Few games have taught me to prepare myself for imminent disaster better than Rimworld. It’s a raw, unforgiving base-builder that requires no small amount of cunning to anticipate the dangers that lurk at the edge of the map. And it can be tiresome, rebuilding time and time again having been hit with yet another base-desolating rabid squirrel attack. So I went in search of a slightly more forgiving management game, one that might give some respite from a hectic life in the Rim.
In discovering Ratopia, a downright adorable rat-themed city builder, I put my rodent avoiding days behind me. With its fairytale assets and nomenclature it promised a gentle foray into the life of a benevolent rat queen and her god-fearing subjects. I imagined long days brimming with rodentesque revelry and midsommar nights of placid quietude, walking the halls of my ornate mousehole. What I found instead was a rat-infested carnival of pestilence and despair.
Best laid plans
As base builder fans often discover, there’s an order to things. You start building with the more common resources dotted about the map, and as you tackle the research tree you’ll delve deeper in order to gain rarer resources for more complex production lines. It’s the basic survival game stepladder.
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Building blocks
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In starting a new game of Ratopia, you first need to build a City Gate to let in migrants. Then you go about meeting their ever more elaborate needs as they become less and less comfortable with the initial asceticism of a frontier lifestyle. Your Ratizens quickly grow tired of snoozing on the cold ground with zero entertainment so you have to scramble early, earning enough research points to work your way through several research trees in quick succession.
While the research pipeline is relatively freeform, in that you’re encouraged to specialize depending on which resource you have greater access to, there’s a core hierarchy of needs that have to be met early. Deviate from that and you’ll have a hard time clawing back a single mistake, as I soon found out.
The rat race
For my third playthrough in two days – I restart city builders a lot – I decided to go without the tutorial. I didn’t see the need to go through it all again. I had the general gist. At least, I thought I did.
I spent a lot of this playthrough exploring, which brings in a steady flow of research points each time you return with a new resource. I then built myself a Laboratory to churn out and stack up even more research points before things got too heated. I thought I’d gamed it. I had a steady flow of research points, I’d locked in an easy food source. I’d even quelled their cries for a circus and went about my day. Little did I know the wave that was about to break over my humble hamlet.