Cassandra doesn't understand what makes a good story

[gnilbert]

First off, I've really been enjoying the game, and I think that your choice to focus on gameplay over VR-enabled 3d graphics was a very smart call.

Unfortunately, I think the random event system needs some work - especially the Cassandra storyteller. In theory, she's supposed to slowly ratchet up the danger level and make your game more fun. She succeeds at the former, but generally fails at the latter.

A "good" storyteller/author manages tension/danger in waves of increasing amplitude, but never intentionally creates an unwinnable situation that robs the players of agency. That last part is what makes the game's fun factor really hit or miss. It seems like the storyteller only measures time between "bad events" of various magnitudes, and has no concept of compounding or emergent threats.

Compounding danger is when some normally minor issue (a solar flare) happens during a long-running event that magnifies its effect (a cold snap or heat wave). A solar flare a few days into a long heat wave on a desert map in the summer is considerably more dangerous than it would be otherwise. This is also true of battery discharges, equipment malfunctions, or even just a "Mad Animal" that happens to be a Boomalope.

Emergent danger occurs in the wake of bad events and often quickly spiral out of control. Getting injured during a raid is pretty typical. But if all your cleaners are bedridden, you're going to see infection. And then if one colonist and his brother both suddenly get the plague, and then one brother dies (he also had heatstroke and muscle parasites), and the other brother goes berserk and kills your only remaining doctor (his fiance), causing her pet yorkie to go berserk and start killing patients in a different hospital room, it seems like the danger level is pretty insane.

So when the storyteller chooses that moment to drop a (very large) raid on you, it seems pretty clear that she isn't really paying attention. There's already a substantial challenge for you to resolve, but the storyteller ignores all this and instead creates an unwinnable situation (yes, this happened last night).

A more succinct example is this: You have 7 colonists. There's a raid, and you now have 2 colonists, both incapable of violence. Not even 2 days later, the storyteller sends a larger raid. Game over.

So, the takeaways from this are:

The storyteller should weigh the "threat" of an event in light of other factors already in play.

The storyteller should introduce escalating threats that are relative to your current ability to deal with them (and not just based on time, wealth, etc).

That would keep the game challenging without creating situations where your choices don't matter.

[eronaile]

I think this is partly why there is Phoebe. She will not usually send big threats while you have to fight others, simply because there is a much longer average time between 'negative' events.
Clearly none of the story tellers give a fig about the situation you are in. That's part of Rimworld. It's meant to be unfair at times.
However I can totally feel your pain because stories like the described happened to me too a few times. Especially the part about berserker patients with unresolved issues pets at their heels
Still I think this is a part of what makes this game fun. You are not meant to fight even odds every time, sometimes you just pathetically lose to freak coincidences. If you do not like this, play Phoebe and NEVER the RNG guy. Ever.

[Listen1]

Yeah, best thing I can say, from my experiences, is that Cassandra is broken.Randy events scale in the same fashion, but their consistency is different. For me, it is by far the best storyteller. Cassandra just want to murder you, as fast as possible, and Phobe will feel pity and give you chickens.

I recently told a tale of how I almost lost my colony to a series of events in cassandra. (here https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=22264.msg241194#msg241194)

As for your ideas:
The storyteller should weigh the "threat" of an event in light of other factors already in play.
"Colonist sick -5 in the scale" - "No turrents -15 in the scale" Something like this should already be at the game, and if it is not, it's not hard to program this with some small factors.
The storyteller should introduce escalating threats that are relative to your current ability to deal with them (and not just based on time, wealth, etc).

Now that is something really hard to do, how do you compute ability so that no-one will cheat it? You can't do that very well. It will at the very least be harder than it should for some, lower for others.

Rimworld, for me, takes a similar difficulty management like dark souls. The difficulty of the game is Always above the line. Do you wanna make a kill box? It becomes easier. Do you wanna put alot of turrents and some pawns with legendary personal shields? Real Easier. Do you have strong charge rifles/survival rifles and everyone is trained to be a decent shooter? Congratz, the game has become very easy.

Can you play without those things? Sure, but being a tribal makes the game harder, being alone with a bunch of pets makes it harder, Starting on a "flat" map makes it harder.

Overall, I agree with you and Cassandra should be reworked. But the raid/events scailing is fine

[Britnoth]

A "good" storyteller/author manages tension/danger in waves of increasing amplitude, but never intentionally creates an unwinnable situation that robs the players of agency.

Please point to the unwinnable situation in a vanilla, unmodded game. Even on extreme I have yet to see one. The only thing that is close is the tribal start scenario on the ice sheet, where starting on a map with a polar bear or two, or some muffalo drastically changes the odds of you surviving long enough to get the tech researched to grow food.

It sounds like you want a storyteller that 'goes easy' on you if you play badly, make mistakes, and are not prepared for the challenges she will send you. This sounds like how Phoebe should work, not the default, consistently dangerous storyteller Cassandra is intended to be.

[Boston]

There is no "unwinnable" situation. 

Sure, there are situations where surviving, much less coming out in a good spot, will be very difficult, but you can technically "win" every situation the game throws at you.

[Gennadios]

We'd need to establish what an "unwinnable situation" actually is.

For many players, an event that wipes all original colonists, or a situation where cannibalism is the only means of survival would qualify as unwinnable. Even if you can technically take in other settlers or keep going after the breakdown spiral.

One of the legitimate negative reviews on steam was that there was no real way to be proactive. In the long abandoned Spacebase DF-9, at the very least the player could perform regular maintenance on equipment to avoid explosions and breakdowns and the like.

In Rimworld, you can kind of mitigate risk but have no real way to proactively manage it. Breakdowns are random, and on an ice sheet colony a bad zzt event or breakdown can cripple the food production of a colony. Placing switch rooms and splitting up the power grid is an advanced skill and requires resources. Why not just have a maintenance timer with a set, predictable resource drain so that the Storyteller can just focus on world building?

Also, the Raids seem to be balanced now - in a pawn for pawn fight - at least, but there are the mental breakdowns and the fact that a lone survivor can't heal himself to contend with. Surviving a raid doesn't necessarily mean that your pawns will still be alive in a few days. Once again, experienced players know how to build defensible colonies to properly manage those risks, 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.

In closing, what worked for Dwarf Fortress was that the entire world map was being calculated and run during the game. All raids in the game came from somewhere and the player could sort of predict what the main threats in the game would be and plan accordingly. Rimworld doesn't have the computational luxury of full world generation, so the Storytellers are there to fudge the numbers and make it look as if there's a full world outside of the starting map.

They're not good yet, and more of a blunt force threat generator than anything resembling artificially intelligent storytellers. This is not a criticism, I fully expect them to get better at some point after all the features are locked in and it becomes time to refine the existing stuff versus adding something new.

In the meantime, hand waiving arguments and claiming that this is how the storytellers are supposed to behave isn't really helping the game in the long run. Hell, if Tynan was to post on this topic that this is as good as the Storytellers will ever be, I'll give up on the game right now.

[Listen1]

Nah, but Cassandra is overpowered with some sequences of events, in short spaces of time. And they always repeate the same kinda of sequence. It's not about quality, it's about density

Right after the stopping point my colony, it became kinda of boring, no raids in a while, only cargo pods, traders and some manhunter packs. Then suddendly (at the change of season) 40 Tribals, multiple hives spawining in my moutain base and a mechanoid drop pod with 2 infernal cannons inside my cafeteria. In 2 weeks again.

Didn't lost the colony, only a few limbs and resources. But now i'm at the state that nothing happens. The last event was a squirel that joined... Randy offers a more constant curve than cassandra, and that is weird.

EDIT

Wow, that was something. Didn't know DF worked that way. And I agree with you, you can only be pro-active on raid events, crashed ship parts or in the colony building. You can't take time to prepare for events like infestations and etc.

What if, instead of the bugs just spawing in the mountain, the would start hitting the wall and cracks would appear where they would spawn. You would have time to take that uninstalled battery and turrent, put them near it, and better prepare your colonists.

[Boston]

We'd need to establish what an "unwinnable situation" actually is.

For many players, an event that wipes all original colonists, or a situation where cannibalism is the only means of survival would qualify as unwinnable. Even if you can technically take in other settlers or keep going after the breakdown spiral.

One of the legitimate negative reviews on steam was that there was no real way to be proactive. In the long abandoned Spacebase DF-9, at the very least the player could perform regular maintenance on equipment to avoid explosions and breakdowns and the like.

In Rimworld, you can kind of mitigate risk but have no real way to proactively manage it. Breakdowns are random, and on an ice sheet colony a bad zzt event or breakdown can cripple the food production of a colony. Placing switch rooms and splitting up the power grid is an advanced skill and requires resources. Why not just have a maintenance timer with a set, predictable resource drain so that the Storyteller can just focus on world building?

Also, the Raids seem to be balanced now - in a pawn for pawn fight - at least, but there are the mental breakdowns and the fact that a lone survivor can't heal himself to contend with. Surviving a raid doesn't necessarily mean that your pawns will still be alive in a few days. Once again, experienced players know how to build defensible colonies to properly manage those risks, 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.

In closing, what worked for Dwarf Fortress was that the entire world map was being calculated and run during the game. All raids in the game came from somewhere and the player could sort of predict what the main threats in the game would be and plan accordingly. Rimworld doesn't have the computational luxury of full world generation, so the Storytellers are there to fudge the numbers and make it look as if there's a full world outside of the starting map.

They're not good yet, and more of a blunt force threat generator than anything resembling artificially intelligent storytellers. This is not a criticism, I fully expect them to get better at some point after all the features are locked in and it becomes time to refine the existing stuff versus adding something new.

In the meantime, hand waiving arguments and claiming that this is how the storytellers are supposed to behave isn't really helping the game in the long run. Hell, if Tynan was to post on this topic that this is as good as the Storytellers will ever be, I'll give up on the game right now.

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.

Not everything needs to be balanced around Ice Sheets.  Just throwing that out there.

The nonpowered production benches were put in specifically to avoid breakdowns. Don't want breakdowns? Don't use the powdered benches

Maintenance? You mean replacing worn out parts? Kinda like ..... I dunno, replacing components? Like what already happens in-game? Sure, it would be nice if we could do that before the machine breaks down, but the difference is minimal, as you would have to shut down the machine to service it anyways.

You can totally be proactive with regards to threats. Stockpile resources (food, spare parts, medicine) to prepare for threats like breakdowns, food shortages, diseases. Lay traps in the travelling paths of enemies, call in allies to help.

I just don't understand where the idea of "unwinnable situation" is coming from.

[Gennadios]

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.

Not everything needs to be balanced around Ice Sheets.  Just throwing that out there.

People have their own preferences. Those without prepare carefully may have needed to reroll a few times to get people they want, customized names and so forth, then cherry picked the pawns to save and/or recruit to flesh out the colony. It's possible to pick up with some randomly generated vagrant after all those colonists died. Not everyone wants to. Hell, not everyone knows it's even possible.

I'm sure you don't agree with the way *those* people see it, but they paid for the game as well. Some late arrivals probably paid more than you did.

The nonpowered production benches were put in specifically to avoid breakdowns. Don't want breakdowns? Don't use the powdered benches

Maintenance? You mean replacing worn out parts? Kinda like ..... I dunno, replacing components? Like what already happens in-game? Sure, it would be nice if we could do that before the machine breaks down, but the difference is minimal, as you would have to shut down the machine to service it anyways.

Maintenance will prevent breakdowns in the dead of night, or right after a raid when the player is busy corralling their grieving idiots to try to heal whoever possible so that they don't starve or bleed to death.

Also, I wasn't talking about crafting benches, I'm talking power generation and heaters. Wood based resources aren't really feasible in... certain wood scarce biomes that don't need to be balanced or accounted for at all.

You can totally be proactive with regards to threats. Stockpile resources (food, spare parts, medicine) to prepare for threats like breakdowns, food shortages, diseases. Lay traps in the travelling paths of enemies, call in allies to help.

I just don't understand where the idea of "unwinnable situation" is coming from.

Traders are unpredictable and the map doesn't always have needed resources. Being proactive in Rimworld is difficult because of 3 points of uncertainty: You won't know when a trader will have what you need, you won't know when a trader will buy what you have to sell, traders carry finite gold so even selling surplus resources to every trader doesn't guarantee that the player will have enough dosh to buy the needed items when the right trader does come along.

[gnilbert]

There is no "unwinnable" situation. 

Sure, there are situations where surviving, much less coming out in a good spot, will be very difficult, but you can technically "win" every situation the game throws at you.

In my original post, "unwinnable" was specifically referring to a set of events that, during the course of the game, created a situation in which no action you could take or plan around would inevitably cause the population of your colony to reach 0 (for some amount of time).

The simplest example, as others have mentioned, is when you're down to one colonist - a skill 20 doctor - he gets an infection, but he can't treat himself, and so he dies.


I'm perfectly content if all my original colonists die off, as long as someone who joined or was brainwashed is still alive. But when the population reaches 0, I consider that "losing," because the colony is dead. Having a random wanderer join you after the extinction event, and somehow magically having a full base and the research from the previous group is the equivalent of starting over on an easier difficulty setting... which you normally do because you lost.

Also, this was not about the initial map conditions. This was specifically about the interactions of the effects of previous events that compound over time.

[Dougalishere]

but some stories are just bound to end in the death of a colony, if ur game just went on and on and on evry single game it would be lame... some of the wierdest and most wonderful stories come from the breakdown spiral .. id go as far as to say nearly all of the best stories I have read and experienced have been about the demise of a colony..  whats wrong with just playing the game out? I can pretty much survive or win anything now days after playing for so long , but sometimes when you get some crazy chain of events that just crushed ur colony ... well personally I love that , you dont have to win rimworld to have a good story, I would say the story is the game to me not the winning or losing.

[Shurp]

Unwinnable situation: a mortar siege 20 days in.  You have short bows and pistols, they have sniper rifles and PDWs.

Sometimes the dice just come up bad.  When they do, load the autosave.  Or accept that this story has ended and start a new one.  It's not a big deal either way.

But you're right that Cassandra does tend to write *boring* stories -- long periods of nothing, then intense terror.  I think I may switch to Randy for a more even curve.

[gnilbert]

but some stories are just bound to end in the death of a colony, if ur game just went on and on and on evry single game it would be lame... some of the wierdest and most wonderful stories come from the breakdown spiral .. id go as far as to say nearly all of the best stories I have read and experienced have been about the demise of a colony..  whats wrong with just playing the game out? I can pretty much survive or win anything now days after playing for so long , but sometimes when you get some crazy chain of events that just crushed ur colony ... well personally I love that , you dont have to win rimworld to have a good story, I would say the story is the game to me not the winning or losing.

I'm perfectly happy with losing - but only if I think there's a way I could have won. In the situation I described in my original post, the illness and mental breakdowns were going to kill destroy my colony, and that would have been fine... because I could have killed both brothers as soon as they got the plague - or I could have amputated their legs, etc.

But when you're down to only two colonists who aren't capable of violence, and seven raiders come in with SMGs and incendiary grenades, it just seems a little silly.

A "storyteller" should be about telling a good story. If the story is about how your colony died, then that should be stated up front, like in Project Zomboid.

[winddbourne]

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.

You just defined the lose condition . . . even in the three castaways scenario you have a goal to help them survive and perhaps leave the planet. If they all die you lost. The game should NEVER give you another colonist; when the last original pawn dies your game should end.

If I'm playing the lone explorer scenario I may be doing just fine . . . but if my lone explorer dies that also counts as a LOSS to me and I'll quit the game. I don't care if he recruited twenty other people and they are doing fine . . . his story just ended and that was the scenario.

If I'm playing a lost tribe I need to keep that tribe alive and help it grow . . . perhaps all of the originals can die but SOMEONE needs to survive that was actually inducted into the tribe by someone else who was able to maintain that continuous line of one culture trying to rebuild, expand, and grow strong enough to defeat the blood machines from the sky.

What counts as a loss depends on the scenario and a BIG problem with the story tellers currently is that we can't let them know what the end goal is supposed to be. For me fleeing the planet in a hand built rocket ship is usually a LOSS . . . my explorer failed to conquer the planet, my lost tribe failed to be strong enough to survive there, etc . . . It's the worst part of the game right now.  We need to be able to add victory conditions to the scenario editor so it knows when we we've won or lost.

If you just repeatedly kill of everyone and restart with a new recruit or two that inherits everyone else' hard work then what was the point? How is that a story? Let alone fun? If I played like that and didn't care about my pawns things would get really easy and dull fast. There just would be no point to playing.

[Dougalishere]

but some stories are just bound to end in the death of a colony, if ur game just went on and on and on evry single game it would be lame... some of the wierdest and most wonderful stories come from the breakdown spiral .. id go as far as to say nearly all of the best stories I have read and experienced have been about the demise of a colony..  whats wrong with just playing the game out? I can pretty much survive or win anything now days after playing for so long , but sometimes when you get some crazy chain of events that just crushed ur colony ... well personally I love that , you dont have to win rimworld to have a good story, I would say the story is the game to me not the winning or losing.

I'm perfectly happy with losing - but only if I think there's a way I could have won. In the situation I described in my original post, the illness and mental breakdowns were going to kill destroy my colony, and that would have been fine... because I could have killed both brothers as soon as they got the plague - or I could have amputated their legs, etc.

But when you're down to only two colonists who aren't capable of violence, and seven raiders come in with SMGs and incendiary grenades, it just seems a little silly.

A "storyteller" should be about telling a good story. If the story is about how your colony died, then that should be stated up front, like in Project Zomboid.

but its not allways about ur colony dying, sometimes its about it surviving sometimes its about it just scraping by , others its about it just spiraling out of control with nothing you can really do about it its why I like it because its very unpredicatable like that.