Cassandra doesn't understand what makes a good story

[Britnoth]

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.

Lets go through this line by line.

1 - Single rich explorer is the non standard scenario. Admittedly, it is possible to suffer some freak event early on before you have many people, that takes out your only doctor resulting in deaths. Personally I would discount these, as while such a start is possible when accepting the first 3 random colonists you get, rerolling them until you get people that are at least willing to bandage the injured is not entirely unjustified if you wish to avoid such cases.

2. Before he could finish building a small room, he both contracted a deadly disease, AND fell over from it? Totally ridiculous. Instead of placing blueprints that would take several days to finish, build 1 small room, 1 bed first. There is also a reasonable time between knowing someone is sick, and being KOed from it reaching extreme.

3. He died because you did not just finish a small room with a bed and keep him there. Getting a disease so early with no one else to treat you is almost certainly a death anyway, but:

Code Select Expand

<li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_Disease">
        <minDaysPassed>5</minDaysPassed>
</li>

means you were not playing on the default storyteller. It explicitly states that Randy does not follow the rules.

4. It is not impossible for a freak series of events to kill a colony when you have only 1 or 2 people, I have seen it. But this is a non standard start. 3 colonist crash landing + Cassandra will give you 4 people before you face any event of that nature. At that point, you may lose people but will still pull through. She will then continue to send you wanderers or easy recruits to help you recover.

5. I have had colonists struck by lightning several times. And once by a psychic ship part.

Please show me a sequence of events hitting a well established colony, that results in everyone dying where there is _literally_ nothing that could have been done differently. I doubt you will find it.

[Naeem]

I love Phoebe Chillax. The story line is relaxed and all cool... Then all of a sudden BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! Insane raid!!! I get like 8-9 Raiders with power armor coming to eat my villagers alive. I just love the struggle. Play Phoebe Chillax on Extreme its amazing. I love it!!!

[Supert]

Please show me a sequence of events hitting a well established colony, that results in everyone dying where there is _literally_ nothing that could have been done differently. I doubt you will find it.

I'd like to see well established colony which can survive literally any sequence of events in this game. Can you share a save file?

[Dodging Rain]

Heat stroke while playing tribals.  You have no air system because you haven't hit electricity yet.

And them my friend literally got 3 consecutive malaria events that infected literally everyone at the early-mid part of the game.  No matter what he does each reload, they were dead.

The storyteller?  Cassandra.  She should be renamed Glados.  And then there will be cake.

[ash1803]

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.

Thanks for the welcome, it's a lot more thoughtful here compared with the Steam/Rimworld forums I have to say.

The doctor was one of the better shooters but she wasn't on the frontline.  A raider had a survival rifle and killed her from longer range.  She was actually standing in a dark bunker when hit!  I usually claim a small outdoor room, add a door and then deconstruct gaps in the wall to leave 0 light spaces next to outdoors spaces.  That's classic RNG at work, painful but no problems, that's why we play the game right.  This happened before any personal shields or more advanced equipment appeared or could be built.

Yes, thats what I try to do normally with toxic fallout, but food was desperately needed (again this was not too far into the game ) and so hunting/crop gathering was essential.  Building an indoor crop would have been possible but even with rice it wouldn't have yielded enough in time.

Good point about the not having subtle warnings for every event.  I do think for those I mentioned it would really enhance the gameplay though.

Overall though I think there are two ways to get better at Rimworld,  trial and error or finding out how other people have done it (wiki, let's plays etc).  Trial and error is fine but most people don't have the time to repeatedly play say 10 hours building up a colony, have it destroyed by an event you haven't seen before and just say 'oh well, put that down to a learning experience'.  Even college students don't have time for that  

Rimworld is great, but in these type of games, I often get tired of having to simply learn the right 'tricks' and then, once correctly applied, you can render previously devastating events almost pointless.  Crashed mechanoid ships for example are almost impossible to attack head on with your colonists so the trick is to just set up a ring of turrets and then shoot the ship from long range to make the mechs leave the ship.  If Tynan made the ring of turrets less effective, BUT also gave more time to prepare (or added other weak points of the ships that could be exploited in certain circumstance) it would improve that event greatly.   I've seen a few players who actually just remove this event in the scenario editor because they think it is no fun. 

[Technical Ben]

An example. The threats the game throws at you seem to be unbalanced... well, as a story not as a challenge.

So, the game looks at your value/tech level and sends in an army of size corresponding. This is somewhat a problem. As if you scale it up, it will just throw 100 boomrats at you. Yeah, it's not "fun" to face that. It is an instant death if you don't always play to max turrets/burrow in.

It is equivalent to the "doomsday" event. A game that decides on day 15 to blow up the galaxy, is not really a story or challenge, is it?

So yes, facing 10 or 15 boomrats is a challenge, something to worry about, something to be fun. Facing a flood, just destroys everything. It is not interesting, it is just a fixed requirement.

[Shurp]

autosave

[Supert]

autosave

Removes threat of fun completely, 0 boomalopas out of 53.5.
I think I was managed to build ship with like 3 colonies out of 50 or 60 in rimworld 0.9.4 and 0.11 (extreme cassandra, no saves, first "win" was on permafrost landsite). I think this is a good winrate for this type of game. I started to play again with 14a and I had like 0 wins out of ~50 attempts. So at this point I was on "rimworld is unbearably hard" side of this thread. But I found out that 14a has almost every event except raids disabled. So I will try few dozens of times more before to have up-to-date opinion about rimworld difficulty. But 0.9.4 and 0.11 were pretty well balanced, imo.

[Gennadios]

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.

Just to be clear, the "unavoidable doom" comment was in reference to the previous poster. Just to give you a tl;dr version of the post, it was something along the lines of "the endgame is a lie and the game is trying to kill you before you get to it."

It doesn't matter how long you survive because you eventually run out of stuff to do. You can technically live forever in Project Zomboid, but eventually you get bored and die in a shotgun rampage through the city. You can technically live forever in Rimworld when you get to the point where your killboxes are so beardy, and your stockpiles are so massive that the RNG doesn't stand a chance, but the game doesn't want you to get to that point and it still tries it's best to kill you before hand.

[Britnoth]

Heat stroke while playing tribals.  You have no air system because you haven't hit electricity yet.

And them my friend literally got 3 consecutive malaria events that infected literally everyone at the early-mid part of the game.  No matter what he does each reload, they were dead.

The storyteller?  Cassandra.  She should be renamed Glados.  And then there will be cake.

My extreme desert tribal start with just the 5 random tribals I rolled got a heat wave day 6. No one Died.

Complex clothing is just 1000 research. Rather than electricity and coolers totalling 5400 research.

You can now craft cowboy hats. Normal quality cloth cowboy hat raises your tribals comfortable temperate to 40C.

This is enough to reduce the heatstroke to get through the heatwave without deaths. People will not be happy or at their best to fight off raiders, but it is certainly enough to not end the colony on its own.

As for disease... a14 made them stupidly dangerous. Before all but malaria was limited to 1 in 6 of the colony. Now all including malaria are up to half your people. if you get spammed with them over and over while having no doctor AND having no good medicine like the tribal start... that can be a RIP. Tribals with 5 people and good backgrounds SHOULD have someone with the 8 growing needed to plant healroot however, so maybe not.

I would assume a tribal start with good doctor and grower would get through such a situation though.

Gennadios: It depends on what storyteller you play on, and what challenges you play under.

[winddbourne]

The storyteller?  Cassandra.  She should be renamed Glados.  And then there will be cake.

Prior to alpha fifteen this game was a crash landing simulator where you "won" by fleeing the planet in home built ships. It does a pretty good job of following the story line of the classic book "Swiss Family Robinson" all the way from beginning to end with a space vibe added in and WAS fairly well balanced.

Cassandra exists to slowly up the pressure over time, never letting you relax. It's "job" is to force you to escape the planet as soon as possible. The more wealth and happiness you have the bigger the threats it throws at you. This was GREAT for a game that simulated being ship wrecked, half starved, and always on the verge of death. She is even named after the mythological prophet who always predicted doom and was never believed . . . but was always right.

Even Pheobe does the same thing. She just gives you time between nasty events to recover. So the eventual explosions are larger, but you can stay on the planet longer and do more base building. Only randy isn't tied to how wealthy and comfortable you are. But he really doesn't care if your prosper or not. He could send a huge raid on day one.

Now that we have other scenarios I'm hoping alpha 16 will really focus on win and lose conditions and improving the way the stories are told. Right now TECHNICALLY you can never lose. If everyone dies wait a few minutes and a new story will start when some random guy comes and claims your old base. But I'd rather tell THAT story with a lone explorer scenario, random ruins, and ancient evils scattered on the map from the very start. Stuff I didn't set up for him to make his story "easier".

The way I currently play is that I pretend it is hard core. If my original crash landed guys die it's game over. I quit. If my lone explorer dies. I quit. Game over. I lost. If my tribe dies out ditto . . . For win conditions I try to survive longer and make my own challenge. Sometimes it is toeing the line and living as long as I can.

Other times, since that is BORING . . . I try to build gardens and make as huge, wealthy, and comfortable a base as I can and see how long I can survive while also prospering and NOT turning everything into a fortress.

Other times it is sim fortress with death boxes, and turrets everywhere inside in case a swarm appears. It's early access. Make your own fun until Tynan fixes the story tellers.

[Reviire]

I can get behind what the OP is saying. Unfair situations are fun and are a test of skill, but unwinnable situations don't fit in games. There should always be a chance to win, no matter how slim. But sometimes the game just doesn't want to give you a chance.

[Listen1]

@ash1803. I must agree with your last comment, If my suggestion to create an Event log gets done, you will be able to make a much better tutorial, teaching the player how to build his first room, his first type of defense, how to get rid of psychic ships (one way), defend from manhunter packs, etc.

The botton line of this topic, as we see both newcomers and old-school players. Is the game unwinnable? No, but it can be freaking hard. Is the storytellers balanced? No, someway they got unbalanced on the last updates, prior to A12 it was a much better experience. Does the tutorial need work? Hell yeah, tutorials mean alot to newplayers.

I believe that the next alphas and betas will focus on balance again. I believe between A8 and A14, we had 3 Alphas focusing only on game balance. The next one will come in time.

[cultist]

I can get behind what the OP is saying. Unfair situations are fun and are a test of skill, but unwinnable situations don't fit in games. There should always be a chance to win, no matter how slim. But sometimes the game just doesn't want to give you a chance.

I'm finding it very hard to define what exactly the reasonable middle ground between unfair and unwinnable is... this argument essentially boils down to "the game feels too hard". That may be right, but it's impossible to fix without something more to go on. Everyone in this thread seems to have different ideas about what exactly the problem is.

[Yoso]

I have to disagree with the emergent and compounding story telling, I think that they're served better by randomness than scripting. When there's a raid in the middle of a pandemic that has half your fighters bedridden while Chuck and Debra are having a marital dispute it's because the storyteller isn't paying attention but if the raiders were paying attention and planning their raids for when it was the most or least convenient you would start seeing the wires. For me personally nothing takes me out of a movie, book, or game than when the only clear explanation for why things are happening or characters are making certain decisions is that it's what would move the story along. It's nice when a solar flare hits during a cold snap because it's a random situation, when a solar flare hits during a cold snap for the eighth time because that's how it's weighted it doesn't feel organic.