Difficulty

[axefrog]

Perhaps the semantics surrounding the difficulty level need to be reassessed. 100% of normal challenge mode sounds like "normal" difficulty. More than 100% suggests you're ramping things up. Less than 100% sounds like you're chickening out a bit. So I choose 100% because the balance of difficulty suggests to me that I'm playing "at par", so to speak. If 100% of challenge mode is actually supposed to be really difficult, I'd suggest reorienting the percentage to align with what "par" difficulty actually should be.

Now, if 100% difficulty is about what it's supposed to be right now... well holy crap. Let's see.

• 4 of my 8 colonists have had their legs shot off... what's the game's obsession with incapacitating my colonists in this way?
• 9/10 trade ships that come by are weapons traders. Occasionally I get an exotic goods trader, but only 1/10 times does that trader have any kind of prosthetic leg. How am I to fix my colonists at this rate?
• The only way to stop a siege is to proactively go and stop it, which ultimately puts at least 25-50% of my colonists in a medical bed afterward. I'm now having to get each one out of bed to heal his friend, then sending him back to bed. Meanwhile, nobody's collecting food, so starvation is kicking in.
• With starvation and infections to try and micromanage my way out of, well hey, why not throw in a psychotic cobra and an outbreak of malaria? yay!
• Now that my colonists are on the brink, hey let's throw in yet another mechanoid attack?
• And having barely fought them off using my last able-bodied but sick, wounded and infected colonist who happens to have a rifle, why not throw another siege my way? Because naturally now I am easily going to be able to fight it off, having been given all of 13 seconds to recover from the mechanoids, infections, starvation and malaria.

This happens every time, in one form or another.

This is alpha, so I want to acknowledge that. There's lots of work yet to be done- I get it. But I figured I'd report this anyway, as Cassandra really does seem to have a sadistic, maniacal side where after a while she deliberately throws literally so much at you that you just can't keep up, no matter how hard you try. My last few colonies were lost in this same way, despite having awesome kill tunnels, masses of defenses and so forth. She hits you hard, then while you're trying to recover, she hits you again. Then she laughs in your face by making everyone sick. Then she has SNAKES smash down STEEL DOORS and kill your prisoners who you're hoping can replenish your colonist numbers, and then she spits on you with psychic drones and mechanoids.

*Sigh*

I'm very much hoping that the "A.I. story teller" gets better at creating stories, as opposed to creating unwinnable situations. These games keep ending in me feeling helpless, defeated and angry at the game for doing its utmost to screw over a colony I've put a lot of effort into holding back the tides of incoming problems. I welcome a challenge, I really do, but Cassandra really should take stock of my capacity overcome a challenge before just randomly smashing the challenge pinada all over my lawn.

[axefrog]

... then again maybe I just suck and should have done a better job of making my base into an insane super-fortress before Cassandra decided to punish me for not keeping up.

[rtiger]

Which is exactly why I avoid putting this on higher difficulty. Dealing with mechanoids and being outnumbered vastly in raids isn't my idea of fun. The game just doesn't take into consideration just how many colonists you have, never mind how many of those can actually fight.

Between the sieges and the raids, it seems the only way to really survive the higher difficulty is to build a base under a mountain and construct a killing floor.

[DNK]

Just wait until we get Titans and megabeasts and necromancers...

Or at least a mod for those things

[BetaSpectre]

Solution:
Modding the game. In the mods folder is the core folder. In there is some storyteller XML file. You can now turn off raids 100% Also there are 3 story tellers use the easiest base builder.

Make kill boxes/mine traps. Walled in turrety entrances designed to kill anything that steps in at minimal cost to you.

Surgically remove organs from prisoners that are hard to recruit.

Euthanise (lock door) on any worthless colonists that you can't cannibalize for spare parts.

The game has things you need to get used to, like in Dwarf Fortress there are skills and strategies that can maximize your survival chances. Rimworld is much easier so its all possible!

[Darkhymn]

Challenge is the difficulty against which the rest are measured, but it's my belief that Rough is probably the best balance of challenge to success chance for a newer player. With only 8 colonists, Cassandra should be challenging but not unwinnable. My guess is that there are a few quirks of the gameplay that you need to be aware of.
If you're losing limbs at that rate, I suspect you're losing them to tribals and their pointy stick limb removal systems (pila and bows). The only advice I have on that front is never engage tribals on their terms. Outrange them or outmaneuver them, and use turrets to explode their melee troops. Line of sight AI exploiting is useful here (break their ranged AI by putting a wall at the entrance to your base with the only gap leading into the line of fire of a turret or two and your ranged colonists.
Traders are horribly broken, and the more useful they would be to you, the less likely you are to see them. I'm not sure how easy it would be to mod this, but I'm looking into it because the current system is stupid.
With sieges, game the AI. Use line of sight and superior range to your advantage if you can. If you can snipe out one or two members of the siege party, the remainder will blind charge your base, and you can mop them up on your terms with the aid of your base defenses.
Mechanoids aren't as scary as they seem. Scythers and their charge lances (right?) are a bit more of a threat, but if you can outflank them or simply overwhelm them, they go down fairly easily. Centipedes, on the other hand, are extremely tough, but their AI is easy to confuse. I just flank them from a few directions. They spin in circles rather than engaging in proper combat, and if they do stop to shoot, just move their target while they're preparing to shoot, and wait for them to start spinning again to move back. They take a while to kill, but they're not very threatening.

Try a game at rough, anyway, and try to keep the bad AI in mind when in combat.
Also, get used to peg legs. Peg legs for everyone!

[CheeseGromit]

Difficulty is an interesting topic since it's quite personal to what the individual player wants from their gaming experience.

I admit I've still not found a difficulty setting that I'm happy playing at. My issue is mostly with the scaling, 30%, 100% doesn't really matter that much as eventually your colony will be seen as doing well enough for the game to start throw overwhelming hoards at you. At that point it devolves into more turrets being the 'best' or at least easist way to deal with things and clean-up becoming a bit of an annoyance.

Modding is going to be my ultimate solution for me but it's a matter of waiting to see how the game changes and adapting from that. I'm playing around with a few things currently to reduce the ease of building turrets but I'm going to need to look into attack scaling and colony 'wealth'.

My theoretical ideal game would be one that starts off as your colonists against the environment as slowly progresses from there. I'm looking for longer term games though.

Looking at the change log I'm interested to see how the animals fighting back plays out in relation to the early game.

[REMworlder]

Rimworld is supposed to be hard! Like in Dwarf Fortress, the best stories are about failure. 100% difficulty (normal) should be very challenging to new players, like with most things. And trying is more interesting than success.

It's easy to get hung up on what happened and forget all the ways you could have prevented it. For example, not having enough meals is a pretty big mistake. Having enough medical beds for all your colonists is also a colony-ending mistake, you'll get colony-ending bottlenecks this way unless you're smart enough to keep your doctors away from combat. If you have a ton of combat traders with their cheap medicine, you shouldn't be struggling with infections and sickness as much either.

I agree RW is definitely alpha and I'm looking forward to more content and refined features, but difficulty is the last thing I'd change.

[SSS]

This is just a limitation of the game because, as you said, this is alpha. RimWorld is a storyteller generator, and at this point it specializes in drama. That being said, when you're leading a very successful colony that's getting progressively richer/stronger/bigger without taking losses, it goes against the "drama instinct" the storytellers have. That's why Cassandra is hitting your base so hard. If I may ask, did you ever lose any colonists, or do you reset whenever your pawns die?

If the latter is the case, then you're trying to play the game/story differently than the storyteller is trying to enforce, meaning you will indeed get frustrated since Cassandra's going to keep getting more and more insane until you take losses. (And yes, it you take it too far, you may eventually find yourself wiped out all at once. You'd be better off taking losses than allowing that to happen, imo.)

That being said, the game isn't totally without reprieve. Given the above premise (drama storytelling), RimWorld is meant to be played "above normal" difficulty. This aspect isn't unique; there are other games with difficulty settings that recommend a difficulty harder than normal for the "truest experience" (Gears of War comes to mind). That's all that's happening here. If you feel like the game is dissing you by labeling the lower difficulties things like "casual", then I don't think I can help. You're operating in a niche (little drama) that RimWorld hasn't expanded into heavily yet.

I personally have been more of a basebuilder for awhile. I never liked killboxes and other strategies that drive the storyteller nuts, but at the same time I didn't like taking losses either. Recently I've been expanding my mindset and playing Ironman-style on low difficulty, to ease myself into the current gameplay/storytelling focus. (Low difficulty is, in fact, quite manageable even for a beginner.)

So, all in all, I have a few solutions for you:

(1) Play on a lower difficulty such as casual. Raids and disasters will be just as common, but each instance will be only one third as severe as it would be in challenge mode. This will help ease you into colony danger management without overwhelming you.

(2) Play on a different storyteller, particularly Phoebe Basebuilder. Phoebe will pack just as much punch as Cassandra on a given difficulty when disaster strikes, but she gives you a wide berth and doesn't send said disasters nearly as often. If you're just looking for a success story, this may be your best bet.

(3) Get used to losses. Again, this is going under assumption, but it sounds like you're the type that refuses to lose any pawns in most scenarios. While I can relate, I would strongly advise getting over that, since you're really limiting your gameplay experience. This applies to more than just pawn deaths too; I used to only accept the creme of the crop when generating starting colonists for my world, and while I still sift through them, I'm more accepting of "fun" colonists that don't fit my own parameters. For example, one colonist which I wouldn't have accepted in my previous mentality is a jogging masochistic melee nut (who's actually rather bad at melee)- the traits went together so well that I just couldn't resist. Playing with her in combat has been a fun change of pace.

Concerning "accepting losses", I can give some cases for allowing this through my own experiences. Take my primary combat colonist. I bought him a charge rifle early on and keep him equipped with the best clothing I can get my hands on, but the guy's a figurative wreck even in easy mode: He has a stab scar on his neck; his left eye has been cut out; his rib's been shattered; his jaw was blown off and had to be replaced with a denture; he lost his left hand for the sake of a power claw... I mean, that might sound awful from one perspective, but it's pretty awesome from another. He's pretty hardcore, no? I probably wouldn't have had a colonist like that before. Another scenario: The melee person I mentioned above lost her left lung in battle, and there were no traders carrying lungs for quite a long time (nor eyes, unfortunately for my combat man), so what did I end up doing...? I harvested a lung from a captured raider, who (ironically enough) had a background in organ farming- her body was genetically engineered to grow organs which were removed repeatedly as she grew up. I probably wouldn't have considered such a recourse during my "perfect colony" days, but when it comes down to making the colonists unhappy for awhile vs. potentially losing one of the important ones, I chose the former. It makes for better dramatic storytelling, but- just because I still like playing the sentimental side- I'll probably just end up releasing her.

Anyway, rambling aside, my point is, the game actually does open up more when you're more accepting of casualties and losses. You can get into some pretty fun/unusual situations in the process.

[Kegereneku]

I have to say that I also find Cassandra Classic ridiculously difficult for what is supposed to be "100% = normal".

Personally I'm quite annoyed by players (accidentally?) implying that difficulty we can "still survive" through explicit exploit, AI limitation, minmaxing and absurd logic should be considered normal.
Saying "but Dwarf Fortress is hard!" have no reason to cut it out, any game have their own dynamic ...and ambiance.

Now of course, maybe it just can't be helped since Rimworld is incomplete.
With few others events centered toward survival, colony moral&health, diplomacy, basebuilding and its current lack of finesse in the Raid themselves it's logical if the storyteller "100%" can't create more than tales of spontaneous dismembering & raider running into giant grinder.

(in fact, its incredible it is already engaging nevertheless)

ps : just to be said : Axefrog and I are really not dramatizing. I too had two siege happening at once plus a tribes attack, all shortly followed by the crash of an ancient starship. Such situation kind of lose its impact when it get regular.

[axefrog]

Thanks for the replies.

I do try to accept reasonable losses. Originally I was trying to play it as a roguelike, with no reloads at all, but sometimes Cassandra would still be just utterly unfair. I mostly limit my reloads to cases where my guys die due to stupid A.I. such as an accidentally non-drafted colonist running through a wall of bullets. I admit sometimes I reload in the heat of irritation though, such as when an enemy brawler gets two one-hit kills in a row and not even a scratch, but hey if Cassandra is trying to keep me under control, maybe that's the "story" I'm supposed to let happen. I guess the problem for me is that because it's alpha, the number of types of challenges to overcome is quite limited, so my ability to perceive a loss as part of the greater story is undermined by the limited number of things that can actually happen. We're not anywhere near a level where true emergent behaviour is really being noticed. Credit where credit is due though. Tynan has not been working on this for ten years. yet

[rtiger]

I am just going to leave this madness here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEJ6QymV7-o

[Boboid]

I don't understand where the notion that "100% = normal " comes from when the setting is listed as " Challenge "

100% = Challenge.
If you want 60% of challenge, go for Rough.
If you want 130% of challenge, go for Serious Challenge.

The trouble is that you're bending your own fingers backwards by trying to intuit what those difficulty settings mean based on what you think you ought to be able to overcome.

When a setting is explicitly labeled " Challenge " and you think to yourself " Well that means normal " you're out of your mind.


It's also worth pointing out that event frequency is limited by the storyteller, not by the difficulty scale.
If you're playing Randy then don't be surprised when you're unfairly wiped out by multiple simultaneous attacks, that's the nature of the storyteller.

If you're playing Cass and your cleanup between attacks takes too long, yeah you'll eventually be buried under attacks.

If you're playing Phoebe and.. I don't know you take a nap or something in-between attacks then yeah that too might prove to be a problem.

All of that aside - If you start struggling you can at any time switch your storyteller and your difficulty scale in the options menu in game which I would strongly suggest doing rather than artificially lowering the difficulty with constant reloads.

Lowering your difficulty setting isn't the same as failure - I can understand where that notion comes from but for anyone who can step back for even half a second it's pretty obvious that you're simply going to enjoy the game more when you're being sufficiently challenged but also simultaneously not being wiped out, and sometimes that means lowering the difficulty.


Play at the difficulty that you enjoy, don't punch yourself in the crotch by forcing yourself to play what you've perceived is the " Normal " difficulty

[axefrog]

I don't understand where the notion that "100% = normal " comes from when the setting is listed as " Challenge "

You're getting caught up in one particular semantic interpretation of the word "challenge". These words are all relative. Does it mean "I like a bit of a challenge" or does it mean "holy crap, this is going to be challenging"?

When choosing a game difficulty mode in any game, going somewhere around the middle, perhaps erring slightly on the difficult side of the midpoint, you're usually saying "yes I want a reasonable challenge; I don't want things handed to me on a silver platter", not "i want you to challenge me in inhuman, tortuous ways I haven't even dreamed of, and then some". The real problem here is the use of percentages. The alignment of "100%" to a particular difficulty mode suggests that the standard level of difficulty, manually-balanced by the game designer, is aligned at that level. Saying that a given level is only 60% of that suggests that you're choosing to tone down what the designer originally intended. More than 100% suggests that you're trying to make things harder than what the designer originally intended.

Your problem is that you're assuming that your interpretation of a word is the same as everyone else's. What I'd really like to know is what default level Tynan thinks the game is designed to be played at, and then we can decide whether he's a sadistic madman or a fluffy toy enthusiast.

[Boboid]

Surely the interpretations of the game dev are broadly irrelevant.

If your end goal is to enjoy the game then the optimal difficulty has nothing to do with the game dev's intentions for you.

It's the difference between playing Chess and using the Chess pieces to construct imaginary battles between castles and goblins.


My original point was that you're deliberately hamstringing yourself by trying to intuit what the game dev's intentions are and then proceeding to assume that the dev knows what's best for you in terms of your enjoyment - which is crazypants.