What is the skill for again? It used to be pretty low value back when most new colonists had to be captured and converted. Nowadays there are plenty of options for new recruits, most of which don't involve the skill at all. Chased colonists, wanderers, rescue missions, ancient rooms, being nice to transport pod people, slave traders.
Price multiplier might have been changed, but at the end of the day caravans are still rare and it's just money.
It may have a role when you're a fan of capturing pirates.
The bottom line - it doesn't seem to *enable* or *allow* doing anything.
It enables the ability to not fail at peace talks quest, but you could say that's "just" faction rep and also rare.
I don't really see the problem though. So it's different than the rest and you don't see the utility. Just ignore it and play without concerning yourself with it. It's even near the bottom of the list.
I think that's his complaint -- he feels like it should be more important. He preferred when recruiting captives was the only/most important way to get new recruits. Now it *can* be ignored.
Maybe it could be made more important other ways. What if you could negotiate with the pirates when they showed up and convince them not to attack?
Or what if the pirates could convince your members to run away, and you had you use your leader's social skill to keep them put and fight?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPY5P0TaC4k
Part of being a good player is identifying useless skills and keeping them low to avoid unnecessary pawn wealth.
I'm pretty sure being high in the social skill makes it easier for your colonist to make friendships and / or get married and being able to maintain that marriage. which provides MASSIVE mood bonuses.
On top of that having a high social skill usually gives ~ a 15% price reduction for buying, and price increase for selling. that's 30% increase in total.
I would say the social skill is exactly where it needs to be. gives mood bonuses, recruit high quality colonists better and provides a financial bonus while selling / buying which you WILL do.
what else do you want this skill to do? rocket you off into space?
Quote from: Shurp on September 23, 2018, 05:28:45 PM
He preferred when recruiting captives was the only/most important way to get new recruits. Now it *can* be ignored.
But it still is the best way to do it. You get a few transport pods a year until you've got a dozen people, and then no more. And half or more of those are enemies that you need to recruit with social skill. You get a few more people running from attackers but generally those attackers (and other attackers who aren't chasing anybody) are better candidates and come in far greater numbers and you can see their stats before deciding to try for them.
Really, social IS still the best way to get candidates, if you care at all what those candidates are like.
Quote from: zizard on September 23, 2018, 06:00:37 PM
Part of being a good player is identifying useless skills and keeping them low to avoid unnecessary pawn wealth.
That's absurd. The game doesn't feature useless skills presented to the player as a trap they're supposed to learn to avoid.
Perhaps the social skill is unbalanced or needs adjustment, but claiming it only exists to confuse and obstruct players makes no sense.
A lot of things in this game are wealth traps. In fact it can be argued that a key aspect in a player's improvement is when they realize that you shouldn't aim for colony growth insomuch as maximizing your utility / wealth ratio.
Recruiting is still the best way to get pawns, at least if you want halfway decent ones that you can be picky about. Also, you can rescue from drop pods, but that's no guarantee they will join, capture and recruit for good pawns.
early on, you hardly have chance to get a good communication pawn as other skills 're more needed, if you get one, well, lucky you, meanwhile later on, there's little use for it
i can barely keep it up to 12, with the pawn being 2 flame, being sole warden, with as many prisoners captured, as many caravan called over as possible, and its no use either way, not significant enough
and 1 pawn being good in communication isnt noticable if you have 18-20 pawns, less if it's RR with 30-ish - 50-ish pawns
Quote from: bbqftw on September 23, 2018, 10:02:25 PM
A lot of things in this game are wealth traps. In fact it can be argued that a key aspect in a player's improvement is when they realize that you shouldn't aim for colony growth insomuch as maximizing your utility / wealth ratio.
Nope. Only a certain type of people play that way. It's not normal though
Actually I like the new varied recruitment options. It used be wanderer-joins or capture-prisoner for a long, long time. I don't think that should be limited. What I don't like is that I can't spot the difference between high social and no social. Even pawns with social disabled can throw parties, at least they could in b18.
I have a few constructive ideas how it could be improved: gossip. Pawns with high Social skill could be getting information from visitors and passing caravans. What kind of information? About quests, caravan opportunities, various world map events, mineral deposits, raids heading your way. You could use existing systems but base them on Social skill - a bit like Luck worked in Fallout 1, 2.
You could even go as far as to introduce fog of war / shroud into world map and make Social substantially help with discovering it. People would tell you about where towns are located, or maybe lower grade roads (worse than asphalt) would be harder to notice if no one told you about them.
Naturally, cartography could be also based on Intellectual skill, but Social needs tweaking much more.
As for minmaxing the game playing the systems to the max - note that Rimworld recently got its title screen updated. It now says it's a story generator by Tynan Sylvester. No mention of simulation, game, colony...
Quote from: Serenity on September 24, 2018, 10:03:35 AM
Quote from: bbqftw on September 23, 2018, 10:02:25 PM
A lot of things in this game are wealth traps. In fact it can be argued that a key aspect in a player's improvement is when they realize that you shouldn't aim for colony growth insomuch as maximizing your utility / wealth ratio.
Nope. Only a certain type of people play that way. It's not normal though
most players don't substantially improve, and it shows.
Quote from: bbqftw on September 24, 2018, 03:18:59 PM
Quote from: Serenity on September 24, 2018, 10:03:35 AM
Quote from: bbqftw on September 23, 2018, 10:02:25 PM
A lot of things in this game are wealth traps. In fact it can be argued that a key aspect in a player's improvement is when they realize that you shouldn't aim for colony growth insomuch as maximizing your utility / wealth ratio.
Nope. Only a certain type of people play that way. It's not normal though
most players don't substantially improve, and it shows.
And most players are quite content to reach a point where the game is fun AND challenging...The moment i start playing like that "Easy way to beat merciless naked brutality" thread is the moment Rimworld loses ALL interest to me. Why would i play a game where i can effortlessly beat the hardest mode?
Winning Rimworld is so *easy*:
1) Turn on Devmode
2) Turn on God Mode
3) Build ship
4) Load ship
5) Launch
See? Note that I didn't say it was *fun*... and like you said, Limdood, that's the whole point, to create a challenge that's fun.
Back to the OP, it sounds like he would enjoy more features which made use of the social skillset. Other players have different priorities. I wonder what mods are out there that might address this.
Having more social interactions (and ones that use the social skill) would fit perfectly with it being so heavily advertised as a "story generator" though. Things like a pawn being able to break up a fight. Or helping other people with their mental issues.
Quote from: Limdood on September 24, 2018, 03:28:16 PM
Quote from: bbqftw on September 24, 2018, 03:18:59 PM
Quote from: Serenity on September 24, 2018, 10:03:35 AM
Quote from: bbqftw on September 23, 2018, 10:02:25 PM
A lot of things in this game are wealth traps. In fact it can be argued that a key aspect in a player's improvement is when they realize that you shouldn't aim for colony growth insomuch as maximizing your utility / wealth ratio.
Nope. Only a certain type of people play that way. It's not normal though
most players don't substantially improve, and it shows.
And most players are quite content to reach a point where the game is fun AND challenging...The moment i start playing like that "Easy way to beat merciless naked brutality" thread is the moment Rimworld loses ALL interest to me. Why would i play a game where i can effortlessly beat the hardest mode?
well, even with all the tech I know, fists only NB/merciless, or violent incaps only would still be pretty challenging. Winnable with clean play and you will have to use every bit of game knowledge though.
If there was some kind of negotiation with raiders, social skill would be way more useful. Imagine talking someone out of raiding you, or into letting you give them an offering instead? That'd be awesome.
I agree with the social skill being mostly useless. Recruiting being a lot easier, i found my colonists with way lower social skill than ever.
"Orion" hospitality mod fix it a bit i guess... but, still.
I like where you'r going "vzoxz0" For those raid that wait before going on or siege. You could send a negociator ?
At thise point you can think about a bigger "moral thing" where the retreat treshold is higher than usual ?
Another weakness of the Social stat is that it also suffers from the same skill decay as every other skill.
As it's an intermittently used skill that simply cannot be focused on unless you constantly keep tons of prisoners it can never realistically pass beyond the 12-13 mark, passion or no. Any pawn that starts with a social score higher than that WILL fall to those lower numers eventually with no way to prevent it.
A possible solution would be to have the every-day social interactions actually contribute more:
-Positive social interactions (conversations) give a small amount of social experience.
-Social skill impacts the frequency of social interactions, in addition to increasing the potential for a positive outcome.
-Positive social interactions contribute a small increase to general learning rate (capped per day) for all skills, as you would expect from discussions and knowledge transfer, as well as having a noticeable impact on skill decay for the same reason.
This would give players a strategic reason to group pawns together more often during the day, and benefits to reward players who go the route of a more stable and healthy social colony... as opposed to brutal min/maxing with hardships and booze (a la Stronghold). You would also have the option of pairing up (through zoning and tasking) your colony's resident Chatty Cathy with a new recruit with a 2 Social, which would "get them out of their shell" much more quickly.
I imagine some people would complain it was messing with their wealth starvation strategy.
Quote from: Murdo on September 26, 2018, 01:07:22 PM
A possible solution would be to have the every-day social interactions actually contribute more:
-Positive social interactions (conversations) give a small amount of social experience.
-Social skill impacts the frequency of social interactions, in addition to increasing the potential for a positive outcome.
-Positive social interactions contribute a small increase to general learning rate (capped per day) for all skills, as you would expect from discussions and knowledge transfer, as well as having a noticeable impact on skill decay for the same reason.
This would give players a strategic reason to group pawns together more often during the day, and benefits to reward players who go the route of a more stable and healthy social colony... as opposed to brutal min/maxing with hardships and booze (a la Stronghold). You would also have the option of pairing up (through zoning and tasking) your colony's resident Chatty Cathy with a new recruit with a 2 Social, which would "get them out of their shell" much more quickly.
I imagine some people would complain it was messing with their wealth starvation strategy.
Unless it was changed, I think chats do give a small amount of social bonus. That said, if both your first and second ideas were implemented, it could be incredibly hard to balance where your pawns could get caught up in a 'social tornado' raising all social levels at an exponential rate as they all feed off of each other. I like the third suggestion though.
I would personally change 3 things:
1) Social skill decay happens slower
2) Increase social skill per trade deal. (The more wealth exchanged in a trade, the more it increases)
3) High(er) social skill pawns perform an action similar to the "kind words" moodlet you get from Kind pawns. They would occasionally say kind words to fellow pawns, increasing their happiness for a set time.
Aside: Do high social pawns already insult/fight their enemies more than non-social pawns?
Quote from: cultist on September 23, 2018, 07:04:30 PM
Quote from: zizard on September 23, 2018, 06:00:37 PM
Part of being a good player is identifying useless skills and keeping them low to avoid unnecessary pawn wealth.
That's absurd. The game doesn't feature useless skills presented to the player as a trap they're supposed to learn to avoid. Perhaps the social skill is unbalanced or needs adjustment, but claiming it only exists to confuse and obstruct players makes no sense.
While improving in this game the main theme I noticed was figuring out all the noob traps. e.g. large stocks of supplies, beautiful / pretty pawns, loot in general, batteries, wood floors, bionics, family members, large colonies, livestock, IT GOES ON.
I dislike skill decay in general, but in social it is particularly annoying.
I don't know if I had mentioned it before B19 was released but social skill should affect arresting pawns, who are less likely to turn berserk as the arresting pawn has high social skill.
I'd love to see Social having more interactivity with prisoners.
Actually hardest possible difficulty should be hard for everyone, period. If it is not than something is wrong with difficulty not with the people who can easily beat it.
I start with no skills to add challenge. And I actually suffer quite a bit for the lack of social skill because of social fights. So it has some utility already.
But I think that it can be more interesting.
First of all there should be a way to get to 20 and to maintain skill at about 18 when frequently used. Now it's basically impossible.
Second of all you can add some mechanics that were proposed in this topic, like "kind words/harsh words".
I would also add suggestion that there should be some raids where raiders demand tribute to leave you alone. You can give them money or valuables or suffer their raid. And having pawn with social should reduce amount you have to give. What do you think about this idea?
Quote from: Shurp on September 24, 2018, 05:56:50 PM
Winning Rimworld is so *easy*:
1) Turn on Devmode
2) Turn on God Mode
3) Build ship
4) Load ship
5) Launch
See? Note that I didn't say it was *fun*... and like you said, Limdood, that's the whole point, to create a challenge that's fun.
Back to the OP, it sounds like he would enjoy more features which made use of the social skillset. Other players have different priorities. I wonder what mods are out there that might address this.
Hospitality mod is the big one.
It makes social a strongly desired skill in my games.
Basically visitors need beds to sleep in, can be chatted with (to raise their mood and how much they liked visiting). Visitors that really liked their visit will leave you gifts they had with them (amusingly, sometimes even the stuff you sold them) and can have their faction relations slightly boosted. Conversely, visitors who hated their stay can negatively affect relations and will visit much less often.
Furthermore, you can "recruit" visiting pawns (at a faction relationship penalty) if enough pawns (based on your colony size) can schmooze them into friendship. Small colonies need only one person to chat and get their relationship up to attempt to recruit...medium colonies can need 2-4, and large colonies i've seen 10 friends needed, which is unlikely to be achieved in one visit, even if you did have the social pawns.
So social can be used to indirectly gain gifts, improve faction relations, and directly recruit visitors, AND multiple social pawns have increased effect at recruiting visitors (which is really nice cuz you can inspect each visitor and pick only the best to attempt to recruit) with that mod.