Mech clusters subvert the game

[lt_halle]

There's really no strategy that at all feels "well played" or effective. Any loss against them feels cheap and unavoidable.

That's obviously the whole point. Forcing pawn damage = story telling.

That's a bad point then. Damage is a punishment mechanism - it is generally a result of non-optimal play. Let's take an extreme example of a random event that results in randomly dealing 5 gunshot wounds to half your colonists, with a chance to kill them. That's the entire event. That's obviously forced damage, but I wouldn't exactly call it story telling. The story telling aspect comes from HOW the damage was inflicted.

You line your colonists up at your bunker. They're holding the line admirably, but you don't notice an enemy carrying a rocket launcher sneak in through your chokepoint. Before you can down him he manages to get a shot off, shredding 3 of your colonists! This is a story - the player encountered a tragedy which was made into existence by their own negligence. It's also thusly a learning experience; the player is unlikely to be so lackadaisical with their enemy targeting in future raids.

Contrast this with a mech cluster raid. You line your colonists up, in the barren open field in which a mech cluster has set up with a mortar shield protecting its main building and 9 mortar turrets. Your colonists use smoke launchers to cover their advance, setting up to destroy the nearest cluster of turrets. As soon as they land a shot, 50 something mechanoids pour out of the dozens of pods in the cluster, and a dozen and change more rain down randomly from the sky. Your colonists are faced with two options - retreat and deal with the mechs, having the colony get bombed to hell as a result; or, fight onwards while getting absolutely destroyed by the massive army of mobile mechanoids despite the safety from the turrets.

There is no winning scenario. There is no outcome that feels like a triumph. There are two sides of a very crappy coin that the player gets to pick their poison with. Most importantly, there's no learning from this that improves further outcomes. The player is screwed in some way no matter what they do. The core element of a tragedy is that the tragedy occurs for some reason - if this tragedy is emergent through gameplay, it must be as a result of player action. The game just deus ex machina-ing a tragedy onto you with nothing you can do about it is uninteractive, feels unfair, and most importantly is not fun.

You argue that the game is a story generator, but I'm not sure how much I want to play a story generator where every story ends with "and then they all died to the 8th mechanoid cluster in a row"

[zizard]

It's a joke, when the player gets screwed over with low to no counterplay, I call it "story telling". Who knows, maybe devs believe it unironically.

[lt_halle]

If it was a joke then sorry. There are a lot of people who unironically fall back on the "it's a story generator!" argument when there's some piece of the game that's poorly balanced.

[mooguy]

Mech clusters just received a massive nerf today.

- Limited mortar numbers
- Minimum range for some turrets
- Cooldown for some turrets/increased

Tynan clearly listened to the concerns people had

[Aponace]

I totally agree with your post. Clearly all those other comments saying otherwise didn't play far enough to see what's up aka didn't accept any quests / have a mountain base / have a killbox / have 4 colonists with a wooden shack.

[Tynan]

Hey guys, so a few things:

1 - I appreciate the feedback. I'm here to make you guys happy so anything you say will be thoughtfully considered. Absorbing and processing feedback is basically what I do all day (across many different feedback channels, forums, subreddit, discord channels, twitch streams and youtube videos, media reviews, Steam reviews, and trusted friends and testers).

2 - Clusters were extensively tested but people have different skills and playstyles so I'm still adjusting them going forward (as you can see from the patch notes). It also is clearly an adjustment from the old turtling gameplay, which is understandable but was the goal all along. Adding variety and new strategies to the game is good, and a great way to do that is to give the player the initiative instead of always putting him in a reactive role.

3 - RimWorld is not a skill test. Just because you play skillfully doesn't mean you'll never lose anything - at least at high difficulty. It's not made to proportionally reward skill. It's got an element of skill but it's not a skill measuring game. Most games are about measuring and rewarding skill, where for RimWorld this is not the central goal of the design.

A story where nobody ever loses anything is not a good story. As a storytelling game, RimWorld is designed to create temporary losses. Note that this is different from a full colony wipe - with skill and forward planning, full wipes should always be avoidable (this doesn't mean any situation is recoverable, but it means that it could have been feasibly prevented). But that doesn't mean you'll never lose any particular resource at any moment.

4 - Expanding on the above: There is a difference between losing a resource (like a pawn or a turret) and losing overall. If you play StarCraft, you expect to lose some marines and tanks. It's part of the game, and expected, even if you're skilled, as long as the game isn't impossible to win overall. RimWorld at high difficulties is similar. You should expect to lose people, get knocked down, and have to recover. Expect to lose half your base or even see the man in black. Recovering is part of the challenge. You can always win the game; it doesn't mean you'll always be gaining and never lose a single person, weapon, resource, emplacement, or battle at any moment. Pawns are a resource to be spent.

5 - I expect Merciless is now harder than it used to be. I consider this a good thing since it was way too easy before. Wider difficulty range is a better game design, since it supports people who really want a true challenge that most people genuinely cannot defeat; while others can just go down to the difficulties that aren't in red text and don't require a special menu interaction to unlock. (Though note that having such a challenge means most people won't be able to beat it.)

[Bozobub]

So I still haven't bought Royalty because I'm content exploring 1.1 mechanic changes for now without getting into the whole 'whining noble' aspect of RimWorld (and psi powers), but I have to concur, there's too many 'mech things' going on.

I like to play Phoebe merciless (laugh it up fuzzballs) because I like base building and usually I'll get 2-3 raids back to back in the spring from the various enemy tribes and factions. Two years in a row now I've just got ship drops and mechanoids podding in on my map. Not a single human raid for two years! Before I even had decent weaponry I was plinking scythers with short bows.

I mean I get that RimWorld is pushing us to get off the planet faster but you know what's gonna happen for people who like base building right? I'm just gonna add mechanoid drops to the list of things that are annoying as hell to deal with all the time that I disable at scenario startup like toxic fallout. I presume there's also going to be mods coming out that lower the frequency of mechanoids or something. It feels dumb to do this but since I'm base building who cares right?

What I'd like to see is some kind of a sliding scale option at scenario startup that lets me tailor the interaction with factions in a way. I don't want all my conflicts to be with robots... seriously it just gets tedious after a while. I could have been unlucky so maybe my observation is all wrong and I should play a few more games, but literally while I'm fighting mechs from one ship drop another one lands on my farms in the middle of the base. Seems excessive!

Also if you don't like the idea of sliding scales then at least give us a way to go to mechanoid bases on the world maps and remove them from existence, like the way we do with other factions.

That was well thought out, kudos.  I appreciate hearing a more level-headed assessment, than the..."overexcited" versions I've been reading.

And thanks for the updates, mooguy and Tynan!

Good stuff; this is a constructive thread.

[DuckBoy]

I'm still not sure how I feel about mech clusters yet.  They're definitely new and different and exciting.  And some of the turrets that kill you from massive distances and explode when engaged in melee have definitely killed many of my favorite pawns. 

But it's overwhelming to the strategies that I know.  The strategies that used to work for me, not necessarily all the strategies that are possible.

There's a new metagame now and I'm just not sure that I've tried enough of the psychic powers to know whether or not the mechanoid drops are really overpowered... 

The berserk power is an instant kill on enemy units.  As is the Skip power if you have a small army of club wielders.  I've found my illegal psion was able to take down ~50 mechanoids over a few days, admittedly while pissing off the royals considerably. 

I might actually want to give it another few weeks to see if there are strategies that let me deal with these clusters effectively. 

[carbon]

I generally enjoy the mech clusters.

The walls especially were a really nice touch. They create safe zones and interesting opportunities to carve holes where you can hit exactly what you want to shoot without drawing additional fire. I think the worst stage of the game for mech clusters is the early game and that's not because they're too hard, but because they often don't come with any walls. You have to go through the trouble of building a wall far from base before any fun can really start. I think creating lesser versions of some of the mech turrets and buildings might also help add complexity to early mech clusters without adding difficulty. There's nothing particularly fun with just 4 random turrets and a handful of barricades sitting in the middle of nowhere, which is often the first introduction people are probably having to mech clusters.

I also like that some of the buildings can be useful if you preserve them. There's obvious stuff like the unstable power cells, but also keep shields and spawners alive can have long term utility. The shields can be used against future clusters (and raiders) that have the bad luck to spawn nearby. The spawners are the target practice some folks have been asking for for ages that doubles as a resource fountain.

I no longer fear scythers. Psycasting burden renders them largely harmless.

I do wish I had a clearer description of what does and does not provoke the dormant state to break. I'm never sure how much creative license the game is giving me to set thing up before the shooting starts, so I often don't really bother.

The mech cluster below is a good example of the fun risk / reward trade-off mech clusters. I had a plant killer land right next to my trees, but at the same time the mortar shield overlapped my geothermal generator. I was really hoping I could preserve the shield so I'd never have to worry about cracking open the generator again for repairs. Sadly, there was an explosion cascade that hit the shield, but I did get the upper unstable power cell intact; so not terrible overall.

-----

Edit: I do think mech clusters can get a bit stale with more than 2 or 3 in a row. It's nice to shoot at things that bleed and feel pain occasionally.

[Tynan]

Today's update includes some changes very relevant to the discussion.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/294100/partnerevents/view/1706240323220949451

Expect ongoing adjustments to the clusters; it's a new concept so it'll need multiple tuning and redesign cycles to really bed in.

[lt_halle]

Today's update includes some changes very relevant to the discussion.

https://steamcommunity.com/games/294100/partnerevents/view/1706240323220949451

Expect ongoing adjustments to the clusters; it's a new concept so it'll need multiple tuning and redesign cycles to really bed in.

Wow, these are some really great changes. They address a lot of the problems I had personally. I'll have to play them out but from the looks of it the mech clusters should be much more in-line with other threats now! Great work, Tynan

[Goldenpotatoes]

Honestly the minimum range addition alone is great, I feel a lot less inclined to spam mortars at the blaster cannon now if I'm actually allowed to close the gap and not get punished for it.

[Bozobub]

What pleases me most, frankly, is Tynan's obvious attention to player feedback.  When it makes sense, that is .  I didn't really need a lot extra in RW before, so the update will take some getting used to, but this kind of (re)work might even get me to buy the DLC.  Eventually, anyway, after a few iterations .

[kclace]

I heard Ludeon is looking into making the clusters non-hostile initially as a way to balance.

Personally, I'd like the clusters to start as an ally, actually protecting your base, but have the relations decline over time.

I agree though. The game needed to give players an incentive to stage an attack. Raid siege was supposed to do that, but it never worked out that way.

[jerome736]

Personally, I'd like the clusters to start as an ally, actually protecting your base, but have the relations decline over time.

What would be the rationale for the clusters to protect you?