The success or failure of a Sim is reflected in their house, and what they want to do is the form the house takes.

But in a game like DF or Rimworld, the roles are reversed. The successes and failures of your base are reflected in the lives the people lead, and they scramble to be who the base wants them to be.

Therefore, MUCH more complex base-building and simpler personal stories.

This stands in contrast to The Sims, which ditches combat and retains frame-to-frame sim.

But their houses tell the story of their characters, rather than the characters telling the story of the base. There's no house-complexity, only house-expression.

As an example, we can make cooking and serving dinner make sense!

Because people don't have to walk over at a strict time and waste 4 hours walking there and back.

Instead it's just scheduled. The whole family just shows up unless there's something explicitly keeping them away. No simulated walking, just a check that they are physically capable of making the trip.

This is also linked to the expressiveness of base-building, since the two are inseperable.

For example, we can suddenly have extremely large facilities now that we aren't punishing the player for every tile a character walks across.

In addition, because the character WILL show up on time unless something interesting is happening to them, the facility runs a lot more reliably and can be easily predicted, linked up, and made arbitrarily nuanced.

If we simulate someone's life by what they do, rather than by what meter of grass they're walking across, we can get a much better grasp of their life, rather than a grasp on their ambulatory inadequacies.

It's the combat that requires that moment by moment tactical layout. When we throw it away, we throw away that obsession and open up a whole new set of things people can tell the stories of their lives through.

The existence of specific characters is a big monkey wrench. It's their story that expresses the base's story.

It's not Starcraft. And even Starcraft eventually added hero units. The base-building isn't combat-centric because lives aren't combat-centric.

I think expressing everyone's story through violence is a pathetic waste of potential, and I think if we ditch the microsecond combat sim we can radically expand our options for noncombat.