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Small scale is how this game is intended to be played as raid point scaling has a component which is effectively represented by wealth^2.

It's not just traps, practically every fair defense loses effectiveness as enemy scaling increases. Exceptions being mortars, doom/trips and <secret degenerate killbox strat which will not be described here>

Its one of the meme raids - so far I have noticed:

* molotovs / grenades / doomsday / trips.
* all melee / almost all melee
* all snipers

thanks.

just to be clear, adaptation works purely as a multiplicative modifier to the unfactored points?

for posterity since certain parties like strawmanning

Basically 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

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

[C) The solution]

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.

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.

Tribal, merciless, temperate forest, 40 days in.

Building speed feels way too fast for me with wood, steel.
I feel like I was able to achieve way too much with 40 days in merciless.

Also way too much steel around, and steel gets mined super fast. I had standing reserve of 1000+ 2 weeks into game.

Food gathering speed is also bit too fast, I have tons of food and my cook is mostly wandering around even though he's feeding 5 people + 3 animals.

Crafting needs some love already, 1 skill for many different activities, still not enough useful shit to craft.

If colonists cared more about what they wore at each point ("this armor is heavy - 8" / "I need a hat -6" / "wearing nice shirt +2", "wearing shitty pants -3"), had affinity for certain weapons ("I prefer using bows -5/+5"), etc, would probably make the whole crafting game much more relevant and help make the mood game less extreme

Animals follow into building when door hugging, massive difference, boom animals fucking scary now.

Muffalos self tamed after I got first quest in tribal, not sure if intentional, but I finally did first caravan runs and that felt great!

If that could be constant that getting quests add some chance for muffaloes to self tame would be awesome.

At same time my quests are giving me rewards that are far beyond tribal level. I would prefer to be given relevant rewards or at least not be able to do a power claw surgery on day 20 as a tribal.

Maybe random thought, but why does patchleather exist if we dont need to convert all leather to it before creating clothes? is it not meant as another (correct imo) step before crafting clothes?

I find that with tribals I need 2 research benches to make decent progress, and at the same time there's still not enough for my tribe to do in between discoveries. Having animal handling be worth while, or having to actively sustain def options like fire wall / oil wall, water moat with ammunition that needs to be continually created would fill that gap of things to do.

You had a big stock of steel cause you kept mining you don't have to mine everything right away.

Crafting seems fine and definitely no -8 mood or any negative mood for wearing required gear such as armour. This won't make crafting more relevant just make armour less worthwhile and increase break risk. Colonists already have lower mood than in B18 due to changes in expectations and wealth.

Patch leather is there so you can turn the small amounts of crappy leather from birds, dogs or other small yield animals in to something somewhat useful if actually not something you would make clothes out of except if you had no other options.

I play tribal start alot and I have no clue why your colonists have so little to do. No need for more busy work.

most things that are not research lead to increased raid and reduced mood due to expectation, so really he is playing optimally even if he doesn't think he is.

It is funny that the best way to improve mood is deliberately impoverishing your colonists, since most mood increasing mechanics besides drugs suffer from such massive  diminishing returns that they are actively detrimental.

In my experience, building the economy to sustain a conditional +2 mood increase from better dining and rec leads to a global 6 mood penalty, in addition to greater corpse disposal pressure. Pretty obvious lesson here.

I like that floors are part of wealth calculation now, but Im going to add my voice to those already stating it needs a bit of rebalance. I added a single 9 by 10 room of sandstone walls and floors, and completely empty it added 10k to my wealth.

As humorous as it is to imagine raiders coming to "take ma'h floors", I feel a floor's "wealth" should be based more on the room they are apart of than just their raw value.

9x10 shouldn't increase wealth that much. What did change in the most recent build is that your pawn market value now contributes to wealth. That is much more likely to contribute to a 10k spike than some flooring.

That said I don't know the sandstone block value off the top of my head.

General concerns for merciless / commitment:

Shield belt baiting is absurdly strong, even more so than door peeking. At least door peeking you have the realistic chance of getting hit, shield belt baiting in cover means you're practically invincible.

I would also point out that research should probably also lead to higher raid point contribution. Every other colony / pawn improvement does, so research is one of the last areas where you can feel like you are making headway without also supralinearly increasing your difficulty. This should be removed.

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.

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.

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.

With writing, there is a concept that you should be as concise as possible. Similarly, with games, you should not add complexity for complexity (or realisms) sake.

The reason meat processing works is because there are interactions and meaningful choices at every step.

Could you not argue the same of anything else in the game? Fingers are a part of pawn anatomy, why not simplify it to hands, and hands to arms? There are no bionic hands or hooks (yes, there is the powerclaw, but let's ignore that), just arms. Just have arms affect manipulation, it'd be simpler. There's no sense of smell, so why bother giving pawns noses?

Similarly, stone chunks have minimal use. They're aped by sandbags. Why not just have them bust into bricks based on mining skills? The stonecutting table isn't used for, say, picking the stone off of jade or gold you found until you get to the precious parts, so it's loss wouldn't be significant. If you're going to shoot an animal just to haul it back to a freezer before you take it out, butcher it, and drag it's bits back to the freezer or textile stockpile, why not just have them explode into pieces based on the hunter's shooting skill? Still gotta haul and store the stuff, gotta keep the kitchen clean, it's just shaving what may be an "unnecessarily complex" part of the game out.

My issue is not with overcomplexity or simpleness, but with the uneven distribution of it. Rooms aren't hot, they're 38 degrees Celsius. That's neat, and complex. Meanwhile: Frozen food is as edible as fresh food, rather than needing to thaw so that it tastes better and doesn't break teeth. A microwave or way to cycle food between a freezer and a refrigerator wouldn't be too bizarre, would it? Probably would be in a world where you can perform a medical operation on an infected pinky-toe, but can't repair the wear on a rifle.

exactly, stone cutting falls under the more useless form of complexity. Wouldn't be sad to see it go.

Consistency of realism is a poor reason to make gameplay worse. It sounds like you are underchallenging yourself, but implementing more mechanical requirements isn't going to help that.

With writing, there is a concept that you should be as concise as possible. Similarly, with games, you should not add complexity for complexity (or realisms) sake.

The reason meat processing works is because there are interactions and meaningful choices at every step.

You have an animal corpse. You could eat it directly. This has different benefits and penalties depending on your game state (character traits + incapabilities, your need for leather, your acceptance of a nutrition efficiency hit for speed, your mental break status).

There's less play with butchering, but there are still some choices (in NB butchering spot vs table is also relevant). Practically it provides a space optimization challenge as most high value corpses butcher to multiple stacks.

Finally with cooking you have options for nutrition efficiency/spoilage/mood. With different game states, there are different choices that are optimal. This is probably the step with the most thought involved, and it is the most interesting since unlike the rest of the steps, the solution is not often obvious.

Whether by intent or by accident, its not needless complexity.

In fact, some of the most elegant mechanics in this game are simple - like the zzt event.

You make the argument of realism and inconsistency in a fantasy abstracted world, and frankly realism is worthless without being connected to meaningful gameplay. Your examples don't lead to more meaningful choice, only more tedium.

You cannot shoot in a 1 tile radius, thus if you are caught in melee combat you will have to move them to range, and this can be difficult since all melee attacks (even ones that miss) cause slowing.