My biggest complaint about Rimworld, and in fact most games, is the lack of causality in random events. This is caused by developers giving up on this complexity in favor of just rolling dice. Just because it's hard to provide a UI that can express these things doesn't make for a satisfying experience by completely ditching the sense that events have causes. When an event has a cause, it gives the player a feeling of agency, and when it's just a roll of the dice that you can make go away by reloading the save file from a few seconds before, they're no longer disasters, but just random bullshit the game throws at you for the sake of making things hard. It feels cheap and lame.
If you get raided, you should be able to scout the caravan before it arrives. If bugs tunnel under your base, your ground penetrating scanner should detect them in time to get in position to defend. The list goes on, and the solutions to the UX challenges are there, if developers didn't simply throw their hands up and say "Welp, that's just too much UX for me!"
The game that got randomness right was Diplomacy. There's no dice rolling at all, but the randomness is there because you don't know what 6 other people are going to do when you put in your orders, but you rely on them holding to their agreements for the success of your own moves. It's a very satisfying mechanic because randomness is still causal. Randomness truly represents your lack of information, and can be mitigated by your ability to extract reliable information from the other players. When you get screwed by randomness, it doesn't feel like arbitrary bullshit. Knowing that effects have causes is crucial for people's ability to form a narrative about their experience.
What isn't necessary is to simulate reality down to the smallest detail, which is what I feel like most people try to do when they end up complaining that it's too complex to present to the user and has minimal effect on gameplay. One needs to be smart about simulating the things that do have an effect on gameplay by focussing on narrative mechanics, and not just trying to recreate physics.
In short, the solution to complexity is not getting rid of it and replacing it with unsatisfying random chance, but instead to create a renormalized model that eliminates the extraneous degrees of freedom.
This is a great comment. I totally agree the mistake that developers often make is to go too granular in the simulation instead of abstracting out these mechanics in a "narrative" fashion like you suggest.
I do wonder, as someone who made this mistake themselves to a degree, how much of this is because it is fun as a developer to work on these over-complicated simulations :)
If you get raided, you should be able to scout the caravan before it arrives. If bugs tunnel under your base, your ground penetrating scanner should detect them in time to get in position to defend. The list goes on, and the solutions to the UX challenges are there, if developers didn't simply throw their hands up and say "Welp, that's just too much UX for me!"
The game that got randomness right was Diplomacy. There's no dice rolling at all, but the randomness is there because you don't know what 6 other people are going to do when you put in your orders, but you rely on them holding to their agreements for the success of your own moves. It's a very satisfying mechanic because randomness is still causal. Randomness truly represents your lack of information, and can be mitigated by your ability to extract reliable information from the other players. When you get screwed by randomness, it doesn't feel like arbitrary bullshit. Knowing that effects have causes is crucial for people's ability to form a narrative about their experience.
What isn't necessary is to simulate reality down to the smallest detail, which is what I feel like most people try to do when they end up complaining that it's too complex to present to the user and has minimal effect on gameplay. One needs to be smart about simulating the things that do have an effect on gameplay by focussing on narrative mechanics, and not just trying to recreate physics.
In short, the solution to complexity is not getting rid of it and replacing it with unsatisfying random chance, but instead to create a renormalized model that eliminates the extraneous degrees of freedom.