Berserk!

Started by toothyp1cks, July 18, 2016, 03:33:57 PM

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toothyp1cks

So, after the nine millionth tantrum spiral I've finally gone berserk enough myself to make this thread. I'm going to start with the conclusion and get to the rationale, so if you don't want my whining and only want my suggestion just read what's under the following header. In a nutshell: the entire mental break system, but the berserk facet in particular, needs to be overhauled for both playability and realism. In its current form it is not fun and it doesn't make sense.

This is my actual suggestion

The new proposed system is actually quite simple. Mental health is a bucket, and it fills and fills with no really terribly bad effects until one day it overflows and your colonist eats a bullet, or just straight up wanders off ne'er to return, or enters a cycle of alcoholic self-destruction, or whichever grisly end you prefer. When your colonist crashes on the planet he begins with a certain number of stress points depending on his background. As bad things happen instead of getting stupid ephemeral maluses he accrues semi-permanent stress points in his bucket. As the bucket begins to fill you might get minor warning signs - "Colonist A has noticed X change in Colonist B's behaviour" - or the colonist might lose good traits (like Hard Worker) and gain negative traits (like Lazy [which could be renamed to Unmotivated, or whatever]). As the bucket continues to fill you get more serious effects, like soft mental breaks. In the third phase you begin to get the most serious effects - new and nasty traits like drug dependency which, when not dealt with either through fulfilling or treating only serve to accelerate stress faster, culminating in the grisly end - a suicide, a useless junkie, whatever.

How do you prevent these spirals of self-destruction? By building up the colonist's ability to cope with stress. Part of this is giving them nice things, like a Megascreen TV, but part of it is by actually removing what they're stressing about. If you have a shitton of food saved up, for example, that's one less thing to stress about. "Gee anon," you say, "that sounds awful similar to the current system. Why have you wasted my time like this?". Well, it's close. The difference is that stress points decrease very slowly, and only when the thing that specifically caused them is addressed. A megascreen TV won't make the colonist suddenly forget that they've only got one more meal in the fridge and two more weeks of winter in the pipeline, or that it's been -40 degrees for the past two weeks and all they have is a tattered parka. If your colonist is stressed about lack of food you need food, not TVs, to unstress him. Stress points also need to decrease incredibly slowly, over a timespan of months potentially. It's not enough to just suddenly have a lot of food because of a passing trader - the colonist needs confidence that the awful thing that they were stressed about happening is never going to happen.

There are three fundamental shifts in focus here. One is that mental health is a long term issue with devastating consequences. You can't just lock berserkers in a room and let them get their mad out and continue on - if you don't deal with it, your colonist will die or become useless. It becomes a crescendo - a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Two is that mental health makes sense. Three is that mental health cannot just be "fixed" by spamming gold statues and hoop sticks. Unless you've got a homestead with all the creature comforts of their former life, the colonists will never not be stressed. You need to basically replicate the life that they lost to have them fully comfortable. In this sense the situation becomes a bit more dire. You can't just limp along from exploit to exploit while you cobble together your meme fort - you need a functioning, industrialised fortress with the comforts of home for the colonists to actually feel at home.

This has the following advantages over the current system. One, it creates better stories. Every colonist's individual breakdown will be unique. Which negative traits they acquire, what those effects are, their particular grim fate, depends on the circumstances of their problems. You could even tie certain stress to certain traits - food stress leads to gluttony, for example. Instead of mental breaks being just a thing that happens to anyone and eventually probably everyone it becomes a life or death personal struggle for each individual colonist, much like it is for any of us, to maintain resolution in the face of adversity - and each colonist will crash and burn in their own fashion. Two, it's more fun. At least it sounds like it to me. No more berserk spirals where you spend forty five minutes unable to do anything because there's never more than 30 seconds when you're not locking someone up. No more colonists throwing hissy fits because they went two days without a bed. With a single stroke it removes annoyance and adds depth. Three, it seems to me relatively easy to implement. All the requisite features are there. The game already tracks how much food you have, for example. It already tracks sleep deprivation, hunger, etc. etc. All that needs to be added is the "effects" side of the system, not the input side, and the traits by and large already exist. The stress points are the only thing that require a lot of new systems (tying particular point to particular situations), but I don't think even they would be new from the ground up.

This is me whining

The whole concept of people going berserk is just straight up fucking retarded. Full stop. There, I said it. People do not just "go berserk". Going berserk is not a thing. It doesn't actually happen. The closest equivalent to berserkers in real life is actually spree killers. There is no other IRL equivalent - a berserk colonist in Rimworld will kill anyone they see for no reason other than "I'm really mad." But even spree killers are a poor equivalence; the Columbine shooters went crazy, but they didn't go retarded. They had a very careful and relatively effective plan. McVeigh was angry enough about whatever he was angry about to kill over it, but he didn't walk into the Murrah building and start wailing on the security guards with his fists. There is no real life equivalent to berserkers because berserk status is not real.

So, to start with, the entire concept is dumb.

Secondly, the mental health of colonists is way too fragile. You crash land on a planet and within two days you start trying to kill your fellow survivors because you don't have a fucking bed? Give me a break. This ignores the huge body of first hand accounts of people who were trapped in vastly worse situations than our prissy Rimworld colonists and who made it out alive and coped with it pretty alright. Even cannibalism. Unless you've got a palatial Rimworld fort cannibalism is a guaranteed trip to berserk town.

Tom Dudley, Edwin Stephens, Edmund Brooks, and Richard Parker, a 17 year old cabin boy, were stranded at sea in 1883 for 24 days. During that time they murdered and consumed Richard Parker. Not only did they not go berserk and then continue on to murder each other, they didn't even strip off all their clothes and walk around in a daze (admittedly they were on a small launch, so walking space would have been confined).

In 1972 a plane carrying the Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes, and they survived for 72 days by consuming each other - especially notable is that basically the entire plane knew each other personally, and many people ate their own family members. Number of berserk rages experienced: 0.

In 1609-1610 the Jamestown colony in America experienced an event known as the "Starving Time," which pretty much says it all. Not only did the colony not descend into murderous rage ending in total failure with everybody involved dead, the colony actually went on to 'flourish' (at least insofar as it didn't disappear for a while).

Need I go on?

People eat other people, and historically this has happened a lot. What has historically not happened a lot is a sudden outbreak of murderous rage and mental retardation leading to flailing incoherent loons wailing on each other. I think it is absolutely inarguable that berserk rage as depicted in Rimworld - a sudden snap and then unchecked murderous desire combined with total loss of all reason - does not happen in real life, and that even if it did, it's far too easy to bring on. This isn't to say that people in those awful situations got through them undamaged. They didn't. But the current system doesn't reflect that at all. That's just talking about berserk. Onto the rest of the system: soft breaks.

Soft breaks are a little bit more sensible. The idea of someone saying "fuck this, I'm going for a walk" is eminently plausible, and I think they're about the right frequency. The problem is that they have no continuing effects, and this ties into the mental health system in Rimworld entire. Mental health in Rimworld is a bar, and when the bar is full you're happy and when it's empty you're sad, and when you're sad you act out for a moment (just a moment) and then you're fine again. That's not even close to real life. In a situation like Rimworld the real threat is the grinding monotony, but also incredible stress, of subsistence living. You're not a gibbering loon one day and then cheery the next, it's a more gradual erosion of your ability to cope with stress until you top yourself or go properly mad, from which there is no (or very limited) return. Soldiers who succumb to battle fatigue, for example, do not wander off into the bushes and then return 24 hours later totally fine. Instead they get through a deployment (or most of it) pretty alright, and the wounds only show up much later. The rising crescendo of stress - which does not necessarily abate when out of danger - combined with a faltering ability to cope with it finally culminates in suicidal depression or irrationality. There's a long video by lindybeige on YouTube you can watch on the subject if you're as autistic as I am (yes, I'm aware that lindybeige is only entry-level autism).

The point is that the system is nonsensical. 'Git gud' does not address my criticisms.

Daman453

I would love to hear thoughts from other people. I just... i don't grasp what you are saying.
Quote from: StorymasterQ on February 02, 2016, 08:19:52 PM
For flu, try a cock. If that doesn't work, try boobmilk. Nice.


Shurp

There's three aspects to the current mood system.  One of these three make sense.  The other two don't.

Part 1: when a colonist gets in a sufficiently bad mood, he stops doing useful work.  This is very realistic and sensible.  He's upset that he's stranded on a planet he's going to die on, doesn't see the point of continuing, and goes off into the corner to sulk for a while.  Or goes back to bed and refuses to get up.  Depression is a real thing.

Part 2: While wandering around being useless, he strips his clothes off and freezes to death.  What The Fudgepucky?  This is just completely bizarre.

Part 3: When he gets really ticked off he starts randomly assaulting other colonists.  What?


Now, let's suppose we remove #2 and #3 above, and replace it with something far more dangerous and realistic: personality trait ABRASIVE.  Yes, that's right, unhappy people are snippy and say mean things and make everyone *else* miserable too.  Ho boy!!!  That's quite an incentive to keep your colonists happy!
If you give an annoying colonist a parka before banishing him to the ice sheet you'll only get a -3 penalty instead of -5.

And don't forget that the pirates chasing a refugee are often better recruits than the refugee is.

Wex

The "part 2" is actually a nice description of being shellshocked.
You got hit by something so big, you don't know how to cope with it.
"You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant."
    Harlan Ellison

toothyp1cks

Quote from: Daman453 on July 18, 2016, 06:12:44 PM
I would love to hear thoughts from other people. I just... i don't grasp what you are saying.

It's relatively straightforward. The current mental health system in Rimworld is an outright failure. It's gamey, boring, and often frustrating. It ought to be replaced with a better system, as detailed in the OP.

MeowRailroad

"Secondly, the mental health of colonists is way too fragile. You crash land on a planet and within two days you start trying to kill your fellow survivors because you don't have a fucking bed? Give me a break. This ignores the huge body of first hand accounts of people who were trapped in vastly worse situations than our prissy Rimworld colonists and who made it out alive and coped with it pretty alright. Even cannibalism. Unless you've got a palatial Rimworld fort cannibalism is a guaranteed trip to berserk town."

YES. This is probably the biggest issue I have with Rimworld. It really, really doesn't seem logical how people would complain about eating while sitting on the ground when the millions of other people on the ship are dead and they could have been too.
Quote from: Tynan on December 02, 2016, 05:24:06 PM
This is like being in a remote fishing town in Libera and asking, "Why can't I just pay one of the fishermen $10 to take me back to Los Angeles?"

cultist

No, hard mental breaks in the game are not very realistic. But within the frame of the game, long-term mental effects/problems would not work well. First off, it creates a negative spiral that becomes hard to break. Once your colonists become negative and depressed, they will continue down that path instead of being "reset" by a mental break. Small missteps early on will stack up and render most pawns uselss eventually.
Or the other way around, a pawn will die (as they tend to do) before the mental effects of abuse even apppear.

The life of a Rimworld pawn is short and intense, because none of us have actual years to play the game at a realistic pace. If you want mental breaks to be realistic, the entire flow of time in the game needs to be radically different - and that of course afffects everything else as well. So I doubt it.

toothyp1cks

Quote from: cultist on July 19, 2016, 01:10:16 PM
No, hard mental breaks in the game are not very realistic. But within the frame of the game, long-term mental effects/problems would not work well. First off, it creates a negative spiral that becomes hard to break. Once your colonists become negative and depressed, they will continue down that path instead of being "reset" by a mental break. Small missteps early on will stack up and render most pawns uselss eventually.
Or the other way around, a pawn will die (as they tend to do) before the mental effects of abuse even apppear.

But this is actually a feature, not a bug. The idea is that stress continuously accumulates until you get to the very late game and have a fully functional fort with stores laid in. The point of the new system is to change mental health from being something that you can practically ignore entirely until someone goes berserk to being something you have to manage all the time. Management of mental health comes simply from playing the game and advancing through it; as your fort becomes more capable your colonists have less to stress about, until eventually they can begin to relax again. If your fort never becomes capable your colonists continue to stress and stress until they fall apart.

In the current system even the best forts have pretty much unavoidable mental breaks occasionally. In the new system you'll only really start to see the significant negative consequences of poor mental health after you have failed to manage it.

If your colonists die before they manage to kill themselves then oh well, but I don't think that the entire mental health system should suffer so that the players whose colonists live fast can be forced to suffer through the mental break system like those who keep their colonists alive for months.

QuoteThe life of a Rimworld pawn is short and intense, because none of us have actual years to play the game at a realistic pace. If you want mental breaks to be realistic, the entire flow of time in the game needs to be radically different - and that of course afffects everything else as well. So I doubt it.

The expected useful lifetime of a soldier in action before they pretty much fall apart is about 200 days in the US army. I think you could truncate that down to 100 days or even 50 days to fit into a RimWorld game and still be able to do justice to the major phases of mental collapse. I'm not after a realistic timeframe, I'm after a realistic progression.

wbonxx

Maybe a really simple implementation could be a bigger mood/stress buffer (the big mental starte bar).... with on the left the usual two bars for hard and soft mental breaks, respectively 2%-8% (changed by character background)... after this a portion of the buffer that could include some penalties.. like on focusing/speed/bench work, so  from 8% to 30%.... then there could be a neutral region from 30 to 75%, then a small boost region from 75% to 90% and a big boost  above 90%.
Boost could be attributes... big boost could be hero fighting skills and/or based on the character background.

I suppose this would need some balance, but should be quite simple to implement.
I couldn't test in detail the last changes, but reducing fast fluctuations and berserk chains was already discussed.
I'm playing at extreme level and is playable, with stress being a major issue from time to time.
Would not implement major changes, rather just enlarge the buffer.
Elements to buffer the buffer are also an idea ;) like wardeners cheering up stressed colonist.

taha

Usually, in a normal game, when you get a potential crisis situation, you are given the means to solve it.

In RW, when a leg gets shot off, you can replace it with peg legs or bionic crap. Same for hands and other body parts. BUT... some bad things have no solution, (eg bad back, frail, shattered spine, etc) because it is supposed to "real", right?

In psi terms, if you have legendary royal beds, 100+ space personal rooms, with "beautiful" spouses, lavish meals and chocolate, heaters and coolers, carpets and gold floors with flowers and statues on each corner, 350+ space rec room with all the joy you can get ... guess what? Your colonist would be still become mad sometimes. That's because certain bad traits have no good equivalent. Abrasive, Volatile, Bloodlust to name only a few. And because RNG wants that way. (... Unless you mod the ThoughtsDef, of course).

Is not small matter. A colony can be destroyed because of bad mood. Mood is just as important as clothes, food, weapons or shelter. Early game we cover basic needs and basic defenses, but how many times you had those covered and you've been screwed by shit like social fight -> low medicine -> death -> death debuff -> break down -> no medicine -> death -> death debuff... etc?

I had a guy, he went from 6 shooting to 20 shooting by killing people. At that time was no statistic system, but I assume he killed over 5000 people. And he was still debuffed for observing corpses. Yep, that makes a lot of sense. I fkn killed 5000 humans, but I cant see dead people. I'm sensitive that way. Or a brawler who likes to kill "close and personal" but chunks of granite are too much for his feelings. People are more resilient than they are pictured in game. Way more. What I see down there, are a bunch of pussies totally unfit to survive in a hostile environment.

See where I'm going? Not only we need a system that uses calm/stress points from a pool, but we also need buffs / debuffs based on something more than traits and simple actions. Thoughts and socials are simple to mod but to make something meaningful, like after 1000+ kills you become psycho or after 1000 days in night-shifts become night-owl... those need a bit more than xml editing.


Better stop here. :)

brcruchairman

I'm going to go ahead and add my two cents here; I really like Shurp's idea of nixing #s 2 and 3, and replacing it with a (temporary?) abrasive trait. That is a very accurate simulation of people under stress, and has the further benefit of mimicking a nerfed version of berserk; colonists already get in fights from social interactions, so adding the abrasive trait would mean someone really unhappy would get into a lot of fights. Mechanically it presents similar challenges to the berserk state (injury of colonists) but does so in a more realistic and more interesting way; no longer do you just lock unhappy people in their room until you snap out of it, but rather have to solve the source of their issue while keeping an eye on them, making sure they don't piss off your legendary brawler.

Shurp

Quote from: brcruchairman on July 20, 2016, 05:28:39 PMmaking sure they don't piss off your legendary brawler.

Oooo, I hadn't even thought of that aspect.  I was just thinking about the potential "FUN" spiral of unhappy people becoming abrasive causing others to become unhappy until the whole colony spirals into doom :)  But you bring up a good point with fighting ability; keeping track of *which* colonists get into a bad mood could become even more important.  And who they interact with.

This could even work with the other thread idea, that of introducing intra-colony politics.  As people get angrier with each other they could split off into factions hostile to each other and you wind up having to split the base in half to keep them from killing each other.
If you give an annoying colonist a parka before banishing him to the ice sheet you'll only get a -3 penalty instead of -5.

And don't forget that the pirates chasing a refugee are often better recruits than the refugee is.

newcadence

I'm a poor writer, so I won't go into a long tangent, but I definitely agree with what you're saying, and that the current mental breaks and mood system should be revamped.

FalconBR

I just have a problem with the berserk!
My main pawn got in berseker in the middle of the dinning room, 3 people shot him at the same time and he lost an arm and a nose!
I got a bionic arm, but I cheated the nose back!
Ok guy, he is furios, instead of running and giving him some space, let´s shoot him dead!

brcruchairman

Gotta love that Rimworld logic. "My lover looks angry. SHOTGUN TO THE NOSE TIME!" My pawns usually just try to beat the poor sod unconscious, but I, too, have seen shots fired. It is sadness.