Difficulty system not based on wealth [1.0]

[Scavenger]

I have to agree with all of it. Particularly pawns becoming less useful and pumping turrets and traps, and doing dumb exploits to keep wealth low.

[Greep]

What bugs me is that wealth should be a major indicator for raids. Ofc people want that legendary stuff you got going or the huge supplies you have. I actually have never bothered with controlling my wealth, but there are fair points that increasing colony wealth doesnt do anything and just makes life harder.
I dont think there is a perfect solution and "exploits" will always happen.

Wealth based raids really only works for one faction lore-wise: "space pirates".  Maybe tribals.  If a very important mechanic isn't working well, lore should be tossed aside anyways.  It's not like regular raids makes sense anyways (pretty sure pirates would give up after the second shot), so lore is given second thought in the first place.

Things get silly if you look at raids in a sensible way.  I wonder where these 100 man tribal sapper raids are coming from to attack my completely isolated island ice cap colony.

[bbqftw]

My conclusion is - the 100+ tribals are coming to test you for either stock of doomsday launchers or barring that, your computer strength.

[Polder]

If raids scale with number of pawns, there is an incentive to keep the number of pawns low, or at least to avoid taking bad pawns

If raids scale with wealth, there is an incentive to limit one's wealth. This leads to absurd situations like not wanting good equipment, high quality rooms, a large base, etc.

Raids should not scale with wealth. Instead, they should scale according to how much harm previous raids inflicted on players. I'll not try to describe the exact algorithm but it would involve counting pawn death, temporary and permanent injury, wealth destruction/theft resulting from the raid in relation to total wealth, and work required to fix things again, and look at several of the last raids. This is roughly how a human game master would do it.

[RemingtonRyder]

Pawns being downed or killed is already covered by adaptation.

While scaling of threats with number of pawns doesn't take into account things like pawn capabilities, it does give a basic number of points which can be scaled by the other factors. A human game master would similarly scale encounters up according to the number of people in the party before considering other factors.

[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

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?

1] I think playtesting would be needed to see where limits would be but there probably should be some.  Also, you could take a lot of damage(injuries) without loosing anything per say, but still be nowhere neer able to fight like you otherwise can.  So injuries would count as a negative modifier.  loss of turrets maybe as well.

2] I think it would depend on how each raid was defeated.  If turrets get the most kills then maybe a raid that counters them. If mortars took out the siege, then maybe a drop pod assault on top of them.  Forcing Defence in Depth, something most players cant really do, so it makes cracks in the line that any raid could exploit.

3]I can get that without exploiting, also, if someone wants to cheat then it doesnt matter if something is balanced.  Animals are annoying for me to fight any time, but manhunter packs dont seem unbalanced.  They are probably the only kind of raid that makes sense to just mob charge the colony.

[RicRider]

Greetings this is my first post. Been playing this game since Alpha 17 and it's probably the game I play the most.

I don't think wealth is a bad metric and have always liked it. I think it just needs to be fleshed out to be more realistic because I agree that in alpha it was fine the way it was but for full release it needs to have some flavour. For instance there's a lot of mods out there that increase the types of traders that come to your base and give tons of different factions. Why not have raids based on your wealth and type of faction raiding you? For instance pirates would react to the value of drugs and weapons you have, tribes to the value of food you have, corporations to the value of buildings and structures you have? Etc. Then you could thematise it even further if you were a mod maker and for instance the Sparkling Worlds Mod Blue Moon corps might go for colonies that stack prosthetics, weapons and medicine... or the Walkblem guys could go for colonies that stack the stuff they make, etc.

Anyway I like wealth but it definitely needs fleshing for full release! By thematising the wealth-raiding system it could also make it very moddable.

[freemapa]

Why not base raid difficulty on colony wealth visibility? Kind of like caravans.

Here's how I envision it:

• the colony starts with zero visibility (only small random raids)
• enemies that flee during a raid increase visibility
• when traders arrive, colonists may leak information, based on their break risk (and Warden skill?), also increasing visibility
• once the comms console is researched, there can be a mental break where colonists radio information to the enemy, greatly increasing visibility
• if a faction turns hostile, visibility increases greatly
• visibility will slowly decrease with time
• this new visibility value is used as a multiplier of the existing wealth value.

This game mechanic would mean you could create all the wealth you wanted, as long as you could keep everyone happy and run a tight ship. I think this addresses many of this issues addressed in these posts in a relatively simple way.

Hmmm... this actually might not be a very difficult mod. Perhaps I'll look into it.

[bbqftw]

The funny part is you would think that wealth scales linearly to threats.

It doesn't, it is actually significantly supralinear in certain ways.

Do some dev mode experimentation and you will see what I'm talking about.

I was curious why I was facing raids of 8-10x my numbers on cas/merciless (including things like 300 v 22 infestations) while streamers in similar game states were getting 3-5x.

Through this dev mode testing I was able to figure out, but the absurdities of the wealth scaling system become even more obvious under such interrogations.

[Misquoth]

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

I like this idea. Leaves a little room for easing off a touch if you get hit too hard. But wealth might make sense as far as being a target for your enemies. Maybe there could be attacks more related to wealth where most of the mobs would steal stuff while the others created a diversion

[Jibbles]

It'd be a bit weird to consider pawns damage as a main factor for raid size.  So you get punished for effective strategies and proper defense? I know there's adaptation but not sure how much that plays a part.

Honestly I agree with wealth being one of the main factors for increasing raid size. Maybe adjusting values for different items would help. Values for armor/weapons doesn't match its worth IMO and they're a necessity. (crazy that players are damaging to lower wealth, understandable tho) I'd prefer those to be adjusted.  I would like for buildings to add a good amount of wealth.  I would like to see new structures which are super useful but very expensive, maybe they are kind of optional tech. Cloning for example (not suggestion btw).

I wouldn't expect raid sizes to get smaller or things to get easier if my colony was hit pretty hard, unless a lot of wealth was taken from me.  I find it interesting that is sort of a common complaint. Couldn't that be solved by adding a new storyteller?

Having ludicrous amount materials that aren't very useful to you + stockpiled on tons of food. The game isn't punishing you for progressing here. Destroying them is tedious and just slow downs progress. If that's what they want to do then I guess let them.

Enemies aren't properly tiered.  I think it would help to have a variety of mechs and more raid types with appropriate tech to counter them.  Game only throws more numbers at you. It'd be great if some threats like infestations were more interesting and not affected much by wealth for obvious reasons. I don't see the game getting a proper balance without drastic changes if not gonna add those kinds of things. Just my opinion tho.

[JimmyAgnt007]

Its not punishment for proper defenses, its scaling with your ability to repel attacks.  The more capable you are, the harder the game tries to hit you.  If you are badly wounded, then it eases off. 

[Jibbles]

If it kept scaling up cause you're not taking much damage then that is indeed punishment. Haven't been playing lately, but I sure hope some of the raids I was seeing was just balancing issues and not due to adaptation.

[Tynan]

It's always interesting the difference between how players interpret increasing difficulty as "punishment" versus progression.

Almost every game gets harder as the player progresses. DOOM, StarCraft, WoW, Portal, Street Fighter, Jagged Alliance 2, etc. It's an attempt to match challenge with player ability so the player is neither overwhelmed nor bored. But players don't tend to interpret, say, DOOM's increasingly difficulty fights as "punishment". Like, "Hey, I defeated a room full of 10 zombies, why am I now punished by having to fight a room of 15 zombies?" Nobody says this.

In RW interpretations seem to shift back and forth across this line very fluidly and it's hard to see exactly what drives that difference. It seems very personal and very situational, and (at least on the forum) can even be driven by meta concerns or theoretical analysis of code or XML.

Also interesting is how much is up to interpretation. Consider situations like this:

A) If you succeed game gets harder
B) Game gets harder over time, but if you get hurt game eases off temporarily to give you breathing room

Note that A and B above can describe the exact same code, the only difference is in interpretation of what is "cause and effect" and what is considered "neutral".

Or consider

C) Game starts at 50% difficulty and scales to 100% as you go without taking damage. Enemies cost 10 threat points each.
D) Game starts at 100% difficulty and scales to 200% as you go without taking damage. Enemies cost 20 threat points each.

Again, note that C and D are identical in actual outcomes. But someone reading the XML or the code might interpret them differently because of the anchoring effect of the "100% multiplier" concept, where 100% is intepreted as "neutral" (when in fact this number is invisible in actual play and may be tuned that way simply to make the design process easier, since it's easier to tune one central multiplier than many other numbers it applies to).

Anyway, I'm just rambling. I'm glad this thread exists, though. Some people are making some good points for me to consider, but it also throws light on the fact that the downsides of wealth as a core challenge-driving mechanic are much easier to describe than they are to solve. It's a damn hard problem.

In truth, raid strength isn't primarily based on wealth (wealth is a major component of it, but so is population including animals, health, recent damage taken, and some other bits). The system in game in the unstable build is really close to an overlapping mix of many of the ideas put forth here. So it'd be very easy to make a mod to apply only some of these systems - e.g. a storyteller who scales difficulty entirely by time and ignores other concerns. Or entirely by population. Etc. So you could try the ideas in this thread.

Having considered it more recently, I figure that if I was going to really rework the threat scaling system I would extend the caravan visibility system back to settlements as well, similar to the direction freemapa described. The game AI War also revolves around a mechanic like this, where the AI machine fleet enemy can always annihilate the player easily in the early game, but simply doesn't "notice" or "care" enough about the player's puny forces; there's an explicit system of how "noticed" you are and playing with that is a core part of the game in AI War. Something similar could be done for RW (though I have no plans for such an aggressive redesign at this point, it's one of many ideas in my long-term idea pool).

[bbqftw]

https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=20912.msg245565#msg245565

the more things change, the more they stay the same.

so with regards to the modern raid point formula:

just because certain raid point term is ∝ wealth * population, does not mean its not proportional to wealth! this is a key concept to grasp, you can really get in trouble with your taxes otherwise!!

The only factor of the ones you mention that is not proportional to wealth is the raid point contribution specific to release-capable animals (this is a special term - animal wealth has a separate contribution). Even in a game with hundreds of combat animals this component will rarely contribute to more than ~15% of the raid points. Every other factor - such as recovery, population, and pawn health is proportional to wealth because they all apply multiplicative modifiers to terms proportional to wealth.