RimWorld: Ideology Review (suejak)
This is definitely my favourite DLC. I don't really understand the sometimes-mixed feedback.
1) The game is way too easy without it. Vanilla Rimworld has a problem with making any and all pawns very easy to recruit and this DLC addresses that by forcing you to consider whether a colonist is worth converting or is similar enough ideologically to be left as-is.
2) The replayability offered here is unmatched. You can alter the incentives to do so many different types of runs. As someone who loves randomizing starting parameters so I'm forced to adapt, it is amazing to randomize all parameters of a complex ideology and just hop in on a random biome with random pawns. Good lord every run is totally different, I love it. I've done everything from mostly-vanilla with a preference for darkness to a drug-addicted cartel in the jungle to a rich offworlder who's got a taste for human flesh and starts a cannibalistic cult that ritually blinds new initiates (this yields psychic power bonuses too -- the cult leader eventually became vampire-like at a genetic level through dynamic events, but that's a Biotech thing).
3) Even if you're not the type of player who enjoys (2), this DLC has you covered. You can start small and simple (baseline "normal" Rimworld value system) and gradually add ideas to your ideology over time as you figure out what kind of colony you have. This makes the ideology system a sort of long-term upgrade system: if you find yourself with a lot of bug meat, you can add ideas that make it OK to eat bug meat. If you find you're underground a lot, you can take darkness ideas so your pawns don't seek out sunlight anymore. If you have a lot of animals, you can go for a Rancher-style ideology. All of these also come with specialist roles that can enhance your colonists' abilities in those areas.
4) The world is way more interesting with ideologies. Every run, enemy factions roll a range of different approaches to life and that adds so much richness to the world. Every refugee or crash-landing survivor you find has their own belief system, either unique or influenced by the world. Systems can interact in really cool ways. My favourite example is as follows: every vanilla run has a Gentle Tribe, but one of mine rolled a Tunneler ideology, which means they live in mountain caves like dwarves. Since I have the Biotech DLC, too, this ideology resulted in the Gentle Tribe spawning primarily as genetic Dirtmoles, which is a race genetically designed to live underground and in darkness. So purely through the magic of procedural generation, I now have a whole Dirtmole faction on the worldmap! This is something probably only a tiny percentage of players has experienced in their worlds, and I think that sort of thing is so cool.
I could go on, but we're at unreadable lengths so I hope my passion for this DLC has been conveyed. It's real cool. Easily my favourite, though they're all great.