Adaptation

[Polder]

- You can "game" the AI by artifically lowering your wealth, sacrificing bad pawns, keeping your colony small and use door-peeking will make your game a cakewalk regardless of difficulty. Changes need to be gradual. I cant stress how important this is. Tynan, if you cant implement exponential functions to calculate these, this will always plague your game.

I do try to avoid rapid growth of wealth because I know wealth influences raid strength. I don't try to stay below some wealth threshold though.

Not letting every pawn join is also a legitimate playstyle. In most cases I just can't be arsed to deal with the withdrawal period of an addict, the frequent mood breaks of the depressed or nervous, or to have a pawn around that refuses violence or hauling or cleaning while not having any other desirable skills/passions.

Traits like psychopath, bloodlust or teetotaller are more interesting in that they have pros and cons.

[RemingtonRyder]

Actually, worn items do count toward wealth. Didn't always, but I can confirm that in 1.0 all a pawn's equipment is factored into wealth calculations.

[bbqftw]

What is the pro of teetotaler? As far as I can tell its all downside. Late game, it's practically equivalent to a pessimist for me, and even if you aren't running drug schedules the lack of emergency mood booster hurts.

I'm going to guess they have certain ineligible mental breaks involving drugs but even that is a drawback imo

[Polder]

What is the pro of teetotaler? As far as I can tell its all downside. Late game, it's practically equivalent to a pessimist for me, and even if you aren't running drug schedules the lack of emergency mood booster hurts.

I'm going to guess they have certain ineligible mental breaks involving drugs but even that is a drawback imo

I believe they will never binge on drugs during a mental break. That's a good thing if you're producing a lot of flake/yayo.

[5thHorseman]

What is the pro of teetotaler?

They're less likely to be a bad trait because one of their trait slots is taken by something unimportant.

Unless you drug up your pawns then sure it's a negative.

[patoka]

adaptation is a good thing. that said, it is too strong in rimworld. send weaker raids if a guy on my side died, but not laughably weak ones. send stronger and stronger raids over time, so that i have a constant challenge, but dont just suddenly surprise me with a huge raid.

as one of the few players (it seems) that has extensive experience with pheebs chillax, i can absolutely assure the devs that the most difficult part about her is that as a new player you most of the time have absolutely no idea how much you should invest into military (be that guns, skilling, armor, defenses, autoguns, but even stuff like hospitals and drugs) because you get raids so rarely. even in extreme late game, the same minor threat will always be the same as in the very beginning of the game. eg. a bzzzzt will produce the same explosion on any difficulty and at any point in time of the game, no matter how many of your pawns died. that makes those events much, much harder to deal with as a beginner at game start (especially since it isnt explained how or why they occur and how you can avoid/weaken them) and later on it's just boring because it's the same as always and you'll essentially just get a heads-up until the next minor/major threat. i think replacing components is the most extreme in this regard. pheebs will absolutely bombard you with these from time to time in late game and no matter how many times it happens it just means nothing to you. on the other hand, early game, especially in extreme cases like rich explorer extreme desert/sea ice/ice sheet, but also "normal" game starts like crashlanded arid shrubland this can cause major inconveniences. what if your only heater dies, your only cooler for your fridge and you are threatened that your food spoils, what if, what if, what if.
(you might think i went off-topic, but no, read on please)
now what is extra difficult is that new players, who probably have the highest percentage of choosing chillax, will be confused. they will need to put out a bzzzt with one half charged battery one day, another day they have to replace a component, then an escape pod and ship chunks arrive, the next one a single guy raid comes, then they get the journey offer, then a wanderer joins, then an animal goes mad, then you get some resources from droppods, then beavers come (which are similar to raids, but noobs dont know that, so they wont look at their numbers and adapt their military to it), then travellers visit, then an eclipse happens, then some pigs join, then a heatwave starts, then an aurora happens, then a blight hits, then you get a flash storm, then psychic soothe starts, then you get a solar flare, then ambrosia plants sprout, then a squirrel self-tames and then a manhunter pack is let loose and then after many days of the same dilly-dally in terms of threats you finally get your second actual real raid, which may catch many new players completely off-guard, because by then they will have achieved quite a bit in the game but never actually experienced a proper raid (first one is weaker). i once had a case where i wasnt raided for 2 straight years, i double checked in the graphs and it's true. all kinds of other things happened, but no raids. (no i wasnt playing on low difficulties)

and to come back to the main point: raids generally dont happen very often. sure, veterans who already know their stuff will play on the highest difficulty and encounter raids every other day or so, but we arent talking about them, at least not exclusively. raids happen every now and then and i believe most players always expect to be able to survive the raid more or less well off. (as in, they have the possibility to do so. i also think that players know that they can still screw up and get obliterated in most bad events) now if raid strength varies aside from being measured with your progress and strength, you will want to give players a fair chance to anticipate a stronger raid somehow. imagine if i wasnt a seasoned player and didnt upgrade my defenses and guns and what not while i wasnt raided for 2 years. a noob would have been curb stomped the next time enemies set foot on their turf (it was a pure centipede mech raid closest to my base perimeter and less defended parts. good luck with that, noobs) i did fairly well because i expected each and every threat to be a raid, as i was taught by cassandra.
now i am not here to hate on pheebs, that's another topic. what i am really trying to say (badly, as always. i suck at making points) is that certain things in rimworld scale (eg: raids), some dont (eg: eclipses), some happen more and more often (eg: machine breakdowns) and some happen less and less often (eg: wanderer joins) in any normal playthrough. for the most part, this has been implemented well ages ago. (eg: no volcanic fallout at game start; weaker raids at first; soft limit on number of pawns and so on)

the problem is that certain events are too strong in the beginning and might throw off your whole game start like an early bzzzt event, while other events are completely uninteresting at the same time like an eclipse. on the other hand, a single machine breaking down could prove to be fatal in the beginning (very rarely) but usually it is a good event early on because you have to use a pawn and repair that machine for quite some time as their skills are still low and you've got so many other things on your mind (that is one out of 1 or 3 pawns (tribals dont usually have machines that early that could break down) which is very considerable) but later on in the game, as i said before, it just means absolutely nothing to you.

to keep it short, i would very much recommend the devs to go through the list of threats (and those positive things that happen, i always forget their name) and make notes on which occurrences should happen mainly when, how many times and maybe invent some new things that could happen with things that dont scale. (eg: multiple machines breaking down; bzzzt scaling with progress and not being (fully) dependent on energy stored; animal joins being dependent on colony state, like more later one, fewer at first. (also no early chickens, dogs instead are much more welcome. cats much later. why? because a silly tame squirrel just gets slaughtered, that's why and early chickens give too much of a boost imo and throw off early game by too much. amount or type of resources falling from the sky could also be influenced. ship chunks in the early days is a very good and interesting start, i'd love it if you elaborated on that. maybe mostly food in the beginning and leather types later on?

[bbqftw]

What is the pro of teetotaler? As far as I can tell its all downside. Late game, it's practically equivalent to a pessimist for me, and even if you aren't running drug schedules the lack of emergency mood booster hurts.

I'm going to guess they have certain ineligible mental breaks involving drugs but even that is a drawback imo

I believe they will never binge on drugs during a mental break. That's a good thing if you're producing a lot of flake/yayo.

This feels a bit 'self-fulfilling prophecy' esque - a teetotaler is much more likely to suffer major and extreme breaks because you don't have the emergency mood injection that tea/beer/smokeleaf/ambrosia offer (all of which don't contribute to overdose).

Looking at the extreme breaks in particular, I think drug binge is much more preferable to stuff like murder rage, catatonic, wildman, berserk, and maybe even slaughterer. So you're making the average extreme break worse by taking away the drug binge option.

What is the pro of teetotaler?

They're less likely to be a bad trait because one of their trait slots is taken by something unimportant.

Unless you drug up your pawns then sure it's a negative.

yeah early game I'd be happy to get a pawn that has zero traits.

[zizard]

- Adaptation does not even considers the pawn's value when he dies. Did you just sacrificed Steve, the legless, armless, one-kidney/lung/eye colonist incapable of Skilled/dumb/violent? Ok. We'll make the next raids until next year safer. Oh is your entire colony still licking their wounds after you defend a mech raid? Too bad, heres a new raid.

I agree; the single most important input for the adaptation mechanic should be colonist damage suffered / (100 * number of colonists).

[Greep]

And what about security buildings?  Why I just dislike it altogether.  20 cannons down and adaptation is like... "you defeated that raid flawlessly"

[Copperwire]

Or the 15 huskies.

[zizard]

And what about security buildings?  Why I just dislike it altogether.  20 cannons down and adaptation is like... "you defeated that raid flawlessly"

That might be the second most important thing.