Adaptation

[Greep]

tl;dr adaptation is artificial and terrible, if the game should be more difficult over time it should go into the raid curve and difficulty settings.

These two screenshots exemplify everything that I dislike about adaptation/rampups (besides being a racing car game mechanic pushed into a colony simulator).

The first is an event that took place where sappers blasted through, shot a bunch of guys but didn't down them, and stole a whole bunch of stuff.  Mortars were fired next to my base in desperation and I blew up my chemfuel generators and hydroponics on accident.  Fun stuff    This happened about a week or two ago.

The second is what the adaptation graph is looking like now (notice nothing occurred on the graph).

For one thing, adaptation is completely blind to your playstyle, and punishes people with different playstyles completely unequally in it's current state.  Someone playing without heavy security and extremely protective of their colony's wealth will have a completely different experience as someone else.  If the enemy comes in and trashes 20 cannons, or blows up half your base and nukes your walls, it don't care.  But oh wait one person died!  Better make the rest of the entire year a cakewalk.  In the first case, though, you are completely ruined if your strategy involved lots of cannons.

It's also hard to really understand how this is affecting the game just looking at a graph, which is why I do hope some internal testing gets done before a full release.  When you look at this graph you just see "oh well this got a bit harder due to adaptation".  But the context is, at the low point I got hit with a sappers in all directions totalling 10 sappers, and at the high point i got hit with sappers totalling 40.  And that is the difference between basically afking and suffering terrible odds every raid.

Some more math on why this happens this way:  The relative difference between survival and merciless is +33% (2/1.5).  However, the difference between mid adaptation and low adaptation can be about +~60% (1.3/0.80).  In other words, adaptation matters much more than difficulty.

I mean, I could just play recklessly and then be rewarded with an easier game, but this just feels bad.  It's not only open to metagaming, it also is punishing to people just trying to play the game normally in different ways which is more important.

Maybe some tweaking could be done to improve it, like increasing the rate of increase again at lower ends and decreasing it even more at the higher end, or considering building and security damage, but it feels like patching a piece of garbage.

[attachment deleted due to age]

[xrumblingcdsx]

Damn Greep, sucks about your Hydroponics. On Sea Ice that'll put you back significantly.

[Greep]

Hah yeah, any loss of steel is horrifying.  I just got some power armor so I can maybe even do LRMS steel sites with ambushes though

[xrumblingcdsx]

I read your other posts, you're playing sea ice pretty similar to how I do with a few highly modified pawns. I've yet to build any turrets but I'm only on year 3 so far.

[m44v]

(...)
For one thing, adaptation is completely blind to your playstyle, and punishes people with difference playstyles completely unequally in it's current state.  Someone playing without heavy security and extremely protective of their colony's wealth will have a completely different experience as someone else.  If the enemy comes in and trashes 20 cannons, or blows up half your base and nukes your walls, it don't care.  But oh wait one person died!  Better make the rest of the entire year a cakewalk.  In the first case, though, you are completely ruined if your strategy involved lots of cannons.
(...)

How would you know? Maybe in the next raid you lose your colony, or maybe you lose some pawns but you still pull through and then adaptation will account that previously you lost half your base, so adaptation is working in a way. Besides, lets imagine that adaptation is an advanced AI that understands your way of playing, that understands your loses and is also impossible to cheese. So whenever you have a setback adaptation will react accordingly, wouldn't that make the game very difficult to lose? what would be the point then?

Isn't rolling a 1 and getting shafted part of playing merciless sea ice?

[Greep]

Regarding merciless sea ice:  I should have posted another example maybe, this isn't really about overall game settings, so much as adaptation basically ignoring that difficulty (see mathy section).  this isn't a whine post, I'm doing fine

Regarding a perfect adaptation:  that's actually my point.  It should be removed entirely rather than improved (although an AI that arbitrarily supports some playstyles that some new players may adopt is worse than one that works equally).

There's 2 scenarios that removing adaptation improves upon (and a 3rd which would be improved if adaptation was "better"  , that being turret spamming)

1) 2 newbs buy the game.  One builds a mix of melee and shooters and plays with reckless abandon and does well due to random downing of melee dudes.  Another plays a more careful deliberate approach and gets a crushing defeat when he meets an enormous raid and gets cornered.  When finding out the solution is playing worse, he says the game sucks and stops playing/recommending.

2)More experienced players start getting increasing raid sizes when doing well and think in the back of their mind "I can survive this a lot easier if every now and then I just let a dude die"

The first is really bad, the second is annoying and immersion breaking, but will probably just lead to adopting mods 

[giltirn]

There's 2 scenarios that removing adaptation improves upon (and a 3rd which would be improved if adaptation was "better"  , that being turret spamming)

1) 2 newbs buy the game.  One builds a mix of melee and shooters and plays with reckless abandon and does well due to random downing of melee dudes.  Another plays a more careful deliberate approach and gets a crushing defeat when he meets an enormous raid and gets cornered.  When finding out the solution is playing worse, he says the game sucks and stops playing/recommending.

2)More experienced players start getting increasing raid sizes when doing well and think in the back of their mind "I can survive this a lot easier if every now and then I just let a dude die"

The first is really bad, the second is annoying and immersion breaking, but will probably just lead to adopting mods 

I agree that it does seem to reward bad play and punish good play, and encourages players not to learn how to play better but instead how to game the system. Personally I felt the difficulty progression in B18 was just fine and didn't need touching.

[Tynan]

FYI, the recovery system is not new, it's been in the game for years. It just didn't have a graph before.

The purpose is not to make the game harder forever, it is limited so that can't happen. The purpose is to make it possible to recover from bad situations instead of entering a dead man walking state.

[Greep]

I think it was actually stronger in b18, although I can't actually say for sure.  This is not a new thing, and it's somewhat ranty, so I split it off the 1.0 discussion.

Well, what I've shown above is it's not really working well to that purpose.  It's making some playstyles arbitrarily considerably harder and others considerably easier.  Even if it did work across the board, I still disagree that it's a good thing.  Is entering a dead man walking state such a bad thing?  Having a recovery system that actually did work correctly would make your decisions meaningless as a poster above said.

[5thHorseman]

Is entering a dead man walking state such a bad thing?

Yes.

[Studly Spud]

Is entering a dead man walking state such a bad thing?

Yes.

Definitely YES.  I want to believe that any colony, with any disaster/accident/mistake, is still salvageable and can grow and thrive again.   Because I CARE, dammit!

[Greep]

You can achieve this by just lowering the difficulty, though, and you won't have some bizarre system that tries to force you back on your feet when you can just try on your own, in a somewhat over compensating way.  The raid formula takes into account number of colonists and wealth anyways, so it should just work on it's own.

That being said the raid formula in general is just weird to begin with, so I guess it's just here to stay.

[Studly Spud]

I really don't want to be modifying the difficulty within a game though.  I want to find my optimal difficulty setting (right now it's 4/6 cassandra, I forget the names, and I like to play a very sub-optimal roleplaying style).  But the adaption system is essential because no game should make you have to adjust your own difficulty setting during play.

[Greep]

I just meant at the beginning, yeah I wouldn't either.  If you started at one notch under what you were playing at, then instead of catastrophic failures that are unrecoverably without some bizarre mechanic, you'd get smaller ones that would just put your colony under pressure (and maybe crack it at some point). That feels more interesting to me, and not completely unrealistic and gamey.

[zizard]

Could there maybe be a mode for the players that want to play it as a base building / tactical challenge? A mode that puts time pressure on progression and doesn't rubberband as much?