Messages

From my experience on the Paradox-Forums it always includes the danger, that revenge ratings make the system more or less meaningless
(i.e. Poster A gives a posting of Poster B a negative/low rating ... Poster B reacts immature and, as a "revenge", seeks out Postings of Poster A to give them a negative/low rating)
(on the other hands this depends on the poster seeing which person/s positively/negatively rated his posting (which is the case on the Paradox forums))

My first thought when reading the OP were the Paradox forums. I'm not active enough there to really know the social dynamics and revenge ratings (they're anonymous, you have to be pretty loud and stupid to get into a downvote war.)

Still, it may still save a bit of space. When a read a post that doesn't need an addendum, I'm perfectly content to just agree with it and move on without posting.

Then there are unavoidable doom games like Rimworld and Project Zomboid,

What.

Sorry, if you think that it is all due to RNG and not the decisions you made that caused you to lose a colony, then you are quite delusional.

You keep going back to the idea that somehow the game sooner or later generates an event that is not possible to survive from, no matter what you did beforehand.

This is complete bollocks.

Once you are experienced at the game and understand how to build a large colony, then that colony is safe from destruction in the vanilla game. Extreme difficulty and all. Including playing without turrets or traps.

The tools are at everyones disposal. It is up to you to stop blaming the game for your failures and to learn from them to make your next colony a success.

Just to be clear, the "unavoidable doom" comment was in reference to the previous poster. Just to give you a tl;dr version of the post, it was something along the lines of "the endgame is a lie and the game is trying to kill you before you get to it."

It doesn't matter how long you survive because you eventually run out of stuff to do. You can technically live forever in Project Zomboid, but eventually you get bored and die in a shotgun rampage through the city. You can technically live forever in Rimworld when you get to the point where your killboxes are so beardy, and your stockpiles are so massive that the RNG doesn't stand a chance, but the game doesn't want you to get to that point and it still tries it's best to kill you before hand.

[always]

20 years of gaming and this is the first time I see someone claiming to know more about the game then the game developer!

I take it you haven't played many MMOs? Devs tend to balance the numbers to the point that they're comfortable with their own style of play, but the wider gamer population always finds ways to break stuff.

You go, mzbear!

Speaking of, that explains the insane pawn power ramp up on ice sheets in A13. Not only did freezing caravans disgorge tons of value in the dead of winter, but raiding parties never made it far enough to down colonists or cause damage.

Unavoidable doom doesn't give a compelling reason to play a game.

Good unavoidable doom games, primarily roguelikes, encourage playthroughs by actively rewarding failure. You get as far enough as you can and you get some small benefit to give your next run a stronger chance of success.

Then there are unavoidable doom games like Rimworld and Project Zomboid, which get played to death upon purchase, and then... you play for a bit with each update to check what's changed. (A14 is still keeping me engaged even though it's reasonably feature light though, but most of my biggest mechanical issues with A13 have been addressed)

Currently Rimworld neither rewards failure nor provides for compelling long term gameplay. The game is actively trying to kill your colony before the player has a chance to get to the end game and get bored with it. Project Zomboid is doing the same thing, and the Devs are upfront with the fact that the brutal difficulty is a stop-gap until features get implemented to keep it engaging in the long run.

There are some events, right now Breakdowns, Blight, Weather Conditions (sun/wind) and Diseases that happen randomly and cannot be controlled. Other than that, player skill will influence alot on your winning condition.

Right on. My impression on the game is that the outside world *should* to be trying to kill the player, but the base (and by 'base' I really mean the structures, pawn health and mind state) needs to be something the player can exercise a greater degree of control over. It's what you build to try and weather the storm.

The Storytellers have too big of a portfolio currently. Some of the stuff they're managing needs to be handed over to the player.

Again, there is no unwinnable situation in Rimworld. If you lose all your colonists, wait a couple of minutes, someone will join the colony. If your colonists are driven to cannibalism as a result of a lack of food, then the game-as-story-generator is working as intended. Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.

Not everything needs to be balanced around Ice Sheets.  Just throwing that out there.

People have their own preferences. Those without prepare carefully may have needed to reroll a few times to get people they want, customized names and so forth, then cherry picked the pawns to save and/or recruit to flesh out the colony. It's possible to pick up with some randomly generated vagrant after all those colonists died. Not everyone wants to. Hell, not everyone knows it's even possible.

I'm sure you don't agree with the way *those* people see it, but they paid for the game as well. Some late arrivals probably paid more than you did.

The nonpowered production benches were put in specifically to avoid breakdowns. Don't want breakdowns? Don't use the powdered benches

Maintenance? You mean replacing worn out parts? Kinda like ..... I dunno, replacing components? Like what already happens in-game? Sure, it would be nice if we could do that before the machine breaks down, but the difference is minimal, as you would have to shut down the machine to service it anyways.

Maintenance will prevent breakdowns in the dead of night, or right after a raid when the player is busy corralling their grieving idiots to try to heal whoever possible so that they don't starve or bleed to death.

Also, I wasn't talking about crafting benches, I'm talking power generation and heaters. Wood based resources aren't really feasible in... certain wood scarce biomes that don't need to be balanced or accounted for at all.

You can totally be proactive with regards to threats. Stockpile resources (food, spare parts, medicine) to prepare for threats like breakdowns, food shortages, diseases. Lay traps in the travelling paths of enemies, call in allies to help.

I just don't understand where the idea of "unwinnable situation" is coming from.

Traders are unpredictable and the map doesn't always have needed resources. Being proactive in Rimworld is difficult because of 3 points of uncertainty: You won't know when a trader will have what you need, you won't know when a trader will buy what you have to sell, traders carry finite gold so even selling surplus resources to every trader doesn't guarantee that the player will have enough dosh to buy the needed items when the right trader does come along.

We'd need to establish what an "unwinnable situation" actually is.

For many players, an event that wipes all original colonists, or a situation where cannibalism is the only means of survival would qualify as unwinnable. Even if you can technically take in other settlers or keep going after the breakdown spiral.

One of the legitimate negative reviews on steam was that there was no real way to be proactive. In the long abandoned Spacebase DF-9, at the very least the player could perform regular maintenance on equipment to avoid explosions and breakdowns and the like.

In Rimworld, you can kind of mitigate risk but have no real way to proactively manage it. Breakdowns are random, and on an ice sheet colony a bad zzt event or breakdown can cripple the food production of a colony. Placing switch rooms and splitting up the power grid is an advanced skill and requires resources. Why not just have a maintenance timer with a set, predictable resource drain so that the Storyteller can just focus on world building?

Also, the Raids seem to be balanced now - in a pawn for pawn fight - at least, but there are the mental breakdowns and the fact that a lone survivor can't heal himself to contend with. Surviving a raid doesn't necessarily mean that your pawns will still be alive in a few days. Once again, experienced players know how to build defensible colonies to properly manage those risks, but it shouldn't have to come down to a "git good or go home" situation when an, ahem, "AI Storyteller" should in theory be pulling punches to keep the people playing sub-optimally engaged.

In closing, what worked for Dwarf Fortress was that the entire world map was being calculated and run during the game. All raids in the game came from somewhere and the player could sort of predict what the main threats in the game would be and plan accordingly. Rimworld doesn't have the computational luxury of full world generation, so the Storytellers are there to fudge the numbers and make it look as if there's a full world outside of the starting map.

They're not good yet, and more of a blunt force threat generator than anything resembling artificially intelligent storytellers. This is not a criticism, I fully expect them to get better at some point after all the features are locked in and it becomes time to refine the existing stuff versus adding something new.

In the meantime, hand waiving arguments and claiming that this is how the storytellers are supposed to behave isn't really helping the game in the long run. Hell, if Tynan was to post on this topic that this is as good as the Storytellers will ever be, I'll give up on the game right now.

Never did Lost tribe myself, I prefer rich and solo with "wanderer joins" disabled,

But first thing I do in ice sheet playthroughs is to build double walls around a decent looking geothermal vent for heat, preferably with some farmable tiles around it (kind of a precious resource on ice sheets.) The first season will usually have a decent amount of huntable animals on the map so you can rush whatever tech you need for wind turbines and sun lamps.

Also, expect your people to get used to the taste of human meat. There won't be many ways to get around it.

My only real problem with existing mood debuffs is post battle, when a sizeable chunk of your colony dies and the survivors limp out with wounds and then spends the next two days dazed, pretty much guaranteeing that the survivors won't get their wounds tended and will die to infection.

There only really needs to be a positive vengance modifier if the group that caused friend/family/spouse deaths end up wiped and routed. Maybe have the vengance positive be about equal, but last half as long as the friend died modifier, which will buy the colony some time to heal up before they spend the 1.5 days out of commission.

From past experience, issues mostly crop up when there are tons of pawns, map size is only a secondary concern.

Generally the game only starts slowing to a crawl when you get to the point of 80+ pawn tribal raids.

I would like to report that the update seems to have turned things up to 11.

I actually *liked* the pace of my normal difficulty randy up until the update. Had a visitor join, a few raids, one cargo pod crash, and mostly just trading stuff with the plentiful caravans. I actually thought the game went through some sort of balance pass.

My 3 (IN-GAME) days since the update were basically raining refugees and cargo pods. My map is littered with corpses and assorted debris, my notification bar filled up to the point there I missed a Manhunter pack. Once I noticed the notification I searched for it, only to find the remains of a trade caravan, including a nice cache of herbal medicine and two pristine Muffalo corpses.

I really hope the low amount of events in the prepatched game just sent Randy into temporary overdrive trying to make up for lost time, but my current volume of incidents is NOT an improvement.

I dont think anyone has a computer that slow that it cant even run Steam+Rimworld, my smartphone could probably handle more than that

This game is built in Unity, it's a good, cheap, full featured engine for indie devs, but it doesn't have a particularly small footprint. I compiled a reasonably simple 3D game on my Galaxy S4 (Back when the Galaxy S4 was the bleeding edge,) and it ran like a dog with no legs.

Your smartphones (and particularly old computers) mileage may vary.

A redditor found a solution, it's not perfect, but solves to problem:

"I would just edit them out of your save file. Load up a new game and create a save. Find the save (should be in C:\Users<username>\AppData\LocalLow\Ludeon Studios\RimWorld\Saves) and delete any entries of <thing Class="Building_SteamGeyser"></thing>
You'll want to use something like Notepad++"

^this. May be considered cheaty, but I used to just search/delete all instances of that line from my save files and then just placing them with the debug mode. It's amazing what you can do with unencrypted saves.

Thank you for all your hard work, and for open sourcing the mod, EdB. You will be missed!

Please don't.  I've written legitimate negative reviews for indie darlings on steam because I had genuine issues that I felt others might need to know about, and I learned the hard way to disable comments.

The reviews are glowing as it is, please no trolling/harassing dissenters whether you feel the negative reviews are legitimate or not.

There *is* an option to disable the "Wanderer join" incident if you edit a pre-packaged scenario. It should pretty much come standard, I don't remember anyone defending that particular incident in the discussions where it was brought up.

Just keep in mind that it'll be game over if your whole colony wipes, you won't have random colonists moving in just for the hell of it.