Another little suggestion: something about the comfort need. More important for female or less important for male. I think this would be a good addition to women's reduced hunger rate.

Is it possible to lower melee damage factor instead of reducing melee hit chance and dodge chance for women? That would make them capable skill wise but be less effective at physically dealing damage. I do appreciate the change eliminating the reduced melee and shooting skill rate because that didn't make a whole lot of sense in the original mod.

Increasing the mental break threshold for both men and women makes mental breaks more common in general without creating a contrast between the two. I would suggest removing the mental break threshold for women and applying either 5% or 10% for men. Adding an increased social fight chance for men or a decreased social fight chance for women would also make sense.

I also wanted to ask if the mod currently eliminates the female presence moodlets from some of the new traits added by Way Better Romance?

@Pozitivizd I'll consider it.

@RaviingLegend I'll look into the increasing the dodge chance and mele hit chance.
regarding the mental break threshold, it's already eliminated for woman and applied to men at 5%+.
I like the social fights idea, will add it to the list.

And regarding the traits in Way Better Romance, no the mod currently doesn't take it into account but I will add it to the todo

I would really like it if the effects of male/female were configurable.
Your mod is a strong improvement over the original, however I think you buffed women too much from how they were in the original version. Obviously, this is a matter of taste, and therefore the best way to make everyone happy is to make the severity of all the changes to men and women configurable in mod options.

Hey @Zorg, thank you for the feedback. Is there anything in particular that you find overly powerful or 'buffed'? While I plan to include customizable settings for various aspects, I cannot provide an exact timeline for these updates. I'm interested in understanding what the community considers a balanced experience, as I may consider adjusting default values accordingly if they make sense to me.

I want to preface this by stressing that these are my OPINIONS, and are quite subjective. You asked for what I thought was balanced, so I’ll give you a bit of my perspective here. My request remains that these numbers all be configurable in mod options so that everyone can craft the experience they want.

The only change I would make that isn’t handled by this is the effect of beauty on opinion, which I talk more about there.

I agree with this, as this effectively changes nothing.

This is a good addition to the original mod.

Makes sense. Women don’t magically get hurt worse from the same stab, but their bodies can take less punishment overall.

Again, this is just moving an effect from one stat to another that makes more sense.

I think 85% is too high, something more like 75% seems more reasonable. A big part of this mod is to discourage women from being exposed to the front lines. While 15% is a notable nerf, and 50% is a bit much, I think the best place is between these numbers.

Good change.

I don’t think this was the right call personally. Historically, female slaves rarely revolt except as part of a male slave revolt.

While opinions differ, it makes sense to me that women are more malleable in their beliefs. This makes sense from a theory perspective (Evolutionary Psychology), and this also explains lots of things about the world. I think 300% is reasonable.

This says it’s already configurable, as it should be. I personally will keep this change in my configuration, because it makes sense.

I don't think this makes sense. Most surgeons are male, most nurses are female. These gender roles should be reflected in a mod that seeks to introduce realistic sexual dimorphism in humans. I liked this as a feature of the original mod.

Again, overwhelmingly most construction workers are men across every culture that has ever existed.

While 75% is extreme, mining technique, which is STRONGLY influenced by upper-body strength for manual mining, does affect the yield of usable metal. while "mining" in rimworld is more accurately considered salvage of buried ruins (refined steel and components from "ore" implies it's not exactly natural ore), this makes it even more true. A woman would need to take the crushed machinery or steel apart in smaller pieces, leaving less useable chunks.

Female brains are less oriented towards physical activities like these. There should be a disparity.

200% makes sense, although I don't play with Combat Extended, so this doesn't affect me.

This one I do agree with, however I would still reduce the female learning rate for shooting (exceptional people like Annie Oakley aside). A big point of this mod for a lot of us is to dramatically reduce the combat efficacy of women, which is exactly what that would do.

The greeks referred to mental breaks as "hysteria", literally relating to their belief that such things were related to the female reproductive system. Some people are going to want that idea present in their simulation.

While this is a fantastic idea, I find that it results in a bit too much “kumbaya” in my colony between the women. People should be more mean to eachother, and the fact that they are all considered pretty/beautiful is not balanced, as “+1 beauty” is effectively “+20 relation with everyone”. It may be outside the scope of this mod, but a much more balanced way to attain the desired effect here would be to give a relation bonus of 5 to men’s opinion of women, and to women’s opinion of men.

This is a good change.

I covered this already, but 85% is not sufficiently nerfed from how men work.

I think one way of having different skill rates for each gender would be by having a "traditional" heddif separate from the gender hediff that would be applied to 85% (adjustable) of pawns when they spawn. This would represent inclinations of a gender toward particular skills while still allowing for some to be out of the norm, such as your Sarah Conners or other female protagonist characters.

So a female pawn might gain a bonus from the traditional hediff to social, medical, and animals, while having a penalty to melee and shoot. While a male pawn may gain bonuses from the hediff to shoot, melee, construction, and mining. Non-straight pawns may be immune to the Traditional hediff or have a reduced rate of having the hediff to represent them often operating outside of gender norms. So this allows for an occasional female pawn that is as good as a male pawn at learning combat skills while reducing the rate for the majority.

An alternate idea to my previous one would be applying gender-based skill learning rates instead to an ideology precept. So different ideologies would either support or deny gender roles which would adjust learning rates. This would make about as much sense since interest in specific topics based on gender is largely cultural rather than biological. I would suggest three precept options: traditional, none, and non-traditional. Traditional might lower combat skill rates and other skill rates for a female pawn, while non-traditional would raise the same skill rates instead, and none would negate any gender-based skill rate differences. A trait that makes a pawn immune to the effects of this precept would also be interesting.

Originally posted by RavingLegend:

This would make about as much sense since interest in specific topics based on gender is largely cultural rather than biological.

What makes you think that? Gender roles are basically consistent across extremely disparate cultures across the world. The aboriginal australians, the native americans, the sub-saharan africans, the europeans, and the oriental cultures all discouraged women from combat roles and encouraged more nurturing and homemaking roles for them. If this were an arbitrary "socially constructed" cultural choice, then why is it consistent across every preindustrial human culture that has ever existed?

Even among LGBTQ+ communities, which actively advocate against traditional gender roles, women are less likely to learn martial skills. This implies that these inclinations are highly biological.

I think that your concern about allowing for non-traditional women, such as Annie Oakley and her abilities with a gun, is handled by the fact that it's a reduced chance of gaining a passion for shooting/melee, rather than a guarantee that they won't have it. Rare women will still spawn with a double-passion for shooting. One of my university professors was a woman who was highly proficient at Judo and preformed well in national Judo competitions (that's probably enough to dox my university, but whatever). She was passionate about both science and martial arts, and as such she is an incredible woman. (side-note: that's why I love Judo. It's the martial art that moves as much of success as possible into the realm of mental chess rather than physical strength). Women like this exist, but they are exceedingly rare. This is properly handled by giving them a very low chance at passions and burning passions for these things, but not a zero chance.

Is there any way you could make the female presence happiness mod consider the presence of "available" women (i.e. single unless there's free love or women can have multiple spouses) rather than just women in general? Currently if you have a situation where men can have multiple spouses and all the women are taken, the single male pawns get a happiness buff even though in reality they'd be quite dissatisfied.

Why can only men be bored without the opposite sex, but it doesn’t work the other way around? If there is a “female presence”, then why is there no “male presence”? It would be fair to women. :)

@HTxL: I think the flat beauty bonus works poorly in practice. The social effect is rather strong (+20 is equal to brother/sister social buff, and it's almost equal to the -25 of misogynist). It also probably shouldn't work for women themselves. I have a colony that happens to be mostly women and pretty much everybody likes everybody else, which seems to be nonsense. It should be like +5 (+10 at most), and work only for men (sort of the opposite of the misogynist debuff).

(height information from Wikipedia which may not be 100% accurate)
Average height:
Male: 170.8
Female: 158.6
difference: ~7%

EDIT body size isn't body scale
Factors:
size & health: .81 (realistic size difference)
MaxNutrition: 1.235 (use 1/body size)
Remove (affected by body size)
MeatAmount, Mass, CarryingCapacity

@alf.lord51: You cannot scale 3d metrics linearly by 1D metric. See 'square-cube law'.

it says on the mod page as one of the changes "Increased meat amount: Raised from 85% to 90% to compensate for the decrease due to body size reduction"
which will give 113 (81%) instead of the intended 119 (85%)

also the game already ignores the square-cube law when it comes to meat amount
in-game formula Base * bodysize * health
Base is 140 (2 for dryads)
the MeatAmount StatDef affects the base