The issue of game pacing, difficulty and speed

[Kent Lang]

So I have been playing the latest alpha and I enjoy all of the new features a lot. During one point I spawned a random colony in a deprived desert biome, where 3 colonists, 1 of which were an "Empiath" or pacifist and two very elderly people were struggling to survive. After trying to set up as quick as humanly possible both my elderly colonists got killed by the 1 man wave, with me being left with only the empiath to dig 3 graves right outside the base. 2 for the elderly couple who were just now deceased and one for him. The director took pity on my pathetic colony and granted me a new colonist, who couldn't haul things. Shortly after my empiath died. I kept getting new colonists much like the unemployment checks I collect every week, but there were just one reoccuring issue. A lot of my colonsts had very crippling disadvantages. Many of which related to them not being able to do certain tasks because of their backstory.

Back in the first alphas there were generally only the medieval lordling which came up all the time and really couldn't do much of anything and while the amount of jobs a colonist now can work on have increased, so have the possible disadvantages. However now an elderly woman with dementia and cataracht, even while it is still technically possible for her to participate in combat, can not with her slightly more healthy husband fight off even the easiest bands.

I propose that we look over the difficulty certain backstories present and give lower weight to colonists who have severe disadvantages. An elderly comissar isn't going to be very good at the one job she or he actually can do, and while it indeed does add flavor to the game having these useless people in the colony and while it does stay faithful to the DF ideology; it kinda makes gameplays a little too unpredictable. While in DF dwarves could be really crap at A or B, but they would never really refuse to do any jobs you assigned them to.

Another thing is the speed and pacing of the game. I think we need faster speed sliders. The game I played yesterday took me the entire Wednesday to complete and I still didn't get much done in the game. I don't feel an additional slider would have much effect on the gameplay itself other than to skip parts of general uneventfulness.

In summary; I absolutely adore this game. Sylvester, my fine gentleman: You and your development team have done wonderful job on this game! However Rimworld risks becoming a very time consuming game with relatively low amount of eventual progress being made in sessions, and that saddens me because I have many other things to do than spend hours playing Rimworld and you don't get much done in a 1 or 2 hr. session I'm afraid. On DF I can just put the game speed to 200 ticks per second and watch my dwarves pretty much dig a fort out in a minute or so. So please consider implementing similar systems to speed up the game a bit. As far as games are concerned; time is relative after all.

[skullywag]

Dev mode, speed 4? which would be 240 ticks per second. (press 4 on keyboard)

[Negocromn]

I feel exactly the same about the current state of your first colonists draw, you pretty much can't play random anymore. I even wrote a post recently in another thread telling almost the same things.

In the first alphas I used to always accept the first 3 colonists, I would only look at them in game, sometimes you would get a noble (arguably even a good thing) and that's it. Now it's the other way around, you need to be very lucky to start randomly with one or two colonists that can actually work or fight, as there are so many possibilities of pawn fuck ups now that your pawns are bound to have some of them.

And the game isn't even harder for the most part when you start with incapable colonists, because threats are calculated to your wealth level which is going to be low, it's just really, really slow and boring because nothing gets done.

I don't think I agree with your suggestion of rebalancing costs tho, I think you should still have a chance of having bad starts or even horrible starts, they just need to be much less prevalent.

[Kent Lang]

Yeah I'm attaching a image to this thread. Just take a look at this colonist I just got. Vatgrown soldier background means that they wont do medicine... he was grown in a lab to be a killing machine... so he got a job as a nurse as an adult... of course right? This is an example where the backstories null eachother. He is supposed to be good at shooting stuff, and good at fixing bandages but the backstories disables him from doing both these jobs... so he's just a near useless colonist. Sure he's decent with animals but at the cost of doctoring, defending the colony and wardening. I love the backstories but those are some hefty costs for backstories that contradict eachother and honestly makes no sense.

If he can't do doctoring. Why would he do something that requires doctoring inbetween the colony and now? I can understand that if he was born to kill later events in life could change how he would behave.

I would mod this myself but for some reason I can't find the data file. This just seems incredibly silly and it happens way too often.

[attachment deleted by admin - too old]

[Anvil_Pants]

In playing A12 with ModVarietyPack, I made edits to BackstoryDefs.xml to include childhood and adulthood backstories that exclude any work-type refusals, through:

Code Select Expand


    <workDisables>
      <li>None</li>
    </workDisables>


It's for the same reasons as above. The rest of a pawn's character sheet should show how reasonable it is for the player to assign a task, therefore influencing the outcome of the player choice, but people (and thus pawns) change and do things they would otherwise refuse to do when life demands it.

workDisables does more harm than good. Setting 0, or even negative values, in place of workDisables seems more appropriate.

[Negocromn]

Yeah I'm attaching a image to this thread. Just take a look at this colonist I just got. Vatgrown soldier background means that they wont do medicine... he was grown in a lab to be a killing machine... so he got a job as a nurse as an adult... of course right? This is an example where the backstories null eachother. He is supposed to be good at shooting stuff, and good at fixing bandages but the backstories disables him from doing both these jobs... so he's just a near useless colonist. Sure he's decent with animals but at the cost of doctoring, defending the colony and wardening. I love the backstories but those are some hefty costs for backstories that contradict eachother and honestly makes no sense.

If he can't do doctoring. Why would he do something that requires doctoring inbetween the colony and now? I can understand that if he was born to kill later events in life could change how he would behave.

I would mod this myself but for some reason I can't find the data file. This just seems incredibly silly and it happens way too often.

haha, the vatgrown soldier male nurse was killer

and yeah, the background inconsistency or even the straight nullifying of it happens all the time, I wonder if the system is completely random or almost completely random... and I think there are way too many special snowflake backgrounds now, every other background seems to have some incapables and so on

[Anvil_Pants]

I think there are way too many special snowflake backgrounds now, every other background seems to have some incapables and so on

Yes. I noticed toward the end of A12 (the past two months) that ModVarietyPack's use of BackstoriesCore is even starting to duplicate some of the A12 backstories to include workDisables versions. Apparently some of us players really like that as a gameplay element.

The "special snowflake" aspect of it is just specificity and the author trying to strongly type a character from the back story. That's the correct RPG thing to do.

It's just the all-or-nothing disabling of activity categories that I disagree with strongly. I'd rather see more fluid/flexible characters who can, over time, defy their pasts through necessity, growth, and repetition. That's the more compelling gameplay element to me in this game.

To get what workDisables is trying to do, but without actually disabling the work, we only need to use negative values on the skill fields.

You can already find this being done by one of the backstory authors who got included into ModVarietyPack:

Code Select Expand


<BackstoryDef>
    <defName>BackstoryVatGrownSlave</defName>
    <title>Vat grown slave</title>
    <titleShort>Vat slave</titleShort>
    <baseDescription>NAME was bred in a vat to be the perfect slave. HECAP can do many things much better than anyone else, but HE was 'born' without compassion or feelings for others.</baseDescription>
    <bodytypeMale>Hulk</bodytypeMale>
    <bodyTypeFemale>Hulk</bodyTypeFemale>
    <slot>Childhood</slot>
    <workDisables>
      <li>None</li>
    </workDisables>
    <skillGains>
      <li>
        <defName>Crafting</defName>
        <amount>3</amount>
      </li>
      <li>
        <defName>Cooking</defName>
        <amount>1</amount>
      </li>
      <li>
        <defName>Growing</defName>
        <amount>-2</amount>
      </li>
      <li>
        <defName>Construction</defName>
        <amount>2</amount>
      </li>
      <li>
        <defName>Mining</defName>
        <amount>4</amount>
      </li>
    </skillGains>
    <spawnCategories>
      <li>Slave</li>
    </spawnCategories>
  </BackstoryDef>


If I had more granular access to skillGains, I could complete that character by debuffing "compassion and feeling" types of "social", but I can't, and right now "social" is too broad for that. The granularity is currently (I think) misplaced in workDisables.

I'm sure it's a base game design thing, and nothing to do with the mentioned mods. Those mods are just examples of digging around in that base system.

workDisables doesn't need to go away, though. There are use cases for it. Any Psychopath back story, for example, really does need to turn off "caring". Maybe it's also true, for comedy, that a Medieval Lordling would die sooner than properly care for himself as benefiting mere peasants.

It's just flatly untrue that any given intellectual character type is irredeemably incapable of stumbling through planting some potatoes, when otherwise they'll starve. Same for first aid, carrying big rocks, or pointing and shooting firearms that are specifically designed to be so easy that a complete novice can kill -something- with them.

[Negocromn]

well, that's why I said special snowflake characters, because they have some mind numbing disadvantages that prevent them from doing basic things to survive in life or death situations

and I agree with you on everything else, perfectly put

[Kent Lang]

I never said I wanted them gone, but it seems too weird that a character can have so many backstory modifiers that can cancel out what is supposed to be their biggest strengths. If the character has been grown to become a soldier but then somehow becomes a nurse, it seems more fitting that they're able to do both those jobs or that he forgoes his past as a vatgrown soldier. Maybe there should be a system that disallows colonists to take adult backstories that strongly contradict their childhoods? Or allow them to take adult backstories that overwrite their childhoods? I don't care which. I just know that this needs to be resolved.

I don't personally care whenever my colonists are special or not. I mostly judge them out from how they contribute to the colony. If they can't contribute, then they're not going to live for very long or be very respected by me as a player at least.

The waves the director, even Phoebe spawns are incredibly tough, and most of those are more than a match for turret systems. While it's nice out of a RPG standpoint - the gameplay doesn't really support weak links in the colony very well.

[Limdood]

my worst colonist was a healthy young kid...

except he was a convent child/sheriff.

He was literally unable to do ANYTHING except "animal" and "artistic."  He was going to be the 8th member of the colony so a dedicated artist could have been nice...

...except his skill level was animal: 5 and artistic: 2....no passions at all.

He was a "call for help, raiders on my tail" join....i just drafted him and left him at the edge of the map...absolutely worthless colonist

[Mathenaut]

I think the problem is the fact that progress is gated behind specific events, while most of the rest is filler - and most of that filler is just things that set back progress.

Especially in A13, it's possible to have no gold on the map. This means that you need to tech up to a console, then wait a few seasons for a ship to show up, then hope that ship is an exotic trader.

Far as progress goes, everything else is either irrelevant or just some growing % chance that you won't be able to access that trader when and if you see it.

Because the scale of threats increases over time, it's finally possible to have actual dead-end games, where you're bombarded with threats that you have no practical means to even really prepare for. That's alot of wasted time.

[NephilimNexus]

I suspect part of the issue is that Storyteller "logic" cannot differentiate between a 24 year old vat-grown assassin with a charge rifle & power armor versus an 89 year old pacifist with asthma, a peg leg & a bad back when it's sizing up how big of a raider force to launch at you.

What's worse is that, after a certain point, the "escalation logic" simply becomes utterly absurd.  Last long enough and you'll have raider spawns appear while still in combat with the previous raider spawn that, by the way, is actually a three-way fight between you, the raiders, and a bunch of Mechanoids that somehow landed through your roof and right inside your hospital bay where all your wounded guys were recovering before the "coincidental" solar flare shut down all the medical equipment and air conditioning right as the heat wave struck in the middle of an eclipse, which in turn was halmarked by the ground itself opening up an the eternal avatarof Yog-Shoggath oozed forth from the infinite abyss to eat all of your chickens and convert your one still standing colonist to Scientology before infecting them with brain parasites that cause subconjunctival hemorrahaging before killing them and forcing them to rise from the dead as a zombie rights activist with a Twitter feed that somehow gets 17,000,000 subscribers simply by typing "YOLO" over & over again.

Seriously, you'd think after my six brave adventurers have killed of the 417th raider that month that, I dunno, Xerses would show up for a cut-scene or something.  But no, all I have to show for it is a bunch of one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged guys still trying to hold the line in front of a field of withering crops, rotting bodies and a pile of used clothing big enough to re-enact a traumatic scene from "Schindler's List."

Tynnan, I think I've got a better picture for "Cassandra Classic:"