Alpha4f difficulty

[Tynan]

The shape of the graph is a little strange. I'm curious about all these people voting "too hard". My hypothesis is that many of these are:

1. Hitting some specific unusual game circumstance that kills very hard. Animal waves, perhaps?
2. Playing extremely long games and eventually getting steamrolled by the late game storyteller. This is what's supposed to happen.

Can any more of these "too hard" voters shed some light?

[Col_Jessep]

2. Playing extremely long games and eventually getting steamrolled by the late game storyteller. This is what's supposed to happen.

I didn't vote yet because  I didn't have enough time to play the new versions. I assume that a lot of players don't expect to be crushed and are frustrated by the experience. Not everybody here is a hardcore Dwarf Fortress fan and its definition of "fun".

I can only speak for myself but I find my enjoyment in building complex structures, managing tight resource budgets, training my colonists and make them happy. A lot of the incidents can be frustrating, especially if they repeat itself.

If I get hit with a mysterious blight on days 3 and 13 that's really more frustrating than a challenge. It's easy enough to harvest some wild plants or hunt animals for food. It's not challenging, it's a nuisance. After I have stockpiled enough food I stop caring about blights altogether.

Raiders are similar. There is a very fine line between nuisance, challenging and devastating. It all depends on what you expect to be pitted against I guess. The problem with RimWorld right now is that it is almost impossible for the player to influence the pace of enemy progression. In most comparable games you have some degree of influence, maybe by digging down into the next level, accepting new prisoners... I haven't found a reliable way to do that in RimWorld yet.

[DeMatt]

The shape of the graph is a little strange. I'm curious about all these people voting "too hard". My hypothesis is that many of these are:

1. Hitting some specific unusual game circumstance that kills very hard. Animal waves, perhaps?
2. Playing extremely long games and eventually getting steamrolled by the late game storyteller. This is what's supposed to happen.

Can any more of these "too hard" voters shed some light?

I initially voted "hard but beatable", but that was before you posted this:

Okay. Also, keep in mind that you are intended to die eventually. I'd typically aim for player death somewhere between day 60-150. In future alphas this will make more sense since there will be an endgame and an actual way to win

Given that benchmark, I'd probably change my opinion to "wasn't really threatened".  I generally don't start seeing unrecoverable (as opposed to suboptimal-result) challenge until around the 70-80 day mark, depending on initial map and faction setup.  Like right now, I'm playing an utter creampuff of a map - lots of soil (=no hungry animals going after crops), no hostile tribes (and only one pirate), and I scored three colonists off of the first three spawns.

Some thoughts:

• Mechanoids should be willing to finish their targets, instead of simply disabling like all the other hostiles do.
• Inferno cannons cycle too fast, given the panic they cause when they hit.
• Hunted animals should have a (small) chance of turning on their hunters, and a (slightly bigger) chance of fleeing.
• Pirate/tribe raids should be much more interesting once they start being interested in stealing things.  Hint, hint.

[Ford_Prefect]

My base got killed off fairly early when "enemy drops right on top of you" when I only had 4 colonists, spread out and there were 6 pirates were able to kill 2 citizens right away.... leaving me with only 2 left inside with pistols.

I'm really not liking the enemy direct drop as it encourages the player to have everything built deep into a mountain. 

All but one of my games had its final downfall because of this mechanic.  (The other time was because a muffolo heard weakened my base right before the pirates attacked.) 

[Ford_Prefect]

I'm able to last around 100 days, but being killed off by airdrops in the middle of my base .... isn't fun.  If we had anti-air capabilities, then it would be an interesting mechanic.  But having no recourse other than to dig deep into the mountain isn't that fun.

[mrofa]

Think that ability to detect them before they land would be nice, like a radar that would pick up orbital objects incomming in colony way or some spy network ^^

[Untrustedlife]

Psychotic waves are a slap in the face. What are you to do against a wave of 25 boom rats? 20 muffalos? Wildlife attacks are frequent and either a waste of time (slow mode while a colonist punches an agitated squirrel to death) or incredibly frustrating way to just kill your colony unfairly (25 boom rats? screw that, load autosave...).

Get rid of them, they're nothing but completely frustrating - this is a colony builder not a less-fair version of Dark Souls

Same for pirates dropping on your colony - no. Just no. Save that for the harder story tellers, not Chill Calle. Indeed the "Chill" story teller is far from it - seems happy to dick you over in stupid ways early on just as much, if not more so, than Cassandra (could be a few bad experiences on my part)

Players are supposed to die between day 70-150 , ever played dwarf fortress? This game is about the story,not simply building a colony,  a story has to end eventually , and currently there is no end game, so tynan programmed the AI to smash us in between that time. So we have a cool story to tell our friends, it will make more sense once there are more various kinds of raids, but as it stands that is how it is, and its extremely fun no matter.

Just because you die in the end DOES NOT mean that its dark souls.

[nuschler22]

For me, it's the horde of animals.  Particularly preceded or followed by a group of raiders.

I think many are getting caught up on the fact that we are dying.  For me, it's not that I am dying, it's how I'm dying.  Either weakened or finished off by a horde of insane animals isn't what I enjoy or want to play. 

I don't mind dying due to slack defenses or poor management.  I won't continue to play this if it becomes a game where the AI is going to kill me off whatever the cost.  Especially when it's a group of insane animals that explode.   Seems like a very cheap direction to take this game and I hope it's not in the final product.  Sounds like the siege aspect is hopefully where we are headed instead, which is a reasonable way to lose.  If that's the case, I'm sure there will be another/updated mod that lets turrets fire on the animals to make them moot.

Having said that, I have played this game more than any other game in recent memory.  I really enjoy it. 

[sparda666]

• Let melee hit everything in a square. The stacked squirrels would have probably gone down then.

Im just imagining some guy punching 5 squirrels to death with a single swing of his gigantic arm.

[Untrustedlife]

• Let melee hit everything in a square. The stacked squirrels would have probably gone down then.

Taht guy, is a bad-ass

Im just imagining some guy punching 5 squirrels to death with a single swing of his gigantic arm.

[vagineer1]

Psychotic waves are a slap in the face. What are you to do against a wave of 25 boom rats? 20 muffalos? Wildlife attacks are frequent and either a waste of time (slow mode while a colonist punches an agitated squirrel to death) or incredibly frustrating way to just kill your colony unfairly (25 boom rats? screw that, load autosave...).

Get rid of them, they're nothing but completely frustrating - this is a colony builder not a less-fair version of Dark Souls

Same for pirates dropping on your colony - no. Just no. Save that for the harder story tellers, not Chill Calle. Indeed the "Chill" story teller is far from it - seems happy to dick you over in stupid ways early on just as much, if not more so, than Cassandra (could be a few bad experiences on my part)

Players are supposed to die between day 70-150 , ever played dwarf fortress? This game is about the story,not simply building a colony,  a story has to end eventually , and currently there is no end game, so tynan programmed the AI to smash us in between that time. So we have a cool story to tell our friends, it will make more sense once there are more various kinds of raids, but as it stands that is how it is, and its extremely fun no matter.

Just because you die in the end DOES NOT mean that its dark souls.

I have to disagree with you. Having a game that utterly destroys you after a set amount of time (Like you said: Between day 70 and 150) is not fun. What kind of game would do that? I would stop playing after that happens. (Keep in mind that this is just me, others may think so aswell)

[Tynan]

It doesn't utterly destroy you automatically, it just ramps up and I expect most players to die in that range. This is the same model that was used in arcade games going back to the 80's - no defined ending, but rather a series of increasing challenges until inevitable death.

[DaNewb]

This version seems better but still allows me to survive without problems.  The additions i really like are how enemies that enter or drop near geothermal generators now destroy them instead of ignoring them like before.  I also like how raiders will fully attack and destroy stone walls and break through although this can be easily dealt with by building another wall behind it and still funneling them into your kill box.

The waves of animals actually presented some fun times, i did have large waves of muffalo attack but because they move so slowly especially over rock debris i was able to kill them easily, but the squirrels were a little more in numbers and faster.  My biggest problem with them is that once they get in melee, my colonist tend to get eaten alive by my other colonists using miniguns, charge rifles, and m16's.

Overall i think the difficulty is still to easy considering once you play the game through a few times, and understand the mechanics it simply turns into a game of waiting for the next raid, then clean-up to wait again.  The drop in raids were a great idea but for me they are no different then the normal raids because i use roofs to prevent them from actually dropping in my base anyway.

[Untrustedlife]

Psychotic waves are a slap in the face. What are you to do against a wave of 25 boom rats? 20 muffalos? Wildlife attacks are frequent and either a waste of time (slow mode while a colonist punches an agitated squirrel to death) or incredibly frustrating way to just kill your colony unfairly (25 boom rats? screw that, load autosave...).

Get rid of them, they're nothing but completely frustrating - this is a colony builder not a less-fair version of Dark Souls

Same for pirates dropping on your colony - no. Just no. Save that for the harder story tellers, not Chill Calle. Indeed the "Chill" story teller is far from it - seems happy to dick you over in stupid ways early on just as much, if not more so, than Cassandra (could be a few bad experiences on my part)

Players are supposed to die between day 70-150 , ever played dwarf fortress? This game is about the story,not simply building a colony,  a story has to end eventually , and currently there is no end game, so tynan programmed the AI to smash us in between that time. So we have a cool story to tell our friends, it will make more sense once there are more various kinds of raids, but as it stands that is how it is, and its extremely fun no matter.

Just because you die in the end DOES NOT mean that its dark souls.

I have to disagree with you. Having a game that utterly destroys you after a set amount of time (Like you said: Between day 70 and 150) is not fun. What kind of game would do that? I would stop playing after that happens. (Keep in mind that this is just me, others may think so aswell)

Dwarf fortress always kills you eventually.

[Col_Jessep]

I just got to day 108 and Cassandra dropped 3 Centipedes in my base, right in the middle of my farms. Some chaos ensued but I managed to pull through with only 2 incapacitated colonists:



The difficulty felt too easy until now and this was a giant leap to about right. The only complaint I have so far is that the raiders really don't prepare you for a couple of mechanoids dropping into your base. A slightly more gradual difficulty curve would be appreciated. =3

PS: I got the mandatory mad boomrat just one day later. As expected. =D