forced population cap and storytellers

[keylocke]

as anyone who's been playing rimworld awhile realized, having a lot of colonists lowers the probability of recruiting more people, while on the flipside having few people increases the probability of new recruits.

i'd get right to the point. think this "feature" should get scrapped.

i think population cap should not be up to the storytellers to decide, it should be up to the player. recruitment and enemy incap probability should be the same from the early game up to the late game regardless of current population. it should be all up to the player to decide if they want more or less people in their story.

the game can just give a tutorial warning that tells players that recruiting too many people also increases raid difficulty, and then let the players decide their own fate and how they wanna play the game.

[harpo99999]

tynan has decided that the engine works better with a smaller number of pawns (both 'human like' and animal), the big drain on performance is the pathfinding for each pawn every tick of the game, so you having a larger population of pawns equals a lot worse performance of the game, possibly even to the point of one game tick per minute(at present at 1x it is something of the order of 30+ ticks per second so (30+) x 60 (1800+) times slower game)

[keylocke]

that also depends on the machine you're playing on isn't it?

just like choosing map size (like ludeonicrous) it's up to the player to decide.

as for pawns dragging on the performance. i can spawn 3 raids at the same time without much performance issues. and it's not that hard to trim down on pawns if and when the fps starts lagging.

so as long as there is a disclaimer (like the disclaimer in ludeonicrous) that tells players that X is the recommended population cap, then it's up to the player to decide if they wanna exceed that.

edit :

actually i think the spike on raider difficulty is a better deterrent than a forced population cap.

probability of diseases should also be higher with a larger population. they also need more infrastructure and supplies to support, etc.. i think these are better deterrents than a forced population cap..

death from these feels more "natural"...

right now the current flow of gameplay is : hit the population cap. -> kill the weakest one by "accident" or let them get kidnapped. coz this is spartaa! -> this will then make it easier for you to recruit replacement pawns, or just be content with what you have because you won't get any new ones until you get rid of some of them.

this feels "unnatural".

[Limdood]

the game is also BUILT for small populations, its balanced around small populations.

Look at even 15 man colonies...they have idle pawns all the time.  The survival difficulty is generally based on having more to do than you have time, resources, and people to do.  having large populations removes all 3 of those challenges

The performance issue is also legitimate.  Just because you may have a supercomputer doesn't mean that someone with a toaster (which rimworld was clearly built to ALSO be able to run on) shouldn't be able to play the game anymore because the storyteller just continually throws new pawns at them.  There have also been concerns even with good computers about performance based on colony size

[hoochy]

I have a quite decent gaming PC, overclocked I7 at 4.8ghz, sure there is faster out there but not by much. The game lags severely on 3x speed when the colony is large enough, it is not just the pawns but amount of items on the map too, the amount of buildings, etc. There is zero lag if run on 1x speed but I can't play the game at that speed, I could take coffee breaks in the time it takes for anything to happen at that speed, so it is not enjoyable. And I only play on 200x200 maps because otherwise the performance is even worse, quicker.

There is a population cap in this game for certain reasons, I can't even imagine the average user with their average CPU and this game, at least the way I play it. I don't know if they (Tyrian) really have to do any of these suggestions for the game to be as successful as it can be. The game is limited highly by the graphics from a marketing perspective. Makes more sense to just release as is and work on an improved version if that is what they want. The current framework is heavily hamstrung and won't get much better, and the effort required to make it better doesn't make financial sense in my opinion.

[keylocke]

geez, i don't have a supercomputer but how many of you guys have already dealt with a chickengeddon? how many animal pawns are there before you start experiencing lag?

people say oh, there are already idle pawns at 16 or whatever population. i actually like the fact that pawns get idle time. it's coz people do like to faf around that makes them human.

so let's say the game allows the player to keep recruiting as many as they friggin want. but i'm assuming before they reach a 30+ or whatever population cap, the raider difficulty has already spiked to annihilation doomstacks level, disease events probability could also be jacked up if players reach a ginormous amount of population.

but this is EXACTLY what i meant. this is a more natural form of "population culling".. the population grows and then storytellers starts causing havoc to cull the population.

now compare that to the current approach of : oh you reached a population cap, now i'm gonna lower the probability of recruits and raider incaps. <--- this is why late game gets too boring.

it's cause the population reaches a superficial plateau.

now remove that superficial population cap, and you now get a new metagame : how much people can i collect before the storytellers decide to kick my teeth in?

[hoochy]

geez, i don't have a supercomputer but how many of you guys have already dealt with a chickengeddon? how many animal pawns are there before you start experiencing lag?

people say oh, there are already idle pawns at 16 or whatever population. i actually like the fact that pawns get idle time. it's coz people do like to faf around that makes them human.

so let's say the game allows the player to keep recruiting as many as they friggin want. but i'm assuming before they reach a 30+ or whatever population cap, the raider difficulty has already spiked to annihilation doomstacks level, disease events probability could also be jacked up if players reach a ginormous amount of population.

but this is EXACTLY what i meant. this is a more natural form of "population culling".. the population grows and then storytellers starts causing havoc to cull the population.

now compare that to the current approach of : oh you reached a population cap, now i'm gonna lower the probability of recruits and raider incaps. <--- this is why late game gets too boring.

it's cause the population reaches a superficial plateau.

now remove that superficial population cap, and you now get a new metagame : how much people can i collect before the storytellers decide to kick my teeth in?

You make good points, the reason the cap exists has nothing to do with gameplay and more with performance in my opinion. If you play on Randy random then the population cap isn't as obvious, but still exists, and you quickly go into performance problems.

The game is certainly different when you are managing over 8 colonists compared to 3 . But this is also the way the game is structured, it doesn't really tolerate much "Down time" for you to experience your colonists personalities. I also think this game is played differently by different people. Maybe the way Tyrian wants it played is different than the way I want to play, and my suggestions, or yours, are simply irrelevant. The fact mods exist is the reason I am still here, playing "Rimworld" but it wouldn't be the case if not for the mods, I would have just played it for 10-30 or so hours and stopped. Just the way I don't play other popular indie games any more because the core game eventually gets quite boring and the developer has only designed for a certain play style.

The big advantage Rimworld has is that the mods can change large aspects of the gameplay due to the C# and Unity design. Other games lack this advantage, but the core Rimworld game being so moddable, and open in nature, has largely made it the success it is today in my opinion.

[thestalkinghead]

this is the reason i always go for randy random, i would like the story teller, but i just find the population cap annoying, at the beginning it is best to just get whoever you can to join, but if you randomly recruit a bunch of losers the story teller just decides you have enough people, what are you supposed to do, kill the worst guys and hope for more later?

[Limdood]

what are you supposed to do, kill the worst guys and hope for more later?

yes.  or don't accept them to begin with

I'm far more critical of the colonists i accept in the beginning than later on.  In the beginning, i need colonists with good skills to either free up my main 3 to do tasks they do better, or take over some tasks they might be better at.  being able to free up my medicine, cooking, growing, researcher to not have to do growing anymore because i recruited a growing 9 interested guy? yay!  Later game, i sometimes just need more hauling/cleaning/generic crafting hands, so i'll capture any raiders with favorable overall traits, as long as they can labor.

[keylocke]

this is the reason i always go for randy random, i would like the story teller, but i just find the population cap annoying, at the beginning it is best to just get whoever you can to join, but if you randomly recruit a bunch of losers the story teller just decides you have enough people, what are you supposed to do, kill the worst guys and hope for more later?

yea, a limited population cap means the metagame is all about min-maxing of the available population slots, coz that's all the pawns you'll ever get unless someone kicks the bucket or gets kidnapped or sold to slavery.

so instead of a population cap, i would prefer the metagame of "population culling", coz it's like tempting fate with your hubris.. coz even if you collect the most badass army you can via min-maxing, if you keep tempting the RNGods by collecting more pawns. they'll still bash your head in and you'd love every second of it. hehe

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edit : currently, if you're good at choosing and min-maxing your pawns, training their fighting skills via hunting, racking up on legendary gear and bionics. that population cap starts to feel like a safety net.

am i alone into thinking, i don't want that safety net?

[thestalkinghead]

don't get me wrong i like a bit of min-maxing, but i also like the idea of having some asshole that can only make art living in my colony, it adds character.

also with a bigger population you can specialise more, and have to up your living quarters and food production, and that is it's own kind of min-maxing/efficiency problem i like a bit more than just callously looking at potential recruits as just skills to use, i like the recruit all the people and work out how to deal with them approach.

[Limdood]

The population "goal" is about game balancing...the game is built to throw encounters at you based on a 4-15 size colony.  Under 4 and some things just get too hard (while others are cake).  Go over 15 and most things are no longer a problem.  I've got an A13 vanilla game going on with 21 colonists...its absolute cake.  On RRextreme there feels little to nothing that can threaten me anymore.

I'm sure Randy COULD  just decide to say screw you and drop an 8 inferno cannon centipede drop pod on my head, but even that i stand a good chance of surviving. 

What you seem to be falsely assuming is that after a certain population, the raids scale to an impossible difficulty.  In fact its the exact opposite.  Once you have a certain threshold of pawns, the raids cease to be a problem as the workforce can create a devastating infrastructure and nearly instantly repair any damage between even rapid-fire raids.  If i could smoothly scale any colony i build up to 25 people or more without issue, the game would be easy and never a survival threat.  That scraping for each pawn after you hit the (soft) cap is what keeps you from just "winning" outright...the rate of population gain is slow enough that being unlucky in a raid could cost you a colonist, which could take half a year to get back.

[keylocke]

The population "goal" is about game balancing...the game is built to throw encounters at you based on a 4-15 size colony.  Under 4 and some things just get too hard (while others are cake).  Go over 15 and most things are no longer a problem.  I've got an A13 vanilla game going on with 21 colonists...its absolute cake.  On RRextreme there feels little to nothing that can threaten me anymore.

I'm sure Randy COULD  just decide to say screw you and drop an 8 inferno cannon centipede drop pod on my head, but even that i stand a good chance of surviving. 

What you seem to be falsely assuming is that after a certain population, the raids scale to an impossible difficulty.  In fact its the exact opposite.  Once you have a certain threshold of pawns, the raids cease to be a problem as the workforce can create a devastating infrastructure and nearly instantly repair any damage between even rapid-fire raids.  If i could smoothly scale any colony i build up to 25 people or more without issue, the game would be easy and never a survival threat.  That scraping for each pawn after you hit the (soft) cap is what keeps you from just "winning" outright...the rate of population gain is slow enough that being unlucky in a raid could cost you a colonist, which could take half a year to get back.

yea, threats seem to be designed for around 16 people. that in itself seems to be part of the problem. (hence why i called it a safety net) population culling should be about scaling the threat better no matter how good at min-maxing you are with your characters, so even if you got the most badass army, RNGods should still kick your ass.

actually the more "cannon fodder" pawns you have with a large population, the less raids become a problem. it's just too easy to slice a useless person's leg off and wait until raiders decide they wanna kidnap and retreat. <-- that is another problem. (edit : actually this also applies to low population if you just wanna get rid of someone to make a vacant spot for new recruits.)

also the only storyteller where i actually get that high a population is randy.. and you know how randy goes, he's too random and not very good at escalating threats. which is why he's not very challenging.. he's more like an accidental homicidal maniac than than a terrifying grim reaper.

[keylocke]

oops. i forgot to write about my main point.

population culling = storytellers kicking threat level on overdrive trying to murderize you until your population is below the threshold. (three raids all at the same time? yes please!)

vs

population cap = making it such a pain to let you recruit more pawns until population is below the threshold. (randy is more lenient with this) but it's kinda meh..

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it's a very subtle difference, but i think population culling has more "fun" factor involved coz there's certainly gonna be more "drama".

[Limdood]

oops. i forgot to write about my main point.

population culling = storytellers kicking threat level on overdrive trying to murderize you until your population is below the threshold. (three raids all at the same time? yes please!)

vs

population cap = making it such a pain to let you recruit more pawns until population is below the threshold. (randy is more lenient with this) but it's kinda meh..

----

it's a very subtle difference, but i think population culling has more "fun" factor involved coz there's certainly gonna be more "drama".

The issue there is that there's no subtlety to the threats.  Raids tend to be either win or lose.  A raid big enough to threaten a very large colony will do one of two things:  die a miserable death in the killbox, giving a huge spike in colony population in your idea, or, much less likely, but one of the only other possible outcomes, they will burn right through or around the killbox and wipe out your colony to the last man.

not much population culling there.

by the way the game is structured, with killboxes, trap mazes, and deep bases being the standard high population defenses, raids are almost functionally unable to wipe out a large colony.  200 tribals can still die to melee attacking a couple turrets.  Pirates will still be mowed to a pulp by snipers and minigunners while they aim at turrets.  If the game finally does just say "screw you" and throws an unwinnable raid at the player, is that supposed to be fun?  You want the game to have a hidden "you lose" switch? 

That's what would happen.  Due to the fundamental design of the game, any attempt at population culling would either have the OPPOSITE effect, beefing up the colony with more and more people, or it would act as such an overwhelming threat that it would be a "you lose" switch...but without even the common courtesy of letting you know you've reached the threshold where you automatically lose.  As it is now, the game tries to keep you AWAY from any situation where that would happen, by making it very difficult (but not impossible) to reach the threshold where every threat is either negligible or the apocalypse.

I find the game as it is much more fun, with smaller, more tactical combat, management, and decisions than i would if the game ran the inevitable risk of ballooning into either easymode or insta-lose