Of starting colonists' skills and their potential as a difficulty "slider"

Started by British, October 07, 2013, 05:27:16 AM

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British

This in kind of relative to the discussions about the researching and manufacturing systems...

I was thinking about the skills our colonists start with, and how it could (should ?) influence the difficulty of the game in relation to the not-yet-fully-defined research and manufacture systems.
We can randomize our colonists' stats to our heart content and choose to focus on these or those stats for each of them, but they don't really have an impact on the game right now.
Even if you take, let's say 3 oafs that have absolutely no scientific skills, you can construct "scientifically-advanced" items (comms console, research table...) and do the research itself.

But what about taking that into account as well ?
That way, if I start with those 3 oafs, I can only do simple tasks/buildings, and have to rely on... luck (randoms people coming off pods, or raiders) ? Something else ?
Likewise, if you choose to take 3 nobles, you can't do much.
That idea would work well with a learning system of sorts (a codex within each pods to slowly learn from at the start, and maybe then learning from rescued/captured characters ? That's a discussion for another thread, though).

Think of it as another subtle layer of difficulty.

Discuss.

AspenShadow

Quote from: AspenShadow on October 06, 2013, 01:33:24 PM
Perhaps to add some semblance of realism to this Theoretical-DIY debate without over-complicating it, we could simply add a system that means along with the random seed that generates what research you have access to learning upon crashing, the topics available are also dependent on numerical Researcher-Skill value or the highest-tech background?

...I feel weird quoting myself. *Shakes head*

But anyway, am I correcting in assuming something like this would be in line with your suggestion?
Say if you have 2 urbworlders (at any stage in their lives or just adult?) and a medieval lord, then you'd be able to build certain urb-world tech without naturally progressing from basic tech.
Or if you had 2 medieval serfs and a medieval lord, you'd be stuck with nothing but basic tech and one or two randomised medieval tech options.

It takes the highest background in your group of three and allows one/two randomly selected technologies from the tech-tier they'd understand naturally to be used right from the get-go.

British


Zeiph

This kind of thing may lead to some difficulties, but on the other side, you could balance that by the needs of the colonists:
for example a medieval serf and a medieval noble don't mandatorily need electricity to be happy, maybe some torch providing them with light should be enough, where some futur-life humain may need his futur-life thingy to be happy... future-life thingy that needs high level technology. Because it's futuristic.

AspenShadow

Quote from: Zeiph on October 07, 2013, 12:41:06 PM
This kind of thing may lead to some difficulties, but on the other side, you could balance that by the needs of the colonists:
for example a medieval serf and a medieval noble don't mandatorily need electricity to be happy, maybe some torch providing them with light should be enough, where some futur-life humain may need his futur-life thingy to be happy... future-life thingy that needs high level technology. Because it's futuristic.

That might help balance people always trying to go for futuristic colonists, that they're harder to please. But once again I'm not sure of whether that'll be too complex to both integrate into the game and into the player's consideration in-game.

It would be easier to discuss if you gave an example of difficulties that may arise from the original thought?

Zeiph

I haven't quite yet, as most information I have are from Christonian's gameplay, but from what I saw, most needs of the colonists are currently implemented as debuffs for their wellness. Thus while coming from middle age worlds, people would still need basic supplies like food, but for them things like (lets imagin some highly futuristic thing) TV and modern entertainment (like internet forums trolling) would not appear as a need.

For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Hypolite