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RimWorld => Mods => Releases => Topic started by: Greep on August 03, 2018, 06:52:13 AM

Title: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 03, 2018, 06:52:13 AM
Strategy Mode

Hey you!  Are you doing any of the following?:

-Limiting your wealth to reduce raids
-Calling caravans on speed dial
-Randomly letting pawns die to reset adaptation
-Worrying about silly things like whether bionics count towards raids or not (they don't ;))
-Executing pawns with bad traits
-Foregoing combat animals, again for raid reasons
-Completely foregoing caravans without drop pods for many reasons.

If so, this may be the mod for you!  Ideally, this will just be the mod for experienced players who mostly want a "vanilla balance" but without all the weird metagaming that it entails if you want to play "strategically".

Currently this only changes the raid system to get rid of the huge amount of bizarre metagaming that many players find themselves doing to stop raids from spiraling out of control.  If all you want to do is limit raids in your own specific way using the built in system, you can download this mod instead:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42721.0

The system in strategy mode wipes out the hundreds of relevant lines of code and replaces it with this simple formula:

Ticks^1.1/25000
Divide by 8 if a caravan.
Divide by 3.5 if a site.
Multiply this by your difficulty factor.

That's it.  No adaptation/wealth/pawn influence etc.  You are free to utilize your environment to the max to do your best to win.

Currently this is unfair on extreme biomes (this will be changed). Additionally, because most players downloading this will be very experienced, "rough" is the new "extreme".  If you've ever played XCOM-Long war, think of that when choosing an appropriate difficulty setting.

The raid system is a very small part of what this mod will become, but this is a good first step.  Much of the future focus will be on caravans, security buildings, etc.

Suggestions for changes you want here are absolutely welcome.  Still pretty WIP, so only available as a zip attachment on the forums, below.



[attachment deleted due to age]
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Copperwire on August 03, 2018, 09:13:17 AM
I am game.  While your at it, think you could make one that deals with the distortions in sale prices?
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 03, 2018, 04:16:01 PM
Yep, but it's all going in here baby, not a separate mod.  Splitting up mods can make sense in some cases, but I think in a balance mod it should all go in one.

Options to turn thing on/off will be in xml or in game options, though, I'm just not going to start out bothering with that.

Regarding sales prices, I'm not sure the best way to go around doing that, so I'm just going to brain dump a bit here.  My thoughts on economy in general are:

-Remove all general item sell multipliers, but tweak item quality percents and influence on market value so good crafters aren't ludicrously profitable as a result, as well as increasing skill needed to level up for this reason and increase work to make things so you need many good crafters.

-Remove tainted and gun sell modifiers and simply make armor and guns material wise cheap to make but worth less in general.  Remove a ton of research techs so you can try and race the raider progression so you have a reasons to build said guns rather then just picking up drops.  I think this is something that works well in 1.0 but wouldn't in b18:  In 1.0, raiders tend not to even wear power armor, and you can make guns like charge lances that don't even drop.

-Remove called caravans to cut down on tedium and double orbital trader stock.  Alternatively, quadruple calle caravan stock and relation cost.

Extreme exploit reduction is also on the menu, so I'm thinking of having killed caravans drop no items.  I'd like a better way to handle that, but as the 400 changes to how insecta are aggroed has shown (and it's still buggy), determining whether the player actually meant to harm something is pretty hard as this is a very complex game!

That's all I got now.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: dyslexier on August 03, 2018, 04:32:51 PM
Made an account to let you know how much this was needed, quality mod.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Madman666 on August 03, 2018, 07:58:04 PM
So currently it just ties raids only to time spent playing*difficulty chosen? Not really my cup of tea :P But i like the idea of making raids more rewarding via weapon price restoration and removing tainted cost reduction. I might implement those changes for my game.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 03, 2018, 08:07:27 PM
Yeah the granularity of what you can turn on and off wil just be whole systems.  So if you're looking for a hardcore long war type experience you can leave it all on.  If you just like parts of it you can take what you like.  So it'll eventually look like:

<TimeBasedRaids>OFF</TimeBasedRaid>
<EconomyRework>ON<EconomyRework>

etc.

This will stack correctly with RaidLimiter when it's done (I will simply not run my code if the xml flag is set here)
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: NiftyAxolotl on August 04, 2018, 01:07:29 AM
On fixing Caravan exploits: if the caravan is significantly harmed for any reason, just have the owner of the caravan refuse to send another for 8 days per colonist or muffalo lost. Not fatal, but painful enough that I would actually take action to protect a caravan if I could. This would also be a welcome source of 2v1 fights, which are fun.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 06:09:28 AM
Quote from: NiftyAxolotl on August 04, 2018, 01:07:29 AM
On fixing Caravan exploits: if the caravan is significantly harmed for any reason, just have the owner of the caravan refuse to send another for 8 days per colonist or muffalo lost. Not fatal, but painful enough that I would actually take action to protect a caravan if I could. This would also be a welcome source of 2v1 fights, which are fun.

So if it gets mangled by manhunters, you ll curse you day and rage quit, cause you got year's worth of cooldown now. IMO the better punishment for player attacking the caravan is applying a modifier to relation increase with that faction. So each time you kill a caravan from a faction, raising relations with it will become much harder, until it will be virtually impossible to mend relations.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 04, 2018, 06:23:16 AM
Well, one issue with these routes is that currently caravans carry goods disproportionate by a long shot to the amount of relation it costs to summon a caravan.  You can kill an exotic caravan, then launch all the stuff as gifts for essentially 1000 relation I think. It seems better then to just take the cheap way and just stop players from being allowed to loot the caravans. 

I guess if I felt like doing a lot of work I'd try to make it so you become a permanent enemy if you unforbid the items dropped, stealing it essentially, but that might be difficult.  Haven't done a whole lot of crazy modding yet.

In any case, not a top priority item.  If something a really obvious exploit it's not going to be worked on for a while.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 06:28:24 AM
Letting stuff lie there forever rotting, isn't a nice idea as well. Feels like a cheap patch for an oversight. Dunno what to offer you, since usually caravan looting already punishing enough - bumps your wealth, makes for one more enemy = next raids s tougher. Completely disabling it this way feels wrong since, you know, profiteering, betrayal and pragmaticism are a thing.

The nice thing to do would be to introduce a temporary cooldown on relations change, so they ll hate you for some time, before gifting and releasing prisoners becomes possible again. And applying a multplier to how much relations you get via those means (again with a cooldown proablly), so it ll be much harder to get them to like you again for a decent time, before their hatred wears off.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 04, 2018, 06:30:59 AM
Well it's not completely disabling it:  You can just become permanent enemies for a crapton of stuff :)

Edit: that idea in general is probably good, though.  It's kinda weird that if you have a lot of stuff lying around, you can basically summon infinite allies by transport pod gifting.  I might do that one game just to show some silly screenshots in the 1.0 thread :3
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 06:32:27 AM
Quote from: Greep on August 04, 2018, 06:30:59 AM
Well it's not completely disabling it:  You can just become permanent enemies for a crapton of stuff :)

Its more or less locking out part of the game in exchange for some randomely generated items. This just doesn't feel like a right game design choice for me :P
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 06:40:09 AM
Quote from: Greep on August 04, 2018, 06:30:59 AM
It's kinda weird that if you have a lot of stuff lying around, you can basically summon infinite allies by transport pod gifting.  I might do that one game just to show some silly screenshots in the 1.0 thread :3

Just don't make Tynan nerf military aid again. Cause the fact that if you have a lot of shit - you can call crapton of allies is actually logical. You have money - you have friends. You re poor - no one likes the hobo. Its more or less the same as just hiring mercs to do the fighting for you. You don't like fighting and do like economic part - become rich, make friends and convince them to fight fot you.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 04, 2018, 06:54:56 AM
Hah alright.  I'm not even sure that would work well, though it's pretty funny that it's even possible.

That said, I'm surprised you don't like the timed raid points system:  That's the most friendly way of completely abolishing wealth's influence on raids. 
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 07:26:43 AM
I don't like timers in general as a concept :P Despite my frequent gripe about raids and all that, i am actually reasonably content with raids rising with wealth. What i don't like a lot in 1.0 is that i need to turn my whole base into one friggin killbox and permanently cram everyone into a tin can, which looks like more of a penal colony of uber strict regime, than a city. And i guess i still don't particularly like world events scale with colony map wealth, cause its stupid. Otherwise - quite fine with it actually.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: NiftyAxolotl on August 04, 2018, 09:23:25 AM
Quote from: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 06:09:28 AM
So if it gets mangled by manhunters, you ll curse you day and rage quit
Well, why didn't you intervene to protect it? Why should caravans visit you if you don't offer protection?

Also, only that caravan owner would blacklist you. Others would still come, but fewer.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 09:25:14 AM
Quote from: NiftyAxolotl on August 04, 2018, 09:23:25 AM
Well, why didn't you intervene to protect it? Why should caravans visit you if you don't offer protection?

Also, only that caravan owner would blacklist you. Others would still come, but fewer.

Cause i don't wanna have several cripples on my hands, when i can sit home and don't do anything? Caravan should provide its own protection, same way player hosted caravans do. You get weapons, armor, your shit together and go risk yourself. And if anything eats your face off the only one who is to blame is you and storyteller. Not the owner of the world tile you happened to be standing on.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: IronicGolem on August 04, 2018, 03:08:06 PM
It makes sense in the way they avoid going to dangerous areas, but the fact that they can go hostile to you personally is a bit wonky.
If they had two stats - the current relationship/goodwill and a "Willingness to Visit", them dying to something you didn't instigate could just lower the second one, but not the first.

That still poses the question of "how did they know they made it to your colony and didn't just get ambushed by pirates on the way to it", but, whatever. Maybe radios exist invisibly.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: zizard on August 04, 2018, 06:11:17 PM
An idea I had about stealing caravan stuff is that the faction will count items dropped on your map as debt and make you repay an equivalent silver value before they will send anything.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: 5thHorseman on August 04, 2018, 09:28:51 PM
Quote from: IronicGolem on August 04, 2018, 03:08:06 PM
That still poses the question of "how did they know they made it to your colony and didn't just get ambushed by pirates on the way to it", but, whatever. Maybe radios exist invisibly.

No they're pretty implicit. You get calls from refugees and captured ex-colony members all the time. And your colonists know what happens to colonists on caravan up to the very moment they lose consciousness. No reason the same can't be said of the other factions.

Regarding the OP, amusingly the only thing I do is limit my wealth to lower raid sizes and I think that's a perfectly reasonable strategy both on my part and on the part of the raiders.

Oh and I don't use combat/hauling animals but that's merely because they count too much in my opinion, not because I don't think they should count at all.

Another thing I do that is not listed is, I am really nice to everybody but the tribals. I treat them like garbage so more raids are from them.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 04, 2018, 09:59:20 PM
I think a lot of people piss off tribals heh.  In b18 before tribal sappers it's just what you did if you were munchkining.  Choosing between fighting 10 centipedes or 50 tribals I'll take the horde any day.

Also: youc an fix combat animals if you like by just downloading raidlimiter linked in the above.  It allows you to lower the influence on raid sizes of combat animals.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: NiftyAxolotl on August 05, 2018, 12:18:23 PM
For profit centers, I am stuck on the Supply/Demand solution. It allows anything the player makes to be profitable to start, but prevents it from scaling forever. Rather than juggling efficiency curve balance on all the different production lines a player might think of, you can just nerf the concept of "Specialized Mass Production". Here's the simplest implementation I can think of that won't drown the player in information:
- For each type of item, add a status Supply Level: Glut, Normal, Shortage. These cause sell/buy price multipliers on the item.
- Whenever the player buys something, there is a chance for the Supply Level to move towards Shortage, depending on the value of the trade.
- Whenever the player sells something, there is a chance for the Supply Level to move towards Glut, depending on the value of the trade.
- Supply Levels revert to Normal over time. Any Supply Level change has a player notification.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Squiggle on August 05, 2018, 03:32:53 PM
For caravaning, it would seem that there are two scenarios right? You murdering them and you letting them be murdered? I'm not sure I fully understand the exploit (not having done it myself) but coming from a common sense perspective the penalties should be different for both, but also price you pay to regain the faction goodwill should be astronomical. It seems to me like there needs to be a second stat "trust" or something that is different than the current "goodwill" or relations. Trust goes down with negative experiences, and increases from positive experiences and modifies the effect of gifting / changes to goodwill. Say trust is 0 to 2.0, starting at 1.0 (neutral), after a caravan dies in your lands your trust goes down, for example to 0.25 so your gift increases goodwill by 0.25 times the usual amount? The gift would increase trust too. If you really wanted it to work well, it would set a new trust target, but then only slowly change the trust as time goes by (i.e. your trust will go up to 0.4 after the gift, but only actually reaches that amount after a week, etc). Trust should be easy to lose and hard and slow to gain thus you could have good relations with someone that you don't trust. They have treated you well enough recently, but you expect betrayal - their positive actions are discounted.

Also really like NiftyAxolotl's suggestions for a supply/demand economy, that should be in vanilla for sure.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: 5thHorseman on August 05, 2018, 06:30:57 PM
Quote from: Squiggle on August 05, 2018, 03:32:53 PM
I'm not sure I fully understand the exploit (not having done it myself)

It's pretty simple. Instead of trading with them, murder them. They drop everything in their stores on the ground. For more fun and profit, do so with the weapons you bought from them. You can buy stuff first because when they die, they drop their silver too.

I've never done it either, but I've benefited from them fighting mechanoids for me before.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Greep on August 05, 2018, 06:34:18 PM
If a supply/demand economy hasn't been added, and if it doesn't look too hard, I'll add it here.  That being said I'd be surprised a mod like that hasn't been done.  Wouldn't want to reinvent the wheel here.  DLL mods aren't as common though so maybe it hasn't.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: lperkins2 on August 16, 2018, 02:31:22 PM
So I've been thinking for a while on the caravan issue (ever since I had a combat supplier carrying a couple thousand mortar rounds get offed).  I think I have a solution to the problem that would work, but would be somewhat fiddly to implement. 

The problem is that the caravan's faction takes the loss of the caravan without complaint or reaction.  Sure, if it looks like you caused the demise of the caravan, they'll attack you for a while, but that does them no good, and usually isn't a big deal to you, and usually, you can engineer the situation so they don't even blame you. 

The solution isn't to have the faction get more angry with you or attack, since that would just introduce a host of other problems.  The solution is to have the faction send an asset retrieval team to gather the dropped supplies. 

The idea is the faction should send basically a nearly empty caravan, with their top-tier combat units to gather everything.  They aren't hostile to you, but will dig their way in if needed.  They don't have to get exactly what was dropped, just similar cash value of stuff.  Which is where it gets fiddly.  Telling what value of stuff got dropped by the caravan is easy, the hard part is telling how much of what got dropped got destroyed, by fire or by just sitting out rotting, or by grenades, or what have you.  A flag saying something was dropped by such and such a faction might be the way to do it, or simply an estimate based on relative faction power and the circumstances that caused the caravan animal to expire (killed by lightning strike vs heart attack). 

Particularly weak factions (tribals) may even hire a professional team to come in, so you can't just kill tribal traders without recourse.  Which also opens the door to some extra events, like raiders showing up to grab the caravan gear, possibly at the same time as the retrieval team, or the colony getting offered a chance to go retrieve stuff on behalf of one of their allies.

Unfortunately, monodevelop isn't really suited to this kind of task, so I've not looked at the game code enough to know how much could be reused and adapted, but it may be as simple as adapting the 'caravan packing' logic to order the item stacks packed up.  Any that get moved should still get packed, and anything that gets destroyed could automatically get ignored.  Depending on how it works, your colonists might even help with the packing.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Sundogs on November 08, 2018, 08:10:17 PM
I've been looking for this mod for two years (https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/4ilcmw/a_pitiless_ai_storyteller_who_doesnt_care_how/). I'm sure I'll use Raid Size Limiter as well, for a different run. Thank you!
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: rook14 on November 08, 2018, 09:11:38 PM
No matter how I read it, I get the vibe of Easy Merciless difficulty. T_T
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Ruisuki on November 10, 2018, 04:07:08 AM
Quote from: Madman666 on August 04, 2018, 07:26:43 AM
I don't like timers in general as a concept :P Despite my frequent gripe about raids and all that, i am actually reasonably content with raids rising with wealth. What i don't like a lot in 1.0 is that i need to turn my whole base into one friggin killbox and permanently cram everyone into a tin can, which looks like more of a penal colony of uber strict regime, than a city. And i guess i still don't particularly like world events scale with colony map wealth, cause its stupid. Otherwise - quite fine with it actually.
what did 1.0 change to have you building smaller bases?
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: 5thHorseman on November 10, 2018, 05:56:38 AM
Quote from: Ruisuki on November 10, 2018, 04:07:08 AM
what did 1.0 change to have you building smaller bases?
Colony wealth and number of pawns are two big factors in raid sizes, so it's always a good idea to not keep expensive junk you're not or are barely using (including rooms and machines and silver floors and that masterwork jade chess table), and instead make sure anything really expensive is there to defend the rest of your stuff.

Some think this is less reasonable than others :)
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: zizard on November 12, 2018, 07:09:55 PM
Biggest problem is that raid points per colonist scales with wealth.

2x larger base -> 2x wealth, 2x colonists -> 4x raid size

Obviously this doesn't make sense and instead the result should be about 2x raid size.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: forumgod on November 13, 2018, 08:03:44 AM
Finally someone did something to address the horrendous metagaming that Tynan's "storytelling game design" entails, thank you for this excellent mod, hope you continue to think of ways to improve it.
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: BladeOfSharpness on November 13, 2018, 11:24:11 AM
You mean like not making friend with an easy to handle faction, so that sometime raids use them and not a top end / nasty faction?  ;D
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: cosmic alpaca on November 22, 2018, 08:42:17 PM
this is still in progress or there is some secret link to download?
Title: Re: [1.0] Strategy Mode: Rimworld as a strategy game
Post by: Canute on November 23, 2018, 03:36:12 AM
I would call it dead, author is offline since months.