How about upkeep costs instead of raid scaling ?

[b0rsuk]

I post this in General rather than Suggestions, because I hope to provoke some brainstorming, and my ideas are far from finalized.

There is an ongoing balance problem in Rimworld. The only thing that seriously threatens player colonies is raids and other combat events - infestations, manhunter packs. Other events are like spices - they make things more interesting, but they won't destroy a colony outright. An early plague might if you play a tribe or are otherwise very poor, but if you use every opportunity to prepare and use a little bit of creativity (like putting diseased people in ancient cryosleep caskets) you can pass this item check.

Difficulty levels only have meaningful effect on combat events, because they're easy to scale just by adding more bodies. Which is a balance problem in itself, because it's a major source of gear, meat and leather. An infestation can feed several bear police officers in an ice sheet colony for at least half a year. It's even not too bad for humans with a good cook.

First very different game Rimworld reminds me of is Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and its player race design. Somehow it ended up fostering a culture of "race X can't do Y or wear Z". I think this school of design is really dull. Missing a helmet or glove slot rarely makes player play different, and in the end I think providing different playstyles is what counts. What about Rimworld ? Its events are often of the "You can't do X" variety. I bring this up, because scaling an event that, say, disables electricity or farming outside is not interesting. Making it last longer just makes less things happen for a longer time. Imagine a heat wave leading to a temporary migration of a pack of elephants, and those elephants dining in your fields. THAT would be interesting. If events more often had consequences beyond disallowing you do something.

So, prolonging "you can't do X" events or piling more of them on player at the same time is boring, and other ways of scaling are difficult. Scaling combat events is easy, but all colonies destroyed in combat is repetitive.

Another game  Rimworld reminds me of is Heroes of Might and Magic. In the classic first 3, there is no army upkeep cost and there's fixed army growth rate for each town. Stats of might heroes are simple multipliers which are easy to apply on ever growing armies.  Magic stats, which some heroes focus on, become less and less useful as the game develops. Spell damage (Spell Power stat) essentially scales with hero level ups, which is logarithmic in nature. Each level is harder and harder to reach. Knowledge, letting you cast  more spells, also gets less useful because battles don't get longer beyond certain point. What is the use of extra spell points if you can't use them all in the decisive battle ? "So use spells that don't rely on Spell Power so much." - but Might heroes are as good at them !

There are basically 2 alternatives for solving the HOMM1-3 scaling problem:
a) make everything else scale with Spell Power, even spells that don't deal damage. And make spell power scale just as fast as conventional armies, for example by making it on rely on "wizards" stack.
b) introduce army upkeep costs, or army attrition like in Heroes IV. It was (too?) easy to defeat fairly big armies without any losses.

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It's hard to say for sure because Tynan is tight-lipped about difficulty and storytellers, but Rimworld is seemingly using the "A" approach of trying to scale everything, including piling more and more events on player. Toxic fallout won't happen in first year, but then it might. Raids obviously get bigger, and wealth is a factor. The downside: finding a way to scale all events with difficulty is very difficult itself.

What if instead of scaling all other threats UP, it merely scaled raid growth DOWN and increased various upkeep costs ? More food to feed your colonists, clothes wear out faster, walls erode, especially in storms and harsh weather, machinery breaks down. This would help with ever-increasing colony wealth, which is currently out of control. Soon, there are no things to buy, especially in a year-round growing zone. This way, you wouldn't have to increase raid size, not so quickly, anyway. A new colonist would be a new mouth to feed. Animals and plants would need more care. More emphasis on resource management and survival, less on killboxes and trapped corridors. More diseases that drag on and develop mostly when you run out of medicine. Earthquakes, meteor storms.

Either way Rimworld colonies accumulate wealth much faster than they spend them. Scaling raids up with wealth, punishing players for being successful is playing whack-a-mole.

[Seeker89]

I do like the idea from other game.... Oxygen Not Included. Where the demands of people goes up as time goes by. Like when the person comes into the world they will be happy to eat mud cakes, but later on it takes the best Art and food you can make to keep them happy.

Other thought:
What about some form of tribute? A way of getting around the raids of groups.... They demand for gold or silver, even furs and in return they don't attack for X amount of time.

[b0rsuk]

...and tribute always goes up over time, forcing player to increase producion, expand, adventure on world map. Yes, that would work.

[Aerial]

The best approach would be adding small amounts of many stressors over time so that there's no one mechanic to game for best results.

Upkeep is a fundamental money sink.  Currently it exists in the form of structural damage from combat, clothing wearing out over time, and zzt! and breakdown events.  However, it doesn't scale much with increasing colony size/wealth. 

I am more in favor of adding storm/earthquake/meteor damage than I am of adding consistent degradation rates on all structures for the simple reason that the constant repair loads becomes an irritating chore but sudden, somewhat-catastrophic events, feel more like challenges and are more "fun".  The timing and severity of these damage events could scale up as time passes.  They would also provide opportunities to damage/destroy the colony stockpiles of various things, which currently are only ever threatened by fire or incoming mortar shells.

Scaling up colonist expectations over time would also be a good mechanic.  This exists currently in the "new colony hope" and "low expectations" mood bonuses that disappear over time, as well as the decreasing returns for joy activities.  (As a side note, a tech tree/development tree related to adding joy opportunities would be a welcome addition to help developed colonies offset this.)  But these lack a significant means to continue applying pressure to an established colony.

I would like to see this mechanic expanded to include colonists expectations for their food and living conditions.  They should be grateful to be alive for the first year or so and happy to eat nutrient paste and sleep on the floor as long as they're safe, but as the colony wealth goes up, they should start to expect good food and nice accommodations for the same mood level.  I'd love to see food variety added in there somehow, too, as something that makes a positive impact on either pawn mood or health.

Resource scarcity would also help apply pressure to the colony.  Right now, you can get leather from any and every creature.  2 or 3 rats produce enough leather for a t-shirt. (I don't think you can actually tan rat skin into leather, but even if you could, you'd need fifty of them, at least...) You can harvest leather from turkeys and chickens, which is nonsense. 

Food scarcity would also help.  I find that I can sustain a colony easily (food-wise) on a 10-day growing period.  Anything more than that and I'm swimming in extra food production.  It's ridiculously simply to feed everyone and it shouldn't be.  Crops should produce a lot less to make it harder to produce a surplus and make it more of a decision as to whether you can afford to take on  more colonists.  Places with longer growing periods should be balanced out with more threats to the crops  - herds of animals that wander in and eat them, locusts/pests, storm/flooding damage (floods could be added as an event without adding a water system per se), blight (ought to affect only one crop at a time), and diminishing crop returns when you keep replanting the same thing over and over (nutrient exhaustion in the soil).

That got long :-)  Some thoughts, anyway...

[Razzoriel]

Weapon blowout event - The Masterwork Assault Rifle of John Doe, the sniper of your colony, blew out while he was firing in a hunt. The weapon is now destroyed, and you gain Assault Rifle Scraps, which can be used to re-assemble into a new weapon (money-sink; forces players to re-roll quality weapons)

Devourer Nanites event - A swarm of devourer nanites is crawling into your colony. They feed on X (insert material/plant there), and will slowly degrade buildings, items and clothing made out of X (you can't fight them; money sink; forces players to re-roll items).

Acid rain event - All buildings/items take damage slowly. Pawns exposed to rain take chemical damage (kind of like burn).

[Bozobub]

Any biome that has acid raining out of the sky — in any concentration strong enough to significantly degrade structures in a short period of time — would also be almost completely barren, at least of anything resembling Earth life (with a few exceptions).  You'd be fantastically unlikely to be able to eat anything that survives; it would almost certainly be far too alien, or if nothing else, far too scant.

Even slightly acidic rain (such as the "acid rain" we see on Earth) is horribad for vegetation.  In fact, the "toxic rain" event is a decent illustration of relatively acidic rain's affects ^^'

Your idea isn't bad but why require the bending of chemistry and physics?  The nanites, for example, are a decent idea =).

[Nameless]

Kinda hoping in the future there will be some event like volcano eruption instead of volcanic winter where an overhead mountain will continuously burn everything around and lava flows to nearby flat ground and burn everything as well.

You will need to proactively stops the lava flow somehow and rehabilitate the land that it destroys. And of course this also causes volcanic winter.

[Seeker89]

there is turkey leather....
http://genuineturkeyleather.com/GTL/Home.html (I had to google it)

[b0rsuk]

I am more in favor of adding storm/earthquake/meteor damage than I am of adding consistent degradation rates on all structures for the simple reason that the constant repair loads becomes an irritating chore but sudden, somewhat-catastrophic events, feel more like challenges and are more "fun".  The timing and severity of these damage events could scale up as time passes.  They would also provide opportunities to damage/destroy the colony stockpiles of various things, which currently are only ever threatened by fire or incoming mortar shells.

I agree with you. Constant wall deterioration, without extra automation controls, would result in builders constantly running around and spit-polishing those walls. Very inefficient and not fun. It's better to do damage in bursts.

Sandstorms in desert. Two birds with one stone: sorely lacking biome would feel harder and more unique. Also, normal rainstorms and dry thunderstorms. Second, events which are at present very dull would gain significance. All weather boiling down to movement speed and shooting accuracy ? Really ? Is that the best they could come up with ?

NO to wall deterioration in simple rain. It might be realistic, but rainforest would become awful to play. It just rains too often and too long. Besides, rain already deteriorates items left outside at increased rate.

[Quazimojojojo]

The key thing to remember here with all of these suggestions is that the player has to have SOME way of countering or preventing the effects of whatever it is that happens. Basically everything in the game as it is can be planned for and mitigated/prevented outright. This is very important, because if you can't stop something, then you take away player agency which kills fun even faster.

"Here's an event that forces you to go repair things for a while and there's nothing you can do to stop it". How is that fun? And yeah, I'm aware that's already in the game, and it's not fun. All it does is encourage optimization of device usage, because they all are liable to break and cost resources, but it also discourages redundancy to prepare for other events. The mod that gives everything a maintenance stat is much better because, if the player is diligent about keeping their turrets well oiled, there's little risk of them heading down right as a raid is walking up. Not a huge change, but it gives the player agency.

Runaway colony wealth is a problem for the late game, but let's be real: if you can reliably get colonies that far, this is a problem of you being too good at the game and getting bored. A perfectly run colony absolutely should be able to get fabulously wealthy and become largely immune to raids/starvation. That's kinda the goal of the game. Adding a time/resource tax in the form of nanites eating everything is both frustrating and boring. Adding a migrating herd of muffalo that like to munch on just about everything but trees(at mentioned above), and might stampede if you try to hunt them is much more interesting. You'll have to wall off your fields, or get them to stampede into a minefield or something, or risk losing your whole crop to a lot of hungry muffalo. Adding a wandering pyromaniac with a delayed rain timer (so nature will wait longer to put it out for you) is interesting. Especially if the pyromaniac is not marked as hostile, but is basically just someone on an extended mental break. Small chunks of scrap that might damage, but not break, walls falling of of ship chunks or mineral-rich meteors with a wider spread (and thus chance to hit the colony) are more interesting.

[SpaceDorf]

The Events scaling up in Number and severity is a good Idea.

But some natural events bound to biomes that can neither be prevented or countered in all severity can be a huge boon to the game.

Playing on an Icesheet where the cold is your biggest enemy is a thing.
Sandstorms that damage your outer walls and anything not protected by walls .. sand creeping into electronics and causing them to deteriorate faster.
The same could happen as snow storms or insect swarms and moisture in the jungle.

The temperate regions could have a higher chance of animal herd events. Big Grazers eating the map bare.

The use of all animals for leather is not unrealistic but giving the different leathers and textiles highly different financial and beauty values in addition to different deterioration rates and even comfort values.

Camelhairs heat protection is unparalleled but it scratches and looks like crap.
Synththread is comfortable, protective and still looks like crap.
The leather of rare predators is beautiful and comfortable but fades quickly.

[Lightzy]

Regarding upkeep costs, I dunno, that seems annoying to me. It makes sense though. You already have something like that (components for failing electric machine repair) and it feels a bit more of an annoyance than anything else.
And I can't think of any way to make it plausible. It's weird if your colonists suddenly start demanding more and more.

Anyway,

There's lots of stuff wrong about raids.. Well, not wrong, just in the way they affect the way the game is played.

Big mid/endgame raids end up either killing you or making you a lot of money because you got tons of good stuff to sell, and they completely invalidate crafting because you can get great high level equipment from raids consistently.
I don't think I EVER crafted weapons if not just for the fun of it. Never because it was useful or necessary  -  in fact it's highly wasteful before you level your crafter up to 15+ in crafting.

I think the best way to add endgame challenge is simply to make the end harder.
Make a ship, fine. But you need lots of stuff to research (you need to find components to research by performing all kinds of missions and excavations in dangerous contested places, etc, for example one part you need is the totem of some tribe or I dunno what), a heckton of very expensive/hard to find parts (because ffs, if a colony of 5 could really build and launch a fucking spaceship by building it from spare metal and some compress springs and bolts then.. fuck me, I dunno), etc.

Just find ways to make the end game supremely hard.

Also lets say that when you start building a ship it goes CIV on you, meaning that other factions get wind and try to steal your ship and components. I dunno, many many ideas.



Also different, difficult endgames. Lets say the tribe start (village destroyed by the machines) has an endgame where they have to find the main hivemind and destroy it (having to destroy many different automata hives until they pinpoint the main baddie)

hrm

[Jibbles]

I agree with you lightzy. 

I cringe when we talk about adding more food types and clothing materials (if that should go more in depth in stats.)  We have different foods for specific reasons, why bother adding to it? I would also prefer other challenges than trying to keep my pawns happy.

I would rather have more item types, events, smarter raids, or raids that have stronger gear/weapons, more caravan events to increase difficulty, or just more stuff to do.  I raid pirate bases sometimes...Just to set myself up in difficult situations. 

Runaway colony wealth is a problem for the late game, but let's be real: if you can reliably get colonies that far, this is a problem of you being too good at the game and getting bored.

My struggles as a new player was finding my way throughout the UI and stuff like zones.  such as; "why can't  my pawn pick up this item." "How do I perform an operation and what all affects operations." Assigning clothes. Small tidbits that you forget about as a new player cause you're not all that familiar with the game yet.  Once I figured my way around that, it didn't take long at all to survive on extreme (A17 intense) difficulty in various storytellers.  When I look back and think that was the biggest challenge, than I can't say that the problem is me being too good at the game.

[BoogieMan]

I don't like the idea of people suddenly needing more food, or things breaking down more often. That would not be an enjoyable way to increase difficulty.

Colonist expectations scaling with colony age and development sounds better. Wanting better rooms, food, and clothing. Quality of life improvements.

But that would still just be an adjustment, and while making the play evolve more with time, still doesn't address the issues with late game. The most effective way to add purpose to the late game would be to add more in depth goals and challenges that the player needs to deal with. Such as..

1: A more powerful and dangerous raider faction that mostly ignores low progress factions until they reach certain tech and development levels would be a good start in my opinion.

2: Enemy factions, especially those that don't accomplish much with their raids against the player, decide to blockade the colony - stopping caravans coming or going until dealt with.

3: Allowing Factions to take towns. Don't help your friendly neighbors enough maybe the pirates will conquer and enslave them. The more towns they control the more dangerous their attacks. This would also allow supply lines to be formed, if you can't easily take a town, take the next town that connects it to the rest of their territory and try to starve them out. Something they can also do to you and each other.

4: Deeper diplomacy. Towns/Factions may merge to deal with threats making their own factions or join the player. Not becoming player controlled, just part of their supply chain.

5: This would allow the player numerous ways to contribute to the overall effort. Say you've joined forces with a few other nearby factions to defend against pirates, or the more dangerous faction I mentioned in #1. You can help with direct military intervention with soldiers, by providing lots of food, medicine, armor, weather dependent clothing, weapons, and technology. Maybe even power. Making power stations to add to a network and you have to run power lines.. Make new roads. Build strongholds for allies to garrison.


I think that sort of thing would add a lot of spice and depth to the game that would be really fun.

[Seeker89]

I think it also boils down to how we see our pawns. I think that survivors would look for a way off the planet vs Colonist that are here to stay. I think it also to do with how long your planning on playing a single run.

It would be cool is at some point, maybe at 3-5 year. A pop up makes us choose that, unlocking different events, tech, and different pawn expectations depending on our choice.

In RL, you have some forms of expectations to feel like your moving up in the world... like buying nicer clothes, cars, etc. Pawns should get that too, after a while they should want better things, but there should also be the flip side to that. Like they should be happy with basic food and eating off the ground.
To expand on this. If you woke up tomorrow on an island in the middle of no where, wanting to leave. If you never made a boat, that could depress you...