RimWorld: Ideology Review (hermanJnr.)
Ideology is a strange expansion because it sounds incredibly exciting on paper but the actual result (in its current iteration at least) is just adding tedium and busywork to the game.
The most annoying feature is that pretty much everyone you want to recruit to your colony will have a completely different ideology to all the other characters you have and it causes constant chaos and mood swings.
The game already VERY slowly dripfeeds you recruits or injured enemies, many of whom have bad stats already, so adding this extra layer that every single recruit you get must also have their worldview completely converted just so your characters can get along is really frustrating.
For example - I got a recruit that was a cannibal. The rest of my people hate cannibalism. Therefore to stop him from constantly throwing a fit, I need to let him butcher human corpses, which massively upsets my whole society. The only way around this is to throw him in prison for about 2 months and SLOOOOWLY change his way of life. Which is just...not fun. It's just annoying.
My alternative is to not have him as a colonist which...cripples my whole colony.
Why is there not more flexibility? Why can he not eat human meat, but no one else cares as long as they're not being forced to do the same? It's in his culture after all, why do they care? But there is no such flexibility built in.
Also most of the cultural ways of playing don't add much but instead just artificially restrict you. For example, if you have a tribe that venerates close combat weapons but hates ranged weapons, what do you do if your characters all just have terrible close combat stats? The answer is that you have to give them knives anyway, or take a massive mood hit.
Surely if a culture venerates close combat, they should get a big skill bonus to close combat? As they would train their whole lives in this? But no. Instead it's just an artificial rule that forces you to use melee even if it totally doesn't fit your colonists' skills.
Or maybe you're playing as a Body Purist faction. So you end up with a society of people who would rather have no limbs and be constantly in pain rather than use high tech body implants that are better in every way. How does this make sense? More importantly, how is it fun?
Baking ideologies into the game for novelty is a great idea, but I really think converting ideologies needs to be made a lot faster and a lot of the stupid massive debuffs for simple conflicts of interest need to be tweaked to be more reasonable.