It's time for the serious talk: I Don't Think RNG rituals is working for this kind of game

[Indestructibirb]

If we're going to talk RNG, we have to mention the most RNJesus game ever: XCom 2. It spawned an entire genre. I beat it on Legendary Ironman and yes I'm proud of myself. You know what people hated about it? Its multiplayer. It sucked to have RNJesus forsake you and there was no way to try again or come back from it.

Now, do that after 30 or 40 days of the same battle and you have Solium Infernum. If my rituals consistently fail, and sometimes they do, and my opponent's consistently succeed, and sometimes they do, I have no way to come back from that. And the game might last another 30 days from there. Is it any wonder that there's so many leavers? Sometimes I have better things to do than play out three weeks of a game that I lost to RNG.

I'm not sure what the fix would be but I really feel as if it's just not working in this game. There needs to be some way to cope with the RNG, but there isn't. You spend tokens and turns on rituals, if they don't work all that's just gone and you got nothing. Other guy spams them and you're ruined, if they all fail he may just quit. It's the kind of system that punishes people for sticking it out and rewards trollish behavior.

Moreover, rituals are not really used by people who are winning. Why take the chance? They are usually the choice of the loser, which is the "I'm losing so I'll zap Panda" phenomenon, just longer and more spread out. And if you are hopelessly losing and then RNG fails you too, now you're broke too.

So yeah, I don't have a solution, besides to say that I have tried both ritual strength and ritual resistance builds and I don't feel like that makes things more enjoyable. It strikes me as a fundamental design problem, I know games need RNG but doing it in the ritual system isn't working here IMHO.

[Lily-an]

It may need to create a completely new game mode or make a new game to eliminate randomness completely.

For example, using a legion's level + inferno attack as their defense against a harmful ritual, ritual with power above their defense will always work, and ritual with power below their defense will have no effect at all. Defense rituals increase legion's ritual defense.

In this system, Pandaemonium Level 7 + 17 inferno attack = 24 ritual defense. Even if you add some means to temporarily increase the power of the ritual, this is not easy to achieve.

[Indestructibirb]

Originally posted by Lily-an:

It may need to create a completely new game mode or make a new game to eliminate randomness completely.

For example, using a legion's level + inferno attack as their defense against a harmful ritual, ritual with power above their defense will always work, and ritual with power below their defense will have no effect at all. Defense rituals increase legion's ritual defense.

In this system, Pandaemonium Level 7 + 17 inferno attack = 24 ritual defense. Even if you add some means to temporarily increase the power of the ritual, this is not easy to achieve.

Yeah, it would require some significant overhauls I think to fix the issue.

Let me give another example: Mario Kart. A lot of people don’t realize this, but in Mario Kart, the further behind you are, the faster you go. Also, getting the best items (lightning bolt and purple shell) can only happen if you are in last place or maybe second to last, I don’t remember. But the point is that this works well to keep players engaged with each other.

In SI, if you are ahead you probably have more tribute. You can spam rituals and go from winning to double winning, or if it fails you are where you were before, or at worst even with the others. But if you are behind and you try a few rituals and they all fail, now you will never catch up because you are both behind and broke, and the game might have 20 or 30 or even 40 days left in it.

I feel like the best system would be similar to Mario Kart. Rituals are super powerful and they should probably be less beneficial to people who are already ahead because they can afford to spam RNG, putting luck on their side, while people who are behind should not end up deeper in the hole if they fail. Meanwhile, you can’t just say “just don’t use rituals if you’re behind” because the other guy is using them and they are stronger when they work, and his lead lets him roll the dice more often. Normal plays won’t beat a larger number of fundamentally stronger plays that have some RNG unless you get super lucky against the other guy’s extra rolls, which is actually the same problem anyway, just under someone else’s control.

[Indestructibirb]

OK so I’m enjoying thinking about this problem, and I’d like to make two more points.

First, yes, this game actually is a lot like Mario Kart in a way, in that it’s a race. You get more tribute, you get more orders. You get more orders, you can seek more tribute and the tokens you get have a higher value. Getting prestige, its main effect is you get more tokens, which is the same thing. It’s all snowballing or acceleration.

Second, we do have a mechanic that helps the people who are behind: the votes. Every time a conclave vote comes up, if it’s good everyone gives it to the last place guy and if it’s bad, everyone gives it to the first place guy.

As such, the most obvious solution is to have way more votes. This would have the effect of slowing down the first place guy and speeding up the last place guy. And a lot of those votes should probably affect rituals, such as making ritual costs reduced or even free for the vote winner.

For example, an event comes up that makes rituals free. Everyone gives it to the last place guy, who can now try to RNG his way back into the game without going broke. Or events that give tribute will also go to the last place guy. Or an event that lowers your resistance to destruction, naturally everyone gives it to the first place guy. This would also encourage more diplomacy over voting.

[Lily-an]

Like Mario Kart, maybe consider popping up events when various failures occur, saying that your servants are working hard to appease your anger, temporarily improving the tribute quality or something.

The game can give some better tributes to the player with the lowest current tribute every certain turn(maybe just use the current period), and accidentally find a set of manuscripts for the player with the lowest current total power, etc.

Players often view sudden rewards as having been earned through their own merit.

[We Burn]

I think it would be a pretty extensive rebalance to have deterministic rituals, to the extent that I do not see them adding this. I would be happy enough with better understanding the probabilities under the hood so that I can make better decisions about how and when to take those risks. My feeling is that those of us who are frustrated with the ritual system (myself included) are probably not taking enough risks because “unlikely” means very different things to very different people. A 40% chance is unlikely. So is a 4% chance. Depending on your risk tolerance you will have very different thresholds for when you feel secure. I have been blown out several times on what I figured was probably a very low percentage play, but maybe I thought it was 5% and it was really like 25%, who knows.

[Indestructibirb]

Another thing they could do is add in better support for people leaving games. Although my instinct was to feel differently, why should we want someone to play out a 30-day long game if they’re not having fun? For better or worse, leaving is a part of the game.

I have one game where I have failed several “likely" rituals in a row. I’m still in the game cause one of the other guys keeps talking to me but like, leaving is to be expected in an RNG-heavy game where matches can last for months. In another game, I have stacked a ton of extra skills and resistances (had theatre of sloth) but every enemy ritual against me, and there’s been many, has succeeded. I want to quit the game but it’s a player-run league thing, yet playing it has become a chore at this point. It’s so bad that I will not be joining another league again because the expectations aren’t matching up with how I want to spend my gaming time, there’s probably at least a few weeks left of the monotony.

[Kolbex]

Months old, but I will also vent my frustration that my deceit rituals (as Belial!) almost *never* work, and yet I've had two games now where my best legion was just straight stolen away from me by a successful ritual, and I'm pretty annoyed about it!

[Lagrossebête]

Ok, i'll be the bad anoying guy here but here it is : this is the randomness of events ( in game or in your life aswell ) that catch up your interest and keep you focusing on what you are experiencing.
If you are walking in a straight line, you will be bored at some point -- but first, you might feel good because you can rest for a bit, you might feel security seeing far in front of you.
But you will get bored at some point, i'll bet on that.
And i"ll tell you this; every breath you take in your life is a dice that God* play for you, every event around you is RNG brother :D ---Some would say RNG do not exist, it is only karma--but--yeah we could talk about it all the night...
I get what your mean being fustrated by a random events that feels unfair 'cause what you planned just felt appart, --but we have messages in game, you can ally with others so maybe, your win will not to be the winner, but to make the current winner being dethroned at the end, you know what i mean ?
You will be the bad RNG to the current leader, and he have nooOooo idea.
You lie, you corrupt, we betray..

But you know, i'm only 10h+ IG , not much :)

--and the mario kart exemple is a really nice find btw

[Maina]

Originally posted by Archfiend AF:

Is it any wonder that there's so many leavers?

Originally posted by Archfiend AF:

It's the kind of system that punishes people for sticking it out and rewards trollish behavior

Trollish behavior? Maybe. But it's kind of a game about trolling.

Punishes people for sticking it out? No, the opposite. If you stick it out, you can turn around almost any bad situation. People in the lead overextend and make mistakes. You can take advantage of it if you stick it out. People give up too easily because they think one misstep means you lose, but that isn't true.

Recently spent the first dozen turns getting absolutely bullied by someone. Eventually, their attention was drawn elsewhere and I took advantage and took their territory and sniped their best army and they ragequit.

And I did it as Lilith, so I didn't have many tools to use except rituals.

The RNG is part of what allows for this sort of comeback. People just give up too easily.

[thefool]

Originally posted by We Burn:

I think it would be a pretty extensive rebalance to have deterministic rituals, to the extent that I do not see them adding this. I would be happy enough with better understanding the probabilities under the hood so that I can make better decisions about how and when to take those risks. My feeling is that those of us who are frustrated with the ritual system (myself included) are probably not taking enough risks because “unlikely” means very different things to very different people. A 40% chance is unlikely. So is a 4% chance. Depending on your risk tolerance you will have very different thresholds for when you feel secure. I have been blown out several times on what I figured was probably a very low percentage play, but maybe I thought it was 5% and it was really like 25%, who knows.

Making rituals deterministic sounds like the easiest thing to implement. But I think it might do more damage than good:
1) It will make prophecy even stronger since when you find out resistances you can alway know the outcome.
2) You can easily abuse rituals without rng - looting vaults over and over, which doesn't sound right to me.
3) You can check resistances with a lower ritual and then go hard if it went through

As a solution I think success / fail probabilities might be tuned, maybe made different for each branch, or even some deterministic or having +x power on execution. In general it's hard to tell how big it's a problem since there will alway be people who got their unlucky ticket and complain about it.

[thefool]

In general I think RNG is fine here since you expect it to get smoothed out in the long run and with diplomacy. But some rng should be dealt with, especially events - people aren't just into such things with games going for weeks and no counterplay.

[thefool]

Another prospect to tackle such issue would be adding pseudo rng generator if it's not there already

[blessku]

That reminds me situation when i was doing fairly decent suddenly asking tributes was banned my vault has been robbed and couldnt pay legion maintenance so it left my service also damage spell destroyed remainings of mine tokens too next round they stole vital artifact from mine legion and I ended up without money army or mean how to change that. Felt pretty beaten and desperate without options to do anything about it coudnt believe where i ended up so suddenly. ¨
Ohh yeah and cherry on top they robbed me of mine IV power point so i had only 2 orders.

[thefool]

The discussion here as I far as I understand is about rng doom where you might get very unlucky. I don't think many people care about deterministic rng (getting the same results from the same board state) which is relevant only to single player games with saves. The idea is to have deterministic outcomes based on yours vs your enemy stats. So yours are higher - you win, no dice rolling stuff in here. A coin doesn't care how it landed previous 10 times, but you might, especially if it was HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH and you were betting on tails. And there will be some people getting unlucky that much, and some - lucky to the same degree. Some people will think they lost to rng when they had -10ik stats check. So instead of unconditional coin flip it might be reasonable to make it conditional on your past tosses - the more you lost - the higher the chances to win this time. But I personally don't think randomness is a major issue with the game.

[Starwild]

Originally posted by blessku:

That reminds me situation when i was doing fairly decent suddenly asking tributes was banned my vault has been robbed and couldnt pay legion maintenance so it left my service also damage spell destroyed remainings of mine tokens too next round they stole vital artifact from mine legion and I ended up without money army or mean how to change that. Felt pretty beaten and desperate without options to do anything about it coudnt believe where i ended up so suddenly. ¨
Ohh yeah and cherry on top they robbed me of mine IV power point so i had only 2 orders.

Might I ask you what turn in the match this happened on?

This sounds INCREDIBLY frustrating, and I have huge sympathy for the emotional impact. I've been on both ends of it.

That said, if it happened early in the match then you could've probably recovered despite the sense of shock, and I'll be happy to try and give advice on how.
If it happened late in the match, then I would love to try and give advice and assistance on how to avoid this in the future.

After the first... oh, you know, 150 hours of playtime out of many more , I've been on the inflicting end of this situation more often than on the receiving end. The difference came from experience, and a deeper understanding of how to run my economy.
If this was late in the game, by all means you want and need more than 3 Orders, and you need all of the benefits that having 3+ Powers at level 4 or above will give you.