I need to know more about the AI Storyteller(s)

[meow]

And I mean as much as possible. Anyone have any links? Videos? How robust is the AI? Does it feel rote and stifling, like if you get too much of a resource the AI will inevitably create an event to dwindle it, or does it actually feel like the AI is there to IMPROVE the experience?

Anything. News articles, interviews, wiki pages, video explanations, code reviews. Any information at all would be nice.

[Qiox]

Events are not tied like that to specifics of your colony.

The 3 story teller choices just sets the parameters for how often events can happen and how quickly the difficulty can ramp up.

With Phoebe you are guaranteed a long time between events early on. Cassandra is fairly even. While Randy has no rules and can throw things at you back to back.

[Cat®]

Have you tried checking the wiki?

[Nuggs]

wouldnt be hard to just google search what youre looking for. Theres plenty of info about rimworld across the net. The wiki is a good start. Plenty of videos on youtube.

My personal opinion is the storytellers are more or less there for added difficulty and scaling purposes. And they are more or less there for different ways in which quests and events hit your colony.

Phoebe is probably the best if youre looking to play with limited events and quests. if youre in the game for the colony building aspects rather than the random challenges. though she will still periodically toss you an event.

Casandra is the most noob friendly in my opinion. and my own preffered choice of story teller. Events will hit you at a steady pase and scale up depending on your colonies wealth values as well as colony survival time

And then theres randy random. Hes a ♥♥♥♥. sometimes he will leave you alone and other times he will mercilessly hit you with one bad event after another. And sometimes you will get really hard events straight away. So randy is more for experienced players or people who enjoy a thourough challenge. its basically all in his name.

but the event rates and how dificult they are will also be determined by the difficulty of the game you choose along with what story teller you choose. As far as i know theres no story or event elements that change depending on what story teller you use. As far as i know you can get any event from any of the story tellers. I may be wrong.

But yea definitely do a google search on what youre looking for. Rimworlds reddit page has some pretty good info too straight from players themselves. Youtube has some good videos on rimworld too. theres plenty of youtubers who just talk about rimworld mechanics and number crunching if thats the kind of stuff youre looking for

[Astasia]

The storytellers are not AI. They have no intelligence of how you play and make no decisions based off any actions you have taken. They aren't trying to do anything, they are a scheduled series of dice roles that happen endlessly. The different storytellers have different schedules and different dice, the wiki probably goes into details if you want to know the odds or rates of each storyteller.

There are a few parameters outside of the storytellers that controls difficulty scaling. Your colony population total controls the frequency of some events in the event pools, on the lower end you get free colonist events and a recruitment chance bonus, on the upper end those events stop and the bonus goes away. Your colony wealth controls the strength and type of attacks against your colony.

That is pretty much the extent of the RimWorld "story generation" system. It's extremely simple and you get the hang of it pretty fast.

[Spack Jarrow]

Ai chooses events.
The type of story teller dictates how these events occur,
Most noticeably the Grace period between harsh and mild events.
With Randy Random being completly random.

Certain events may trigger depending on your situation, for example a caravan may get sick mid way trough the journey.

The difficulty of the story teller only applies certain modifiers
Like the Raid size or again frequency.

Casandra is best for steady amount of events.
The other two can become very quiet then HIT HARD AS MOFO.
or in case of randy he can sometimes trigger multiple events one after another without break.

Every game is highly custimizeble, you can set various conditions that you find attractive.
Such as Never ending witnter or never Ending Fallout.
You can boost mining speed multiplier , reasearch multiplier , health
or you can disable events such as Infestation.
It's all up to you really.

[meow]

Originally posted by Astasia:

The storytellers are not AI.

From the store page:

RimWorld is a sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller

So who's lying to me, and why?

[Qiox]

Originally posted by nurupo:

Originally posted by Astasia:

The storytellers are not AI.

From the store page:

RimWorld is a sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller

So who's lying to me, and why?

You are imagining a level of decision making that does not exist in the game. Just because they call it an AI does not mean it can play chess. Calling it an "intelligent AI storyteller" does not mean you can lookup that phrase anywhere and expect a particular implementation.

They call it that, and it does only what it has been programmed to do. Nothing more.

Your imaginings about what the phrase means are of course meaningless and irrelevant.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by nurupo:

From the store page:

RimWorld is a sci-fi colony sim driven by an intelligent AI storyteller

So who's lying to me, and why?

It's a store page, it's trying to sell you a game, that often involves exaggerating features or using ambiguous language.

In this case they are probably using "AI" as synonymous with "computer opponent." It's not technically correct, any sort of "AI" requires the ability to react to a changing environment, and the storytellers in RimWorld simply do not react to anything. That's generally not something laymen would be aware of so to simplify it by saying the selectable "opponents" are "AI" is probably fair. Especially since the RNG used by the storytellers and player's selective memory and habit of seeing patterns that aren't real will lead some players to believe the storyteller's are actually psychic entities that know exactly how to beat them by anticipating their decisions. This perhaps deepens the experience for some players, so I'm not sure I would hold it against the devs for claiming their random number generator is an AI.

I could explain briefly how it works though, since I noticed the wiki is actually horribly out of date and just as misleading as the store page in this area. Here's one of the "die" the Casandra storyteller throws and the schedule for it:

<li Class="StorytellerCompProperties_OnOffCycle">
<category>ThreatBig</category>
<minDaysPassed>11.0</minDaysPassed>
<onDays>4.6</onDays>
<offDays>6.0</offDays>
<minSpacingDays>1.9</minSpacingDays>
<numIncidentsRange>1~2</numIncidentsRange>
<forceRaidEnemyBeforeDaysPassed>20</forceRaidEnemyBeforeDaysPassed>
<disallowedTargetTags>
<li>Map_RaidBeacon</li>
</disallowedTargetTags>
</li>

This is the die for major threats against your colony, or "raids." minDaysPassed means the schedule doesn't start until 11 days after the game begins. onDays is when the die is allowed to be thrown, offDays is the cooldown. numIncidentsRange means the die can be thrown 1-2 times during the onDays period, but minSpacingDays means there has to be a gap of 1.9 days between events. forceRaidEnemyBeforeDaysPassed is there to ensure at least one thing happens every 20 days. disallowedTargetTags just blocks this schedule during a specific game event. Once the die is thrown so to speak, the random number it comes up with determines the type of ThreatBig event that is started. The storyteller doesn't actually have any control over the die, this is manipulated by other game systems based off simple variables, like if there is no "overhead mountain" tiles the infestation event is excluded, and if your colony wealth is above or below certain numbers the die is loaded to favor certain numbers a little more.

This type of scheduled RNG toss is repeated for most of the event categories for both Casandra and Phoebe. Randy is much more simple, he doesn't have much of a schedule, he instead throws like a d20 around once a day that can trigger anything.

The result is pretty fun in any case. The numbers are tuned to provide a pretty steady challenge, and the randomness of the events can keep you on your toes while playing.

[meow]

That's incredibly disappointing. I was genuinely hoping for a bot that at least kept track of stats other than days passed and decided on events using an algorithm taking far more into account.

[rav]

well it takes into account the amount of colonists your have and your overall wealth.