I'm balancing skill learning rates.
It's tricky because the learning rate really depends on what the pawn is doing, which is something that only comes out in long test games.
My question to you, good players, is: What skills seem to have higher and lower learning rates? Is there any skill that seems really easy to level up? Any that seems really hard?
In principle I'd like to even them out so they all take similar amounts of effort/time to level.
Thanks for the feedback!
Easiest skill to upgrade would probably be Intellectual, where they literally just need to sit there researching all day. Others would include tasks like crafting and growing, where you can just have them automated to preform certain tasks over and over throughout the day.
The hardest skill I've noted to increase is Melee.
Unless you start with a high melee stat to begin with, it's not going to be a fun time increasing it. Unlike other automated tasks, increasing Melee is a more demanding grind with a lot more risks involved like injuries and death.
easy: mining, intellectual
hard: craftinggggg, and cooking
In my case, I've always feel that leveling minery and build is really easy, while medicine and combat skills is hard
Intellectual is I think the most grueling to level up. Especially considering it involves your character not creating anything tangible for the colony.
Starting out with a pawn that has no intellectual passion slows the game down drastically.
Quote from: SilencerRolf on February 20, 2018, 05:53:25 AM
Easiest skill to upgrade would probably be Intellectual, where they literally just need to sit there researching all day. Others would include tasks like crafting and growing, where you can just have them automated to preform certain tasks over and over throughout the day.
The hardest skill I've noted to increase is Melee.
Unless you start with a high melee stat to begin with, it's not going to be a fun time increasing it. Unlike other automated tasks, increasing Melee is a more demanding grind with a lot more risks involved like injuries and death.
This
I've always had a very easy time leveling construction. Have someone interested in it set to high priority, and they'll be very high level pretty quick. Maybe too fast.
Shooting and melee are very hard, particularly the latter. I use a mod that offers a shooting range and a melee dummy as joy objects that helps, but even then it's pretty slow. I'd love to see something like that in vanilla, since opportunity-to-practice is a big obstacle there.
Quote from: SilencerRolf on February 20, 2018, 05:53:25 AM
Easiest skill to upgrade would probably be Intellectual, where they literally just need to sit there researching all day. Others would include tasks like crafting and growing, where you can just have them automated to preform certain tasks over and over throughout the day.
The hardest skill I've noted to increase is Melee.
Unless you start with a high melee stat to begin with, it's not going to be a fun time increasing it. Unlike other automated tasks, increasing Melee is a more demanding grind with a lot more risks involved like injuries and death.
While I agree with this,
Quote from: Giraffe on February 20, 2018, 05:55:19 AM
Intellectual is I think the most grueling to level up. Especially considering it involves your character not creating anything tangible for the colony.
Starting out with a pawn that has no intellectual passion slows the game down drastically.
I also agree with the above. Grinding intellectual is easy: assign a pawn to research with high priority and watch him do fuckall for months and months while still needing to be fed. If he doesn't have passion for it you're screwed, because it *does* take pretty long, especially from level 1. If I had to guess I'd say it'd take that pawn over a year without doing anything else, not getting sick and so on.
Other than that, I agree that Melee is pretty hard to level up. Grinding it involves sending a pawn to the frontlines and risking serious, permanent injury or death. I also haven't
noticed much Social gain. And I think a very small buff to Crafting would be nice.
In truth I'd prefer it if non-passion gain was higher, level 1 passion was
very slightly higher and level 2 passion was the same or very slightly lower.
I will put scores on a ten-point scale (10 is hardest) based on my intuitive perception:
Animals 7/10
Artistic 3/10
Construction 5/10
Cooking 6/10
Crafting 4/10
Growing 7/10
Medicine 8/10
Melee 10/10
Mining 6/10
Intellectual 2/10
Shooting 9/10
Social 8/10
P.S.: I see problem with some skill learnyng not in the way that they grow, but in the lack of ways to practice them enough. It is the exact problem for melee, medicine and (somewhat) shooting. There must be some additional jobs (like random non-combat injuries for doctors to practice) or training/joy things (like punching bags or shooting range).
Let's start with the "slow-to-learn" skills. Descending.
1)Melee - have to agree with SilencerRolf on this one. Even if melee was a good skill, to begin with(compared to shooting, obviously) it would be still to bothersome to learn.
2)Social
3)Medicine
All these skills have one thing in common, - a lack of a good source of constant training, compared to mining for example. Shooting also falls into this category, but colonists even with 0 shooting are useful enough, not to mind the speed of leveling. If I may make a suggestion, that would be allowing pawns to somehow train these skills.
Notable skill is Cooking. It is just very slow to level compared to the likes of construction.
On the easier side of things is:
1)Researching - the fastest, as long as you can dedicate somebody to slave behind a research bench 24/15
2)Mining - if you have a mountain, that is.
3)Construction, Artistic, Crafting
4)Growing - is a bit slower than the others, unless you specifically plant all the growing zones in the world. That said, I don't think it's unbalanced or too slow. Just slower than the other ones.
5)Animals skill is... fine? But you probably want to play a dedicated husbandry game. Otherwise, animals are something I usually don't bother with.
Like many other before, the hardest skill to train is mellee.
Since you can't hunt anymore with mellee skill there is no daily training.
Not to forget the injury you get when you doing mellee.
We all know Tynan trained all squirrels to go for the eye's and toes first.
Even prisoner punch back when you hit them with a wood log.
Social/medicin need target's but once you can afford to have 2-3 prisoner, you get enough target dummys for these skills.
Shooting is slow but can be trained well, while they can pratice with hunting all day long.
the really complicated parts start at level 10.
shooting get'S so bad that it >feels< like they are losing EXP when they start at 18-20 even while shooting.
so in my expierence.
shooting out of this world hard
melee out of this world hard
mining easy in term of leveling and is not that important.
construction is easy even to easy
growing is fast too.
animal handling feels slow but it's not easy to reliable check for it.
the rest doesn't feel to odd.
cooking feels slow but a higher skill gives you little to nothing anyway. the cooking skill speed bonus is so little time of the cooking it self that' it doesn't matter to much.
maybe the real issue is the loss of skill points. because i see no problem in the fact that it needs a long time to train artistic or crafting because they are needed for master pieces really really special items but construction speed (only the speed part) is fine if it get's really fast after some weeks/month of in game time if they just build normal stuff faster like a wall. so if they don't loose skill point they will get there at some point. or it shouldn't start loosing EXP if you get let's say about 250 EXP in 3 days or something like that.
and do i see that correctly that growing, mining, construction or everythign that get faster level faster the better they are because they do let's say more walls a day which may result in not optimal learning curves.
I'd say the animal skill has a big problem that if your pawn has the skill very low, it's borderline impossible to increase it enough to interact with wild animals. Now I'm not exactly sure what are the lowest required skills to train domesticated animals, but let's be honest. It can be difficult to get them. Perhaps it's not necessarily an issue of balancing the skill gain itself, but it would be nice if there was a way to get XP in animals for low levels.
My ten cents in the discussion:
Shooting: The only way to meaningfully train shooting currently is by defending the colony from threats, or purposefully aggroing animals on the map that will likely turn manhunter. In the former case, that in turn heavily depends on storyteller and difficulty, being easier with more aggressive storytellers (i.e. Cassandra) and with higher difficulty levels. In the end-game, I find that my passionate shooters tend to stabilise around level 15, whereas most others stay around 12 or so, with Cassandra on Extreme.
IMO hunting should give more than a measly 6 baseline experience, since chasing down a deer or something isn't exactly as easy as shooting at a wall. Of course, it should still be much lower than the 240 gained in combat situations. Perhaps around 30 or so, but scaling with the shooter's chance to hit the target.
Melee: As it stands, I don't really bother with melee much at all since RimWorld's combat heavily emphasises engagements at a distance. Unless your colonists have shield belts, sending them out in melee engagements is more or less a suicide mission. That being said though, routine prisoner beating is a nice way to gain some experience.
Social: Again depends on difficulty and storyteller: higher difficulties mean more prisoners to throw in the rat pit, and aggressive storytellers mean more frequent opportunities. I find that my best wardens tend to stay around 13 social in the long run.
Animals: Biome-dependent: training's pretty consistent in biomes that have a lot of wildlife and allow you to grow a lot of food. On the other end of the spectrum, it's rightly more challenging in deserts, ice sheets, extreme desert and sea ice - tundra wasn't mentioned since there's still a lot of soil in that biome. Best handlers tend to stay around 15 in better conditions.
Medicine: Depends on if you love crippling your prisoners with peg legs. Also depends on difficulty and storyteller to a degree, with higher difficulties and more aggressive storytellers increasing the likelihood of colonist injury. My best doctors tend to stay at around 14 skill.
Cooking: This skill's a staple for your colony's survival so it's a slightly easier one to sustain. Also depends on how many cooks your colony has: fewer high-skilled cooks or many moderately-skilled cooks. I tend to have a few level 14 or 15 cooks by end-game.
Construction: Depends on playstyle and biome. In general, my best constructors tend to stay consistently at or above the 17 mark in the long run.
Growing: Necessary for colony survival, so this is another one with a lot of opportunities to train. Also depends on if you favour long-cycle crops like corn, or short-cycle crops like rice, with the latter leading to higher skill levels. My best growers when using rice tend to stay at around 13 or 14 skill again, with the majority probably being closer to 10 or 11.
Mining: Most of my runs tend to be on flat terrain rather than large hills or mountain, so I find this one slightly harder to sustain. That being said though, my best miners tend to be around 10 or 11 skill. I don't deep drill much since I try to keep my colony's wealth in check and demand remains relatively low unless going for the escape ship.
Artistic: Depends on resource abundance. Late-game raids tend to be a good source of metal, which in turn make a good source of sculptures. My best artists tend to stay around 14-18 skill, depending on if I feel like upgrading my colonist bedrooms and rec/dining room or not, or if I get an influx of resources.
Crafting: Generally quite an easy one since by the time I get loads of resources by mid-game, I frequently produce armour and weaponry for my fighters (my entire colony). I also tend to butcher tribal raiders and make them into dusters for economic purposes, which works quite well. My best crafters stabilise around 18 skill, occasionally getting to 19 or even rarely 20 if I produce more than usual.
Intellectual: An easy one to train early-game since researching is consistent and always readily available - I tend to aim for 2 researchers during the day and 2 during the night. Best researchers eventually get to 20 if they're passionate and/or too smart/fast learners. After that though, it becomes more diffifcult, but I produce smokeleaf for economy rather than pekoe.
I assume we're talking only about passion (honestly I don't think I've ever levelled up a skill without some passion).
Based on the way I pick pawns I would say..
easy:
-growing
-cooking
I think growing and cooking are among the easiest, but perhaps that's because the associated thresholds are relatively low. Cooking you need 6 for fine meals (or something like that?) so a pawn with 2 but passion will be there in no time. Someone will probably get food poisoning, but that's never THAT bad.
Similarly growing needs 8 for healroot (I could be wrong about that too!) so even a pawn with only 4 but good passion will learn it after planting a few fields.
hardish:
Crafting and art are a pain because you want them as high as possible. Sure even a low skill pawn can learn it, but they're slow and produce poor quality stuff while you wait for them to improve.
super hard:
-social
-medicine
-(animals)
I feel like if you don't have a pawn that's good at these to begin with, it's probably never going to get there. There aren't many opportunities to train them - or in the case of animals there is a risk to trying to train them up. If you start with a cat for example, you can't train that and any other training sends your pawn half way across the map for ages and risks getting attacked. obviously training medicine on a low skill pawn is incredibly risky/difficult. Social you only do twice a day so it trains slowly and you have to have a prisoner who you are feeding and waiting for ages for them to be recruited.
I don't have strong feelings about the other skills.
Animals: easy
Artistic: very easy
Construction: very easy
Cooking: middle
Crafting: very easy
Growing: very
Medicine: middle
Melee: very hard
Mining: very easy
Intellectual: easy af
Shooting: hard
Social: hard
We can talk about skill rates all we want but I think the thing to focus on is on the levelling method themselves. Others have already spoken on others but my main focus is on Shooting and Melee which in my opinion are the hardest with Shooting being harder than Melee.
The reason is pretty clear, you need to engage in combat to level them up. The old "shoot at sleeping spot forever" and "beat up prisoners" works but it's a very "gamey" way to do it. I'd rather see every time after a raid or a prison break or whatever, people who engaged in fighting get a bit of experience in what they do. We have mods for fighting dummies and shooting ranges but without dedicated training periods, it's very haphazard. We can grind just about any skill from mining to cooking, why not fighting? Even if it gives a quarter XP for each shot/stab, I'd rather that than nothing at all.
Lastly, Tynan, is it possible to have pop ups indicating level ups? You know, like every time something rots away we get a message at the top? I think mentions of levels increasing would increase enjoyment because we see/hear the progress. I check my colonist skills only once in a while, it'd be nice to know they are in fact getting better at what they're doing.
Easy: mining, growing
Hard: crafting, melee,
I find melee and shooting are really slow to level, and lack opportunities to level them at a decent pace.
Social can be a tad slow as well.
If I feel any skill is too easy, it's probably construction or crafting.
Shooting, melee, medicine and animals. The problem with shooting and melee is that you can only train them while fighting (or using tricks that disable your pawns for a LONG TIME like shooting at a downed animal or to an animal spot), and this is a problem cause literally the pawn's lives depend on it.
Medicine is a bit easier cause every operation you perform gives you a huge xp, but its still not very nice to have to mutilate enemies to get that, there is no "good/benevolent" way of training it.
About animals, you said you were reworking it so I have nothing to say until I see the results.
I literally could never see cooking reach 20/20, not even 19/20.
Could only have my only constructor get to 20/20 for a few days keeping him on construction all-the-time but as soon as there were no more construction jobs to keep him practiceing it dropped and i could never rise it back.
Same way I can have crafter on 20/20 if he only crafts all his life, as soon as he goes to sleep it drops to 19/20.
This on a year 5026 pretty peaceful colony.
Special mention for melee: may be the impossible to raise skill.
Edit:
All my examples are of people at max passion
The hardest skills in my opinion are
-Social !!
-Melee
-Shooting
-Medicine
I wouldn't necessarily increase their gain rates, but add alternative methods to increase them in your pawn's daily life, independent of events or luck.
Like some sort of combat training or studying anatomy with books or corpses.
All other skills are fine already. :)
HARD:
Shooting
Melee
Social
Medicine
All other skills can be raised relatively easily.
For me it seems that a lack of opportunity to use the skill on a continuing basis means that it is VERY hard to level. I include shooting here because I don't like to clear my maps of animals just to raise that skill.
Hello Tynan, in my opinion, the easiest to hardest skills to level up are :
Intellectual : Nothing hard to do, just left the pawn do the job in good conditions. It's easy but balanced, the only use of intellectual skill is for researching.
Artistic : Very easy.
Construction : There is always something to build and a lot of ways to level up this skill.
Mining : It's similar to intellectual but it's a bit more dangerous skill to level up.
Crafting : Easy to level up when you have time and materials.
Social : Just let the pawns chatting with prisonners and the skill will improve without difficulty, it's a bit long to level up maybe.
Growing : Easy but take a very long time to level up.
Cooking : Easy but take a very long time to level up.
Medicine : We can use prisonners to level up this skill, average time to level up.
Animals : It's hard to level up, we need a lot of animals and a lot of time to level up this skill.
Shooting : Hard to level up even with a shooting stand.
Melee : The hardest of all, we can't train this without risk.
Hard: Melee, Social, Medicine
(Because the opportunities to train are rare/fraught with danger)
Medium: Cooking, Crafting
(There are no dangers involved in leveling up beyond food poisoning and low-value items, but it takes a ton of time and materials)
Easier: everything else
Animals: middle
Artistic: very easy
Construction: easy
Cooking: middle (easy but slow)
Crafting: easy
Growing: middle
Medicine: hard/easy (Depends If you use exploits like practice with prisoners..)
Melee: very hard
Mining: easy
Intellectual: very easy
Shooting: hard
Social: very hard
So far I think the easiest to learn are: Mining, Crafting, Growing, and Intellectual. All these can be made so that they are done pretty much all day every day, making it pretty easy to level up, growing also has the benefit of leveling from tree cutting.
Intermediate Difficulty: Medicine, Animals, Art, and Construction. Medicine and animals are pretty situational IMO because it depends on whether you actively keep animals and prisoners. If you can capture raiders and the like medicine becomes extremely easy to do, and animals the same way. Training boars 1-70 in hauling will level you up pretty good.
Hard: Social, melee, and shooting. Social takes a lot of effort from a dedicated person and a steady supply of people to use it on (i.e. prisoners). Melee and shooting both are using fairly sparingly compared to the rest of the skills in the game. Leveling up shooting either takes hunting or raids, and melee is used almost exclusively in raids. So lots of risk for little reward
Mining definitely grows fast. Not unnaceptably fast, but is still way above average.
Mining is what i always send my useless pawns to do.
I just pick a massive randomly selected area deep in a mountain for him to mine, and before i notice he is above lvl 10 already.
Quote from: Skyburn on February 20, 2018, 06:24:19 AM
Let's start with the "slow-to-learn" skills. Descending.
1)Melee - have to agree with SilencerRolf on this one. Even if melee was a good skill, to begin with(compared to shooting, obviously) it would be still to bothersome to learn.
2)Social
3)Medicine
All these skills have one thing in common, - a lack of a good source of constant training, compared to mining for example. Shooting also falls into this category, but colonists even with 0 shooting are useful enough, not to mind the speed of leveling. If I may make a suggestion, that would be allowing pawns to somehow train these skills.
Notable skill is Cooking. It is just very slow to level compared to the likes of construction.
On the easier side of things is:
1)Researching - the fastest, as long as you can dedicate somebody to slave behind a research bench 24/15
2)Mining - if you have a mountain, that is.
3)Construction, Artistic, Crafting
4)Growing - is a bit slower than the others, unless you specifically plant all the growing zones in the world. That said, I don't think it's unbalanced or too slow. Just slower than the other ones.
5)Animals skill is... fine? But you probably want to play a dedicated husbandry game. Otherwise, animals are something I usually don't bother with.
I agree with what most people have said on this forum post. I in general agree with this list in particular except that in my experience social is not too difficult to overcome since I often take prisoners. I would add that at certain levels the skill point loss/gain ratio becomes near impossible to overcome. This usually means my level 20 master skills usually fall down to 19 during the night. I am not against certain skills being harder to learn and master than others. This gives value more to an expert melee pawn compared to an expert miner for example. The skills of a doctor and of a cook should not level the same IMO since the value of the skills and "product" differ greatly.
Maybe you could include things like
-training targets for shooting
-training dummies for melee
-a workstation for medicine like this one: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1214615921
-a mirror for social (yeah I've played too much Sims)
IRL people train hand-to-hand combat through sparring. We can already make wooden swords, all we'd really need is a way to get our colonists to fight with eachother without trying to kill eachother, and we could train melee that way.
Mining, intellectual, construction, growing level up pretty fast with at least 1 flame.
Crafting/art have good, but somewhat slower rates. Handling is in this category if someone is constantly doing it too.
Cooking levels up pretty slowly considering the frequency/duration it's done. Social and medicine also fall in this category, trainable but relatively slow.
Skills like shooting and melee are awful, especially melee. These are doubly worse because along with medicine, they require lots of manual inputs to train effectively (hunting is still a false choice to leave to the AI in Rimworld).
+1 to wanting more skills to be trainable. Even better would be having pawns train each other.
I would love it if the animal skill was easier to train.
Thanks everyone for the feedback! I'm making some adjustments now based on this. Much appreciated.
Some off-topic random suggestions were appearing, but this is just a feedback thread so those should go elsewhere. I removed them.
I'll lock this thread, too, since it's no longer needed. Thanks again everyone.