Perhaps the semantics surrounding the difficulty level need to be reassessed. 100% of normal challenge mode sounds like "normal" difficulty. More than 100% suggests you're ramping things up. Less than 100% sounds like you're chickening out a bit. So I choose 100% because the balance of difficulty suggests to me that I'm playing "at par", so to speak. If 100% of challenge mode is actually supposed to be really difficult, I'd suggest reorienting the percentage to align with what "par" difficulty actually should be.
Now, if 100% difficulty is about what it's supposed to be right now... well holy crap. Let's see.
- 4 of my 8 colonists have had their legs shot off... what's the game's obsession with incapacitating my colonists in this way?
- 9/10 trade ships that come by are weapons traders. Occasionally I get an exotic goods trader, but only 1/10 times does that trader have any kind of prosthetic leg. How am I to fix my colonists at this rate?
- The only way to stop a siege is to proactively go and stop it, which ultimately puts at least 25-50% of my colonists in a medical bed afterward. I'm now having to get each one out of bed to heal his friend, then sending him back to bed. Meanwhile, nobody's collecting food, so starvation is kicking in.
- With starvation and infections to try and micromanage my way out of, well hey, why not throw in a psychotic cobra and an outbreak of malaria? yay!
- Now that my colonists are on the brink, hey let's throw in yet another mechanoid attack?
- And having barely fought them off using my last able-bodied but sick, wounded and infected colonist who happens to have a rifle, why not throw another siege my way? Because naturally now I am easily going to be able to fight it off, having been given all of 13 seconds to recover from the mechanoids, infections, starvation and malaria.
This happens every time, in one form or another.
This is alpha, so I want to acknowledge that. There's lots of work yet to be done- I get it. But I figured I'd report this anyway, as Cassandra really does seem to have a sadistic, maniacal side where after a while she deliberately throws literally so much at you that you just can't keep up, no matter how hard you try. My last few colonies were lost in this same way, despite having awesome kill tunnels, masses of defenses and so forth. She hits you hard, then while you're trying to recover, she hits you again. Then she laughs in your face by making everyone sick. Then she has SNAKES smash down STEEL DOORS and kill your prisoners who you're hoping can replenish your colonist numbers, and then she spits on you with psychic drones and mechanoids.
*Sigh*
I'm very much hoping that the "A.I. story teller" gets better at creating stories, as opposed to creating unwinnable situations. These games keep ending in me feeling helpless, defeated and angry at the game for doing its utmost to screw over a colony I've put a lot of effort into holding back the tides of incoming problems. I welcome a challenge, I really do, but Cassandra really should take stock of my capacity overcome a challenge before just randomly smashing the challenge pinada all over my lawn.
... then again maybe I just suck and should have done a better job of making my base into an insane super-fortress before Cassandra decided to punish me for not keeping up.
Which is exactly why I avoid putting this on higher difficulty. Dealing with mechanoids and being outnumbered vastly in raids isn't my idea of fun. The game just doesn't take into consideration just how many colonists you have, never mind how many of those can actually fight.
Between the sieges and the raids, it seems the only way to really survive the higher difficulty is to build a base under a mountain and construct a killing floor.
Just wait until we get Titans and megabeasts and necromancers...
Or at least a mod for those things :)
Solution:
Modding the game. In the mods folder is the core folder. In there is some storyteller XML file. You can now turn off raids 100% Also there are 3 story tellers use the easiest base builder.
Make kill boxes/mine traps. Walled in turrety entrances designed to kill anything that steps in at minimal cost to you.
Surgically remove organs from prisoners that are hard to recruit.
Euthanise (lock door) on any worthless colonists that you can't cannibalize for spare parts.
The game has things you need to get used to, like in Dwarf Fortress there are skills and strategies that can maximize your survival chances. Rimworld is much easier so its all possible!
Challenge is the difficulty against which the rest are measured, but it's my belief that Rough is probably the best balance of challenge to success chance for a newer player. With only 8 colonists, Cassandra should be challenging but not unwinnable. My guess is that there are a few quirks of the gameplay that you need to be aware of.
If you're losing limbs at that rate, I suspect you're losing them to tribals and their pointy stick limb removal systems (pila and bows). The only advice I have on that front is never engage tribals on their terms. Outrange them or outmaneuver them, and use turrets to explode their melee troops. Line of sight AI exploiting is useful here (break their ranged AI by putting a wall at the entrance to your base with the only gap leading into the line of fire of a turret or two and your ranged colonists.
Traders are horribly broken, and the more useful they would be to you, the less likely you are to see them. I'm not sure how easy it would be to mod this, but I'm looking into it because the current system is stupid.
With sieges, game the AI. Use line of sight and superior range to your advantage if you can. If you can snipe out one or two members of the siege party, the remainder will blind charge your base, and you can mop them up on your terms with the aid of your base defenses.
Mechanoids aren't as scary as they seem. Scythers and their charge lances (right?) are a bit more of a threat, but if you can outflank them or simply overwhelm them, they go down fairly easily. Centipedes, on the other hand, are extremely tough, but their AI is easy to confuse. I just flank them from a few directions. They spin in circles rather than engaging in proper combat, and if they do stop to shoot, just move their target while they're preparing to shoot, and wait for them to start spinning again to move back. They take a while to kill, but they're not very threatening.
Try a game at rough, anyway, and try to keep the bad AI in mind when in combat.
Also, get used to peg legs. Peg legs for everyone!
Difficulty is an interesting topic since it's quite personal to what the individual player wants from their gaming experience.
I admit I've still not found a difficulty setting that I'm happy playing at. My issue is mostly with the scaling, 30%, 100% doesn't really matter that much as eventually your colony will be seen as doing well enough for the game to start throw overwhelming hoards at you. At that point it devolves into more turrets being the 'best' or at least easist way to deal with things and clean-up becoming a bit of an annoyance.
Modding is going to be my ultimate solution for me but it's a matter of waiting to see how the game changes and adapting from that. I'm playing around with a few things currently to reduce the ease of building turrets but I'm going to need to look into attack scaling and colony 'wealth'.
My theoretical ideal game would be one that starts off as your colonists against the environment as slowly progresses from there. I'm looking for longer term games though.
Looking at the change log I'm interested to see how the animals fighting back plays out in relation to the early game.
Rimworld is supposed to be hard! Like in Dwarf Fortress, the best stories are about failure. 100% difficulty (normal) should be very challenging to new players, like with most things. And trying is more interesting than success (http://www.pixartouchbook.com/blog/2011/5/15/pixar-story-rules-one-version.html).
It's easy to get hung up on what happened and forget all the ways you could have prevented it. For example, not having enough meals is a pretty big mistake. Having enough medical beds for all your colonists is also a colony-ending mistake, you'll get colony-ending bottlenecks this way unless you're smart enough to keep your doctors away from combat. If you have a ton of combat traders with their cheap medicine, you shouldn't be struggling with infections and sickness as much either.
I agree RW is definitely alpha and I'm looking forward to more content and refined features, but difficulty is the last thing I'd change.
This is just a limitation of the game because, as you said, this is alpha. RimWorld is a storyteller generator, and at this point it specializes in drama. That being said, when you're leading a very successful colony that's getting progressively richer/stronger/bigger without taking losses, it goes against the "drama instinct" the storytellers have. That's why Cassandra is hitting your base so hard. If I may ask, did you ever lose any colonists, or do you reset whenever your pawns die?
If the latter is the case, then you're trying to play the game/story differently than the storyteller is trying to enforce, meaning you will indeed get frustrated since Cassandra's going to keep getting more and more insane until you take losses. (And yes, it you take it too far, you may eventually find yourself wiped out all at once. You'd be better off taking losses than allowing that to happen, imo.)
That being said, the game isn't totally without reprieve. Given the above premise (drama storytelling), RimWorld is meant to be played "above normal" difficulty. This aspect isn't unique; there are other games with difficulty settings that recommend a difficulty harder than normal for the "truest experience" (Gears of War comes to mind). That's all that's happening here. If you feel like the game is dissing you by labeling the lower difficulties things like "casual", then I don't think I can help. You're operating in a niche (little drama) that RimWorld hasn't expanded into heavily yet.
I personally have been more of a basebuilder for awhile. I never liked killboxes and other strategies that drive the storyteller nuts, but at the same time I didn't like taking losses either. Recently I've been expanding my mindset and playing Ironman-style on low difficulty, to ease myself into the current gameplay/storytelling focus. (Low difficulty is, in fact, quite manageable even for a beginner.)
So, all in all, I have a few solutions for you:
(1) Play on a lower difficulty such as casual. Raids and disasters will be just as common, but each instance will be only one third as severe as it would be in challenge mode. This will help ease you into colony danger management without overwhelming you.
(2) Play on a different storyteller, particularly Phoebe Basebuilder. Phoebe will pack just as much punch as Cassandra on a given difficulty when disaster strikes, but she gives you a wide berth and doesn't send said disasters nearly as often. If you're just looking for a success story, this may be your best bet.
(3) Get used to losses. Again, this is going under assumption, but it sounds like you're the type that refuses to lose any pawns in most scenarios. While I can relate, I would strongly advise getting over that, since you're really limiting your gameplay experience. This applies to more than just pawn deaths too; I used to only accept the creme of the crop when generating starting colonists for my world, and while I still sift through them, I'm more accepting of "fun" colonists that don't fit my own parameters. For example, one colonist which I wouldn't have accepted in my previous mentality is a jogging masochistic melee nut (who's actually rather bad at melee)- the traits went together so well that I just couldn't resist. Playing with her in combat has been a fun change of pace.
Concerning "accepting losses", I can give some cases for allowing this through my own experiences. Take my primary combat colonist. I bought him a charge rifle early on and keep him equipped with the best clothing I can get my hands on, but the guy's a figurative wreck even in easy mode: He has a stab scar on his neck; his left eye has been cut out; his rib's been shattered; his jaw was blown off and had to be replaced with a denture; he lost his left hand for the sake of a power claw... I mean, that might sound awful from one perspective, but it's pretty awesome from another. He's pretty hardcore, no? I probably wouldn't have had a colonist like that before. Another scenario: The melee person I mentioned above lost her left lung in battle, and there were no traders carrying lungs for quite a long time (nor eyes, unfortunately for my combat man), so what did I end up doing...? I harvested a lung from a captured raider, who (ironically enough) had a background in organ farming- her body was genetically engineered to grow organs which were removed repeatedly as she grew up. I probably wouldn't have considered such a recourse during my "perfect colony" days, but when it comes down to making the colonists unhappy for awhile vs. potentially losing one of the important ones, I chose the former. It makes for better dramatic storytelling, but- just because I still like playing the sentimental side- I'll probably just end up releasing her.
Anyway, rambling aside, my point is, the game actually does open up more when you're more accepting of casualties and losses. You can get into some pretty fun/unusual situations in the process.
I have to say that I also find Cassandra Classic ridiculously difficult for what is supposed to be "100% = normal".
Personally I'm quite annoyed by players (accidentally?) implying that difficulty we can "still survive" through explicit exploit, AI limitation, minmaxing and absurd logic should be considered normal.
Saying "but Dwarf Fortress is hard!" have no reason to cut it out, any game have their own dynamic ...and ambiance.
Now of course, maybe it just can't be helped since Rimworld is incomplete.
With few others events centered toward survival, colony moral&health, diplomacy, basebuilding and its current lack of finesse in the Raid themselves it's logical if the storyteller "100%" can't create more than tales of spontaneous dismembering & raider running into giant grinder.
(in fact, its incredible it is already engaging nevertheless)
ps : just to be said : Axefrog and I are really not dramatizing. I too had two siege happening at once plus a tribes attack, all shortly followed by the crash of an ancient starship. Such situation kind of lose its impact when it get regular.
Thanks for the replies.
I do try to accept reasonable losses. Originally I was trying to play it as a roguelike, with no reloads at all, but sometimes Cassandra would still be just utterly unfair. I mostly limit my reloads to cases where my guys die due to stupid A.I. such as an accidentally non-drafted colonist running through a wall of bullets. I admit sometimes I reload in the heat of irritation though, such as when an enemy brawler gets two one-hit kills in a row and not even a scratch, but hey if Cassandra is trying to keep me under control, maybe that's the "story" I'm supposed to let happen. I guess the problem for me is that because it's alpha, the number of types of challenges to overcome is quite limited, so my ability to perceive a loss as part of the greater story is undermined by the limited number of things that can actually happen. We're not anywhere near a level where true emergent behaviour is really being noticed. Credit where credit is due though. Tynan has not been working on this for ten years. yet ;)
I am just going to leave this madness here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEJ6QymV7-o (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEJ6QymV7-o)
I don't understand where the notion that "100% = normal " comes from when the setting is listed as " Challenge "
100% = Challenge.
If you want 60% of challenge, go for Rough.
If you want 130% of challenge, go for Serious Challenge.
The trouble is that you're bending your own fingers backwards by trying to intuit what those difficulty settings mean based on what you think you ought to be able to overcome.
When a setting is explicitly labeled " Challenge " and you think to yourself " Well that means normal " you're out of your mind.
It's also worth pointing out that event frequency is limited by the storyteller, not by the difficulty scale.
If you're playing Randy then don't be surprised when you're unfairly wiped out by multiple simultaneous attacks, that's the nature of the storyteller.
If you're playing Cass and your cleanup between attacks takes too long, yeah you'll eventually be buried under attacks.
If you're playing Phoebe and.. I don't know you take a nap or something in-between attacks then yeah that too might prove to be a problem.
All of that aside - If you start struggling you can at any time switch your storyteller and your difficulty scale in the options menu in game which I would strongly suggest doing rather than artificially lowering the difficulty with constant reloads.
Lowering your difficulty setting isn't the same as failure - I can understand where that notion comes from but for anyone who can step back for even half a second it's pretty obvious that you're simply going to enjoy the game more when you're being sufficiently challenged but also simultaneously not being wiped out, and sometimes that means lowering the difficulty.
Play at the difficulty that you enjoy, don't punch yourself in the crotch by forcing yourself to play what you've perceived is the " Normal " difficulty
Quote from: Boboid on March 14, 2015, 08:40:48 PM
I don't understand where the notion that "100% = normal " comes from when the setting is listed as " Challenge "
You're getting caught up in one particular semantic interpretation of the word "challenge". These words are all relative. Does it mean "I like a bit of a challenge" or does it mean "holy crap, this is going to be challenging"?
When choosing a game difficulty mode in any game, going somewhere around the middle, perhaps erring slightly on the difficult side of the midpoint, you're usually saying "yes I want a reasonable challenge; I don't want things handed to me on a silver platter", not "i want you to challenge me in inhuman, tortuous ways I haven't even dreamed of, and then some". The real problem here is the use of percentages. The alignment of "100%" to a particular difficulty mode suggests that the standard level of difficulty, manually-balanced by the game designer, is aligned at that level. Saying that a given level is only 60% of that suggests that you're choosing to tone down what the designer originally intended. More than 100% suggests that you're trying to make things harder than what the designer originally intended.
Your problem is that you're assuming that your interpretation of a word is the same as everyone else's. What I'd really like to know is what default level Tynan thinks the game is designed to be played at, and then we can decide whether he's a sadistic madman or a fluffy toy enthusiast.
Surely the interpretations of the game dev are broadly irrelevant.
If your end goal is to enjoy the game then the optimal difficulty has nothing to do with the game dev's intentions for you.
It's the difference between playing Chess and using the Chess pieces to construct imaginary battles between castles and goblins.
My original point was that you're deliberately hamstringing yourself by trying to intuit what the game dev's intentions are and then proceeding to assume that the dev knows what's best for you in terms of your enjoyment - which is crazypants.
Quote from: Boboid on March 14, 2015, 09:29:48 PM
Surely the interpretations of the game dev are broadly irrelevant.
If your end goal is to enjoy the game then the optimal difficulty has nothing to do with the game dev's intentions for you.
It's the difference between playing Chess and using the Chess pieces to construct imaginary battles between castles and goblins.
My original point was that you're deliberately hamstringing yourself by trying to intuit what the game dev's intentions are and then proceeding to assume that the dev knows what's best for you in terms of your enjoyment - which is crazypants.
You are massively overcomplicating (and misinterpreting) what I'm trying to convey. I do not want to construct fancy bases and "safe" preconstructed scenarios of my own choosing. I would play in basebuilder mode if that were the case. Or Minecraft. Or something else.
I want a challenge. I don't however want it to be an insanely unreasonable challenge. I don't want to play in carebear mode. I'm ok with losses and bad things happening. I'm ok with being forced to think and strategize if I have any hope of winning. I'm ok with the unexpected. I'm NOT ok with Cassandra mass-murdering my citizens without me having any chance to rise to the occasion and defeat the challenge (even just barely) and then having some vaguely-reasonable period to recover.
So yes, I do want a challenge. Challenges are fun. Nailing all of my colonists to a wall and executing them is not fun. See the difference?
Optimal difficulty is a level of challenge that you'll have to work at to ultimately stay on top of, but which you'll feel rewarded and satisfied for having done so. You'll feel like the work you put in was worth it, and had a purpose. An optimal challenge takes into account what you're capable of and pushes you to the edge to try and defeat said challenge. That is what should be optimised for by the designer, and what should be implied by "100%". 100% isn't just some fancy big number put there to sound scary. It is relative to something, and in this case, it is relative to some baseline difficulty that has been optimised for by the developer. If you think it means something else, you need to back that up with something Tynan has said, because otherwise you're just just making assumptions and preaching those assumptions irrespective of how correct they are.
I agree that 100% implies standard, the difficulty the game was "meant to" be played at. However, again, not all games are meant to be played at a "normal" level. Take maniac shooters or "platform hell" games as extreme examples of this. One person's idea of optimal difficulty isn't going to carry across every game, which is why difficulty settings exist in the first place: If you don't like the dev's intentions, you can tweak it yourself.
That being said, I do agree that the challenge is fairly one-dimensional and harsh at this point when played at challenge or above. Hopefully this will be alleviated when more types of challenges and goals are incorporated beyond "keep colonists mood high" and "survive overwhelming odds against raids".
Quote from: axefrog on March 14, 2015, 10:16:49 PM
You are massively overcomplicating (and misinterpreting) what I'm trying to convey.
What you're
really trying to convey is that you misinterpreted the difficulty variables and as a result think that the entire system needs to be revamped to align with your particular preferred perceptions.
What
I'm attempting to point out is that if you take in this new information and incorporate it into further decisions about difficulty settings you will have a more enjoyable game experience.
You couldn't handle 100%, try something easier. It's that simple.
No, it really isn't. The only real difference between the difficulties is how long the storyteller will wait before crap hits the fan, and none of then take into account any losses your colony has suffered, let alone get a chance to recruit more before dozens more enemies drop in to raid your base. You might fight off a wave of a dozen raiders with your 10, but lose 3 colonists in the process. Then the next wave is 16 and you only have 5 that are not dead or in medical. Get the picture now?
Constantly fighting overwhelming odds is not fun.
Boboid, I just don't feel like you're actually trying to help as much as bully with your point of view. Axefrog has been reasonable in his observations, you haven't been nearly as accommodating with yours
To the topic on hand, I'm pretty sure Tynan doesn't want the difficulty of the ''storytelling'' to be about increasingly massive numbers of raiders/mechs/supersquirrels. Strategy and tactics help greatly but I'll agree that at the "100%" difficulty you basically have to resort to what I think are immersion breaking exploits to have any chance of survival that doesn't involve massive RNG.
Unfortunately that is the only way for the storytelling to give any difficulty imo, because aside from physical attacks there isn't anything the storyteller throws at us that endangers colonies, even in the harsh biomes to a large extent. With time I hope there will be plenty of other events that will be a significant stress but not necessarily involve hordes of raiders etc.
I do think the game is a bit too much about slugging it out with raiders these days. I'm planning some changes that will change the entire difficulty matrix, hopefully in ways you guys will all like. These likely changes includes:
-Reworking the raider AI so they know how to get around killboxes. This will make them stronger, so we'll be able to reduce their frequency/numbers.
-Reworking the challenge scale system to do more than scale raider numbers. Scaling other things like crop harvests will provide a more evenly-changing experience as you shift challenge levels, instead of one that becomes more and more about optimizing a killbox.
-Obviously the previous thing will require rethinking all the difficulty settings, including which one might be presented as "100%" in a tooltip.
EDIT: That all said, there will probably still be a mode called "challenge", and it will still be about defeating a serious challenge. I hope the challenge will be broader than perfecting a killbox design, but it will still be very difficult or impossible to beat for most players. Some people want that, and that's what "challenge" means. I guess where I fell down in messaging is exposing that percentage figure.
It's an interesting game design observation just how much heartbreak can be caused by a single percentage number in one tooltip. If OP had simply been given the difficulty level labels, he'd likely have had an entirely different perception of that choice and an entirely different experience.
Very cool. Nice too see some official feedback. Sounds promising for how I like to play.
Interesting to see two sides of the argument. One relating to the difficulty nomenclature and peoples preconceptions of what it means vs the more practical, choose the difficulty that suits you regardless of what it's called.
Quote from: Tynan on March 15, 2015, 02:54:50 AM
Scaling other things like crop harvests will provide a more evenly-changing experience as you shift challenge levels, instead of one that becomes more and more about optimizing a killbox.
Little bit worried about that - Crop harvests seem innocuous enough but scaling various game mechanics to difficulty can be a bit of a brain-chomper for players.
Sticking with Crop Harvests - It's annoying to have to memorize the effects of various difficulty levels on crop yields, if it's as simplistic as " X difficulty increases growth time by X number " then that's not
too bad, but if potatoes yield 2 instead of 4 or if trees yield 30 wood instead of 60 it gets a bit frustrating to keep all that info together.
Combat difficulty has the same problems, if you make raiders limbs have 5 more hitpoints each or make them 10% more accurate it's doubly frustrating to increase the difficulty, because not only are you likely dealing with
more but also simultaneously
all your preconceptions are off.
X-Com EU and the original CoH both come to mind as examples of statistically scaled difficulty done very very wrong.
Quote from: Boboid on March 15, 2015, 05:09:07 AM
Combat difficulty has the same problems, if you make raiders limbs have 5 more hitpoints each or make them 10% more accurate it's doubly frustrating to increase the difficulty, because not only are you likely dealing with more but also simultaneously all your preconceptions are off.
Yes, that is the main danger of this kind of system, which is why I want to keep the changed variables few in number and obvious in effect. E.g. it's not that complicated if plants simply yield 40% more food at an easy difficulty level, or the colonist default mood is 8 points higher. These effects are simple, centralized, and easy to understand.
I wouldn't do something like modifying raider health; it's way too obscure and makes no sense since raiders become colonists and can retain their same injuries.
Quote from: Tynan on March 15, 2015, 02:35:18 PM
Quote from: Boboid on March 15, 2015, 05:09:07 AM
Combat difficulty has the same problems, if you make raiders limbs have 5 more hitpoints each or make them 10% more accurate it's doubly frustrating to increase the difficulty, because not only are you likely dealing with more but also simultaneously all your preconceptions are off.
Yes, that is the main danger of this kind of system, which is why I want to keep the changed variables few in number and obvious in effect. E.g. it's not that complicated if plants simply yield 40% more food at an easy difficulty level, or the colonist default mood is 8 points higher. These effects are simple, centralized, and easy to understand.
I wouldn't do something like modifying raider health; it's way too obscure and makes no sense since raiders become colonists and can retain their same injuries.
You want raiders to be more threatening, not just harder to kill. Right now, the raiders aren't very threatening at all and are particularly hard to kill, vs how vulnerable colonists are in contrast. Thus, the killbox design to optimize damage output at minimal risk. Alternatively, many requests/popular mods revolve around moar damage for turrets or better protection for colonists (who do more damage than turrets).
A raider that shoots an exposed windmill/solar panel is more threatening than the same raider walking into turrets.
A raider with a riot shield (better than the shield generator, imo) is a bigger threat because of how turret targeting works. Even if such a shield provided little other protection and made him a weak melee combatant.
Two raiders, one with a shield, the other with an incendiary launcher, could complicate a killbox more than 20 raiders just mob-rushing in.
Especially if raiders don't prioritize unpowered turrets.It's also something that colonists could handle with much less effort, even with weak weaponry.
May also wish to reconsider general lethality of firearms. For the most part, they only really kill when they hit something vital, so they should be incapping more than obliterating people with protection.
Oh man, I can only imagine how stressing (in the good way) it could be to take down raiders in a modern sort of testudo formation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testudo_formation), if riot shields were a thing. You'd be more likely to have to get up close and personal- which could turn ugly quite fast.
Raiders using strategies would make combat leagues more interesting/entertaining than it is now. I'm guessing it's a coding sink, though; programming even one strategy, when and where to perform it, when to stop performing it, and so on would take a lot of effort, I'd think.
It sounds awesome though. Maybe you could base an alpha (or two) around that sort of thing, Tynan? :3
Well, there was a step forward with the personal shield concept, though that's an attempt to make melee viable on a per-pawn basis.
Equipping a riot shield (high bullet protection, can't carry anything else, does crap melee damage) on the first raider stepping into a killbox would draw most of the fire. Everyone else could function with only the change of ignoring unpowered turrets. This means that instead of pounding on a turret until it explodes, they just attack the wire (or deactivate it since they're right there)
Doesn't require immense changes I don't think. If you want, you could make this 'tech-savvy' approach specific to pirates instead of tribals.
Peg legs will allow your legless colonists to move around, albiet a lot slower.
Trading system right now is a placeholder. It functions, and I am glad I have something instead of nothing.
The good replay value functions (procedurally generated landscape, rpg elements in pawns, random events, steep learning curve) are wasted if it doesn't challenge you / kill your first few settlements.
Quote from: SSS on March 15, 2015, 07:51:12 PM
Oh man, I can only imagine how stressing (in the good way) it could be to take down raiders in a modern sort of testudo formation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testudo_formation), if riot shields were a thing. You'd be more likely to have to get up close and personal- which could turn ugly quite fast.
I actually use such formation against mechanoid from time to time, my shield wearer are on the front with sharpshooter just behind.
Of course it only work against concentrated/lone enemy and it take 2 time more manpower, depending if you attack with melee weapon or just want shield.
Just thought I'd drop this in here.
Cassandra blessed all my shooters with an outbreak of malaria and then not a minute later, dropped a siege into an area with basically nowhere that I can get any decent cover from. I outfitted my two remaining healthy colonists with the best gear I could find laying around, then when I got to the siege had them hide behind a tree and a rock, and both were promptly taken out in succession - and i mean literally first shot taken on both - (one had his head destroyed, and the other was shot through the chest) by a single sniper with only 9 shooting skill.
Tynan, if you're still keeping up with this thread, it'd be interesting to know what sorts of plans with regards to building out the A.I. of the storyteller's own decision making process for what to challenges to present the player with, and when and how those challenges should be paced, particularly with respect to chronologically-adjacent challenges. I know you talked about making the way raiders behave more intelligent, and improving the types of challenges that we can be presented with, but I really can see a need to need to look at the logic and heuristics of how challenges are selected and paced. Would it be difficult to do something like build a score around each colonist's capacity to do a given thing, project that towards the base's general capacity to achieve a given thing, and also weigh that against those generalised base-level scores as they exist both before and after a given challenge has been met and triumphed against? Assessing the unbiased calculation of how well the storyteller expects the player to succeed against a given obstacle, as compared to how well they *actually* faired would perhaps allow further calculations to be weighted. I think there's a lot you could do with that idea anyway.
My experience of having the storyteller first incapacitate those who are capable of defending my base, immediately follow it up with a siege, and then one-shot kill both of my last-ditch attempts to fight off the siege, makes the blatant randomness of the current system quite visible.
Quote from: axefrog on March 16, 2015, 10:18:13 AM
Just thought I'd drop this in here.
Cassandra blessed all my shooters with an outbreak of malaria and then not a minute later, dropped a siege into an area with basically nowhere that I can get any decent cover from. I outfitted my two remaining healthy colonists with the best gear I could find laying around, then when I got to the siege had them hide behind a tree and a rock, and both were promptly taken out in succession - and i mean literally first shot taken on both - (one had his head destroyed, and the other was shot through the chest) by a single sniper with only 9 shooting skill.
Tynan, if you're still keeping up with this thread, it'd be interesting to know what sorts of plans with regards to building out the storyteller's decision making process for what to do and when. I know you talked about making the way raiders behave more intelligent, and improving the types of challenges that we can be presented with, but I really can see a need to need to look at the logic and heuristics of how challenges are selected and paced.
My experience above of having the storyteller first incapacitate those who are capable of defending my base, immediately follow it up with a siege, and then one-shot kill both of my last-ditch attempts to fight off the siege, makes the randomness of the current system quite visible.
1. Does malaria really
incapacitate pawns ? If it works like any other Rimworld disease or plague, surely they could delay their treatment a little to handle the more pressing danger, then go to bed. Googling says it merely impairs consciousness in early stages.
2. Sieges are rarely immediately lethal. They cause damage, but if you have people running around and putting out fires, they rarely do anything permanent.
3. You offer very little detail. At least a screenshot of the sieging camp would let us speculate if there was a way around it. Making balance changes based on your evidence is controversial at best.
Cassandra is only responsible for the Malaria and the Siege. Getting your guys one-shotted sounds like RNG screwing you.
Welcome to savescumming.
Quote from: Mathenaut on March 16, 2015, 10:47:33 PM
Welcome to savescumming.
I prefer to think of it as rage reloading.
I have two issues with combat:
1. No-win scenarios occur so easily. If a siege starts and 3 of the guys have rifles (I think they're M-24's), it doesn't matter how many colonists you have or how good they are with guns, all it takes is a few head shots and your colony is finished.
2. There's few options to work with in combat. Either the enemy is wandering into your killbox (which is ideal) or you're marching out to meet them (not ideal with high casualties). As a result I spend most of my game time creating elaborate killboxes as it's the most viable way to keep a colony alive. It's also the most boring...
Some ways to fix this:
- Make artillery easier to acquire/use and more effective
- Gun turrets with different barrel types, i.e. a long range EMP for taking out mechs, short range flamethrower for roasting raiders
- Crafting weapons/armor made easier so you can outfit at least some of your colony in the way you want
- Crafting medkits or ways to slowly improve medical so injuries are not colony ending
- Make colonists easier to come by so they're more disposable and losing 2 or 3 in combat isn't colony ending
- Randomly make some raids that try to cut power to killboxes
- Randomly make some raids that carry EMPs to disable killboxes
Quoteboth were promptly taken out in succession - and i mean literally first shot taken on both - (one had his head destroyed, and the other was shot through the chest) by a single sniper with only 9 shooting skill.
It's not a huge difficulty issue as much as it's a matter of if you fight snipers at range (especially during the day in clear weather), you're going to have a bad time (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynxPshq8ERo).
Tynan has some revamps for combat balancing in the works, so we'll mostly have to see how he handles that and give feedback from there.
Until then: rage reloading (I'm keeping that, lol)
The only problem I currently see with the difficulty (Cassandra) is that it gets harder with time without giving the player any way (other than killboxes) to compensate for it. So, ultimately the game wants you to fail, and the only way you can prevent it is by build a killbox and bugger off (build a spaceship) before your killbox breaks. Or you build a killbox that cant break - which probably has to exploit every AI quirk there is.
It gets a race between the killbox and the ridiculus amounts of raiders basically. Was fun for a while, sure. However, "how long can I hold out until I loose/stop playing" started to demotivate me instead of motivating me. I found myself only playing less and less because of that.
Everything IMO, for sure. I rather like the game, but if the game wants me to loose ultimately, I ultimately dont want to play it anymore it seems.
Quote from: Tynan on March 15, 2015, 02:35:18 PM
Quote from: Boboid on March 15, 2015, 05:09:07 AM
Combat difficulty has the same problems, if you make raiders limbs have 5 more hitpoints each or make them 10% more accurate it's doubly frustrating to increase the difficulty, because not only are you likely dealing with more but also simultaneously all your preconceptions are off.
Yes, that is the main danger of this kind of system, which is why I want to keep the changed variables few in number and obvious in effect. E.g. it's not that complicated if plants simply yield 40% more food at an easy difficulty level, or the colonist default mood is 8 points higher. These effects are simple, centralized, and easy to understand.
I wouldn't do something like modifying raider health; it's way too obscure and makes no sense since raiders become colonists and can retain their same injuries.
I honestly think the best kind of difficulty scaling should be easily understandable and expected from a player's point of view too. Perhaps working on the AI and tweaking that in addition to gear quality, numbers, and raid frequency should suffice for now. In the long term, it can perhaps dictate the frequency and strength additional types of "boss" raids, or unique/rare factions that are technologically much more superior but rewarding at the same time if defeated. By reducing numbers via mood, yield, etc, the difficulty setting simply adds a handicap and does not really become "more difficult" by adding in new content, behaviors, or anything interesting from a player's point of view (at least mine). Difficulty and handicaps should be separated.
The game is supposed to be challenging but FUN. It should not become a hassle or make players memorize long formulas or stats for each equipment/yield/etc. A game like this should be various "end-games" and various types of ways to build a base and still progress while being enjoyable at the same time. The difficulty setting should not nerf something but instead enhance the enemy of the player in a game (like some of the examples listed above). Handicaps can be added in, but it should not be bound to the difficulty setting. Instead, it should be utilized as an additional, optional, game rule subset. This will be akin to starting off in winter in a frozen place. If the player wants to be handicapped, let them do so themselves, and let them define it at will.
A good example of this might be AI War, a RTS game that is also extremely hard (to win) at its default difficulty level (1-10, default 7), however, this level only dictates enemy AI's behavior and response thresholds (in Rimworld, it would mean larger raids trigger at lower wealth levels). In addition to that, there are tons of modifiers that allow the player to make the game easier, harder, and/or force a different play style. For example, if those customizations were carried over...,
- Define what kind of enemies you want to see, for example, only tribals/low-tech or only aliens? Maybe you crash landed in a place with NO other humans (other than new ones that crash lands for the sake of growing the colony, unless we start getting growth enhancers for baby colonists or drones/droids).
- Define what kind of weapons/buildings/tech will be allowed. (For example, no shields, or no sniper rifles, no bionic items, etc.)
- Define yield, "money", HP, basically any statistics against % sliders. This would be the handicap modifier, you should also be allowed to increase it, say 200% yields too!
- Change the game's combat mechanics from fast and deadly, to slow and drawn out, and anything inbetween (damage modifiers, limb/incap thresholds, etc.)
- Add/remove/modify ally factions (those visitors, what if we don't want them, or perhaps we want more of them?)
- How about actual game modes/events as well? In the future (as the game gets more content), I expect Rimworld to get much more random events/interactive quests?/story-mission-like-events, there should be a setting to also define what you want to see and what you don't. Even now, some players might really dislike the diseases system, or the mood modifiers, or anything. However, the only way to make the experience match their tastes at the moment is to rely on mods.
Allowing an advanced configuration of a game can extend the possibilities of replay-ability of it without even requiring new content. Obviously there should still be a few "default" presets, but there should also be an advanced menu that will allow tweaks to fine tune an experience. Hence, I really hope the difficulty setting doesn't get rolled into things that simply make the game more of a pain to play. <- TLDR version
And to the OP, you have to cheese the AI a little to survive it, if you aren't building a bulletproof killbox, you need to out micro the AI. Conventional logic will get you killed very fast because your colonists are almost always outgunned and sometimes outgeared (and outskilled/traited?). The only thing you can do to ensure YOU win against a raid is to for example, do quick hit and runs, think... Starcraft 2's "stutter step". Exploit the enemies' aiming period (OOR, LOS them). Equip yourself if you can, with weapons that are longer ranged, also equip a few with weapons that have short aim/cooldown times. Juggle between these and you'll eventually find a good way to be able to ambush-distract-kill enemies without taking too much if at all, any casualties. I must admit though, it largely becomes a cat and mouse game (hit and run, rinse and repeat). Use the pause option very often and remember to move your colonists alot.
/\ that .. exactly that. +infinite
Most 4x Games have this kind of gameplay customisation.
In addition to the before mentioned settings you can also set the Victory Condition which would answer
the ongoing discussion between stay forever or build a ship.
In terms of raid sizes, I'd rather not see an ever increasing raid size each time around as, as Merry76 said, it results in a race to see whether you can build a ship in time, or inevitably results in one enormous raid following another and walking right through whatever is left from the last time around.
I think it would make for a better experience if there was more of a bell curve to raid frequency and sizes rather than what appears to be an exponential increase until collapse or escape. Raids should start off as scouting parties and, depending on how strong you are, how quickly you dispatch with them, how much more advanced you are in terms of technology, and how big the colonies are relative to each other, influences the size and delay of the next raid, which could be considerably larger. Should a significant raid be beaten, similar sized raids won't occur for a while. Think of it as a single tribe trying their luck with you and getting a severe smackdown, and that smackdown discourages other tribes from attacking.
I play toward building a ship to escape, but that's not everyone's deal.
The problem (well, odd to call it that, given the alpha status) is that a limited event que and an even more limited subset of events make for raider scaling being the only challenge constant with respect to high playtime or colony size.
That is to say, there aren't many other things for the game to throw at you. Essentially, Cassandra's deal is essentially pushing you to get off planet eventually.
Basebuilder has the issue of longer intervals between events. So fewer raids, but also fewer trade ships or other things that generally bring life to the game.
An idea would be for threats to be independent of the general event cycle.
In my mind, normal storyteller are meant for time-limited* game and push you toward an ENDING (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=11275.msg112541#msg112541), even if only two exist right now (Spaceship or Death)
However raid being constant, predictable in process and increasing difficulty don't make a good story. This is what make Rimworld still an ALPHA.
From how Tynan sold the project to me, the game will in the end generate event in a way that can form narrative, hopefully logical yet not predictable.
*of course, another Storyteller could be made for endless playtime.
Is this just me, or difficulty only really makes raids stronger ? I think the duration of solar flare and eclipse is fixed.
I agree. That's why I hate the difficulty, cause eventually you get overwhelmed and the moment you start taking a few losses, your screwed cause the storyteller won't scale back the number of raiders that get thrown at you. Something else is that these are survivors. This isn't a military base. It is rare I ever have more then two or three colonists that can actually fight, and often have to fight at odds of five to one, or worse, which makes killboxes needed.
Stop trying to find ways to get around killboxes. Start trying to find ways that make killboxes no longer required!
you are all raging at a thing in development that is very difficult to fix without more content. its like a snake eating its own tail. The game is hard because the enemies have good weapons and you dont, but in order to get those weapons you have to kill the enemies. The Logic that drives the Storytellers isnt worth refining until most of the systems they need to calculate are implemented, but in order to implement those systems more content needs to be made and round and round it goes. Weirdly enough, if you all went and grabbed a few of the vanilla style content mods, you might find your issues with the difficulty fade. The reason for this is because more content means you have more options(such as different guns for different problems, different turrets or different crew or more capable crew or more medicine etc etc). Basically, these problems will go away with more content.
that being said, the current storytellers and the tactics of the ai are rather dull. once again, its a dev thing, but your less likely to find mods to fix it couse that sort of Logic is difficult to code. Basically, it is what it is until it isnt anymore. Thats why game development is an iterative process.
At that point I think we all know it is all because "the game is just in alpha", but Alpha were supposed to be near unplayable, It's Early-access game that make them playable plus "reduced expectation" debuff.
YET, still good for each person to point out what exactly bother them. Me for example want more non-combat event and diplomacy, other want to fight other faction on equal footing.
And pointing out that event duration like Solar-flare didn't change is a pretty interesting remark. Those should vary.