Difficulty

[b0rsuk]

Just thought I'd drop this in here.

Cassandra blessed all my shooters with an outbreak of malaria and then not a minute later, dropped a siege into an area with basically nowhere that I can get any decent cover from. I outfitted my two remaining healthy colonists with the best gear I could find laying around, then when I got to the siege had them hide behind a tree and a rock, and both were promptly taken out in succession - and i mean literally first shot taken on both - (one had his head destroyed, and the other was shot through the chest) by a single sniper with only 9 shooting skill.

Tynan, if you're still keeping up with this thread, it'd be interesting to know what sorts of plans with regards to building out the storyteller's decision making process for what to do and when. I know you talked about making the way raiders behave more intelligent, and improving the types of challenges that we can be presented with, but I really can see a need to need to look at the logic and heuristics of how challenges are selected and paced.
My experience above of having the storyteller first incapacitate those who are capable of defending my base, immediately follow it up with a siege, and then one-shot kill both of my last-ditch attempts to fight off the siege, makes the randomness of the current system quite visible.

1. Does malaria really incapacitate pawns ? If it works like any other Rimworld disease or plague, surely they could delay their treatment a little to handle the more pressing danger, then go to bed. Googling says it merely impairs consciousness in early stages.

2. Sieges are rarely immediately lethal. They cause damage, but if you have people running around and putting out fires, they rarely do anything permanent.

3. You offer very little detail. At least a screenshot of the sieging camp would let us speculate if there was a way around it. Making balance changes based on your evidence is controversial at best.

[Mathenaut]

Cassandra is only responsible for the Malaria and the Siege. Getting your guys one-shotted sounds like RNG screwing you.

Welcome to savescumming.

[CheeseGromit]

Welcome to savescumming.

I prefer to think of it as rage reloading.

[Piata]

I have two issues with combat:

1. No-win scenarios occur so easily. If a siege starts and 3 of the guys have rifles (I think they're M-24's), it doesn't matter how many colonists you have or how good they are with guns, all it takes is a few head shots and your colony is finished.

2. There's few options to work with in combat. Either the enemy is wandering into your killbox (which is ideal) or you're marching out to meet them (not ideal with high casualties). As a result I spend most of my game time creating elaborate killboxes as it's the most viable way to keep a colony alive. It's also the most boring...

Some ways to fix this:

• Make artillery easier to acquire/use and more effective
• Gun turrets with different barrel types, i.e. a long range EMP for taking out mechs, short range flamethrower for roasting raiders
• Crafting weapons/armor made easier so you can outfit at least some of your colony in the way you want
• Crafting medkits or ways to slowly improve medical so injuries are not colony ending
• Make colonists easier to come by so they're more disposable and losing 2 or 3 in combat isn't colony ending
• Randomly make some raids that try to cut power to killboxes
• Randomly make some raids that carry EMPs to disable killboxes

[REMworlder]

both were promptly taken out in succession - and i mean literally first shot taken on both - (one had his head destroyed, and the other was shot through the chest) by a single sniper with only 9 shooting skill.

It's not a huge difficulty issue as much as it's a matter of if you fight snipers at range (especially during the day in clear weather), you're going to have a bad time.

[Mathenaut]

Tynan has some revamps for combat balancing in the works, so we'll mostly have to see how he handles that and give feedback from there.

Until then: rage reloading (I'm keeping that, lol)

[Merry76]

The only problem I currently see with the difficulty (Cassandra) is that it gets harder with time without giving the player any way (other than killboxes) to compensate for it. So, ultimately the game wants you to fail, and the only way you can prevent it is by build a killbox and bugger off (build a spaceship) before your killbox breaks. Or you build a killbox that cant break - which probably has to exploit every AI quirk there is.

It gets a race between the killbox and the ridiculus amounts of raiders basically. Was fun for a while, sure. However, "how long can I hold out until I loose/stop playing" started to demotivate me instead of motivating me. I found myself only playing less and less because of that.

Everything IMO, for sure. I rather like the game, but if the game wants me to loose ultimately, I ultimately dont want to play it anymore it seems.

[Montanio]

Combat difficulty has the same problems, if you make raiders limbs have 5 more hitpoints each or make them 10% more accurate it's doubly frustrating to increase the difficulty, because not only are you likely dealing with more but also simultaneously all your preconceptions are off.

Yes, that is the main danger of this kind of system, which is why I want to keep the changed variables few in number and obvious in effect. E.g. it's not that complicated if plants simply yield 40% more food at an easy difficulty level, or the colonist default mood is 8 points higher. These effects are simple, centralized, and easy to understand.

I wouldn't do something like modifying raider health; it's way too obscure and makes no sense since raiders become colonists and can retain their same injuries.

I honestly think the best kind of difficulty scaling should be easily understandable and expected from a player's point of view too. Perhaps working on the AI and tweaking that in addition to gear quality, numbers, and raid frequency should suffice for now. In the long term, it can perhaps dictate the frequency and strength additional types of "boss" raids, or unique/rare factions that are technologically much more superior but rewarding at the same time if defeated. By reducing numbers via mood, yield, etc, the difficulty setting simply adds a handicap and does not really become "more difficult" by adding in new content, behaviors, or anything interesting from a player's point of view (at least mine). Difficulty and handicaps should be separated.

The game is supposed to be challenging but FUN. It should not become a hassle or make players memorize long formulas or stats for each equipment/yield/etc. A game like this should be various "end-games" and various types of ways to build a base and still progress while being enjoyable at the same time. The difficulty setting should not nerf something but instead enhance the enemy of the player in a game (like some of the examples listed above). Handicaps can be added in, but it should not be bound to the difficulty setting. Instead, it should be utilized as an additional, optional, game rule subset. This will be akin to starting off in winter in a frozen place. If the player wants to be handicapped, let them do so themselves, and let them define it at will.

A good example of this might be AI War, a RTS game that is also extremely hard (to win) at its default difficulty level (1-10, default 7), however, this level only dictates enemy AI's behavior and response thresholds (in Rimworld, it would mean larger raids trigger at lower wealth levels). In addition to that, there are tons of modifiers that allow the player to make the game easier, harder, and/or force a different play style. For example, if those customizations were carried over...,
- Define what kind of enemies you want to see, for example, only tribals/low-tech or only aliens? Maybe you crash landed in a place with NO other humans (other than new ones that crash lands for the sake of growing the colony, unless we start getting growth enhancers for baby colonists or drones/droids).
- Define what kind of weapons/buildings/tech will be allowed. (For example, no shields, or no sniper rifles, no bionic items, etc.)
- Define yield, "money", HP, basically any statistics against % sliders. This would be the handicap modifier, you should also be allowed to increase it, say 200% yields too!
- Change the game's combat mechanics from fast and deadly, to slow and drawn out, and anything inbetween (damage modifiers, limb/incap thresholds, etc.)
- Add/remove/modify ally factions (those visitors, what if we don't want them, or perhaps we want more of them?)
- How about actual game modes/events as well? In the future (as the game gets more content), I expect Rimworld to get much more random events/interactive quests?/story-mission-like-events, there should be a setting to also define what you want to see and what you don't. Even now, some players might really dislike the diseases system, or the mood modifiers, or anything. However, the only way to make the experience match their tastes at the moment is to rely on mods.

Allowing an advanced configuration of a game can extend the possibilities of replay-ability of it without even requiring new content. Obviously there should still be a few "default" presets, but there should also be an advanced menu that will allow tweaks to fine tune an experience.  Hence, I really hope the difficulty setting doesn't get rolled into things that simply make the game more of a pain to play. <- TLDR version



And to the OP, you have to cheese the AI a little to survive it, if you aren't building a bulletproof killbox, you need to out micro the AI. Conventional logic will get you killed very fast because your colonists are almost always outgunned and sometimes outgeared (and outskilled/traited?). The only thing you can do to ensure YOU win against a raid is to for example, do quick hit and runs, think... Starcraft 2's "stutter step". Exploit the enemies' aiming period (OOR, LOS them). Equip yourself if you can, with weapons that are longer ranged, also equip a few with weapons that have short aim/cooldown times. Juggle between these and you'll eventually find a good way to be able to ambush-distract-kill enemies without taking too much if at all, any casualties. I must admit though, it largely becomes a cat and mouse game (hit and run, rinse and repeat). Use the pause option very often and remember to move your colonists alot. 

[SpaceDorf]

/\ that .. exactly that. +infinite

Most 4x Games have this kind of gameplay customisation.
In addition to the before mentioned settings you can also set the Victory Condition which would answer
the ongoing discussion between stay forever or build a ship.

[Monkfish]

In terms of raid sizes, I'd rather not see an ever increasing raid size each time around as, as Merry76 said, it results in a race to see whether you can build a ship in time, or inevitably results in one enormous raid following another and walking right through whatever is left from the last time around.

I think it would make for a better experience if there was more of a bell curve to raid frequency and sizes rather than what appears to be an exponential increase until collapse or escape. Raids should start off as scouting parties and, depending on how strong you are, how quickly you dispatch with them, how much more advanced you are in terms of technology, and how big the colonies are relative to each other, influences the size and delay of the next raid, which could be considerably larger. Should a significant raid be beaten, similar sized raids won't occur for a while. Think of it as a single tribe trying their luck with you and getting a severe smackdown, and that smackdown discourages other tribes from attacking.

[Mathenaut]

I play toward building a ship to escape, but that's not everyone's deal.

The problem (well, odd to call it that, given the alpha status) is that a limited event que and an even more limited subset of events make for raider scaling being the only challenge constant with respect to high playtime or colony size.

That is to say, there aren't many other things for the game to throw at you. Essentially, Cassandra's deal is essentially pushing you to get off planet eventually.

Basebuilder has the issue of longer intervals between events. So fewer raids, but also fewer trade ships or other things that generally bring life to the game.

An idea would be for threats to be independent of the general event cycle.

[Kegereneku]

In my mind, normal storyteller are meant for time-limited* game and push you toward an ENDING, even if only two exist right now (Spaceship or Death)
However raid being constant, predictable in process and increasing difficulty don't make a good story. This is what make Rimworld still an ALPHA.
From how Tynan sold the project to me, the game will in the end generate event in a way that can form narrative, hopefully logical yet not predictable.

*of course, another Storyteller could be made for endless playtime.

[b0rsuk]

Is this just me, or difficulty only really makes raids stronger ? I think the duration of solar flare and eclipse is fixed.

[rtiger]

I agree. That's why I hate the difficulty, cause eventually you get overwhelmed and the moment you start taking a few losses, your screwed cause the storyteller won't scale back the number of raiders that get thrown at you. Something else is that these are survivors. This isn't a military base. It is rare I ever have more then two or three colonists that can actually fight, and often have to fight at odds of five to one, or worse, which makes killboxes needed.

Stop trying to find ways to get around killboxes. Start trying to find ways that make killboxes no longer required!

[rexx1888]

you are all raging at a thing in development that is very difficult to fix without more content. its like a snake eating its own tail. The game is hard because the enemies have good weapons and you dont, but in order to get those weapons you have to kill the enemies. The Logic that drives the Storytellers isnt worth refining until most of the systems they need to calculate are implemented, but in order to implement those systems more content needs to be made and round and round it goes. Weirdly enough, if you all went and grabbed a few of the vanilla style content mods, you might find your issues with the difficulty fade. The reason for this is because more content means you have more options(such as different guns for different problems, different turrets or different crew or more capable crew or more medicine etc etc). Basically, these problems will go away with more content.

that being said, the current storytellers and the tactics of the ai are rather dull. once again, its a dev thing, but your less likely to find mods to fix it couse that sort of Logic is difficult to code. Basically, it is what it is until it isnt anymore. Thats why game development is an iterative process.