.
I agree with you, I always cheat save whenever a pawn died because I just want to win or just don't want to be miserable with loosing skilled pawn. That's not the main purpose of this game being made, I think I just let all whatever it will be
3:03 listening on repeat at work in the background so I can finally understand the dlc I bought months ago because it interacts with anomaly and is required for some mods I've been looking at
If you're going to mod it, the VE Memes and Structures and Alpha Memes are practically auto-adds. With those 2 alone you'll easily get 10 times more functionality out of Ideology.
Vanilla memes are alright, they're just very flat. It's the difference between someone saying 'I have a surprise for you' and it being a new soap in the bathroom vs VE and Alpha building an entirely new bathroom. You'll struggle to go back to unmodded Ideology once you've used them.
Is that a new microphone I hear?! Your format and style of narrative is of fantastic consistency, the rising overall quality of every video speaks for itself!
Also at 2:18 - I couldn't agree more!! I've always felt like Ideology, while fun and providing a solid template for creative-writing nerds like myself to go buckwild in creating our own canon stories into the game, it always felt like the most barren of all the DLCs when it came to content.
With that being said, while I enjoy it for what it was, Ideology wouldn't be as successful as it was if it wasn't for the modding community. Vanilla Expanded and Alphas Memes being some of the biggest contributors.
No new mic, just a few new tweaks on compression and slightly better recording setup. Still can't quite get rid of all the... Mouth noise... Eww... But it's getting there! Glad that people have noticed
I love your content man, detailed but still concise. Hope you keep making more stuff.
This channel is a perfect mix of personal opinion, levity, and facts. It's clear you're passionate about it and that's why it's so fantastic
I personally find Ideology to be the least fun out of the DLC. The more I think about it the more I would change.
Thanks for the video! You were a welcome recommendation in my feed this morning. This review does feel catered to playing in optimal ways. In my (limited) experience with RimWorld I have tried to lean in on the story generation aspect of the game. With that in mind, even base Ideology offers tons of roleplay value to your colony. Look forward to seeing your coverage of the other expansions!
I love this dlc. It's genuinely the most important dlc I'd you're into really role-playing a colony. But you're absolutely right about the first experience.
It took me more than a few runs to really get my ideos to feel right.
Frankly at this point I usually remove the more fiddly things like apparel requirements and despised weapons.
And I always forget how bare the dlc is without alpha memes and vanilla expanded
Thanks for the videos, I was looking forward to this one.
Learning all the details about a well crafted game is almost as fun as playing.
Great and deep material. Thank you Im new in the game and looking around for a first DLC.
I have never played modded Rimworld. I decided I would use mods once I felt comfortable with the game. I'm about a thousand hours in.
I like ideology dlc
I do feel when I remove a mod and now I do t have that cool meme and if wasn't for Samuel streamer "vanilla" series I won't know that vanilla blindsight was bad and you need a mod to make it cool, Atho making psylink neuro formers by the cost of two bionic eyes and a stabbing section is cool trick for a party
Good vid, gonna be waiting for the Biotech video
To answer your first question - yesterday. I just completed a Archonexus ending.
Thing is, i'm late to the party and playing through the game adding one DLC each time. I have enjoyed Ideology better than Royalty btw because there i have to babysit a single pawn on top of usual Randy's nonsense, and here i can get all the pawns on the same wavelength much easier and just kill and cook a few special snowflakes that don't fit.
Love the vids man, keep going
based takes tbh. thanks for being honest and not another shill channel o7
rimworld's the dlc cheeseburger meme, except the meat and vegetables are stolen from steam workshop and resold [and ideology is the big sliced onion that I like but some people don't]
Adeptus Mechanicus mentioned.
It'll be interesting to see further how this game treats ideology crank-wise compared to other games that attempt to, like Stellaris.
First!
Also loving these videos I can't wait to see more!
Great videos sir. Subscribed.
Ah yes Ideology, the dlc that the more I play it the more I feel like I've been ripped off. Stuff like Nudism being nothing but symbol burning is such an insult. Every ideology can choose to be nude, that's not special. Running it or not running it is completely irrelevant in a nudist colony, "High Impact." How did this get past testing and then remain this way indefinitely? Darkness? Eclipse Beautiful and mining specialist, everything else can be taken by any ideology. "Forcing" fully accessible precepts just means so little in a choose your own adventure system, especially if they aren't actually attached to anything unique to the meme. It takes an already low variety list and cuts it down even more. There are interesting memes that show what potential the system had, it's a real shame how much of the meme roster is just, not that. I do have to wonder if the ideology system looked very different at some point in development and things like Nudism are relics of that.
Great cross dlc content additions though. I do like dryads, slaves can be interesting, if only when you self ban recruiting prisoners primarily using biotech and events for recruitment, rituals are interesting, raidable camps are absolutely great. I really should try some ideology mods at some point, perhaps I'll try your suggestions in hopes for a more meaningful system.
You trashed my second favourite DLC and I agreed with everything you said. Lol
My first time seeing that screen was mixed with an equal amount of curiosity and confusion, and I ended up picking up things I didn't understand that by the time I realized they were in play in my colony, it was too late.
But yeah human primacy and transhumanist are now things I'm sick of picking.
Why I do love this DLC though is because I'm control freak player and it grants a lot of passive mood buffs that can keep colonists in the green for months, High Life for example is a great match to transhumanist colonies, if you have bionics that contribute to consciousness, they're some fairly balanced ones and some extremely OP ones though. If not, the trick is to get them high at the end of a day and for a short period.
I like placing the smokeleaf bongs in dining areas where a colonist will come in eat get high and leave and suffer a debuff for only an hour.
Mods can be quite unbalanced the same, like having the need for a hospital can leave you in a permanent +10 for Huge Hospital, Pirate Camaraderie is active once they talk to each other and often times staying with each other for long periods grants a social bonus even with enemies
That pirate camaraderie buff is hilariously broken if you set it to most severe for 2 reasons. You can use temporary colonists to buff your own pawns opinions by 'accidentally' having them die whilst they stay with you, eventually this gives all of your pawns basically permanent +100 opinion, amazing for a VE empire run as royal gossip always succeeds. The downside of this? If anyone ever arrives to help you, pretty much *everyone* gets the 5x friend died mood debuff when they inevitably get smoked. The absolute rollercoaster of emotions are hilarious. Colonists go from having lovely conversations to slipping into a month long coma.
@@MysteriousFawxhonestly they should give the camraderie precepts to loyalists to actually give them a purpose
Maybe I'm mistaken, but doesn't ideology allow you to do all the war crime things without having negative buffs? Before eating people and executing people gave a negative mood buff didn't it? And ideology allows your people to be happy about eating people or executing anyone for any reason. I dno it's been a long time since I've played without any dlc.
It does, with the issue being for a lot of vanilla ideology stuff, there is very little downside to doing it, outside of potentially upsetting guests or visitors who are on your tile. You'd expect news of the cannibal cult to maybe scare off any visitor quests altogether, to give you a penalty for being able to eat raiders and sell their skin, but nope...
It's why so many of the memes feel pointless after 1 use and others are pretty much a no brainer for almost every colony, there isn't enough variety in the vanilla toolkit to make dramatically different colonies without a bunch of extra modded memes in to fill the gaps.
I love it. Thank you
Glad I'm not the only who thinks Ideology is like this. Now, I don't think Ideo is a bad DLC per se, the fact I can roleplay as hippie cannibal Buddhists that worship rats is pretty fucking awesome.
But I DEFINITELY think that the game needed a major update like Royalty got when they introduced new meditation types, reworked Favor into Honor, and so on.
Slavery is probably the best implementation of the system, much better than any mods. Overall, it's still a good DLC, but maybe not the greatest.
Not gonna lie, this DLC is just bad. I tried a few different runs. Being Cannibal makes the game a lot easier, so is stuff like rough living or pain worship. You can get some flavor for some themed runs, like Vaultdwellers. After a while in got mods like "Rituals can't fail" where the worst possible outcome is just the smallest positive. Then I got stuff like 5x conversion speed and 90% faster cooldown on abilties.
And then I just played with the System Inactive, and suddenly Rimworld was so much fun again. The Balance is just all over the place. You can pick any weapon, ANY weapon and then go on a 5 step quest to get a legendary version of it. You are putting a lot of time and effort into building temples and churches to get a -5 mood debuff handed to you unless you reload 10 times. Ritual outcomes often make no sense at all (burn that flag down to find an abandond lab!)
Also, with the system inactiv you can just choose whatever style you want. I am keeping the like 3 buffing machines it adds.
And... if you have the Character Editor mod, you can edit the invisible default Belief everyone has and still get your strange marriage systems and overpowered Weapons
It sounds like you modded all of the challenge out of Ideology. Of course it’s boring running a colony where everything is acceptable and you can’t fail a ritual.
I really like ideology because it adds mechanical incentives for certain play styles. I almost never do slavery because I’m not about that… but if my ideology demands slaves…
8:12 Ok, time to do something new and experience more of what the game offers. Just gonna pick a couple of memes annnnnd.... I've recreated the Cult Mechanicus again....
just wondering if your gonna go through alpha mods for rimworld mods rundown, thanks! great video as always
I bought the Ideology DLC a long time ago when it was on sale and never actually enabled it. I cannot believe the whole starting setup menu! It takes me so long as it is to get started because I have the mod Prepare Carefully and I get decision paralysis when I have to many choices and yet I want to have complete control...sigh.
This breakdown hasn't really shown me anything that makes me think that I want to actually enable it. Sure, it's nice to be able to set somethings up so that you can avoid certain debuffs or to encourage others and having more clothing options is cute if you never plan on fighting enemies...but yeah, I don't see anything mind blowing.
SIDE NOTE: I bought Royalty on sale at the same time, and I just recently enabled it. I'm not too impressed with it either, seems to add more annoyances than anything else. I never remember to use the psychic abilities that I acquire. However, the upside is the additional quests that cause you to interact with random pawns on your base and cool things to research. I detest the room size requirements that force you to make large sprawling bases that ultimately make your pawns less effective since they have to walk too far for everything. Also, the food requirements for some pawns is annoying as well.
Might want to swap out Prepare Carefully for a different mod, it's got some pretty major problems that can wreck a long term colony. Just make sure if you do take it out, it isn't mid run as that'll cause even more issues!
Good alternatives that aren't as destructive as Prepare Carefully are Character Editor and Pawn Editor. Yes, Prepare Carefully is a little easier to use, but if you're playing colonies that often run over 3 years it'll be making your game absolutely crawl and there is *no* way to fix it once it's started to happen!
@@MysteriousFawx I haven't noticed any problems with prepare carefully. Can you elaborate on what you mean?
Prepare carefully creates pawns outside of the games parameters. So normally the game runs something called GC, or garbage collection, which clears out pawns that it generated that aren't really needed anymore, old traders, visitors, raiders that ran away, you get the idea.
Prepare carefully stops this happening. So as raids get bigger and colonies live longer, you go from a couple of hundred pawns sitting around in memory to thousands. It makes everything slower and will eventually end in the grey screen bug, that'll kill the colony it happened on basically.
If you've always used prepare carefully, you'll likely think the slowdown when you've played for a while is normal, I did. Then when I took prepare carefully off and used something else the same sized colonies were still able to run at 3x speed, compared to prepare carefully which stopped the speed buttons doing anything after about 3 or 4 years in a colony.
Some people experience no obvious issues, but they're always in the background. If you ever submit a bug report about another mod and share your modlist, if it has prepare carefully, it'll be the first thing they tell you to get rid of.
@@MysteriousFawx Wow! That is very interesting. I haven't noticed any issues yet, but then I am usually playing and doing something else so maybe I am just distracted. Plus, I don't think I have ever had more that 15 pawns at any given time, so it could be that I haven't been pushing my colonies to the limit yet. I have only been playing Rimworld for less than a year.
That said, are their any mods like prepare carefully that you recommend?
Pawn editor and character editor both do very similar things, they just have a different interface. They also don't cause generation issues.
I'd say give them a try, one at a time of course, and see which one you prefer. Just make sure you finish up any colonies you're playing before removing prepare carefully. It doesn't like being removed mid game, that will 100% make the grey screen error pop up.
Basically: this shouldn't cost as much as it does. If it was a 5 dollar dlc, there would be no issue.
Mmmm... not necessarily. When I do breakdowns and coverage I do as much as I can to try and avoid going into straight up $ value, because what may be expensive for some is nothing to others, equally what I may have gotten 500 hours of playtime out of, others might only get 10, but we could still be just as happy with how much we got out of it in that time you know?
So whilst I do acknowledge upfront in these videos that Rimworld is a game that has a price point that is isn't super accessible for everyone, I don't believe cost should be a metric to review something by, it's just too user specific. That is something people can come to their own conclusion around, not something that should be dictated to them. I try my best to review towards helping them forming that conclusion.
If that means for you, this is a $5 DLC, absolutely fine. But I wouldn't personally say my issues with the DLC are around it's price point, that isn't a metric that I'm using to review it.
@@MysteriousFawx Valid. I should probably specify that the comment isn't intended to be hostile or angry or anything. It's difficult to convey that when speaking negatively in text format. Personally, I'm quite poor. So monetary value is something that I look at quite closely.
The reason I specify that this should probably be a $5-$10 DLC is looking at what that $25s can get you. That is the full price of a decent indie game that's being blown on a DLC that's, frankly, the one you should get last if I were to make an ordered list of which DLCs to buy for rimworld. In fact, you could probably get two decent indie games for that price depending on your tastes. That's also the money it would take someone to feed themselves for the week, or at least a couple days if they were really that desperate. For a person like me, I have to save up for about a month before I can spend that much money on gaming.
Just looking at the content the DLC adds, the content is roughly equivalent to one of the VE Factions mods. And even then, it honestly comes up short. It also doesn't help the case that, once again, Tynan's taken a handful of popular mods, filed off their serial numbers, changed them up just a bit, and then released them as something "new" for the cost of a game. For that cost, I would expect something more along the lines of the entire VE mod catalogue in terms of content. I say that as someone that actually quite likes the DLC's ideas as well. Personally I also think the modding potential for the systems it adds is great, and am looking forward to what the community cooks up for it. This is also, actually a DLC that doesn't feel like it should have just been an update like the other three were as what it does add is radically different from the rest of the game. It's one of those things where I WANT to like this DLC, but the price point is a major black mark.
No worries, I didn't take it as a negative comment, I was just hoping that wasn't the takeaway about my opinion of the DLC. If it's the conclusion you'd come to, absolutely fine.
Personally the pricing of the Rimworld DLC's doesn't work out that way for me, because of the sheer mileage I get from the game. It's why discussion around pricing is so subjective. I could indeed get 2 decent indie games for that price, but I'd be unlikely to get anywhere near 1000 hours out of those 2 decent indie games, I've managed to get almost 3x that out of Rimworld (and counting) so the price is easy to justify.
As for Tynan releasing mods as official content, a large part of the discussion that people normally skip over is that the content he includes is then always supported. You no longer have mods that break, stop being updated or have conflicts with other things you want to use. Features that might have originated from mods being added into basegame makes for a more stable experience overall and gives mod makers a break from being shouted at on the Steam Workshop. Freeing up their time to work on other projects rather than needing to support something they made 3 years ago with every new patch or release.
@@MysteriousFawx here's a better way to frame the pricing thing: would you play more rimworld because of these DLCs, or do you get these DLCs because you play rimworld so much? Being able to buy a couple decent indie games gives you the opportunity for variety. As far as I can tell, the only reason to get half or more of the DLCs is because they're needed for mods.
Also, on the topic of "it means always being supported", that's not an excuse. Which is why it's not brought up. It's irrelevant to the conversation. However, I'll counter that point: a great many mods are now going to require the DLC in question, and because they're basically just an old mod, those old mods are likely going to stop being supported. Meaning that the dlc in question becomes a pay gate for future mods related to the content you liked. I love tons of different races. So much so that I wish there was a way to disable baseliner (I don't know of one atm, correct me if there is one). However, after biotech released, how many new races were released using the mods biotech was taken from without requiring biotech? How many of these mods stopped being supported, or were swapped over to biotech?
I play more rimworld because of these DLC's, when you're putting 1000's of hours into a game, new content is always a welcome thing. I wouldn't say its irrelevant to the conversation to mention any content incorporated into basegame will always be supported, we're literally talking right now about how a base game patch has broken mods that still haven't been updated weeks after launch, not because they require Anomaly, because the mod makers just haven't updated them to 1.5.
None of the old mods should need the new DLC to work, as they were never designed to use any of its features. So unless they incorporate them it won't change anything. They just need to be updated to work with 1.5, a free patch, not paid content, which is the strange thing people seem to be getting angry over. Yes, new mods released that want to integrate with Anomaly will require it as DLC, but the vast majority of mods work just fine with basegame. Looking at the top mods for just this week, so many need nothing but other workshop items like Harmony.
For disabling the baseliner, you want to use something called Xenotype Spawn Control and yank it out of all the factions it's included in. You'll see the other Xenotypes you've downloaded that way. I used to set the Republic factions from VE Classical to different specific races to differentiate them even more.
As for HAR losing a lot of its support after Biotech, in my eyes, that wasn't a bad thing. HAR as a system is inherently janky and has a lot of conflicts, with so many of the races added into being wildly different in how well they're made and how well they were balanced. Everything being tied together with the genes from Biotech stops so many of the old errors that happened constantly. The missing body parts or being unable to operate on certain races without multiple mods to patch compatibility, strange conflicts caused because mod makers named something the same and it breaks references. Players can always roll back their game and use the older versions of mods if they really wanted to.
How do I paint the structure of my colony to ideology colour. I always choose a colour and when painting can never find it again?
Annoyingly Ideology colours are different to floor/structure paints, they use different palettes and only a few of the colours are shared between them.
2:40 I play wih a lot of mods enabled but I honestly never really modded Ideology. Sure one or two mods might add a very small thing to ideology like the vehicles expanded add the driving memes, but I rarely use those. I play very few colonies, but those one very long, so I stick a lot to one or two presets and have yet to play all of them. Mods are really cool but ideology was never something I need to mod. it's just something to tailer your colonie with better, and 95% of ideas I have a totally accevable with the "vanilla" DLC. But I see how someone who play more different colonies with shorter times would benefit more from mods
A lot of my colonies have gone 4-5+ years. If you're not using VE/Alpha for new Memes it's a wealth of diversity you're missing out on. I didn't think I needed it until I used it, then you realise how flat 90% of the Vanilla memes are, you can achieve what most of them offer purely by swapping precepts, there isn't anything to set them apart or make a colony 'unique'. The few memes that are unique in vanilla are complete troll choices like Blindsight.
Hey man are you doing a rundown of biotech DLC?
6pm UK time this Thursday, about an hour and a half long.
the only mod i use is the rocket man performance mod
so i don't really see what's wrong with ideology
Can you make a video about Biotech DLC?
Was due tomorrow but I've had to push it back as it's like 90 minutes long. Should be out on Thursday
@@MysteriousFawx nice :D
Doesn’t blinsight only inccur a - 2 opinion but gives the medical specialist which could have only been obtained through fledh purity
Medical specialist won't offset not being able to see sadly. The 'best' way to play blindsight is to constantly take on and off blindfolds, so you can buff you mood when needed, then take it off to work. Its just a broken meme without extra mods to restore sight depending on psycasting level (actual psysight)
Is that age of empires music I hear in the background of the video lmao
"No ones ever been to a fun funeral" You clearly have never been to an Irish or cajun funeral huh lol
What? Highlife is great. The issue is choosing to fulfill the requirements with smokeleaf (which is trash for anything but emergency mood management) instead of the superior options like psychite tea (or with Biotech, any drug you like because you can pound yayo like a 80's executive with the right genes)
The issue with highlife is the frequency that it requires. A hit every 0.75 days to keep them happy, which is fine if you've got the diversity to try and avoid addictions, splitting it across beer, smokes and tea maybe, but most of the time it just leads to massive tolerances on all pawns so the drugs they're taking do practically nothing.
Biotech does fix it for sure, but I try to review these DLC's on the basis of what they alone offer. It's why I had to address the elephant in the room around the mods to 'fix' Ideology, as they won't be an option for everyone.
@@MysteriousFawx the mood change is incremental from +3 at the the original dose to -1 after 2 days. Only giving them psychite tea every two days and nothing else (which avoids tolerance build up and which player should consider doing anyway because of the mood and rest fall rate buffs) averages out to a net positive in mood without even considering the mood buff from the tea itself. And -1 is honestly negligible and not likely to cause issues while it's up.
Add in other drugs to expand out your drug schedule at safe tolerance gains (beer 1/day, ambrosia 1/2 days, smokeleaf never/only when really unhappy) and you're keeping them very happy, with no productivity loss and no tolerance gain, even if Ideology is your only DLC.
@@MysteriousFawx TH-cam appears to have lost my first attempt at this comment so apologies if its a duplicate.
The mood change is a gradual, incremental decrease from +3 at the the original dose and after 2 days its only down to -1 . Only giving them psychite tea every two days (which doesn't increase tolerance, and which player should consider doing anyway because of the buffs tea provides) averages out to a net positive in mood from the precept (so not including the mood from the tea). The mood penalty also only applies once expectations increase a bit so you have leeway to get drug production up and running. You could also just use beer from the start (safe at 1/day), never have the mood penalty at all, and have the extra mood buff up most of the time but it has more set up and tra had better buffs.
After the early game, if you want to, you can even add in whichever other non-smokeleaf social drugs you didn't pick and schedule them for their safe dose rates to keep your pawns very happy
And none of that requires anything but core and ideology, risks tolerance or addiction (on adults) or requires smokeleaf or hard drugs.
Still runs the massive issue of drugs in Rimworld that is, wealth. The crops aren't particularly fast so you'll need to get decent yields in (depending on summer/winter cycle anyway) to keep your colony happy. So avoiding addictions and raising tolerance, that's Hops, Smoke and Psych. Which in its raw form, not such an issue, albeit a bit space hungry. If you're making beer, that's space for barrels needed too. But any product sat around waiting to be used is just harder raids that you wouldn't have needed outside of high life, with the benefit of high life being....?
If it reduced overdose chances or something I'm down, let pawns slam some harder drugs before combat with less risk to make up for the increased raid size. As it stands it's just easier to make drugs for normal recreation and not take a meme that forces them to need it. The upside of increased yield and production speed, with boosted sell prices actively encourages players to sit on a stack of drugs that makes them a bigger target. Won't be an issue on all difficulties, but the upside just isn't enough, same with most memes in Vanilla Ideology. It's why the few that are most beneficial always rise to the top.
ideology gives your game more lore
I need the biotech video 🥸
Anomaly first (because its brand spanking new) and then I'll get Biotech out, scripting and VO is done, it's just a massive video, lol
OMG 1.5
I kinda disagree I feel like Royalty is basically a massive waste of time and money where as Ideology is allot of fun Though I do like to RP as I play so that might be why I feel this way. Also I don't think the game itself is playable without mods.
at 17:36 the screen went black.
Angry comment
Ideology best expansion, buy before biotech and millions of years before royalty.