A) The problem
Rimworld uses wealth as the main factor to determine raid sizes and expectations. I think it is a bad design choice.
1) It leads to perverse incentives such as damaging your weapons and tainting your armors to reduce their wealth value.
2) Your pawns react negatively to opulence. Building a beautiful golden sculpture to lift the mood of your pawns have the opposite effect: their mood decreases due to increased expectations.
3) It encourages players to avoid improving their bases and pawns to keep wealth under control. The optimal decision you can make to increase your odds of survival is to aggressively limit wealth. There are no feelings of progression and limited design options.
4) Since there are no restrictions on the number of traps / turrets you can use, and since raid size scales mostly through wealth rather than your number of pawns, your pawns become mostly useless for defence. It's doable to use 10 pawns against 20 pawns; less so when it's 10 pawns against 100 pawns. This happens because the game conflates opulence and defence strength, e.g. your sculpture is worth 50 turrets as far as the game is concerned.
B) Making wealth desirable
Suppose instead that wealth was a positive thing. You would rejoice when you finally got all your pawns dressed in hyperweave and power armor. Your pawns would like it when you made their rooms more beautiful. They would in fact become disgruntled if the wealth of the base didn't increase as time goes on. Wouldn't it be more fun?
C) The solution
Fixing the wealth issue is much more difficult than listing its shortcomings. What do you think could be done to improve the game with respect to difficulty? Discuss!
Keep in mind that it has to be simple to have a shot to be implemented, i.e. implementation effort must be handled as wealth ;)
I don't think it's going to change in vanilla. Just to much history to it I guess. But my idea is just time based raid sizes, no wealth/adaptation/etc, and I've started working on a mod that included that and other things to come.
It sounds punishing, but the reasoning is pretty simple: if you look at all the raid points graphs for people's games, unless they're doing something weird, they all pretty much follow the exact same curve at the same time. Making it time based only removes odd restrictions people place on themselves, like never prettying up their fort, or not using combat animals or whatever because maybe the "right raid point multiplier" wasn't put on them.
It might need some tweaking. Biomes probably need a multiplier on points, and there might need to be a hard cap based on # of pawns*difficulty for people liking that solo experience or whatever.
I'm not against wealth increasing raid difficulty to be honest, but there is room for improvement.
The mood buff related to wealth just has to go and could be replaced by a mood buff which is high at the start of a colony and decreases over time, giving you time to gain wealth to replace that buff.
Perhaps allies or the ability to call for assistance needs work. If I'm wealthy and my allies benefit from me by trade and occasional gifts they should be more willing to come to my aid, which brings me to the stupid AI allies tend to have in the occasional help they send.
My last game was 450 days in which I only called for help during the 15 day startup and only during that time I got a 1 time free help during a raid, which spawned at the opposite side of the map. A big swarm of tribals rushing a group of mechanoids which I could've handled on my own.
The balance between wealth and raid difficulty does need some work though. I agree with your example of building that golden sculpture.
Cheers :)
Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything? Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?
100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill. +100pts for next raid.
so, its based on how easily you repel a raid. if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points. this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them. where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them. also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.
other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.
this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders
Imho, wealth of base must be calculated only as raw resource. You have 5 bricks? Its a 5$ of useless wealth. You build a wall from it? It must be same 5$, but its already useful as cover. Same with resources for weapon/armor/decorations. You must not be punished so much for building that legendary golden royal bed, or converting 100 plasteel and 5 components into 4k$ gun.
PS Or count as base wealth only stealable and transportable resources like silver or drug stockpiles and ignore wealth from floores and other such things.
Also, about expectations. Its ok if you pawns lose expectation buff from base upgrading. But in same time i think their morale must be stabilized with each loosed level, so mood must degrade significantly slower and/or have some protection from at least harshes of mental breaks, at well supplied base. Now its ridiculous when a guy who sit a week at top mood just loose all this after a short trip outside of his chair.
Quote from: JimmyAgnt007 on August 09, 2018, 11:00:53 AM
Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything? Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?
100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill. +100pts for next raid.
so, its based on how easily you repel a raid. if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points. this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them. where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them. also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.
other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.
this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders
This sounds like a good approach.
What is bugging me most of the time is that raider are just trying to do dmg, they should have some form of behavior that targets valuable stuff.
They wont raid you for your gold floor or that gigantic power generator - cant plunder them anyway. Instead they want to have that crazy gun or snatch all the gold you have in your storage.
I was very surprised on my Sea Ice run that the one raider, while I was door peeking/hiding for a short time decided to snatch those 300 gold lying outside from a meteorite and run with it. He didnt manage to get that but it was a behavior I think is logic - no pawns in sight? grab that stuff and run - stuff is hidden but that one pawn just vanished behind the door? smack it down and capture this guy, then run.
They actually do have a goal, it's just it's not noticeable under most circumstances. If you see an unstoppable sapper raid you can actually "bribe" them by just leaving a bunch of goodies in their path and they'll leave with it. If pirates have a colonist in close range that they can kidnap, they'll switch to kidnapping mode.
It's just that most players want to defend their stuff and their colonists to the death. And on an extreme biome that can make sense.
Mechanoids on the other hand... they just want to kill you.
They do if it is an obvious choice, but once on a ahip site without launching the reactor. They just smahesd everything and then left a few of their dead ones behind - thats not reasonable.
They need to have a more clear goal (except the mechanoids, which makes sense that they just destroy pawns ) which can be related to a raid size system based on key items and adaption maybe on time and damage on previous ones, but if it is damage related I can already see knowingly harm or down pawns to reduce size.
The only independant raid size is time and that can really kill you if you have some setback.
As a hoarder, I usually have too much stuff laying around doing nothing for me. Like I still keep cotton plantations the same size after creating a healthy field of devilstrand. So I'll perpetually have 3k+ of cloth sitting in my storage waiting for me to use them (which, to be fair, it does happen with caravan requests). I can understand if someone wants to steal my cloth, but that storage is not going to help me defend it. Same happens with most of my production. Wealth doesn't really captures my ability to fend off raids, so... the solution is to not be wealthy :-\
Different Colony Stats should attract different events.
- Wealth should increase the chance of Basic Pirate raids, and raids from other non-pirate hostile human factions. But defensive strength(any building or colonist capable of dealing any form of damage to another pawn, and any animal trained to release) should decrease the chance of such raids.
- Large food stockpiles and large fields of at least half grown crops, should increase the chance of manhunter packs. Manhunter packs should be split into two groups. The "guards" and the "locusts". The guards hang out around the doors of the colony as normal, but the locusts will ignore humans and instead make a beeline for the crop fields and eat everything they can(or in the case of carnivores just destroy crops). Once the locusts have had their fill they meet up with the guards so they can switch roles.
- Defensive strength should increase the chance of mechanoid raids, mechanoid ship parts, drop pods, sieges, and sappers.
- Colonists that have been captured and recruited should increase the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from. Colonists that joined of their own free will or were rescued from a Chased event should reduce the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from, and increase the chance of future "Chased" and "Join" events.
- Cosmic events(solar flares, eclipse, ect) should be purely random and time based.
Basically colony wealth should
only ever attract low level basic human raids. And defensive strength should be the attractor for most of the other heavy hitting raids. That way the player can down scale their defenses if they are attracting too much attention. The important part will be balancing basic raid strength so as to make sure there is always at least some threat to encourage building defenses.
Quote from: SchizoidCrow on August 09, 2018, 01:04:47 PM
As a hoarder, I usually have too much stuff laying around doing nothing for me. Wealth doesn't really captures my ability to fend off raids, so... the solution is to not be wealthy :-\
Don't be unnecessarily wealthy. If you have a freaking pile of gold laying about and no guns to defend it I would probably swipe it off you if there was no real negative to me.
Maybe wealth in conjunction with defenses, but defenses might even be a deterrent. Because of the huge negative to raiding somewhere with high wealth, but death incarnate defenses. Noone wants to die, but them wanting your crap is completely reasonable. Maybe once you have x amount of defense and y amount of wealth you only get uber powered raids desperately trying to overcome your walls.
"Hey Bob want to go raid that outpost?"
"Nah man they don't have anything worth risking my neck for. I hear they have to eat people just to make ends meet."
"What about that one?"
"Are you kidding me? They have enough firepower to turn us into putty! Remember last time, Frank was vaporized as soon as he got in range. I still remember his arms going one way and his legs the other. Don't even ask where his head went."
"Okay... What about that art convent over there? I hear they have been working in Gold recently."
....
"Now Jim that right there is my speed. Bring up places like that more often."
I like wealth based raid sizes, it makes sense. If you settlement looks wealthy, there will be more people willing to ransack it. If you want to live good, you must invest in protecting it, it matches the feeling of a rimworld.
And it allows you to develop in your own pace, you can be equally successful both on NB and normal start.
I think all other systems, like time based or based on damage inflicted by the previous raid have their own problems and suit less for this game.
There is of course the problem that this system discourages players from progressing. The best way to fix it I think is to somehow make progressing more desirable for players, so they see increased raid threat as another problem they need to solve to get to their goal.
May be the way to fix it is to allow players to bribe the raiders with expensive items if the raiders are after the wealth. This way, even if you've miscalculated your ability to defend your wealth, you can always just give the excesses away. And later, after the raid, you'll have motivation to protect your wealth better. And you'll want that wealth even more, because it was denied from you.
Or may be instead of giving players a way to bribe the raiders, may be make the wealth-based raids less targeted to destruction and more targeted to robing. So, those raiders won't try to kidnap colonists or burn the base, just grab some amount of valuables and leave. Or may be combine this and the previous one.
Also, one way that encourages progressing right now is a necessity to be sustainable against other threats, like you need enough food in your storages to be able to survive random volcanic winter -> toxic fallout combo.
Another way is may be presenting players with quests with desirable rewards, like cool implants or mech healing serum, but to complete these quests the player must progress.
Quote from: erdrik on August 09, 2018, 01:12:13 PM
Different Colony Stats should attract different events.
- Wealth should increase the chance of Basic Pirate raids, and raids from other non-pirate hostile human factions. But defensive strength(any building or colonist capable of dealing any form of damage to another pawn, and any animal trained to release) should decrease the chance of such raids.
- Large food stockpiles and large fields of at least half grown crops, should increase the chance of manhunter packs. Manhunter packs should be split into two groups. The "guards" and the "locusts". The guards hang out around the doors of the colony as normal, but the locusts will ignore humans and instead make a beeline for the crop fields and eat everything they can(or in the case of carnivores just destroy crops). Once the locusts have had their fill they meet up with the guards so they can switch roles.
- Defensive strength should increase the chance of mechanoid raids, mechanoid ship parts, drop pods, sieges, and sappers.
- Colonists that have been captured and recruited should increase the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from. Colonists that joined of their own free will or were rescued from a Chased event should reduce the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from, and increase the chance of future "Chased" and "Join" events.
- Cosmic events(solar flares, eclipse, ect) should be purely random and time based.
Basically colony wealth should only ever attract low level basic human raids. And defensive strength should be the attractor for most of the other heavy hitting raids. That way the player can down scale their defenses if they are attracting too much attention. The important part will be balancing basic raid strength so as to make sure there is always at least some threat to encourage building defenses.
These are good suggestions. However, there still needs to be some mechanism to determine the basic strength level of any raid or pack that is generated.
I think raid strength should fundamentally be time-dependent. A simple line or curve whose slope (or equivalent if a curve) increases with difficulty level (basebuilder would be pretty flat, extreme quite steep). Difficulty *should* increase with time, requiring a colony to advance to survive.
That said, the basic shape of the time curve should be modified by things like:
1. Total number of colonists (potentially could make violent-capable pawns count more toward this than non-violent)
2. Combined strength of combat-capable animals. Four rhinos/elephants/thrumbos should add more to raid strength than 4 artic foxes, for example.
2. Number of defensive installations (traps, turrets, sandbags, mortars, IEDs, etc), including those in storage
3. Highest-technology level of armor and weapon(s) equipped or in storage (i.e. there's an orbital bombardment device in storage so raids would be a little stronger, even if everyone is using bows and clubs)
4. Total number of defensively useful structures (i.e. doors and walls). This would have to be balanced against the total number of colonists so that an ordinary base appropriate to the population isn't punishing but someone who has built 300 doors to maximize door peeking or a vast maze of double-thick walls will see more difficult raids. This factor could potentially be used to penalize mountain bases without requiring massive infestations as a counter. A mountain base could simply count as a huge number of walls.
And on top of that, the current concept of adaptation also should be incorporated to dynamically adjust the raid strength *somewhat* in response to spectacular success or failure of the previous raid to help prevent death spirals.
Just spitballin' here, some quick ideas ignoring "but muh base building sim":
A system where different factors affect raid type, wealth attracts more pirate raiders, research attracts more tribals, time played attracts more mechs. To avoid player manipulation it would only be increased odds, not a definite raid type. Eg if you have a lot of research you have a 70% chance of a 100pt tribal raid, an 20% chance of a 90 pt pirate raid, 10% chance of a 80pt mech raid. No matter the playstyle there is never 0% chance of a raid type, but the player can influence it a bit, and still can complain later about the shitty RNG because they didn't get their way. :)
Be old school and scale raids based on colony age only using a constantly increasing factor- no matter the population or wealth they get harder over time. This is less sandbox and more straight up game-y. Perhaps decrease the factor if a colony moves to a new location and restarts from scratch or a major catastrophe happens like 2/3 of the colonists die. This would give a sense of urgency to the game and could be fun.
I like the idea that uses past raids as a factor for scaling, if plain old walk-in raids do little damage increase drop ins, or have a seige + flank walk-in raid combo. This could be a workaround for killboxes.
You could be mean and increase the chance of a raid happening during a solar flare, I feel like these could be smaller/less powerful to account for the raiders assembling quickly to take advantage.
Quote from: JimmyAgnt007 on August 09, 2018, 11:00:53 AM
Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything? Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?
100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill. +100pts for next raid.
so, its based on how easily you repel a raid. if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points. this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them. where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them. also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.
other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.
this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders
Could you expand on this a little? How would you handle the following conditions to ensure fair, balanced, and enjoyable gameplay?
1] Would you include an upper limitation(perhaps based on wealth) for maximum points? Otherwise what would stop this system from eventually pointing out and causing an artificial "death of colony" point? IE at what point do you give negative points?
2] What about situations where if the above situation results in a "median" raid size after a few gameplay years? How would you entice the system to occasionally force a stress on the colony? Randy random style with a large scaling modifier occasionally? Forcing more sapper events?
3] Would you completely exclude animal raids from this system? Manhunter threat scales too iirc so what would stop a player from min/maxing several raids to gain an absurd quantity of leather and meat?
Quote from: Aerial on August 09, 2018, 02:33:48 PMI think raid strength should fundamentally be time-dependent. A simple line or curve whose slope (or equivalent if a curve) increases with difficulty level (basebuilder would be pretty flat, extreme quite steep). Difficulty *should* increase with time, requiring a colony to advance to survive.
Cassy doesn't give that already? (See the storyteller description!)
@ Crow: /Colony total wealth/ already affects raid size/danger (see above OP complaints); however I agree that raids could be more varied: eg a 'snatch' raid to kidnap a specific colonist*; a 'grab' raid to gather <stuff> (food or high-wealth items etc); a 'kill' raid to wipe out your colony, etc..
No idea how this will develop into the game; I'm just throwing out thoughts..
Don't forget that the 'win condition' of this game is to escape the planet (ie build/find a starship). If you choose to ignore that goal & treat it as a base-builder/colony game then fair enough, but don't expect conditions to improve..
*Esp. if said colonist is a relation; perhaps ramp up that raid type probability?
The storyteller description is incorrect. There is no time element. There used to be a "long term rampup" which sort of but not really was time based, although that got switched into adaptation which is a little more reactive. But even the old system was multiplied onto wealth.
I hated the old timed system. It meant you were fine until you lost once and then you were screwed because the next attack would be bigger while you were smaller. I never found a situation where it was worth it to keep playing. I always did, it just was never worth it.
The game can't ever become easier or safer as a colony improves, because then it would become boring. Dangers have to scale in line with the player's ability to handle them, keeping the risk level the same.
See how ARPGs like Diablo deal with this. The player never makes any lasting progress on difficulty, but progresses on story and aesthetics. Chain Lightning versus level 30 monsters isn't any easier than Shock Bolts at level 1, but it looks and sounds so much cooler, and the control feels smoother. Often, the late-game monsters are the same as the level 1 monsters except for a palette swap. But having cycled through other monsters still feels like progress.
RimWorld lets the player decorate bedrooms, buy guns, orchestrate complex production lines, heal maimed colonists, train pets, install air conditioning - all sorts of goals to strive for, achieve, and feel good about. The problem with wealth-based raid scaling is that every accomplishment is poisoned by a feeling of helplessness. The colony is endangered because all threats get bigger. How can the player prepare against "all threats get bigger"?
But the player can prepare against specific, telegraphed dangers. I like the themed, motivated raid idea. Specific, well-communicated player accomplishments should unlock larger sizes of different raid types, which try to push the player back on that accomplishment.
- Thieves scale by how much carryable loot you have. And they try to steal it.
- Tribals scale by how much electricity you are using. And they try to destroy it.
- Mechanoids scale by how many Advanced Components you have or are using. And they try to destroy them.
- Infestations scale by how many excavated mountain tiles you are occupying. And they try to push you off of them.
- Slavers scale by the value of your colonists. And they try to kidnap them.
- Maddened herbivores eat your grain, carnivores eat your animals, boomrats burn your furniture.
Threats feel more actionable if they are specific. If I know that my Alpaca ranch is going to attract swarms of maddened wolves, I can prepare for wolves. Which feels much better than a vague knowledge that everything will become more dangerous.
I also like that a motivated raid has limited (but painful) consequences for opting out. Currently, fighting a raid to the death feels mandatory.
There is an easy solution.
In order to build a particular building, it requires specific materials.
And this material has to get a fixed scale threat. This threat can be done at the desired timing.
This battle can not be done by reducing property.
Fixed threats can be difficult to deal with with with low property.
It doesn't have to be a battle. It could be a huge mental shock or a long winter.
It seems to be a good result if you combine the increased threat according to property and the fixed threat of the desired timing.
If your property is high and you have enough fighting power, it's easy to strike a fixed threat, but on the contrary, a property-based threat will be difficult.
If your property is small, fixed threats will be difficult and property-based threats will be easy.
Quote from: Aerial on August 09, 2018, 02:33:48 PM
...
These are good suggestions. However, there still needs to be some mechanism to determine the basic strength level of any raid or pack that is generated.
I think raid strength should fundamentally be time-dependent. A simple line or curve whose slope (or equivalent if a curve) increases with difficulty level (basebuilder would be pretty flat, extreme quite steep). Difficulty *should* increase with time, requiring a colony to advance to survive.
That said, the basic shape of the time curve should be modified by things like:
...
I don't really support time dependent raid strength, partly for meta reasons.
Eventually if you play long enough you will reach a point where your computer simply cannot handle the horde the game will send at you. If the intent is endless scaling that eventually kills you, there needs to be a hard cap where instead of adding ever more numbers, you get raids with ever
stronger individual units.
Even if the intent is
not endless scaling, I'd still prefer prioritizing the scaling the strength of
individual units over numerical hordes.
Time based doesn't necessarily mean time only. While vanilla has like 1000 lines of code in various areas related to the raid size, making it time based doesn't necessarily mean you need to make it a one liner. But you can do a 1 liner if you like: exponents < 1 take care of what you say and slowly cap it in a gradual way. Although having looked at a lot of graphs, I think you want it to be the other way around and be > 1, as wealth grows almost quadratically in rimworld.
The other part I agree with, however, that simply means there should be new units with higher points per unit. The actually formula for raid points would be increasing all the time.
Thanks all for the comments! Your feedback has been very helpful to improve my own proposal. Even though I can't please everybody, I tried to incorporate as many of your suggestions as I could.
First, let's discuss some fundamental scaling issues. Suppose that the raid strength depends primarily on wealth or defence strength or time. Two things can happen. If your effective defence strength increases faster than the raid strength, then the game becomes too easy. Conversely, if the raid strength increases faster than your ability to defend against it, you eventually lose. Neither those situations are desirable.
In particular, if the raid strength depends on wealth, and the game becomes exponentially harder with wealth, then we obtain the current state of Rimworld. Most of the wealth becomes focussed on defence. Raid sizes become huge and tedious to clean up. The computer starts to lag. Non-pawn-based defences become the dominant mean of defence. It leads to dubious incentives such as damaging your weapons and limiting the luxuries of your base.
Now, if the raid strength depends primarily on how well on how you dealt with the last one, then eventually, no matter how well you play, you'll get a bloody nose because the raid strength will keep increasing until you lose. I don't find this very satisfying.
I propose to resolve these scaling issues with a system based primarily on progression.
The stronghold system
The stronghold system offers an alternative for the players who do not seek to escape with the ship at the earliest opportunity. It is fully compatible with this goal, however.
There are three variables used by the system: the luxuries (aka wealth), the defences, and the development level. You start the game at the lowest development level. Your goal is to progressively increase your development level and reach the maximum level you can sustain, both militarily and economically.
At the beginning, the other factions look at you with contempt. Look at the little settlement, they say. No electricity. Play with a horseshoes pin. Savages! Even the actual savages look down at you.
Accumulating wealth is very dangerous initially. As per Thane's suggestion, the pirates will leave you alone so long as you have nothing worth taking. If you start churning out golden statues while your defences consist of a grand total of three traps, you'll be sorry. However, hoarding wealth becomes less of a worry at high development levels. By then, it will be widely known that the stuff is guarded.
In terms of mechanics, the raid strength is very sensitive to wealth at low development level. The wealth contribution levels off at high development level. Eventually you can hoard luxuries as much as you want. In fact, you'll have to if you play on high difficulty.
The pawn expectations depend only on the development level, with some exceptions made for caravans. As per Koek's suggestion, expectations start very low, but as the development level increase, wealth must be obtained to improve the base to please the pawns. Critically, high wealth by itself does not lead to high expectations.
The defences are counted in a different pool than the luxuries. This includes walls, doors, traps, turrets, weapons, worn apparels, pawns, bionics, and animals (based on actual combat potential -- chickens don't count for much).
Like Awe proposed, the weapon quality has no bearing on its defence rating; it only affects its market value. Thus, obtaining a legendary weapon is a major reason for celebrating. Conversely, awful weapons are truly awful. This is true for armor and apparel as well. Apparels like cloth dusters that don't provide meaningful protection do not count as defence.
The defence pool is soft-capped by the development level. You can build sky-high defences if you want, and sit back and relax while your traps and turrets take care of the raiders automatically. You'll have a mutiny on your hand, though.
See, your pawns interest lies mainly on having a good time and making progress. They'll put up with building some defences, but they won't tolerate ugly turrets everywhere they look, traps that can blow them up at a moment's notice, and walls so high they can't see the scenery anymore. Wealth won't placate them indefinitely. Yes, that golden statue looks very nice, but they'd rather watch X-rated movies on that plasma TV that they don't currently have in their neolithic development level.
In terms of mechanics, the raid strength is marginally influenced by your defence rating. Lower defences lead to slightly lowered aggression, since your attackers believe you're an easy prey. It helps you to recover between raids. The main raid scaling factor comes from your development level. The attackers guess your probable defences based on how advanced you are. When your development level increase, the raids become stronger, but your defence pool also becomes larger, i.e. you can build more turrets without incurring a revolt because your pawns acknowledge the necessity.
The defence pool is a critical resource to manage. At high difficulty, it is too small to realistically repel a raid using only fixed defences. You have to use every tool at your disposal, especially your pawns. The defence pool size increases slightly slower than the raid strength, so the game becomes harder as you go on. But, since time is not a major raid scaling factor, you have a chance even on sea ice. As many have suggested, the difficulty can also change dynamically when you're dealt a bloody nose. Adaptation mechanics are already in the game. Importantly, you never have to deal with gigantic raids that are a chore to handle.
The player upgrades its development level by researching the corresponding technology.
The core of the proposed system can be implemented without too many changes to the existing mechanics (possibly in a mod). Mostly, the accounting needs to be changed and the research tree must be tweaked to integrate the development thresholds. The main challenge is the balancing.
Optional stuff
Ideally, it would be very difficult to obtain high-level stuff in a low-development colony. Trade ships and outlanders snub you. Raiders don't carry high-level gear (and if they do, beware). Basically, you're stuck with the stuff of your era. Quests could be an interesting exception.
It could be fun to make the defence cost of an item non-linear with the amount of that item that you have, e.g. to give freebies. Say, the first 2 power armors you have don't contribute to your defence pool. So, this encourages you to use all of the variety of the tools at your disposal, even those with lower absolute utility.
The number of pawns you can recruit could be affected by the development level. Not many people want to live in a slum.
The development level could scale off indefinitely, so you can brag that you reached development level 12 on merciless. This allows the difficulty to increase smoothly past the intended difficulty of merciless, for the players who want to. Conversely, for players who just want to build the base, the defence pool is effectively unlimited.
Another possibility to soft-cap the defence pool is to make the raider strength non-linear with it, rather than incurring a debuff. Don't scare the neighborhood -- they don't like it.
The development level could also have economic consequences. To make your stronghold rise to pre-eminence in the world, you have to bribe politicians, impress the world with your art, and feed, dress and heal the hordes of visitors who seek your protection and charity. Then, the challenge becomes to increase your throughput to meet the demand. This makes your pawn skills important. Rimworld meet Factorio!
tl-dr
- Separate wealth from defence.
- Defence pool is limited, incur major debuff if exceeded.
- Expectations, defence pool and raid scaling depend mostly on development level.
- Development level increases at the player's pace, through research.
The more I play and understand the wealth based raid system (And adaption) the more I dislike it. There is really no reward for good management and efficiency. If it takes me 60 days or 10 years to get to 75k wealth it's all the same to the game. If you're a good manager and your colony expands and progresses quickly you're generally punished for it. On the other hand, you can sit at 18k wealth forever and wait for your colonists to research the entire tech tree with no punishment. Likewise if you defend raids perfectly they get harder and harder, until eventually you can get a raid that's powerful enough to destroy the entire colony. On the other hand, if you did less well and were taking small losses, you get adapted into easier raids. Success is punishment.
It's to the point where I don't really want to play on Merciless anymore. Not because I can't survive on Merciless, but because playing on Merciless involves you going against what I feel should be the actual point of the game: Making the best colony you can.
The main problem with using wealth as a base for generating threat points is that not all of it translates into something which gives you an edge over the next raid. It isn't selective enough. One of the things my mod Combat Readiness Check does is to ignore the item wealth calculation in favour of assessing the wealth value of weapons and protective armour that the colony has available to them (equipped or not).
By the way, there's a cap of 20000 threat points in 0.19, so there is sort of a limit to how large raids can be.
I think combat readiness is a great mod if you're playing in a sandboxy way, sort of like a very adaptive difficulty. However, I don't think it's great on a colony planning level, as there would be no real point to building any sort of defenses: the enemy would just scale exactly to those defenses. And it kind of relies on the modder to have perfect knowledge of how much your preparation is worth in raid value, which I think it's better to be blind to. One thing I think 1.0 kind of failed on is combat animals, and it's because it's pretty hard to choose a right number for how much raid points an animal is worth. So you really shouldn't.
There are settings so you csn adjust the threat points that things generate. The defaults mean that only light defences are needed, but if you crank it up then yoy need to be more prepated.
Quote from: Greep on August 10, 2018, 12:12:36 AM
One thing I think 1.0 kind of failed on is combat animals, and it's because it's pretty hard to choose a right number for how much raid points an animal is worth. So you really shouldn't.
I don't know if it fails. Animals are fun and it's not easy to manage a large number of animals and use them against raiders. It's rather like a weird strategy which shouldn't be penalized.
What bugs me is that wealth should be a major indicator for raids. Ofc people want that legendary stuff you got going or the huge supplies you have. I actually have never bothered with controlling my wealth, but there are fair points that increasing colony wealth doesnt do anything and just makes life harder.
I dont think there is a perfect solution and "exploits" will always happen.
Quote from: NiftyAxolotl on August 09, 2018, 10:57:43 PM
The game can't ever become easier or safer as a colony improves, because then it would become boring. Dangers have to scale in line with the player's ability to handle them, keeping the risk level the same.
See how ARPGs like Diablo deal with this. The player never makes any lasting progress on difficulty, but progresses on story and aesthetics. Chain Lightning versus level 30 monsters isn't any easier than Shock Bolts at level 1, but it looks and sounds so much cooler, and the control feels smoother. Often, the late-game monsters are the same as the level 1 monsters except for a palette swap. But having cycled through other monsters still feels like progress.
RimWorld lets the player decorate bedrooms, buy guns, orchestrate complex production lines, heal maimed colonists, train pets, install air conditioning - all sorts of goals to strive for, achieve, and feel good about. The problem with wealth-based raid scaling is that every accomplishment is poisoned by a feeling of helplessness. The colony is endangered because all threats get bigger. How can the player prepare against "all threats get bigger"?
But the player can prepare against specific, telegraphed dangers. I like the themed, motivated raid idea. Specific, well-communicated player accomplishments should unlock larger sizes of different raid types, which try to push the player back on that accomplishment.
- Thieves scale by how much carryable loot you have. And they try to steal it.
- Tribals scale by how much electricity you are using. And they try to destroy it.
- Mechanoids scale by how many Advanced Components you have or are using. And they try to destroy them.
- Infestations scale by how many excavated mountain tiles you are occupying. And they try to push you off of them.
- Slavers scale by the value of your colonists. And they try to kidnap them.
- Maddened herbivores eat your grain, carnivores eat your animals, boomrats burn your furniture.
Threats feel more actionable if they are specific. If I know that my Alpaca ranch is going to attract swarms of maddened wolves, I can prepare for wolves. Which feels much better than a vague knowledge that everything will become more dangerous.
I also like that a motivated raid has limited (but painful) consequences for opting out. Currently, fighting a raid to the death feels mandatory.
the current system is also boring, as ultimately there is no sense of progression, and that most strategic choices are meaningless besides a very specific set of ones that lower your wealth. In fact it is almost worse in the sense that early game outcomes are dominated by combat choices, late game is dominated by considerations like "how do I destroy all these weapons that sell for 20% price but count for full market value" and "corpse disposal party", since your colonists will break at any simultaneous sight of rotting and regular corpses.
I like to discuss optimizing economy, but the conclusion is that none of it really matters. Play well, or play badly in this regard, arguably the latter is better.
Same concept with mood management. Everything you know about making space efficient bedrooms that pawns like goes out the window when you realize that it means nothing in the face of "make sure you don't go up an expectations tier"
PS there is absolutely progression in Diablo, the difference in efficiency of geared and ungeared character is immense.
I have to agree with all of it. Particularly pawns becoming less useful and pumping turrets and traps, and doing dumb exploits to keep wealth low.
Quote from: Nynzal on August 10, 2018, 09:46:45 AM
What bugs me is that wealth should be a major indicator for raids. Ofc people want that legendary stuff you got going or the huge supplies you have. I actually have never bothered with controlling my wealth, but there are fair points that increasing colony wealth doesnt do anything and just makes life harder.
I dont think there is a perfect solution and "exploits" will always happen.
Wealth based raids really only works for one faction lore-wise: "space pirates". Maybe tribals. If a very important mechanic isn't working well, lore should be tossed aside anyways. It's not like regular raids makes sense anyways (pretty sure pirates would give up after the second shot), so lore is given second thought in the first place.
Things get silly if you look at raids in a sensible way. I wonder where these 100 man tribal sapper raids are coming from to attack my completely isolated island ice cap colony.
My conclusion is - the 100+ tribals are coming to test you for either stock of doomsday launchers or barring that, your computer strength.
If raids scale with number of pawns, there is an incentive to keep the number of pawns low, or at least to avoid taking bad pawns
If raids scale with wealth, there is an incentive to limit one's wealth. This leads to absurd situations like not wanting good equipment, high quality rooms, a large base, etc.
Raids should not scale with wealth. Instead, they should scale according to how much harm previous raids inflicted on players. I'll not try to describe the exact algorithm but it would involve counting pawn death, temporary and permanent injury, wealth destruction/theft resulting from the raid in relation to total wealth, and work required to fix things again, and look at several of the last raids. This is roughly how a human game master would do it.
Pawns being downed or killed is already covered by adaptation.
While scaling of threats with number of pawns doesn't take into account things like pawn capabilities, it does give a basic number of points which can be scaled by the other factors. A human game master would similarly scale encounters up according to the number of people in the party before considering other factors.
Quote from: Nafensoriel on August 09, 2018, 07:37:14 PM
Quote from: JimmyAgnt007 on August 09, 2018, 11:00:53 AM
Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything? Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?
100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill. +100pts for next raid.
so, its based on how easily you repel a raid. if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points. this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them. where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them. also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.
other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.
this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders
Could you expand on this a little? How would you handle the following conditions to ensure fair, balanced, and enjoyable gameplay?
1] Would you include an upper limitation(perhaps based on wealth) for maximum points? Otherwise what would stop this system from eventually pointing out and causing an artificial "death of colony" point? IE at what point do you give negative points?
2] What about situations where if the above situation results in a "median" raid size after a few gameplay years? How would you entice the system to occasionally force a stress on the colony? Randy random style with a large scaling modifier occasionally? Forcing more sapper events?
3] Would you completely exclude animal raids from this system? Manhunter threat scales too iirc so what would stop a player from min/maxing several raids to gain an absurd quantity of leather and meat?
1] I think playtesting would be needed to see where limits would be but there probably should be some. Also, you could take a lot of damage(injuries) without loosing anything per say, but still be nowhere neer able to fight like you otherwise can. So injuries would count as a negative modifier. loss of turrets maybe as well.
2] I think it would depend on how each raid was defeated. If turrets get the most kills then maybe a raid that counters them. If mortars took out the siege, then maybe a drop pod assault on top of them. Forcing Defence in Depth, something most players cant really do, so it makes cracks in the line that any raid could exploit.
3]I can get that without exploiting, also, if someone wants to cheat then it doesnt matter if something is balanced. Animals are annoying for me to fight any time, but manhunter packs dont seem unbalanced. They are probably the only kind of raid that makes sense to just mob charge the colony.
Greetings this is my first post. Been playing this game since Alpha 17 and it's probably the game I play the most.
I don't think wealth is a bad metric and have always liked it. I think it just needs to be fleshed out to be more realistic because I agree that in alpha it was fine the way it was but for full release it needs to have some flavour. For instance there's a lot of mods out there that increase the types of traders that come to your base and give tons of different factions. Why not have raids based on your wealth and type of faction raiding you? For instance pirates would react to the value of drugs and weapons you have, tribes to the value of food you have, corporations to the value of buildings and structures you have? Etc. Then you could thematise it even further if you were a mod maker and for instance the Sparkling Worlds Mod Blue Moon corps might go for colonies that stack prosthetics, weapons and medicine... or the Walkblem guys could go for colonies that stack the stuff they make, etc.
Anyway I like wealth but it definitely needs fleshing for full release! By thematising the wealth-raiding system it could also make it very moddable.
Why not base raid difficulty on colony wealth
visibility? Kind of like caravans.
Here's how I envision it:
- the colony starts with zero visibility (only small random raids)
- enemies that flee during a raid increase visibility
- when traders arrive, colonists may leak information, based on their break risk (and Warden skill?), also increasing visibility
- once the comms console is researched, there can be a mental break where colonists radio information to the enemy, greatly increasing visibility
- if a faction turns hostile, visibility increases greatly
- visibility will slowly decrease with time
- this new visibility value is used as a multiplier of the existing wealth value.
This game mechanic would mean you could create all the wealth you wanted, as long as you could keep everyone happy and run a tight ship. I think this addresses many of this issues addressed in these posts in a relatively simple way.
Hmmm... this actually might not be a very difficult mod. Perhaps I'll look into it.
The funny part is you would think that wealth scales linearly to threats.
It doesn't, it is actually significantly supralinear in certain ways.
Do some dev mode experimentation and you will see what I'm talking about.
I was curious why I was facing raids of 8-10x my numbers on cas/merciless (including things like 300 v 22 infestations) while streamers in similar game states were getting 3-5x.
Through this dev mode testing I was able to figure out, but the absurdities of the wealth scaling system become even more obvious under such interrogations.
Quote from: JimmyAgnt007 on August 09, 2018, 11:00:53 AM
Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything? Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?
100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill. +100pts for next raid.
so, its based on how easily you repel a raid. if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points. this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them. where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them. also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.
other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.
this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders
I like this idea. Leaves a little room for easing off a touch if you get hit too hard. But wealth might make sense as far as being a target for your enemies. Maybe there could be attacks more related to wealth where most of the mobs would steal stuff while the others created a diversion
It'd be a bit weird to consider pawns damage as a main factor for raid size. So you get punished for effective strategies and proper defense? I know there's adaptation but not sure how much that plays a part.
Honestly I agree with wealth being one of the main factors for increasing raid size. Maybe adjusting values for different items would help. Values for armor/weapons doesn't match its worth IMO and they're a necessity. (crazy that players are damaging to lower wealth, understandable tho) I'd prefer those to be adjusted. I would like for buildings to add a good amount of wealth. I would like to see new structures which are super useful but very expensive, maybe they are kind of optional tech. Cloning for example (not suggestion btw).
I wouldn't expect raid sizes to get smaller or things to get easier if my colony was hit pretty hard, unless a lot of wealth was taken from me. I find it interesting that is sort of a common complaint. Couldn't that be solved by adding a new storyteller?
Having ludicrous amount materials that aren't very useful to you + stockpiled on tons of food. The game isn't punishing you for progressing here. Destroying them is tedious and just slow downs progress. If that's what they want to do then I guess let them.
Enemies aren't properly tiered. I think it would help to have a variety of mechs and more raid types with appropriate tech to counter them. Game only throws more numbers at you. It'd be great if some threats like infestations were more interesting and not affected much by wealth for obvious reasons. I don't see the game getting a proper balance without drastic changes if not gonna add those kinds of things. Just my opinion tho.
Its not punishment for proper defenses, its scaling with your ability to repel attacks. The more capable you are, the harder the game tries to hit you. If you are badly wounded, then it eases off.
If it kept scaling up cause you're not taking much damage then that is indeed punishment. Haven't been playing lately, but I sure hope some of the raids I was seeing was just balancing issues and not due to adaptation.
It's always interesting the difference between how players interpret increasing difficulty as "punishment" versus progression.
Almost every game gets harder as the player progresses. DOOM, StarCraft, WoW, Portal, Street Fighter, Jagged Alliance 2, etc. It's an attempt to match challenge with player ability so the player is neither overwhelmed nor bored. But players don't tend to interpret, say, DOOM's increasingly difficulty fights as "punishment". Like, "Hey, I defeated a room full of 10 zombies, why am I now punished by having to fight a room of 15 zombies?" Nobody says this.
In RW interpretations seem to shift back and forth across this line very fluidly and it's hard to see exactly what drives that difference. It seems very personal and very situational, and (at least on the forum) can even be driven by meta concerns or theoretical analysis of code or XML.
Also interesting is how much is up to interpretation. Consider situations like this:
A) If you succeed game gets harder
B) Game gets harder over time, but if you get hurt game eases off temporarily to give you breathing room
Note that A and B above can describe the exact same code, the only difference is in interpretation of what is "cause and effect" and what is considered "neutral".
Or consider
C) Game starts at 50% difficulty and scales to 100% as you go without taking damage. Enemies cost 10 threat points each.
D) Game starts at 100% difficulty and scales to 200% as you go without taking damage. Enemies cost 20 threat points each.
Again, note that C and D are identical in actual outcomes. But someone reading the XML or the code might interpret them differently because of the anchoring effect of the "100% multiplier" concept, where 100% is intepreted as "neutral" (when in fact this number is invisible in actual play and may be tuned that way simply to make the design process easier, since it's easier to tune one central multiplier than many other numbers it applies to).
Anyway, I'm just rambling. I'm glad this thread exists, though. Some people are making some good points for me to consider, but it also throws light on the fact that the downsides of wealth as a core challenge-driving mechanic are much easier to describe than they are to solve. It's a damn hard problem.
In truth, raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth (wealth is a major component of it, but so is population including animals, health, recent damage taken, and some other bits). The system in game in the unstable build is really close to an overlapping mix of many of the ideas put forth here. So it'd be very easy to make a mod to apply only some of these systems - e.g. a storyteller who scales difficulty entirely by time and ignores other concerns. Or entirely by population. Etc. So you could try the ideas in this thread.
Having considered it more recently, I figure that if I was going to really rework the threat scaling system I would extend the caravan visibility system back to settlements as well, similar to the direction freemapa described. The game AI War also revolves around a mechanic like this, where the AI machine fleet enemy can always annihilate the player easily in the early game, but simply doesn't "notice" or "care" enough about the player's puny forces; there's an explicit system of how "noticed" you are and playing with that is a core part of the game in AI War. Something similar could be done for RW (though I have no plans for such an aggressive redesign at this point, it's one of many ideas in my long-term idea pool).
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=20912.msg245565#msg245565
the more things change, the more they stay the same.
so with regards to the modern raid point formula:
just because certain raid point term is ∝ wealth * population, does not mean its not proportional to wealth! this is a key concept to grasp, you can really get in trouble with your taxes otherwise!!
The only factor of the ones you mention that is not proportional to wealth is the raid point contribution specific to release-capable animals (this is a special term - animal wealth has a separate contribution). Even in a game with hundreds of combat animals this component will rarely contribute to more than ~15% of the raid points. Every other factor - such as recovery, population, and pawn health is proportional to wealth because they all apply multiplicative modifiers to terms proportional to wealth.
If one clicks back and forth between the wealth and debug pages, one finds it difficult to say "raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth" with a straight face.
Quote from: seerdecker on August 09, 2018, 10:36:36 AM
C) The solution
Fixing the wealth issue is much more difficult than listing its shortcomings. What do you think could be done to improve the game with respect to difficulty? Discuss!
Keep in mind that it has to be simple to have a shot to be implemented, i.e. implementation effort must be handled as wealth ;)
I think that the wealth system makes people who know about it feel threatened. Those who doesn't know about instead, get a very balanced gameplay feeling as the wealth adaption is actually a pretty good idea.
In this way, same like the unknowing, nobody should be afraid of the wealth system. It affects the difficutly, but in a good way.
A rough Example:
Let's say you will craft a excellent LMG. it's a strong weapon that makes you stronger. If i get the math right thats LMG 300 x excellent 2 = 600 wealth. itemWealth gets divided by 100, so its 600/100=6. The next raid will have 6 points more than the last one.
A raider has a point value of 35-210 depending on its type. The difference of 6 means, that from 20 Raiders attacking you next time, the one with the two peg legs, will only have one peg leg!
This means, while you get a rambo rifle, the raider gets a new leg. Now I ask you: Is a LMG able too fight a leg? I'm pretty sure it is.
Here's the formula:
P = (( C × 42 ) + ( iW ÷ 100 ) + ( bW ÷ 200 )) × ( sR × lR ) × D × T × R
C= Colonist
iW = Items
bW = building
Further information here:
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider
Quote from: Tynan on August 15, 2018, 09:59:01 PM
It's always interesting the difference between how players interpret increasing difficulty as "punishment" versus progression.
...
In RW interpretations seem to shift back and forth across this line very fluidly and it's hard to see exactly what drives that difference. It seems very personal and very situational, and (at least on the forum) can even be driven by meta concerns or theoretical analysis of code or XML.
...
I think it's not just increasing difficulty, but the way in which it increases (both cause and variety). I enjoyed my 1st unstable play through, haven't been able to pick it up again yet due to work, but appreciate that you're listening to feed back.
I think Oblivion vs. Morrowind is a decent case study re: effects of scaling. IIRC, Morrowind had no scaling. While this occasionally lead to unwinnable situations, I thought it enhanced the story telling, and gave the PC a true sense of progression: mid-level ancient ruins that obliterated the PC at a low level are memorable because of the danger, and once the PC has gained strength, that strength has tangible meaning (the ruins are no longer an impassable threat). This does lead to eventually "capping" difficulty, but I think that's fine (whether it's above or below what is feasible to defend against).
In contrast, everything was scaled in Oblivion: everything from end-game dungeons to mud crabs matched the PCs level. This caused several issues:
1) It homogenized encounters to the point that everything felt like a DPS calculation - if every enemy grows to match you, are any of them really that different?
2) It pushes the player away from non-combat growth - it's not so much the increased difficulty as it is the active discouragement from different builds (i.e., homogenizing builds/play styles).
3) It sabotages the internal game system of progression: it's fun to figure out how to optimize to handle a challenge, but when the conclusion is to simply avoid growing in level, it's a little disappointing. As a player, you're either "cheesing" the system, or you're choosing to ignore the optimized solution (and figuring that solution out is usually the fun part of the challenge).
The difficulty slider in that game is even worse - it just directly scales damage and HP. I remember turning it to max once; I ended up kiting a boar for about 5 minutes, and I realized it was just a "tedium" slider.
All that said, I think the best way to circumvent the problems with scaling involve different methods of increased difficulty. I think AI is the best way to do this: adding a handful of different raid types has already forced people to adjust their strategy, I think there's still a ton of room to explore there (especially with e.g. Changing targets, shooting at doors, etc). The launch sequence is another great step - it's a huge ramp up in difficulty, but it's an active choice with a tangible benefit. I think the caravan quests are a great prototype to a sort of mid-game progression step, with a ton of room to flesh out more significant events (rescue multiple/special colonists from slavers, assassinate a faction leader, capture a large established base, etc).
Re: other changes, such as the "man in black" thing I've read about - I think that's another example of over-scaling. If it happens with a degree of predictability, that sort of difficulty reduction just ends up making the rest of the game feel homogenized, or even "fake." Even if the random colony deaths can be brutal/frustrating, I think the game is much better if they exist; I still have fond memories of failing to build fire-breaks before rain was guaranteed, and frantically sending out most of the colony to try to contain huge brush-fires. If it rained, it felt like a miracle - now that it rains predictably afterwards, that type of story moment becomes meaningless.
With certain pawn count you are probably better off burning archotech legs than installing them.
For the vast majority of things in this game, combat utility gain does not really match raid point contribution (at least on respectable difficulty).
As a result, on merciless with clean play you end up facing 3-4x your numbers in midgame, which progresses to increasingly degenerate 10v1 odds late if you don't deliberately wealth control. With the new bionics tax its probably something closer to 13-15v1 odds if raid cap isn't met.
Bionics are good, but not good to the point that its worth adding another 3 raiders per cyborg
And you can make that calculation for most things, and they are found wanting.
Quote from: Tynan on August 15, 2018, 09:59:01 PM
Almost every game gets harder as the player progresses. DOOM, StarCraft, WoW, Portal, Street Fighter, Jagged Alliance 2, etc. It's an attempt to match challenge with player ability so the player is neither overwhelmed nor bored. But players don't tend to interpret, say, DOOM's increasingly difficulty fights as "punishment". Like, "Hey, I defeated a room full of 10 zombies, why am I now punished by having to fight a room of 15 zombies?" Nobody says this.
Here is the big misunderstanding I think: Raid scaling by wealth is not equivalent to this scenario. An equivalent scenario is if you scaled further enemies by, say, how much ammo + health + armor at a given time. Most players would understandably find it odd if you took on a big bad baron of hell and, at the final end of the game, simply fought 12 basic possessed simply because you ran out of ammo and have to use a pistol. What a let down that would be! Conversely, you would be punished for doing well if you did well.
Rimworld's situation is slightly worse than that even, though: much wealth is not useful in a fight and it's unclear to newer players that wealth is the main determining factor. Using the DOOM analogy, it would be as if enemy scaling also considered how many times you jumped in the game. It would be a bizarre and pointless sense of progression, but a smooth one nonetheless that can be worked around in weird ways and hurts some players randomly (probably ex oblivion players ::)).
The equivalent scenario here to what DOOM actually does would be timed based raids: In DOOM the progression simply increases the further you play and in Rimworld it would increase the longer you play.
Quote from: Tynan on August 15, 2018, 09:59:01 PM
But players don't tend to interpret, say, DOOM's increasingly difficulty fights as "punishment".
Imagine DOOM with permadeath and when you pick a pack of shells threat level increases significantly. When you pick up a gun threat level increases even more. Now you no longer can grab all the ammo you see, and you no longer can pick all that shiny new guns. You have to think careful what to select and what not. And that's kind of frustrating, because you really want that shiny toys.
Now, even then you'll want to progress in that inhuman DOOM, because it has clear sense of progression - completing levels. In RimWorld your progress can be increasing level of safety and well-being of your colonists, and if not developing your base means more safety for your people, then you are very motivated to not develop it. But you really want to.
An explicitly articulated "notice" system sounds like a great solution though.
Since there is no BOSS fight or explicit end of the game, we shouldnt be progressing as if there were. In DOOM, we can recover a lot more easily than in RW and there is an end point. I dont like the 'play until you inevitably die' logic in a constantly escalating threat. Id rather a level of challenge being maintained.
Also, some raids should be easy. It happens. But trying to avoid wealth to manage raids is not how it should be played. Thats why they should be scaled with your capacity to repel them. Give or take a little.
I also like how you insinuate how most concerns re: raid scaling are from theorycrafting or code analysis.
That is a very unfair characterization. I tested all my 1.0 games without deliberate wealth control, and without looking into the specifics of the raid formula.
However, after getting threats like 41 centipedes / 220 tribal sappers / 300+ insects for 22 pawns, when early game my fights were more on the 3-5 to 1 odds, I realized there was something I didn't understand about raid scaling. It felt off. If you played it, it would feel off too. I hope.
Only then did I spend an evening dev testing calculating the contribution of pawns, adaptation, and animals. At which point I realize that wealth scaling to threat is actually higher than first order.
But I did not go into 1.0 thinking I needed to wealth control. Play experience taught me it is not only the most important thing, it is the only important thing.
This makes the game a lot less appealing to me, because wealth management is actually pretty simple (and yes it works, consistently smaller raids - 2-3:1 odds are the trickiest you will face on merciless if done right). In contrast, there's enormous space to optimize in economy management and its something I am pretty bad at compared to top players.
But all economy optimization does is make your game significantly harder.
What about a "Useful Wealth" metric for raids? Since some colonists require lavish surroundings that raiders wouldn't find practical, why wouldn't only things they find useful be counted? Like for instance if you have tons of higher quality food, drugs, armour, weapons etc. just lying around then word would get out to other factions that your settlement could be a juicy target.
A system like this would allow players to keep themselves busy by further improving their colony rooms without being "punished" for it, without having to play on a lower difficulty.
Unless as JimmyAgnt007 above said, the idea is you're supposed to die eventually to finish the colonist's story and to move onto another.
Quote from: zizard on August 16, 2018, 12:52:37 AM
If one clicks back and forth between the wealth and debug pages, one finds it difficult to say "raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth" with a straight face.
This happens because you're playing clean games without significant population losses. If a formula has several inputs, and you hold several of them constant (adaptation/population) while changing just one (wealth), obviously the output will respond to the thing that you're changing.
Try holding your wealth steady and losing 90% of your population in a battle and see how things change.
Also when I say this I'm not saying wealth isn't really important to threat strength, it is, for sure. But from many posts in this thread, it's obvious some people have the impression wealth is the only factor, or nearly the only factor. Many people here are suggesting things like losses-adaptation/recovery, population-based changes, time-based changes which are in the game already, which suggests that it's not widely understood that the threat strength isn't just a factor of wealth. That's all I'm trying to communicate. There's no value in taking an adversarial stance here, this should be a collaborative process.
Quote from: bbqftwjust because certain raid point term is ∝ wealth * population, does not mean its not proportional to wealth!
I never said it's not proportional to wealth. I said, "In truth, raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth (wealth is a major component of it, but so is population including animals, health, recent damage taken, and some other bits)."
If it was, hypothetically, wealth*population, it would be proportional to population exactly as much as it is proportional to wealth. What I'm responding to is the general myth that it's based
only on wealth or
primarily on wealth, which is the premise of this entire thread and which is false. People just tend to notice the wealth effects more because wealth changes more, as I noted above.
Regarding the very strong threats you've mentioned in your extreme late-game Merciless run - I'd say that it seems you are in fact surviving these threats indefinitely, so far from being too strong, they're probably not strong enough. It's just that you've played so far (years and years of game time) at such a difficulty level that you're reaching a level of development the game can't match since it can't scale infinitely and we don't want to cap your progress or force an endgame either. This is another "easy to describe and hard to solve" problem.
Quote from: JimmyAgnt007 on August 16, 2018, 01:54:02 PM
Since there is no BOSS fight or explicit end of the game, we shouldnt be progressing as if there were. In DOOM, we can recover a lot more easily than in RW and there is an end point. I dont like the 'play until you inevitably die' logic in a constantly escalating threat. Id rather a level of challenge being maintained.
Also, some raids should be easy. It happens. But trying to avoid wealth to manage raids is not how it should be played. Thats why they should be scaled with your capacity to repel them. Give or take a little.
"Play until you inevitably die" is not and has never been the logic behind the RimWorld design here, especially at non-extreme difficulty settings. The goal is to not bore people with trivial non-challenges, nor crush them with impossible odds, in a game with no fixed levels or story. This thread was about discussing ways to do that.
Scaling raids with your capacity to repel them would create the same complaints you see here to an even greater degree, plus bizarre exploits like "never build defenses, just build a mega-wealthy super-base and burn every weapon you find".
--
Jpagano: I think the Morrowind vs Oblivion case is really interesting. But they key here is that in a TES game the player can choose where to go and what to do. He can choose to enter a high-level dungeon, or not enter it. RW as it stands is more reactive - threats come to you, not the other way around. This has upsides and downsides.
E.g. Imagine in Morrowind if 70% of the fights were actually enemies tracking you down wherever you were and attacking, forcing a player response. How difficult are these enemies? It's a problem I don't think those games really have at all because the structure is fundamentally different.
I've thought a lot about this and come to understand that it would probably be better if the player was actually the one initiating the most dangerous events in the game, as it is with the end-game ship sequence in unstable build right now. DF also does this a lot considering how easy it is to wall yourself off from sieges, and how the player can choose when and whether to dig deep and reveal the greatest threats.
This would solve a lot of problems and allow us to put up a "menu" of challenges the player can choose to undertake or ignore. It's a direction I'm interested in, and one I've moved in with recent releases (e.g. quests), but it's a very different structure from what's there so I'm not going to retool the entire game right this moment near 1.0 release of course. But, along with "explicit visibility" as a mechanic, it's something in mind for sure.
--
This thread was going really well, I hope the spirit of the OP can be respected going forward. Specifically the idea of thinking about solutions and new options, instead of just pointing out downsides of the existing system.
Technologies don't give passive bonuses but allow the creation of new items and buildings. It makes no sense to increase raid strength based on progression through the technology tree.
Quote from: Tynan on August 16, 2018, 04:33:10 PM
"Play until you inevitably die" is not and has never been the logic behind the RimWorld design here, especially at non-extreme difficulty settings. The goal is to not bore people with trivial non-challenges, nor crush them with impossible odds, in a game with no fixed levels or story. This thread was about discussing ways to do that.
Scaling raids with your capacity to repel them would create the same complaints you see here to an even greater degree, plus bizarre exploits like "never build defenses, just build a mega-wealthy super-base and burn every weapon you find".
I didn't mean that's how it is, a constant increase in difficulty was mentioned and I didn't want the game to turn into something like that. I love my long-term colonies.
Currently Ive been building an open colony with no killboxes, no meta managing of wealth and minimal turrets. The result is that the raids feel a bit over powered. Rocket launchers devastate where regular guns would have been exciting. My mountain fort killboxes on the other hand would have absolutly needed that type of raid. Thats why I suggested some kind of reaction to how raids were repelled. If the turrets got the most kills, send in the rockets. If its mortars then use drop pods. Lots of walls, use sappers. and so on. let the player be forced to mix things up as they play. let the challange be in adaptation rather than a pure increase of numbers. When I did get smaller raids, in the early game, they were a lot of fun. Having a running gun battle in the streets as people responded to the threat.
Not sure how good the 'burn all weapons' exploit would be in my system. Hostiles would still show up and kill you if you arnt armed. It would devolve into fistfights maybe but one manhunter pack and you are dead. Different kinds of raids to deal with different kinds of exploits would be interesting. The one exploit i thought of for my system is to only allow pacifists. Since they have no capacity for dealing with raids, they would be immune? Thats why I suggested some variance. Also, there would be a min strength to each raid, even if its just a guy with a club. Every system will have its flaws, I just think we need one with the fewest possible. Currently, a dev mode delete of the most devastating weapons is what works for me. Though my open colony is getting a perimeter wall and I will be adding more turrets.
Is there a difference in raid calculations for tribes vs colonists? Primitives would have a harder time fending off raids. Some people like to impose their own rules as well.
Well, my argument for a constant timed increase was simply that if you look at your colony fun points graphs, it is a constant increase anyways, superlinear even in most cases. A timed increase that was linear would actually be more forgiving, while at the same time removing some metagaming weirdness. Unless you're arguing both against the current raid system and timed increase, jimmy.
There could be an argument that maybe the different difficulties should actually have separate raid formulae altogether: From the feedback I've seen in 1.0 thread, medium and under players don't really care for a constant increase at all, while rough and over do. In which case a fully adaptive raid design like you suggest might even work best on medium and under. Would be nice to see a poll on that. I think people choosing medium don't care to metagame in the first place or at least only do so when it's overwhelmingly hard not to (e.g. no gold statues), so there would be no concern there.
Edit: meh, I've bickered enough, removed sillier parts of post.
Quote from: Tynan on August 16, 2018, 04:33:10 PM
This would solve a lot of problems and allow us to put up a "menu" of challenges the player can choose to undertake or ignore. It's a direction I'm interested in, and one I've moved in with recent releases (e.g. quests), but it's a very different structure from what's there so I'm not going to retool the entire game right this moment near 1.0 release of course. But, along with "explicit visibility" as a mechanic, it's something in mind for sure.
This is a really interesting idea. Maybe quests to specifically anger factions? We were just talking about spicing up downed refugee quests. Maybe instead of refugees, they stole something big from another faction, and by going to get them you get the item(s) but also trigger - some time in the next 15 days - a HUGE raid.
I actually think a constant timed increase mode would be interesting.
There's the problem of dead man walking states (e.g. you took damage and now you just have to wait 10 days until the next threat and then die, there's no way to recover).
There's also the problem of:
-How are caravan threats handled?
-What if you start another base or migrate your base?
Seeing these it's just a can of worms I chose not to open. Lots of more fundamental stuff to work on.
Quote from: Bolgfred on August 16, 2018, 05:37:40 AM
Quote from: seerdecker on August 09, 2018, 10:36:36 AM
C) The solution
Fixing the wealth issue is much more difficult than listing its shortcomings. What do you think could be done to improve the game with respect to difficulty? Discuss!
Keep in mind that it has to be simple to have a shot to be implemented, i.e. implementation effort must be handled as wealth ;)
I think that the wealth system makes people who know about it feel threatened. Those who doesn't know about instead, get a very balanced gameplay feeling as the wealth adaption is actually a pretty good idea.
In this way, same like the unknowing, nobody should be afraid of the wealth system. It affects the difficutly, but in a good way.
A rough Example:
Let's say you will craft a excellent LMG. it's a strong weapon that makes you stronger. If i get the math right thats LMG 300 x excellent 2 = 600 wealth. itemWealth gets divided by 100, so its 600/100=6. The next raid will have 6 points more than the last one.
A raider has a point value of 35-210 depending on its type. The difference of 6 means, that from 20 Raiders attacking you next time, the one with the two peg legs, will only have one peg leg!
This means, while you get a rambo rifle, the raider gets a new leg. Now I ask you: Is a LMG able too fight a leg? I'm pretty sure it is.
Here's the formula:
P = (( C × 42 ) + ( iW ÷ 100 ) + ( bW ÷ 200 )) × ( sR × lR ) × D × T × R
C= Colonist
iW = Items
bW = building
Further information here:
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider
1) Formula is different. Specifically, there is now a component where wealth also increases the raid point contribution per pawn.
2) Its telling you picked one of the few item classes where the combat utility increase justifies the wealth increase.
The good thing about a time-based system is that it rewards having a good economy, beautifying the base, etc.
There are downsides though.
- If you outpace the system, it gets boring.
- Raids will keep getting bigger and bigger, so the clean-up phase will become more tedious.
- Your pawn contribution matters less and less relative to the fixed defences required to deal with the larger raids.
I like Tynan's idea about the player choosing to undertake difficult events, beyond launching the ship. It's a great progression system!
I'd like to hear some opinions about my proposal to scale raids with (pop + defence strength + downscaled luxury wealth) rather than (pop + total wealth) -- everything else being the same.
It's not perfect (every system can be gamed), but it offers those advantages:
- Ease of implementation wrt the current system (even a partial fix would improve the situation a lot in 1.0).
- It still scales to total wealth, just much more slowly, so burning every weapon on the map won't work.
- Having a bigger base means you have more to cover, so defending becomes harder.
- Pawns have to fight!
- Raids don't get huge.
- You can have golden statues.
*Edit* By defence strength, I really mean add up those turrets, traps, armors, etc, and weight them by utility, not market value.
I have seen two things suggested here that I really like, and would be fairly simple to implement.
1. Some types of raids (e.g. pirates) have a bribe dialog where they ask for some of your wealth. Always something that you have sitting around. This would really tie into the existing notification of "you have produced this spectacular sculpture and news has spread around the land", well now someone has actually turned up to take it! You have the option of just giving it to them. Or they ask for other things you have lying around. A stack of silver. Weapons. Clothes. A bunch of your animals or food, I dunno. But you have the option of accepting their demands, especially if they have a big force you are scared of.
2. Have raid scaling tied directly into the effects of the previous raid. (possibly it already looks at this, I haven't looked through the game code). But if a raid was super easy, or super damaging, then the next raid ties this in somehow. Would need definition of exactly what to count; damage to structures, injuries, medicine and wealth used immediately after to repair, whatever. But I think it would keep things more manageable.
What I want to be able to do is play the One Rich Explorer scenario, and stay alone the whole game. Get richer and richer and never recruit. Or maybe roleplay a tiny bit; find your one true love, or find a trusty manservant from a tribal raid, or whatever. And just two against the world, getting insanely rich, but still managing vs raid scaling. Actually I have not yet tried this playthrough yet so I am talking out of my proverbial bum, sorry Tynan I know you specifically asked for concerns from actual playing! I've just been scared off by thinking about scaling vs someone who only wants one pawn permanently.... I'll give it a go now. While I'm still in the 1.0 limbo of no mods :)
I think the difficulty should somehow be limited by technology, such that you need to use items as you unlock them. If you unlock smithing but decide to skip building anything until you have long swords (for example) you should get punished by a raid with Gladius armed pawns wearing simple helmets. You should rarely get attacked by enemies with better weapons than you can build, so that you can't steal your entire arsenal. Whatever the right balance is, I feel too much of the content in the game is unusable b/c you just get better stuff right away. I like the idea of timing difficulty in conjunction with more linear tech progress which matches the difficulty progression.
Quote from: Tynan on August 16, 2018, 04:33:10 PM
Quote from: zizard on August 16, 2018, 12:52:37 AM
If one clicks back and forth between the wealth and debug pages, one finds it difficult to say "raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth" with a straight face.
This happens because you're playing clean games without significant population losses. If a formula has several inputs, and you hold several of them constant (adaptation/population) while changing just one (wealth), obviously the output will respond to the thing that you're changing.
Try holding your wealth steady and losing 90% of your population in a battle and see how things change.
My current colony has only 7 people so 86% of them will have to do. I had them strip naked so they wouldn't taint any clothes by dying in them, grouped them up outside and spawned a bunch of lancers, write storyteller. To speed things up I might have injected go juice and restored a leg or two. I then gave the remaining colonist bionics via 'add hediff' until the pawn wealth was near the original value.
before:
wealth 74464: items 50395, buildings 23878(/2), pawns 12130
raid points 1489
after:
wealth 74731: items 51338, buildings 23875(/2), pawns 11455
raid points 721
-52% raid points for -86% of population seems like a stiff deal!!
Regarding timed threats, the way I started using it in a mod is to just use:
"Ticks^1.1/25000
Divide by 8 if a caravan.
Divide by 3.5 if a site.
Multiply this by your difficulty factor."
Haven't got any feedback on it yet, although I'm working on an economy mod that will be part of that so I'm not in a hurry. It doesn't handle biomes well, so this obviously can't just be the final version, though, and just doesn't care if you got hammered last raid. You could always just slap on adaptation here with a weaker influence, and give each biome a raid coefficient and exponent. So like Ice Sheet: mult:0.7;exp:0.9, Temperate: mult: 1.1;exp:1.1
Possibly an overall solution is to just have ticks be the largest factor, so that even if a pawn/wealth counts for something, it's not enough to "game" it or worry about it. So putting it together something like...
Old: Ticks^1.1/25000
New: Ticks^1.1(*biome_exp)/40000(*biome_mult) + pawns*average_health*(wealth_curve)*A + wealth*B
Biome is kind of like a second difficulty level, so it's not like people would choose a biome based on raid sizes. It'd probably be biased in favor of making the biome still harder than normal just doable. But you can't just slap on "Ticks^1.1/25000" to Sea Ice and expect a fun experience lol.
But yeah that requires a lot of work at this stage to find out appropriate A/B/etc. I do agree that the wealth*pawns was a good idea even if I'm gurmpy about it, my experience just seems to show that 110 peak is a bit high especially with bionics counting.
One criticism seerdecker mentiones was if you outpace the raid time it gets boring. This is a fair criticism, but this is kinda true no matter what system you use: with a system that tries to be "clever" if the player remains "clever" they will outgame it and also make the game "boring". This is why I don't like seerdeckers idea of just tossing up what counts as wealth/utility for raids, even if it is an improvement. A player is just going to have the weird process of calculating which factors he thinks skews raid sizes in his favor, when he should just be thinking what gives him the best colony and defense.
What are some ways the player could opt in to more dangerous raids at their own pace, in a mechanically and thematically coherent way? What are some lures that would make a player want or have to do those things?
Honestly caravan activities kind of fill that role, I've done a bunch of sites/lumps on merciless and they can be pretty brutal but fun. Tweaking that feels all that's necessary. Right now they feel a bit too easy to cheese with sending in equipment, but some sites, like mortar always has the danger of death: You either gotta bite the bullet and drop to center to stop the mortar fire or take another risk and drop at edge.
Counterpoint to this: People tend not to opt in to danger. I did it because it was necessary on sea ice, but you'll notice for instance, powergaers and general players alike, would not caravan when the rewards were small in B18. That's an option to opt in to danger for fun, and overwhelmingly people opted out.
Quote from: zizard on August 16, 2018, 11:53:07 PM
Quote from: Tynan on August 16, 2018, 04:33:10 PM
Quote from: zizard on August 16, 2018, 12:52:37 AM
If one clicks back and forth between the wealth and debug pages, one finds it difficult to say "raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth" with a straight face.
This happens because you're playing clean games without significant population losses. If a formula has several inputs, and you hold several of them constant (adaptation/population) while changing just one (wealth), obviously the output will respond to the thing that you're changing.
Try holding your wealth steady and losing 90% of your population in a battle and see how things change.
My current colony has only 7 people so 86% of them will have to do. I had them strip naked so they wouldn't taint any clothes by dying in them, grouped them up outside and spawned a bunch of lancers, write storyteller. To speed things up I might have injected go juice and restored a leg or two. I then gave the remaining colonist bionics via 'add hediff' until the pawn wealth was near the original value.
before:
wealth 74464: items 50395, buildings 23878(/2), pawns 12130
raid points 1489
after:
wealth 74731: items 51338, buildings 23875(/2), pawns 11455
raid points 721
-52% raid points for -86% of population seems like a stiff deal!!
that's only a 242% increase in raid points per pawn for not simultaneously burning down your base as you were being storytold!!! great finding
Quote from: Greep on August 17, 2018, 12:49:03 AM
...Counterpoint to this: People tend not to opt in to danger. I did it because it was necessary on sea ice, but you'll notice for instance, powergaers and general players alike, would not caravan when the rewards were small in B18. That's an option to opt in to danger for fun, and overwhelmingly people opted out.
I use to "opt out" of caravans for this reason, but recently I gave it a try and found it to be less risky than I had built it up to be. Right now the only "barriers to entry" I have for caravaning are packaged survival meals and having enough good colonists for both the colony and the caravan. And depending on the quest, just two colonists are enough for the caravan. I think putting packaged survival meals lower on the tech tree and tweeking them to be almost exclusively a caravaning meal(including a description for it) might be a good way to encourage caravaning in the early game.
There are two factors that increase difficulty as you "progress": "Raid Scaling" and "Expectations". When you take the game to extremes, the effects of both factors blend together and make it hard to isolate either. What both have in common is that "progression" without gaming the system makes you weaker rather then stronger and both dynamics are less then apparent until they end your game a few times.
To continue the analogy, "Expectations" are a bit like if you were playing Doom and the more health, ammo, and weapons you collected the greater the chances of having a weapon jam or rocket explode in the tube next to your head. If this was present in Doom, experienced players would shed weapons and ammo to optimize performance. While I am sure there is a limited audience who would find this fun, and more who might like to give it a try as a mode, it is not fun as a part of a base game.
Current "Raid Scaling" has many issues. Net, it creates "Right Path" which is both counter-intuitive and bad for creating story/immersion. Regardless of how it happens or the genre, it is unsatisfying when you have a game with a large amount of content of which most is ignored or used only when playing around except when it is acting as a "trap/journey of exploration" for newer players.
Right now, "Right Path" has three primary tenants;
1. Wealth Optimization
2. Direct Pawn Combat Avoidance/AI Exploitation (Killbox, Turrets, Animals, Trap Maze, etc)
3. Intentional Loses/Pawn Rejection
Without beating a dead horse, accomplishing the above, or even 2 out of 3, limits the "palette" a lot, which is shame, because it is a big and interesting palette.
Solving this is a matter of choosing a method of regulating difficulty that does not have these side effects and implementing it. Ideas for several have been offered and I am sure you can think of some yourself, all of which involve work and time.
The question of of "is this worth doing at this time" is a tough one. On one hand, the game as it is and was is very enjoyable and has found a healthy audience. On the other, once people dig deep enough and begin to understand what is going on under the hood, some players begin to experience a "chalky after-taste".
To me, this comes down to a simple question - when you release this game as a final product, do you want it to be a great game (it already is) or an amazing game (which it certainly can be). Most of that probably comes down to your emotional reserves - how badly you want to be able to say this chapter is done.
That choice is really personal and none of us can even pretend to judge it for you.
As always, thanks for the game, and cheers.
Quote from: Copperwire on August 17, 2018, 11:57:42 AM
Current "Raid Scaling" has many issues. Net, it creates "Right Path" which is both counter-intuitive and bad for creating story/immersion. Regardless of how it happens or the genre, it is unsatisfying when you have a game with a large amount of content of which most is ignored or used only when playing around except when it is acting as a "trap/journey of exploration" for newer players.
Right now, "Right Path" has three primary tenants;
1. Wealth Optimization
2. Direct Pawn Combat Avoidance/AI Exploitation (Killbox, Turrets, Animals, Trap Maze, etc)
3. Intentional Loses/Pawn Rejection
I disagree that the "Right Path" is at all counter-intuitive. The end goal is to make a ship capable of taking you off the god forsaken planet you're stranded on. This is not a sandbox game.
1. Wealth Optimization: I'm not 100% sure what you mean by this - I presume destroying extra valuable items in order to game the system into sending you smaller raids? 'Wealth' in all forms in RW has inherent value toward getting you off the planet. Almost all wealth is generated via pawn labor, so why are you incurring additional 'unusable' wealth if it doesn't get you towards that end goal?
2. Direct Pawn Combat Avoidance/AI Exploitation (Killbox, Turrets, Animals, Trap Maze, etc): Certainly agree AI exploitation is an issue, and I know Tynan has devoted a lot of time attempting to counter the most egregious examples. I can't understand why you think why attempting to keep pawns out of harms way is counter-intuitive though.
3. Intentional Loses/Pawn Rejection: Intentional losses are hard to justify with the strong and lasting negative moodlets for losing colonists (maybe they should be harsher?).
A lot of great discussion in this thread. The counterintuitive disincentive to improve your colony is what I dislike most about the current difficulty curve in regards to wealth, when the natural (and I think, desired) incentive should be to improve your colony and your colonists' lives.
I think an easy way to encourage that is by changing the "Low Expectations" buff so that it decays over time, rather than with wealth. This would at least remove the counterintuitive/gamey result that your colonists can become less happy directly because of your efforts to improve their surroundings, switching it to a more straightforward scenario where they become less happy over time at a (mostly) flat rate, which you could counter in a more intuitive/natural manner by trying to improve their surroundings.
RE: raid strengths, if the wealth calculation simply weighted unused items and artwork less, that might be all that is needed to make colony improvement feel like a net boon again, when combined with a built in need to increase colonists mood over time (because "Low Expectations" decayed over time).
QuoteThe end goal is to make a ship capable of taking you off the god forsaken planet you're stranded on. This is not a sandbox game.
Rimworld has always supported both play styles -- building a ship, or playing indefinitely.
Everyone seems to be talking about avoiding wealth growth as a way of reducing raid size and seeing it as a negative thing, but perhaps it doesn't have to be that way.
Maybe some sort of 'mercenary' mechanic could be added to the game, allowing you to pay friendly factions as mercenaries to protect your colony. Essentially the idea behind this would be that you pay a 'subscription fee' to a faction, say X amount of wealth/silver every Y days and in exchange they protect you, either bolstering your defenses with heavily armed pawns of their own that would simply hang around your base (maybe even manning defense stations that you tell to man instead of simply running headlong into battle and dying like the current friendlies) or weakening enemy raids (simply reducing enemy raid size by some multiplier).
A system like this is already in place in the game with friendlies, but imo they tend to be a little too useless lategame since their numbers and gear seem vary so much. A dedicated money for protection system would provide a way to sacrifice wealth for safety, allowing people who simply want to get rich without having significant setbacks for it to have a proper system to achieve their goals, slowing their growth but preventing catastrophic losses in raids. This would also allow players to increase their wealth growth rate at the cost of greater risk of catastrophe from raids.
I don't know if this is a good idea, but it's just a thought I had
/snipersnip
Thank you for answering my questions. I think I understand your idea more entirely. This thread has gotten a ton of good ideas and insigts since I last visited it.
Hotel napkin theorycrafting isn't exactly the best but I could not find a situation exclusively tied to just +/- points that did not median out after a sufficient amount of time even if you included random multipliers. Using injuries and target destruction would, however, ensure the raids faced were at the very least challenging. The biggest problem I had was trying to fit in things like drop pod raids.. which skew any system drastically. An edge started raid, even sapper, is infinitely easier to defeat than drop pod raid right into the very worst part of your base.
This leads a team of engineers to talk about a video game for 2hrs driving to a remote site and the eventual consensus was "why have one threat system?". You almost hit the nail on the head with how manhunters work. Breaking the system into 3 different parts might also simplify both mod creation and future updates as well. (I don't for a second believe Tynan is going to ever be entirely done with rimworld)
So what if we broke down raids into 3 functions?
1] Animal Raids
2] Regular Raids
3] Special Raids
1] Animal raids would be fairly simple.. wealth systems work incredibly well already for this. Wealth+raidpoint would again eventually median out threat wise but keep a constant challenge.
2] Regular raids would be entirely point based as you describe yet to include a variable challenge they would also need a "pawn size limit". This secondary roll would create the simulation of tribal raids or space pirate raids by forcing a situation where you have more pawns or better-equipped pawns. Why separate this when it's so similar to animal raids? Keeping animal raids independent would allow for things like zombie mods more effectively.
3] Special raids would be your "breakers". Specific but independent raid designs like the poison ship or drop pod raid. The purpose of these types of raids is stress generation. As such they would have to be triggered by either time, wealth, pawn count, or even turret count. All ratios that can be adjusted by difficulty or storyteller type using preexisting ideologies. By allowing a triggerable raid type exclusive of regular raids you directly prevent a colony from full automation and create situations where you can breakpoint raids from being median locked.
This means you can have regular raids maintain pressure on a colony similar to the way pneumonia works for humans. It's always there.. and 90% of the time its not fatal. If you stumble through it can kick you in the pants hard though. By keeping regular raids additive/subtractive point based though it will rarely be entirely fatal.
Using special raids, however, lets the original idea of wealth being a consequence still exist. With these, you could say.. have a wealth trigger at 100k wealth that would then fire a raid in 1-7 days. The effects of this raid would impact the regular raids point totals but would be sized off your wealth instead of your success in defending against previous raids. Its exclusive purpose is to stress the player beyond the "kill box" and create situations where good loss and victory is meaningful(i mean this is rimworld. Death of pawns is 50% of the addiction)
This method also allows for different storytellers to have different effects on special raids as well as different effects based off difficulty. You could even completely remove them from "base builder" to satisfy that style of play.
I have been thinking about a system where the players condition is broken into different indicators (total wealth, deterrence, technology, animal wealth, etc) and the different "factions" (manhunters, pirates, raiders, mechs, and room for mods etc to add more - etc) make "do i raid" decisions and "what do i raid for" decisions. Having each faction make those decisions independently and then having the attacks arrive later based on the nearest point of origin for that faction would create interesting noise. You might end up with raids arriving simultaneously - but you get that already and that is story.
I think a number of people in this thread have been pointing at something along those lines and I hope we see it.
Quote from: Dolphinizer on August 17, 2018, 04:53:44 PM
Everyone seems to be talking about avoiding wealth growth as a way of reducing raid size and seeing it as a negative thing, but perhaps it doesn't have to be that way.
Maybe some sort of 'mercenary' mechanic could be added to the game, allowing you to pay friendly factions as mercenaries to protect your colony. Essentially the idea behind this would be that you pay a 'subscription fee' to a faction, say X amount of wealth/silver every Y days and in exchange they protect you, either bolstering your defenses with heavily armed pawns of their own that would simply hang around your base (maybe even manning defense stations that you tell to man instead of simply running headlong into battle and dying like the current friendlies) or weakening enemy raids (simply reducing enemy raid size by some multiplier).
A system like this is already in place in the game with friendlies, but imo they tend to be a little too useless lategame since their numbers and gear seem vary so much. A dedicated money for protection system would provide a way to sacrifice wealth for safety, allowing people who simply want to get rich without having significant setbacks for it to have a proper system to achieve their goals, slowing their growth but preventing catastrophic losses in raids. This would also allow players to increase their wealth growth rate at the cost of greater risk of catastrophe from raids.
I don't know if this is a good idea, but it's just a thought I had
Seems like a good idea to me. Tie this into the factions system as well. For example, the savage tribals or rough outlanders might be happier with you (change their resting goodwill) if you keep paying them protection money. Why would they raid a colony when they can just milk them for cash?
for posterity since certain parties like strawmanning
QuoteBasically the system is somewhat complex and very often incorrectly simplified down to something like "points=wealth*constantFactor" which really isn't even close to the truth.
ok, lets not be imprecise when we can be more precise
roughly speaking, raid point proportionality is to following factors - wealthfactor + pawnfactor + animalcombatfactor
where
wealthfactor = a * (itemwealth + pawnwealth + animalwealth + buildingwealth/2)
pawnfactor = b * number of pawns * totalwealth(? unsure about this one, maybe it only counts certain subclasses of wealth)
animalcombat factor = c * combatfactor, sum over all release capable animals
global modifiers to raid points are time factor, and adaptation factor modified for difficulty (base 0.4-1.5, appx 0.76 to 1.2 on proper difficulty)
in which case you can reduce raid point calc down to, rp = x ( y * total wealth * (1 + z * number of pawns) + combatanimalcontribution)
this ( y * total wealth * (1 + z * number of pawns) ) element even with a scenario with hundreds of combat animals contributes to over 80% of the raid point calculation.
how close am I? realistically I just spent about an evening and I didn't look at the code too closely. happy to have the math corrected
I will explain raid point caclulation fully, including all factors and relative contribution of said factors:
(special note, not all events rely on threat points fully, some rely on points just to calculate if event can spawn or not, others are hardlinked to specific wealth like)
VisitorGiftChanceFactorFromPlayerWealthCurve
with hardcoded 30k boundary for "expected" gifts
source of method that does most of job, raw image:
// Token: 0x06000F9F RID: 3999 RVA: 0x000859B0 File Offset: 0x00083DB0
public static float DefaultThreatPointsNow(IIncidentTarget target)
{
float playerWealthForStoryteller = target.PlayerWealthForStoryteller;
float num = StorytellerUtility.PointsPerWealthCurve.Evaluate(playerWealthForStoryteller);
float num2 = 0f;
foreach (Pawn pawn in target.PlayerPawnsForStoryteller)
{
float num3 = 0f;
if (pawn.IsFreeColonist)
{
num3 = StorytellerUtility.PointsPerColonistByWealthCurve.Evaluate(playerWealthForStoryteller);
}
else if (pawn.RaceProps.Animal && pawn.Faction == Faction.OfPlayer && !pawn.Downed && pawn.training.CanAssignToTrain(TrainableDefOf.Release).Accepted)
{
num3 = 0.08f * pawn.kindDef.combatPower;
if (target is Caravan)
{
num3 *= 0.7f;
}
}
if (num3 > 0f)
{
if (pawn.ParentHolder != null && pawn.ParentHolder is Building_CryptosleepCasket)
{
num3 *= 0.3f;
}
num3 = Mathf.Lerp(num3, num3 * pawn.health.summaryHealth.SummaryHealthPercent, 0.65f);
num2 += num3;
}
}
float num4 = num + num2;
num4 *= target.IncidentPointsRandomFactorRange.RandomInRange;
float totalThreatPointsFactor = Find.StoryWatcher.watcherAdaptation.TotalThreatPointsFactor;
float num5 = Mathf.Lerp(1f, totalThreatPointsFactor, Find.Storyteller.difficulty.adaptationEffectFactor);
num4 *= num5;
num4 *= Find.Storyteller.difficulty.threatScale;
num4 *= Find.Storyteller.def.pointsFactorFromDaysPassed.Evaluate((float)GenDate.DaysPassed);
return Mathf.Clamp(num4, 35f, 20000f);
}
Source code with inlines, factors and comments:
// Token: 0x06000F9F RID: 3999 RVA: 0x000859B0 File Offset: 0x00083DB0
public static float DefaultThreatPointsNow(IIncidentTarget target)
{
float playerWealthForStoryteller = target.PlayerWealthForStoryteller;
//WealthItems + WealthPawns + WealthBuildings * 0.5f
//summ of all wealth with wealth of building halved
//this value range from 10k to 500k
float pointsfromwealth = StorytellerUtility.PointsPerWealthCurve.Evaluate(playerWealthForStoryteller);
//set of curves, that should be related to wealth, but actually out of sync
//new CurvePoint( 14 000f, 0f)
//new CurvePoint( 400 000f, 2400f)
//new CurvePoint( 700 000f, 3600f)
//new CurvePoint(1000 000f, 4200f)
//curve is singular entity, it means, that before 14k you have zero points from wealth, but then points are steadily increasing
//hitting 400k wealth result in 2400 points, then points growth is slowed
//curve is not random, you may calculate exact points for any wealth
//before in range from 14 to 400k each 160 units of wealth gives 1 point here, then 250 per 1
//this value range from 0 to 3600
float pawnvalueacc = 0f;
foreach (Pawn pawn in target.PlayerPawnsForStoryteller)
{
float num3 = 0f;
if (pawn.IsFreeColonist)
{
num3 = StorytellerUtility.PointsPerColonistByWealthCurve.Evaluate(playerWealthForStoryteller);
//CurvePoint(10000f, 15f)
//CurvePoint(400000f, 140f)
//CurvePoint(1000000f, 200f)
//this means, that each free pawn contribute here based on overall wealth
//more wealth - more contribution
}
else if (pawn.RaceProps.Animal && pawn.Faction == Faction.OfPlayer && !pawn.Downed && pawn.training.CanAssignToTrain(TrainableDefOf.Release).Accepted)
{
num3 = 0.08f * pawn.kindDef.combatPower;
//animals provide almost no effect here
//i will take average value of 100 for muffalo
//as result each animal contribute fixed 8 points compared to 140 for normal colonist
}
if (num3 > 0f)
{
if (pawn.ParentHolder != null && pawn.ParentHolder is Building_CryptosleepCasket)
{
num3 *= 0.3f;
//cryosleep stored pawns contribute 0.3 of base value
}
num3 = Mathf.Lerp(num3, num3 * pawn.health.summaryHealth.SummaryHealthPercent, 0.65f);
//wounded pawns contribute greatly decreased value
pawnvalueacc += num3;
}
}
float unfactoredpoints = pointsfromwealth + pawnvalueacc;
//this is "that" line of code, that generate unfactored threat points for all events
//this based on wealth and number of colonists
//with expected wealth rate 0-400k
//wealth will contribute 2600 points and pawns 140 each
//basically, 10 pawns at this stage will contribute exactly half of raid points - 1400
//pawn contribution in raw wealth is 160*140 == 22 400
//this means, getting single pawn equal to getting 22 400 wealth
unfactoredpoints *= target.IncidentPointsRandomFactorRange.RandomInRange;
//random factor from storyteller
float totalThreatPointsFactor = Find.StoryWatcher.watcherAdaptation.TotalThreatPointsFactor;
//<li>(-40, 0.40)</li>
//<li>( 0, 0.80)</li>
//<li>( 60, 1.20)</li>
//<li>(120, 1.60)</li>
//basically you get one adaptation per day and lose adaptation when colonist goes down in combat (6) or die (28)
//keeping everyone alive will result in 1.60 points in 120 days
//killing one colonist each 28 days (human sacrifice!) will keep raid power at bay
float adaptationfactor = Mathf.Lerp(1f, totalThreatPointsFactor, Find.Storyteller.difficulty.adaptationEffectFactor);
//linean factor from difficulty
unfactoredpoints *= adaptationfactor;
//apply adaptation
//at this stage adaptation may give up to
//(2600+1400)*1.6 == 6400 points total 2400 factor
//almost as much as 400k wealth and almost two times higher then 10 pawns population
unfactoredpoints *= Find.Storyteller.difficulty.threatScale;
//2.6 for merciless, 1.6 for savage and 1.0 for rought
//in case of savage, this line will contribute much more points then wealth and pawns combined multiple times
unfactoredpoints *= Find.Storyteller.def.pointsFactorFromDaysPassed.Evaluate((float)GenDate.DaysPassed);
//40 days grace period
return Mathf.Clamp(unfactoredpoints, 35f, 20000f);
}
// Token: 0x06000F9F RID: 3999 RVA: 0x000859B0 File Offset: 0x00083DB0
public static float DefaultThreatPointsNow(IIncidentTarget target)
{
//threat points calculation simplified for wealth of 400k
float pointsfromwealth = target.PlayerWealthForStoryteller / 167;
float pointsfrompawns = target.PlayerPawnsForStoryteller.numberofnonprisoners * 140;
//expected contribution 66-34
float unfactoredpoints = pointsfromwealth + pointsfrompawns;
unfactoredpoints *= 0.011*adaptdays;
return Mathf.Clamp(unfactoredpoints, 35f, 20000f);
}
adaptation is major factor with 50% contribution, 33 wealth and 17 population, animals contribution will be less then 1% as long as you do not have large amount of trained animals (only trained animals count)
thanks.
just to be clear, adaptation works purely as a multiplicative modifier to the unfactored points?
The formula is specailised to wealth values of 14-400k, which encompass most of gameplay. The effects of animals and wounded colonists is ignored. In this case, the raid point formula is:
[6.22(W-14) + C(0.32W + 11.8 )] * F
W: (wealth with buildings halved) / 1000
C: number of colonists
F: factors, comprising:
F = AF * DF * TF * RF
AF: adaptation factor; 0.4 to 1.6 on low difficulty, 0.76 to 1.24 on extreme
DF: difficulty factor for storyteller
TF: time factor, from 0.7 at 10 days to 1.0 at 40 days and 1.0 afterwards
RF: random factor, 0.5-1.5 for Randy storyteller
RF is irrelevant. DF and TF are basically constant. Considering only days after 40, the raid point formula is:
[6.22(W-14) + C(0.32W + 11.8 )] * DF * AF
This can be further simplified by estimating the number of colonists from wealth. The practical minimum wealth gain per pawn is about 3k, comprising 1.5k from pawn value, 1k from clothing, and 0.5k for room. Therefore a conservative estimate for wealth to colonist ratio is 5k each, and a practical upper bound to colonists is wealth / 3k. The constant wealth offset of 14 in the first term is also neglected. These approximations yield (with 5k wealth / colonist):
[8.6W + 0.064W^2] * DF * AF
The first factor of 8.6 will vary between 6.22 (for 0 colonists) to about 10 (for 3k wealth per colonist) depending on the wealth to pawn ratio. The squared term only increases the importance of wealth control. It is responsible for perceived increase in raid point scaling around 200k wealth.
This analysis is consistent with the author's earlier test of killing 6 of 7 colonists while holding wealth constant; i.e. that raid points is proportional to wealth multiplied by a number which varies by no more than a factor of 2 on extreme.
TLDR: it's basically wealth * constant * pity factor if you're on easy mode
adaptation just multiply points by it's value, making things a bit easier or a bit harder.
killing colonists intentionally allows you to get easier raids and easy replacements, as both adaptation and population intent will work toward restoring your numbers.
basically, all calculations are inside single method, you can propose any formula you like and i will brew modification for testing (you can do same with harmony but still)
also it's possible to brew modification that will take formula from XML compile and evaluate it, this can allow you to change it on fly and check results instantly.
Quote from: NiftyAxolotl on August 17, 2018, 12:43:19 AM
What are some ways the player could opt in to more dangerous raids at their own pace, in a mechanically and thematically coherent way? What are some lures that would make a player want or have to do those things?
I think that's more the way to go. The difficulty system is quite good, it's reactive and offers and great scale from rough to merciless. What is needed is more different pathways mid game.
You want to chill? stay on the main path.
You want to go to war? destroy an enemy base (hostile -> at war) to trigger a "war cycle", a special cycle mid way between the ship sequence and a normal cassandra 'oncycle'. Why would you go to war? to deliver prisoners in an enemy base, to get a good amount of plasteel, gold, to test your defense system before the ship start up, to help a faction at war with pirates and get a long term diplomatic buff, great gifts, for fun, etc...