tl;dr adaptation is artificial and terrible, if the game should be more difficult over time it should go into the raid curve and difficulty settings.
These two screenshots exemplify everything that I dislike about adaptation/rampups (besides being a racing car game mechanic pushed into a colony simulator).
The first is an event that took place where sappers blasted through, shot a bunch of guys but didn't down them, and stole a whole bunch of stuff. Mortars were fired next to my base in desperation and I blew up my chemfuel generators and hydroponics on accident. Fun stuff ::) This happened about a week or two ago.
The second is what the adaptation graph is looking like now (notice nothing occurred on the graph).
For one thing, adaptation is completely blind to your playstyle, and punishes people with different playstyles completely unequally in it's current state. Someone playing without heavy security and extremely protective of their colony's wealth will have a completely different experience as someone else. If the enemy comes in and trashes 20 cannons, or blows up half your base and nukes your walls, it don't care. But oh wait one person died! Better make the rest of the entire year a cakewalk. In the first case, though, you are completely ruined if your strategy involved lots of cannons.
It's also hard to really understand how this is affecting the game just looking at a graph, which is why I do hope some internal testing gets done before a full release. When you look at this graph you just see "oh well this got a bit harder due to adaptation". But the context is, at the low point I got hit with a sappers in all directions totalling 10 sappers, and at the high point i got hit with sappers totalling 40. And that is the difference between basically afking and suffering terrible odds every raid.
Some more math on why this happens this way: The relative difference between survival and merciless is +33% (2/1.5). However, the difference between mid adaptation and low adaptation can be about +~60% (1.3/0.80). In other words, adaptation matters much more than difficulty.
I mean, I could just play recklessly and then be rewarded with an easier game, but this just feels bad. It's not only open to metagaming, it also is punishing to people just trying to play the game normally in different ways which is more important.
Maybe some tweaking could be done to improve it, like increasing the rate of increase again at lower ends and decreasing it even more at the higher end, or considering building and security damage, but it feels like patching a piece of garbage.
[attachment deleted due to age]
Damn Greep, sucks about your Hydroponics. On Sea Ice that'll put you back significantly.
Hah yeah, any loss of steel is horrifying. I just got some power armor so I can maybe even do LRMS steel sites with ambushes though :)
I read your other posts, you're playing sea ice pretty similar to how I do with a few highly modified pawns. I've yet to build any turrets but I'm only on year 3 so far.
Quote from: Greep on August 02, 2018, 07:45:44 PM
(...)
For one thing, adaptation is completely blind to your playstyle, and punishes people with difference playstyles completely unequally in it's current state. Someone playing without heavy security and extremely protective of their colony's wealth will have a completely different experience as someone else. If the enemy comes in and trashes 20 cannons, or blows up half your base and nukes your walls, it don't care. But oh wait one person died! Better make the rest of the entire year a cakewalk. In the first case, though, you are completely ruined if your strategy involved lots of cannons.
(...)
How would you know? Maybe in the next raid you lose your colony, or maybe you lose some pawns but you still pull through and
then adaptation will account that previously you lost half your base, so adaptation is working in a way. Besides, lets imagine that adaptation is an advanced AI that understands your way of playing, that understands your loses and is also impossible to cheese. So whenever you have a setback adaptation will react accordingly, wouldn't that make the game very difficult to lose? what would be the point then?
Isn't rolling a 1 and getting shafted part of playing merciless sea ice?
Regarding merciless sea ice: I should have posted another example maybe, this isn't really about overall game settings, so much as adaptation basically ignoring that difficulty (see mathy section). this isn't a whine post, I'm doing fine ;)
Regarding a perfect adaptation: that's actually my point. It should be removed entirely rather than improved (although an AI that arbitrarily supports some playstyles that some new players may adopt is worse than one that works equally).
There's 2 scenarios that removing adaptation improves upon (and a 3rd which would be improved if adaptation was "better" ::), that being turret spamming)
1) 2 newbs buy the game. One builds a mix of melee and shooters and plays with reckless abandon and does well due to random downing of melee dudes. Another plays a more careful deliberate approach and gets a crushing defeat when he meets an enormous raid and gets cornered. When finding out the solution is playing worse, he says the game sucks and stops playing/recommending.
2)More experienced players start getting increasing raid sizes when doing well and think in the back of their mind "I can survive this a lot easier if every now and then I just let a dude die"
The first is really bad, the second is annoying and immersion breaking, but will probably just lead to adopting mods ::)
Quote from: Greep on August 02, 2018, 09:09:30 PM
There's 2 scenarios that removing adaptation improves upon (and a 3rd which would be improved if adaptation was "better" ::), that being turret spamming)
1) 2 newbs buy the game. One builds a mix of melee and shooters and plays with reckless abandon and does well due to random downing of melee dudes. Another plays a more careful deliberate approach and gets a crushing defeat when he meets an enormous raid and gets cornered. When finding out the solution is playing worse, he says the game sucks and stops playing/recommending.
2)More experienced players start getting increasing raid sizes when doing well and think in the back of their mind "I can survive this a lot easier if every now and then I just let a dude die"
The first is really bad, the second is annoying and immersion breaking, but will probably just lead to adopting mods ::)
I agree that it does seem to reward bad play and punish good play, and encourages players not to learn how to play better but instead how to game the system. Personally I felt the difficulty progression in B18 was just fine and didn't need touching.
FYI, the recovery system is not new, it's been in the game for years. It just didn't have a graph before.
The purpose is not to make the game harder forever, it is limited so that can't happen. The purpose is to make it possible to recover from bad situations instead of entering a dead man walking state.
I think it was actually stronger in b18, although I can't actually say for sure. This is not a new thing, and it's somewhat ranty, so I split it off the 1.0 discussion.
Well, what I've shown above is it's not really working well to that purpose. It's making some playstyles arbitrarily considerably harder and others considerably easier. Even if it did work across the board, I still disagree that it's a good thing. Is entering a dead man walking state such a bad thing? Having a recovery system that actually did work correctly would make your decisions meaningless as a poster above said.
Quote from: Greep on August 02, 2018, 11:30:12 PM
Is entering a dead man walking state such a bad thing?
Yes.
Quote from: 5thHorseman on August 03, 2018, 12:36:51 AM
Quote from: Greep on August 02, 2018, 11:30:12 PM
Is entering a dead man walking state such a bad thing?
Yes.
Definitely YES. I want to believe that any colony, with any disaster/accident/mistake, is still salvageable and can grow and thrive again. Because I CARE, dammit!
You can achieve this by just lowering the difficulty, though, and you won't have some bizarre system that tries to force you back on your feet when you can just try on your own, in a somewhat over compensating way. The raid formula takes into account number of colonists and wealth anyways, so it should just work on it's own.
That being said the raid formula in general is just weird to begin with, so I guess it's just here to stay.
I really don't want to be modifying the difficulty within a game though. I want to find my optimal difficulty setting (right now it's 4/6 cassandra, I forget the names, and I like to play a very sub-optimal roleplaying style). But the adaption system is essential because no game should make you have to adjust your own difficulty setting during play.
I just meant at the beginning, yeah I wouldn't either. If you started at one notch under what you were playing at, then instead of catastrophic failures that are unrecoverably without some bizarre mechanic, you'd get smaller ones that would just put your colony under pressure (and maybe crack it at some point). That feels more interesting to me, and not completely unrealistic and gamey.
Could there maybe be a mode for the players that want to play it as a base building / tactical challenge? A mode that puts time pressure on progression and doesn't rubberband as much?
I'm going to make a mod that does exactly that. I usually like just playing vanilla since it's fun talking about the "same game" with other people; however, after my most recent experiences on sea ice just playing what feels like "normal gameplay behavior" I ended up with such an incredibly bizarre experience due to the raid system that makes vanilla no longer interesting to play normally. The only thing that made the game manageable was launching 750 thrumbo furs and 1400 human leather into the sea. Rimworld is officially north korea ::) So I'm actually just going to end up testing 1.0 with that mod after that sea ice game to see how it goes.
It would make sense as simply an optional mode alongside regular gameplay, though. So TBH I think it really should be in vanilla. I'll see how it goes personally.
Edit: Huzzah! https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=43044.0
In my last playthrough, merciless Cassandra was so easy as to be boring. I don't know how adaptation works but I wonder if that was due to my habit of regularly letting bad pawns die. Sending them away in a caravan, or just using them as meatshields during raids, or just leaving them to die when they arrive in a drop pod.
If you have the save, that would help a lot to show your graph. You just turn dev mod on, go to history, and change it to debug.
Here it is. Do you know how to interpret it?
[attachment deleted due to age]
Yeah your game hit raid point level that is about 6 times less than what is normal heh. You essentially ended up playing on a raid multiplier divided by 6. Since Merciless is 2 and base builder is 0.35, you had raids of what you would expect on the lowest non-peaceful difficulty.
Only about half of that was caused by adaptation, it looks like there was a lot of pawn or wealth limiting going on there as well, which also makes for a weird experience.
I think you need a wealth graph to truly reflect how important adaptation was in such case
What happened on day 144, that looks like a lot more than one bad pawn dying
Quote from: Greep on August 03, 2018, 05:19:51 PM
Yeah your game hit raid point level that is about 6 times less than what is normal heh. You essentially ended up playing on a raid multiplier divided by 6. Since Merciless is 2 and base builder is 0.35, you had raids of what you would expect on the lowest non-peaceful difficulty.
Only about half of that was caused by adaptation, it looks like there was a lot of pawn or wealth limiting going on there as well, which also makes for a weird experience.
These numbers are false, recovery cannot in any case make a 6x difference or close to it.
Heh you're reading half my posts, both the OP and that one.
He had 1000 raid points, a usual merciless is 6000-8000 raid points, so it's unusual by 6-8x. But I said only half of that was due to adaptation, most of the rest cause by pawns/wealth.
And adaptation can make pretty high of a difference. If you check out his fairly normal gameplay style and his adaptation levels, it's actually negative much of the time. At it's lowest it's 0.4 and highest it's 1.6, so 4x potential difference. Although here it's somewhere around 2-3x it looks like.
Quote from: bbqftw on August 03, 2018, 05:30:55 PM
I think you need a wealth graph to truly reflect how important adaptation was in such case
What happened on day 144, that looks like a lot more than one bad pawn dying
I am not sure because it was some time ago, but I had times were most of the colony was ill with malaria/plague/sleeping sickness (before scheduled penoxycycline for everybody). At one point I also had two deaths. It looks like there were two raids around that time.
[attachment deleted due to age]
Quote from: Greep on August 04, 2018, 01:06:19 AM
Heh you're reading half my posts, both the OP and that one.
He had 1000 raid points, a usual merciless is 6000-8000 raid points, so it's unusual by 6-8x. But I said only half of that was due to adaptation, most of the rest cause by pawns/wealth.
And adaptation can make pretty high of a difference. If you check out his fairly normal gameplay style and his adaptation levels, it's actually negative much of the time. At it's lowest it's 0.4 and highest it's 1.6, so 4x potential difference. Although here it's somewhere around 2-3x it looks like.
Yes I interpreted your post as adaptation making about half of 6x difference. Unfortunately you allowed the tiniest chance of misinterpretation. Better luck next time.
raids always was horrific mess, it's really fun to fight agains the odds, cold snap, cold snap, fallout, volcanic winter, common winter, cannibalism, starvation, cannibalism hard decision who will die and who will survive, but then, zergrush come and just pwn you without any options at all.
it feels like you pissed off GM and he invoked "rocks fall"
Actually, adaptation can only multiply points by roughly 1.46 at the top end (100 adaptation, not 120) so, the difference between minimum and maximum is a factor of roughly 3.66 - and that's always going to be in the player's favour.
In the player's favour, because smaller raids showing up when the colony has suffered significant losses usually means the player will have an easier time defeating those raids.
Sure, in comparison the raids at the high end of adaptation are going to be more difficult than the ones at the low end, but they're actually only 46% harder than normal in terms of points, not 366%. :)
This is true, although hardly anyone plays randy because of the potential 50% higher raids. Small numbers mean a lot when they're multipliers and not additives.
You can see some obscenely large variety in rimworld with the right mutipliers. And I have seen some crazy things.
Theoretically, you can see in the same day with the same untouched colony: A randy high roll, high adaptation, chased refugee with 80 raiders. And a Randy low roll, low adaptation (say two people died), drop pod attack with 4 dudes using clubs (which would actually end up so low as to be supressed probably).
Hmm, that's a fair point about all the multipliers stacking up. Also, if you have low adaptation but other high multipliers, they can basically cancel each other out, when I think the whole point of adaptation should be to override those multipliers.
Anyway, I've come up with a simple def patch for Storytellers.xml which may make things a bit more agreeable. In the case of the chased refugee event it means that (not considering difficulty) the maximum possible multiplier is 1.6, instead of 1.6 times some other factors greater than 1.
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=30508.msg424966#msg424966
Id never view Cassandra as a fun experience anyway because it is predictable and easy to "cheat". Randy was made for the DF veterans with so much randomness that you have either long good luck streaks or bad luck streaks. Ive played both (never bothered with Phoebe) on this series of test builds. Some of my two cents from my experience, others and code-wise why the game sucks at judging how to attack you:
- You can "game" the AI by artifically lowering your wealth, sacrificing bad pawns, keeping your colony small and use door-peeking will make your game a cakewalk regardless of difficulty. Changes need to be gradual. I cant stress how important this is. Tynan, if you cant implement exponential functions to calculate these, this will always plague your game.
- Armor changes made the game harder, in a bad way. It could be more interesting to see armor that can either deflect or reduce damage, or both. No. We got "half-or-none-or-everything". Dogs being more competent at piercing armor than modern pistols. Flak pants being semi-useless. Thrumbofur overclassing steel plate armor. These just to list a few.
- Implementing resource consumption for turrets is the wrong way to tackle their usage. Tynan could make all sorts of interesting events such as hackers that can disable/convert your turrets. AI prioritizing destroying defenses with explosives. Artificial solar flares with raids. Passive mechs that wrecks the psyche of pawns. All sorts of alternatives are already there.
- Adaptation does not even considers the pawn's value when he dies. Did you just sacrificed Steve, the legless, armless, one-kidney/lung/eye colonist incapable of Skilled/dumb/violent? Ok. We'll make the next raids until next year safer. Oh is your entire colony still licking their wounds after you defend a mech raid? Too bad, heres a new raid.
- Worn items do not count towards wealth. Seriously, the wealth mechanic is just retarded. If Im swimming in uber-expensive bionics but still defending myself with bows, it makes no sense to send a more difficult raid. Granted, wealth does not count as much as it used to, and this is a positive.
All this being said, I felt the game to be easier in 1.0 overall than B18. At the same time, it is more tense in a bad way, because combat is as RNG-dependant as ever, so the only good strategy is not play the RNG game. Which makes combat uninteresting. Looking forward for the official version and future changes. The Bioshock-way of testing is frustrating and alienating, but if it works, great. Hope it does and provides enough data for improvements.
EDIT: Apparently bionics do not count to wealth. But tamed animals do and other things which may or may not help in the aid defending the colony do, so my point still stands.
Quote from: Razzoriel on August 06, 2018, 01:23:48 PM
- You can "game" the AI by artifically lowering your wealth, sacrificing bad pawns, keeping your colony small and use door-peeking will make your game a cakewalk regardless of difficulty. Changes need to be gradual. I cant stress how important this is. Tynan, if you cant implement exponential functions to calculate these, this will always plague your game.
I do try to avoid rapid growth of wealth because I know wealth influences raid strength. I don't try to stay below some wealth threshold though.
Not letting every pawn join is also a legitimate playstyle. In most cases I just can't be arsed to deal with the withdrawal period of an addict, the frequent mood breaks of the depressed or nervous, or to have a pawn around that refuses violence or hauling or cleaning while not having any other desirable skills/passions.
Traits like psychopath, bloodlust or teetotaller are more interesting in that they have pros and cons.
Actually, worn items do count toward wealth. Didn't always, but I can confirm that in 1.0 all a pawn's equipment is factored into wealth calculations.
What is the pro of teetotaler? As far as I can tell its all downside. Late game, it's practically equivalent to a pessimist for me, and even if you aren't running drug schedules the lack of emergency mood booster hurts.
I'm going to guess they have certain ineligible mental breaks involving drugs but even that is a drawback imo
Quote from: bbqftw on August 06, 2018, 04:08:55 PM
What is the pro of teetotaler? As far as I can tell its all downside. Late game, it's practically equivalent to a pessimist for me, and even if you aren't running drug schedules the lack of emergency mood booster hurts.
I'm going to guess they have certain ineligible mental breaks involving drugs but even that is a drawback imo
I believe they will never binge on drugs during a mental break. That's a good thing if you're producing a lot of flake/yayo.
Quote from: bbqftw on August 06, 2018, 04:08:55 PM
What is the pro of teetotaler?
They're less likely to be a bad trait because one of their trait slots is taken by something unimportant.
Unless you drug up your pawns then sure it's a negative.
adaptation is a good thing. that said, it is too strong in rimworld. send weaker raids if a guy on my side died, but not laughably weak ones. send stronger and stronger raids over time, so that i have a constant challenge, but dont just suddenly surprise me with a huge raid.
as one of the few players (it seems) that has extensive experience with pheebs chillax, i can absolutely assure the devs that the most difficult part about her is that as a new player you most of the time have absolutely no idea how much you should invest into military (be that guns, skilling, armor, defenses, autoguns, but even stuff like hospitals and drugs) because you get raids so rarely. even in extreme late game, the same minor threat will always be the same as in the very beginning of the game. eg. a bzzzzt will produce the same explosion on any difficulty and at any point in time of the game, no matter how many of your pawns died. that makes those events much, much harder to deal with as a beginner at game start (especially since it isnt explained how or why they occur and how you can avoid/weaken them) and later on it's just boring because it's the same as always and you'll essentially just get a heads-up until the next minor/major threat. i think replacing components is the most extreme in this regard. pheebs will absolutely bombard you with these from time to time in late game and no matter how many times it happens it just means nothing to you. on the other hand, early game, especially in extreme cases like rich explorer extreme desert/sea ice/ice sheet, but also "normal" game starts like crashlanded arid shrubland this can cause major inconveniences. what if your only heater dies, your only cooler for your fridge and you are threatened that your food spoils, what if, what if, what if.
(you might think i went off-topic, but no, read on please)
now what is extra difficult is that new players, who probably have the highest percentage of choosing chillax, will be confused. they will need to put out a bzzzt with one half charged battery one day, another day they have to replace a component, then an escape pod and ship chunks arrive, the next one a single guy raid comes, then they get the journey offer, then a wanderer joins, then an animal goes mad, then you get some resources from droppods, then beavers come (which are similar to raids, but noobs dont know that, so they wont look at their numbers and adapt their military to it), then travellers visit, then an eclipse happens, then some pigs join, then a heatwave starts, then an aurora happens, then a blight hits, then you get a flash storm, then psychic soothe starts, then you get a solar flare, then ambrosia plants sprout, then a squirrel self-tames and then a manhunter pack is let loose and then after many days of the same dilly-dally in terms of threats you finally get your second actual real raid, which may catch many new players completely off-guard, because by then they will have achieved quite a bit in the game but never actually experienced a proper raid (first one is weaker). i once had a case where i wasnt raided for 2 straight years, i double checked in the graphs and it's true. all kinds of other things happened, but no raids. (no i wasnt playing on low difficulties)
and to come back to the main point: raids generally dont happen very often. sure, veterans who already know their stuff will play on the highest difficulty and encounter raids every other day or so, but we arent talking about them, at least not exclusively. raids happen every now and then and i believe most players always expect to be able to survive the raid more or less well off. (as in, they have the possibility to do so. i also think that players know that they can still screw up and get obliterated in most bad events) now if raid strength varies aside from being measured with your progress and strength, you will want to give players a fair chance to anticipate a stronger raid somehow. imagine if i wasnt a seasoned player and didnt upgrade my defenses and guns and what not while i wasnt raided for 2 years. a noob would have been curb stomped the next time enemies set foot on their turf (it was a pure centipede mech raid closest to my base perimeter and less defended parts. good luck with that, noobs) i did fairly well because i expected each and every threat to be a raid, as i was taught by cassandra.
now i am not here to hate on pheebs, that's another topic. what i am really trying to say (badly, as always. i suck at making points) is that certain things in rimworld scale (eg: raids), some dont (eg: eclipses), some happen more and more often (eg: machine breakdowns) and some happen less and less often (eg: wanderer joins) in any normal playthrough. for the most part, this has been implemented well ages ago. (eg: no volcanic fallout at game start; weaker raids at first; soft limit on number of pawns and so on)
the problem is that certain events are too strong in the beginning and might throw off your whole game start like an early bzzzt event, while other events are completely uninteresting at the same time like an eclipse. on the other hand, a single machine breaking down could prove to be fatal in the beginning (very rarely) but usually it is a good event early on because you have to use a pawn and repair that machine for quite some time as their skills are still low and you've got so many other things on your mind (that is one out of 1 or 3 pawns (tribals dont usually have machines that early that could break down) which is very considerable) but later on in the game, as i said before, it just means absolutely nothing to you.
to keep it short, i would very much recommend the devs to go through the list of threats (and those positive things that happen, i always forget their name) and make notes on which occurrences should happen mainly when, how many times and maybe invent some new things that could happen with things that dont scale. (eg: multiple machines breaking down; bzzzt scaling with progress and not being (fully) dependent on energy stored; animal joins being dependent on colony state, like more later one, fewer at first. (also no early chickens, dogs instead are much more welcome. cats much later. why? because a silly tame squirrel just gets slaughtered, that's why and early chickens give too much of a boost imo and throw off early game by too much. amount or type of resources falling from the sky could also be influenced. ship chunks in the early days is a very good and interesting start, i'd love it if you elaborated on that. maybe mostly food in the beginning and leather types later on?
Quote from: Polder on August 06, 2018, 04:42:08 PM
Quote from: bbqftw on August 06, 2018, 04:08:55 PM
What is the pro of teetotaler? As far as I can tell its all downside. Late game, it's practically equivalent to a pessimist for me, and even if you aren't running drug schedules the lack of emergency mood booster hurts.
I'm going to guess they have certain ineligible mental breaks involving drugs but even that is a drawback imo
I believe they will never binge on drugs during a mental break. That's a good thing if you're producing a lot of flake/yayo.
This feels a bit 'self-fulfilling prophecy' esque - a teetotaler is much more likely to suffer major and extreme breaks because you don't have the emergency mood injection that tea/beer/smokeleaf/ambrosia offer (all of which don't contribute to overdose).
Looking at the extreme breaks in particular, I think drug binge is much more preferable to stuff like murder rage, catatonic, wildman, berserk, and maybe even slaughterer. So you're making the average extreme break worse by taking away the drug binge option.
Quote from: 5thHorseman on August 06, 2018, 05:31:43 PM
Quote from: bbqftw on August 06, 2018, 04:08:55 PM
What is the pro of teetotaler?
They're less likely to be a bad trait because one of their trait slots is taken by something unimportant.
Unless you drug up your pawns then sure it's a negative.
yeah early game I'd be happy to get a pawn that has zero traits.
Quote from: Razzoriel on August 06, 2018, 01:23:48 PM
- Adaptation does not even considers the pawn's value when he dies. Did you just sacrificed Steve, the legless, armless, one-kidney/lung/eye colonist incapable of Skilled/dumb/violent? Ok. We'll make the next raids until next year safer. Oh is your entire colony still licking their wounds after you defend a mech raid? Too bad, heres a new raid.
I agree; the single most important input for the adaptation mechanic should be colonist damage suffered / (100 * number of colonists).
And what about security buildings? Why I just dislike it altogether. 20 cannons down and adaptation is like... "you defeated that raid flawlessly"
Or the 15 huskies.
Quote from: Greep on August 06, 2018, 07:47:22 PM
And what about security buildings? Why I just dislike it altogether. 20 cannons down and adaptation is like... "you defeated that raid flawlessly"
That might be the second most important thing.