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To conclude I have to disagree with the assertion that all gamers want to believe they are uber-competent

Didn't mean to suggest "all".  But I think "many" is accurate.

it's interesting that you interpreted the storyteller selection screen to be a difficulty selection option so I wonder how many other people do the same thing?

Well, whether you think of it as "difficulty selection" or "preferred playstyle", the storyteller screen is the most obvious place to choose that sort of thing.

If you really want to just build stuff you could play on Phoebe (she does still raid you),

OK, next version I'll try Phoebe.  (I'm trying not to play too much of any one version, so my feedback stays at least a little fresh.)

But if Phoebe performs raids, then I think you have a serious mismatch between the storyteller descriptions and their actual contents...  (So often in game design the fix that is both cheapest and best at preserving the designer's intent is to clarify the wording in player-facing material.)  A friend of mine in another startup (non game-based) was recently having an on-line discussion about naming skill levels, and a mutual friend of ours who is professionally a UX person, said the following: "I think it's important that "Easy" sounds really attractive. People want to believe that they're uber competent, and then they get into hot water, and they blame the system. If you can brand the "typical user" level in a positive way, that may help."  Phoebe sounded *too* simple, so I didn't give her a try...

[Search on these forums isn't being very helpful to me, so I'm starting a new thread...]

It seems to me that the current design of the game is that combat constantly gets harder as the player progresses.  That seems like a fine *option* for *some* storytellers, but not all of them.  I'd really like something less challenging, yet still not a total lack of challenge.  "Chill" Callie continues to not function as described (for me, at least); every wave of enemies is bigger than the last, until I am inevitably crushed.  This is both predictable and un-fun.

I'm enjoying the colony-management stuff, and it wouldn't feel meaningful without *some* threats to protect against.  But I want a Storyteller where the threat level is capped, at least until/unless I take some conscious action to invite trouble.

Now, I know the super-skilled players think I'm a wimp, and that Chill Callie is totally beatable.  But she's advertised as "a good choice for your first game".  I've played about 6 games now, in various alpha versions, and I still get consistently crushed.

Why do raiders always *attack*?  I mean, having the occasional group of psychotics is one thing, but this is *every* time.  What ever happened to extortion and negotiation?  Do they really just want to kill us all, or do they want our stuff.  I would (often) give them some stuff, if they would then go away at least for a while, if they only asked.

... there're expert & casual players, so the only thing we can watch for are the result of each battle to decide the next.

Quoting for emphasis, as I think this is a VERY important insight.

Currently the storyteller estimates strength based on this core formula:

ColonistCount + 0.4*TurretCount

So if you lost a colonist, and build two more turrets, the AI will regard you as weaker than if nothing had happened.

Note that strength isn't translated directly into raider composition. Other factors are applied, including random variance and colony age, differently per storyteller.

I've been thinking about this some.  You seem to be implying that most (all?) storytellers currently make the raiders tougher as the colony gets more successful.  As a player, that's not what I'm looking for.  I like there to be *some* threat, but I want to be able to manage the threat level myself. 

An example of a game that gets this perfect is Minecraft's survival mode.  You have to beware of Creepers wandering around in the morning, and underground explorations need to be cautious, but if you *are* patient and cautious, there's almost no risk of dying.  Conversely, if/when you get impatient, and find yourself in a dangerous position, it's immediately clear how it's your own fault for being careless.

I've never played with Phoebe Friendly, because I don't want to turn off raiders altogether.  But my (current) experience of Chill Callie Classic is that things do keep getting tougher until I eventually succumb.  Her curve may be shallower than Cassandra's, but (seems to be) still the same basic *shape*.  I'd like to have a storyteller available that had a cap for the 'ambient raider level', so I'd still have raiders to deal with, but at a level I knew I could manage.  (It would be cool if I could, either deliberately or carelessly, trigger a bigger-than-usual raid, but that sounds like a post-Alpha feature.)

So, as discussed in a previous thread, I've been having trouble with Raiders.  I've learned some new tactics, which may help, but I also want to call Tynan's attention to something I've seen multiple times now.  The "corpse madness death spiral".

Once there are >10 raiders in a raid, I start to run into a problem.  Even when my defenses are good enough to kill them all, I don't have time to *recover* before the next assault.  Besides just dealing with the raw damage they caused (to both people and stuff), the raider's *corpses* are a huge issue.  Each one of them makes my people freak out.  I can bury them, but that *necessitates* putting colonists in freak-out proximity, and also takes up a significant amount of time/effort.  If I micromanage to get all the corpses buried fast, then my colonists start to go hungry, which upsets them further.  Even if I manage to avoid a mental break, I've lost several days worth of progress on the colony itself.

When I get hit by a raid of 20, there's a large chance that I just can't ever recover.  I literally cannot get all the corpses cleaned up before another wave of raiders hits.  And then my people start going crazy left and right.  What looked like a thriving colony is quickly reduced to madness and death.

Some suggestions:
* Make seeing corpses less of a negative.
* Have the impact of seeing corpses diminish over time.  ("Yeah, that dead body is gross, but I've been walking past it for two days now, and I'm getting used to it.")
* Make hauling/burying corpses cause positive mood.

I've been overwhelmed by raiders a lot lately, and eventually found this thread.  I have a few comments.

Firstly, the game explicitly tells you to "build defenses".  It does *not* advise you to boost your colonist's shooting skills (nor tell you how to do so), nor does it suggest (or instruct) on building defensive walls.  The only thing the game explicitly encourages for defense is Turrets.

If the player isn't thinking about walls (which I wasn't), then they tend to place their turrets in a loose circle around the base.  After all, I don't know where the enemy will attack from.  This means that only about 30% turrets actually fire in any given battle (unless things *really* go south).  Yet the game is still calculating my 'strength' based on the full number of turrets.

Perhaps this is really a *training* issue?  If I *knew* that I was expected to use few turrets, supported by walls, then I might have fared better.

That makes sense for random deaths, but not for deaths that I purposefully caused.  Hunting in particular makes no sense if you don't bring back the food.

Why are things which die automatically set to forbidden?  It seems like (at least if I specifically killed them) that I almost always want to then pick up the corpse (or dropped loot).  Having to explicitly mark it as OK seems like needless micromanagement.

Currently, after the early game, raiders pretty much always die or escape while still shooting.  You don't get the option to "Capture" them unless they are physically incapacitated (which doesn't happen often once you're well armed).  It would be nice to have some less-lethal ways of interacting.  The Raiders could surrender if things go bad.  Or they could at least stop fighting once they are "fleeing", and the player could be given "Capture" options.

A save game I made last night isn't loading, and seems to be giving similar error spam  to the above poster when I try.  Luckily, there's an autosave from a few seconds earlier that does load.  The files are too large to attach (zipped they are ~450KB); you want me to email one or both of them?

I also had this happen in 408.