Uncertainty Veil (Fog of War)

[Mathenaut]

If by 'rebalancing' you mean spite solutions against what you're encouraging with this, then no, that isn't a great idea at all. You're basically falling into some sort of tunnelvision bias for a concept that you really like and are just casually upturning everything inconvenient to support it.

[akiceabear]

If by 'rebalancing' you mean spite solutions against what you're encouraging with this, then no, that isn't a great idea at all. You're basically falling into some sort of tunnelvision bias for a concept that you really like and are just casually upturning everything inconvenient to support it.

I'm not spiteful whatsoever; above I acknowledged that an alternative (much lighter) FoW implementation was a fine idea. I'm not even asking for him to make it the core of vanilla gameplay, just to put the system in place (in <6 days) for the modding community to run with. For example, BTSGs is a great mod, but probably not everyone's cup of tea, and I know it doesn't make sense to force it on everyone by absorbing it into vanilla. That said, a modder was able to make it because the core systems were in place and available to exploit.

I've also made clear elsewhere that I think the game is plenty fun as is - I think Tynan could publish A10 as 1.0 if he wanted to be done with all of our gripes; and no one would have much to reasonably complain about. The game is already great value for money.

I have a few changes I'd like to see still, and will voice my opinion on them in the few threads dedicated to them. If my tone strays too far from acceptable I expect I'll be warned/dinged by a forum-mod - which is fine. Any view of this game that differs from your own isn't necessarily spiteful or biased - which is of course true for all of us.

[RemingtonRyder]

If Tynan wants to test out a new fog of war system, then he has a group of testers to give feedback on it.

I think this is something which he would probably have to consider a while before adding it (back) into the mix. Not saying that it is a good or bad feature but that it would have quite an impact on gameplay. Which is a reason to try it out on testers first.

Also, it's not really the tone so much as the bickering that gives me cause for concern, just so you know. I know you guys are passionate about the game but dial it back a bit, please.

[Mathenaut]

'Spite solutions' aren't a personal criticism or judgment. It's a criticism of what are very shallow solutions whose only purpose is to punish a certain type of gameplay, often arbitrarily.

These are very bad solutions as (by virtue of being shallow) they fail to address the underlying problem and will only lead to an innovative exploit to get around them.

That being said, if Tynan wants to add another feature for modders to play with, I'm all for it. There are some nice rts mods that would do great with it.

[Kegereneku]

Myself I am not interested by fog of war outside of revealing underground zone.
Such game mechanic is suited for strategy combat game, something Rimworld isn't. You start with 3 colonist, not 3 combats groups of commandos.

Not all features are good for any game. Imagine what it would be if you had to cook your food in a typical fast FPS shooter.
And it isn't less realist in anyway, I consider my omnivision as Rimworld abstracting my colonist checking around without me micro-managing them..

Of course, if Tynan said he wanted to I believe he would know his stuff, but given the reason he took back the last one I don't him do so.

[b0rsuk]

I may re-consider this some day, but at this point hiding information does not seem like the right direction to go for story generation. To me that's more a strategy game mechanic, and it only really works well in multiplayer strategy games where human players can fake each other out for strategic advantage.

It's one of those ideas that seems good but just doesn't work out that well. RimWorld has had and lost several of those so far.

Rimworld certainly can work as a satellite game it is now. But lack of fog of war also limits it.
Rimworld is missing something that I crave - MYSTERY.

I'm seriously going to fetch and play the early alpha that had fog of war, if possible. To compare.

The satellite view always gives you perfect information. You know exactly where raiders are landing and heading. You can see what dropped from crashed cargo and where. There are no surprise encounters with strange animals, or people. You don't accidentally find any resource or item. There's not a moment of doubt what's happening or what might happen, other than the storyteller throwing dice. I would enjoy the game more if non-critical events like crashing cargo were NOT announced, and hidden.

There's no drama sending a rescue party. Instead of sending a search party and biting your nails, you send the closest pawn. Imagine a colonist with damaged Consciousness having difficulty reporting his position. You could represent this by making him periodically disappear from the world map. He would still be there, and be moving somewhere, but wouldn't report. He wouldn't generate a field of view. Maybe he became sick, or his electronics were broken (potential for a Storyteller event). You would need to send someone and rescue him. A race against time.

Rampaging squirrels could be much more terrifying with FoW ! You could be scared as hell to let your people leave the colony until the threat is gone.

That's another story Rimworld, by design, can't tell - horror stories. All the classic horrors rely on the unknown. Darkness is a staple in horror movies and books. Darkness has stuff you can't see. We fear the unknown.

You are not a fan of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, are you ? :-(

Pawns create footprints on snow and sand. You could make them disappear slower. With Fog of War, they would tell a story. Currently they're just eyecandy. Multiple footprints - probably the pirates that landed a while ago. Single footprints - your colonist ? Or a ship crash survivor ? Speaking of these, instead of having them lie there injured every single time, you could have them wander around, exhausted, and hungry. Current lack of FoW makes this infeasible. Rimworld has no detective stories.

You could have not just weather affecting vision distance, but colonist traits, health and age. You could have a variety of scouting mechanics, including binoculars, automatic sensors, radars, cat-mounted webcams http://www.mr-lee-catcam.de/ . And finally, research some high tech radar or satellite that shows you everything.

In roguelikes, a great deal of tension comes from not knowing what's around the corner. Any tool or spell that lets you reveal areas from afar is highly valuable. Rimworld can't have that tension.

At the moment, the only surprises in the game not generated by the storyteller can be underground. Only underground can contain undiscovered areas, hidden mineral veins, ancient cryosleep caskets you don't instantly notice. DF has much more mystery, because you're constantly digging and finding new stuff. What's on the next level ? Lava ? River ? Kobolds ? Silver ? Hell ? Without a fog of war, your choice is either no mystery, or having all the hidden objects underground.

Consider: Raiders approach, some muffalo go mad and attack them and there's a dramatic battle. With FoW over them, you never see any of it.

Frankly, I'm surprised you make this point when the game has such excellent sound design and distant gunfire! You would hear the battle. Must everything be literal ? Do you want no place for imagination to hide ? If you really wanted, you could send a scout - with binoculars, so you're not really in danger yourself. Or use a satellite scan like in Starcraft 2 - that would drain your batteries quite a lot, and grant vision in a small area for short duration. And if you don't, corpses, bloodstains and dropped weapons also tell a story.  As for faction vs faction warfare, you could have a mechanic where friendly factions share their vision with you (like is common in RTS games). That way you wouldn't miss too many battles.

This actually used to be in the game back in June. I took it out after seeing people get really confused and blindsided by stuff from outside the fog of war.

I don't know how early alphas handled this, but I would still announce important events like crashing survivor or landing pirates. You could have a long-range radar that picks up such events and marks the location on (low-resolution) minimap. Only the initial landing spot, so if pirates are going somewhere, you would need to send a spy. I don't imagine this would be a big deal if vision range is at least as much as Survival Rifle range. A flashing notification as soon as something hostile comes into view of a colonist, and it's solved. For most types of hostile events I can come up with mechanics that give you just enough information to prevent unfair ambushes, but strike fear into players.

[Mathenaut]

Seems a bit.. exaggerated. There's no horror in fog of war, same as there's no horror in exploring your area in an RTS game. If there's something big, you walk it back into your killbox, rinse and repeat.

There is already a drama in retrieving an injured colonist in a fight. It's a race against time. No fog is going to trump that.

As said time and before, FoW is great if we're leaning toward rts, but not otherwise.

[b0rsuk]

I don't really see where all of this massive appeal and sudden challenge is supposed to come from.

Finally something we agree on.

Fog won't stop mountain base digging. It won't even add tension to raids, it will just grant a huge incentive/reward for having complex turret arrays and killboxes to avoid getting blindsided, which is exactly why Tynan removed it to begin with.

The last several alphas prove the causes for killboxes run much deeper. Fog is gone, but killboxes remained. There are still no alternatives to turrets. Mortars are not even good enough to weaken a raid that waits before it attacks. So many colonists are either incapable of fighting, or skilled in melee only. It's almost as if Tynan wanted players to rely on turrets.

[Mathenaut]

Killboxes are definitely a complex issue. My claim is that the Fog contributes to and further complicates that issue by further promoting and rewarding that behavior.

That's a consequence of tipping the gameplay toward rts.

[Darth Fool]

So to be clear, you are saying that killing Fog of War has proven to be an ineffective "spite solution" to kill boxes.  Kill boxes are a result of raider AI that is incapable of handling a kill box. A darkness based fog of war is not going to encourage kill boxes any more than they already are.  FoW would open up the opportunity for new types of interactions between existing game mechanics which can lead to emergent behaviour and hence more interesting stories.  There is obviously a place in this world for both perfect and imperfect knowledge games, but for creating stories imperfect knowledge is far superior.

As for tipping towards RTS, I don't see why you think this.  Fog of War is a staple in TBS, RPGs, FPS, and card games.  It is not unique to RTS and there are certainly plenty examples of RTSs that do not have fog of war. 

[Johnny Masters]

So to be clear, you are saying that killing Fog of War has proven to be an ineffective "spite solution" to kill boxes.  Kill boxes are a result of raider AI that is incapable of handling a kill box. A darkness based fog of war is not going to encourage kill boxes any more than they already are.  FoW would open up the opportunity for new types of interactions between existing game mechanics which can lead to emergent behaviour and hence more interesting stories.  There is obviously a place in this world for both perfect and imperfect knowledge games, but for creating stories imperfect knowledge is far superior.

As for tipping towards RTS, I don't see why you think this.  Fog of War is a staple in TBS, RPGs, FPS, and card games.  It is not unique to RTS and there are certainly plenty examples of RTSs that do not have fog of war. 

Yep, and the fact that Fog of War has its origin as a military term and not from a RTs game, tells a lot about its "uniqueness" to RTS. It goes well beyond its iconic graphical implementation of a covering black or dark veil as it came to be known in strategic and tactical games.

Adding fog of war would influence rimworld into changing it's genre as much as revealing all enemies and items would in a FPS game, changing into something else other than a FPS. It wouldn't.

[b0rsuk]

Let's not forget that you can apply uncertainty veil in varying degrees. You can have the strict, binary way used in most RTS games. Or something more like in Total Annihilation, where you can still detect things with a radar and see them on minimap. In Rimworld terms, this could mean that a radar would let you see where enemies are (represented as red dots), but you wouldn't know how they're equipped, their names, stats. Until you get close enough to see them. Such radars or sensors could be quite cheap, but run on electric energy so they would only cover the area near your base. Unless you make a point of building a solar generator and a sensor somewhere far away just for early warning.

[Johnny Masters]

Let's not forget that you can apply uncertainty veil in varying degrees. You can have the strict, binary way used in most RTS games. Or something more like in Total Annihilation, where you can still detect things with a radar and see them on minimap. In Rimworld terms, this could mean that a radar would let you see where enemies are (represented as red dots), but you wouldn't know how they're equipped, their names, stats. Until you get close enough to see them. Such radars or sensors could be quite cheap, but run on electric energy so they would only cover the area near your base. Unless you make a point of building a solar generator and a sensor somewhere far away just for early warning.

Yep, there's a ton of creative ways to deal with fow. Red blips are pretty cool, kinda like aliens, and they could be just a herd of animals.

I think early game should be scarier, and fog is a good way to deliver that. Unless people want to trivialize the theme of the game, then it doesn't ever matter if they are shipwrecked or just a small band of colonists pioneers.

The kind of tactical choices the player has to make, such as "do i research better sensors or better ways to farm?" are the stuff that makes the game richer IMHO, and fow promotes that.

[b0rsuk]

Speaking of red blips, the free MMO-bullet hell game Realm of the Mad God achieves something remarkable. For most part you can recognize monsters on minimap by their movement signature. Many monsters move in very particular ways.

[Kegereneku]

I would like to recall a bit from Tynan : With a fog of war you cannot see elements of storytelling like a raider attacked by fauna or becoming broken.

I also support that FoW would not change the Killbox problem in any way. Killbox work precisely because AI are extremely predictable. And I'll go on saying that if we had FoW, not being able to count on that anymore could make raider/tribal quite frustrating (and again, I don't want to need guard outside of those clear event)