Difficulty system not based on wealth [1.0]

[bbqftw]

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

I think that the wealth system makes people who know about it feel threatened. Those who doesn't know about instead, get a very balanced gameplay feeling as the wealth adaption is actually a pretty good idea.
In this way, same like the unknowing, nobody should be afraid of the wealth system. It affects the difficutly, but in a good way.

A rough Example:
Let's say you will craft a excellent LMG. it's a strong weapon that makes you stronger. If i get the math right thats LMG 300 x excellent 2 = 600 wealth. itemWealth gets divided by 100, so its 600/100=6. The next raid will have 6 points more than the last one.
A raider has a point value of 35-210 depending on its type. The difference of 6 means, that from 20 Raiders attacking you next time, the one with the two peg legs, will only have one peg leg!
This means, while you get a rambo rifle, the raider gets a new leg. Now I ask you: Is a LMG able too fight a leg? I'm pretty sure it is.

Here's the formula:
P = (( C × 42 ) + ( iW ÷ 100 ) + ( bW ÷ 200 )) × ( sR × lR ) × D × T × R
C= Colonist
iW = Items
bW = building

Further information here:
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raider

1) Formula is different. Specifically, there is now a component where wealth also increases the raid point contribution per pawn.
2) Its telling you picked one of the few item classes where the combat utility increase justifies the wealth increase.

[seerdecker]

The good thing about a time-based system is that it rewards having a good economy, beautifying the base, etc.

There are downsides though.
- If you outpace the system, it gets boring.
- Raids will keep getting bigger and bigger, so the clean-up phase will become more tedious.
- Your pawn contribution matters less and less relative to the fixed defences required to deal with the larger raids.

I like Tynan's idea about the player choosing to undertake difficult events, beyond launching the ship. It's a great progression system!

I'd like to hear some opinions about my proposal to scale raids with (pop + defence strength + downscaled luxury wealth) rather than (pop + total wealth) -- everything else being the same.

It's not perfect (every system can be gamed), but it offers those advantages:
- Ease of implementation wrt the current system (even a partial fix would improve the situation a lot in 1.0).
- It still scales to total wealth, just much more slowly, so burning every weapon on the map won't work.
- Having a bigger base means you have more to cover, so defending becomes harder.
- Pawns have to fight!
- Raids don't get huge.
- You can have golden statues.

*Edit* By defence strength, I really mean add up those turrets, traps, armors, etc, and weight them by utility, not market value.

[Studly Spud]

I have seen two things suggested here that I really like, and would be fairly simple to implement. 

1. Some types of raids (e.g. pirates) have a bribe dialog where they ask for some of your wealth.  Always something that you have sitting around.  This would really tie into the existing notification of "you have produced this spectacular sculpture and news has spread around the land", well now someone has actually turned up to take it!  You have the option of just giving it to them.  Or they ask for other things you have lying around.  A stack of silver.  Weapons.   Clothes.  A bunch of your animals or food, I dunno.  But you have the option of accepting their demands, especially if they have a big force you are scared of. 

2. Have raid scaling tied directly into the effects of the previous raid.  (possibly it already looks at this, I haven't looked through the game code).  But if a raid was super easy, or super damaging, then the next raid ties this in somehow.  Would need definition of exactly what to count; damage to structures, injuries, medicine and wealth used immediately after to repair, whatever.  But I think it would keep things more manageable. 

What I want to be able to do is play the One Rich Explorer scenario, and stay alone the whole game.  Get richer and richer and never recruit.  Or maybe roleplay a tiny bit; find your one true love, or find a trusty manservant from a tribal raid, or whatever.  And just two against the world, getting insanely rich, but still managing vs raid scaling.  Actually I have not yet tried this playthrough yet so I am talking out of my proverbial bum, sorry Tynan I know you specifically asked for concerns from actual playing!  I've just been scared off by thinking about scaling vs someone who only wants one pawn permanently....  I'll give it a go now.  While I'm still in the 1.0 limbo of no mods

[d3th2u420]

I think the difficulty should somehow be limited by technology, such that you need to use items as you unlock them. If you unlock smithing but decide to skip building anything until you have long swords (for example) you should get punished by a raid with Gladius armed pawns wearing simple helmets. You should rarely get attacked by enemies with better weapons than you can build, so that you can't steal your entire arsenal. Whatever the right balance is, I feel too much of the content in the game is unusable b/c you just get better stuff right away. I like the idea of timing difficulty in conjunction with more linear tech progress which matches the difficulty progression.

[zizard]

If one clicks back and forth between the wealth and debug pages, one finds it difficult to say "raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth" with a straight face.

This happens because you're playing clean games without significant population losses. If a formula has several inputs, and you hold several of them constant (adaptation/population) while changing just one (wealth), obviously the output will respond to the thing that you're changing.

Try holding your wealth steady and losing 90% of your population in a battle and see how things change.

My current colony has only 7 people so 86% of them will have to do. I had them strip naked so they wouldn't taint any clothes by dying in them, grouped them up outside and spawned a bunch of lancers, write storyteller. To speed things up I might have injected go juice and restored a leg or two. I then gave the remaining colonist bionics via 'add hediff' until the pawn wealth was near the original value.

before:
wealth 74464: items 50395, buildings 23878(/2), pawns 12130
raid points 1489


after:
wealth 74731: items 51338, buildings 23875(/2), pawns 11455
raid points 721

-52% raid points for -86% of population seems like a stiff deal!!

[Greep]

Regarding timed threats, the way I started using it in a mod is to just use:

"Ticks^1.1/25000
Divide by 8 if a caravan.
Divide by 3.5 if a site.
Multiply this by your difficulty factor."

Haven't got any feedback on it yet, although I'm working on an economy mod that will be part of that so I'm not in a hurry.  It doesn't handle biomes well, so this obviously can't just be the final version, though, and just doesn't care if you got hammered last raid.  You could always just slap on adaptation here with a weaker influence, and give each biome a raid coefficient and exponent.  So like Ice Sheet: mult:0.7;exp:0.9, Temperate: mult: 1.1;exp:1.1

Possibly an overall solution is to just have ticks be the largest factor, so that even if a pawn/wealth counts for something, it's not enough to "game" it or worry about it.  So putting it together something like...

Old: Ticks^1.1/25000
New: Ticks^1.1(*biome_exp)/40000(*biome_mult) + pawns*average_health*(wealth_curve)*A + wealth*B

Biome is kind of like a second difficulty level, so it's not like people would choose a biome based on raid sizes.  It'd probably be biased in favor of making the biome still harder than normal just doable.  But you can't just slap on "Ticks^1.1/25000" to Sea Ice and expect a fun experience lol.

But yeah that requires a lot of work at this stage to find out appropriate A/B/etc.  I do agree that the wealth*pawns was a good idea even if I'm gurmpy about it, my experience just seems to show that 110 peak is a bit high especially with bionics counting.

One criticism seerdecker mentiones was if you outpace the raid time it gets boring.  This is a fair criticism, but this is kinda true no matter what system you use:  with a system that tries to be "clever" if the player remains "clever" they will outgame it and also make the game "boring".  This is why I don't like seerdeckers idea of just tossing up what counts as wealth/utility for raids, even if it is an improvement.  A player is just going to have the weird process of calculating which factors he thinks skews raid sizes in his favor, when he should just be thinking what gives him the best colony and defense.

[NiftyAxolotl]

What are some ways the player could opt in to more dangerous raids at their own pace, in a mechanically and thematically coherent way? What are some lures that would make a player want or have to do those things?

[Greep]

Honestly caravan activities kind of fill that role, I've done a bunch of sites/lumps on merciless and they can be pretty brutal but fun.  Tweaking that feels all that's necessary.  Right now they feel a bit too easy to cheese with sending in equipment, but some sites, like mortar always has the danger of death:  You either gotta bite the bullet and drop to center to stop the mortar fire or take another risk and drop at edge.

Counterpoint to this:  People tend not to opt in to danger.  I did it because it was necessary on sea ice, but you'll notice for instance, powergaers and general players alike, would not caravan when the rewards were small in B18.  That's an option to opt in to danger for fun, and overwhelmingly people opted out.

[bbqftw]

If one clicks back and forth between the wealth and debug pages, one finds it difficult to say "raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth" with a straight face.

This happens because you're playing clean games without significant population losses. If a formula has several inputs, and you hold several of them constant (adaptation/population) while changing just one (wealth), obviously the output will respond to the thing that you're changing.

Try holding your wealth steady and losing 90% of your population in a battle and see how things change.

My current colony has only 7 people so 86% of them will have to do. I had them strip naked so they wouldn't taint any clothes by dying in them, grouped them up outside and spawned a bunch of lancers, write storyteller. To speed things up I might have injected go juice and restored a leg or two. I then gave the remaining colonist bionics via 'add hediff' until the pawn wealth was near the original value.

before:
wealth 74464: items 50395, buildings 23878(/2), pawns 12130
raid points 1489


after:
wealth 74731: items 51338, buildings 23875(/2), pawns 11455
raid points 721

-52% raid points for -86% of population seems like a stiff deal!!

that's only a 242% increase in raid points per pawn for not simultaneously burning down your base as you were being storytold!!! great finding

[erdrik]

...Counterpoint to this:  People tend not to opt in to danger.  I did it because it was necessary on sea ice, but you'll notice for instance, powergaers and general players alike, would not caravan when the rewards were small in B18.  That's an option to opt in to danger for fun, and overwhelmingly people opted out.

I use to "opt out" of caravans for this reason, but recently I gave it a try and found it to be less risky than I had built it up to be. Right now the only "barriers to entry" I have for caravaning are packaged survival meals and having enough good colonists for both the colony and the caravan. And depending on the quest, just two colonists are enough for the caravan. I think putting packaged survival meals lower on the tech tree and tweeking them to be almost exclusively a caravaning meal(including a description for it) might be a good way to encourage caravaning in the early game.

[Copperwire]

There are two factors that increase difficulty as you "progress": "Raid Scaling" and "Expectations".  When you take the game to extremes, the effects of both factors blend together and make it hard to isolate either.  What both have in common is that "progression" without gaming the system makes you weaker rather then stronger and both dynamics are less then apparent until they end your game a few times.

To continue the analogy, "Expectations" are a bit like if you were playing Doom and the more health, ammo, and weapons you collected the greater the chances of having a weapon jam or rocket explode in the tube next to your head.  If this was present in Doom, experienced players would shed weapons and ammo to optimize performance.  While I am sure there is a limited audience who would find this fun, and more who might like to give it a try as a mode, it is not fun as a part of a base game.

Current "Raid Scaling" has many issues.  Net, it creates "Right Path" which is both counter-intuitive and bad for creating story/immersion.  Regardless of how it happens or the genre, it is unsatisfying when you have a game with a large amount of content of which most is ignored or used only when playing around except when it is acting as a "trap/journey of exploration" for newer players.

Right now, "Right Path" has three primary tenants;

1.  Wealth Optimization
2.  Direct Pawn Combat Avoidance/AI Exploitation (Killbox, Turrets, Animals, Trap Maze, etc)
3.  Intentional Loses/Pawn Rejection

Without beating a dead horse, accomplishing the above, or even 2 out of 3, limits the "palette" a lot, which is shame, because it is a big and interesting palette.

Solving this is a matter of choosing a method of regulating difficulty that does not have these side effects and implementing it.  Ideas for several have been offered and I am sure you can think of some yourself, all of which involve work and time.

The question of of "is this worth doing at this time" is a tough one.  On one hand, the game as it is and was is very enjoyable and has found a healthy audience.  On the other, once people dig deep enough and begin to understand what is going on under the hood, some players begin to experience a "chalky after-taste".

To me, this comes down to a simple question - when you release this game as a final product, do you want it to be a great game (it already is) or an amazing game (which it certainly can be).  Most of that probably comes down to your emotional reserves - how badly you want to be able to say this chapter is done.

That choice is really personal and none of us can even pretend to judge it for you.

As always, thanks for the game, and cheers.

[fecalfrown]

Current "Raid Scaling" has many issues.  Net, it creates "Right Path" which is both counter-intuitive and bad for creating story/immersion.  Regardless of how it happens or the genre, it is unsatisfying when you have a game with a large amount of content of which most is ignored or used only when playing around except when it is acting as a "trap/journey of exploration" for newer players.

Right now, "Right Path" has three primary tenants;

1.  Wealth Optimization
2.  Direct Pawn Combat Avoidance/AI Exploitation (Killbox, Turrets, Animals, Trap Maze, etc)
3.  Intentional Loses/Pawn Rejection

I disagree that the "Right Path" is at all counter-intuitive. The end goal is to make a ship capable of taking you off the god forsaken planet you're stranded on. This is not a sandbox game.

1. Wealth Optimization: I'm not 100% sure what you mean by this - I presume destroying extra valuable items in order to game the system into sending you smaller raids? 'Wealth' in all forms in RW has inherent value toward getting you off the planet. Almost all wealth is generated via pawn labor, so why are you incurring additional 'unusable' wealth if it doesn't get you towards that end goal?

2. Direct Pawn Combat Avoidance/AI Exploitation (Killbox, Turrets, Animals, Trap Maze, etc): Certainly agree AI exploitation is an issue, and I know Tynan has devoted a lot of time attempting to counter the most egregious examples. I can't understand why you think why attempting to keep pawns out of harms way is counter-intuitive though.

3. Intentional Loses/Pawn Rejection: Intentional losses are hard to justify with the strong and lasting negative moodlets for losing colonists (maybe they should be harsher?).

[Plockets]

A lot of great discussion in this thread. The counterintuitive disincentive to improve your colony is what I dislike most about the current difficulty curve in regards to wealth, when the natural (and I think, desired) incentive should be to improve your colony and your colonists' lives.

I think an easy way to encourage that is by changing the "Low Expectations" buff so that it decays over time, rather than with wealth. This would at least remove the counterintuitive/gamey result that your colonists can become less happy directly because of your efforts to improve their surroundings, switching it to a more straightforward scenario where they become less happy over time at a (mostly) flat rate, which you could counter in a more intuitive/natural manner by trying to improve their surroundings.

RE: raid strengths, if the wealth calculation simply weighted unused items and artwork less, that might be all that is needed to make colony improvement feel like a net boon again, when combined with a built in need to increase colonists mood over time (because "Low Expectations" decayed over time).

[seerdecker]

The end goal is to make a ship capable of taking you off the god forsaken planet you're stranded on. This is not a sandbox game.

Rimworld has always supported both play styles -- building a ship, or playing indefinitely.

[Dolphinizer]

Everyone seems to be talking about avoiding wealth growth as a way of reducing raid size and seeing it as a negative thing, but perhaps it doesn't have to be that way.

Maybe some sort of 'mercenary' mechanic could be added to the game, allowing you to pay friendly factions as mercenaries to protect your colony. Essentially the idea behind this would be that you pay a 'subscription fee' to a faction, say X amount of wealth/silver every Y days and in exchange they protect you, either bolstering your defenses with heavily armed pawns of their own that would simply hang around your base (maybe even manning defense stations that you tell to man instead of simply running headlong into battle and dying like the current friendlies) or weakening enemy raids (simply reducing enemy raid size by some multiplier).

A system like this is already in place in the game with friendlies, but imo they tend to be a little too useless lategame since their numbers and gear seem vary so much. A dedicated money for protection system would provide a way to sacrifice wealth for safety, allowing people who simply want to get rich without having significant setbacks for it to have a proper system to achieve their goals, slowing their growth but preventing catastrophic losses in raids. This would also allow players to increase their wealth growth rate at the cost of greater risk of catastrophe from raids.

I don't know if this is a good idea, but it's just a thought I had