Cassandra doesn't understand what makes a good story

[Listen1]

A game session being unwinnable and fair are two different things.

The storytellers Randy and Cassandra will not be fair. Hell no. Randy may just say "Yolololo" and make a colony that was thriving for 5 years implode. Cassandra will use every tool in her kit to make you give up. And that is their design.

I agree that there are some situations that in that precise sittuation, the game is unwinnable. Now go back a Season. Plant Healroot. Mine compacted machinery. Build extra turrents. Wait for it again. Bam, you won that situation. It took me about 7 colonies to make one thrive in A14.

In RimWorld, you can always do better. When you reach a certain level in the game, you will prepare ahead for any event that may happen. The game is not fair, but it is not unwinnable.

[Britnoth]

but it shouldn't have to come down to a "git good or go home" situation when an, ahem, "AI Storyteller" should in theory be pulling punches to keep the people playing sub-optimally engaged.

You do not seem to comprehend how a game that is supposed to be challenging works.

If you play well, you succeed.

If you play badly, you fail.

If you play badly and the game fudges dice rolls for you so you still succeed, you are a 5 year old that starts to cry when the grown ups don't let you win.

Phoebe has less bad events for a reason. Lower difficulty levels exist for a reason.

People coming to these forums and continuously complaining about something being "too hard" for them so it must be dumbed down to their level at the expense of the enjoyment of the many others who actually want a challenging game, purely because they are too selfish and prideful to lower the difficulty while learning the game make me feel like having my own mental break.

Please, please stop. 

[SteelRodent]

...
Again, there is no unwinnable situation in Rimworld. If you lose all your colonists, wait a couple of minutes, someone will join the colony. If your colonists are driven to cannibalism as a result of a lack of food, then the game-as-story-generator is working as intended. Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.
...

Losing all your colonists IS a loss, plain and simple. Having another dweeb show up is not a win, that's just starting over in a prebuilt base.

When your last two survivors lay on the ground with their legs chopped off and you have a third abducted by slavers, the game won't send you another dude to join you because you technically still have a bunch of survivors. You're just effed.

If you lose because you failed to look after the colony properly, then you (hopefully) can learn from it and know what to do different when you start over to avoid ending in the same situation again. But if you lose all your people to some RNG event that you couldn't possibly cope with or prevent, that's just bad game design.

Not every colony will be successful. Most won't.

True, but unless the failure comes from your lack of skill or something you can control (but didn't), then it's just the game screwing you over because it's out to murder you. That's not fun to most people (def isn't fun for me).

Being challenged is fine, having to replace a limb or two is fine, but getting death rained upon you ad naseum  because the RNG is geared to screw you over, ruins the game. For the most part the game seems to think that because you barely survived one raid, then it needs to send an even harder raid at you minutes later just to make sure to eradicate the last of your survivors. Unless you settle right next to a massive pirate settlement or pissed off whoever somehow, that is not in any way a logical event curve.

There is way too much reliance on RNG to create events and everything else, while the game is called a "colony simulator", which means that every single event should come from simulated conditions in all the other camps - they have no reason to attack you 99% of the time because clearly they're better equipped and thus have better resources than you do. In that aspect the game fails hard. It makes sense when a feeble tribesman comes into your colony to steal medicine. It doesn't make sense when a bunch of pirates with pulse rifles and kevlar helmets go through your colony, murder everything, and then leaves without taking anything with them - that's not a raid, that's just murder.

[gnilbert]

You do not seem to comprehend how a game that is supposed to be challenging works.
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If you play badly and the game fudges dice rolls for you so you still succeed, you are a 5 year old that starts to cry when the grown ups don't let you win.

Game Design 101: When you're designing games for kids, you rely heavily on random events (dice rolls, card draws, etc.), because random events reduce the impact of skill, allowing the child (who doesn't understand that luck isn't a skill) to have a shot at beating an adult, without forcing the adult to intentionally throw the game. Think Candy Land, Monopoly, etc.

Games designed for adults that involve large amounts of randomness usually add a "meta" element to counteract it (multiple rounds, bluffing, cooperation, planning, etc.), allowing the more skilled player to (usually) triumph.

People coming to these forums and continuously complaining about something being "too hard" for them...

My original post isn't about the game being "too hard." My original post is saying (in part) that currently the game feels a bit too much like Candy Land and not enough like Poker. I don't think anyone would disagree that Poker is a "harder" game, and that you need to really practice to get good at it.

But you can practice Candy Land night and day, and you're not really going to improve.

Even so, this is still a bit of a tangent. My main gripe is that the feature is described as a "Storyteller," and the stories just aren't that interesting - even though they can be funny or surprising.

For more about what makes a good story, I'd strongly recommend reading Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight Swain. It was published in 1965, but it's still hands-down the best book I've ever read on the subject.

[Listen1]

Wait The game events happen on a random form. It is rng based.The scale of these events, depends on your wealth and your playtime. If you build sterile rooms you will reduce your chance of infections. If you make individual bedrooms people will not brake from disturbed sleep. If you build a good defense mechanism, people will thrive on raids.

There are some events, right now Breakdowns, Blight, Weather Conditions (sun/wind) and Diseases that happen randomly and cannot be controlled. Other than that, player skill will influence alot on your winning condition.

[NuclearNate]

If you can win all the games, why would you even want to play? Sounds pretty damn boring. For me, not knowing whether I can pull it off is fun. When I see impending, unavoidable doom, I like to see if I can make it more interesting. All this bellyaching...... This is what happens when people give their kids participation trophies.

As far as the storyteller goes, I'm pretty sure they are only half of the story. Your actions should also have an impact. Maybe try to think of Cassy as the teller, but you are the Ghost writer?

I dunno. In this game, winning isn't everything. If you take it too seriously, you might end up like the "Drudge."

[Gennadios]

Unavoidable doom doesn't give a compelling reason to play a game.

Good unavoidable doom games, primarily roguelikes, encourage playthroughs by actively rewarding failure. You get as far enough as you can and you get some small benefit to give your next run a stronger chance of success.

Then there are unavoidable doom games like Rimworld and Project Zomboid, which get played to death upon purchase, and then... you play for a bit with each update to check what's changed. (A14 is still keeping me engaged even though it's reasonably feature light though, but most of my biggest mechanical issues with A13 have been addressed)

Currently Rimworld neither rewards failure nor provides for compelling long term gameplay. The game is actively trying to kill your colony before the player has a chance to get to the end game and get bored with it. Project Zomboid is doing the same thing, and the Devs are upfront with the fact that the brutal difficulty is a stop-gap until features get implemented to keep it engaging in the long run.

There are some events, right now Breakdowns, Blight, Weather Conditions (sun/wind) and Diseases that happen randomly and cannot be controlled. Other than that, player skill will influence alot on your winning condition.

Right on. My impression on the game is that the outside world *should* to be trying to kill the player, but the base (and by 'base' I really mean the structures, pawn health and mind state) needs to be something the player can exercise a greater degree of control over. It's what you build to try and weather the storm.

The Storytellers have too big of a portfolio currently. Some of the stuff they're managing needs to be handed over to the player.

[Listen1]

Right on. My impression on the game is that the outside world *should* to be trying to kill the player, but the base (and by 'base' I really mean the structures, pawn health and mind state) needs to be something the player can exercise a greater degree of control over. It's what you build to try and weather the storm.

The Storytellers have too big of a portfolio currently. Some of the stuff they're managing needs to be handed over to the player.

I can build structures in a fashion of my taste. Compared to A13, Breakdowns are really rare right now. After you build Hospital beds and Vitals monitors in a sterile room, your recovery of diseases gets alot better.

As for the mind state, confortable workplaces, beutiful rooms, beer, chocolate, joywire, got some loving, painstopper, fine/lavish meals, tons of joy are ways to control your pawns mental health.

Can this system be improved and better worked? Hell yeah, that's why this game is on Alpha.

[Britnoth]

Then there are unavoidable doom games like Rimworld and Project Zomboid,

What.

Sorry, if you think that it is all due to RNG and not the decisions you made that caused you to lose a colony, then you are quite delusional.

You keep going back to the idea that somehow the game sooner or later generates an event that is not possible to survive from, no matter what you did beforehand.

This is complete bollocks.

Once you are experienced at the game and understand how to build a large colony, then that colony is safe from destruction in the vanilla game. Extreme difficulty and all. Including playing without turrets or traps.

The tools are at everyones disposal. It is up to you to stop blaming the game for your failures and to learn from them to make your next colony a success.

[gnilbert]

Sorry, if you think that it is all due to RNG and not the decisions you made that caused you to lose a colony, then you are quite delusional.

You keep going back to the idea that somehow the game sooner or later generates an event that is not possible to survive from, no matter what you did beforehand.

This is complete bollocks.
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Just to be clear, this actually happened during one of my (very short) not-extreme games. I started with the single rich explorer. It was the first day, and he immediately began building a bed and small room.

On the very first day, before he could finish, he contracted a deadly illness (Plague or Malaria, I can't remember).

He fell to the ground, was incapable of moving, and he eventually died - but not from the disease (which probably would have killed him). He was actually killed by a hare who went mad while he was lying on the ground.

How exactly was I supposed to have prevented that?

A lot of posters seem to believe that the game can't generate these situations. The reality is, with random events and a large player base, it's incredibly likely that some players never see these situations, and some players only see them. That's just how randomness works. Small sample size (the games played by one player) = very high variance from the "expected" case, for better or worse.

Just because you haven't been struck by lightning doesn't mean that no one else has.

[Listen1]

Weren't you playing Randy? Cassandra follows a pattern, and she always follow this. Diseases happen very rarely unless you are at a Jungle Biome, and even in these, you should have another colonists at that point.

This shouldn't happen, and if it did I suggest you to post on "Bugs" with the Logs and save-files. Because that may be a bug on the system.

[ash1803]

Interesting discussion. My experience playing the game leads me to agree with  the gnilbert entirely.   I play Cassandra/Challenge and trust me, I have encountered plenty of  "unwinnable" situations due entirely to a combination of events occurring at specific times.  Ever had 5 or so colonists and only one with decent medicine who gets one shot killed in a raid, followed quickly by toxic fallout for a whole season?

A major reason for this is the way the game just "drops" many events on you with no prior indicators. 

Much more 'fun' would be for it to provide subtle in-game indicators that something is likely to occur, ahead of time.  For example (as someone else suggested) instead of infestations just magically appearing in rooms (do hives fall through the roof or something!), a few rock wall pieces should slowly start to break up as if they are being mined from the other side. 

If you're observant and notice this early, you realize something is trying to get through and can either reinforce/build over the wall, build turrets and prepare or actually open the breach yourself and preemptively attack. Your choice depends on your current strength/situation. If you don't notice it, well bad luck!  The key point is that it gives you a choice in how/when you deal with it while still forcing you to deal with eventually.

Likewise with toxic fallout.  Instead of the entire map suddenly being covered, perhaps it enters the map from one edge and over the period of a day or 2 gradually expands over the whole map.  Once again, if you are observant you will see it early and have a chance to go on a hunting spree or start building indoor crops.  If you don't bad luck. 

Crop blights could start by one or two plants in the crop visually appearing brown or shriveling.  Once again, if you notice this you can take action such as clearing the problem plants manually.  (More experienced growers could notice this themselves and report it to you).  If you don't, you guessed it, bad luck.

I don't want the game to be easier!  I just want the cheap RNG feel of many of these events to be reduced by giving the player more control over how well they plan/prepare for them.  This in turn will mean that if you do lose, you really do always have just yourself to blame.     

[Listen1]

Nice first post Ash1803 but for your first situation, I must agree with Brinoth.

If you only have one medic in your colony, why would you send him on the frontlines? You don't, even if he is the best shooter in the history of best shooters, he's your only medic. Give him a personal shield and send him to wait in a corner away from the action.

Toxic Fallout already has a long time before it starts killing everything, I believe it's almost 5 days for crops. In 5 days you can hunt alot while still building a roof on your crops and installing sun lamps. Then you keep everybody inside resting from toxic exposition.

I know what you mean, some events may have the need to prepare for it before it happens. Because you never know when they will happen and in which combination. But, after you play the game for a while, won't you prepare for it before they even happen?

Some events may need to have an anticipation factor, other don't. Somethings are better to be instanteneos, to feel like you lost control. As a story generator, this is where RimWorld shines.

If everything is predictable, why would I send my boomalopes to attack a siege? Ah, yeah, because they explode and spread fire.

[cultist]

This is just my opinion, but I think Cassandra has been acting weird since A13. She used to be extremely predictable, using very specific events in a specific order up until a certain point. Pretty much every game would be a random wanderer joins event first, then a single pirate with a shiv second. But since A13, it feels like the balance is off somehow. I suspect some of the new events are related to this, as the chain of events determine how quickly you can replace lost pawns.

There is also the question of player expectation. When you play on Randy, you are essentially always anticipating the worst. Every positive event is an unexpected present, and most negative events are shrugged off as "Randy being Randy".
But with Cassandra, you are expecting something more coherent, more fair or at least more predictable. I don't think the AI itself has become less predictable but rather that the events that the AI use as building blocks have become more randomized and subject to new factors, such as relationships, new mood buffs/debuffs, new tiered mood break states etc.

The complexity of the game has grown, which makes it harder for even experienced players to predict what will happen next. Compared to earlier versions, the efficiency of a pawn at any given time can vary greatly depending on mood, which makes it harder to judge how much time a certain task will take to complete. Lately, I often find myself falling behind in a game without knowing exactly why it happened or what I could have done to prevent it. And I feel like I know the game quite well, been playing since A8.

If you take away the predictability, Cassandra suddenly becomes the hardest AI by default because Randy can scale in any direction (presumably) while Cassandra's threat level grows exponentially.

Perhaps the simplest way to deal with this without "dumbing down" the game is to create different challenges for different AIs.
With Cassandra, building a spaceship and gettting off the planet should be your priority, because she will eventually come up with something that will destroy you.
Phoebe's challenge could be a permanent or semi-permament settlement. The outside world will disturb you less, and the challenge lies more in creating an environment that your pawns can live in without mental breaks every 3 days.
And Randy... well. Randy will be Randy. I think the entire point of this AI is to have your best-laid plans ruined by something completely hilarious. It's like a reverse creative mode. Anything you can build, he will tear it down. Using squirrels and drop pods filled with gold when you're starving to death.

[RemingtonRyder]

Hey gnilbert!

I've given this matter some thought too.

One of the problems is that colonists can be so injured that their effectiveness in combat is limited to holding a club and swinging wildly if they hear footsteps.

As far as the game is concerned though, they're as combat effective as that veteran mercenary that you recruited last week. Doesn't make a lot of sense, does it?

Earlier today I had a look at addressing that problem. Basically, instead of taking a headcount of colonists, I went a little bit deeper and considered their sight, consciousness, and manipulation. Partial sight? Less points. Shattered radius? Less points.

I also exempted those colonists who are incapable of violence because of their backstory.

I haven't tested the full range of difficulty settings, obviously, but I think it's nice to have a storyteller which reacts to changes in colonist capacity, and I think it'll play well.