AI Director between friendly and classic.

Started by Teiwaz, November 06, 2013, 10:42:22 PM

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Teiwaz

I'm finding that Classic is too grueling for long-term play. (Attacks get nearly constant after a few hours, and the game end up playing more like tower defense than a town builder). However, friendly is just boring - attacks never seem to get tougher than 3 raiders and they hardly ever attack.

I'd like an AI director between Classic and Friendly. Closer to Classic than Friendly, but significantly slower than Classic, which gets silly. Right now that's just a huge gap, and I want to play somewhere in the middle of it.

nja

Completely agree.  The area between the two is exactly where my play-style would land.

Even Evan - Evan enjoys more of a challenge than Phoebe, but he's not as malicious as Cassandra.  He's the best choice for a relaxed game that won't get boring.

Tynan

I'm getting the sense of this from many community sources. Look forward to Chill Callie Classic in the next build (soon).
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

nja


ShadowDragon8685

I think part of this may be the bug that causes nothing but raids and the very occasional enraged boomrat to happen...

But yeah. Honestly, the combat tempo on Cassandra is just too much. Sometimes I barely had time to get the sandbags and turrets back up before the next group of raiders was landing, let alone sweep up or do any building on my fortress.
Raiders must die!

Tynan

We're testing Callie Classic in 253c. If there are no major bugs it'll be public tomorrow.
Tynan Sylvester - @TynanSylvester - Tynan's Blog

ThomasA

Looking forward to the new build!

An AI like "Pacifist Pete" would also be great, challenging but without so much fighting apart of wild animals.

As the list of possible events gets longer I think Cassandra Classic will also use less raids.

Teiwaz

I played a couple hours on the new director last night.

The step down from Classic Cassandra certainly helped. My Colonists were able to fare much better on their own even though I was playing without turrets (perhaps because I was playing without turrets, causing slower raid ramp-up) but ultimately I was still forced to move entirely underground within a couple hours. (Fortunately my underground refuge was mostly done, and while the raiders burned my surface town to the ground, my colonists mostly survived and just had to make do with doubling up in the partially-completed underground bedrooms while I finished them.)

The attacks still seem pretty frequent, and I still don't see how an above-ground colony is feasible against raids as often as they are and in the strength they are. I suspect that some of the idea that raids are really frequent is due to the fact that I often end up playing on 3x time acceleration, and then swap to 1x for raids, which means the raids feel three times longer than they actually are. At the moment, they still don't feel as "important" as Dwarf Fortress... Even though it's easy to just pull up the drawbridge in DF, making the raids meaningless, their much lower frequency just makes them feel like bigger events, somehow. But given that the raids already are quite dangerous, it's not like just having less frequent, but more major raids is a realistic answer.

I think one solution might be to have larger, but less frequent raids, but also make combat less lethal. Guns are almost always fatal at the moment, which means that it tends to be the case that either a raid fails utterly, or it completely destroys your colony. You'd have to make it harder to recruit raiders to balance this out, but I don't think that's a bad thing at this point, as I quickly end up with colonies of entirely ex-raiders, which seems odd.

The other issue is that the underground approach is just hugely superior to surface colonies. The game is pretty good about not letting you just move underground right away - you have to survive long enough outside to get hydroponics up and running, and find enough geysers underground to move to geothermal power, but once you do the game is pretty much "won." I think I'd like to see some more influences pushing you to maintain a surface presence. Something to make it so that an underground refuge bunker makes a lot of sense, but just going down there full time and becoming mole people has more drawbacks. That way the game could be rebalanced to support the gameplay it seems to be intended to have - defending a town with an armed militia of citizens ala "Firefly," rather than defending an underground tunnel with machinegun turrets ala "Aliens."

chaotix14

I really like the new easier but not passive AI storyteller. It gives me the ability to build a base without feeling rushed, as I felt with cassandra. The only thing I would really like to see is the removal of some of the more destructive events, like the battery shotcircuit. "You know that piece of wall in the centre of your base? Yeah, it's a massive fire now that will burn down a large part of your base because you decided that you'd need a couple of batteries to store solar energy."
It's just such an annoying event in that it feels unavoidable, it can happen basically anywhere in your base and you generally can't defend against it. A crop blight, while annoying won't cause any trouble if properly prepared. A short circuit however will always cause considderable damage to a base, and you are almost always forced to rely on solar power and batteries if you want to build a base which can support more than a handfull of colonists.