RimWorld - Odyssey expansion and update 1.6 out now!

Gonna sit on this one for a bit. I haven't really enjoyed any of the dlc. Royalty powers are neat but the upkeep is tedious. Ideology is fun if you RP but I don't. Otherwise converting people is just a chore. Biotech is my favorite but the pollution system is unbalanced. Anomaly I skipped because it's not interesting to me in the slightest.

I still love and play the base game. I like the logistics!

I don't think ideology is for RP. I can see how that could be a thing. I look at it more as easy mood management. Stack the buffs and minimize debuffs. Converting isn't hard if you don't mind imprisoning your pawns for a bit. If you are recruiting prisoners just break their will, convert and recruit.
- easy mood management
  
  Easy? Well then I certainly didn't grasp the concept. I never found it to be easy, at all. It was always more negative than positive for me.

And now to wait for the mods to update...

I played the base game a lot (many hundreds of hours, also before it was released on Steam). I think I've only tried the royalty DLC.

On one hand I want to get back into Rimworld, on the other hand the mechanics from all the DLCs seem overwhelming.

I've tried all DLCs except odyssey. Unfortunately I've been away for the past couple of days, it looks amazing. I would recommend biotech DLC if you are looking for a suggestion. It's very player driven in it's consumption. You don't need to play a genetically altered vampire mechanitor lord. You can just play with mechs and dip your toe into it. Maybe mess around with some genetics later in the play through. To be honest I still have not fully played a successful vampire run. It doesn't appeal to me as much

Ideology adds flavor to your plauthrough and can make your playthrough infinitely easier as drugged up, cannibal, raiders or infinitely harder as secular, tree hugging, ranchers that need to cut down trees for their sky lantern festivals but worship trees and get upset when they cut trees down. Not that I accidentally did that at all.

Anomaly is a horror expansion that adds more events and a little to the base game. It's under royalty in my recommendation.
- I will admit, your recommendation makes me want to play Rimworld with he new DLCs. :)
  
  Sounds like there is a lot of cool new stuff.
Yeah all of them together is a lot,but you can disable them before wkrldgen i think
- can disable them before wkrldgen i think
  
  yup. And even if you enable them, a lot of the stuff can just be ignored. Don't like royalty? Just don't follow royalty quests. Don't like unimaginable horrors beyond comprehension? Don't poke around weird haunted areas of the map

I want to like Rimworld but every time I even think of giving it another go it is like a massive wave of fans come out of the woodwork to scream about how they are all cannibals with slaves locked up to make pleasure farms and just... yeah.

Also I am not a fan of the storyteller system. It is nice that you get some variety but it mostly just boils down to tedium (and I think most players just switch to Random Ricky or whatever so it won't actively destroy their colonies?). And, overall, I don't like that you can go from success to wipe in like ten days. I am not saying everything needs to be Dwarf Fortress "Oh... we have been in a fail state for ten years..." but I do prefer there to be a long enough time period to actually realize I done fucked up.

Random Randy is for the people who want the destruction of their colony.

I prefer the "Pheobe Chillax" one that allows me to just build and recruit with only occasional raids from enemies and/or natural disasters.

Rimworld is very customizable in this regard, and you can swap your 'storyteller' at any point mid-run.

And in regards to the 'cannibal/pleasure farm' stuff, yeah that can be weird. I prefer to use the Hospitality mod and make my colony a luxury resort with pools/spa and thats how I make money for trading
I've played a lot of rimworld and I think the main problem with it is the developers solution to difficulty after the early game is just more and bigger raids.

Everybody starts building kill boxes to deal with raids being the only challenge after midgame. Developers response is new types of raids that bypass kill boxes (drop, breacher).

Give us some different threats or ways to mitigate raids like paying off raiders or building outposts.
- This + the way raid difficulty ramps proportionally to the value of your settlement and has nothing to do with where you're located or anything else.
  
  It sorta makes sense as you're a more attractive target, but it feels way too artificial and gamey, at least when i played. You can be out on an ice sheet in the middle of nowhere and get raided by a bunch of shirtless guys that all freeze to death as soon as they spawn on the map. Or how you can feed valuable objects into an incinerator and that sends out a telepathic signal that your base value is lower. Aside from the immersion issues ("immersion" is not exactly the right word for it, as I think this kind of artificiality actually kills systems based gameplay, not just the atmosphere of the game) this is also auto-scaling difficulty, which has never felt good in any game ever.
  
  To be honest I dislike a lot of the design of rim world, which presents itself as a sandbox game but actually has all kinds of heavy handed difficulty ramps and guardrails built into it. You can make it somewhat better by switching to Randy Random, but the whole game is riddled with that design philosophy, not just the event timing system.
- Are there mods to make that part more interesting? The colony building and management is my favorite part of the game.

I wonder what will happen with Save our Ship 2 now that ships are in the main game

I like how these trailers are always like "I want more" then everything becomes chaotic. The gameplay does feel like that.