I haven't watched the movies in a looong time. But I read the books a lot when I was younger.

Helpful refresher course on references from the books and movies on orc/uruk hai breeding:

https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Uruk-hai

Tolkien himself wrote that orcs worm their way out of the ground like maggots. Saruman bred existing orcs ("uruk") into stronger orcs, thus uruk hai.

My suggestion for making this fit both Rimworld gameplay and actual book/movie lore is to change and/or add the input material from rock chunks to meat. Lots of it. :) This could fit a magical alternative pseudo-science explanation that orcs are created from mud and huge lumps of organic raw material like Frankenstein's monster, using Saruman's and Sauron's dark magic arts. Similar to how chemfuel can be created at the refinery using organic material.


https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/55no7s/the_economics_of_rimworld/

has a nice explanation of the market value of anything. Looks like market value of pawn labor is display_work * 0.24.

A rock chunk equals 20 stone blocks for $16.20 (if comparing granite at $0.81 / 1 block, the most valuable stone). However, that includes 27 work, which by the formula above is worth about $6.50. So the stone chunk itself seems to be worth $9.70.

Typical meat (chicken, beef, etc.) is worth $1.80 per 1 unit. Meat is a pretty high value resource and fairly easy to source in normal game conditions, thus it will be much easier to create game balance.

For balancing typical uruk hai, I have a bunch of uruk hai right now that have pawn value $1000-2000, which is about the same as most humanlike pawns with an average range of skills. A zero-skill pawn is worth about $500, I think?

Your current uruk hai recipe is 15 chunks and 17 work (17 seconds of gameplay at 1x speed), which by the above calculation is worth about $150. It's waaay too cheap, which means the uruk hai are unbalanced and OP (over-powered).

Some extreme logic and "normal" suggestions for balanced uruk hai ingredients based on a minimum $500 value pawn:

50 chunks, 0 work (not realistic, just simple math to show an uruk hai's value)

277 meat, 0 work (same thing)

25 chunks, 1000 work (kind of shows that chunks-only will always be too cheap, OP, and almost impossible to balance for gameplay properly)

264 meat, 100 work

5 chunks, 240 meat, 100 work

5 chunks, 225 meat, 200 work

Conclusion: Work and chunks are really cheap for market value of any in-game item. Use meat or any raw resource that is higher value, to easily balance your uruk hai. You're using tons of simple steel for all their weapons and armor. That's one way. Add steel to the basic uruk hai mud pit recipe. Market value $1.71, which is pretty close to meat.

Therefore use work mostly as a TIME-based limit on producing uruk hai. Most pawns can create a single item in a day of work with about 50-200 work. Most powerful weapons and armor require an "unfinished item" object, so that a pawn can continue working on it over multiple days/work shifts (taking breaks to eat, sleep, etc.) -- these are often 100-1000 work.

Remember, my ideas above were for a VERY cheap $500 pawn, so the player is still creating a lot of "free" value. For average pawn value, you would need to DOUBLE these recipes for a $1000 value typical uruk hai pawn created with the mud pit. That means the occasional $1500 to $2000 value uruk hai pawns would be a nice bonus.

I would personally suggest 5 chunks, 225 meat, 200 work because that is a decent balance of stone chunks, 3 complete stacks of meat (easy for pawns to haul), and a medium amount of work. A fast-working pawn could still crank out several uruk hai per day, thus leading to massive colony uruk hai populations limited only by barracks space, food, and apparel/weapons.

My less fun suggestion would be to crank the work up. Perhaps compare to the total work to create an android from the two android mods. 500 or even 1000 work would be okay per uruk hai. Pawn colonists are normally a big investment, and not supposed to be cheap b/c they can be productive in so many different ways. Your uruk hai are already pretty OP with their super low mental break thresholds, etc.

Feel free to ignore these ideas if your concept for the mod is to simply pump out cheap combat pawn fodder and send them to their deaths! :) In that case, I would suggest that you increase the probability of certain traits, reduce or disallow many more skills or skill levels aside from combat.

I am enjoying messing around with my uruk hai hordes for now, but I have been realizing I could exploit their cheap price in a lot of ways, if I wasn't limiting myself for role-playing.