Adaptation

[Greep]

I'm going to make a mod that does exactly that.  I usually like just playing vanilla since it's fun talking about the "same game" with other people; however, after my most recent experiences on sea ice just playing what feels like "normal gameplay behavior" I ended up with such an incredibly bizarre experience due to the raid system that makes vanilla no longer interesting to play normally.  The only thing that made the game manageable was launching 750 thrumbo furs and 1400 human leather into the sea.  Rimworld is officially north korea  So I'm actually just going to end up testing 1.0 with that mod after that sea ice game to see how it goes.

It would make sense as simply an optional mode alongside regular gameplay, though.  So TBH I think it really should be in vanilla.  I'll see how it goes personally.

Edit: Huzzah! https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=43044.0

[Polder]

In my last playthrough, merciless Cassandra was so easy as to be boring. I don't know how adaptation works but I wonder if that was due to my habit of regularly letting bad pawns die. Sending them away in a caravan, or just using them as meatshields during raids, or just leaving them to die when they arrive in a drop pod.

[Greep]

If you have the save, that would help a lot to show your graph.  You just turn dev mod on, go to history, and change it to debug.

[Polder]

Here it is. Do you know how to interpret it?

[attachment deleted due to age]

[Greep]

Yeah your game hit raid point level that is about 6 times less than what is normal heh.  You essentially ended up playing on a raid multiplier divided by 6.  Since Merciless is 2 and base builder is 0.35, you had raids of what you would expect on the lowest non-peaceful difficulty.

Only about half of that was caused by adaptation, it looks like there was a lot of pawn or wealth limiting going on there as well, which also makes for a weird experience.

[bbqftw]

I think you need a wealth graph to truly reflect how important adaptation was in such case

What happened on day 144, that looks like a lot more than one bad pawn dying

[Tynan]

Yeah your game hit raid point level that is about 6 times less than what is normal heh.  You essentially ended up playing on a raid multiplier divided by 6.  Since Merciless is 2 and base builder is 0.35, you had raids of what you would expect on the lowest non-peaceful difficulty.

Only about half of that was caused by adaptation, it looks like there was a lot of pawn or wealth limiting going on there as well, which also makes for a weird experience.

These numbers are false, recovery cannot in any case make a 6x difference or close to it.

[Greep]

Heh you're reading half my posts, both the OP and that one.

He had 1000 raid points, a usual merciless is 6000-8000 raid points, so it's unusual by 6-8x.  But I said only half of that was due to adaptation, most of the rest cause by pawns/wealth.

And adaptation can make pretty high of a difference.  If you check out his fairly normal gameplay style and his adaptation levels, it's actually negative much of the time.  At it's lowest it's 0.4 and highest it's 1.6, so 4x potential difference.  Although here it's somewhere around 2-3x it looks like.

[Polder]

I think you need a wealth graph to truly reflect how important adaptation was in such case

What happened on day 144, that looks like a lot more than one bad pawn dying

I am not sure because it was some time ago, but I had times were most of the colony was ill with malaria/plague/sleeping sickness (before scheduled penoxycycline for everybody). At one point I also had two deaths. It looks like there were two raids around that time.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[zizard]

Heh you're reading half my posts, both the OP and that one.

He had 1000 raid points, a usual merciless is 6000-8000 raid points, so it's unusual by 6-8x.  But I said only half of that was due to adaptation, most of the rest cause by pawns/wealth.

And adaptation can make pretty high of a difference.  If you check out his fairly normal gameplay style and his adaptation levels, it's actually negative much of the time.  At it's lowest it's 0.4 and highest it's 1.6, so 4x potential difference.  Although here it's somewhere around 2-3x it looks like.

Yes I interpreted your post as adaptation making about half of 6x difference. Unfortunately you allowed the tiniest chance of misinterpretation. Better luck next time.

[RawCode]

raids always was horrific mess, it's really fun to fight agains the odds, cold snap, cold snap, fallout, volcanic winter, common winter, cannibalism, starvation, cannibalism hard decision who will die and who will survive, but then, zergrush come and just pwn you without any options at all.

it feels like you pissed off GM and he invoked "rocks fall"

[RemingtonRyder]

Actually, adaptation can only multiply points by roughly 1.46 at the top end (100 adaptation, not 120) so, the difference between minimum and maximum is a factor of roughly 3.66 - and that's always going to be in the player's favour.

In the player's favour, because smaller raids showing up when the colony has suffered significant losses usually means the player will have an easier time defeating those raids.

Sure, in comparison the raids at the high end of adaptation are going to be more difficult than the ones at the low end, but they're actually only 46% harder than normal in terms of points, not 366%.

[Greep]

This is true, although hardly anyone plays randy because of the potential 50% higher raids.  Small numbers mean a lot when they're multipliers and not additives.

You can see some obscenely large variety in rimworld with the right mutipliers.  And I have seen some crazy things.

Theoretically, you can see in the same day with the same untouched colony:  A randy high roll, high adaptation, chased refugee with 80 raiders.  And a Randy low roll, low adaptation (say two people died), drop pod attack with 4 dudes using clubs (which would actually end up so low as to be supressed probably).

[RemingtonRyder]

Hmm, that's a fair point about all the multipliers stacking up. Also, if you have low adaptation but other high multipliers, they can basically cancel each other out, when I think the whole point of adaptation should be to override those multipliers.

Anyway, I've come up with a simple def patch for Storytellers.xml which may make things a bit more agreeable. In the case of the chased refugee event it means that (not considering difficulty) the maximum possible multiplier is 1.6, instead of 1.6 times some other factors greater than 1.

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=30508.msg424966#msg424966

[Razzoriel]

Id never view Cassandra as a fun experience anyway because it is predictable and easy to "cheat". Randy was made for the DF veterans with so much randomness that you have either long good luck streaks or bad luck streaks. Ive played both (never bothered with Phoebe) on this series of test builds. Some of my two cents from my experience, others and code-wise why the game sucks at judging how to attack you:

- You can "game" the AI by artifically lowering your wealth, sacrificing bad pawns, keeping your colony small and use door-peeking will make your game a cakewalk regardless of difficulty. Changes need to be gradual. I cant stress how important this is. Tynan, if you cant implement exponential functions to calculate these, this will always plague your game.

- Armor changes made the game harder, in a bad way. It could be more interesting to see armor that can either deflect or reduce damage, or both. No. We got "half-or-none-or-everything". Dogs being more competent at piercing armor than modern pistols. Flak pants being semi-useless. Thrumbofur overclassing steel plate armor. These just to list a few.

- Implementing resource consumption for turrets is the wrong way to tackle their usage. Tynan could make all sorts of interesting events such as hackers that can disable/convert your turrets. AI prioritizing destroying defenses with explosives. Artificial solar flares with raids. Passive mechs that wrecks the psyche of pawns. All sorts of alternatives are already there.

- Adaptation does not even considers the pawn's value when he dies. Did you just sacrificed Steve, the legless, armless, one-kidney/lung/eye colonist incapable of Skilled/dumb/violent? Ok. We'll make the next raids until next year safer. Oh is your entire colony still licking their wounds after you defend a mech raid? Too bad, heres a new raid.

- Worn items do not count towards wealth. Seriously, the wealth mechanic is just retarded. If Im swimming in uber-expensive bionics but still defending myself with bows, it makes no sense to send a more difficult raid. Granted, wealth does not count as much as it used to, and this is a positive.

All this being said, I felt the game to be easier in 1.0 overall than B18. At the same time, it is more tense in a bad way, because combat is as RNG-dependant as ever, so the only good strategy is not play the RNG game. Which makes combat uninteresting. Looking forward for the official version and future changes. The Bioshock-way of testing is frustrating and alienating, but if it works, great. Hope it does and provides enough data for improvements.

EDIT: Apparently bionics do not count to wealth. But tamed animals do and other things which may or may not help in the aid defending the colony do, so my point still stands.