I'd like to see energy crystals being made more common or a way to manufacture them, as is I can mine about four per map which is enough to build one or two pieces of furniture.

Did you know that they already can be crafted from uranium and components on hisa workbench? Later in game you can mine them from underground or send caravans to Hisa Enclaves to buy them. They designed to be quite rare. And i can recommend mod named Set Up Camp to send caravans to nearby locations to mine resources ) Perhaps crafting level requirement is quite high, i'll lower it in next patch.

-Edited: Balance tweaks applied, mod updated, see Update Description.

I didn't know that, thanks.

Been usign this mod for a few days. So far I can think of a few things.

About weapons: even thought it can be researched early on, a lot of the materials (plasteel especially) are not easily gained without mods and therefore are difficult to create. One way to get around this is to hunt down mechs, but even with a safe strat, it takes time, these foxes are good at that. The best suggestion I can make is to give death acidifiers, or find some other way to prevent/make it much harder to loot these weapons from fallen hisa or other factions that use these weapons. I was able to loot these weapons really early on, making battles pretty easy.

The walls/doors/floor. Not exactly a balance issue, but would it be possible to turn off the glow? I am forced to use different walls in underground gorwing zones as the light is killing my nutrifungus. Walls glowing with different colors would be nice for ideoligion theming.

About floors: once again, not a balance issue, it would be nice to have it in different colors and then an advanced version that helps to keep the place clean - I think that would go nicely with the theme of these high tech foxes.

Suggestion: advanced wall in higher tier that does the color changes + turns on/off. It could also have something lilke built in power conduit. The current hisa wall in game would be too cheap for this.

Beds: The colonists rest so fast and get way more things done, one of the biggest buffs to them, ironically. The bed should be either more expensive to build, or be pushed to later tier. More or less the same issue with medical beds.

I am still playing around with the faction a bit so this is what I can think of so far.

So far, a lot of things, even if they are avaliable early on, are seemingly too expensive to build without mods or cheating. The weapons are the biggest issue due to how easy is to get them witout building them myself.

Thanks for your suggestions @CloudDLuna, soon there will be another addon for Rimworld - Biotech, so i'll make some major changes and overall rebalance of things with patch 1.4, will definetely like to hear more about balancing!

About glowing walls: it will be easier to implement nonglowing variant and darklight variant.

I need to see how "coloring" work with Biotech, as you can paint everything with any color now, but even if this cannot be used i'll add several colored versions and hightech variant with "clean" parameters, it will be quite easy to add.

Beds: It will be better to adjust costs for things and not nerf them )

And with hisa mercenaries a think i like the idea about Death Acidifiers as powerarmor is even more OP early )


I would like to know your opinion on this:
- Hisa resistances (they have 33% incoming damage reduction) are this too much?
- Turret costs
- Advanced neurobelts costs


Feel free to add new suggestions!

I still very new to this mod, right now I am creating mod list for a new game focused on the hisa to examine them closer. The previous base was more focused on other races.

As for the death acidifiers, the thought behind that was to destroy the gear when the holder is killed so it couldn't be used by the player faction.

-Damage reduction: Would it be possible to create something what the Revia race has? Revia race basically upgrades, gains buffs the more people they kill. In this case, to go along with the anti mech theming, have the race gain this damage resistance depending on how many mechs they destroy. Or maybe create a system that the mechs drop something with which you can upgrate the existing hisa. Kind of like a permanent drug?

That way, you wouldn't be removing it, but making the player earn that.

I know that there are some hisa original drugs, going to look into them.

The 33% damage reduction wouldn't be bad in some very hard playthroughs, but when there are going to be many other hisa late game with the same resistance... I had to download a mod that lets me increase threat scale beyond 500

- Turrets seem fine so far.

-Saw that there are advanced ones, but have no built them yet.

So the damage reduction on Hisa is no joke. It could be fun in difficult scenarios like naked brutality + increased threat scale but later on, it is just OP when it is combined with everything else.
I would definetely do something with it.

Possible solutions that maybe could work?
-Make it so that Hisa have some negatives. Maybe something like the Miho race has, they need to constantly get a drug that gives them their OP powers, without it, their body becomes weaker and weaker, even weaker than a normal human would.
Other possiblity could be something like what the Rabbies have, they need to get their own drug, otherwise they would spend 90% of time on a mental break.

Just make it so that Hisa need more upkeep and resources than what a normal human would need. If you do not want to just remove it or to nerf it by a lot which is a pretty boring option.

Next are the armors and weapons: Those are OP, no question asked. And the issue conmes with the fact that is is very easy to get them even without crafting them because others either sell it or raiders drop it after they are killed.

Possible solutions:
-nerfing the weapons, or making them much harder to make... though this sounds pretty boring
-make it so that all hisa gears and weapons bond with the first person that equips them, maybe with the option to remove this bond, but at a pricey cost. This would make it much harder to get them.

Funny idea: turn this up to eleven and make the gear self destruct when the bonded one dies.

Jokes aside, the gears is OP enough to warrant this.

Even with nerfs, I would put a warning in the describtion of this mod that it is reccomended to use this mod alongside mods that make the game considerably more difficult.

Just did a nine-year long game with the Hisa in it. The Hisa were so game-warping that they basically *defined* my run. It was super fun, but I want to make some Rimworld stories that are about something other than the Hisa, so I'll be removing it so they don't steal the show from my next run as well.

Here are my thoughts:

There are several mods that restrict certain levels of tech to certain stages of the game in various ways. (For instance, maybe one mod requires that you do all your medieval tech before you can do industrial, then requires that you do all your industrial tech before you do spacer tech, etc. Or maybe a mod makes it so that you get random research progress, and the higher the tier, the less likely you are to get it.)

Because of this, I think that most hisa tech should be a tech tier higher than it is currently. (ie, you start doing hisa tech in the spacer era instead of the industrial era, and more stuff gets pushed to ultra, and maybe even make black gates archotech tier.) The research costs can stay the same; they're mostly immaterial at that stage of the game anyway.

Hisa bases have *tons* of silver. This makes it so that if you settle near one, finding ways to offload your plethora of plainleather hats is far, far easier than in vanilla. Not only that, but when you do, you get tons and tons of rep with the Hisa because the rep bonus for trading is based on the silver value of the stuff you sell. Then, with that tons of rep, you can call the Hisa mercs whenever you want for whatever threat appears and never be in danger of losing their allianceship so long as you keep selling them hats. Worse, the Hisa don't seem to have their points value configured correctly; when they come to help (or, in the worst case, come to attack you) they tend to be a couple orders of magnitude more powerful than any other group.

Also, there's something strange about the way they join. If you rescue a downed Hisa, it is *far* more likely to join than when you rescue a downed ally from any other faction. In my last playthrough, I had *five* hisa try to join me after they were downed after I called them for help. This makes their armor super easy to gain. Even if you don't want the Hisa, you can claim their stuff and send them on their way.

Also, Exodust is amazingly OP. The ability to get as much of it as you do means that you can easily, in the early/mid game, make stuffable armor and weapons *way* more powerful than in vanilla just because it exists. It's great as a temporary building material too; it builds so fast that when a raid spawns, you can often put up walls before the raiders reach you, then take them down again afterwards if they're in the way of your animal pen or whatever. Now if Exodust were hard to get, this wouldn't be a problem, but for some reason, *every single gibbet cage* I every found was made of exodust! This meant if I ever needed any, I could just do one of those randomly appearing logging or mining sites and get around 120 per site, enough to build 24 walls or a decent weapon or two. I was playing with Dragonians, and three years in, one of my guys had a creativity inspiration, and I rolled lucky and got a Legendary Exodust Dragonian Mace. I *think* there was no better melee weapon in my pack.

It's your mod, of course, but I think I'd do the following (in addition to the tech tier swap I suggested above):

- Hisa bases have 1/3rd as much silver. (Still more than any other faction base!)
- Hisa rep is more "expensive", it takes 2-3 times as much gifts or trade to get rep with them.
- Leave the strength of Hisa help and Hisa raids like it is. Basically, you do *not* want to tick off the Hisa, and the reason their rep is expensive is because it's so much more valuable than rep with other factions.
- Fix whatever's making Hisa so happy to join.
- Have Hisa biocode their weapons and armor the vast majority of the time.
- Keep the power level of their guns, armor, and Daodan. The Hisa's *thing* is that they're super OP, an unstoppable, mysterious force that you need to keep happy before you find them on your doorstep with rail grenades. If you take away their power, it might damage their identity.
- No more Exodust gibbet cages. Find some way to prevent the game from generating exodust ruins, too.
- Exodust can't be made from stone chunks. Before that, you need to buy it from Hisa bases. Increase its price, too.

I *love* the Hisa! It's one of the coolest mods IMO. But this time, I'm going to make a new mod (private, not public) copy over some of the Hisa items to the new mod (Hisa Medical Bed, Daodan, a few weapons, etc) and set them to be uncraftable quest rewards, sort of like archotech is. Then, I'll headcanon that the Hisa *used* to live on this rimworld, but left because it was too poor to support their ultra-tech mercenary lifestyle, and they left for a world with better clients. Now, the Rimworld fights over what little rare tech their inhabitants were able to steal from the handful of Hisa Mercs that died in combat during their stay here.

Thanks so much for the mod!

Thank you for such detailed review, @Talonos!

We think some what the same about balancing, i just didnt have time to get to it yet (trying to finish some bonus synergy with SOS2 mod right now). I'm planning to lower availability of exodust (infamous gibbet cages i see everywhere too, with anomaly even more XD), the cost of exodust will stay the same because of recipes for Converter. There will be Archotech Tier after Black Gates soon, and i plan to reevaluate research to some degree (costs and requirements). Pawn combat points of squads stayed the same for a long time, so they will be fixed. Biocode weapons planned for faction squads. Dont really know why they so happy to join, never actually noticed this, but i'll check stats.

Your post is very informative, i appreciate this very much!