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

[Pangaea]

Thanks. Will stick to this version for now though, since I'm so close to the very end-game.

Interesting about wealth. I assumed wealth was still a solid driver here, since raid sizes keep going up. But if wealth over 400k doesn't matter very much, it's definitely good for my playstyle, since I tend to end up with wealth of 800k-1 mill. Currently around 700k (forgot that I had 7 people on the road in the above stat image).

New ship lands inside our base. Probably over-prepared (went through ~3500 steel! ), but I'm quite frankly scared of all these centipedes in the midst of our base. And we did need a lot of it tbh, including the anti-grain warhead trap. This time it went off

The auto-cannons were already there from before, so I have some defence against all the sappers, but most of the mini turrets are new, and of course all the traps.







15 centipedes and 28 others. Yikes. Anti-grain trap took out most of the mini-turrets, but it also seems to have one-shot many mini-mechs, and even a few centipedes (head blown off on at least one I inspected).

Unfortunately all that preparation emptied our steel reserves, and we have much power infrastructure to rebuild, but it was probably worth it. No deaths, and only a few lost arms and legs. The friendlies were suicidal again, so most of the lost their lives. Wish they were a bit smarter in where they positioned themselves.

Unfortunately I placed the firing line too far back, so people with assault rifles (most of my guys) couldn't fire until the mechs came closer. But overall I'm pleased with how it turned out, and think there is a decent balance between high material cost from preparing like this, and reduced risk.

It does again show that play style matters a lot, though. I could have set up behind a sandbag line, with nothing else, and maybe gotten wiped out. Or at least lost 10-15 people. Once people go down, get set on fire, die, more people go down... It can quickly become untenable with sort of a doom spiral like that. I've seen it before in ship encounters. Have actually lost colonies to infections + bleeding post-battle because everybody are badly injured and inable to fix things. Then the spiral of mental breaks.



PS: Are others playing with this story teller? How are your experiences?

[Pangaea]

OMG. I think this shows the version I'm using is harder than default Cassandra now? Over 1700 fun points, which is around 500 more than I've had during the height of ship startup.



Btw, I had a crew of 7-8 people on the road for over 30 days to various mining locations. They got attacked a fair few times, but managed to handle it without deaths or lost limbs (but some very serious injuries).




Crew back, and I'm pleased about getting another raid, especially since it has humans. So much happening. This raid, plus a too deep infestation (spawned simultaneously). And then an ally stops by...

143!? 



At this point the game lagged something unreal. And the game basically doesn't lag for me at all. Now it was one frame every 1-2 seconds  This huge force felt bonkers big at the time, but that was before I noticed what the sappers brought.



That's a LOT of doomsday rocket circles... And they brought an equal amount of triple rocket launchers.

the almost 150 friendlies dropped in two big hurdles near the north-east of the map. The sappers entered further south, and went towards a mountain to hack through. I've never seen anything like this (but sadly none of the screenshots properly captured it). The first group of friendlies, around 70 people, simple evaporated from a hail of rockets and doomsdays. Everybody dead, and barely a corpse to show for it. Holy shit!

And they still had a handful more for the second group, though this lot largely survived. Earlier I was disappointed that so many friendlies joined, but this event made me very grateful  Thank goodness we weren't the recipients of all that hell. I lobbed mortars at the sappers, which only lost around 10-15 people at this point. Got a few kills here and there, as the group moved in towards our walls. Friendlies were engaging the other sappers, who oddly enough were largely out of weapons at this point Lots of casualties between them, but it was the friendlies that came out on top. Once the sappers started to flee, they got gunned down trying to exit the map. Only a few made it.

Tried to rescue 4-5 allies and capture around 5 badly injured raiders. Only two allies and 3 raiders made it back to the base. One raider was literally 2 seconds from dying, with 100% blood loss. Close call? Kinda!

This one ally had a rough time of it.



That is three different (or was it four?) doomsday rockets to the face. I counted up the pain, and it's at 212%. Yeah, I can see how that may hurt a little 

Amazingly she made a full recovery and exited the map without any permanent scars. Got +22 points for it, which is higher than I've seen from others. Don't know if that is based on the quality of the pawn, or the amount of injuries suffered, but it does vary quite a bit.


Anywho... you may say I'm a little concerned about starting up the ship now 

[Wanderer_joins]

If you've made it so far i'm confident you'll successfully start up the reactor. Don't be afraid to send your latest recruits to the frontline!

In the last update i've mainly rebalanced how the weights given to colonists increases with time, to make it more progressive. Here, at year 7-8, with few killed colonists, this factor should be high (even in the previous version i've never overcome vanilla's difficulty, but i had losses).
If you've got any save file before the launch it'd be really usefull to compare the end games.

The other points i'd like to check with the new version is whether raids on top aren't too easy and whether we can play merciless reliably without killboxes and cheesy tactics.

[Pangaea]

Have never had so many people before (almost 40), so even with heavy losses we'll hopefully get through it.

Admittedly this is Savage, but I really can't see how one can survive raids like this without a way to channel them into a field of fire. I got wiped when I tried at least. They are too many and too dangerous.

Will remember to save before triggering the ship, so you can check out how it would compare with vanilla Cassandra.

Looks like fun points top out at 2000? Never got this much in the vanilla Cassandra games (~1200 iirc), but I assume this limit is in the game itself? Probably a good thing tbh, as raids are intense as hell, and at some point it will be unmanageable in terms of lag and CPU/memory.

[Wanderer_joins]

Yes, there's a hard cap at 20000 points in vanilla... which i've removed, because i don't like hard caps

That said adaptive cassie is much more progressive and lenient early mid game, she'll only catch up with cassandra classic in late game, if you've been really successful. And in the latest version it should take even more time, but still there's a 3 to one difference between experienced colonists and recruits.

But i don't think you're actually at 20000 points, it's the vanilla graph which i think is disconnected from the mod's formula. You're so high because you're wealthy and must have a large team (even in vanilla the points are mostly based on colonists in the end-game with large colonies).

[Pangaea]

That's intriguing, that the graph isn't correct because this is using a mod instead of the vanilla game. I've turned on dev mode now and then to check it out, and seen the graph rise and rise. Some of the raids have been crazy, like the doomsday one I mentioned. But given this info it's probably more in line with previous default Cassandra games on savage. I'll know more when the reactor is enabled and the game throws the kitchen sink at me.

It's a little scary seeing the upper cap is removed, but I'll see how it pans out Based on what you have said, it should be roughly on the level of default Cassandra now, or possibly a little tougher. Really glad I learnt about the Numbers mod, because now I can see how many raiders attack us (the game can only select up to 80 "things"). The last tribal raid was 187.

Edit: this is current wealth, just shy of 1 million. Only around 18% of that is in people and the horde of animals. Haven't lost any pawns, but a mortar sadly landed in the middle of the barn (safe-zone) and insta-killed 12-15 animals.

[Pangaea]

Errr, some attacks are kinda savage *gulp*

35 centipedes? I wrote a little more about it here.



Suffered our first death in Hutch. 9 others downed (I tried to save them throughout combat, but it was rough as hell). Had almost forgot about the two night owls. Thankfully one of them is a doctor, so we have one guy able to fix people. Poor chap has his work cut out for him now.

I don't know how many raids point or whatever this amounts to, but 80 mechs and 35 centipedes sure is rough.

Much wrecked afterwards you may say.



Edit: I uploaded the file from just before the ship was triggered HERE, in case you want to have a peek.

[Wanderer_joins]

No cap confirmed 

Thanks, it'll help for the end game tuning, I'll look into it!

Edit: i've looked into it and you've overcome 20000 pts, you're using the 9-1 version (1st update). In the 11-3 version (2nd and current update) i tuned it down, since the philosophy of this mod is a "no kill box" storyteller. So even on merciless, 1 million wealth and 40+ colonists you'd still be under 20000pts. So if you plan to give another try, i'd say you're ready for merciless difficulty with adaptive Cassie!

[Pangaea]

Cheers, that is interesting. Perhaps I should indeed make the step up to Merciless then and see how we fare. It sounds like a pretty big boost from Savage (re: xml values), but it also sounds like we're kinda dealing with the same sized raids already, so.. hehe.


Anyway, the reason I came to the thread again (and saw your edit) was that we're 10 years in, everybody are healthy, we have resources up the wazoo, so I think it's time. I'm feeling confident based on the recent sapper raids, but we shall see.

Savefile for when I trigger the ship: https://ufile.io/m1b68z8p

Fun points topped out at 2000 as usual (which shouldn't actually apply), and wealth at 1.3 million.






I'll post another save if we survive the onslaught.


Edit: Gee. Tough start. The counter is still at 15 days, we've had two raids on top of each other, and one death. Doomsday and triple rockets to the face from drop attacks are pretty much impossible to defend against. Just cross your fingers people only get downed instead of killed. RIP Rissa.

[Pangaea]

I don't even... This is unpleasant 



There were even more as well, though I'm not sure exactly how many came. First mechs dropped from the sky in three groups, and while I'm desperately trying to deal with that, another horde invaded. We survived, for now, and I'm trying to heal up people in the midst of cascading mental breaks. No more deaths thankfully (we had another in between these raids), but everything is destroyed. I used two triple rockets and two doomsday, so most corpses disappeared. Therefore not sure how many it was in total. But I'm pretty sure it was at least 50 centipedes and feck knows how many others. 80-100? Not impossible.

With that, only about 5 days in, I've moved everybody to "Anything" schedule so they can get some rest in between battles and repairs. Keeping count of raids now, and this was the 8th and 9th. I've used two antigrain warheads. One was a mighty sweet hit and basically wiped out the tribals in that one hit.

[Wanderer_joins]

Yeah, 10 years and only one death, at that point cassie goes for the kill. Most of your colonists are worth more than a centipede for the storyteller.
But she also takes into accounts more significantly down colonists and health status, so it should help during the ship sequence.
This is fine since i like apocalyptic endings, but still, i delayed the time factor for those who like playing 15-20yo colonies. In this version the max weight was roughly reached after 5 years as a colonist, it's more like 10 in the last update.

An antigrain warhead on top of a tribal raid is always satisfying. And i've seen there's an outpost with 2 more

[Pangaea]

Yep, that quest came up when I had already decided to trigger the ship, so I actually didn't do it. Sounds like the latest version is a fair bit more lenient than this one, which is probably a good thing. Some of the raids throughout were pretty obscene.

But we survived! Two deaths and three combined, but not too bad all things considered. Only had one resurrection serum, so wanted to save it in case a truly crucial pawn died. Used three healer serums on brain scars, some of them were vegetables.

The first half of the 15 days was a lot worse than the last half. 4 spare antigrain warheads, plus the two other gadgets I totally forgot about.

Unless I missed some raids, we got 19 throughout the 15 days. 10 (!) of those were mechs, including centipedes dropping on top of us. But two of those cases were scattered drop-pods, so it wasn't terrible. With such wealth, it may actually be worse to get pirate on-top drops, because they bring the mass one-shot weapons. They certainly tore us a new bumhole early on.

Some stuff to rebuild before we lift off, including fixing an engine and rebuilding a life pod. The ~200 animals will unfortunately need to stay behind.

Here is the savefile from moments after the last attack is dealt with, and the reactor is ready.
https://ufile.io/1a54ibva

The raids from about day 7-8 were noticeably less severe. Either because we suffered two deaths, or due to attrition from all the people downed and injuries suffered. Some animals died too, but doubt that matters much. Due to all the mech attacks, we ended up with more components than fine meals 







PS: Alex ended up with a colossal amount of kills because he fired the before-mentioned antigrain that wrecked the tribals.

[Wanderer_joins]

Congrats!

If there is any good time to lose one or two pawns, it's at the start of the ship sequence, it'll ease the following raids, works well with vanilla storytellers as well.

Alex has huge kill stats, that's also why i'd rather not use them in the metrics, outliers may be hard to deal with. As a side note kills from mortars also give mood buff for bloodlust pawns, so you could use 'chimpanze', 'legend' and 'morton' on the first round of mortars to fulfill easily their need for kills.

I'm impressed you made it with so few deaths with this set up, notably with mechs, your pawns behind sandbags are all in the AoE of their heavy charge blaser. Usually people hide themselves behind a mix of walls and sandbags, and spread the defense out.

[Pangaea]

Thanks

Good point about bloodlust. I didn't do that on purpose. When raids hit I generally just picked whoever was closest to the mortars, so we had a decent chance to get some hits before they got too close to our walls. But I do recall that once we flanked a tribal sapper crew and filled them full of holes, one of my pawns ended up with +37 from 5 kills. Wow! At other times I flanked them with somebody with a doomsday, which tended to get them to flee ;-) Again this was simply done with whoever non-shield that was close. And Legend, being a Night Owl, would often sleep through combat tbh. Depended when they hit us. He was a medic, though, and would often rack up something like 6000 XP (well above the 4000 soft cap) with only normal tends.

About walls+sandbags, this is something I was advised about earlier and tried out in a previous save. It works really well if the angle is basically straight on. Cover is obviously better than just sandbags. But in my experience it would often hurt us, because many people with narrower angles would not be able to shoot at enemies because a neighbouring wall would block their view. So this time I went for this simpler setup. As the colony grew they wouldn't fit in, so logistics was kind of an issue.

Mechs was always really hard though, particularly when they brought so god damn many Infernos are hell to deal with. People catch fire and run into the middle of combat. So I would micro real hard here, try to put people out. Sometimes a pawn would not actually be on fire either, but still run about. It helps to undraft-draft them. That 'resets' their madness. With so many infernos, however, it's impossible to sufficiently deal with it. You can get hit with 6+ infernos in the same area, meaning everybody will start running about. Firefoam poppers help for the first hit, but these battles could last for a real-time hour.

Heavy chargers was a big issue too ofc, but unless you rely on sniper rifles, or possibly bolt actions, you're going to have to get into the thick of battle to be within range. There will be a wall of bullets in both directions, so good armour is important. Without that, we would have suffered a lot more deaths. Oh, and if somebody could downed in a bad position (on fire, or badly timed mental break), I would try to rescue them witha shield belter. With so many bullets flying everywhere, stray bullets could easily kill off a downed pawned lying ahead of the sandbags.

Sappers are gruesome though. By the end here, as you can see from the save, I had autocannons and miniturrets everywhere in the various pockets, but sappers would still find a way. They'll gladly start zigzagging through the walls to avoid field of fire. Unless you're able to hurt them with mortars, the best solution is to flank them I think. Especially tribals. Not really an option with pirates when they have 10s of doomsday, mind you 


This save was a lot of fun, so it's kind of a little sad to have ended it. Given what you have said, think I'll try out Merciless next, with the updated 11-3 storyteller. I honestly can't see surviving without a killbox though, despite you saying this storyteller is meant to be played without them. I liked playing without a trap maze, however, so will stay away from that moving forward.

Well, by the end here I did put many traps in strategic locations, especially where sappers had targeted, but it was pretty rare for anybody to actually trigger them. Most probably got triggered as raiders were fleeing the map tbh. But I liked having those IEDs in the maze. A few people would usually catch fire, and if there was some grass or trees there, it could cause some issues for invading raiders. And it felt less cheesy than traps every which way (and less maintenance ofc).

Thanks again for this storyteller. It's been fun to play with, and I especially enjoy being able to go on caravans without quite so much worry about the caravan or base getting wiped out. Wish the base game had more quests and events tbh, as it's fun to interact with them, although most aren't all that good (especially in the end game).

On Merciless, do you get a lot more mental breaks than on Savage? I can see that may be a big issue, particularly in the end when loads of relatives die in the huge raids. And we won't have more ways to boost mood after all. Oh, and I was helped in the end-game here by setting up the game with 25% chance for Transhumanist trait. That's why we have so many.


Edit: Oh holy shit that got long lol. Sorry! Didn't meant to erect a text wall 

[Wanderer_joins]

Sappers are deadly if you don't block them before they get in. And i thought they could destroy your ship.

It's always a bitter-sweet experience when you launch your ship, so much time invested in your pawns and hours micromanaging their work. But at some point your colony is mature and they can live their lives.

The threats on merciless won't be much different from what you've faced, the main difference will be mood management.