I love Rimworld and play it a lot. I frequently see posts and articles comparing the two. I got Dwarf Fortress, watched tutorials, printed out flow charts, and really gave it a try for several hours.
But I didn’t get into Dwarf Fortress :( some of the mechanics are weird. Many things are not intuitive or don’t make sense. Like seeds that are needed for growing mushrooms are defaulted to be used in cooking and the setting to turn that off is difficult to find.
I finally realized an analogy today. Rimworld is like The Sims while Dwarf Fortress is like Sim City. Rimworld you directly control people and micromanage a colony. Dwarf Fortress is Sim City - you zone things and say generally what you want to happen, but don’t control your meeples directly.
Thoughts on the comparison? Any other folks like Rimworld but not Dwarf Fortress?
I’m only a few hundred hours in to Rimworld, but have 5 or 6 times that in DF.
I very much enjoy the micro management of RW and it’s polish, but DF feels so much richer and deeper to me at least. I do prefer the longer term, macro management of DF.
Perhaps it’s nothing more than which I played first?
I can see the Sims/Sim City analogy! Hated the Sims, loved Sim City!
Oh DF is definitely a deeper world. There are a lot more knobs to turn (obvious or not). I’ve seen some really cool colonies and worlds. I’m just not very apt at building them myself.
Another comment made a good point that DF did come before, with Rimworld building on what DF made. It’s difficult (for me at least) to go backwards. Like I really enjoyed Baulder’s Gate 3 and tried the original but couldn’t get into it :/