Intermediate Midgame Guide

Overview

In some ways, Midgame is vastly different from early game in RimWorld. Sometimes the point comes that you have to use devious tactics when your colony is helplessly outnumbered, or drastically change the priorities of your colonists.

Construction

What you should have in a midgame base:

• Large-sized freezer with at least 5 days' worth of food
• Cover structures around the base
• Private bedrooms for your colonists
• Self-sufficient food supply
• Sufficient power supply + Backup Power
• Medium-grade Hospital
• Rec room
• Workshop

Power

Geothermal power is an important source of power from mid-game onward, as it is constant and high-powered. You will need to research Geothermal Power first before you can unlock it, and the generator itself is quite costly (though affordable in midgame). However, once researched and built you can have a constant power supply; you can even have a lot of excess power.

Hospital

While in early game you can live on a rudimentary hospital, or even a spare room converted into a temporary hospital, in midgame you should have something more dedicated than that.

For starters, a decent hospital should have sterile tiles as a floor instead of any other flooring. Sterile floors provide a slight cleanliness buff that can increase surgery success chance and reduce wound infection chance.

If you have hospital beds researched, obviously you will want to use them instead of your regular beds. Being made specially for medical purposes, they provide a boost to treatment quality and immunity gain speed, meaning that your colonists will gain immunity to diseases faster and are less likely to die. Colonists resting in a hospital bed also heal faster than they do when on a normal bed.

The vitals monitor brings even better boosts to treatment and immunity gain, so once you've researched them it's recommended that you put them down near your hospital beds.

Failsafes

There are many types of ways you can set up buildings on your map to possibly save your colonists' lives in dire situations:

• Shelters: If your colony relies on hunting for food(tundra, desert, etc) building small rooms with an emergency food and wood supply can save your colonists from enraged animals.
• Backup power: Many events will cause you to lose power if you are unprepared. Some colonies rely on wind or solar power to power everything, and eventually every colony with electricity will suffer from a fault conduit explosion, also show as 'Zzzt...' Both cases will cause you to lose power, whether it's not enough wind or sun, or an explosion. Raider attacking and destroying power conduits connected to power generators can sever power from the colony, reducing the power available.

Always have spare power sources and storages, including multiple battery systems with switches. Have a handful of batteries constantly connected to the main grid, and only connect extra when they are about to run out, or are charging.

Midgame combat & defense tactics

When you are outnumbered, thinking smart with your combat tactics is also key to not losing colonists. It's also worth checking out defense tactics with more in-depth detail in defensive strategy, and cover for how cover works.

Turret mounds

Sometimes sandbags and your colonists alone are just not enough. Building "turret mounds" around the map in strategic locations can decimate a good number of raiders before they even get to the colony. Turret mounds are built on a 3x3 block of land:

O#O
###
O#O

Where O is a turret and # is a stone wall. Remember, however, that turrets can be a bit expensive to build and repair. They also require a lot of electricity, so try hooking them up to a wire which is remotely turned on to save your batteries.

Note that you will have to sacrifice some turrets this way as raiders often target the turrets before your colonists due to proximity.

Diffusing your opponent

Don't be too arrogant when facing a bombardment of arrows and pila - each can deal almost an equivalent amount of damage as a survival rifle. Diffusing your opponent consists of separating the melee attackers from the ranged, and dealing with each of them with your melee and ranged colonists.

One way of diffusing your opponent is with a smaller version of an attention suppressor. This means that the majority of raiders will end up attacking the walls instead of your colonists. Those that come through can be easily dealt with using tactics from the next section. You can also use turret mounds as mentioned above surrounded by a nest of rock chunks to to catch the raiders in the explosion.

Fighting in the small numbers

Once you have diffused your opponent's army, their forces will trickle towards you slowly so you can easily deal with each one alone.

Kiting

Kiting is the method of using a colonist as bait for an attacker to run towards, and a second colonist taking shots off while the attacker is focused on the first. It does not work if the raider has a personal shield that protects them from bullets. Note: Colonists incapable of violence can still act as bait.

         R
 C       |
         v
         C

Diagram of kiting. C is a colonist, R is a raider and -> is the direction the raider is going.

Splitting

When two of your colonists are being chased by one person and your weaponry is significantly poorer than the attacker's, you can conduct a split so that the enemy can only chase and down 1 colonist while the other escapes. If one of your colonists has ranged weapons, then you could split and then conduct a kite.

Rushing

Rushing is the tactic of sending your best melee attackers to finish off the ranged attackers at the back. The ranged attackers who do not succumb to the attention suppressor could be a pain for your own ranged forces, so it's best to send your melee colonists with personal shields to distract the ranged attackers. Before battle, hide your melee attackers behind a nearby hill outside your base so that they remain hidden until all enemy melee attackers are engaged with either the walls or your ranged.

Resources

Useful resources include:

• Medicine to heal wounded and sick colonists
  • Glitterworld medicine for successful surgeries
• Stone Blocks to make your base
• Components and steel to make non-primitive things
• Plasteel for durable constructs and high-end equipment
• Silver to barter for nearly anything

Farming

At this stage you should have solved your food problems (mostly) and should turn to farm economic crops instead.

Two good choices are devilstrand and psychoid plants.

Devilstrand is an excellent choice as a mid-game fabric, providing good protection and can be farmed. It can net a large amount of silver for every harvest, but it's very slow-growing.

Psychoid can he harvested and made into drugs, which can sell for a lot. Be careful with drugs as colonists with the chemical interest or fascination traits will binge on drugs if given access to them.

Mining

There's only so much metals on the surface, but there's much more beneath your colony.

You will need to research deep drilling and ground-penetrating scanner first to use drills effectively. After this, when you put down a deep drill, you can see where mineral deposits are.

Deep drilling should be the main source of steel and plasteel for your colony.

Production bases

If you want to run multiple colonies, then you can start a mining or farming base in a colony nearby. Make sure that it is close enough to your main bases so you can easily transfer resources between the bases.

Trade

As of version 0.16.1393 (21 December 2016), players can form and travel around in caravans, as well as transport pods. This greatly opens trade opportunities and enables the player to command multiple colonies (options) at once. It also raises the importance of Silver and economics in the game, as well as, inevitably, drug trafficking.

For the average colony, earning money mainly relies on either cash crops like Smokeleaf, stone sculptures or the brutal treatment of prisoners. It is important for every colony to select at least one of these options as their main income source, to obtain important resources like Steel.

With the comms console you are able to call factions to send traders to visit your base. It's better to do so than wait for them to send traders on their own, as they rarely do so without being prompted.

You should also send your own caravans to friendly bases for trade, as they are considerably better-stocked than their traders, and also offer a small discount.

Diplomacy

The comms console also allows you to give gifts of silver to factions, improving goodwill.

To do so, call the faction, then select 'Offer gift'. As with trading, select your colonist best at Social to improve the goodwill increase.

Increasing goodwill allows you to call traders at a lower price and to call for immediate military assistance if you need help.

If tribals raid you should capture, heal and release their prisoners, as well as gift them. Turning them friendly will stop them from trying to raid your colony with their massive raider forces, which is helpful at long-term survival.

New colonists

With more colonists in, the chance of you getting a wanderer or an escape pod becomes much rarer. From midgame onward, capturing and recruiting prisoners becomes the main source of new blood. Occasionally, you will still see slaves for sale, wanderers, escape pods or chased refugees.

However, now that you have more colonists and better equipment, you have a new option to getting new blood: attacking enemy faction bases.

To do so, create a caravan with your soldiers, food for the journey and medicine to treat the wounded. Once the caravan is ready, set it to go attack an enemy.

Once you succeed in destroying the base, you will be given 24 hours to treat the wounded and rest before your caravan packs up and leaves.

The journey usually takes days so remember to bring enough food. There will also be people guarding the base so you should have enough soldiers. 10 well-equipped soldiers should be enough to take down any base without much problem, though sometimes you will still lose someone. The base also has food, drugs and medicine. They always have some food, but don't count on them having enough medicine to treat all your injuries.

Other guides

Continuing guided play

• Advanced Endgame Guide: Ending your colony on YOUR terms