My problem with skill decay.

Started by Klomster, July 23, 2018, 03:22:37 AM

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Klomster

I think this is a good summary.

For my own pet gripe, melee, and as you mention medicine is difficult to raise when it should be as simple as set up some simple training sessions.
For melee, sparring, or dummies. Medecine, corpses from animals and if one feels inclined, humans. (With some possible mood debuffs if one feels like it "I cut up a human just to learn how it ticks." -3mood or something.)

And if one as well as making every skill trainable in some way (doesn't need to be fast) combined with a one day decay timer, i think it would add up to a very good balance actually.
Since yes, i can train melee on a dummy. But that person is as said before "not doing anything productive" and adds very little to the colony in terms of construction and logistics. But it's being improved.
It's a tradeoff.
And as long as something is a tradeoff, it's usually not too imbalanced.

Perhaps a doctor could get a miniscule doctor xp when butchering animals? Or only to a certain level?
Perhaps we could add a glass floor mirror, where pawns can practice speaking ala sims?
Or an action "Practice discussions." Which trains social with a chance to insult, but it also builds friendship?

As long as there is something one can always do to train the skill so decay doesn't destroy the skills. Even if i'm ready to put this pawn into train melee only, there is no way for me to train it.
Apart from unethical ways, and i'm not going to beat up animals, heal them with medicine and then beat them up in a cycle to level my medic and my melee.
Since that is the only real way to train melee.

Shooting has hunting. But can't i hunt with the sword? Yes, but anything too small and i just one-shot it, gaining no xp.
Too big and suddenly it goes ape-shit mode, and every hunt my pawn is all beat up, risking body-part loss further risking them becoming useless or costly to fix.

I could have two of my pawns fistfight all day long, but they'd suffer tremendous wounds and actually not learn that much from it, since melee doesn't get much xp in my experience.

Overall, this is something i'd love Ludeon to add to the game.
I'm gonna figure out what skills can be trained. Methods marked with D means Difficult or exploity things or outright dangerous ones. ? for those i'm not sure about.

Shooting.
Combat D, Hunting (chance of danger), Horseshoes.
Melee.
Combat D, Fistfights D, Torturing D.
Social.
Trading D?, Prisoner interaction.
Animals.
Taming animals D, Training animals.
Medicine.
Wound treatment, Surgeries D, Evil surgeries D, Torture exploit D.
Cooking.
Making meals, Butchering?.
Construction.
Build stuff (super easy), Deconstruct stuff (one could even construct, deconstruct, repeat)
Growing.
Grow plants (nice safe and easy).
Mining.
Mining (Duh).
Artistic.
Make sculptures.
Crafting.
Make stuff, Cut stone blocks (very easy).
Research.
Chess table, Researching.

Do tell if i missed something.
As one can see, most activities have a nice and safe activity one can do to raise the skill.
The problems lie in melee, having no way to raise skills safely or ethically, medicine requiring your colony to be beat up to be able to level, which is something you don't want, surgeries are dangerous and often expensive or pointless and if done to poor prisoners will ruin your colony mood.
Social doesn't rise that much either, while construction and growing tend to get high rather fast since they are done so much.
So yeah, the skill leveling isn't too bad. But the decay is since often you can't do the task all the time, and as soon you stop, you lose xp.
Hard earned xp.
And as often is with melee, xp you are NEVER getting back.

NTJedi

Lots of discussions, but who are developing mods for fixing the issue ?  If this is beyond the scope of mods and can only be fixed by developers are they planning to fix this issue?
Would be nice to see two or three different mods as options for players.

cultist

Some skills are very susceptible to power creep (research). Others are almost impossible to keep at high levels because you can't just (safely) use them at will (medicine, melee). Skill decay is a mechanic that punishes some sklls while balancing out others. The obvious solution is to vary skill decay depending on skill type.

NTJedi

Quote from: cultist on August 03, 2018, 12:56:38 PM
Some skills are very susceptible to power creep (research). Others are almost impossible to keep at high levels because you can't just (safely) use them at will (medicine, melee). Skill decay is a mechanic that punishes some sklls while balancing out others. The obvious solution is to vary skill decay depending on skill type.
That was the point of my previous posting... are solutions being created with mods or is a better improvement from developers only possible?  I am sure some senior members know some modders.  We need less talk and more action.

Brainsample

Quote from: NTJedi on August 03, 2018, 04:00:10 PM

... are solutions being created with mods or is a better improvement from developers only possible?  I am sure some senior members know some modders.  We need less talk and more action.

Actually, I think the all talk in this thread has been fruitful. :)
No, skill decay is currently not 'moddable', which in my opinion is a missed opportunity.
Many improvements in Rimworld started as a mod once.

AileTheAlien

#50
Quote from: NTJedi on August 03, 2018, 04:00:10 PMare solutions being created with mods or is a better improvement from developers only possible?
This is possible to mod, but the only mods are for old versions of the game. See the Practice Target mod which is older than B18, and the Misc Training mod, which works in B18 but not 1.0.

It would be relatively simple to make a broken-ish training building (which is the method I believe that the "Misc Training" mod, going by the comments; I could check...if I downgraded from 1.0, and I'm busy playing a game), by copying off of the billiards table. The way the billiards table / horseshoes / hoopstone ring buildigns work, is that pawns gain a specific skill while they gain recreation; That skill appears to just be an XML tag you can set, along with the experience amount. However, the reason that's not very good, is that you'd have a lot of stressed out pawns (or an over-powered recreation building), because they'd always be trying to raise their recreation with a building that doesn't raise recreation (assuming you balanced it for training).

EDIT:
(Originally had a large paragraph about how this would be hard to make a UI for.)
Another way to train skills (can't do with just XML, though, I think) would be to have crafting-bench-like objects, where you can get pawns to train. Other crafting benches can already raise skills, and recipes can be balanced by requiring resources or time. This is definitely do-able, I think, at least if you're comfortable making C# mods, or if we get some official XML tags/hooks in the base game. There's the Medical Dissection mod which shows how this could work. The bench uses bills, and pawns interact with it like other bill-able tables, so most of the game's existing UI / pawn-restrictions would work.

Klomster

Quote from: cultist on August 03, 2018, 12:56:38 PM
Some skills are very susceptible to power creep (research). Others are almost impossible to keep at high levels because you can't just (safely) use them at will (medicine, melee). Skill decay is a mechanic that punishes some sklls while balancing out others. The obvious solution is to vary skill decay depending on skill type.

Varying skill decay is nice, but it doesn't solve the fact that once cannot train melee reasonably.
But it helps, so i'm all for varying skill decay. And of course varying skill gain. Depending on skill.
While i like having a super advanced builder because of the high stuff that he builds, it's silly easy to get hold of one so getting a good one to begin with as important as getting a burning passion builder and just use that one.

Aerial

I'd like to see a floor tile type called "sparring mat" that melee pawns can go to for sparring time that would train melee.  Brawlers and bloodlust could get a mood boost from it as a joy activity, too.  Likewise, there should be shooting targets that could be used to establish a shooting range where pawns could train shooting.

The rate of skill gain is what would make this balanced because the time spent training is time the pawn can't do other tasks.

Sierra Mike

Got on my bike today ,was couple of months ago,if Tynan had his way I would have felt flat on my face.

lunaticneko

"Yeah, I might be a bit rusty, but don't underestimate me. That deer is good as dead."

I think there should be a "mastery" factor that reduces slightly over time. If your mastery is at 100%, there is zero decay, but at 0% the decay proceeds like vanilla. It should also allow a higher "no decay" zone. Mastery basically is there as a proof that the pawn does have a long-term understanding of a skill, independent on mechanical capability to do it at the time. Mastery should also allow a pawn to get back up to speed faster.

This mechanic will obviously reduce the effectiveness of neurotrainers, but I think that should be okay. How I imagine is that neurotrainers are supposed to be supplementary to manual learning, not as a complete replacement.

Mastery reduces faster (from 100% to 0%) if a pawn has brain dysfunction.

Klomster

The mastery idea is actually kinda cool.

NTJedi


AileTheAlien

#57
Nothing's changed in the base game, so "yes", although it looks like the Misc. Training mod has been updated for 1.0. (Some quick searching shows that other mods that allow for training have been updated for 1.0 too, but they either only do combat skills, or have artwork that doesn't match the base game, so I'm only linking this one. :)

NTJedi

It's too bad this was never fixed.

khun_poo

Totally agree with OP.

Since we got EXP gain cap at 4000 point per day already (might be wrong in number  :P ). The skill decay it's a bane to me.

IMO, skill decay shouldn't reduce colonist level that fast. They should just stay at 0 EXP on that level so that make them harder to climb on to the next level. Maybe make it decay faster if the colonist discard the skill for some time.

If the skill stay at 0 EXP for a long time, the level reduce  :)