1.0 changing the game too much?

[Trblz42]

Many players and as many different strategies based on the vanilla game / modded game role of the dice. I personally don't like to check what a raider/mech is targeting - this is cheating IMHO. Kiting mechs however is using the game weapon ranges in a smart way, no problem here.

In one of my games, one of my star pawns (extreme good cook, industrious etc) was tired of all the misery and walked out. He was later part of a rescue quest but it would have been nice if he'd become part of the raiders too.

What I miss in the game is a dynamic fog of war-principle:
At first raid of a faction A, the FoW is 100%, meaning they can only see as far as their eyes+weapons reach. So a melee/club has only a limited view, while a sniper sees more. This will result in more dump-raids, going directly at the best opportunity (front gate, exposed farms etc).

If there are any survivors after the raid (either by escaping, releasing or walking away from the colony), the FoW reduces (by 20%) for that faction. The consequence is that in the next raid, they know the location of the killbox and some of the other defenses. Consequence could be more sapper raids than frontal attacks.
Note: this also is a catch22 as for factions (except pirates), releasing prisoners will increase goodwill but also reduces the FoW.

After the 5(?)th raid by the same faction, the FoW is reduced to 0%. This means the faction knows the buildings, kill boxes, traps and guns from the previous raids.  The raid can now be more precise (fire vs wood walls, sapper to non-defended walls, power plant attacks etc)
Note: The devs will need to keep a snapshot map of the colony for each attacking faction.

High goodwill with a faction makes them forget the colony, thus increases the FoW over time.

Buying goodwill should also become more expensive to gain higher levels.
The FoW also depends on the biome. Tropical biome will by default have more hidden areas than an ice biome.
--
This also means, an attack on a raider base should give the pawns a 100% FoW on the first try. This make the attack longer, more tedious/dangerous by default. A tactical retreat and a later return will show the map with a reduced FoW.

[zizard]

btw I don't actually enjoy using exploits such as door abuse. But on higher difficulties there are otherwise not enough ways to get an advantage against raids.

[Ruisuki]

I read two things

1. bionics give mood debuff unless pawn is prostophile

2. living under mountains is automatic mood penalty

That alone broke my love for this game. If its true (and there are worse things that punish the player for playing) then I would definitely drop this unless theres a modder to fix this aspect. I hope its changed if true.

[Ser Kitteh]

I read two things

1. bionics give mood debuff unless pawn is prostophile

2. living under mountains is automatic mood penalty

That alone broke my love for this game. If its true (and there are worse things that punish the player for playing) then I would definitely drop this unless theres a modder to fix this aspect. I hope its changed if true.

1. Bionics only give debuff to normal colonists if they have 3 or more. You're safe giving your colonists 3 bionics as the penalty for having 3 is only a very minuscule -1.

2. I don't understand your argument here. Are you speaking of cabin fever? That is easily fixable with a few hours of joy with a horseshoe ring outdoors.

[dragonalumni]

Instead of 1.0 being a smooth transition of YEARS of alpha/beta, it was in my opinion a middle-of-the-night-drug-induced I'm never going to let it go, recreation of the core mechanics, balance and "I don't want my game to be easy" phobia aka "I don't know when to stop messing with basic balance" bullshit.

newb dev shit tbh.

[Tynan]

Instead of 1.0 being a smooth transition of YEARS of alpha/beta, it was in my opinion a middle-of-the-night-drug-induced I'm never going to let it go, recreation of the core mechanics, balance and "I don't want my game to be easy" phobia aka "I don't know when to stop messing with basic balance" bullshit.

newb dev shit tbh.

Please be more specific.

Shouldn't hard mode be... hard?

[Razzoriel]

Instead of 1.0 being a smooth transition of YEARS of alpha/beta, it was in my opinion a middle-of-the-night-drug-induced I'm never going to let it go, recreation of the core mechanics, balance and "I don't want my game to be easy" phobia aka "I don't know when to stop messing with basic balance" bullshit.

newb dev shit tbh.

Please be more specific.

Shouldn't hard mode be... hard?

Yes, please. Don't cater to this audience. If they want easy mode, let them go and play their easy mode and not feel like everyone needs to lower their playstyle so normal is "easy" and hard is "normal".

[Nafensoriel]

Have you ever seen the inside workings of other companies? This level of rapid change isn't uncommon. Tynan isn't exactly a "newbie" dev either. People mistakenly assume the "simple" look of rimworld means it has "simple" code under the hood. In reality, if rimworld had 500 employees and hundreds of millions of funding it would be a terrifingly and overwhelmingly superior game to any triple-A title out there.

The changes between b18 and 1.0 are also nowhere near as massive or unexpected as people believe either. It's pretty much been the natural retrospective "way it should have been" if you've gone through every beta and seen the vision evolve over time.

There are really only a few rough patches left. I personally might complain that turrets and zzzt events need a rethink but I also can't argue them as they stand beyond nitpicking. I might, for example, want to see turrets in a tit for tat counter rather than just making them weaker. IE tribals die but space pirates can be smart enough to bring McGuffin X to quickly wreck them out of range unless you also have an active defence. To me, that provides a better story by forcing you to engage in limited risk or face a greater risk by being a lazy or less skilled gamer. Though that would be, again, a nitpick and not a "this mechanic is broken" complaint. Most of what people are complaining about is from a flat unwillingness to change their plays. Adapt or die.. rimworld isn't a game about "everyone survives and eats cake". It's a game where the cake randomly turns into cakezilla and eats everyone.

[dragonalumni]

Shouldn't hard mode be... hard?

Obviously hard is a subjective term, much like "fun". I've been playing rough for a couple of years (I think..), but rough on 1.0 is a lot "rougher" than it has been especially in 16 and also 18. The reason for the that is you have tweaked just about every mechanic. I should have a long list, I don't but some examples off the top of the head.

Infestations, mechanics have gotten tougher in every single version from 16.. when it was still fun.
New traits, like gourmand, no counter traits like light-eater, or 'stays-full' or something to balance it.
The way factions slide into KOS status if you don't actively do something for them no more 3 friendly factions.
The way research is a pain in the ass, researching batteries and solar panels if your a space cowboy, and needing to learn how to plant trees. (1000 research!?)
The way food sickness leaves you suddenly incapacitated on the floor unable to even get into a bed.
The new mood debufs, needing more entertainment, while yet somehow we are are supposed to do more research, pump more work out and ya-da-ya-da.

It "feels" like a million tiny tweaks, all of them up scaling the difficulty, all of them taking away old strategies (going back to burning of freezing raiders who come to visit, that shit is actually fun, that is what SOME players want and would actually make Rimworld a legendary game).

I don't need to play on "hard" to "be a man" or something like that, but I truly believe that 1.0 shouldn't be "an epiphany of balance changes to make the game hard (again)" (NOT FUN!?), 18 was fairly bad on this but 1.0 is ridiculous.

If you want to make Riwworld the best game of all time, make as many strategies viable to players as possible, don't care so much about "players breaking the game" as much. Let players decide what kind of cheese they want in their game instead of nanny dev-ing stuff out of the game.

[Tynan]

Shouldn't hard mode be... hard?

Infestations, mechanics have gotten tougher in every single version from 16.. when it was still fun.
New traits, like gourmand, no counter traits like light-eater, or 'stays-full' or something to balance it.
The way factions slide into KOS status if you don't actively do something for them no more 3 friendly factions.
The way research is a pain in the ass, researching batteries and solar panels if your a space cowboy, and needing to learn how to plant trees. (1000 research!?)
The way food sickness leaves you suddenly incapacitated on the floor unable to even get into a bed.
The new mood debufs, needing more entertainment, while yet somehow we are are supposed to do more research, pump more work out and ya-da-ya-da.

Your note on food poisoning indicates you're working on really obsolete information from very early, highly experimental 1.0 builds. Food poisoning hasn't had an incapacitating effect since June 25, over a month ago. A lot of stuff has changed since then.

1.0 came with a lot of intentionally over-done balance changes. This is a classic balancing technique where we push a change too far on purpose to find the boundaries where it breaks the game or creates negative effects. It's something I learned from the senior designers when I was working on BioShock Infinite. It works well, as a design method, but of course it makes the game worse in the short term, until those experiments are harvested and wrapped up.

I've seen this characterization that "Every change made the game harder" before and I find it really strange since it's so obviously not true. Tons of things have been made easier and more beneficial to the player, tons of new options and pathways to success have been opened up, more strategies are viable. Just look at some of the recent patch notes. Here's last patch:

"Speed up: -Speed up research 10%. -Speed deep drilling 10%. -Cocoa tree yield adjusted, harvest speed adjusted. -Shift plant work from sow to harvest and speed it up a bit. -Adjust some build speeds. -Made prosthetics and bionics a bit cheaper. -Remove smelting and cremation research. -Devilstrand research is cheaper. -Increase mineable yields. -Improve power armor insulation. -Animal taming/training chance improved. -Made the ship buildings cheaper. -Double snow clearing speed. Factor it by unskilled labor speed. -Increase uranium prevalence.
Traders sell everything at normal price. Trade price base adjusted. Orbital traders carry 30k silver.
Bandit camp letter now says how many enemies are at the site. Bandit camp now gives the total value of all the rewards. Sites listing rewards now also list their total value in brackets after the rewards."

Basically I encourage you to play the build and give feedback based on how it is currently. I'm really trying to kill these zombie memes based on out-of-date information because they're really damaging the feedback process. (I blame myself, of course, for exposing the public to the instability of the balancing process without properly preparing people; I won't make that mistake again.)

For everyone: If you comment, it'd be good if you indicated your storyteller, difficulty, biome, and the last time you played 3+ hours. It'll really help contextualize feedback since a lot of us aren't even talking about the same game at this point.

[Oblitus]

I've seen this characterization that "Every change made the game harder" before and I find it really strange since it's so obviously not true. Tons of things have been made easier and more beneficial to the player, tons of new options and pathways to success have been opened up, more strategies are viable

Game is just watered down now. I start the game and don't see a point to to do anything - I know that I would be punished for any action in long term. Build turrets and traps? Massive investment and upkeep, limited usefullness. Walls? They are pointless against any serious threat and are only good to exploit AI. Shooters? Ranged combat is just broken to make melee viable. Melee? Melee pawn would spend its life in a hospital, accumulating traumas and ending up as whiny leprous Jensen. Animals? They are micro-heavy expendables with massive upkeep. I look at patchnotes and see small buffs here and there, but none of them are anywhere around pathway to success.

Why? Note that "long-term," it is the keyword. Early game is more or less okay. First year or two. But what after? And After you find yourself sitting on a hoard of everything only to realize that nothing of it matters and you have no more progression available and is even more vulnerable than you was in early game and your best move is to start new game.

I'm not saying it is not possible to survive or anything like that. But when game is in stasis of eternal struggle it is as fun as y=x graph. When you know that y=x for every y, it is does not matter what x is.

And I'm not even touching whole "RNG-fest" aspect.

[TheMeInTeam]

The issue here is that you think about this argument as a player, not a developer. For Tynan it's not really about what the players do - it's about how he can balance raids and turrets among other things. Turrets need to be far more deadly and raids much weaker if killboxes are useless, but if they are the go-to tactic, then the game requires completely different numbers.

The balance changes are in many cases made on presumptions of relative strength inconsistent with reality. 

In some ways the QoL aspect has improved substantially, in other ways less so.

The game has toyed with and removed extremely punitive events/interactions without counterplay a few times.  I'm waiting to see what settles.  The mental gymnastics associated with equating a lack of skill situation to skill are always interesting, but also frustrating.  We'll see how Rimworld looks when the dust settles.

[Oblitus]

1.0 came with a lot of intentionally over-done balance changes. This is a classic balancing technique where we push a change too far on purpose to find the boundaries where it breaks the game or creates negative effects. It's something I learned from the senior designers when I was working on BioShock Infinite. It works well, as a design method, but of course it makes the game worse in the short term, until those experiments are harvested and wrapped up.

I've understood it instantly, I just couldn't believe that you'll use it on this stage honestly expecting it to work. This is a good method, but it has major issues if applied here and now.

First, it is iterative. You need a long enough cycle of approximations to find the best point. And it grows exponentially with game complexity. Bioshock Infinite as a game (sans story part) is a railed B-class shooter with static world. Rimworld is a sim full of complex, intertwining mechanics that are RNG-heavy and change with game progression.

Second, one ingame year is >16 real time hours. Sure, you can speed it up, but not much, and you have a lot of slowdowns, especially early on, when you have to micro a lot. So one average ingame year is something like 10 real time hours and endgame section is twenty-four hours away. With daily update cycle, even abusing met wake-up hard won't allow one really experience endgame and provide fresh, relevant feedback. BSI is segmented and each level can be tested independently with little variances from rudimentary leveling system and poor weapon varience.

Third, how much players are providing feedback here? Several dozens? They are not representative for a million sized player base. They are hardcore veterans who are happily killing themselves on NB and declaring any tactics that can allow you to somewhat reliably survive first year OP.

Is everything all that bad? No, it would work with several more public betas. But next public version is announced to be final release. And now it looks like a perfect recipe for disaster.

The only way to speed up development would be to equalize everything, nerfing any mechanics that stands away. It makes process much faster, but it kills game variety, making everything equally boring. And that is exactly what is happening so far. Bioshock can go for it because game is just a wrapper for an awesome pre-made story. But Rimworld is supposed to make own stories. Can boring game make fun stories?

Sure, you can always go Bethesda-"we'll let modders fix this for us"-way, and it would work thanks for good modding support, but don't you want to make vanilla interesting too?

This move only made sense should you want to go for genre change from colony sim to disaster sim that is not even supposed to have any end-game. But if this is not the case - I have no idea how you plan to pull it off.

[Jagerius]

I was pretty sure some negativity gonna come alongside releasing the unstable build. I saw negative reviews disscussing changes on the daily updated and changed UNSTABLE version of the game, and I just can't grasp how dense can people be regarding these things. Instead of providing helpfull and meaningfull feedback, all I saw was rage about some over the top features that was there to balance them out later, not to mention complete lack of grasp what is unstable build.

Not to mention people playing on harder difficulties and complaining about game beign unfair and "broken". I guess some people can't get around "must win everytime and everything" mentality.

I'm playing since A14 on various storytellers and difficulties, and I'm enjoying the changes so far, new obstacles to overcome, etc. Even my suggestion about translations was taken into consideration in one of the builds, and that suprised me in a positive way.

[GideonHidolka]

As dumbed down and casual as many games are becoming, I am absolutely ecstatic to see that Tynan wants the harder modes to be hard because that's not a given anymore. A lot of games are laughably easy on harder difficulties, and that's if they give the option at all. Its refreshing for me because I've been on undead labs backs in the discord since state of decay 2 released.

Its a survival game with permadeath as one of its defining features and the game is toddler level easy with no way to change it and I took irrefutable video proof of it FOR them. And I've been ignored and they add new toys but never touch the difficulty.


If you want an easier rim world, play an easier difficulty.