Or, hear me out, kidnap one of the 50 wasters constantly raiding you and extract it’s gene and just slap pollution immunity on your mechanitor and the rest of your colony.
@@SilkwoodFam1999 Look, the meat might be stringy and greasy but smokes very well and spices really bring out that flavor. Just ignore the hallucinations
Xenotypes work differently if used by raiders or players. A AI Raider has a huge advantage from Impids Firespit, a player however gets next to no use out of it, as they actually have to wait for the cooldown and can't just spawn 30 of them in whenever
Considering that they're fast and fragile, I feel like the fire spew is meant to be an emergency move to get away from someone who's about to get in your face. Impids are clearly meant to be long-range fighters.
@@kaschey6145 especially with how many people forget that fire weapons are SUPER strong in RimWorld. they will literally cause pawns that aren't fireproof to panic and flee when they get set on fire, which makes them easy targets for any ranged attackers. i always have one or two people with fire weapons whenever i can.
@@GinaRanTruthEnforcer which reminds me of how I lost one of my Sanguophage colonies - I got 7 people and decided to open an Ancient Danger... there was a surprisingly big group of mechanoids with an inferno centipede inside. The centipede shot behind a corner where my vampire fighter was, and... one-shotted them. I mean, they were alive but the shot instantly incinerated their legs because of the fire vulnerability. And while they were down, the rest of my colony couldn't stop that centipede together with two small flamethrower mechs...
@@kaschey6145 yep, sanguophage runs are the only times when i absolutely refuse to use fire weapons because i know that my dumbass pawns WILL find a way to fry my vampire with them by accident xD
@@kaschey6145yeah, impids are ranged fighters, so if enemy melee fighters broke the frontline and quickly approaching shooters, imps can quickly install firewall, then run away and regroup (because they are also fast).
They make good support... But some of the best psycasts like invisibility and skip are best used when you back a gun anyway. They make good moral guides with Ideology, good traders.
They honestly still could use a buff, they're kind of rare since you can't get them in raids, so why not make them a reward? Reduce their price and make exotic goods traders and settlement sell them often, It makes sense for them to be a comodity given the lore.
I love Highmates because I play roleplay-centered, easy-medium difficulty, heavily modded playthroughs. If I played on harder difficulties, I would likely like Highmates less. They're also my favorite from a lore perspective.
Highmates are awesome. They keep someone super happy as long as they stay alive and can grow your colony like crazy with kids. Plus the great social means they can recruit easily and trade for a cheap. They're best in the ling run when you need to grow your population
@@Sigmamale-alpha they spawn rarely in outlander caravans and drop pods and can be found somewhat frequently from slaver ships or slaver empire caravans.
Honestly, I like impids. Maybe I'm bias because somehow, almost every early game, I was often getting impids that were amazing researches, builders, and cooks, so their negative genes weren't affecting them so much, and thsnks to the speed buff, they make pretty good snipers for hit-and-run. And the fire spew works very well as a "GET AWAY FROM ME!" kind of move. When you get overwhelmed by a raid and somebody is about to melee lock your impid, they have basically a get out of jail card against that. Also, one of my colonies was literally saved by an impid because there was a very rough raid that downed everyone and set our colony on fire that got out of control - the impid (who happened to be a doctor) finished off the raiders, and saved people fron fire thanks to the fire resistance. (They could use some shooting buffing gene, tho)
I appreciate the impid roast. They suck to get raided by though, all of their negative traits don’t matter in the short lived life of a raider and the fire spew and fast running makes them a pain in the ass to deal with
First time i played with biotech i had a prison break and the impid i had as a prisoner set the entire base on fire and i lost the colony after that, now when i get an impid prisoner i make aure to take their leg privileges away instantly
I love highmates, i usually found myself lacking social colonists very often and a single highmate is so helpful. They are always my moral guide and i always bound them with one of my fighters for the counsciouness boost. Also i make my highmates be mechanitors for labour mechs or make them be psycasters to compensate for the incapable of violence.
It's rough to get the psycasts you'd want for kiting pawns (e.g. Focus, Invisibility) on a highmate tbf, it makes granting psylink feel less worthwhile for them.
"[Highmates] are doomed to evolve into cowboy hats." I literally could not stop laughing after you said this ☠️ I wouldn't say it's uncalled for because I also think high mates suck
Another aspect that i myself consider but isn't really mentioned is how harvestable their genes are and how well they can be engineered together for a more optimal genome. And for that i consider highmates, genies, hussans and obviously sangouphages especially good, because they basically have extreme strengths and weaknesses. For example what's the difference between poor and awful plants? You wouldn't use that colonist for farming either way so might as well have that extra point of metabolism, which allow you to better micromanage into stronger xenotypes. So might as well enslave that highmate and have it clean around while harvesting his genes for that damnable psychic bonding.
I really dislike the psychic bonding just for the sole reason that it forces two colonists to caravan together at all times and gives me less flexibility in terms of caravaning.
Problem with having a colony of sanguophage is that as soon as anyone with a molotov shows up and lights something on fire near the battlefield your sanguophage become useless. This is especially problematic when fighting Diabolus or explosive pirates. That also means you can't use incendiary weapons yourself. I still think they are the best xenotype generally, just not as good at combat as hussars.
The trick is to make sure your colony is diverse enough. If fire-based enemies show up, you can always fight them off with non-Sanguophage pawns, and even Sanugophages can still do their part by using high-range weapons or hit-and-run tactics through the use of their hemo-powered legs.
Neanderthals in B is just ridiculous. One time I had that runaway deserter from the empire, double passion in melee, and she had the tough trait. Neans are already genetically tough, taking -25% damage, which meant that with tough, she took -66% damage. Her double passion in melee, coupled with her higher melee damage gene made her an absolute monster in melee. As she had a double passion in cooking, she basically turned into a cook. Funny annecdote, I once sent her to kill 2 wargs close to each other, on her own, except that i forgot to give her a weapon. She fucking ripped two wargs, with her bare hands, because the genes, traits AND the armor i gave her made her an absolutely terrifying sight. Also happened to rip off a colonist's leg while social fighting, so yea, double-edged swords and all that. A good melee neanderthal is a colony-changing colonist. They can also spawn with passions, and very occasionally, "smart" traits, essentially bypassing their genetics dispositions. I'd take a neanderthal over a hussar ANY day for melee colonists, with the main reason being the absence of the "robust" gene for the hussars, which is the one element that holds them back from being instant-recruits. Overall a good video, i'd just add that the highmates don't belong in F, especially if they have medical, crafting or planting passions. Someone who stays behind while the others are fighting is a godsent.
Neanderthals are just worse Hussars. And if your in a decent colony chances are you have someone else that can do anything a highmate can do, without having the combat capability of a twig.
Personally, I would not put Hussars in S, they are about tied with Neanderthals for combat See, hussars make for amazing ranged soldiers, especially high tech facing against mechanoid events (Being psychically deaf turns psychic ships into easy parts), but neanderthals absolutely DESTROY in melee against humans I would put both of them in high A as ideal army would consist of both of them combined
@@bennet2347 Until you start factoring in shields that let pawns charge your firing line with minimal injuries and engage the guy carrying a rifle with a hammer making him suddenly extremely disadvantaged Ideal army really should have both, sure, more firepower could prevent the melee charge from reaching the firing line, but having some melee fighters to catch and aggro the charge before that is much more reliable
Had a body purist genie once. His own elongated fingers freaked him out. Also every single time I've had a highmate as a warden, they bonded with my prisoners.
Note that I don't run VE race mods that change the base game xenos because while the genes they add are cool... i like them as they are Baseliner - "Boring", but often lead long and healthy, storied lives. Very nice. Dirtmoles - Will carry an economy on their back if you have quarry mods. The melee gods neanderthals wish they were. Genies - They can quite literally range from "the nerd you toss in your lab to do the research minigame" or "scary mechanitor with an end game sniper rifle". I never say no to the big head bastards. Wasters - I love them. They drink stuff that makes them happy, they have the general "idgaf" attitude needed for life on the rim, and they're too ugly to cause cheesy love triangles. Unironically better wife material than Highmates. Hussars - For some reason, everyone that I got also likes mining...? They certainly shrug off any would be issues if they're caught with their pants down. Also, they're cool. Give them Pervitin and keep em busy so the bad thoughts don't win. Highmate - Really hot janitors. Having a big ass wall around your base is necessary for holding one of them, you know, just so they don't accidentally get decapitated by a wooden mace and have her (or his; it is the future) Hussar boyfriend go on a murder spree in full cataphract armor to avenge the death of their blue-boo. If you have outposts expanded, they make for excellent trade hub workers! If not, if your colony has kids, just let them teach. Also give them healing psycasts if you have VPE. I too, however, hate caring for them. Yttakin - They are better friends with the rhinos we have than the other colonists. That said, they also make excellent cooks most of the time sooo... Pigskins - They really don't have a huge upside going for them, but every pigskin I've recruited has had Floridian level stories to go with them. Definitely consider keeping them around for shits and giggles, harvest them if they're not great. Impids - I'm sure the 70th guy with a marble club with absolutely get him this time. Usually don't take them because they're depressed. Cool to look at, though. Neanderthal - Grug smack big bug til it stop move. Grug take nap now. TAKE TOUGH NEANDERTHALS! Sanguophage - The quest NEVER spawns for me but when I play sanguo starts, I usually get brained so maybe they should appreciate life more.
I'm glad I'm catching this channel before it blows up. I literally just started playing rimworld a few days ago and your vids have really helped me build out my roleplay and character lore. Fun tidbit: I checked my colonists socials and it turns out my priest is THE SISTER OF THE EMPRESS. Sadly we cannot call her for pick up 😅
@@felicityseleneford Woah, not even of The Stellarch? That should warrant some noble title I say. But you should definitely go and try and make that pawn honorary. Anyway, glad you are enjoying the videos!
Sleeping Modifiers are very strong, which is why Quick Sleeper is such a strong trait. The smallest buff to rest gain or less rest fall is a HUGE improvement. And so on the other side, the smallest debuff makes a pawn useless. Never forget that not only do they not work in that time, they still get hungry and count towards colony wealth. But if you have some sort of implant that removes the need for sleep...
Early game it's a big detriment, but if you have a solid constructor (especially a production specialist/tortured artist/word of inspiration boosted pawn) that can spam out masterwork or legendary beds, the amount of time they need to sleep for is not as noticeable. They are also more likely to continue reliably ending up in bed with their partner, securing mood boosts from lovin' and opinion of partner. Running a biphasic sleep schedule is recommended if their work is mostly inside the base, but if they are your primary tamer or hunter (likely with such a high animal skill and the robust/melee damage genes for revenge moments) then you probably want to ensure their sleep lines up with the animal sleep and only once per day, or you'll find they waste much of the day travelling to and from their bed. They also make half decent sanguo targets as the sleepy gene is overridden.
So, a cannibalistic sociopath doesn't like empaths? Go figure, but yeah, anyone incapable of violence is hard to justify when raids are the main challenge of the game.
Just make marriages unrestricted, and they will have constant morale bonus from marriages. One real downside - with big enough colony, they tend to celebrate twice a day. +75 morale from visiting marriages for all colony is a nice boost, but... They don't do anything else.
I will say, impids and highmates REALLY shine in the anomaly DLC where psychic sensitivity is helpful for rituals and fire resistance/spewing is uniquely positioned to fight like half the entities showcased. A good impid fireteam can shut down fleshbeast and shambler assaults in their tracks while also serving as good firefighters.
Yeah, thing is, the Anomaly DLC also adds a new weapon called "Hellcat Rifle" which is essentially a weapon-sized Impid. I would assume they would be good for extinguishing fires (although fire-foam exists) but I'd still rather use a Hellcat Rifle at that point.
@@thenightarchives4148 personally, I give the impids the fire weapons and devilstrand gear because they can handle the fire best and are geared well to putting the fire out after the fact.
Sure but at that point I could just get someone who is psychically hypersensitive by trait and also slap an implant too on top. But this also would require for someone to have the Royalty DLC in order to be taken into account which, I guess it's fair to assume. If you have Biotech you most likely have Royalty too. They are good as psycasters but beyond that not at other stuff. Plus not being capable of violence makes them unable to use psycasting weapons that further enhance your psycasting.
I once tried to do a colony without committing war crimes or crimes against humanity, it was THE singlehandedly hardest challenge i attempted in Rimworld
I love playing genie transhumanist mechanitors, let them sit and research as long as they want and give them a nice self-crafted antimatter rifle, and let them go to town behind an army of plasteel soldiers
For themed play thou high mates are amazing slaves. But you have to be careful with them. Because everyone will love them, and so if they die because they are being used as “optimal targets” then everyone will be sad that their friend died.
A single highmate in the colony is pretty damn useful, you get an overall great social pawn for trading (either via caravan or orbital trade) plus they can be meatshield with a shield belt in case shit goes down hard. Bonus points if they roll a sickly trait, as pawns with that will force disease events to only affect them and not the rest of the colony.
Impids are made to be really annoying when fighting against them and have vood genes you want to extract. But they are also very annoying to keep as prisoners, which you want to do to extract genes. And fast running is good to kite enemies from away, if they get close you can spew fire and continue shooting, but its pretty hard. And Highmates is my favorite xenotype as a design, but I also agree that you must not take them unless everything in your colony is already great, which is very rare in Rimworld Yttakis, Pigskins and probably Wasters are really cool if your colony is only them and if you always play around their features but they are not that useful if have other people
I think you are undervaluing Wasters. Like you said, in a mixed colony they stick out a bit, but once you can build up to the point where you can meet their needs with flake they become one of the last colonists to break during a tough spot and they have zero combat disadvantages. Pollution is so strong and so long as you segregate out your base to accommodate it early on they really have no downsides other than the aggression. Once you rip out some genes and get everyone in the colony TAL and on Flake you can run unlimited free power from Tox Gens and get the free movement speed bonus on top of it. The last fringe benefit is that you will always be able to call an organic raid of some sort as you can either force a wastepack infestation, or drop pod your spare tox packs to a humanoid settlement to force a retaliation raid; its great for recruitment in endgame when all randy throws at you is mech clusters. The only other add, and its a niche case at best, is Yttakin make great Ghouls for the Anomoly DLC. Get a Tough Yttakin, ghoul it, and deck it out in all the ghoul upgrades and it legit wont die.
Ghoul Yttakin does sound like a great idea. I'm wondering how other xenotypes would fare in that field. Wasters I have no doubt in regards to their usefulness. As I said, I just consider them very situational. Using Tox Genes also pretty much means committing to a pollution colony which means having to give up various other things. I don't dislike them, but they essentially require their own playthrough, on their own map with their own rules in order to shine.
@@thenightarchives4148 even without a tox map I find my wasters to be the last to break as they have all the extra bonuses from being on a separate drug policy. Wake-up impervious means they are literally always ready to go which is a big boon on a combat-heavy playthrough. That being said, i can understand how a player not playing on the higher difficulty would find them taxing as the aggressive and unattractive genes make for a rough pawn to keep happy, especially early game. I guess it just shows my playstyle bias.
@@thenightarchives4148Neanderthals also make great ghouls. Really anything with the robust and strong melee genes are great. Especially if you can get one with the tough trait. That is one TANKY ghoul. Sanguinophages also make good ghouls but that fire weakness is rough and you can't infuse them with "ghoul soup" custom xenogenes without replacing their sanguinophage buffs
Your comparison between Neanderthals and Hussars massively undervalues Robust and Strong Melee Damage. Hussars aren't even close as melee pawns, and melee pawns are ridiculously useful in RW - the only problem with thals is that you have to find one with a high melee skill already because training them is slow
In defence of Highmates: They are the single best pawns to assign as a Moral Guide, ESPECIALLY when partnered with the faction leader, effectively nullifying the heightened expectations debuff and can usually skirt around the debilitating psychic distance debuff when kept on-base together which would otherwise come into play with a staggering consciousness penalty when caravaning/cryptosleeping/biosculpting/deathresting. Additionally, they make excellent partners to royalty (particularly conceited nobles should you be so reckless as to house one) due to the mood and psy-sensitivity buff. That being said, for the same reasons described prior the actual thing that makes them worth running is for installing joywires and turning them into an ambulatory psychic emanator. Their naturally high mood and buffed consciousness from psychic bonding makes the penalty from joywires and the risk of mood debuffs using a harmonizer effectively irrelevant, and their naturally high psy-sensitivity means they can really easily reach +30 mood buffs for nearby pawns.
Impids arent meant to be used by the player effectively, thats why when the AI raids you with them it is a genuine threat while you using them is like hitting the enemy with a wet blanket XD
In defense of highmates: The Psychic Bond buff gives +10% psychic sensitivity, and while that alone is enough to bring highmates up a few tiers imo, this buff also applies to colonists that don’t have _any_ psychic sensitivity. And I don’t care if it’s sub-optimal or whatever, a Hussar with a load of combat Mechanoids is a whole lot of fun, even outside of Combat Extended, where militors go absolutely nuts.
Absolutely agree with your highmate placement, I usually have one for one of my best combat colonist purely for the mood and consciousness bonus. Nothing gets you through an insect nest like knowing you're going home later to get that jelly slobbed of your knob. Outside of that they're worth nothing but their biomass to chemfuel ratio
I know this is the first time I have commented on one of your videos ( since I mostly watch on the tv and I can’t comment there, I literally went in my phone to say this), but I was watching your q&a and you mentioned having multiple channels and all of failing and I just wanted to say that you should never quit, you and ratknight are the only reasons I play this game and I would probably be depressed if you were to quit.
I think you understimate how absurdly tanky and strong neanderthals are until you get a raid with +12 of them they simply DO NOT go down and if they reach your pawns they are getting 4 tapped, they are hard to escape at arms reach They are a double edged sword they cost a lot of maintenance for an inefficient pawn but their specialisation as a melee god is something to fear because their biggest counter is ranged and with enough technology that no longer becomes an obstacle for your juggernaut neandarthal
@@claustrophobicmole867 I certainly do not underestimate them. I am both really aware and really scared of how much a neanderthal raid can snowball me.
Something I'm shocked I don't see more of is waster mechinators, they're nearly tailor made for the role. Tox production by charging and gestating mechs becomes a good thing, their appearance doesn't matter because they're a recluse anyway, poor soil for psychite doesn't matter if you've got a dedicated agrihand, just make the field bigger, and even though it's a research heavy playstyle, it hardly matters when your guy hardly sleeps.
They are good as mechanitors only if you don't plan on getting rid of wastepacks, which in Vanilla Rimworld you can do easily by just using drop pods on a tribal colony whose response is going to be to simply raid you. (Protip: If you drop pod a more tech advanced colony they might just drop pod you the waste back which is why this strat works best only on tribal colonies)
You should do a tierlist of the Vanilla Expanded Xenotypes; it might change your opinions about the vanilla xenos especially when compared to their original state and the unique xenos added by Vanilla Expanded
I have tried Vanilla Expanded Xenotypes. Surpsingly, I didn't enjoy it as much. I feel that it overcomplicates many aspects that didn't need overcomplication. On the other hand, I love the new ones. Saurids and Phytokins especially are really neat.
Played for Graymole colony and waster colony. The greatest games I had tbh. But highmates, they are great for socials in your colony. And extremely rare. Had seen them only a few times at the empire settlements, for sale. Pretty uncommon, always picking one in my colony if I can
Impids I feel are a meme - speed is nice, firespew is mediocre at best... But slow wound healing and weak immunity are downright crippling. There are two things that make Dirtmoles amazing - melee damage and healing factor. A Dirtmole in heavy armour and with a Zeushammer becomes a melee god. And it outperforms slashing weapons like monoswords, believe it or not - because of how blunt damage works. You see - with a slashing or piercing attack, damage is transferred only to the body part that was hit. You hit an arm, it will at most slash away the arm. But blunt works kind of like splash damage - if you destroy the extremity, the remaining force of the attack is transferred to the adjacent body part - meaning a hit to an arm or leg can actually kill. And with a damage multiplier... it becomes very, very potent. Genies make wonderful crafters and scientists but the problem I have with their abilities is that they fall off very much in mid and late game - and after that you are left with only with flaws. It is not hard to train the character in crafting, all things considered. And weaker science can be mitigated by having more benches. Highmates - they would be good if average colony size was not about 10-12 people. If we could maintain Dwarf Fortress sized colonies, without the need to dedicate most of them to the combat, they would be fine. In small colonies, forced pacifism is crippling. Hussars - I'll be honest, they are great, but... I think they are overrated. Their abilities are most well suited for early game - but at this point sustaining their go-juice dependency is pretty hard. Late game - unless you were loosing pawns left and right, most of their kit becomes redundant with proper implants and training. They get no improved toughness or melee damage - and the only real boon you have left at this point is superfast healing. Now, with dependency on go-juice, they do make excellent shooting specialists. Neanderthal - THE best melee xenotype (beyond the blood sucking elephant in the room). Resistant to disease, robust, strong melee damage, reduced pain. All I said about Dirtmole melee applies here with addition of extra durability - if you find one with a "tough" trait, you suddenly have a nearly unkillable melee tank that can also dish out massive damage. Cataphract armour, Zeus Hammer in hand and this guy can SOLO full mechanoid waves if you funnel them in, and will take little damage in return. But beyond that niche, neanderthals have little to offer. BUT that is one hell of a good niche. Consider this - Hussar kit is basically suited for ranged combat - and melee skill buff is just the icing on a cake - nothing else beyond healing factor supports it. For Neanderthal, the melee combat IS THE CAKE. Pigskins - I have a soft spot for them. They are not amazing on paper, but they have one major advantage early game - they do not ever get food poisoning. This makes them great in early game or if you are relocating the colony. They also make good caravan groups, because they can feed themselves with anything with no risk. I can't even count how many times my caravans were slowed to a crawl becasue of berry pisoning. No problem with Pigskins. Yttakin - I'll be honest, I actively avoid them in my colonies - sleepyness makes their scheduling a mess. And a melee oriented traits combined with slow healing - that is just... a very poor combination that is basically mutually exclusive. Wasters - another meme - they are fun for themed runs, but overall they have not much to offer. Pollution stimulus is only 5% consciousness buff and 20% speed buff at most. Well... They do make decent mechanitors, because they don't about pollution... But on the flipside, dealing with pollution is not hard. Sanguophage - vampires are a league of their own. And the only problem is that the coffin requires some setup to get going - making running a full colony of vampires a bit of a chore at times. BUT you get insane power in return. All you need is to protect the head - and it is not that hard - just make sure to wear a cataphract helmet. It should be more than enough. A Legendary Cataphract Helmet literally makes a single hit headshot impossible with anything from vanilla. At this point your only concern are mass damage weapons, like missile launchers. Or animals that devour corpses. Vampires make excellent "main character" xenotype.
A highmate is one of my prized colonists for the conciousness and mood buff it gives to my one melee fighter who is also the leader that i put all cybernetics into. If you had any control over who the psychic bond was with, a permanant conciousness buff for them and another colonist is sooooo good. Plus both psychic bond and psi-sensitivity increases are useful. They make good psy casters too. +30% psy sensitivity with a mood buff and incapable of violence to counteract the weaknesses of high sensitivity. IF: you can use it reliably and pick who it goes to. Unfortunately it's just whoever the first person they happen to romance is. I rank pigs lower, their only actual real advantage is eating uncooked food, even though it still provides less nutrition than simple meals and no mood buff like fine or better, but they're not even metabolically efficient. Sure that's not the biggest deal, but you can't do anything with it
Alright, I'll give my thoughts on each xenotype. Worth noting that I play heavily modded, so I don't use vanilla xenotypes as much, and I tend to play turtle-style with Strive to Survive as my difficulty of choice, so my thoughts might be a bit skewed. Baseliner: B-tier sounds about right. I'd argue that they could be A-Tier, simply because they're a genetic blank slate, if you're making your own xenogerms. You don't have to work around pre-existing genes like you would with say, an Impid or Neanderthal. Impid: They have one job, and that's setting the enemy on fire, and potentially keeping them on fire if you have enough of them. I've had a very tanky melee pawn get downed by an impid raid, simply because they couldn't put themselves out in time before the burns stacked up. Unfortunately a single pawn with molotovs or an incendiary launcher does basically the same thing. Also, fire attacks are significantly worse in rainy weather. Dirtmoles: fantastic for underground bases, great otherwise. Especially good with some mods like Vanilla Outposts Expanded, as well. Genies: Dedicated crafter, researcher, and potentially builder. Give them a long-ranged weapon, and keep them off the front lines. Any custom crafting/researching xenotypes I make tend to be based off them. Also, Dead Calm is great to slap on any high-risk prisoners you get. No prison breaks, no prison brawls, and everyone keeps their own legs/spines. Highmates: I, to some extent, agree with everything mentioned about them excluding the mechanator part - I think they can be pretty decent mechanators, actually - except there is one important thing about them that would pull them out of F tier for me: They only have Xenogenes. Slap ANY xenogerm on them, and they effectively become baseliners for almost no extra cost. You only have to care about the traits and skills at that point. Hussars: Great at combat and decent at most other things. If you can keep them juiced up, they will rip and tear until it is done, then go do a different job, potentially better than a baseliner. And if you can't, well... You can repurpose the Cryptosleep Caskets from an ancient danger until you get more go-juice. Neanderthals: Big, Tanky, and dumb. Very, very dumb. They tend to get put as dedicated dumb labor and melee combatants, if I get them. The big thing that might be an issue with them is the slow learner gene becoming a major hinderance, due to passive skill loss and them not going to be able to be in combat all the time to keep their skill up. Would much rather just get the Robust gene off them as a prisoner, and give it to my other pawns than try to recruit them. If I get one, I'll take them, but I'm not going to make any sort of attempt to actively get one. Pigskins: The best part with them is getting Strong Stomach off them. If you can give all your pawns Strong Stomach and Awful Cooking, you never need to worry about food poisoning or a dedicated chef effectively for no cost. Robust Digestion and Strong Stomach also means one less pawn to cook for. Yttakin: They're ok, but slow wound healing makes them only slightly better than Neanderthals imo. I'd rather have a Yttakin that can do something outside of just slicing down enemies, than a Neanderthal that can only club enemies and haul. I do think a colony of yttakins and only yttakins could be interesting, though; although that falls into the usual problem of "getting more Yttakins" is easier said than done. Wasters: They're good in polluted environments, and kinda meh in non-polluted environments. Sanguiphage: They're extremely busted. Weakness to fire? Ok, so keep them away from impids or around firefoam poppers, and don't let them go fight fires. They need blood? It's the easiest resource to get, just keep any one prisoner as a renewing happy meal. Or an Unwaveringly Loyal pirate, if you care about morals. Deathrest isn't even a weakness, since they get buffs if they complete it, and you can interrupt it early if you have to. One interesting thing to note about most of the ability genes - and thus, the Xenotypes that have them - is that they're really bad because they have such a low cooldown. If Fire Spew had, say, an one hour cooldown, or if Animal Warcall had a 1-2 day cooldown, then they could be decent. A lot of the genes are "great" from the perspective of being an enemy raider - They don't care about Slow Learner and skill loss, they don't care about long cooldowns, and they definitely don't care about slow healing.
Neantherthalls suck 90% of the time, but that 10% is when they are gods Heres the meta strat Get psychic shock lance, wait for neantherthall tribal raid. Look for tough trait or brawler or nimble. Shock em, recruit em, you now got a killer melee pawn, only downside is that they are essentially stuck with whatever skills they spawn with due to how stupid they are They are melee GODS. A tough thall is the first time i have ever had a pawn die from overall damage, rather then bleeding or torso or head health going to 0. They overall just took so much damage that they *had* to die by a thousand cuts. Recruit a thall, you wont regret it, im in your walls.
Neanderthals should also be ranked lower because slow learner means that their combat skills don't level up as quickly either. this means that they will miss more in melee combat and also get hit more in melee combat.
Interesting 😂 when you consider that Raiders of Impid, Yttakin & Wasters have essentially NO cooldown for their abilities❤. Every impid is a walking talking flamethrower🔥 Every Yttakin is an extra wild animal attacking your colony. And Wasters love to use poison gas weapons 😅 yeeet! Essentially, Biotech DLC is a boon and a threat/enemy pack! Just like Anomaly DLC, that is a threat first, and boon second.😮😮😮
Highmates are either the best or worse for me in RP gameplay. They can either be that baby-factory that gets with the colony's best mage and builds the next generation of the Harry Potter wannabes in my faction. Or they get with someone of the same gender and all I get is a mood boost from them. I mean, I don't got any irl problem with that, but when I'm playing with compressed raiders and Winston Waves, and desperately need mages to defend my colony against increasingly harder attacks, I can't have them having their own will and sexuality. I NEED THEM TO TAKE/GIVE BACKSHOTS
it's really sad for me that dirtmoles are quite hard for me to find and recruit. I just never managed to capture one because for some reason I rarely get raids from the pirates that are not race specific and I tend to keep a good enought relationshi with the outlanders for trading, so I rarely get to see then at all, whish is a chame since I like their concept :^(
Yeah Dirtmoles are really hard to get by. Keep an eye out for slavers/slave ships and try to go on as many quests as possible. Most dirtmoles I ever got were usually wounded enemies/prisoners from enemy prison camps or places like that.
You should do a video of modded zenotypes so many great community made xenotypes out there like the phytokin alternative sangrophages that use different blood types, hunterphages, slimes Ulangs from VRE hussars. Moonjellies, Fungoids ,Lowmates, Boarskins Taukai so many great community made xenotypes
I'm going to give my honest opinion or complement to each genotype and germline, I have 3 thousand hours, think I have the minimum knowledge to give a good overall opinion Impids strengths: They are made to be raiders, both in lore and gameplay, they are very fast and fire-resistant, they also came with the fire spew to keep enemies away, while they use range Impids weakness that said, they are in my personal opinion the world germline, they only have 2 strengths to counter a bunch of disadvantages, Make them better: they could easily be better if they also had fire immunity and good shooting, they also really could use clothed speed, and heat tolerance. Making them live in deserts much easier while being more useful and lore accurate. Dirtmoles Strengths: They are indeed, very good, they are great miners, and they can punch like a truck, they don't need light to fight. Dirtmoles Weakness: Even tho most people think they are very good hey have 2 very debilitating weaknesses that can be easily bypass by having a cave/mountain base, but outside this play style the sun and their speed is very debilitating, and they are almost impossible to use ranged combat, meaning if the enemy has any space to run or retreat they are going to be outgunned Make them Better: They are already very good, they could use being good a construction to make them better builders, This would extend their usefulness late game when the map is most mined or all the caves have being explored and all they need to do is occasionally use the deep drillers Genies Strengths: They are excellent crafters and builds, they are great mechanitors and cultists, Mechanitors can use mechs to fight and cultists can dehumanize making them better at taking damage negating the wimp trait. Genies Weakness: They are very bad at combat, not only they are wimps, but they also are delicate receiving more damage making them more likely to die from damage, keep them making the weapons not using them. Make them Better: I think Genies could have weak melee to receive quick study or have something to make them useful in combat without getting involved in combat, my main suggestions would be, make them have psy sensitivity, Foam spray or good medical. Any of the three would greatly increase their usefulness in combat situations without the need to be involved Highmates Strengths: They are great supporters, any pawn they bound with are greatly affected by mood both by having a great relationship and having some lovin, They also are great at social, making them useful at taking care of prisoners and children Highmates Weakness: They are troublesome, for 3 main reasons, One is obvious, lack of any combat skills, two the moment you enter a relationship with a highmate you are basebound since high mates are not recommended in world trip, they can't fight and have a high value, The third one is that they are friends with everyone and can only have 1 partner, meaning everyone tries to flirt with them making them get rebuff having a mood penalty that most times are stronger than the positive of having someone attractive being kind to them Make them better: There are some ways they could be better, First would be to add a cooldown in the distance before a penalty making world trips possible, give them some kind of mood boost skill like the moral guide, make they asexual once they bound to someone and this wear off after the person they are bound dies, or they don't see each other or sleep together for 1 year, this would make people stopping flirting with them, would also be useful to speeding up pregnancy if they are the mother or father, making a pair of them very good at making new children, or making them having the ability to disable pregnancies without a need for surgery Hussars Strengths: They are great a combat they heal faster, can do both melee and shooting, have reduced pain and don't get slowdown by receiving shoots. That said Hussars weakness: They are not very good at anything else, can't plant, animals, Arts or social, are hyper aggressive meaning any mood swings are going to make them beat your own people, they also have to partial strengths, reduced pain and antitoxin lungs, both can be more weakness them strengths, receiving more damage before going to only increases the chance of being killed and the accumulation of scars is going to eventually make them useless, and the lungs barely are noticeable, they can stay like 50% more time inside toxgas and the only people that uses are the wasters, and I don't even think they are resistant to lung rot, the Go-Juice dependency makes them unreliable and price to keep since is the only drug that can't be mass-produced because of the Neutroamine component needed Make them better: They need to have the coagulant and scarless gene, and they really could use the robust and melee damage bonus, They are made for combat but if you put them in a scale, the only thing they have that makes them better at combat is the fact they know how to fight, and they take longer to die, they are not better, they can outlast a germline. If they had these 4 perks they would be better fighters, they would outlast by not bleeding, deal and tank more damage, they also could have the unattractive and unhappiness traits without this being a problem, they are not made for relationships, and since they are not good at any work would be easy to keep them happy outside combat. This would make them eat a little bit more but could easily be prevented by also removing the Cold and Heat tolerance
Neanderthals Strengths: Easily the best melee combatants and can easily survive diseases and infections, That said, my personal opinion They are the worst genepack in the entire game by miles. Neanderthals Weakness: They have the Slow Study make them garbage at anything forever, they should be the best melee fighters, they are not, they such, They are slow, taking longer to reach the enemy and also are very likely to die because of the reduced pain, if they survive, the next fight is going to be just as hard, because they are not learning how to fight better or have any scientific progress because they are stupids as rocks Make them better: Remove the stupid slow Study and increase the weakness of the poor intellectual, or make them slow at complex tasks, like thick fingers that reduced work speed, anything but reduce the XP to almost zero, also why they are slow? They are earlier humans before the full development of the brain, there is no reason for them to be slow, Dirtmoles are slow because they are almost blind are not use to running because they live underground in cramped spaces, neanderthals are hunter and gatherers, Make them good with animals and plants Piskins Strengths: Personal opnion, the most balanced genepack in the game, They are near immune to diseases and infections because of the strong immunity and have reduced pain, They have strong and robust digestion making them much better at eating raw meal Pigskin Weakness: They have 2 weaknesses, they work slightly slower and have a poor eyesight, this forces you to have 1 o 3 play styles, explosives, short ranged or melee, reduced pain is a double edge sword, and they can't cook, but they don't need to, they also eat a little bit more Make them better: they are very balanced but are not very interesting, they don't cook, which negates both the drawbacks and advantages of cooking, you can't get food poison but can get buffs for eating, but also don't waste time cooking, They could be good with animals because they are pigs, or have some bonus for eating meat forcing a ranching play style but to be honest they don't have anything going on for them Yttakin Strengths: They are ... weird, They are great at melee fights, but because they are fast naked, most of them fight naked, As a pawnn tho, They are decent at many things, not great at nothing, They can call for animal aid but the cooldown is very long, they are great tamers. Yttakin Weakness: They heal slow and sleep more make them perfect at doing nothing, they are also aggressive and poor casters and miners, Make them Better: Remove slow healing and make them have a purpose, want them to be good wild people, make them ascetic and poor researches or crafters, both would make sense in lore and would make them eat less and be more useful i the tribal stage, make them have higher psy sensitive so they can meditate or even make a perk that allow them to rest by meditating, they would all sleep around the anima or garalean tree, stop giving them rocket launchers ad give them melee weapons, make them the opposite of the Impids, one great at ranged, one great at melee. Wasters Strengths : They are great at... something? They are immune to pollution and get buffed by it, resisted to infection and diseases, and can for some reason take as much wake up as they want. Wasters Weaknesses: They are ugly and aggressive, and they need psychite to survive, They plant to survive, more than anyone, they need food, and they need psychite, meaning they should be great at taking care of plants right? Wrong, they are bad with animals, cooking and arts. Make them Better: Make the wasters Great at plants, they need to make plants survive in a wasteland, they should be good at that, There are several animals that live in said wasteland, make them great with animals or at least good at mining, maybe good medical since they live in Wastelands and having doctors would help, make them great cooks, they need to transform radioactive meat and potatoes into food, they should be capable of making the best with the little they have. Instead of just sucking. Sanguophages Powers : They have 2 very useful abilities, Longjump legs and Coagulate, both can save someone very quickly by jumping in healing and running away, They have piercing spine that I never used or saw someone using in like maybe 2 thousands hours watching people play this game, absolute Dogshtt, They can also once every 2 years infect someone into also becoming a Vampire, I mean egr, sanguophage Sanguophages Strengths: They have by far the most strengths going on with them, they are deathless they are immune to diseases, infection, chronically illnesses, Toxins, scars, darkness and bleeding, they are fast runners, know how to melee fight, do social and research they heal faster, sleep less and take less and deal more damage, they are also psy sensitive and attractive. Sanguophages Weakness: They have only 4 weaknesses to compensate all this near bullshtt powers, They need to Deathrest, meaning entering a coma every 25~30 days for 4 days, meaning they spend like 15~25% of their time sleeping, they also are extremely nerfed i the sun, but you can just cover as much as possible of the map in roofs, and keep them away from the farms. And last and Important, actually the most important, FIRE is deadly, extremely more them normal, Fire does 400% more damage /4x damage in them, they also never self extinguish if they fall down burning, meaning fire is one of the couple of things that can straight up kill them. Normally if they died without a brain damage they deathrest instead because of the deathless, fire is going to burn them until nothing is left Make them Better: To be honest, they are very balanced, because of the rarity, hard to replicate and major weaknesses, They also need Blood, meaning for every one of them you have you need a normal person to be there as a bloodbag, could be a prisoner or colonist, but they need to be there, people normally don't like being bite or blood unless your ideology says so.
I always go to have at least one yttakins, maybe a genie and a highmate if we are chilling in my colony but my favorite is sanguophague they go butcher pete when you give them go juice and wake up
@thenightarchives4148 Kawalski, Anylisis! A Dirtmole Sanquiphage adds Nearsighted and Good Mining to the Sanguiphage genes, with all other non-cosmetic genes being canceled out. This gives a -1 Metabolic Efficiency. -A Hussar Sanguiphage adds: Heat tolerant, Cold tolerant, Reduced pain, Unstoppable, Go-juice dependency, Partial antitoxic lungs (Useless for a Sanguiphage), Great shooting, Awful animals, Awful plants, & Awful artistic. This gives a +1 Metabolic Efficiency with all other Non-cosmetic genes being canceled out.- Obviously, the correct answer is custom geneline + Sanguiphage, but in the meantime? -I think I'd go Hussar...Reduced Pain for an undying warrior, and if they're go-juice dependency gets out of hand, they just go into a Deathless coma. Also, small bonus temperature tolerance for heatwaves and cold snaps.- Thralls can make the food for them.
Ironically, a Highmate Sanguiphage would be decent if they weren't both Xenotypes. Their Violence Disabled would be disabled and so would their Delicate weakness. Would make for a very happy colony. Genie-phage is just a Sanguiphage that feels more pain and crafts more gooder... Neanderthal Vampire is just a worse, but more consistent (non drug dependent) Hussar-pire. Ytta-phage are furries. Waster-pire gets huffed on their own farts and are depressed. Don't bother with Pigskins or Impids...
I usually play with a lot of mods, but even if we're considering vanilla, i'd get a high mate if i had a hussar or sanguophage. Good way to keep your super soldier/eldritch vampire in a good mood, and the downside is what? Not capable of fighting? You have their partner for this, just one colonist incapable of fighting is not that bad, good for caring for the others after fights, since they'll not get hurt. Awful mining and plants? At this point you should have someone already doing this. Put the cat in the lab, the kitchen or the workshop. There's always the need of more hands. And the Psy Bond gives some good bonuses. ×50% pain multiplier, +15% consciousness, +12 mood and +10% psy sensitivity when on same map. Fight harder and for longer. I think the blue cats are more situational than straight up F tier. And i HATE neanderthals. F-ing Slow Study makes them a pain to train in anything even if they have passion, they don't get any bonus in skills and on top of that Slow Runner. Basically Walmart Hussar that the only thing they have is being a damage sponge. Hit hard, tank damage, but if you target gets away it's over, you're not catching them. I'd rather deal with the constant social fighting of 10 Hussar high on Go Juice than waiting 1 year for a neanderthal get up 1 level in Melee. That's my opinion with 3k hours in the game. Good video btw, RimWorld content is always nice.
I love highmates for the same reason you hate them. But I play very highly oriented for story/larping, rather than winning and being powerful. So I agree with your points but id put them elsewhere based on different value system :) Good vid though
Glad you enjoyed the video! Yeah, I tried to take this analysis from more of an "outsider" point of view, tried to analyze xenotypes based on their usefulness to an average colony. I have no doubt Highmates are and can be useful but the setup around them always bothers me. I did have a highmate once as a psycaster and that was fairly okay.
I disagree on the Hussars, near perfect fighters but they start social fights all the time and when they break it's always violent. I mean I don't give the bastards fancy expensive armours for them to smash them to bits against each other. One or two is fine but I would never want a colony of them.
I’m not a combat oriented player at all, having low difficulty levels with good starting characters chosen. With that said, I don’t care that much about the combat downsides to colonists AT ALL. The only colonists I don’t really like are pigskins, just cause I don’t like the aesthetics. I love the idea of highmates and don’t care about hussars.
My main disagreement with you is regarding the Hussars and Yttakin. The Hussar's go-juice dependency pushes them to D-tier for me, since again Sanguophages and Ghouls are my combat pawns, and flesh and blood are MUCH easier to procure than Go-Juice. Dirtmoles, Yttakin and Genies are my go-to specialist xenotypes. A-tier for the 2 former and lower-S for the latter. A colony comprised of a Baseliner/Impid, a Dirtmole, a Yttakin and a Genie is all but guaranteed to be well-balanced if the Yttakin or Baseliner has a Plants-boosting backstory. Additionally, while the Genies SUCK at combat, they're not barred from it, so they can still defend from a distance, which makes them acceptable snipers in the early game. Impids are great as they're not addicts or barred from violence(looking at you Highmates), but they still have skill and mood penalties that imo makes them lower-B tier and perfectly counterbalances them. I'd recruit them if they have skills I want but aren't a higher or lower priority than baseliners. Highmates only make sense for the faction where they were engineered - the Shattered Empire. Sanguophages have most of their societal advantages(do you really need that psychic bond tho?) and other usefulness(backing up Genies in Intellectuals and being beasts in battle comes to mind). I wouldn't recruit them even if they were ALREADY psychically bonded with my farmer-beastmaster-crafter-researcher Yttakin-turned-Genie pawn. Absolute bottom F tier. Neanderthals' slowness and proneness to social fights is why I'd place them in C-tier. Not an absolute avoid as they don't have dependencies but I'd pick most xenotypes over them if I had the chance. Likewise Pigskins don't have dependencies or incapabilities which saves them from the lowest tiers. Wasters' psychite dependency is why I put them in bottom-D tier. I'm not dedicating an entire field and production line just to sustain one or two pawns, ESPECIALLY when that pawn has irrelevant specialties and several penalties. Sorry not sorry. Sanguophages are my must-have xenotypes, to the point I started playing even Rich Explorer/Naked Brutality with a Sanguophage starter pawn and ALWAYS include vampire worship in my starter Ideo. Absolute top-tier. And the Impids turned Sanguophage that sometimes get randomized? Oh baby! Just don't implant onto a Yttakin, they'll eat five times as much as a goddamn Pigskin.
I already have some trouble with pacifist colonist, and some role that enforce pacifism. Being a highmate is a plus for social, and since blue is the color of medical bed sheet, might as well chuck gene that increase medical stat. That's coming from broke bloke that absolutely love royalty psycast, and ideology means of modify stats. Just don't chuck anomaly situation upon me, I already greatly busy with farms, water infrastructure, and building every impressive ritual room for any ideology I happen to recruit.
I basicly don't recruit any xenotypes that need drugs constantly (aside from hemogen, wich only requires prisoners rather than taking up precious farm spots) or that are annoying to deal with in other ways. Like highmates. I hate highmates. one turned my colony into a highschool drama because he was a serial cheater slut and I had to restart. a few like impids seem to have been made with hating them in mind. they'd make good colonists in a raider colony, except no because when I raid I don't want the chance of accidently burning the loot. genies, however, I disagree. If you're running things correctly, you dont need all of your colonists in combat anyway. How fast they churn out legendary and mastercraft armor and weapons at maxed skill levels is more than the replacement for them staying out of a fight. they're SS teir for me. every colony I start unless I'm restricting myself to a single xenotype will always have a genie churning out all the equipment we need. Also, I believe Yttakin are supposed to be wookies. Furrys would have animal heads. they're just fuzzy and ugly. this also explains their love of sashes and refusal to wear pants. I'm very unracist. except for when its wasters. fuck wasters. all my colonists hate wasters. wasters get sacrificed to the great moon god! In conclusion, Sanguphage up top. they'd be the final step in human evolution if they didn't need to eat humans to survive. except wait, bruja from VRE can feed off of eachother. BRUJA UP TOP.
7:20 But have you seen Impid girl with curvy body and blonde hair? Run Hooman cute and facial animation mod and who can let go? Impid with these mods are S tier for sexy Sad that you don't see the allure of Highmates. One highmate can populate your colony without a recruit and with the xenotype od your choosing. S tier...for sexy...ahem
Wasters make good solo mechinators because there immune to thier own pollution and is boosted by it
Or, hear me out, kidnap one of the 50 wasters constantly raiding you and extract it’s gene and just slap pollution immunity on your mechanitor and the rest of your colony.
but you need to manage thei drugs quickly i think
For mechanitors I usually go with genie, and as soon as I can I kidnap a waster and trip their toxic resistance gene
@@soraa0128I’m pretty sure psychoid can be farmed in pollution fine.
@@soraa0128 eh, psychoid is by far easiest to maintain. Just tea will do.
Baseliner is clearly the superior species
Just as the emperor intended
Legitimately in the late game they (and the non-germline xenotypes) are because theyre blank slates for ridiculous gene modding.
total xeno death
Honestly as long as it’s not a filthy pigskin they’re welcome in the colony
Skyrim is for the nords
don't be racist they all taste good
Especially Pigskins!
Wasters?
@@SilkwoodFam1999 Look, the meat might be stringy and greasy but smokes very well and spices really bring out that flavor. Just ignore the hallucinations
@@lordshennington2756no, don’t ignore the hallucinations, that’s the best part
But impids taste the best, we all love a little spice after all
Xenotypes work differently if used by raiders or players. A AI Raider has a huge advantage from Impids Firespit, a player however gets next to no use out of it, as they actually have to wait for the cooldown and can't just spawn 30 of them in whenever
Considering that they're fast and fragile, I feel like the fire spew is meant to be an emergency move to get away from someone who's about to get in your face. Impids are clearly meant to be long-range fighters.
@@kaschey6145 especially with how many people forget that fire weapons are SUPER strong in RimWorld. they will literally cause pawns that aren't fireproof to panic and flee when they get set on fire, which makes them easy targets for any ranged attackers. i always have one or two people with fire weapons whenever i can.
@@GinaRanTruthEnforcer which reminds me of how I lost one of my Sanguophage colonies - I got 7 people and decided to open an Ancient Danger... there was a surprisingly big group of mechanoids with an inferno centipede inside. The centipede shot behind a corner where my vampire fighter was, and... one-shotted them. I mean, they were alive but the shot instantly incinerated their legs because of the fire vulnerability. And while they were down, the rest of my colony couldn't stop that centipede together with two small flamethrower mechs...
@@kaschey6145 yep, sanguophage runs are the only times when i absolutely refuse to use fire weapons because i know that my dumbass pawns WILL find a way to fry my vampire with them by accident xD
@@kaschey6145yeah, impids are ranged fighters, so if enemy melee fighters broke the frontline and quickly approaching shooters, imps can quickly install firewall, then run away and regroup (because they are also fast).
Pretty sure this is just called racism
Racism in my warcrime simulator? O_O
Racism is built into the ideologies. You only want the good and strong races. Its canon.
I was wondering when someone was gonna say that.
@@VollificationIt's more likely than you think 🤔🤔🤔
Yes.
In defence of highmates
Psycasting. They make crazy good psycasters.
If you come across a highmate grab him and turn him into a wizard
They make good support... But some of the best psycasts like invisibility and skip are best used when you back a gun anyway.
They make good moral guides with Ideology, good traders.
They honestly still could use a buff, they're kind of rare since you can't get them in raids, so why not make them a reward? Reduce their price and make exotic goods traders and settlement sell them often, It makes sense for them to be a comodity given the lore.
@@ciranopunalesvigliarolo3788VRE Highmates mod makes the empire hand you a Highmate for reaching the rank of Baron, at least.
Highmate women are BADDIES
I'd only use one for psycasts if you're using vanilla psycasts expanded and even then, they're only useful for protectors healing abilitys.
I love Highmates because I play roleplay-centered, easy-medium difficulty, heavily modded playthroughs. If I played on harder difficulties, I would likely like Highmates less. They're also my favorite from a lore perspective.
Highmates are awesome. They keep someone super happy as long as they stay alive and can grow your colony like crazy with kids. Plus the great social means they can recruit easily and trade for a cheap. They're best in the ling run when you need to grow your population
“Favorite from a lore perspective” dawg they’re genetically modified prostitutes.
Highmates are good at higher difficulty because you can give your moral guides or nobles one and they'll break down less
Can you even recruit them I dont remember ever seeing one
@@Sigmamale-alpha they spawn rarely in outlander caravans and drop pods and can be found somewhat frequently from slaver ships or slaver empire caravans.
Honestly, I like impids. Maybe I'm bias because somehow, almost every early game, I was often getting impids that were amazing researches, builders, and cooks, so their negative genes weren't affecting them so much, and thsnks to the speed buff, they make pretty good snipers for hit-and-run.
And the fire spew works very well as a "GET AWAY FROM ME!" kind of move. When you get overwhelmed by a raid and somebody is about to melee lock your impid, they have basically a get out of jail card against that.
Also, one of my colonies was literally saved by an impid because there was a very rough raid that downed everyone and set our colony on fire that got out of control - the impid (who happened to be a doctor) finished off the raiders, and saved people fron fire thanks to the fire resistance.
(They could use some shooting buffing gene, tho)
I appreciate the impid roast. They suck to get raided by though, all of their negative traits don’t matter in the short lived life of a raider and the fire spew and fast running makes them a pain in the ass to deal with
First time i played with biotech i had a prison break and the impid i had as a prisoner set the entire base on fire and i lost the colony after that, now when i get an impid prisoner i make aure to take their leg privileges away instantly
@@Nuclear_energy_enjoyer not sure why we arn't allowed to annie wilkes the fuckers.
I never thought someone would concider the name of a pawn in wether to recruit them or not
I once found a pawn named "Walnut" and I just had to.
There's a chance a Pigskin having the name "Pog". How can you not recruit them?
Understandable
My favourite was a 96 yr old genie called Paul Paulson
I have a colony with people like "Chad Broski", "Johnny the Man" and "John". Why Do that if you can Name the People yourself ? @@thenightarchives4148
I like being a Human Superiority Colony and killing all the xenos
Just like the Emperor intended
*HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH*
those tierlists are just soo entertaining to watch
I'm glad you enjoy them :)
16:41 killer delivery on that one
I love highmates, i usually found myself lacking social colonists very often and a single highmate is so helpful. They are always my moral guide and i always bound them with one of my fighters for the counsciouness boost.
Also i make my highmates be mechanitors for labour mechs or make them be psycasters to compensate for the incapable of violence.
It's rough to get the psycasts you'd want for kiting pawns (e.g. Focus, Invisibility) on a highmate tbf, it makes granting psylink feel less worthwhile for them.
"[Highmates] are doomed to evolve into cowboy hats."
I literally could not stop laughing after you said this ☠️ I wouldn't say it's uncalled for because I also think high mates suck
Glad it amused you
Another aspect that i myself consider but isn't really mentioned is how harvestable their genes are and how well they can be engineered together for a more optimal genome.
And for that i consider highmates, genies, hussans and obviously sangouphages especially good, because they basically have extreme strengths and weaknesses. For example what's the difference between poor and awful plants? You wouldn't use that colonist for farming either way so might as well have that extra point of metabolism, which allow you to better micromanage into stronger xenotypes.
So might as well enslave that highmate and have it clean around while harvesting his genes for that damnable psychic bonding.
I really dislike the psychic bonding just for the sole reason that it forces two colonists to caravan together at all times and gives me less flexibility in terms of caravaning.
Problem with having a colony of sanguophage is that as soon as anyone with a molotov shows up and lights something on fire near the battlefield your sanguophage become useless. This is especially problematic when fighting Diabolus or explosive pirates. That also means you can't use incendiary weapons yourself.
I still think they are the best xenotype generally, just not as good at combat as hussars.
The trick is to make sure your colony is diverse enough. If fire-based enemies show up, you can always fight them off with non-Sanguophage pawns, and even Sanugophages can still do their part by using high-range weapons or hit-and-run tactics through the use of their hemo-powered legs.
Neanderthals in B is just ridiculous. One time I had that runaway deserter from the empire, double passion in melee, and she had the tough trait. Neans are already genetically tough, taking -25% damage, which meant that with tough, she took -66% damage. Her double passion in melee, coupled with her higher melee damage gene made her an absolute monster in melee. As she had a double passion in cooking, she basically turned into a cook. Funny annecdote, I once sent her to kill 2 wargs close to each other, on her own, except that i forgot to give her a weapon. She fucking ripped two wargs, with her bare hands, because the genes, traits AND the armor i gave her made her an absolutely terrifying sight. Also happened to rip off a colonist's leg while social fighting, so yea, double-edged swords and all that.
A good melee neanderthal is a colony-changing colonist. They can also spawn with passions, and very occasionally, "smart" traits, essentially bypassing their genetics dispositions. I'd take a neanderthal over a hussar ANY day for melee colonists, with the main reason being the absence of the "robust" gene for the hussars, which is the one element that holds them back from being instant-recruits.
Overall a good video, i'd just add that the highmates don't belong in F, especially if they have medical, crafting or planting passions. Someone who stays behind while the others are fighting is a godsent.
Neanderthals are just worse Hussars. And if your in a decent colony chances are you have someone else that can do anything a highmate can do, without having the combat capability of a twig.
They slow they stupid and meatshield role taken by ghoul. And yes they will start social fight and they will tear limbs
@@bennet2347high mates work well as a moral guide for your ideology but aren't great otherwise
Personally, I would not put Hussars in S, they are about tied with Neanderthals for combat
See, hussars make for amazing ranged soldiers, especially high tech facing against mechanoid events (Being psychically deaf turns psychic ships into easy parts), but neanderthals absolutely DESTROY in melee against humans
I would put both of them in high A as ideal army would consist of both of them combined
I feel like the majority of the time gun > sharp stick. Sword doesn’t matter if your gunned down charging someone.
@@bennet2347 Until you start factoring in shields that let pawns charge your firing line with minimal injuries and engage the guy carrying a rifle with a hammer making him suddenly extremely disadvantaged
Ideal army really should have both, sure, more firepower could prevent the melee charge from reaching the firing line, but having some melee fighters to catch and aggro the charge before that is much more reliable
Had a body purist genie once. His own elongated fingers freaked him out.
Also every single time I've had a highmate as a warden, they bonded with my prisoners.
Note that I don't run VE race mods that change the base game xenos because while the genes they add are cool... i like them as they are
Baseliner - "Boring", but often lead long and healthy, storied lives. Very nice.
Dirtmoles - Will carry an economy on their back if you have quarry mods. The melee gods neanderthals wish they were.
Genies - They can quite literally range from "the nerd you toss in your lab to do the research minigame" or "scary mechanitor with an end game sniper rifle". I never say no to the big head bastards.
Wasters - I love them. They drink stuff that makes them happy, they have the general "idgaf" attitude needed for life on the rim, and they're too ugly to cause cheesy love triangles. Unironically better wife material than Highmates.
Hussars - For some reason, everyone that I got also likes mining...? They certainly shrug off any would be issues if they're caught with their pants down. Also, they're cool. Give them Pervitin and keep em busy so the bad thoughts don't win.
Highmate - Really hot janitors. Having a big ass wall around your base is necessary for holding one of them, you know, just so they don't accidentally get decapitated by a wooden mace and have her (or his; it is the future) Hussar boyfriend go on a murder spree in full cataphract armor to avenge the death of their blue-boo. If you have outposts expanded, they make for excellent trade hub workers! If not, if your colony has kids, just let them teach. Also give them healing psycasts if you have VPE. I too, however, hate caring for them.
Yttakin - They are better friends with the rhinos we have than the other colonists. That said, they also make excellent cooks most of the time sooo...
Pigskins - They really don't have a huge upside going for them, but every pigskin I've recruited has had Floridian level stories to go with them. Definitely consider keeping them around for shits and giggles, harvest them if they're not great.
Impids - I'm sure the 70th guy with a marble club with absolutely get him this time. Usually don't take them because they're depressed. Cool to look at, though.
Neanderthal - Grug smack big bug til it stop move. Grug take nap now. TAKE TOUGH NEANDERTHALS!
Sanguophage - The quest NEVER spawns for me but when I play sanguo starts, I usually get brained so maybe they should appreciate life more.
I'm glad I'm catching this channel before it blows up.
I literally just started playing rimworld a few days ago and your vids have really helped me build out my roleplay and character lore.
Fun tidbit: I checked my colonists socials and it turns out my priest is THE SISTER OF THE EMPRESS. Sadly we cannot call her for pick up 😅
@@felicityseleneford Woah, not even of The Stellarch? That should warrant some noble title I say. But you should definitely go and try and make that pawn honorary. Anyway, glad you are enjoying the videos!
I swear Sleepy gene is so bad, i only have like 1 or 2 Yatakkin in my colony because of animals, cuz half of the time they are sleeping.
Sleeping Modifiers are very strong, which is why Quick Sleeper is such a strong trait. The smallest buff to rest gain or less rest fall is a HUGE improvement. And so on the other side, the smallest debuff makes a pawn useless. Never forget that not only do they not work in that time, they still get hungry and count towards colony wealth.
But if you have some sort of implant that removes the need for sleep...
Really? They seem to sleep less than some of my other colonists half the time tbh, it barely changes things.
Early game it's a big detriment, but if you have a solid constructor (especially a production specialist/tortured artist/word of inspiration boosted pawn) that can spam out masterwork or legendary beds, the amount of time they need to sleep for is not as noticeable. They are also more likely to continue reliably ending up in bed with their partner, securing mood boosts from lovin' and opinion of partner.
Running a biphasic sleep schedule is recommended if their work is mostly inside the base, but if they are your primary tamer or hunter (likely with such a high animal skill and the robust/melee damage genes for revenge moments) then you probably want to ensure their sleep lines up with the animal sleep and only once per day, or you'll find they waste much of the day travelling to and from their bed. They also make half decent sanguo targets as the sleepy gene is overridden.
So, a cannibalistic sociopath doesn't like empaths? Go figure, but yeah, anyone incapable of violence is hard to justify when raids are the main challenge of the game.
Honestly I could get over their lack of violence if Highmates wouldn't just be destroying all of my colony's marriages constantly
Just make marriages unrestricted, and they will have constant morale bonus from marriages. One real downside - with big enough colony, they tend to celebrate twice a day. +75 morale from visiting marriages for all colony is a nice boost, but... They don't do anything else.
I will say, impids and highmates REALLY shine in the anomaly DLC where psychic sensitivity is helpful for rituals and fire resistance/spewing is uniquely positioned to fight like half the entities showcased. A good impid fireteam can shut down fleshbeast and shambler assaults in their tracks while also serving as good firefighters.
Yeah, thing is, the Anomaly DLC also adds a new weapon called "Hellcat Rifle" which is essentially a weapon-sized Impid. I would assume they would be good for extinguishing fires (although fire-foam exists) but I'd still rather use a Hellcat Rifle at that point.
@@thenightarchives4148 personally, I give the impids the fire weapons and devilstrand gear because they can handle the fire best and are geared well to putting the fire out after the fact.
Surprised few said it: Does psychic bond and psy-sensitive imply something? Yes, highmates are good psychers, and it doesn't even count as violence!
Sure but at that point I could just get someone who is psychically hypersensitive by trait and also slap an implant too on top. But this also would require for someone to have the Royalty DLC in order to be taken into account which, I guess it's fair to assume. If you have Biotech you most likely have Royalty too. They are good as psycasters but beyond that not at other stuff. Plus not being capable of violence makes them unable to use psycasting weapons that further enhance your psycasting.
I once tried to do a colony without committing war crimes or crimes against humanity, it was THE singlehandedly hardest challenge i attempted in Rimworld
I love playing genie transhumanist mechanitors, let them sit and research as long as they want and give them a nice self-crafted antimatter rifle, and let them go to town behind an army of plasteel soldiers
For themed play thou high mates are amazing slaves. But you have to be careful with them. Because everyone will love them, and so if they die because they are being used as “optimal targets” then everyone will be sad that their friend died.
Really good tier list!👍
Glad you enjoyed
Highmate fan here, fair enough.
I just don't like leaving people out to dry, I take anyone in.
Same most of the time, but highmates always make me regret it.
A single highmate in the colony is pretty damn useful, you get an overall great social pawn for trading (either via caravan or orbital trade) plus they can be meatshield with a shield belt in case shit goes down hard.
Bonus points if they roll a sickly trait, as pawns with that will force disease events to only affect them and not the rest of the colony.
Impids are made to be really annoying when fighting against them and have vood genes you want to extract. But they are also very annoying to keep as prisoners, which you want to do to extract genes. And fast running is good to kite enemies from away, if they get close you can spew fire and continue shooting, but its pretty hard.
And Highmates is my favorite xenotype as a design, but I also agree that you must not take them unless everything in your colony is already great, which is very rare in Rimworld
Yttakis, Pigskins and probably Wasters are really cool if your colony is only them and if you always play around their features but they are not that useful if have other people
I think you are undervaluing Wasters. Like you said, in a mixed colony they stick out a bit, but once you can build up to the point where you can meet their needs with flake they become one of the last colonists to break during a tough spot and they have zero combat disadvantages.
Pollution is so strong and so long as you segregate out your base to accommodate it early on they really have no downsides other than the aggression. Once you rip out some genes and get everyone in the colony TAL and on Flake you can run unlimited free power from Tox Gens and get the free movement speed bonus on top of it. The last fringe benefit is that you will always be able to call an organic raid of some sort as you can either force a wastepack infestation, or drop pod your spare tox packs to a humanoid settlement to force a retaliation raid; its great for recruitment in endgame when all randy throws at you is mech clusters.
The only other add, and its a niche case at best, is Yttakin make great Ghouls for the Anomoly DLC. Get a Tough Yttakin, ghoul it, and deck it out in all the ghoul upgrades and it legit wont die.
Ghoul Yttakin does sound like a great idea. I'm wondering how other xenotypes would fare in that field. Wasters I have no doubt in regards to their usefulness. As I said, I just consider them very situational. Using Tox Genes also pretty much means committing to a pollution colony which means having to give up various other things. I don't dislike them, but they essentially require their own playthrough, on their own map with their own rules in order to shine.
@@thenightarchives4148 even without a tox map I find my wasters to be the last to break as they have all the extra bonuses from being on a separate drug policy. Wake-up impervious means they are literally always ready to go which is a big boon on a combat-heavy playthrough.
That being said, i can understand how a player not playing on the higher difficulty would find them taxing as the aggressive and unattractive genes make for a rough pawn to keep happy, especially early game. I guess it just shows my playstyle bias.
@@thenightarchives4148Neanderthals also make great ghouls. Really anything with the robust and strong melee genes are great. Especially if you can get one with the tough trait. That is one TANKY ghoul. Sanguinophages also make good ghouls but that fire weakness is rough and you can't infuse them with "ghoul soup" custom xenogenes without replacing their sanguinophage buffs
Goddamn. That promo you threw out for the Hussar made me so proud of my little doomguys
Your comparison between Neanderthals and Hussars massively undervalues Robust and Strong Melee Damage. Hussars aren't even close as melee pawns, and melee pawns are ridiculously useful in RW - the only problem with thals is that you have to find one with a high melee skill already because training them is slow
The idea behind impids seem to be a ranged kiter - fast, ranged-focused and with firespew that can disrupt melee pawns that attempt to close distance.
I use Rimworld of Magic in most of my games and let me tell you, having all of your Highmates being Priests makes them so damn useful all the time.
I consider Neanderthals to be the Tribal Budget Hussars, kinda?
The algorithm is pickin’ you up. Keep slammin’ out videos friend
In defence of Highmates:
They are the single best pawns to assign as a Moral Guide, ESPECIALLY when partnered with the faction leader, effectively nullifying the heightened expectations debuff and can usually skirt around the debilitating psychic distance debuff when kept on-base together which would otherwise come into play with a staggering consciousness penalty when caravaning/cryptosleeping/biosculpting/deathresting. Additionally, they make excellent partners to royalty (particularly conceited nobles should you be so reckless as to house one) due to the mood and psy-sensitivity buff. That being said, for the same reasons described prior the actual thing that makes them worth running is for installing joywires and turning them into an ambulatory psychic emanator. Their naturally high mood and buffed consciousness from psychic bonding makes the penalty from joywires and the risk of mood debuffs using a harmonizer effectively irrelevant, and their naturally high psy-sensitivity means they can really easily reach +30 mood buffs for nearby pawns.
Impids arent meant to be used by the player effectively, thats why when the AI raids you with them it is a genuine threat while you using them is like hitting the enemy with a wet blanket XD
Effectively like the wasters. Since their main faction is a savage impid tribe you can't even ally with they were kind of designed as "bad guys"
In defense of highmates:
The Psychic Bond buff gives +10% psychic sensitivity, and while that alone is enough to bring highmates up a few tiers imo, this buff also applies to colonists that don’t have _any_ psychic sensitivity. And I don’t care if it’s sub-optimal or whatever, a Hussar with a load of combat Mechanoids is a whole lot of fun, even outside of Combat Extended, where militors go absolutely nuts.
My favorite is Dirtmoles, they keep the work going at night and are really good for mountain bases
Absolutely agree with your highmate placement, I usually have one for one of my best combat colonist purely for the mood and consciousness bonus. Nothing gets you through an insect nest like knowing you're going home later to get that jelly slobbed of your knob. Outside of that they're worth nothing but their biomass to chemfuel ratio
I know this is the first time I have commented on one of your videos ( since I mostly watch on the tv and I can’t comment there, I literally went in my phone to say this), but I was watching your q&a and you mentioned having multiple channels and all of failing and I just wanted to say that you should never quit, you and ratknight are the only reasons I play this game and I would probably be depressed if you were to quit.
I think you understimate how absurdly tanky and strong neanderthals are until you get a raid with +12 of them they simply DO NOT go down and if they reach your pawns they are getting 4 tapped, they are hard to escape at arms reach
They are a double edged sword they cost a lot of maintenance for an inefficient pawn but their specialisation as a melee god is something to fear because their biggest counter is ranged and with enough technology that no longer becomes an obstacle for your juggernaut neandarthal
@@claustrophobicmole867 I certainly do not underestimate them. I am both really aware and really scared of how much a neanderthal raid can snowball me.
The Dirtmoles are definetly ROCKING AND STONING
Something I'm shocked I don't see more of is waster mechinators, they're nearly tailor made for the role.
Tox production by charging and gestating mechs becomes a good thing, their appearance doesn't matter because they're a recluse anyway, poor soil for psychite doesn't matter if you've got a dedicated agrihand, just make the field bigger, and even though it's a research heavy playstyle, it hardly matters when your guy hardly sleeps.
They are good as mechanitors only if you don't plan on getting rid of wastepacks, which in Vanilla Rimworld you can do easily by just using drop pods on a tribal colony whose response is going to be to simply raid you. (Protip: If you drop pod a more tech advanced colony they might just drop pod you the waste back which is why this strat works best only on tribal colonies)
You should do a tierlist of the Vanilla Expanded Xenotypes; it might change your opinions about the vanilla xenos especially when compared to their original state and the unique xenos added by Vanilla Expanded
I have tried Vanilla Expanded Xenotypes. Surpsingly, I didn't enjoy it as much. I feel that it overcomplicates many aspects that didn't need overcomplication. On the other hand, I love the new ones. Saurids and Phytokins especially are really neat.
Highmates are mostly thrown into a bed with my moral guide and left at that lol
Played for Graymole colony and waster colony. The greatest games I had tbh. But highmates, they are great for socials in your colony. And extremely rare. Had seen them only a few times at the empire settlements, for sale. Pretty uncommon, always picking one in my colony if I can
"Thumps a genie" COLONIST NEEDS RESCUE
Impids I feel are a meme - speed is nice, firespew is mediocre at best... But slow wound healing and weak immunity are downright crippling.
There are two things that make Dirtmoles amazing - melee damage and healing factor.
A Dirtmole in heavy armour and with a Zeushammer becomes a melee god. And it outperforms slashing weapons like monoswords, believe it or not - because of how blunt damage works.
You see - with a slashing or piercing attack, damage is transferred only to the body part that was hit. You hit an arm, it will at most slash away the arm. But blunt works kind of like splash damage - if you destroy the extremity, the remaining force of the attack is transferred to the adjacent body part - meaning a hit to an arm or leg can actually kill. And with a damage multiplier... it becomes very, very potent.
Genies make wonderful crafters and scientists but the problem I have with their abilities is that they fall off very much in mid and late game - and after that you are left with only with flaws. It is not hard to train the character in crafting, all things considered. And weaker science can be mitigated by having more benches.
Highmates - they would be good if average colony size was not about 10-12 people. If we could maintain Dwarf Fortress sized colonies, without the need to dedicate most of them to the combat, they would be fine. In small colonies, forced pacifism is crippling.
Hussars - I'll be honest, they are great, but... I think they are overrated. Their abilities are most well suited for early game - but at this point sustaining their go-juice dependency is pretty hard. Late game - unless you were loosing pawns left and right, most of their kit becomes redundant with proper implants and training. They get no improved toughness or melee damage - and the only real boon you have left at this point is superfast healing. Now, with dependency on go-juice, they do make excellent shooting specialists.
Neanderthal - THE best melee xenotype (beyond the blood sucking elephant in the room). Resistant to disease, robust, strong melee damage, reduced pain. All I said about Dirtmole melee applies here with addition of extra durability - if you find one with a "tough" trait, you suddenly have a nearly unkillable melee tank that can also dish out massive damage. Cataphract armour, Zeus Hammer in hand and this guy can SOLO full mechanoid waves if you funnel them in, and will take little damage in return.
But beyond that niche, neanderthals have little to offer. BUT that is one hell of a good niche.
Consider this - Hussar kit is basically suited for ranged combat - and melee skill buff is just the icing on a cake - nothing else beyond healing factor supports it. For Neanderthal, the melee combat IS THE CAKE.
Pigskins - I have a soft spot for them. They are not amazing on paper, but they have one major advantage early game - they do not ever get food poisoning. This makes them great in early game or if you are relocating the colony. They also make good caravan groups, because they can feed themselves with anything with no risk. I can't even count how many times my caravans were slowed to a crawl becasue of berry pisoning. No problem with Pigskins.
Yttakin - I'll be honest, I actively avoid them in my colonies - sleepyness makes their scheduling a mess. And a melee oriented traits combined with slow healing - that is just... a very poor combination that is basically mutually exclusive.
Wasters - another meme - they are fun for themed runs, but overall they have not much to offer. Pollution stimulus is only 5% consciousness buff and 20% speed buff at most. Well... They do make decent mechanitors, because they don't about pollution... But on the flipside, dealing with pollution is not hard.
Sanguophage - vampires are a league of their own. And the only problem is that the coffin requires some setup to get going - making running a full colony of vampires a bit of a chore at times. BUT you get insane power in return.
All you need is to protect the head - and it is not that hard - just make sure to wear a cataphract helmet. It should be more than enough. A Legendary Cataphract Helmet literally makes a single hit headshot impossible with anything from vanilla. At this point your only concern are mass damage weapons, like missile launchers. Or animals that devour corpses.
Vampires make excellent "main character" xenotype.
Aaah, so this is what he was doing as a Magistrate back in the city.
What
Rank every xenotype in real life too pls
LMAO i agree
Kinda hard to do when everyone is by definition a baseliner
1: baseliners
2: whatever you are
Offendingeverybody already did
A highmate is one of my prized colonists for the conciousness and mood buff it gives to my one melee fighter who is also the leader that i put all cybernetics into. If you had any control over who the psychic bond was with, a permanant conciousness buff for them and another colonist is sooooo good. Plus both psychic bond and psi-sensitivity increases are useful.
They make good psy casters too. +30% psy sensitivity with a mood buff and incapable of violence to counteract the weaknesses of high sensitivity.
IF: you can use it reliably and pick who it goes to. Unfortunately it's just whoever the first person they happen to romance is.
I rank pigs lower, their only actual real advantage is eating uncooked food, even though it still provides less nutrition than simple meals and no mood buff like fine or better, but they're not even metabolically efficient. Sure that's not the biggest deal, but you can't do anything with it
Alright, I'll give my thoughts on each xenotype. Worth noting that I play heavily modded, so I don't use vanilla xenotypes as much, and I tend to play turtle-style with Strive to Survive as my difficulty of choice, so my thoughts might be a bit skewed.
Baseliner: B-tier sounds about right. I'd argue that they could be A-Tier, simply because they're a genetic blank slate, if you're making your own xenogerms. You don't have to work around pre-existing genes like you would with say, an Impid or Neanderthal.
Impid: They have one job, and that's setting the enemy on fire, and potentially keeping them on fire if you have enough of them. I've had a very tanky melee pawn get downed by an impid raid, simply because they couldn't put themselves out in time before the burns stacked up. Unfortunately a single pawn with molotovs or an incendiary launcher does basically the same thing. Also, fire attacks are significantly worse in rainy weather.
Dirtmoles: fantastic for underground bases, great otherwise. Especially good with some mods like Vanilla Outposts Expanded, as well.
Genies: Dedicated crafter, researcher, and potentially builder. Give them a long-ranged weapon, and keep them off the front lines. Any custom crafting/researching xenotypes I make tend to be based off them. Also, Dead Calm is great to slap on any high-risk prisoners you get. No prison breaks, no prison brawls, and everyone keeps their own legs/spines.
Highmates: I, to some extent, agree with everything mentioned about them excluding the mechanator part - I think they can be pretty decent mechanators, actually - except there is one important thing about them that would pull them out of F tier for me: They only have Xenogenes. Slap ANY xenogerm on them, and they effectively become baseliners for almost no extra cost. You only have to care about the traits and skills at that point.
Hussars: Great at combat and decent at most other things. If you can keep them juiced up, they will rip and tear until it is done, then go do a different job, potentially better than a baseliner. And if you can't, well... You can repurpose the Cryptosleep Caskets from an ancient danger until you get more go-juice.
Neanderthals: Big, Tanky, and dumb. Very, very dumb. They tend to get put as dedicated dumb labor and melee combatants, if I get them. The big thing that might be an issue with them is the slow learner gene becoming a major hinderance, due to passive skill loss and them not going to be able to be in combat all the time to keep their skill up. Would much rather just get the Robust gene off them as a prisoner, and give it to my other pawns than try to recruit them. If I get one, I'll take them, but I'm not going to make any sort of attempt to actively get one.
Pigskins: The best part with them is getting Strong Stomach off them. If you can give all your pawns Strong Stomach and Awful Cooking, you never need to worry about food poisoning or a dedicated chef effectively for no cost. Robust Digestion and Strong Stomach also means one less pawn to cook for.
Yttakin: They're ok, but slow wound healing makes them only slightly better than Neanderthals imo. I'd rather have a Yttakin that can do something outside of just slicing down enemies, than a Neanderthal that can only club enemies and haul. I do think a colony of yttakins and only yttakins could be interesting, though; although that falls into the usual problem of "getting more Yttakins" is easier said than done.
Wasters: They're good in polluted environments, and kinda meh in non-polluted environments.
Sanguiphage: They're extremely busted. Weakness to fire? Ok, so keep them away from impids or around firefoam poppers, and don't let them go fight fires. They need blood? It's the easiest resource to get, just keep any one prisoner as a renewing happy meal. Or an Unwaveringly Loyal pirate, if you care about morals. Deathrest isn't even a weakness, since they get buffs if they complete it, and you can interrupt it early if you have to.
One interesting thing to note about most of the ability genes - and thus, the Xenotypes that have them - is that they're really bad because they have such a low cooldown. If Fire Spew had, say, an one hour cooldown, or if Animal Warcall had a 1-2 day cooldown, then they could be decent. A lot of the genes are "great" from the perspective of being an enemy raider - They don't care about Slow Learner and skill loss, they don't care about long cooldowns, and they definitely don't care about slow healing.
Neantherthalls suck 90% of the time, but that 10% is when they are gods
Heres the meta strat
Get psychic shock lance, wait for neantherthall tribal raid. Look for tough trait or brawler or nimble. Shock em, recruit em, you now got a killer melee pawn, only downside is that they are essentially stuck with whatever skills they spawn with due to how stupid they are
They are melee GODS.
A tough thall is the first time i have ever had a pawn die from overall damage, rather then bleeding or torso or head health going to 0. They overall just took so much damage that they *had* to die by a thousand cuts. Recruit a thall, you wont regret it, im in your walls.
Neanderthals should also be ranked lower because slow learner means that their combat skills don't level up as quickly either. this means that they will miss more in melee combat and also get hit more in melee combat.
Highmates lorewise would make bad cowboy hats, because their leather won't be as sturdy as most other xenotypes.
Interesting 😂 when you consider that Raiders of Impid, Yttakin & Wasters have essentially NO cooldown for their abilities❤.
Every impid is a walking talking flamethrower🔥
Every Yttakin is an extra wild animal attacking your colony.
And Wasters love to use poison gas weapons 😅 yeeet!
Essentially, Biotech DLC is a boon and a threat/enemy pack!
Just like Anomaly DLC, that is a threat first, and boon second.😮😮😮
I feel like a lot of xenotypes where designed to be enemies, which is a shame honestly
Yeah. Impids, Yttaki and Wasters certainly feel that way, especially due to belonging primarily to factions you cannot ally with.
Highmates are either the best or worse for me in RP gameplay.
They can either be that baby-factory that gets with the colony's best mage and builds the next generation of the Harry Potter wannabes in my faction. Or they get with someone of the same gender and all I get is a mood boost from them.
I mean, I don't got any irl problem with that, but when I'm playing with compressed raiders and Winston Waves, and desperately need mages to defend my colony against increasingly harder attacks, I can't have them having their own will and sexuality. I NEED THEM TO TAKE/GIVE BACKSHOTS
video starts at 3:30
i love highmates
as campfire fuel
it's really sad for me that dirtmoles are quite hard for me to find and recruit.
I just never managed to capture one because for some reason I rarely get raids from the pirates that are not race specific and I tend to keep a good enought relationshi with the outlanders for trading, so I rarely get to see then at all, whish is a chame since I like their concept :^(
Yeah Dirtmoles are really hard to get by. Keep an eye out for slavers/slave ships and try to go on as many quests as possible. Most dirtmoles I ever got were usually wounded enemies/prisoners from enemy prison camps or places like that.
You should do a video of modded zenotypes so many great community made xenotypes out there like the phytokin alternative sangrophages that use different blood types, hunterphages, slimes Ulangs from VRE hussars. Moonjellies, Fungoids ,Lowmates, Boarskins Taukai so many great community made xenotypes
yeah that's the problem tho, there's far too many and some of them are extremely unbalanced. It would hardly make for a fair tierlist.
goated channel
thanks african jesus, very cool
I'm going to give my honest opinion or complement to each genotype and germline, I have 3 thousand hours, think I have the minimum knowledge to give a good overall opinion
Impids strengths: They are made to be raiders, both in lore and gameplay, they are very fast and fire-resistant, they also came with the fire spew to keep enemies away, while they use range
Impids weakness that said, they are in my personal opinion the world germline, they only have 2 strengths to counter a bunch of disadvantages,
Make them better: they could easily be better if they also had fire immunity and good shooting, they also really could use clothed speed, and heat tolerance. Making them live in deserts much easier while being more useful and lore accurate.
Dirtmoles Strengths: They are indeed, very good, they are great miners, and they can punch like a truck, they don't need light to fight.
Dirtmoles Weakness: Even tho most people think they are very good hey have 2 very debilitating weaknesses that can be easily bypass by having a cave/mountain base, but outside this play style the sun and their speed is very debilitating, and they are almost impossible to use ranged combat, meaning if the enemy has any space to run or retreat they are going to be outgunned
Make them Better: They are already very good, they could use being good a construction to make them better builders, This would extend their usefulness late game when the map is most mined or all the caves have being explored and all they need to do is occasionally use the deep drillers
Genies Strengths: They are excellent crafters and builds, they are great mechanitors and cultists, Mechanitors can use mechs to fight and cultists can dehumanize making them better at taking damage negating the wimp trait.
Genies Weakness: They are very bad at combat, not only they are wimps, but they also are delicate receiving more damage making them more likely to die from damage, keep them making the weapons not using them.
Make them Better: I think Genies could have weak melee to receive quick study or have something to make them useful in combat without getting involved in combat, my main suggestions would be, make them have psy sensitivity, Foam spray or good medical. Any of the three would greatly increase their usefulness in combat situations without the need to be involved
Highmates Strengths: They are great supporters, any pawn they bound with are greatly affected by mood both by having a great relationship and having some lovin, They also are great at social, making them useful at taking care of prisoners and children
Highmates Weakness: They are troublesome, for 3 main reasons, One is obvious, lack of any combat skills, two the moment you enter a relationship with a highmate you are basebound since high mates are not recommended in world trip, they can't fight and have a high value, The third one is that they are friends with everyone and can only have 1 partner, meaning everyone tries to flirt with them making them get rebuff having a mood penalty that most times are stronger than the positive of having someone attractive being kind to them
Make them better: There are some ways they could be better, First would be to add a cooldown in the distance before a penalty making world trips possible, give them some kind of mood boost skill like the moral guide, make they asexual once they bound to someone and this wear off after the person they are bound dies, or they don't see each other or sleep together for 1 year, this would make people stopping flirting with them, would also be useful to speeding up pregnancy if they are the mother or father, making a pair of them very good at making new children, or making them having the ability to disable pregnancies without a need for surgery
Hussars Strengths: They are great a combat they heal faster, can do both melee and shooting, have reduced pain and don't get slowdown by receiving shoots. That said
Hussars weakness: They are not very good at anything else, can't plant, animals, Arts or social, are hyper aggressive meaning any mood swings are going to make them beat your own people, they also have to partial strengths, reduced pain and antitoxin lungs, both can be more weakness them strengths, receiving more damage before going to only increases the chance of being killed and the accumulation of scars is going to eventually make them useless, and the lungs barely are noticeable, they can stay like 50% more time inside toxgas and the only people that uses are the wasters, and I don't even think they are resistant to lung rot, the Go-Juice dependency makes them unreliable and price to keep since is the only drug that can't be mass-produced because of the Neutroamine component needed
Make them better: They need to have the coagulant and scarless gene, and they really could use the robust and melee damage bonus, They are made for combat but if you put them in a scale, the only thing they have that makes them better at combat is the fact they know how to fight, and they take longer to die, they are not better, they can outlast a germline.
If they had these 4 perks they would be better fighters, they would outlast by not bleeding, deal and tank more damage, they also could have the unattractive and unhappiness traits without this being a problem, they are not made for relationships, and since they are not good at any work would be easy to keep them happy outside combat. This would make them eat a little bit more but could easily be prevented by also removing the Cold and Heat tolerance
Neanderthals Strengths: Easily the best melee combatants and can easily survive diseases and infections, That said, my personal opinion They are the worst genepack in the entire game by miles.
Neanderthals Weakness: They have the Slow Study make them garbage at anything forever, they should be the best melee fighters, they are not, they such, They are slow, taking longer to reach the enemy and also are very likely to die because of the reduced pain, if they survive, the next fight is going to be just as hard, because they are not learning how to fight better or have any scientific progress because they are stupids as rocks
Make them better: Remove the stupid slow Study and increase the weakness of the poor intellectual, or make them slow at complex tasks, like thick fingers that reduced work speed, anything but reduce the XP to almost zero, also why they are slow? They are earlier humans before the full development of the brain, there is no reason for them to be slow, Dirtmoles are slow because they are almost blind are not use to running because they live underground in cramped spaces, neanderthals are hunter and gatherers, Make them good with animals and plants
Piskins Strengths: Personal opnion, the most balanced genepack in the game, They are near immune to diseases and infections because of the strong immunity and have reduced pain, They have strong and robust digestion making them much better at eating raw meal
Pigskin Weakness: They have 2 weaknesses, they work slightly slower and have a poor eyesight, this forces you to have 1 o 3 play styles, explosives, short ranged or melee, reduced pain is a double edge sword, and they can't cook, but they don't need to, they also eat a little bit more
Make them better: they are very balanced but are not very interesting, they don't cook, which negates both the drawbacks and advantages of cooking, you can't get food poison but can get buffs for eating, but also don't waste time cooking, They could be good with animals because they are pigs, or have some bonus for eating meat forcing a ranching play style but to be honest they don't have anything going on for them
Yttakin Strengths: They are ... weird, They are great at melee fights, but because they are fast naked, most of them fight naked, As a pawnn tho, They are decent at many things, not great at nothing, They can call for animal aid but the cooldown is very long, they are great tamers.
Yttakin Weakness: They heal slow and sleep more make them perfect at doing nothing, they are also aggressive and poor casters and miners,
Make them Better: Remove slow healing and make them have a purpose, want them to be good wild people, make them ascetic and poor researches or crafters, both would make sense in lore and would make them eat less and be more useful i the tribal stage, make them have higher psy sensitive so they can meditate or even make a perk that allow them to rest by meditating, they would all sleep around the anima or garalean tree, stop giving them rocket launchers ad give them melee weapons, make them the opposite of the Impids, one great at ranged, one great at melee.
Wasters Strengths : They are great at... something? They are immune to pollution and get buffed by it, resisted to infection and diseases, and can for some reason take as much wake up as they want.
Wasters Weaknesses: They are ugly and aggressive, and they need psychite to survive, They plant to survive, more than anyone, they need food, and they need psychite, meaning they should be great at taking care of plants right? Wrong, they are bad with animals, cooking and arts.
Make them Better: Make the wasters Great at plants, they need to make plants survive in a wasteland, they should be good at that, There are several animals that live in said wasteland, make them great with animals or at least good at mining, maybe good medical since they live in Wastelands and having doctors would help, make them great cooks, they need to transform radioactive meat and potatoes into food, they should be capable of making the best with the little they have. Instead of just sucking.
Sanguophages Powers : They have 2 very useful abilities, Longjump legs and Coagulate, both can save someone very quickly by jumping in healing and running away, They have piercing spine that I never used or saw someone using in like maybe 2 thousands hours watching people play this game, absolute Dogshtt, They can also once every 2 years infect someone into also becoming a Vampire, I mean egr, sanguophage
Sanguophages Strengths: They have by far the most strengths going on with them, they are deathless they are immune to diseases, infection, chronically illnesses, Toxins, scars, darkness and bleeding, they are fast runners, know how to melee fight, do social and research they heal faster, sleep less and take less and deal more damage, they are also psy sensitive and attractive.
Sanguophages Weakness: They have only 4 weaknesses to compensate all this near bullshtt powers, They need to Deathrest, meaning entering a coma every 25~30 days for 4 days, meaning they spend like 15~25% of their time sleeping, they also are extremely nerfed i the sun, but you can just cover as much as possible of the map in roofs, and keep them away from the farms. And last and Important, actually the most important, FIRE is deadly, extremely more them normal, Fire does 400% more damage /4x damage in them, they also never self extinguish if they fall down burning, meaning fire is one of the couple of things that can straight up kill them. Normally if they died without a brain damage they deathrest instead because of the deathless, fire is going to burn them until nothing is left
Make them Better: To be honest, they are very balanced, because of the rarity, hard to replicate and major weaknesses, They also need Blood, meaning for every one of them you have you need a normal person to be there as a bloodbag, could be a prisoner or colonist, but they need to be there, people normally don't like being bite or blood unless your ideology says so.
I always go to have at least one yttakins, maybe a genie and a highmate if we are chilling in my colony but my favorite is sanguophague they go butcher pete when you give them go juice and wake up
🎉It's a great audio!🎉
It's a 10/10 for me!
Now heres the REAL question: Sanguiphage Hussar or Sanguiphage Dirtmole?
@@zanthe_ Thats actually a good question, I don't know. I think maybe Dirtmole.
@thenightarchives4148 Kawalski, Anylisis!
A Dirtmole Sanquiphage adds Nearsighted and Good Mining to the Sanguiphage genes, with all other non-cosmetic genes being canceled out. This gives a -1 Metabolic Efficiency.
-A Hussar Sanguiphage adds: Heat tolerant, Cold tolerant, Reduced pain, Unstoppable, Go-juice dependency, Partial antitoxic lungs (Useless for a Sanguiphage), Great shooting, Awful animals, Awful plants, & Awful artistic. This gives a +1 Metabolic Efficiency with all other Non-cosmetic genes being canceled out.-
Obviously, the correct answer is custom geneline + Sanguiphage, but in the meantime? -I think I'd go Hussar...Reduced Pain for an undying warrior, and if they're go-juice dependency gets out of hand, they just go into a Deathless coma. Also, small bonus temperature tolerance for heatwaves and cold snaps.- Thralls can make the food for them.
Ironically, a Highmate Sanguiphage would be decent if they weren't both Xenotypes. Their Violence Disabled would be disabled and so would their Delicate weakness. Would make for a very happy colony.
Genie-phage is just a Sanguiphage that feels more pain and crafts more gooder...
Neanderthal Vampire is just a worse, but more consistent (non drug dependent) Hussar-pire.
Ytta-phage are furries.
Waster-pire gets huffed on their own farts and are depressed.
Don't bother with Pigskins or Impids...
Oh...I forgor Hussars are a Xenogene Xenotype...
Neanderthals it is.
Yttakin make excellent ghouls. High melee damage, tough, and nudist speed.
I believe in impid supremacy
Painblockers make genies a really great xenotype imo.
You forgot to mention the biggest downside of sanguophages - their performance impact, especially in late game.
Late game performance is the greatest threat to any colony, worse than the planetkiller
When I do this in Rimworld it is called a tier list. But when I do it in the realworld, they call me a racist.
Not fair...
I would put the pigs at C at least. They are not that bad. Heavy armor, jet pack, combat shotgun - they do great like that.
same level of "What race is best?"
The war call is like a psy lance only good use for it is for hunting thrumbos… if you don’t have the psycaster
The war call is lowkey kinda funny to use on Boomalopes
@@thenightarchives4148 they just want to give 🔥 spicy 🔥 hugs
I usually play with a lot of mods, but even if we're considering vanilla, i'd get a high mate if i had a hussar or sanguophage. Good way to keep your super soldier/eldritch vampire in a good mood, and the downside is what?
Not capable of fighting? You have their partner for this, just one colonist incapable of fighting is not that bad, good for caring for the others after fights, since they'll not get hurt.
Awful mining and plants? At this point you should have someone already doing this. Put the cat in the lab, the kitchen or the workshop. There's always the need of more hands.
And the Psy Bond gives some good bonuses. ×50% pain multiplier, +15% consciousness, +12 mood and +10% psy sensitivity when on same map. Fight harder and for longer.
I think the blue cats are more situational than straight up F tier.
And i HATE neanderthals. F-ing Slow Study makes them a pain to train in anything even if they have passion, they don't get any bonus in skills and on top of that Slow Runner.
Basically Walmart Hussar that the only thing they have is being a damage sponge. Hit hard, tank damage, but if you target gets away it's over, you're not catching them.
I'd rather deal with the constant social fighting of 10 Hussar high on Go Juice than waiting 1 year for a neanderthal get up 1 level in Melee.
That's my opinion with 3k hours in the game. Good video btw, RimWorld content is always nice.
Should have done this with the vanilla expanded races as well!
I was considering it, but some are just far too unbalanced.
Now do a real race tierlist
Sure, I'll do it right now.
S: Horse Racing
A: Car Racing/Snail Racing
B: Boat Racing/Dog Racing
C: Biking Racing/Tortoise Racing
@@thenightarchives4148 you slick bastard
I love highmates for the same reason you hate them. But I play very highly oriented for story/larping, rather than winning and being powerful. So I agree with your points but id put them elsewhere based on different value system :) Good vid though
Glad you enjoyed the video! Yeah, I tried to take this analysis from more of an "outsider" point of view, tried to analyze xenotypes based on their usefulness to an average colony. I have no doubt Highmates are and can be useful but the setup around them always bothers me. I did have a highmate once as a psycaster and that was fairly okay.
Impids are good... when AI uses them. In early game, when you have only 3 colonists and get raided by 6 impids, you're pretty much cooked.
*6:38 Blessed be the Night Archive chairs, for they teach us to stay motionless while reading manuscripts.
Even standing motionless won't stop it from creaking
Are you going to make an explanation on anomaly DLC?
Yeah
I disagree on the Hussars, near perfect fighters but they start social fights all the time and when they break it's always violent. I mean I don't give the bastards fancy expensive armours for them to smash them to bits against each other. One or two is fine but I would never want a colony of them.
I’m not a combat oriented player at all, having low difficulty levels with good starting characters chosen. With that said, I don’t care that much about the combat downsides to colonists AT ALL. The only colonists I don’t really like are pigskins, just cause I don’t like the aesthetics. I love the idea of highmates and don’t care about hussars.
nah but highmates on F is brutal god damn
My main disagreement with you is regarding the Hussars and Yttakin.
The Hussar's go-juice dependency pushes them to D-tier for me, since again Sanguophages and Ghouls are my combat pawns, and flesh and blood are MUCH easier to procure than Go-Juice.
Dirtmoles, Yttakin and Genies are my go-to specialist xenotypes. A-tier for the 2 former and lower-S for the latter. A colony comprised of a Baseliner/Impid, a Dirtmole, a Yttakin and a Genie is all but guaranteed to be well-balanced if the Yttakin or Baseliner has a Plants-boosting backstory. Additionally, while the Genies SUCK at combat, they're not barred from it, so they can still defend from a distance, which makes them acceptable snipers in the early game.
Impids are great as they're not addicts or barred from violence(looking at you Highmates), but they still have skill and mood penalties that imo makes them lower-B tier and perfectly counterbalances them. I'd recruit them if they have skills I want but aren't a higher or lower priority than baseliners.
Highmates only make sense for the faction where they were engineered - the Shattered Empire. Sanguophages have most of their societal advantages(do you really need that psychic bond tho?) and other usefulness(backing up Genies in Intellectuals and being beasts in battle comes to mind). I wouldn't recruit them even if they were ALREADY psychically bonded with my farmer-beastmaster-crafter-researcher Yttakin-turned-Genie pawn. Absolute bottom F tier.
Neanderthals' slowness and proneness to social fights is why I'd place them in C-tier. Not an absolute avoid as they don't have dependencies but I'd pick most xenotypes over them if I had the chance. Likewise Pigskins don't have dependencies or incapabilities which saves them from the lowest tiers.
Wasters' psychite dependency is why I put them in bottom-D tier. I'm not dedicating an entire field and production line just to sustain one or two pawns, ESPECIALLY when that pawn has irrelevant specialties and several penalties. Sorry not sorry.
Sanguophages are my must-have xenotypes, to the point I started playing even Rich Explorer/Naked Brutality with a Sanguophage starter pawn and ALWAYS include vampire worship in my starter Ideo. Absolute top-tier. And the Impids turned Sanguophage that sometimes get randomized? Oh baby! Just don't implant onto a Yttakin, they'll eat five times as much as a goddamn Pigskin.
You should do a video which is the best xenotype to mix with like which is the best lover/lover = best genes or worst genes.
so eugenics
damn blue pepol is op'
my main chemical / weapon engineer is a waster
HUSSARS ON TOP
Comment for algae
Magic water moss
I already have some trouble with pacifist colonist, and some role that enforce pacifism. Being a highmate is a plus for social, and since blue is the color of medical bed sheet, might as well chuck gene that increase medical stat.
That's coming from broke bloke that absolutely love royalty psycast, and ideology means of modify stats. Just don't chuck anomaly situation upon me, I already greatly busy with farms, water infrastructure, and building every impressive ritual room for any ideology I happen to recruit.
I basicly don't recruit any xenotypes that need drugs constantly (aside from hemogen, wich only requires prisoners rather than taking up precious farm spots) or that are annoying to deal with in other ways. Like highmates. I hate highmates. one turned my colony into a highschool drama because he was a serial cheater slut and I had to restart. a few like impids seem to have been made with hating them in mind. they'd make good colonists in a raider colony, except no because when I raid I don't want the chance of accidently burning the loot.
genies, however, I disagree. If you're running things correctly, you dont need all of your colonists in combat anyway. How fast they churn out legendary and mastercraft armor and weapons at maxed skill levels is more than the replacement for them staying out of a fight. they're SS teir for me. every colony I start unless I'm restricting myself to a single xenotype will always have a genie churning out all the equipment we need.
Also, I believe Yttakin are supposed to be wookies. Furrys would have animal heads. they're just fuzzy and ugly. this also explains their love of sashes and refusal to wear pants.
I'm very unracist. except for when its wasters. fuck wasters. all my colonists hate wasters. wasters get sacrificed to the great moon god!
In conclusion, Sanguphage up top. they'd be the final step in human evolution if they didn't need to eat humans to survive. except wait, bruja from VRE can feed off of eachother. BRUJA UP TOP.
I see some strong opinions there.
@@thenightarchives4148 is there any point to weak opinions?
7:20 But have you seen Impid girl with curvy body and blonde hair? Run Hooman cute and facial animation mod and who can let go? Impid with these mods are S tier for sexy
Sad that you don't see the allure of Highmates. One highmate can populate your colony without a recruit and with the xenotype od your choosing. S tier...for sexy...ahem
The allure of Highmates is to cause constant divorces in all of my colony those guys will just bring ruin to any relationship
some are better but only slightly. my biggest problem is social fights. deadcalm is the best gene
Agreed I do like deadcalm a lot.