The problem with Cassandra and Phoebe vs Randy

[Ambaire]

I read this on a different forum. It was a post from August 2016. Is it still accurate? It's the primary reason that I've always played Randy Rough and nothing else.

Please don't play Cassandra people.

Here's how the storytellers work.

There are 10ish "bins" full of events to pull from. Each bin has harder and harder events/different stuff going on in them. So like bin 1 might have stuff like "Single Raider attack!", while bin 7 will be like poison ships/toxic fallout and whatnot.

Outside of those toy bins, you also have the Raid button, which is tied to the tiered bins.

Cassandra and Phoebe work the exact same way. Every month they will send you a raid, no matter what position you are in, because they don't actually look at your colony, they are hardcoded to send you a raid. After every raid they jump up a bin tier, which also increases the size of the next raid. In between raids, they will pull out an event from their bins, and use it against you. The only difference between Cassandra and Phoebe is the timing of the events, Cassandra pulls out two events a month outside of raids, Phoebe only pulls out one, which means you get more time in between Phoebe's events.

This isn't a great system, and it's outright designed for you to eventually lose. Due to how this plays out, it means you will eventually hit a point where Cassandra and Phoebe are sending massive 20+ people raids at you constantly, and in between are dropping Poison Ships/Mech invasions left and right, because it's the only tools they have at their disposal. If you can survive all that, you get to the last two bins, which are literally just "50+ person raids.". This is what people talk about when they say the game requires killboxes.

Randy doesn't do any of that, and is the best storyteller because of it. Randy is not hardcoded to send raids, which means he'll only send a raid if he feels like it'd be fun. He actually is coded to check your base and see what'd be the most interesting way to mess with it is, which gives you a lot of more personal events to deal with. He can pull from any bin at any time, which means even in the endgame you'll still be getting small scale raids, or manhunter packs, etc etc. What he does to keep this interesting is if he's pulling from bin 3 during the lategame, he'll allow himself to also pull from other low bins to give you multiple events at once, which makes the combined events more dangerous then they would have been.

Randy is significantly more enjoyable/Dwarf Fortressy/playable then Cassandra and Phoebe in their current state. Unless you really enjoy the idea of nonstop raids/forced killboxes as part of your DFlike I guess. He is not the "hard" option at all, he's the random events option.

Of course this could mean you start the game and get a 5-6 person raid with sniper rifles involved as your 1st/2nd raid, because he pulled from a higher level bin, but that's part of the fun!

[ashaffee]

If you feel it becomes unwinnable just lower the difficulty. I never feel like I have unwinnable scenarios on extreme besides early game. I do feel like variety and better ai can be used but I bet it is lower on the to do list since what it is now isn't broken but could easily break

[Jibbles]

Did Randy get tweaked in 1.0? Seems more active than usual in my recent games which is nice.

[bbqftw]

I think this analysis relies on a bad case of confirmation bias. He is assuming randy is the most fun for him and misrationalizes observation that can be explained by other things (e.g. Randys 0.5x-1.5x raid size modifier roll)

[Greep]

It's not accurate.  Whoever posted that obviously hasn't played randy much.  You get less raids overall with randy, but occasionally you just get a shitstorm, because there is simply no minimum time between raids.  I'm sure someone at some point has gotten like 10 raids in a week.  Additionally, the idea that other storytellers do not look at your base to determine raid size is incorrect.

[Gfurst]

It's not accurate.  Whoever posted that obviously hasn't played randy much.  You get less raids overall with randy, but occasionally you just get a shitstorm, because there is simply no minimum time between raids.  I'm sure someone at some point has gotten like 10 raids in a week.  Additionally, the idea that other storytellers do not look at your base to determine raid size is incorrect.

Yeah I agree, I've used to play a lot in randy, and from my experience he may throw nothing, but a lot of times he throws shitstorms and in sequence of threes as well.
Now I'm preferring Phoebe, because it still makes it hard based on your solitude, less raid lot, less trade, so its rougher on the survival aspect of the game, and they usually size up the challenge properly as well. Though difficulty is all over the place in the unstable build.

[PleaseBro]

By month he means quarter right? So every 15 days.

Yes I think that's what the code says but tbh I haven't looked at it since like A15.

I always liked randy cause there were times where I went half a year without raids on my cannibal tribe and then after a peaceful half, a season of toxic fallout. Only 1 guy survived.

[Kranzius]

Cassandra and Phoebe work the exact same way. Every month they will send you a raid, no matter what position you are in, because they don't actually look at your colony, they are hardcoded to send you a raid.

I´m sure thats not right. For example, when you are caravaning and you only left one Pawn at your base, you will have more tiny raids, like all pawns are in your colony. Im sure that, at least Cassandra, will check your wealth and your current colony state.

[tyriaelsoban]

"I dont believe in a 'no win scenario'" - Jim Kirk 


Playing randy in A15-17 was interesting, i had a stint on tiberium rim where i got raided daily for four or five days straight, all my crops got ruined when the weather turned and my growers were too badly injured to shoot, let alone pick potatoes ...
What saved me that last day is that lack of minimum time between raids; two factions showed up who 'effin hated eachother more than they hated me, and they just went ham on eachother.