"Tower Defence" solution: Raiders don't kill you, you'll starve or freeze first.

[Luckless]

Based on the forums it seems that the current biggest issue in the game is that raiders turn it into a cheap tower defence game, and in turn many people have been thinking up wild ideas of ways raiders can be 'improved' to make it more challenging and negate the current choke point tower defence game play that lets you actually survive them.

My solution to the 'raider problem' is to make them less common, less powerful, and not out for blood. Make raiders just that, raiders. They get in, smash and grab, but pull back at a reasonable resistance. Taking resources, possibly kidnapping a settler or two if they're not resisted firmly and quickly enough. If they don't become lemmings running to their death in a hail of gun fire, then 'tower defence' naturally becomes far less of a needed element to survive.

(To make them really interesting and effective we would need a more detailed resource and item modelling system, rather than having just weapons include things like tools, clothes, etc, and rather than having 'magic numbers' for food, metal, etc, they exist as measured units in storage lockers/bins that can be spread over the base. But that is over and above this topic.)


So, if raiders aren't the biggest threat, and are more of a 'set back' mechanic, then what can cause a game to end? Improved character stats and greater focus on basic survival.

Add some form of a heat model, need for water, various kinds of nutrients, etc. Characters can be in one of several states of weakness/strength. Let them dip too far into weakness because you're not fulfilling enough of their needs, and you can quickly find yourself in a hole you can't get out of.

Push the game in the direction where finding water, more than one kind of food source, protection from the elements, sanitation, medical care, etc, will be the prime motivators in building a 'good colony', and then 'build a maze of turrets to kill baddies' is no longer needed.

Include more options for a character's mental state than simply going berserk. Let them become depressed, less motivated and productive which can set them in a feedback loop where they do less, become more depressed, and possibly drag your other survivors down with them.

[Darthaidan]

One of my running Ideas is to have disease and or plague. On my fist night in game my people slept outside in the rain, as a boy scout I don't recommend this. My people should have had a major cold, or some weird space disease.

Also I want a random event of plague rats or lepers who are like raiders and a random event, but if not buried in time leave a plague cloud. Maybe even have infected Raiders to make their disposal more important.

[Spike]

Well, the truth is, it seems this way because there is nothing else to do in the game - yet.  Right now, once you get food, power & living quarters up, that's about it.  There's a few things to research - really just a "demo" of the research system, but there's nothing else to do except fight raiders.

The biggest solution will be to have more things that you need or want to work on - which will come.  This is alpha, after all.

[Kender]

raiders. ... possibly kidnapping a settler or two if they're not resisted firmly and quickly enough...

I like this idea, since colonists are the biggest asset in this game.
Also, especially in this case, 'Hand-to-Hand' may become important.
PS: Those 'kidnapper' type of raiders may use some sort of stealth, as invisible in darkness, so they can sneak in.

Add some form of a heat model, need for water, various kinds of nutrients, etc. Characters can be in one of several states of weakness/strength. Let them dip too far into weakness because you're not fulfilling enough of their needs, and you can quickly find yourself in a hole you can't get out of.

Agree with this too. We are well trained in fighting against ill intentioned humans by now, it maybe the time to emphasize on the other aspect of this game, fighting and surviving the element of nature.

[Galileus]

I'm sorry to be rude, but this idea is a disaster.

Easier raiders are possible on lower difficulty story tellers. But this is a minor part of it, as this does not addresses the other hazards. The main problem with your idea is that id doesn't help the problem - it worsens it. If right now raiders are too easy to fight off with turrets - they will be even easier if they are weaker. Fact, that they won't be for blood changes nothing - and if anything, they will be even more eager to jump under fire and do nothing about it. Not only that, this is not a solution - even if it would work. It's a castration! You don't fix a problem with part of your game by removing it!

I just... no! NO!

[ShootyFace]

I would love to see the raiders adapt to your defenses. Instead of all rushing the front door every time, what if a group decided to use a rocket launcher to blow a hole in a wall and enter that way? Perhaps they could siege your colony if your defenses are too strong, burning down crops and targeting solar panels. I think having adaptive raider AI that finds new and interesting ways to ruin your day would be preferable to nerfing things like turrets. The hands-on strategic element of RimWorld would shine if you had to break a siege, or even eliminate a raider camp that might spring up on your map. Having AI that would learn from it's mistakes, or vary their approaches to assault, would go a long way to shaking up the current formula.

[Kender]

I would love to see the raiders adapt to your defenses...

I would love it too.

I am wondering could some parts of the problem caused by the 'turtling' play style?
Except capturing a roaming refugee once in a while, I don't really need to make any interaction with outside world.
It would be more difficult if colonist have to go outside to search/scavenge for vital supply more often.

For now, without improve the AI to adapt to player's defense, make them camp some kind of source of supply outside. by doing this, let player lead the attack to them would probably make some interesting fight. Players are more adaptive than AI of course. XD

PS: the location of this 'source' should not be fixed on the map.

[Luckless]

I'm sorry to be rude, but this idea is a disaster.

Easier raiders are possible on lower difficulty story tellers. But this is a minor part of it, as this does not addresses the other hazards. The main problem with your idea is that id doesn't help the problem - it worsens it. If right now raiders are too easy to fight off with turrets - they will be even easier if they are weaker. Fact, that they won't be for blood changes nothing - and if anything, they will be even more eager to jump under fire and do nothing about it. Not only that, this is not a solution - even if it would work. It's a castration! You don't fix a problem with part of your game by removing it!

I just... no! NO!

I really have to ask how many paragraphs from my post did you even bother to read?

It doesn't matter how you spice them up, strong, frequent, and deadly raiders results in a tower defence like game play in one form or another where the entire game revolves around trying to find a way to exploit the raider AI with something that ends up being a cheap mechanic.

This suggestion also plays into how the development process works. As it stands now there is a lot of discussion and push for making raiders harder to add complexity and make the game more interesting. This is simply a bad direction that doesn't actually address the problem with raiders and the defences against them. Spend a week's development time changing the raiders to be 'better', players/testers will spend a day breaking it and we go back to square one. Either there will be some method to them that reduces raiders to something equally trivial as their current bottle neck, or they will end up as a crushing force. Testers will report it as 'broken', players will complain that it is too easy or too hard, and then more development time gets pushed towards improving raiders because that is what the community is up in arms over.

And I've been employed full time with game development for three years with a third party testing house. I have had my fingers in the pies on alpha builds for hundreds of titles. Trust me, removing something is very much a perfectly valid solution to a problem.


This is a game about colony survival. Raiders aren't even needed to make it complex and challenging.

[Galileus]

I really have to ask how many paragraphs from my post did you even bother to read?

It doesn't matter how you spice them up, strong, frequent, and deadly raiders results in a tower defence like game play in one form or another where the entire game revolves around trying to find a way to exploit the raider AI with something that ends up being a cheap mechanic.

That makes no sense. Is Jagged Alliance a Tower Defence game? If you play marines on a timed mission, is Star Craft a tower defense game? Would RimWorld be tower defense game without turrets? No, it's a tactical game.It wants to be and should be a tactical game. You're missing the whole point here, blaming the problem on raiders and trying to push a solution to a different problem (that is, in my opinion, non-existent), calling it a solution to a TD one.

As it stands now there is a lot of discussion and push for making raiders harder to add complexity and make the game more interesting. This is simply a bad direction that doesn't actually address the problem with raiders and the defences against them. Spend a week's development time changing the raiders to be 'better', players/testers will spend a day breaking it and we go back to square one. Either there will be some method to them that reduces raiders to something equally trivial as their current bottle neck, or they will end up as a crushing force. Testers will report it as 'broken', players will complain that it is too easy or too hard, and then more development time gets pushed towards improving raiders because that is what the community is up in arms over.

False. There is a push to make raiders act in a way different than lemmings, not to make them harder. And your approach here is just despicable. You try to present the problem as unsolvable by design and reduce the whole idea of raids to wasted time. I'm sorry, but your agenda is clearly visible here.
Also, hiding from a problem and claiming someone will always find a way to cheat or cheese they way though is also not addressing the problem
The whole process is called balancing. Imagine if every tester or developer would approach things like that. "Someone will find a way to break this game! PANIC TIME!". Boom! Tetris was never created.

And I've been employed full time with game development for three years with a third party testing house. I have had my fingers in the pies on alpha builds for hundreds of titles. Trust me, removing something is very much a perfectly valid solution to a problem.

Please, do not pull the "shut up, I can back up my claims with WORDS!" card on me. I could've done so myself, but you know what? It's an insult. You try to validate your point with pointless titles that mean nothing here. Sorry pal, but as long as you're not Sid Meiers, I simply do not give a frell.

This is a game about colony survival. Raiders aren't even needed to make it complex and challenging.

This is a game about colony survival in hostile world of rim world full of raiders, that prides itself with a tactical combat. For all the pies you touched, you could at least read the description...

[ShadowDragon8685]

Gallieus, this game is not Starcraft. It's not Jagged Alliance or what-have-you.

It's a game about an unplanned colony founded by a group of castaways. Think "Dwarf Fortress" - you're guaranteed not to get sieges for at least a year! If you're lucky or careful when you select your embark site, your Dwarves won't have to engage anything more threatening than a tower-cap that grew somewhere it blocked a dorf in a room for at least that long.

But as it stands now, raiders are the only problem once you've got your hydroponics tables up and running. Cassandra rushes you with incessant raid after raid of 16-20 or more raiders, all of whom have one goal in life: destroy your colony.

So is it any wonder that people come up with effective, efficient defensive plans that stop them dead in their tracks? No, it isn't. And if you don't want to see every game of RimWorld look like that, stop making Raiders the constant threat!

Seriously, packs of raiders throwing themselves at your guns every five days becomes frustrating and boring. It's a tedious interlude between the stuff I want to do - fixing up my colony, mining, making rooms and what-not.

[Luckless]

Galileus, let me rephrase this.

The problem with raiders is that they are the ONLY threat. And the problem with gameplay challenge is that at this time there is only one solid solution to reliably deal with them, and this solution renders them rather trivial once you get setup.

Currently nothing else is really all that harmful to the survival of your colony.

So what is the obvious solution to making raiders non-trivial? Well 'obviously' you make them harder to deal with. Make them more 'clever', attack in more ways, etc. However any suggestion that drives development toward a "Better Raider" results in not addressing the main core issue:

Raiders being the only real threat. This is suppose to be a survival game, and yet the only thing to survive that is getting all that much attention are raiders.

Making Good raiders is going to take a lot of development, testing, and reworking time to create something that actually functions well and isn't easy to defeat with cheap tricks. A really good well balanced raider system is going to be at risk of making it that much harder to add other challenging elements to after the fact, as small changes to things can easily through a really complex AI system out of whack, suddenly making it insanely hard again, or overly easy.

Pushing a focus on Raider development Now with all the work, testing, and reworking, just means that you turn around and do all the testing and reworking over again for each new complex element.

Implement more threats in basic forms, then move forward with all of them together. This way adjustments that bring a simple food system to a more complex one aren't at risk of completely undermining all the careful balance work that went into making an exceptionally complex Raider system.


I'm not asking for raiders to be removed completely or improvements to them abandoned forever. I'm asking for a discussion on establishing threats from multiple angles so we have more ways we can probably lose.

So much focus is being forced on the ineffective raiders as a problem that cause boring game play because it becomes too easy that most people are ignoring the ineffective starvation and nutrition problem that gives no difficulty to the game. The ineffective/nonexistent shelter and warmth system that makes the game too easy. The ineffective/nonexistent social interactions that make the game too easy. Etc, etc, etc.


If 99 out of a 100 times the reason the game ends is "Raiders overwhelmed the colony and killed everyone", (and that other 1 game is some random freak accident of back luck such as where my oaf dies and my two nobles who won't do social or manual labour starve to death) then what is the point in playing a sim like this? I will already know how it ends. I'll play the finished game for a week or two, get bored, and probably not recommend such a game to my friends. The world already has tons of games that work just like that.

[Galileus]

However any suggestion that drives development toward a "Better Raider" results in not addressing the main core issue:

Raiders being the only real threat. This is suppose to be a survival game, and yet the only thing to survive that is getting all that much attention are raiders.

Stopped reading at that. I agree with you and Shadow to a point, but sorry - this is just beyond me. What issue? Issue of raider's intensity OR tower defence issue? These are two totally different things! You present a solution to one and claim it will fix the other magically, but it's just not true. You claim you have a solution to tower defence problem and then proceed to debate issues of raiders power and intensity... why? Seriously, I'm desperate here, why? There is lack of other threats? I agree! But having cold and illness and food that goes bad does not fix the TD issue...

So, develop new threats and intensify survival from nature first. You know what? I agree! This is a brilliant thing to have! Damn it, I hated Skyrim for being a "baby's first open world" and played it with mods for hunger, sleep deprivation, illness, cold affecting you and my avatars specialized in running away like frell in panic for first 20 levels. I love that stuff. But just say so: we should discuss that element of the game now, it's lacking greatly. I agree! But I do not agree that this will fix the TD problem. These are two separate things, and putting more weight on one won't magically solve the other.

If this is what you had in mind all along - just say so, so we can put that unfortunate TD business behind as and concentrate on the issue you brought up here. Because while I would love discuss that - I absolutely refuse to pretend looking the other way will fix an existing problem. It looks to me like you're trying to use the TD issue to piggyback a different idea altogether, and there is simply no need.

I don't know if we catastrophically misunderstood each other, maybe I have misinterpreted something in an armageddon-like way, or if your way of presenting the "solution" - as just moving to more important things first - was spelled out badly, or if you indeed believe changing priorities will fix some completely different problem - but I do hope we can separate these two and move on to talk on them as separate things. Because I love both of these and I care for both - and thus cannot just pretend one does not exist for the sake of other.

[ShootyFace]

I would love to see the raiders adapt to your defenses...

I would love it too.

I am wondering could some parts of the problem caused by the 'turtling' play style?
Except capturing a roaming refugee once in a while, I don't really need to make any interaction with outside world.
It would be more difficult if colonist have to go outside to search/scavenge for vital supply more often.

For now, without improve the AI to adapt to player's defense, make them camp some kind of source of supply outside. by doing this, let player lead the attack to them would probably make some interesting fight. Players are more adaptive than AI of course. XD

PS: the location of this 'source' should not be fixed on the map.

This is definitely a problem. Once you are able to defend yourself to a reasonable degree, it's easy to just mine away for minerals and not venture out. There need to be reasons to brave the environment. Wood, seeds for growing, hostile critters that pose a threat, make-shift raider encampments. There could also be nasty things waiting inside the rock that could attack your settlers while mining.

[Produno]

I dont understand the point of this thread. If you want less raiders who are less powerfull then choose an easier ai narrative, or am i missing something here?

As for giving them a different objective they still have to pass through your tower defence thats been set up so how does that solve anything?  It just takes more time to code for no gain because they still get slaughtered at the gates.. Adaptive ai sounds good though.

Once the tower defence scenario is a little more under control then it will be more viable to work on the other bits mentioned in this thread.

Btw, i would suggest some of you try randy random. I can go a couple of weeks without a raid on that, though the tower defence problem is obviously still there.

[Kender]

If you want less raiders who are less powerfull then choose an easier AI narrative, or am i missing something here?

I think unless you choose 'Phoebe Friendly' which basically removed the concept of raiders, the way of raider parties in this game will always leading this game into a defense focused game. And since those improvements suggested by OP have not been added to RimWorld yet, there is simple no much thing going on in 'Phoebe Friendly'.
    So, the easier AI narrative is not really appealing for now, and we have to deal with raiders in other narrative options.

    The raiders are the only challenging in this game, but it is still pre-alpha, temporary game solution like this exsits. But I do agreed with OP that they shouldn't be the only challenging when this game is done.

As for giving them a different objective they still have to pass through your tower defence thats been set up so how does that solve anything?

Correct. Maybe it is time to stop turtling and move out to hunt them down. j/k
    Giving them a different objectives won't stop them raiding player's colony, but it could stop the abuse of the current AI by using currently well developed 'turret defense tactic'. Since raiders basically acts like walkers in Walking Dead every single time (come in numbers, attack anyone they can reach, don't care a bit about their own survival), the combat aspect of this game just stop evolving, and it is the reason why this is a problem and bad.

    Think this way, what will you do if currently a group of bad guys decided a frontal assault would not work, so they didn't simplify rush into your property, instead they are
1) waiting for their opportune moment (solar flare, or waiting for the next group of raiders), and
2) circling around to find a weak point of your defense, or simply just make their own gate (tear down a section of wall), or just
3) camp an area and kill the possibly of recruit new member in that zone or access to that region?
Wouldn't it be wise to reduce their force early in someway or even bargain with them, instead of just waiting for their expected move?

    Just an example, not necessarily good at current stage of game, but of curse it add new things to this game, at least - 'we are not only defending anymore, we are making our own combat decisions'.

Once the tower defence scenario is a little more under control then it will be more viable to work on the other bits mentioned in this thread.

Can't agree more.