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First off, I've really been enjoying the game, and I think that your choice to focus on gameplay over VR-enabled 3d graphics was a very smart call.

Unfortunately, I think the random event system needs some work - especially the Cassandra storyteller. In theory, she's supposed to slowly ratchet up the danger level and make your game more fun. She succeeds at the former, but generally fails at the latter.

A "good" storyteller/author manages tension/danger in waves of increasing amplitude, but never intentionally creates an unwinnable situation that robs the players of agency. That last part is what makes the game's fun factor really hit or miss. It seems like the storyteller only measures time between "bad events" of various magnitudes, and has no concept of compounding or emergent threats.

Compounding danger is when some normally minor issue (a solar flare) happens during a long-running event that magnifies its effect (a cold snap or heat wave). A solar flare a few days into a long heat wave on a desert map in the summer is considerably more dangerous than it would be otherwise. This is also true of battery discharges, equipment malfunctions, or even just a "Mad Animal" that happens to be a Boomalope.

Emergent danger occurs in the wake of bad events and often quickly spiral out of control. Getting injured during a raid is pretty typical. But if all your cleaners are bedridden, you're going to see infection. And then if one colonist and his brother both suddenly get the plague, and then one brother dies (he also had heatstroke and muscle parasites), and the other brother goes berserk and kills your only remaining doctor (his fiance), causing her pet yorkie to go berserk and start killing patients in a different hospital room, it seems like the danger level is pretty insane.

So when the storyteller chooses that moment to drop a (very large) raid on you, it seems pretty clear that she isn't really paying attention. There's already a substantial challenge for you to resolve, but the storyteller ignores all this and instead creates an unwinnable situation (yes, this happened last night).

A more succinct example is this: You have 7 colonists. There's a raid, and you now have 2 colonists, both incapable of violence. Not even 2 days later, the storyteller sends a larger raid. Game over.

So, the takeaways from this are:

The storyteller should weigh the "threat" of an event in light of other factors already in play.

The storyteller should introduce escalating threats that are relative to your current ability to deal with them (and not just based on time, wealth, etc).

That would keep the game challenging without creating situations where your choices don't matter.

I think this is partly why there is Phoebe. She will not usually send big threats while you have to fight others, simply because there is a much longer average time between 'negative' events.
Clearly none of the story tellers give a fig about the situation you are in. That's part of Rimworld. It's meant to be unfair at times.
However I can totally feel your pain because stories like the described happened to me too a few times. Especially the part about berserker patients with unresolved issues pets at their heels ;)
Still I think this is a part of what makes this game fun. You are not meant to fight even odds every time, sometimes you just pathetically lose to freak coincidences. If you do not like this, play Phoebe and NEVER the RNG guy. Ever.

Yeah, best thing I can say, from my experiences, is that Cassandra is broken.Randy events scale in the same fashion, but their consistency is different. For me, it is by far the best storyteller. Cassandra just want to murder you, as fast as possible, and Phobe will feel pity and give you chickens.

I recently told a tale of how I almost lost my colony to a series of events in cassandra. (here https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=22264.msg241194#msg241194 (https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=22264.msg241194#msg241194))

As for your ideas:
The storyteller should weigh the "threat" of an event in light of other factors already in play.
"Colonist sick -5 in the scale" - "No turrents -15 in the scale" Something like this should already be at the game, and if it is not, it's not hard to program this with some small factors.
The storyteller should introduce escalating threats that are relative to your current ability to deal with them (and not just based on time, wealth, etc).

Now that is something really hard to do, how do you compute ability so that no-one will cheat it? You can't do that very well. It will at the very least be harder than it should for some, lower for others.

Rimworld, for me, takes a similar difficulty management like dark souls. The difficulty of the game is Always above the line. Do you wanna make a kill box? It becomes easier. Do you wanna put alot of turrents and some pawns with legendary personal shields? Real Easier. Do you have strong charge rifles/survival rifles and everyone is trained to be a decent shooter? Congratz, the game has become very easy.

Can you play without those things? Sure, but being a tribal makes the game harder, being alone with a bunch of pets makes it harder, Starting on a "flat" map makes it harder.

Overall, I agree with you and Cassandra should be reworked. But the raid/events scailing is fine

Quote from: gnilbert on August 01, 2016, 10:50:09 AM
A "good" storyteller/author manages tension/danger in waves of increasing amplitude, but never intentionally creates an unwinnable situation that robs the players of agency.

Please point to the unwinnable situation in a vanilla, unmodded game. Even on extreme I have yet to see one. The only thing that is close is the tribal start scenario on the ice sheet, where starting on a map with a polar bear or two, or some muffalo drastically changes the odds of you surviving long enough to get the tech researched to grow food.

It sounds like you want a storyteller that 'goes easy' on you if you play badly, make mistakes, and are not prepared for the challenges she will send you. This sounds like how Phoebe should work, not the default, consistently dangerous storyteller Cassandra is intended to be.

There is no "unwinnable" situation.  ::)

Sure, there are situations where surviving, much less coming out in a good spot, will be very difficult, but you can technically "win" every situation the game throws at you.

We'd need to establish what an "unwinnable situation" actually is.

For many players, an event that wipes all original colonists, or a situation where cannibalism is the only means of survival would qualify as unwinnable. Even if you can technically take in other settlers or keep going after the breakdown spiral.

One of the legitimate negative reviews on steam was that there was no real way to be proactive. In the long abandoned Spacebase DF-9, at the very least the player could perform regular maintenance on equipment to avoid explosions and breakdowns and the like.

In Rimworld, you can kind of mitigate risk but have no real way to proactively manage it. Breakdowns are random, and on an ice sheet colony a bad zzt event or breakdown can cripple the food production of a colony. Placing switch rooms and splitting up the power grid is an advanced skill and requires resources. Why not just have a maintenance timer with a set, predictable resource drain so that the Storyteller can just focus on world building?

Also, the Raids seem to be balanced now - in a pawn for pawn fight - at least, but there are the mental breakdowns and the fact that a lone survivor can't heal himself to contend with. Surviving a raid doesn't necessarily mean that your pawns will still be alive in a few days. Once again, experienced players know how to build defensible colonies to properly manage those risks, but it shouldn't have to come down to a "git good or go home" situation when an, ahem, "AI Storyteller" should in theory be pulling punches to keep the people playing sub-optimally engaged.

In closing, what worked for Dwarf Fortress was that the entire world map was being calculated and run during the game. All raids in the game came from somewhere and the player could sort of predict what the main threats in the game would be and plan accordingly. Rimworld doesn't have the computational luxury of full world generation, so the Storytellers are there to fudge the numbers and make it look as if there's a full world outside of the starting map.

They're not good yet, and more of a blunt force threat generator than anything resembling artificially intelligent storytellers. This is not a criticism, I fully expect them to get better at some point after all the features are locked in and it becomes time to refine the existing stuff versus adding something new.

In the meantime, hand waiving arguments and claiming that this is how the storytellers are supposed to behave isn't really helping the game in the long run. Hell, if Tynan was to post on this topic that this is as good as the Storytellers will ever be, I'll give up on the game right now.

Nah, but Cassandra is overpowered with some sequences of events, in short spaces of time. And they always repeate the same kinda of sequence. It's not about quality, it's about density

Right after the stopping point my colony, it became kinda of boring, no raids in a while, only cargo pods, traders and some manhunter packs. Then suddendly (at the change of season) 40 Tribals, multiple hives spawining in my moutain base and a mechanoid drop pod with 2 infernal cannons inside my cafeteria. In 2 weeks again.

Didn't lost the colony, only a few limbs and resources. But now i'm at the state that nothing happens. The last event was a squirel that joined... Randy offers a more constant curve than cassandra, and that is weird.

EDIT

Wow, that was something. Didn't know DF worked that way. And I agree with you, you can only be pro-active on raid events, crashed ship parts or in the colony building. You can't take time to prepare for events like infestations and etc.

What if, instead of the bugs just spawing in the mountain, the would start hitting the wall and cracks would appear where they would spawn. You would have time to take that uninstalled battery and turrent, put them near it, and better prepare your colonists.

Quote from: Gennadios on August 01, 2016, 03:33:17 PM
We'd need to establish what an "unwinnable situation" actually is.

For many players, an event that wipes all original colonists, or a situation where cannibalism is the only means of survival would qualify as unwinnable. Even if you can technically take in other settlers or keep going after the breakdown spiral.

One of the legitimate negative reviews on steam was that there was no real way to be proactive. In the long abandoned Spacebase DF-9, at the very least the player could perform regular maintenance on equipment to avoid explosions and breakdowns and the like.

In Rimworld, you can kind of mitigate risk but have no real way to proactively manage it. Breakdowns are random, and on an ice sheet colony a bad zzt event or breakdown can cripple the food production of a colony. Placing switch rooms and splitting up the power grid is an advanced skill and requires resources. Why not just have a maintenance timer with a set, predictable resource drain so that the Storyteller can just focus on world building?

Also, the Raids seem to be balanced now - in a pawn for pawn fight - at least, but there are the mental breakdowns and the fact that a lone survivor can't heal himself to contend with. Surviving a raid doesn't necessarily mean that your pawns will still be alive in a few days. Once again, experienced players know how to build defensible colonies to properly manage those risks, but it shouldn't have to come down to a "git good or go home" situation when an, ahem, "AI Storyteller" should in theory be pulling punches to keep the people playing sub-optimally engaged.

In closing, what worked for Dwarf Fortress was that the entire world map was being calculated and run during the game. All raids in the game came from somewhere and the player could sort of predict what the main threats in the game would be and plan accordingly. Rimworld doesn't have the computational luxury of full world generation, so the Storytellers are there to fudge the numbers and make it look as if there's a full world outside of the starting map.

They're not good yet, and more of a blunt force threat generator than anything resembling artificially intelligent storytellers. This is not a criticism, I fully expect them to get better at some point after all the features are locked in and it becomes time to refine the existing stuff versus adding something new.

In the meantime, hand waiving arguments and claiming that this is how the storytellers are supposed to behave isn't really helping the game in the long run. Hell, if Tynan was to post on this topic that this is as good as the Storytellers will ever be, I'll give up on the game right now.

Again, there is no unwinnable situation in Rimworld. If you lose all your colonists, wait a couple of minutes, someone will join the colony. If your colonists are driven to cannibalism as a result of a lack of food, then the game-as-story-generator is working as intended. Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.

Not everything needs to be balanced around Ice Sheets.  Just throwing that out there.

The nonpowered production benches were put in specifically to avoid breakdowns. Don't want breakdowns? Don't use the powdered benches

Maintenance? You mean replacing worn out parts? Kinda like ..... I dunno, replacing components? Like what already happens in-game? Sure, it would be nice if we could do that before the machine breaks down, but the difference is minimal, as you would have to shut down the machine to service it anyways.

You can totally be proactive with regards to threats. Stockpile resources (food, spare parts, medicine) to prepare for threats like breakdowns, food shortages, diseases. Lay traps in the travelling paths of enemies, call in allies to help.

I just don't understand where the idea of "unwinnable situation" is coming from.

Quote from: Boston on August 01, 2016, 04:21:37 PM

Again, there is no unwinnable situation in Rimworld. If you lose all your colonists, wait a couple of minutes, someone will join the colony. If your colonists are driven to cannibalism as a result of a lack of food, then the game-as-story-generator is working as intended. Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.

Not everything needs to be balanced around Ice Sheets.  Just throwing that out there.

People have their own preferences. Those without prepare carefully may have needed to reroll a few times to get people they want, customized names and so forth, then cherry picked the pawns to save and/or recruit to flesh out the colony. It's possible to pick up with some randomly generated vagrant after all those colonists died. Not everyone wants to. Hell, not everyone knows it's even possible.

I'm sure you don't agree with the way *those* people see it, but they paid for the game as well. Some late arrivals probably paid more than you did.

Quote from: Boston on August 01, 2016, 04:21:37 PM
The nonpowered production benches were put in specifically to avoid breakdowns. Don't want breakdowns? Don't use the powdered benches

Maintenance? You mean replacing worn out parts? Kinda like ..... I dunno, replacing components? Like what already happens in-game? Sure, it would be nice if we could do that before the machine breaks down, but the difference is minimal, as you would have to shut down the machine to service it anyways.

Maintenance will prevent breakdowns in the dead of night, or right after a raid when the player is busy corralling their grieving idiots to try to heal whoever possible so that they don't starve or bleed to death.

Also, I wasn't talking about crafting benches, I'm talking power generation and heaters. Wood based resources aren't really feasible in... certain wood scarce biomes that don't need to be balanced or accounted for at all.

Quote from: Boston on August 01, 2016, 04:21:37 PM
You can totally be proactive with regards to threats. Stockpile resources (food, spare parts, medicine) to prepare for threats like breakdowns, food shortages, diseases. Lay traps in the travelling paths of enemies, call in allies to help.

I just don't understand where the idea of "unwinnable situation" is coming from.

Traders are unpredictable and the map doesn't always have needed resources. Being proactive in Rimworld is difficult because of 3 points of uncertainty: You won't know when a trader will have what you need, you won't know when a trader will buy what you have to sell, traders carry finite gold so even selling surplus resources to every trader doesn't guarantee that the player will have enough dosh to buy the needed items when the right trader does come along.

Quote from: Boston on August 01, 2016, 02:18:26 PM
There is no "unwinnable" situation.  ::)

Sure, there are situations where surviving, much less coming out in a good spot, will be very difficult, but you can technically "win" every situation the game throws at you.

In my original post, "unwinnable" was specifically referring to a set of events that, during the course of the game, created a situation in which no action you could take or plan around would inevitably cause the population of your colony to reach 0 (for some amount of time).

The simplest example, as others have mentioned, is when you're down to one colonist - a skill 20 doctor - he gets an infection, but he can't treat himself, and so he dies.


I'm perfectly content if all my original colonists die off, as long as someone who joined or was brainwashed is still alive. But when the population reaches 0, I consider that "losing," because the colony is dead. Having a random wanderer join you after the extinction event, and somehow magically having a full base and the research from the previous group is the equivalent of starting over on an easier difficulty setting... which you normally do because you lost.

Also, this was not about the initial map conditions. This was specifically about the interactions of the effects of previous events that compound over time.

but some stories are just bound to end in the death of a colony, if ur game just went on and on and on evry single game it would be lame... some of the wierdest and most wonderful stories come from the breakdown spiral .. id go as far as to say nearly all of the best stories I have read and experienced have been about the demise of a colony..  whats wrong with just playing the game out? I can pretty much survive or win anything now days after playing for so long , but sometimes when you get some crazy chain of events that just crushed ur colony ... well personally I love that , you dont have to win rimworld to have a good story, I would say the story is the game to me not the winning or losing.

Unwinnable situation: a mortar siege 20 days in.  You have short bows and pistols, they have sniper rifles and PDWs.

Sometimes the dice just come up bad.  When they do, load the autosave.  Or accept that this story has ended and start a new one.  It's not a big deal either way.

But you're right that Cassandra does tend to write *boring* stories -- long periods of nothing, then intense terror.  I think I may switch to Randy for a more even curve.

Quote from: Dougalishere on August 01, 2016, 05:41:09 PM
but some stories are just bound to end in the death of a colony, if ur game just went on and on and on evry single game it would be lame... some of the wierdest and most wonderful stories come from the breakdown spiral .. id go as far as to say nearly all of the best stories I have read and experienced have been about the demise of a colony..  whats wrong with just playing the game out? I can pretty much survive or win anything now days after playing for so long , but sometimes when you get some crazy chain of events that just crushed ur colony ... well personally I love that , you dont have to win rimworld to have a good story, I would say the story is the game to me not the winning or losing.

I'm perfectly happy with losing - but only if I think there's a way I could have won. In the situation I described in my original post, the illness and mental breakdowns were going to kill destroy my colony, and that would have been fine... because I could have killed both brothers as soon as they got the plague - or I could have amputated their legs, etc.

But when you're down to only two colonists who aren't capable of violence, and seven raiders come in with SMGs and incendiary grenades, it just seems a little silly.

A "storyteller" should be about telling a good story. If the story is about how your colony died, then that should be stated up front, like in Project Zomboid.

Quote from: Boston on August 01, 2016, 04:21:37 PM
Again, there is no unwinnable situation in Rimworld. If you lose all your colonists, wait a couple of minutes, someone will join the colony. If your colonists are driven to cannibalism as a result of a lack of food, then the game-as-story-generator is working as intended. Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.

You just defined the lose condition . . . even in the three castaways scenario you have a goal to help them survive and perhaps leave the planet. If they all die you lost. The game should NEVER give you another colonist; when the last original pawn dies your game should end.

If I'm playing the lone explorer scenario I may be doing just fine . . . but if my lone explorer dies that also counts as a LOSS to me and I'll quit the game. I don't care if he recruited twenty other people and they are doing fine . . . his story just ended and that was the scenario.

If I'm playing a lost tribe I need to keep that tribe alive and help it grow . . . perhaps all of the originals can die but SOMEONE needs to survive that was actually inducted into the tribe by someone else who was able to maintain that continuous line of one culture trying to rebuild, expand, and grow strong enough to defeat the blood machines from the sky.

What counts as a loss depends on the scenario and a BIG problem with the story tellers currently is that we can't let them know what the end goal is supposed to be. For me fleeing the planet in a hand built rocket ship is usually a LOSS . . . my explorer failed to conquer the planet, my lost tribe failed to be strong enough to survive there, etc . . . It's the worst part of the game right now.  We need to be able to add victory conditions to the scenario editor so it knows when we we've won or lost.

If you just repeatedly kill of everyone and restart with a new recruit or two that inherits everyone else' hard work then what was the point? How is that a story? Let alone fun? If I played like that and didn't care about my pawns things would get really easy and dull fast. There just would be no point to playing.

Quote from: gnilbert on August 01, 2016, 05:57:03 PM

Quote from: Dougalishere on August 01, 2016, 05:41:09 PM
but some stories are just bound to end in the death of a colony, if ur game just went on and on and on evry single game it would be lame... some of the wierdest and most wonderful stories come from the breakdown spiral .. id go as far as to say nearly all of the best stories I have read and experienced have been about the demise of a colony..  whats wrong with just playing the game out? I can pretty much survive or win anything now days after playing for so long , but sometimes when you get some crazy chain of events that just crushed ur colony ... well personally I love that , you dont have to win rimworld to have a good story, I would say the story is the game to me not the winning or losing.

I'm perfectly happy with losing - but only if I think there's a way I could have won. In the situation I described in my original post, the illness and mental breakdowns were going to kill destroy my colony, and that would have been fine... because I could have killed both brothers as soon as they got the plague - or I could have amputated their legs, etc.

But when you're down to only two colonists who aren't capable of violence, and seven raiders come in with SMGs and incendiary grenades, it just seems a little silly.

A "storyteller" should be about telling a good story. If the story is about how your colony died, then that should be stated up front, like in Project Zomboid.

but its not allways about ur colony dying, sometimes its about it surviving sometimes its about it just scraping by , others its about it just spiraling out of control with nothing you can really do about it :) its why I like it because its very unpredicatable like that.

A game session being unwinnable and fair are two different things.

The storytellers Randy and Cassandra will not be fair. Hell no. Randy may just say "Yolololo" and make a colony that was thriving for 5 years implode. Cassandra will use every tool in her kit to make you give up. And that is their design.

I agree that there are some situations that in that precise sittuation, the game is unwinnable. Now go back a Season. Plant Healroot. Mine compacted machinery. Build extra turrents. Wait for it again. Bam, you won that situation. It took me about 7 colonies to make one thrive in A14.

In RimWorld, you can always do better. When you reach a certain level in the game, you will prepare ahead for any event that may happen. The game is not fair, but it is not unwinnable.

Quote from: Gennadios on August 01, 2016, 03:33:17 PMbut it shouldn't have to come down to a "git good or go home" situation when an, ahem, "AI Storyteller" should in theory be pulling punches to keep the people playing sub-optimally engaged.

You do not seem to comprehend how a game that is supposed to be challenging works.

If you play well, you succeed.

If you play badly, you fail.

If you play badly and the game fudges dice rolls for you so you still succeed, you are a 5 year old that starts to cry when the grown ups don't let you win.

Phoebe has less bad events for a reason. Lower difficulty levels exist for a reason.

People coming to these forums and continuously complaining about something being "too hard" for them so it must be dumbed down to their level at the expense of the enjoyment of the many others who actually want a challenging game, purely because they are too selfish and prideful to lower the difficulty while learning the game make me feel like having my own mental break.

Please, please stop.  :-\

Quote from: Boston on August 01, 2016, 04:21:37 PM
...
Again, there is no unwinnable situation in Rimworld. If you lose all your colonists, wait a couple of minutes, someone will join the colony. If your colonists are driven to cannibalism as a result of a lack of food, then the game-as-story-generator is working as intended. Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.
...

Losing all your colonists IS a loss, plain and simple. Having another dweeb show up is not a win, that's just starting over in a prebuilt base.

When your last two survivors lay on the ground with their legs chopped off and you have a third abducted by slavers, the game won't send you another dude to join you because you technically still have a bunch of survivors. You're just effed.

If you lose because you failed to look after the colony properly, then you (hopefully) can learn from it and know what to do different when you start over to avoid ending in the same situation again. But if you lose all your people to some RNG event that you couldn't possibly cope with or prevent, that's just bad game design.

Quote
Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.

True, but unless the failure comes from your lack of skill or something you can control (but didn't), then it's just the game screwing you over because it's out to murder you. That's not fun to most people (def isn't fun for me).

Being challenged is fine, having to replace a limb or two is fine, but getting death rained upon you ad naseum  because the RNG is geared to screw you over, ruins the game. For the most part the game seems to think that because you barely survived one raid, then it needs to send an even harder raid at you minutes later just to make sure to eradicate the last of your survivors. Unless you settle right next to a massive pirate settlement or pissed off whoever somehow, that is not in any way a logical event curve.

There is way too much reliance on RNG to create events and everything else, while the game is called a "colony simulator", which means that every single event should come from simulated conditions in all the other camps - they have no reason to attack you 99% of the time because clearly they're better equipped and thus have better resources than you do. In that aspect the game fails hard. It makes sense when a feeble tribesman comes into your colony to steal medicine. It doesn't make sense when a bunch of pirates with pulse rifles and kevlar helmets go through your colony, murder everything, and then leaves without taking anything with them - that's not a raid, that's just murder.

Quote from: Britnoth on August 02, 2016, 08:24:39 AM
You do not seem to comprehend how a game that is supposed to be challenging works.
...
If you play badly and the game fudges dice rolls for you so you still succeed, you are a 5 year old that starts to cry when the grown ups don't let you win.

Game Design 101: When you're designing games for kids, you rely heavily on random events (dice rolls, card draws, etc.), because random events reduce the impact of skill, allowing the child (who doesn't understand that luck isn't a skill) to have a shot at beating an adult, without forcing the adult to intentionally throw the game. Think Candy Land, Monopoly, etc.

Games designed for adults that involve large amounts of randomness usually add a "meta" element to counteract it (multiple rounds, bluffing, cooperation, planning, etc.), allowing the more skilled player to (usually) triumph.

Quote from: Britnoth on August 02, 2016, 08:24:39 AM
People coming to these forums and continuously complaining about something being "too hard" for them...

My original post isn't about the game being "too hard." My original post is saying (in part) that currently the game feels a bit too much like Candy Land and not enough like Poker. I don't think anyone would disagree that Poker is a "harder" game, and that you need to really practice to get good at it.

But you can practice Candy Land night and day, and you're not really going to improve.

Even so, this is still a bit of a tangent. My main gripe is that the feature is described as a "Storyteller," and the stories just aren't that interesting - even though they can be funny or surprising.

For more about what makes a good story, I'd strongly recommend reading Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain. It was published in 1965, but it's still hands-down the best book I've ever read on the subject.

Wait The game events happen on a random form. It is rng based.The scale of these events, depends on your wealth and your playtime. If you build sterile rooms you will reduce your chance of infections. If you make individual bedrooms people will not brake from disturbed sleep. If you build a good defense mechanism, people will thrive on raids.

There are some events, right now Breakdowns, Blight, Weather Conditions (sun/wind) and Diseases that happen randomly and cannot be controlled. Other than that, player skill will influence alot on your winning condition.

If you can win all the games, why would you even want to play? Sounds pretty damn boring. For me, not knowing whether I can pull it off is fun. When I see impending, unavoidable doom, I like to see if I can make it more interesting. All this bellyaching...... This is what happens when people give their kids participation trophies.

As far as the storyteller goes, I'm pretty sure they are only half of the story. Your actions should also have an impact. Maybe try to think of Cassy as the teller, but you are the Ghost writer?

I dunno. In this game, winning isn't everything. If you take it too seriously, you might end up like the "Drudge."

Unavoidable doom doesn't give a compelling reason to play a game.

Good unavoidable doom games, primarily roguelikes, encourage playthroughs by actively rewarding failure. You get as far enough as you can and you get some small benefit to give your next run a stronger chance of success.

Then there are unavoidable doom games like Rimworld and Project Zomboid, which get played to death upon purchase, and then... you play for a bit with each update to check what's changed. (A14 is still keeping me engaged even though it's reasonably feature light though, but most of my biggest mechanical issues with A13 have been addressed)

Currently Rimworld neither rewards failure nor provides for compelling long term gameplay. The game is actively trying to kill your colony before the player has a chance to get to the end game and get bored with it. Project Zomboid is doing the same thing, and the Devs are upfront with the fact that the brutal difficulty is a stop-gap until features get implemented to keep it engaging in the long run.

Quote from: Flying Rockbass on August 02, 2016, 09:41:55 AM
There are some events, right now Breakdowns, Blight, Weather Conditions (sun/wind) and Diseases that happen randomly and cannot be controlled. Other than that, player skill will influence alot on your winning condition.

Right on. My impression on the game is that the outside world *should* to be trying to kill the player, but the base (and by 'base' I really mean the structures, pawn health and mind state) needs to be something the player can exercise a greater degree of control over. It's what you build to try and weather the storm.

The Storytellers have too big of a portfolio currently. Some of the stuff they're managing needs to be handed over to the player.

Quote from: Gennadios on August 02, 2016, 11:55:27 PM
Right on. My impression on the game is that the outside world *should* to be trying to kill the player, but the base (and by 'base' I really mean the structures, pawn health and mind state) needs to be something the player can exercise a greater degree of control over. It's what you build to try and weather the storm.

The Storytellers have too big of a portfolio currently. Some of the stuff they're managing needs to be handed over to the player.

I can build structures in a fashion of my taste. Compared to A13, Breakdowns are really rare right now. After you build Hospital beds and Vitals monitors in a sterile room, your recovery of diseases gets alot better.

As for the mind state, confortable workplaces, beutiful rooms, beer, chocolate, joywire, got some loving, painstopper, fine/lavish meals, tons of joy are ways to control your pawns mental health.

Can this system be improved and better worked? Hell yeah, that's why this game is on Alpha.

Quote from: Gennadios on August 02, 2016, 11:55:27 PM
Then there are unavoidable doom games like Rimworld and Project Zomboid,

What.

Sorry, if you think that it is all due to RNG and not the decisions you made that caused you to lose a colony, then you are quite delusional.

You keep going back to the idea that somehow the game sooner or later generates an event that is not possible to survive from, no matter what you did beforehand.

This is complete bollocks.

Once you are experienced at the game and understand how to build a large colony, then that colony is safe from destruction in the vanilla game. Extreme difficulty and all. Including playing without turrets or traps.

The tools are at everyones disposal. It is up to you to stop blaming the game for your failures and to learn from them to make your next colony a success.

Quote from: Britnoth on August 04, 2016, 10:53:14 AM
Sorry, if you think that it is all due to RNG and not the decisions you made that caused you to lose a colony, then you are quite delusional.

You keep going back to the idea that somehow the game sooner or later generates an event that is not possible to survive from, no matter what you did beforehand.

This is complete bollocks.
...

Just to be clear, this actually happened during one of my (very short) not-extreme games. I started with the single rich explorer. It was the first day, and he immediately began building a bed and small room.

On the very first day, before he could finish, he contracted a deadly illness (Plague or Malaria, I can't remember).

He fell to the ground, was incapable of moving, and he eventually died - but not from the disease (which probably would have killed him). He was actually killed by a hare who went mad while he was lying on the ground.

How exactly was I supposed to have prevented that?

A lot of posters seem to believe that the game can't generate these situations. The reality is, with random events and a large player base, it's incredibly likely that some players never see these situations, and some players only see them. That's just how randomness works. Small sample size (the games played by one player) = very high variance from the "expected" case, for better or worse.

Just because you haven't been struck by lightning doesn't mean that no one else has.

Weren't you playing Randy? Cassandra follows a pattern, and she always follow this. Diseases happen very rarely unless you are at a Jungle Biome, and even in these, you should have another colonists at that point.

This shouldn't happen, and if it did I suggest you to post on "Bugs" with the Logs and save-files. Because that may be a bug on the system.

Interesting discussion. My experience playing the game leads me to agree with  the gnilbert entirely.   I play Cassandra/Challenge and trust me, I have encountered plenty of  "unwinnable" situations due entirely to a combination of events occurring at specific times.  Ever had 5 or so colonists and only one with decent medicine who gets one shot killed in a raid, followed quickly by toxic fallout for a whole season?

A major reason for this is the way the game just "drops" many events on you with no prior indicators. 

Much more 'fun' would be for it to provide subtle in-game indicators that something is likely to occur, ahead of time.  For example (as someone else suggested) instead of infestations just magically appearing in rooms (do hives fall through the roof or something!), a few rock wall pieces should slowly start to break up as if they are being mined from the other side. 

If you're observant and notice this early, you realize something is trying to get through and can either reinforce/build over the wall, build turrets and prepare or actually open the breach yourself and preemptively attack. Your choice depends on your current strength/situation. If you don't notice it, well bad luck!  The key point is that it gives you a choice in how/when you deal with it while still forcing you to deal with eventually.

Likewise with toxic fallout.  Instead of the entire map suddenly being covered, perhaps it enters the map from one edge and over the period of a day or 2 gradually expands over the whole map.  Once again, if you are observant you will see it early and have a chance to go on a hunting spree or start building indoor crops.  If you don't bad luck. 

Crop blights could start by one or two plants in the crop visually appearing brown or shriveling.  Once again, if you notice this you can take action such as clearing the problem plants manually.  (More experienced growers could notice this themselves and report it to you).  If you don't, you guessed it, bad luck.

I don't want the game to be easier!  I just want the cheap RNG feel of many of these events to be reduced by giving the player more control over how well they plan/prepare for them.  This in turn will mean that if you do lose, you really do always have just yourself to blame.     

Nice first post Ash1803 but for your first situation, I must agree with Brinoth.

If you only have one medic in your colony, why would you send him on the frontlines? You don't, even if he is the best shooter in the history of best shooters, he's your only medic. Give him a personal shield and send him to wait in a corner away from the action.

Toxic Fallout already has a long time before it starts killing everything, I believe it's almost 5 days for crops. In 5 days you can hunt alot while still building a roof on your crops and installing sun lamps. Then you keep everybody inside resting from toxic exposition.

I know what you mean, some events may have the need to prepare for it before it happens. Because you never know when they will happen and in which combination. But, after you play the game for a while, won't you prepare for it before they even happen?

Some events may need to have an anticipation factor, other don't. Somethings are better to be instanteneos, to feel like you lost control. As a story generator, this is where RimWorld shines.

If everything is predictable, why would I send my boomalopes to attack a siege? Ah, yeah, because they explode and spread fire.

This is just my opinion, but I think Cassandra has been acting weird since A13. She used to be extremely predictable, using very specific events in a specific order up until a certain point. Pretty much every game would be a random wanderer joins event first, then a single pirate with a shiv second. But since A13, it feels like the balance is off somehow. I suspect some of the new events are related to this, as the chain of events determine how quickly you can replace lost pawns.

There is also the question of player expectation. When you play on Randy, you are essentially always anticipating the worst. Every positive event is an unexpected present, and most negative events are shrugged off as "Randy being Randy".
But with Cassandra, you are expecting something more coherent, more fair or at least more predictable. I don't think the AI itself has become less predictable but rather that the events that the AI use as building blocks have become more randomized and subject to new factors, such as relationships, new mood buffs/debuffs, new tiered mood break states etc.

The complexity of the game has grown, which makes it harder for even experienced players to predict what will happen next. Compared to earlier versions, the efficiency of a pawn at any given time can vary greatly depending on mood, which makes it harder to judge how much time a certain task will take to complete. Lately, I often find myself falling behind in a game without knowing exactly why it happened or what I could have done to prevent it. And I feel like I know the game quite well, been playing since A8.

If you take away the predictability, Cassandra suddenly becomes the hardest AI by default because Randy can scale in any direction (presumably) while Cassandra's threat level grows exponentially.

Perhaps the simplest way to deal with this without "dumbing down" the game is to create different challenges for different AIs.
With Cassandra, building a spaceship and gettting off the planet should be your priority, because she will eventually come up with something that will destroy you.
Phoebe's challenge could be a permanent or semi-permament settlement. The outside world will disturb you less, and the challenge lies more in creating an environment that your pawns can live in without mental breaks every 3 days.
And Randy... well. Randy will be Randy. I think the entire point of this AI is to have your best-laid plans ruined by something completely hilarious. It's like a reverse creative mode. Anything you can build, he will tear it down. Using squirrels and drop pods filled with gold when you're starving to death.

Hey gnilbert!

I've given this matter some thought too.

One of the problems is that colonists can be so injured that their effectiveness in combat is limited to holding a club and swinging wildly if they hear footsteps.

As far as the game is concerned though, they're as combat effective as that veteran mercenary that you recruited last week. Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

Earlier today I had a look at addressing that problem. Basically, instead of taking a headcount of colonists, I went a little bit deeper and considered their sight, consciousness, and manipulation. Partial sight? Less points. Shattered radius? Less points.

I also exempted those colonists who are incapable of violence because of their backstory.

I haven't tested the full range of difficulty settings, obviously, but I think it's nice to have a storyteller which reacts to changes in colonist capacity, and I think it'll play well.

Quote from: gnilbert on August 04, 2016, 01:31:48 PMJust to be clear, this actually happened during one of my (very short) not-extreme games. I started with the single rich explorer. It was the first day, and he immediately began building a bed and small room.

On the very first day, before he could finish, he contracted a deadly illness (Plague or Malaria, I can't remember).

He fell to the ground, was incapable of moving, and he eventually died - but not from the disease (which probably would have killed him). He was actually killed by a hare who went mad while he was lying on the ground.

How exactly was I supposed to have prevented that?

A lot of posters seem to believe that the game can't generate these situations. The reality is, with random events and a large player base, it's incredibly likely that some players never see these situations, and some players only see them. That's just how randomness works. Small sample size (the games played by one player) = very high variance from the "expected" case, for better or worse.

Just because you haven't been struck by lightning doesn't mean that no one else has.

Lets go through this line by line.

1 - Single rich explorer is the non standard scenario. Admittedly, it is possible to suffer some freak event early on before you have many people, that takes out your only doctor resulting in deaths. Personally I would discount these, as while such a start is possible when accepting the first 3 random colonists you get, rerolling them until you get people that are at least willing to bandage the injured is not entirely unjustified if you wish to avoid such cases.

2. Before he could finish building a small room, he both contracted a deadly disease, AND fell over from it? Totally ridiculous. Instead of placing blueprints that would take several days to finish, build 1 small room, 1 bed first. There is also a reasonable time between knowing someone is sick, and being KOed from it reaching extreme.

3. He died because you did not just finish a small room with a bed and keep him there. Getting a disease so early with no one else to treat you is almost certainly a death anyway, but:

<li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_Disease">
        <minDaysPassed>5</minDaysPassed>
</li>

means you were not playing on the default storyteller. It explicitly states that Randy does not follow the rules.

4. It is not impossible for a freak series of events to kill a colony when you have only 1 or 2 people, I have seen it. But this is a non standard start. 3 colonist crash landing + Cassandra will give you 4 people before you face any event of that nature. At that point, you may lose people but will still pull through. She will then continue to send you wanderers or easy recruits to help you recover.

5. I have had colonists struck by lightning several times. And once by a psychic ship part.

Please show me a sequence of events hitting a well established colony, that results in everyone dying where there is _literally_ nothing that could have been done differently. I doubt you will find it.

I love Phoebe Chillax. The story line is relaxed and all cool... Then all of a sudden BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! Insane raid!!! I get like 8-9 Raiders with power armor coming to eat my villagers alive. I just love the struggle. Play Phoebe Chillax on Extreme its amazing. I love it!!!

Quote from: Britnoth on August 05, 2016, 04:58:22 PM
Please show me a sequence of events hitting a well established colony, that results in everyone dying where there is _literally_ nothing that could have been done differently. I doubt you will find it.

I'd like to see well established colony which can survive literally any sequence of events in this game. Can you share a save file?

Heat stroke while playing tribals.  You have no air system because you haven't hit electricity yet.

And them my friend literally got 3 consecutive malaria events that infected literally everyone at the early-mid part of the game.  No matter what he does each reload, they were dead.

The storyteller?  Cassandra.  She should be renamed Glados.  And then there will be cake.

Quote from: Flying Rockbass on August 05, 2016, 08:25:48 AM
Nice first post Ash1803 but for your first situation, I must agree with Brinoth.

If you only have one medic in your colony, why would you send him on the frontlines? You don't, even if he is the best shooter in the history of best shooters, he's your only medic. Give him a personal shield and send him to wait in a corner away from the action.

Toxic Fallout already has a long time before it starts killing everything, I believe it's almost 5 days for crops. In 5 days you can hunt alot while still building a roof on your crops and installing sun lamps. Then you keep everybody inside resting from toxic exposition.

I know what you mean, some events may have the need to prepare for it before it happens. Because you never know when they will happen and in which combination. But, after you play the game for a while, won't you prepare for it before they even happen?

Some events may need to have an anticipation factor, other don't. Somethings are better to be instanteneos, to feel like you lost control. As a story generator, this is where RimWorld shines.

If everything is predictable, why would I send my boomalopes to attack a siege? Ah, yeah, because they explode and spread fire.

Thanks for the welcome, it's a lot more thoughtful here compared with the Steam/Rimworld forums I have to say.

The doctor was one of the better shooters but she wasn't on the frontline.  A raider had a survival rifle and killed her from longer range.  She was actually standing in a dark bunker when hit!  I usually claim a small outdoor room, add a door and then deconstruct gaps in the wall to leave 0 light spaces next to outdoors spaces.  That's classic RNG at work, painful but no problems, that's why we play the game right.  This happened before any personal shields or more advanced equipment appeared or could be built.

Yes, thats what I try to do normally with toxic fallout, but food was desperately needed (again this was not too far into the game ) and so hunting/crop gathering was essential.  Building an indoor crop would have been possible but even with rice it wouldn't have yielded enough in time.

Good point about the not having subtle warnings for every event.  I do think for those I mentioned it would really enhance the gameplay though.

Overall though I think there are two ways to get better at Rimworld,  trial and error or finding out how other people have done it (wiki, let's plays etc).  Trial and error is fine but most people don't have the time to repeatedly play say 10 hours building up a colony, have it destroyed by an event you haven't seen before and just say 'oh well, put that down to a learning experience'.  Even college students don't have time for that ;) 

Rimworld is great, but in these type of games, I often get tired of having to simply learn the right 'tricks' and then, once correctly applied, you can render previously devastating events almost pointless.  Crashed mechanoid ships for example are almost impossible to attack head on with your colonists so the trick is to just set up a ring of turrets and then shoot the ship from long range to make the mechs leave the ship.  If Tynan made the ring of turrets less effective, BUT also gave more time to prepare (or added other weak points of the ships that could be exploited in certain circumstance) it would improve that event greatly.   I've seen a few players who actually just remove this event in the scenario editor because they think it is no fun. 

An example. The threats the game throws at you seem to be unbalanced... well, as a story not as a challenge.

So, the game looks at your value/tech level and sends in an army of size corresponding. This is somewhat a problem. As if you scale it up, it will just throw 100 boomrats at you. Yeah, it's not "fun" to face that. It is an instant death if you don't always play to max turrets/burrow in.

It is equivalent to the "doomsday" event. A game that decides on day 15 to blow up the galaxy, is not really a story or challenge, is it?

So yes, facing 10 or 15 boomrats is a challenge, something to worry about, something to be fun. Facing a flood, just destroys everything. It is not interesting, it is just a fixed requirement.

autosave

Quote from: Shurp on August 06, 2016, 07:52:37 AM
autosave

Removes threat of fun completely, 0 boomalopas out of 53.5.
I think I was managed to build ship with like 3 colonies out of 50 or 60 in rimworld 0.9.4 and 0.11 (extreme cassandra, no saves, first "win" was on permafrost landsite). I think this is a good winrate for this type of game. I started to play again with 14a and I had like 0 wins out of ~50 attempts. So at this point I was on "rimworld is unbearably hard" side of this thread. But I found out that 14a has almost every event except raids disabled. So I will try few dozens of times more before to have up-to-date opinion about rimworld difficulty. But 0.9.4 and 0.11 were pretty well balanced, imo.

Quote from: Britnoth on August 04, 2016, 10:53:14 AM

Quote from: Gennadios on August 02, 2016, 11:55:27 PM
Then there are unavoidable doom games like Rimworld and Project Zomboid,

What.

Sorry, if you think that it is all due to RNG and not the decisions you made that caused you to lose a colony, then you are quite delusional.

You keep going back to the idea that somehow the game sooner or later generates an event that is not possible to survive from, no matter what you did beforehand.

This is complete bollocks.

Once you are experienced at the game and understand how to build a large colony, then that colony is safe from destruction in the vanilla game. Extreme difficulty and all. Including playing without turrets or traps.

The tools are at everyones disposal. It is up to you to stop blaming the game for your failures and to learn from them to make your next colony a success.

Just to be clear, the "unavoidable doom" comment was in reference to the previous poster. Just to give you a tl;dr version of the post, it was something along the lines of "the endgame is a lie and the game is trying to kill you before you get to it."

It doesn't matter how long you survive because you eventually run out of stuff to do. You can technically live forever in Project Zomboid, but eventually you get bored and die in a shotgun rampage through the city. You can technically live forever in Rimworld when you get to the point where your killboxes are so beardy, and your stockpiles are so massive that the RNG doesn't stand a chance, but the game doesn't want you to get to that point and it still tries it's best to kill you before hand.

Quote from: Dodging Rain on August 06, 2016, 12:28:59 AM
Heat stroke while playing tribals.  You have no air system because you haven't hit electricity yet.

And them my friend literally got 3 consecutive malaria events that infected literally everyone at the early-mid part of the game.  No matter what he does each reload, they were dead.

The storyteller?  Cassandra.  She should be renamed Glados.  And then there will be cake.

My extreme desert tribal start with just the 5 random tribals I rolled got a heat wave day 6. No one Died.

Complex clothing is just 1000 research. Rather than electricity and coolers totalling 5400 research.

You can now craft cowboy hats. Normal quality cloth cowboy hat raises your tribals comfortable temperate to 40C.

This is enough to reduce the heatstroke to get through the heatwave without deaths. People will not be happy or at their best to fight off raiders, but it is certainly enough to not end the colony on its own.

As for disease... a14 made them stupidly dangerous. Before all but malaria was limited to 1 in 6 of the colony. Now all including malaria are up to half your people. if you get spammed with them over and over while having no doctor AND having no good medicine like the tribal start... that can be a RIP. Tribals with 5 people and good backgrounds SHOULD have someone with the 8 growing needed to plant healroot however, so maybe not.

I would assume a tribal start with good doctor and grower would get through such a situation though.

Gennadios: It depends on what storyteller you play on, and what challenges you play under.

Quote from: Dodging Rain on August 06, 2016, 12:28:59 AM
The storyteller?  Cassandra.  She should be renamed Glados.  And then there will be cake.

Prior to alpha fifteen this game was a crash landing simulator where you "won" by fleeing the planet in home built ships. It does a pretty good job of following the story line of the classic book "Swiss Family Robinson" all the way from beginning to end with a space vibe added in and WAS fairly well balanced.

Cassandra exists to slowly up the pressure over time, never letting you relax. It's "job" is to force you to escape the planet as soon as possible. The more wealth and happiness you have the bigger the threats it throws at you. This was GREAT for a game that simulated being ship wrecked, half starved, and always on the verge of death. She is even named after the mythological prophet who always predicted doom and was never believed . . . but was always right.

Even Pheobe does the same thing. She just gives you time between nasty events to recover. So the eventual explosions are larger, but you can stay on the planet longer and do more base building. Only randy isn't tied to how wealthy and comfortable you are. But he really doesn't care if your prosper or not. He could send a huge raid on day one.

Now that we have other scenarios I'm hoping alpha 16 will really focus on win and lose conditions and improving the way the stories are told. Right now TECHNICALLY you can never lose. If everyone dies wait a few minutes and a new story will start when some random guy comes and claims your old base. But I'd rather tell THAT story with a lone explorer scenario, random ruins, and ancient evils scattered on the map from the very start. Stuff I didn't set up for him to make his story "easier".

The way I currently play is that I pretend it is hard core. If my original crash landed guys die it's game over. I quit. If my lone explorer dies. I quit. Game over. I lost. If my tribe dies out ditto . . . For win conditions I try to survive longer and make my own challenge. Sometimes it is toeing the line and living as long as I can.

Other times, since that is BORING . . . I try to build gardens and make as huge, wealthy, and comfortable a base as I can and see how long I can survive while also prospering and NOT turning everything into a fortress.

Other times it is sim fortress with death boxes, and turrets everywhere inside in case a swarm appears. It's early access. Make your own fun until Tynan fixes the story tellers.

I can get behind what the OP is saying. Unfair situations are fun and are a test of skill, but unwinnable situations don't fit in games. There should always be a chance to win, no matter how slim. But sometimes the game just doesn't want to give you a chance.

@ash1803. I must agree with your last comment, If my suggestion to create an Event log gets done, you will be able to make a much better tutorial, teaching the player how to build his first room, his first type of defense, how to get rid of psychic ships (one way), defend from manhunter packs, etc.

The botton line of this topic, as we see both newcomers and old-school players. Is the game unwinnable? No, but it can be freaking hard. Is the storytellers balanced? No, someway they got unbalanced on the last updates, prior to A12 it was a much better experience. Does the tutorial need work? Hell yeah, tutorials mean alot to newplayers.

I believe that the next alphas and betas will focus on balance again. I believe between A8 and A14, we had 3 Alphas focusing only on game balance. The next one will come in time.

Quote from: Reviire on August 07, 2016, 07:37:59 PM
I can get behind what the OP is saying. Unfair situations are fun and are a test of skill, but unwinnable situations don't fit in games. There should always be a chance to win, no matter how slim. But sometimes the game just doesn't want to give you a chance.

I'm finding it very hard to define what exactly the reasonable middle ground between unfair and unwinnable is... this argument essentially boils down to "the game feels too hard". That may be right, but it's impossible to fix without something more to go on. Everyone in this thread seems to have different ideas about what exactly the problem is.

I have to disagree with the emergent and compounding story telling, I think that they're served better by randomness than scripting. When there's a raid in the middle of a pandemic that has half your fighters bedridden while Chuck and Debra are having a marital dispute it's because the storyteller isn't paying attention but if the raiders were paying attention and planning their raids for when it was the most or least convenient you would start seeing the wires. For me personally nothing takes me out of a movie, book, or game than when the only clear explanation for why things are happening or characters are making certain decisions is that it's what would move the story along. It's nice when a solar flare hits during a cold snap because it's a random situation, when a solar flare hits during a cold snap for the eighth time because that's how it's weighted it doesn't feel organic.

Quote from: winddbourne on August 07, 2016, 06:54:37 PM
Cassandra exists to slowly up the pressure over time, never letting you relax. It's "job" is to force you to escape the planet as soon as possible.

Except, she doesn't. Once you get over the hump of increasing you population from 4 or 5 into the teens, the colony is all but safe.

Quote from: winddbourne on August 07, 2016, 06:54:37 PM
The more wealth and happiness you have the bigger the threats it throws at you.

Except, she doesn't. Raids do not scale with your ability to defend against them.

Which is why I made my own modded storyteller that does.

Sorry to burst your bubble but it was A14 that was meant to focus on balance and bugfixing. The only feature it got is scenario system.