Alpha4f difficulty

[FroBodine]

The point of the game, I hope, is to make a rich awesome colony with happy colonists.

It sounds like that is what Col_Jessep is getting at.  If you make a rich, awesome colony, the game becomes impossibly difficult.  It is defeating the purpose.  If that is not what you are saying, then my humble apologies.

[Tynan]

The point of the game, I hope, is to make a rich awesome colony with happy colonists.

It sounds like that is what Col_Jessep is getting at.  If you make a rich, awesome colony, the game becomes impossibly difficult.  It is defeating the purpose.  If that is not what you are saying, then my humble apologies.

I'm saying that the strategy of self-impoverishment isn't a strategy at all if you think the goal of the game is to make a wealthy colony. It works to achieve the goal of living a long time. But living a long time isn't the goal.

e.g. You can play Call of Duty and just hide in a corner and never shoot at anyone and probably survive for good long periods of time. But why would you? You're not making any progress towards the goal of the game, which is to get kills. You're alive longer, but it's pointless.

I'm drawing a comparison between this and the RimWorld strategy of simply not making anything so nobody attacks you. You can do the same in countless other games - Civilization, Crusader Kings, DF, Prison Architect - but in each case all you're doing is sitting there and refusing to play. You don't win Prison Architect by having no escapes or riots, but by having a big wealthy prison. You don't win CoD by never dying, but by killing a lot. You don't win RimWorld by lasting forever, but by getting rich.

I hope this will be even clearer when we have an endgame that requires wealth to achieve.

[linkxsc]

Aha but here we have a problem. Since there is currently no other goal in the game but to try and survive as long as possible, thats what every player is going to be comparing their experiences against.

Also the CoD analogy is lulzy. The goal is to get the most kills with the feqest deaths. If not for that why are there campers everywhere?

Thing is its just like dwarf fortress. Df has no defuned goal, just to survive. Both games steadily ramp up difficulty as time goes on. But it reaches a point in df where your easily too powerful to be taken out. This game on the other hand forces death upon you so you have to go and start a new colony. Yes i guess there is a degree of fun in the building of a colony (or df fort) but there is some enjoyment also out of watching something you spent hours making, run and survive.

Yeah we could all play phoebe friendly, but theres never raiders in that. In df as long as theres gobbos theres always seiges to give you something to do while managing your successful fort. It comes down to the player deciding then how hard they want their survival to be, not the game.

[Tynan]

It comes down to the player deciding then how hard they want their survival to be, not the game.

I am hoping to add more ways for this sort of thing to happen.

[FroBodine]

The point of the game, I hope, is to make a rich awesome colony with happy colonists.

It sounds like that is what Col_Jessep is getting at.  If you make a rich, awesome colony, the game becomes impossibly difficult.  It is defeating the purpose.  If that is not what you are saying, then my humble apologies.

I'm saying that the strategy of self-impoverishment isn't a strategy at all if you think the goal of the game is to make a wealthy colony. It works to achieve the goal of living a long time. But living a long time isn't the goal.

e.g. You can play Call of Duty and just hide in a corner and never shoot at anyone and probably survive for good long periods of time. But why would you? You're not making any progress towards the goal of the game, which is to get kills. You're alive longer, but it's pointless.

I'm drawing a comparison between this and the RimWorld strategy of simply not making anything so nobody attacks you. You can do the same in countless other games - Civilization, Crusader Kings, DF, Prison Architect - but in each case all you're doing is sitting there and refusing to play. You don't win Prison Architect by having no escapes or riots, but by having a big wealthy prison. You don't win CoD by never dying, but by killing a lot. You don't win RimWorld by lasting forever, but by getting rich.

I hope this will be even clearer when we have an endgame that requires wealth to achieve.

I get all this.  But, if the game, in its current state, is too hard once you start doing well and become wealthy, that is not good either.  But, you know that.   

[Col_Jessep]

I'm saying that the strategy of self-impoverishment isn't a strategy at all if you think the goal of the game is to make a wealthy colony. It works to achieve the goal of living a long time. But living a long time isn't the goal.

You probably don't want to repeat that in presence of my colonists...
I think what we have here is the clash of two visions who are different but probably not exclusive.

Tynan, if I understand you correctly you want to tell a short but intense story with every colony. Life is hard out in the Rim and if you make too many mistakes... Maybe a bit like FTL: You have a deadline and you have to be ready at that point or die horribly.

I think a majority of the players who don't enjoy the new balance, me included, are in it for the building and management part. Think of us as the "Architects". We want to build Hedley's Hope, our own neighborhood, a 5 star hotel for our colonists, a Fort Knox for silver... I'm sure a lot of the Architects enjoy being challenged by raiders, tribes and mechanoids - as long as they can keep working on their colony until they are satisfied with the result.


I think the best option would be a storyteller similar to Randy for the Architects:
There should be no forced end around day 100. Difficulty should go up based on number of settlers similar to Alpha 3 and before because we will build large bases that are not necessarily optimized around defense. Raiders should aim to steal goods and weapons but not set everything on fire just for the heck of it. (You said that might be in A5 already.)

It would be completely awesome if you could expose the values the storyteller uses to evaluate your base to the XLM file.
Something like number of colonist/turrets, value of buildings/items, value of weapons...
A switch for open ended, death on day X and continuously increasing difficulty.
Maybe even a value for the likeliness of incidents like raiders compared to blights, mad animals and the like.
That way it would be easy for us to add new storytellers based on Cassandra, Randy or Phoebe to create our own perfect storyteller. I did that in Alpha 3 with Randy by increasing his difficulty setting and it worked like a charm.


No worries, RimWorld is already loads of fun and I'm sure you will make it into a really great game, reflecting your vision. A small backdoor for us Architects would be really nice and appreciated though. Probably financially attractive, too. Minecraft, Banished, Sim City (the old ones!), Prison Architect, Towns... Lots of people like to build, often just for creativity's sake.

[abelsavard]

The current build seems pretty reasonable though I am disliking the current mechanic of drop in attackers particularly after I got hit with a dozen pirates with advanced weapons dropping into the center of my home zone. 

[Tynan]

Well, the storytellers are completely open to modding. You can change all their properties in the defs, and rewrite all the code they use to generate events if you like. I actually find it strange that nobody has made a storyteller mod.

As for the architect/winner dichotomy, I see what you mean. Certainly I'd like to support really long games with epic colonies by players who want to do it. A "forced death" isn't the goal and I do suspect that there is a bit of an (unintended) difficulty spike around day 100-150. This will have to be rebalanced. What I'm really hoping to do over the next few months is add a lot more construction and colony management systems so we can ease off combat entirely and the game won't feel empty. So combat will be the topping, not the bread.

[Col_Jessep]

Well, the storytellers are completely open to modding. You can change all their properties in the defs, and rewrite all the code they use to generate events if you like. I actually find it strange that nobody has made a storyteller mod.

Well, I played around with the numbers and stuff and made Randy slightly more difficult than Cleo in Alpha 3. Mod worked great but I didn't release it. Thought it might be a bit too rough. If I find the time I'll look into it again. Rewriting your storyteller code is probably beyond me though.

As for the architect/winner dichotomy, I see what you mean. Certainly I'd like to support really long games with epic colonies by players who want to do it. A "forced death" isn't the goal and I do suspect that there is a bit of an (unintended) difficulty spike around day 100-150.

Then all is good. =3

What I'm really hoping to do over the next few months is add a lot more construction and colony management systems so we can ease off combat entirely and the game won't feel empty. So combat will be the topping, not the bread.

That sounds awesome!

[mrofa]

I think that the raiding party goal mechanic would be better, adding to that that every faction would have diffrent wealth value for diffrent things i.e.
Pirates got 2x from silver value of wealth but would get only 0.3x from food.
Triblas would get 2x from food but would get only 0.3x from silver.
Spacer, midworld factions would mostly go for tech, which means 2x from manofactured items.
Cannepids detects power sources so thier attacks could be dependant on power storage and power output of colony.

Also with that mechanic in mind factions relations between themselvs could be used making a raid of two factions at the same time, dependable no thier relations they would either fight themselfs and colonist or shquish colonist togheter

[Leffa]

Tynan

One suggestion, increase the chances of capturing settlers ... A colony with many settlers is very difficult to manage, psychotic episodes, lack of food and all that this can create confusion ....

[Bilxx1]

I'm enjoying Rimworld, 650 ish days so far, over 50 raids, Arachnids, PA and the Kitchen mod mainly oh and workplaces. Alot of the fun is ramping up defensive strategies as the raids ramp up. I like to keep in mind that these people are here to prosper, not just survive so I sell lumber, excess food, weps... etc. Ive lost alot of people and have been almost out a couple of times but were at 15 strong now. Toughest to deal with are Cent drops in the base, about 4 of those 5,5,6 and 6 in strength. Its not impossibly hard but it is challenging. Thank you for a great game!!!

[Battlemage15]

After giving the poll choices and thread a quick read...

The idea of beatable is kind of amusing, considering there is no way to 'beat' the game other than make an iron-clad settlement the AI can't take down.  Unfortunately, even on Chill Callie, I have not been able to do that.  The thing that I can't seem to cope with are mechanoids.  Their weapons are just murderous and their high health is really hard to deal with before you end up losing the fight.  I find mechanoids and drop raids make a mockery of static defenses.  I do have hope that in Alpha 5 the colonists will get access to the mortar the same as the raiders (long range indirect fire would be amazing against large scale attacks); I also hope there is a high-damage direct fire weapon added in at some point, like a anti-armor cannon that will allow the colony to combat mechanoid raids and sieges weapons better.

Now, this is not to say that I do not enjoy the game, it's just that on any storyteller other than Phoebe, death is more or less inevitable.  I wish there was a difficulty between Phoebe and Chill Callie.  I love the game, I am enjoying the progress it is making; Rimworld is basically one of my 3-4 'dream game concepts'.  A space western colony sim.  I'll never not have fun playing it, I just wish I had more to play with (and bigger guns to deal with the damn mechanoids).

Also, I wish there was someone to buy all this stone brick I'm making...

[Untrustedlife]

I'm saying that the strategy of self-impoverishment isn't a strategy at all if you think the goal of the game is to make a wealthy colony. It works to achieve the goal of living a long time. But living a long time isn't the goal.

You probably don't want to repeat that in presence of my colonists...
I think what we have here is the clash of two visions who are different but probably not exclusive.

Tynan, if I understand you correctly you want to tell a short but intense story with every colony. Life is hard out in the Rim and if you make too many mistakes... Maybe a bit like FTL: You have a deadline and you have to be ready at that point or die horribly.

I think a majority of the players who don't enjoy the new balance, me included, are in it for the building and management part. Think of us as the "Architects". We want to build Hedley's Hope, our own neighborhood, a 5 star hotel for our colonists, a Fort Knox for silver... I'm sure a lot of the Architects enjoy being challenged by raiders, tribes and mechanoids - as long as they can keep working on their colony until they are satisfied with the result.


I think the best option would be a storyteller similar to Randy for the Architects:
There should be no forced end around day 100. Difficulty should go up based on number of settlers similar to Alpha 3 and before because we will build large bases that are not necessarily optimized around defense. Raiders should aim to steal goods and weapons but not set everything on fire just for the heck of it. (You said that might be in A5 already.)

It would be completely awesome if you could expose the values the storyteller uses to evaluate your base to the XLM file.
Something like number of colonist/turrets, value of buildings/items, value of weapons...
A switch for open ended, death on day X and continuously increasing difficulty.
Maybe even a value for the likeliness of incidents like raiders compared to blights, mad animals and the like.
That way it would be easy for us to add new storytellers based on Cassandra, Randy or Phoebe to create our own perfect storyteller. I did that in Alpha 3 with Randy by increasing his difficulty setting and it worked like a charm.


No worries, RimWorld is already loads of fun and I'm sure you will make it into a really great game, reflecting your vision. A small backdoor for us Architects would be really nice and appreciated though. Probably financially attractive, too. Minecraft, Banished, Sim City (the old ones!), Prison Architect, Towns... Lots of people like to build, often just for creativity's sake.

This "architect" group however IS NOT the majority, you can see this by looking at the graph.

Dwarf fortress tries it's best to kill you when you are "too" powerful

You can also see by playing well/watching lets plays that players can also become "too" powerful, (so much that they can never be defeated.) In this game, using kill boxes.

I suppose all people have their options though...

Edit: tynan you said earlier that it is intended for us to die around day 150, did you not. So why are you suddenly saying it is unintended....

[dd0029]

I think I've gotten a handle on this now. Finally lost my first colonist on day 150+. Ironically, not directly to a raid, but to the rescuer walking through fire and my little man bouncing over the wall when he got dropped. Poor Hengvorst.

Those Mechanoids, they are rough. Melee'ing them down works sometimes if you can catch them in the open. Then they try to back away to firing range. But if you catch them like that in a place where they can't back away, your little men get trampled something quick. I was disappointed they didn't drop their guns. The time I had 6 of them drop on my trade beacon was a Game over man! I'm at a complete loss how to handle that one.

Outside of the mechanoid base drops, I'd rate things as fair.