(1.0)(WIP) Adaptive Cassie Storyteller - Fine tuning

[Wanderer_joins]

A swarm of small manhunter animals is harder to deal with in the open, and fighting behind sandbags is really brutal. I'd add a few traps and turrets. Funneling pirates into traps is cheesy but using a few traps strategically placed is really useful and fair.

Mie is always a keeper for my colonies, such a good background, too bad she didn't make it. I've seen Truth, he's almost spent a year as a colonist, but you also have a good pool of prisoners. With Adaptive Cassie, the following raid must have been easier after the manhunter pack. It's nice to see she's working as intended, after almost two years and a rather good start, she's still more lenient than Cassandra classic as you're building your colony.

The fun points are reflective of the threat on your colony (vanilla) and the adapt days on "recovery" are translated into a factor. For example at 60 days (when you lost Truth) it's worth 1.2 (20% larger threats) 0.8 at 0 days (where you're in your last screen shot - i.e. -20%), and weighted 70% at savage difficulty i.e. +/- 14%. It can go higher but the growth is slower (like in your previous playthrough) so it's rather theoretical.

[Pangaea]

Bad news. We died. Ish. 





Three people on the road when 10-11 mechs (all scythers) landed outside our gates. Actually surprised it was such a tough attack with people on the road, but perhaps it was more a case of scythers being a nightmare to fight. Had it been 10-15 normal raiders we may have been okay. Actually had 4 melees as well, but they didn't stand a chance. Those awful swishing sounds, and arms, legs and ears flying every which way.

Not everybody dead here yet, and the three on the road will be back soon, but with 5 scythers still standing I consider this a total colony wipe.

(Onesan is on fire, and Mole's corpse is almost consumed by flames.)

Actually quite liked this base, map and colonists, so it's a bit sad.

Unfortunately I think the only lesson I can take from this is that without a killzone we are fucked. It really is that simple. Maybe short of extreme wealth control. But then we didn't have all that much wealth yet. I did notice that smoothed floors and especially smoothed walls add a pretty big chunk of wealth. And doubly so for walls since 20 silver is added in every adjacent room. Some of the wealth increases is due to smoothed material.

After almost getting wiped several times I did eventually put up some traps here and there along mountain passes, but no killzone. And that seems to be what killed us. Although I'm sure I could have done things differently here, like locking ourselves behind the gates and trying to lob mortars at them. Or employing other semi-cheesy tactics like bunching up behind a door with melees in front.

Think the save is able to be uploaded. Hopefully you can get something useful out of checking it out.

[Wanderer_joins]

Thanks for the feed back, i'll check it out.
Do you have a save just before the scyther raid to see how it compared to Cassandra Classic?

[Pangaea]

Thanks for the feed back, i'll check it out.
Do you have a save just before the scyther raid to see how it compared to Cassandra Classic?

Have one from when I was forming the caravan, which should be pretty close.

[Pangaea]

This is when the mechs landed, which may be too late for your purposes?

[Wanderer_joins]

Thanks, it will help. It's roughly working as intended, your colony had a good start, savage difficulty, day ~200ish, 9 healthy colonists. 10 scythers is a deadly threats, but they can be handled with a few casualties and micro. You had 4 melee with shields, animals and shooters. You can also die, but that's Rimworld 

That said i'm thinking of a few tweaks. The idea of this mod is to stick to vanilla balance but with more time for colony building, more importance given to experienced colonists and lower threats when colonists are out. I could delay the weigh increase of colonists at lower difficulty levels.

[Pangaea]

Cheers. Although it didn't exactly seem like a good start with several people dying and generally getting our arses handed to us whenever tough raids hit 

Will try the story teller again, though. I particularly like that it lowers raid strength during caravans, since I like to interact with the trade and quests. Sending people out can still be suicidal, but probably less so with your storyteller.

The bane of my failed colonies seem to be bad luck when taking on raiders in fair ways. I simply like taking on threats by sitting behind sandbags or chunks and have two teams firing at each other. Can work in the early game, but later on it gets dangerous, and in this case it killed us. Which, for better or worse, kinda forces me in the direction of cheesy tactics like killzones. It simply works, while also enabling us to take on threats (sort of) directly.

They may be even more important for tribal starts tbh, as even mini turrets are very far away. Hadn't gotten them yet in this game. We generally have terrible weapons and armour too, so are easily outgeared.

[Pangaea]

New game after getting wiped. After almost a full year we are only 6 people (first raider was great, then nothing), so we have gotten a few chased refugees. I took on two of them. Unfortunately the refugee was total gunk, so I left them at the map edge, hoping they'd get kidnapped so I wouldn't have to banish them.

Seemed things were a bit peaceful after that, so I checked out the graphs.



Guess this could be taken advantage of (but then you could suicide poor pawns in regular raids anyway, I've heard people do that). I am glad there is a function like this, however, as I've had games where almost the entire colony has been kidnapped, and in theory this could enable us to get back on our feet again.

[Wanderer_joins]

As you can see the recovery is short when it's negative ( less than 10 days). Chased refugees are relatively rare at mid- high pop, so it's not really significant.
Even the strategy to recruit poor pawns to sacrifice is hard on the long term, because you've to recruit them and they always end up valuable in some way, and they still increase your threat points even if they can't shoot at their feet!
That's also why experienced pawns are weighted up to 3x a new recruit.
All in all, it's hard to base a strategy on attrition, but it helps for recovery.

[Pangaea]

Fair points. It did increase pretty quickly, although life also felt really quiet for a long time. But part of that might have been random spread. And especially as tribals, it takes a long time to recruit people (and the vast majority die in raids anyway, and soon there are barely human raiders), so it's not like it's easy to recruit new people.


Good grief. This is not a sight you wanna see. Doomsday rocket + triple rocket. Vast amounts of red liquid flowed out of Red.





Definitely not this either. I hate it when ships crash down inside the base, especially this late in the game, because obscene amounts of mechs will pop out. 8 centipedes plus almost 20 others.



Horrific fight. I actually installed an antigrain warhead trap (south of the ship), expecting some scythers or whatever to attack the people I had down there. Unfortunately for me they never did, and the battle was very tough -- despite asking for ally help (10 people came). 5 of my own plus an ally were downed, though thankfully *we* didn't lose anybody (but around 10 limbs/eyes). 3 allies fled mid-battle (bastards!), the rest died -- except the one person we managed to save.

So far the hospital has been almost ludicrously over-sized at 16 beds, but it was filled to the brim.




Forgot to take screenshots of the dev mode graphs, but despite the heavy injuries, the graphs spike up pretty quickly. That looks fairly normal, however, unless you suffer deaths.

Don't know if you follow threads elsewhere on the forum, but I posted about a killzone I'm using now, because for better or worse it seems to be mandatory to survive for me, especially on Savage difficulty. I'm not using a a trap maze so far, but I do have a double corridor to buy me some time to get into position. I hope you don't hate me too much for it. I simply want to survive, and the last game ended rather quickly without one of these gadgets.

(It looks a little different now as I'm trying to move some turrets north, but this is the general set-up)

[Wanderer_joins]

Yes, if anything i'm thinking of slowing the pace at which she catches up to vanilla's storyteller.

[Pangaea]

It is mostly okay in fairness, though perhaps that is also because I'm now using a killbox and it's easier to handle with giant raids then -- as long as they go that way of course. Recently 60-70 raiders attacked, and they brought big guns. Three or possibly four doomsday rockets went off in our face (took out all turrets+cannons of course), and once we counted the corpses afterwards, they left another 7 doomsday rockets and 7 triple rockets on the ground. Don't know how many more they brought (who ran away).

We survived okay, largely thanks to good armour in the late game I think, but I don't see how one could reasonably survive something like this without them all going into a killzone.

It's tricky though. It's fun to fight battles like this, as long as we survive haha! Yet it's also easy to get overpowered. Particularly in the early-ish stages of the game when have few people and poor weapons and armour.

[Wanderer_joins]

Yes, and the idea of this mod is really to get away from the wealth crush. I've just rebalanced it, always in the spirit of a no killbox defense, delaying the time/factor.
It should be "easier" but in Rimworld much of the difficulty is in the playstyle of the player.

[Pangaea]

That is true, difficulty is wildly different depending on how one plays. Killbox/no killbox, wealth control/no wealth control, trap mazes galore/or not. Et cetera.

I'm using the version before some of the recent changes (downloaded from a dropbox link, because I don't use steam), so maybe it's tougher than vanilla now, I'm not sure. But we've had some tough raids, that's for sure. Almost 1300 fun points. 19 scythers dropped right on top of us, cutting off animals from escaping and pawns from engaging. 7 people downed, with countless lost limbs. Many animals died too.

This lot just showed up from the map edge. Holy cow.



22 centipedes (7-8 infernos) and 16 lancers. Good armour really helps, but people keep running into the middle of combat when on fire. One person became a vegetable from a 2/10 mangled scar brain injury, but other than that it went fairly well. Though I did, in desperation, fire a doomsday rocket and triple rocket into a crowd of around 12 centipedes. Nobody went down, and everything dead got evaporated (sad face for lost plasteel), but it must have done some damage. All walls disappeared

An attack like this would have completely ruined us without focus fire and cannon support.


Just a thought here, and maybe it would have to be for a different mod, but would it be possible to almost totally ignore wealth for raid sizes and frequency?

It's a tough one, though. Wouldn't be much fun in the late game if your 25 assault rifle pawns get attacked by 10 raiders. Or likewise, if you after a meltdown have 5 pawns, and they get attacked by 100 raiders because it is year 7 or whatever. Maybe if it was possible to calculate it on actual base structures/defences and pawn strength, rather than total wealth.

Speaking for myself, with little to no wealth control, I tend to end up with mountains of spare textiles and clothes (that I trade away when traders visit). Then backup marine helmets and armour that people don't wear automatically. Slightly degraded devilstrand pants, shirts and dusters, a pack of art, and hundreds of meals, thousands of pemmican, and maybe 10,000 vegetable+meat+milk, depending on weather/toxic events.

Maybe all of that shouldn't be ignored entirely, but the way things are now, the majority of wealth is item wealth. Some of that is equipment of course, but I reckon most of it is textiles, clothes/armour, ex-raider weapons, food.

Currently, in the late game with a mountain base, this is my spread (Fall 5506):

[Wanderer_joins]

I've updated the dropbox version, same link.

Actually, wealth has very little impact beyond 400k. It's mainly the experience of your colonists which grows with time. I've reduced it in the last update. Another advantage she gives is for large colonies, the threats no longer increases linearly with the number of colonists.

22 centipedes is tough according to any metric