Difficulty system not based on wealth [1.0]

Started by seerdecker, August 09, 2018, 10:36:36 AM

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seerdecker

A) The problem

Rimworld uses wealth as the main factor to determine raid sizes and expectations. I think it is a bad design choice.

1) It leads to perverse incentives such as damaging your weapons and tainting your armors to reduce their wealth value.

2) Your pawns react negatively to opulence. Building a beautiful golden sculpture to lift the mood of your pawns have the opposite effect: their mood decreases due to increased expectations.

3) It encourages players to avoid improving their bases and pawns to keep wealth under control. The optimal decision you can make to increase your odds of survival is to aggressively limit wealth. There are no feelings of progression and limited design options.

4) Since there are no restrictions on the number of traps / turrets you can use, and since raid size scales mostly through wealth rather than your number of pawns, your pawns become mostly useless for defence. It's doable to use 10 pawns against 20 pawns; less so when it's 10 pawns against 100 pawns. This happens because the game conflates opulence and defence strength, e.g. your sculpture is worth 50 turrets as far as the game is concerned.



B) Making wealth desirable

Suppose instead that wealth was a positive thing. You would rejoice when you finally got all your pawns dressed in hyperweave and power armor. Your pawns would like it when you made their rooms more beautiful. They would in fact become disgruntled if the wealth of the base didn't increase as time goes on. Wouldn't it be more fun?



C) The solution

Fixing the wealth issue is much more difficult than listing its shortcomings. What do you think could be done to improve the game with respect to difficulty? Discuss!

Keep in mind that it has to be simple to have a shot to be implemented, i.e. implementation effort must be handled as wealth ;)

Greep

#1
I don't think it's going to change in vanilla.  Just to much history to it I guess.  But my idea is just time based raid sizes, no wealth/adaptation/etc, and I've started working on a mod that included that and other things to come.

It sounds punishing, but the reasoning is pretty simple: if you look at all the raid points graphs for people's games, unless they're doing something weird, they all pretty much follow the exact same curve at the same time.  Making it time based only removes odd restrictions people place on themselves, like never prettying up their fort, or not using combat animals or whatever because maybe the "right raid point multiplier" wasn't put on them.

It might need some tweaking.  Biomes probably need a multiplier on points, and there might need to be a hard cap based on # of pawns*difficulty for people liking that solo experience or whatever.
1.0 Mods: Raid size limiter:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42721.0

MineTortoise:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42792.0
HELLO!

(WIPish)Strategy Mode: The experienced player's "vanilla"
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=43044.0

Koek

I'm not against wealth increasing raid difficulty to be honest, but there is room for improvement.

The mood buff related to wealth just has to go and could be replaced by a mood buff which is high at the start of a colony and decreases over time, giving you time to gain wealth to replace that buff.

Perhaps allies or the ability to call for assistance needs work. If I'm wealthy and my allies benefit from me by trade and occasional gifts they should be more willing to come to my aid, which brings me to the stupid AI allies tend to have in the occasional help they send.
My last game was 450 days in which I only called for help during the 15 day startup and only during that time I got a 1 time free help during a raid, which spawned at the opposite side of the map. A big swarm of tribals rushing a group of mechanoids which I could've handled on my own.

The balance between wealth and raid difficulty does need some work though. I agree with your example of building that golden sculpture.

Cheers :)

JimmyAgnt007

Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything?  Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?

100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill.  +100pts for next raid.

so, its based on how easily you repel a raid.  if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points.  this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them.  where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them.  also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.

other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.

this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders

Awe

#4
Imho, wealth of base must be calculated only as raw resource. You have 5 bricks? Its a 5$ of useless wealth. You build a wall from it? It must be same 5$, but its already useful as cover. Same with resources for weapon/armor/decorations. You must not be punished so much for building that legendary golden royal bed, or converting 100 plasteel and 5 components into 4k$ gun.

PS Or count as base wealth only stealable and transportable resources like silver or drug stockpiles and ignore wealth from floores and other such things.

Also, about expectations. Its ok if you pawns lose expectation buff from base upgrading. But in same time i think their morale must be stabilized with each loosed level, so mood must degrade significantly slower and/or have some protection from at least harshes of mental breaks, at well supplied base. Now its ridiculous when a guy who sit a week at top mood just loose all this after a short trip outside of his chair.

Nynzal

Quote from: JimmyAgnt007 on August 09, 2018, 11:00:53 AM
Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything?  Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?

100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill.  +100pts for next raid.

so, its based on how easily you repel a raid.  if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points.  this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them.  where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them.  also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.

other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.

this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders


This sounds like a good approach.
What is bugging me most of the time is that raider are just trying to do dmg, they should have some form of behavior that targets valuable stuff.
They wont raid you for your gold floor or that gigantic power generator - cant plunder them anyway. Instead they want to have that crazy gun or snatch all the gold you have in your storage.

I was very surprised on my Sea Ice run that the one raider, while I was door peeking/hiding for a short time decided to snatch those 300 gold lying outside from a meteorite and run with it. He didnt manage to get that but it was a behavior I think is logic - no pawns in sight? grab that stuff and run - stuff is hidden but that one pawn just vanished behind the door? smack it down and capture this guy, then run.
Winter is coming

Greep

They actually do have a goal, it's just it's not noticeable under most circumstances.  If you see an unstoppable sapper raid you can actually "bribe" them by just leaving a bunch of goodies in their path and they'll leave with it.  If pirates have a colonist in close range that they can kidnap, they'll switch to kidnapping mode.

It's just that most players want to defend their stuff and their colonists to the death.  And on an extreme biome that can make sense.

Mechanoids on the other hand... they just want to kill you.
1.0 Mods: Raid size limiter:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42721.0

MineTortoise:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=42792.0
HELLO!

(WIPish)Strategy Mode: The experienced player's "vanilla"
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=43044.0

Nynzal

They do if it is an obvious choice, but once on a ahip site without launching the reactor. They just smahesd everything and then left a few of their dead ones behind - thats not reasonable.

They need to have a more clear goal (except the mechanoids, which makes sense that they just destroy pawns ) which can be related to a raid size system based on key items and adaption maybe on time and damage on previous ones, but if it is damage related I can already see knowingly harm or down pawns to reduce size.

The only independant raid size is time and that can really kill you if you have some setback.
Winter is coming

SchizoidCrow

As a hoarder, I usually have too much stuff laying around doing nothing for me. Like I still keep cotton plantations the same size after creating a healthy field of devilstrand. So I'll perpetually have 3k+ of cloth sitting in my storage waiting for me to use them (which, to be fair, it does happen with caravan requests). I can understand if someone wants to steal my cloth, but that storage is not going to help me defend it. Same happens with most of my production. Wealth doesn't really captures my ability to fend off raids, so... the solution is to not be wealthy  :-\ 

erdrik

#9
Different Colony Stats should attract different events.


  • Wealth should increase the chance of Basic Pirate raids, and raids from other non-pirate hostile human factions. But defensive strength(any building or colonist capable of dealing any form of damage to another pawn, and any animal trained to release) should decrease the chance of such raids.


  • Large food stockpiles and large fields of at least half grown crops, should increase the chance of manhunter packs. Manhunter packs should be split into two groups. The "guards" and the "locusts". The guards hang out around the doors of the colony as normal, but the locusts will ignore humans and instead make a beeline for the crop fields and eat everything they can(or in the case of carnivores just destroy crops). Once the locusts have had their fill they meet up with the guards so they can switch roles.


  • Defensive strength should increase the chance of mechanoid raids, mechanoid ship parts, drop pods, sieges, and sappers.


  • Colonists that have been captured and recruited should increase the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from. Colonists that joined of their own free will or were rescued from a Chased event should reduce the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from, and increase the chance of future "Chased" and "Join" events.


  • Cosmic events(solar flares, eclipse, ect) should be purely random and time based.


Basically colony wealth should only ever attract low level basic human raids. And defensive strength should be the attractor for most of the other heavy hitting raids. That way the player can down scale their defenses if they are attracting too much attention. The important part will be balancing basic raid strength so as to make sure there is always at least some threat to encourage building defenses.

Thane

Quote from: SchizoidCrow on August 09, 2018, 01:04:47 PM
As a hoarder, I usually have too much stuff laying around doing nothing for me. Wealth doesn't really captures my ability to fend off raids, so... the solution is to not be wealthy  :-\

Don't be unnecessarily wealthy. If you have a freaking pile of gold laying about and no guns to defend it I would probably swipe it off you if there was no real negative to me.

Maybe wealth in conjunction with defenses, but defenses might even be a deterrent. Because of the huge negative to raiding somewhere with high wealth, but death incarnate defenses. Noone wants to die, but them wanting your crap is completely reasonable. Maybe once you have x amount of defense and y amount of wealth you only get uber powered raids desperately trying to overcome your walls.

"Hey Bob want to go raid that outpost?"
"Nah man they don't have anything worth risking my neck for. I hear they have to eat people just to make ends meet."
"What about that one?"
"Are you kidding me? They have enough firepower to turn us into putty! Remember last time, Frank was vaporized as soon as he got in range. I still remember his arms going one way and his legs the other. Don't even ask where his head went."
"Okay... What about that art convent over there? I hear they have been working in Gold recently."
....
"Now Jim that right there is my speed. Bring up places like that more often."
It is regular practice to install peg legs and dentures on anyone you don't like around here. Think about that.

spidermonk

I like wealth based raid sizes, it makes sense. If you settlement looks wealthy, there will be more people willing to ransack it. If you want to live good, you must invest in protecting it, it matches the feeling of a rimworld.

And it allows you to develop in your own pace, you can be equally successful both on NB and normal start.

I think all other systems, like time based or based on damage inflicted by the previous raid have their own problems and suit less for this game.

There is of course the problem that this system discourages players from progressing. The best way to fix it I think is to somehow make progressing more desirable for players, so they see increased raid threat as another problem they need to solve to get to their goal.

May be the way to fix it is to allow players to bribe the raiders with expensive items if the raiders are after the wealth. This way, even if you've miscalculated your ability to defend your wealth, you can always just give the excesses away. And later, after the raid, you'll have motivation to protect your wealth better. And you'll want that wealth even more, because it was denied from you.

Or may be instead of giving players a way to bribe the raiders, may be make the wealth-based raids less targeted to destruction and more targeted to robing. So, those raiders won't try to kidnap colonists or burn the base, just grab some amount of valuables and leave. Or may be combine this and the previous one.

Also, one way that encourages progressing right now is a necessity to be sustainable against other threats, like you need enough food in your storages to be able to survive random volcanic winter -> toxic fallout combo.

Another way is may be presenting players with quests with desirable rewards, like cool implants or mech healing serum, but to complete these quests the player must progress.

Aerial

Quote from: erdrik on August 09, 2018, 01:12:13 PM
Different Colony Stats should attract different events.


  • Wealth should increase the chance of Basic Pirate raids, and raids from other non-pirate hostile human factions. But defensive strength(any building or colonist capable of dealing any form of damage to another pawn, and any animal trained to release) should decrease the chance of such raids.


  • Large food stockpiles and large fields of at least half grown crops, should increase the chance of manhunter packs. Manhunter packs should be split into two groups. The "guards" and the "locusts". The guards hang out around the doors of the colony as normal, but the locusts will ignore humans and instead make a beeline for the crop fields and eat everything they can(or in the case of carnivores just destroy crops). Once the locusts have had their fill they meet up with the guards so they can switch roles.


  • Defensive strength should increase the chance of mechanoid raids, mechanoid ship parts, drop pods, sieges, and sappers.


  • Colonists that have been captured and recruited should increase the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from. Colonists that joined of their own free will or were rescued from a Chased event should reduce the chance of a Raid from the faction they came from, and increase the chance of future "Chased" and "Join" events.


  • Cosmic events(solar flares, eclipse, ect) should be purely random and time based.


Basically colony wealth should only ever attract low level basic human raids. And defensive strength should be the attractor for most of the other heavy hitting raids. That way the player can down scale their defenses if they are attracting too much attention. The important part will be balancing basic raid strength so as to make sure there is always at least some threat to encourage building defenses.

These are good suggestions.  However, there still needs to be some mechanism to determine the basic strength level of any raid or pack that is generated.

I think raid strength should fundamentally be time-dependent.  A simple line or curve whose slope (or equivalent if a curve) increases with difficulty level (basebuilder would be pretty flat, extreme quite steep).  Difficulty *should* increase with time, requiring a colony to advance to survive. 

That said, the basic shape of the time curve should be modified by things like:
1.  Total number of colonists (potentially could make violent-capable pawns count more toward this than non-violent)
2.  Combined strength of combat-capable animals.  Four rhinos/elephants/thrumbos should add more to raid strength than 4 artic foxes, for example.
2.  Number of defensive installations (traps, turrets, sandbags, mortars, IEDs, etc), including those in storage
3.  Highest-technology level of armor and weapon(s) equipped or in storage (i.e. there's an orbital bombardment device in storage so raids would be a little stronger, even if everyone is using bows and clubs)
4.  Total number of defensively useful structures (i.e. doors and walls).   This would have to be balanced against the total number of colonists so that an ordinary base appropriate to the population isn't punishing but someone who has built 300 doors to maximize door peeking or a vast maze of double-thick walls will see more difficult raids.  This factor could potentially be used to penalize mountain bases without requiring massive infestations as a counter.  A mountain base could simply count as a huge number of walls.

And on top of that, the current concept of adaptation also should be incorporated to dynamically adjust the raid strength *somewhat* in response to  spectacular success or failure of the previous raid to help prevent death spirals.

Crow_T

Just spitballin' here, some quick ideas ignoring "but muh base building sim":

A system where different factors affect raid type, wealth attracts more pirate raiders, research attracts more tribals, time played attracts more mechs. To avoid player manipulation it would only be increased odds, not a definite raid type. Eg if you have a lot of research you have a 70% chance of a 100pt tribal raid, an 20% chance of a 90 pt pirate raid, 10% chance of a 80pt mech raid. No matter the playstyle there is never 0% chance of a raid type, but the player can influence it a bit, and still can complain later about the shitty RNG because they didn't get their way. :)

Be old school and scale raids based on colony age only using a constantly increasing factor- no matter the population or wealth they get harder over time. This is less sandbox and more straight up game-y. Perhaps decrease the factor if a colony moves to a new location and restarts from scratch or a major catastrophe happens like 2/3 of the colonists die. This would give a sense of urgency to the game and could be fun.

I like the idea that uses past raids as a factor for scaling, if plain old walk-in raids do little damage increase drop ins, or have a seige + flank walk-in raid combo. This could be a workaround for killboxes.

You could be mean and increase the chance of a raid happening during a solar flare, I feel like these could be smaller/less powerful to account for the raiders assembling quickly to take advantage.
(regarding dead man's apparel)
"I think, at the very least, the buff should go away for jackets so long as you're wearing the former owner's skin as a shirt."
-Condaddy20

Nafensoriel

Quote from: JimmyAgnt007 on August 09, 2018, 11:00:53 AM
Why not ignore the colony wealth and everything?  Just send x pts of raid and guage the result?

100pts raid = 0 injury, light damage, total raid kill.  +100pts for next raid.

so, its based on how easily you repel a raid.  if you get your ass kicked, it reduces the raid points.  this way, a killbox player gets stronger raids because they can defeat them.  where an open colony with the same basic wealth gets smaller raids because they are more damaging to them.  also, if you just had a raid that did a lot of damage, the game knows it did damage and will dial down the next one.

other things it can look at is the average health of pawns, how much medicine or food you happen to have, extra components, basically anything that decides how quickly you can recover from a raid.

this way we can have legendary gold statues all over the place but the single pacifist pawn in your colony wont be overwhelmed with a hundred raiders

Could you expand on this a little? How would you handle the following conditions to ensure fair, balanced, and enjoyable gameplay?

1] Would you include an upper limitation(perhaps based on wealth) for maximum points? Otherwise what would stop this system from eventually pointing out and causing an artificial "death of colony" point? IE at what point do you give negative points?

2] What about situations where if the above situation results in a "median" raid size after a few gameplay years? How would you entice the system to occasionally force a stress on the colony? Randy random style with a large scaling modifier occasionally? Forcing more sapper events?

3] Would you completely exclude animal raids from this system? Manhunter threat scales too iirc so what would stop a player from min/maxing several raids to gain an absurd quantity of leather and meat?