So, I've played ONI for a while, but had enough of dealing with gases, liquids, temperatures, and pipes, why did it have to be pipes everywhere? (especially the last one, at some point building anything new or expanding was often a problem like "Okay.... where and how can I lay down those new pipes for it. Uhh. Okay. Need to tear down and remake half of my setup first.")

Is RimWord simpler in that aspect? Both (not) having to deal with Real Life-ish physics, and trying to find a place and laying down every friggin' pipe and wire manually?

Please note I said "simpler" not "easier", I don't mind dealing with (reasonable) difficulties, but ONI was a bit too complicated for my taste (and requiring too much micromanagement of pipes and wires).

Though I do like eventually reaching a stage, when the basic needs are mostly taken care of, and I can mostly focus on making things better, without having to worry about survival all the time.

As an example of what was down my alley, Frostpunk was quite fun, and I might get back to it, once the expansion is out.

So, with the above in mind, is RimWorld simpler than ONI and a game for me?

First of all let it be noted that I have never played Oxygen Not Included. I know a bit about it but i will manly focus on what you say bothers you. Also this is just my personal experience, others may think I am totally wrong.

I would not say that there is alot of physics in RimWorld. The only sorta physics related aspect i can think of is temperature. Which however does not require more than heaters and coolers to be taken care of.

When playing RimWorld I never needed to redo my base like what you describe in ONI with pipes and wires. When i am redoing my base or parts of it it is mainly just because i think it would be nicer that way or because i want to optimize thinks a bit.

The game can however require quite a bit of micromanagement e.g. of your colonists, especially in the beginning. This however usually gets less the longer you play but may increase again when you are unlucky.

It has to be said that i never played the game on a high difficulty. However, i know that the micromanagement can increase quite a bit with a higher difficulty just like base remoddeling can get necessary.

I hope this helps you a bit deciding whether this game is for you. If there is anything else i can help you with please let me know.

Thanks. :)

On topic of controlling the colonists, how is it done?

In ONI you don't control them directly - you set the priorities of tasks for each citizen separately, and assing separate priorities to buildings and tasks.

For example, let's say you have a citizen with Very High priority assigned to Farming and Ranching, and High priority assigned to Research.

Then you assign priority 8 to Grooming Station (ranching building), priority 7 to plant pots (farming buildings) and priority 9 to Research Station.

The citizen's AI would first look at the citizen's priorities, then building priorities. So, the first one to be worked with would be Grooming Station (Very High personal priority, 8 building priority), then plant pots (Very High personal priority, 7 building priority), and only after those are done, Research Station (even though it has 9 building priority, Research is less important for the citizen, so it would be left for after Ranching and Farming). And afterwards, if there's time left in a day, the citizen would go to do anything else left.

Well, there are also proximity rules, but I'm not quite sure how exactly do they work.

You can't order the citizen to do something directly - while you can tell them to move to a specific spot, there's no guarantee they will do what you want them to do, once they get there, and not go back to whatever they were doing, or something else yet (that's part of the game's challenge, you need a way dug out for that one citizen behind whom sand collapsed, before they suffocate due to lack of oxygen? Too bad, the other citizen is going to do Research first).

Although you can give the "Yellow alert" priority to something, meaning "Drop everything else and do it NOW!", but it's still subject to citizen's personal priorities (for the above example, if Digging is Very Low priority for a citizen, they would probably ignore it, unless there's really nothing other than digging for them to do) and no guarantee they'd get to it in time.

How does RimWorld compare?

RimWorld is acually a bit different in that aspect. You assign each colonists to different tasks and give them priority values of one to four or simply disallow them doing that task. Tasks are also prioritized internally which means that if you for example assing both hunting and research with a value of one the colonist would always do hunting first as it has a higher priority than research when you assign the same value to both. Some colonists are unable to do specific task for example because they are afraid of fire or are opposed to violence and therefore can't hunt. Colonists will also care for their own needs.

Unlike in Oxygen Not Included you can't prioritize one machine higher than another. So if you assign a colonist to cooking they are free to choose between butchering or preparing meals as both are subtasks of the cooking task. You can try to do something about this by manually pausing the butcher table or stove, by assigning ownership of one of these stations to different colonists or simply by controlling the colonist manually. You are able to controll every person youself and tell them what to do which they then do until they finish or a personal need like sleeping or eating becomes to big.

You can also toggle a warmode in which colonists stop doing anything and only act on your command. Fighting is typically done manual as you otherwise may find a colonist minding his own business while his friend is getting his arm bitten of just a few meters away. This way you are also able to place you colonists behind cover.

I must say just thinking about this again makes me want to play it again. I definetly recommend the game and think you should check it out especially now that GOG has that 30 day refund policy where you get your money back even though you downloaded and played the game. :)

To make sure I got it right: Can I assign more than one task to a colonist, and prioritise them? As in, let's say: 1) Cooking, 2) Building, 3) Research, in that order? (I don't know what tasks are there in the game to do, so I made up what makes sense to me, for the sake of an example)

As for not doing some jobs, ONI has that too, I just skipped it in order not to complicate things, as they didn't matter for how you control the citizens (f.ex. a citizen with "Yokel" negative trait is not smart enough to do Research related jobs, while "Squeamish" can't get themselves to work as a doctor). The citizens are automatically blocked from doing the job in question on the personal priorities screen (you can also select, which other jobs are forbidden for a citizen, f.ex. Decorating is something I went to only have one citizen a skill for, as it's not used all that often, and blocked all the other ctiizens from doing it, so that the morale-influencing decorations are created by a most, actually only, skilled one in that area).

Yes, you are able to assign a colonist to every possible task and prioritize each task from one to four. The game will then, if you have multiple task with the same assigned priority value, let the colonist do the task which gamewise has a higher priority. If you assign a colonist to have priority one at Doctor, Cook and Clean the colonist will always do doctoring first afterwhich he cooks and lastly cleans.