Trying to find the right difficulty balance

[Watermelon Cat]

So I have been playing Rimworld for a while now, but I prefer to play a bit more casually. Sure, I sometimes have fun playing at a high difficulty for a while, but eventually I start getting attached to my carefully cultivated colony and pawns and run into a conundrum of not wanting to see my little virtual sand castle get kicked over.

I usually taper off to using Phoebe as my storyteller and scaling the difficulty down to adventure story, because sometimes I just want to finish my latest project without a horde of insects obliging me to turn them into kibble which I then have to find storage space for...

Toward the late game though, I find that the scaling mechanic becomes a problem. If you keep fighting everything off without losing pawns, eventually you start seeing swarms of centipedes appearing.

The alternative is to turn it down to community builder, but I find that the "threats" at that level are pretty much nothing, and I never get to use my killbox.

I am curious if anyone has come up with a custom storyteller or something which just caps out at a certain point. I know there are custom storyteller settings possible, but I've never really messed with it.

In Dev console, I see there are point ratings on raids. I am curious if there is a way to set a storyteller so they don't go over a certain level.

[ichifish]

There’s a mod called “Combat Readiness Check,” which I’ve never used but I’ve heard streamers describe. My understanding is that it calculates raid points in accordance to your defensive gear, not overall wealth. Seems like it might be appropriate for what you want.

You can also use the custom difficulty settings to adjust the threat scale lower. So for example you can set the overall difficulty to blood and dust but reduce the threat scale (which is a multiplier of raid points). So you’ll still get the same number of raids, but they’ll be smaller.

The wiki has a much clearer explanation of the raid point calculation than it used to, btw. You might be able to figure out how to fine tune your raid strength using the info there.

[Jaggid Edje]

This mod lets you adjust all of the parameters related to raid points, exposing far more of the variables involved than the game's custom difficulty does. It also allows you to set a hard cap, which is what you said you wanted to be able to do:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2373405081

[pmutzu]

you know . , tend to favor this playstyle, but at the same time , i also enjoy large piles of corpses to loot. so i let the game run on randy and set it to strive to survive. , i enable the no infestations mod ,because FLOCK a bunch of bugs, and i let the game just send whatever it wants. EXCEPT i dev mode anything i do not feel i can handle. by this i mean . a mechanoid hive shows up with shields . dev mode select explosion bomb . go over and blow it all up or ,dev mode kill and go kill it. annnnd then walk over and loot the goodies. large multi prong raid . dev mode bomb/kill or eff it if im lazy clear area 21x21 . point being. you have complete control of this game on even the most brutal setting. dead pawn. dev mode rez . flu in 12 colonists. dev mode grant immunities to either all of em or to a managable amount. some days i cheat. some days i like to just play and die. no need to play rimworld and be mad at all at this game. you are literally able to drive anything you want. fires everywhere? CHANGE WEATHER TO RAIN . map slow? DEV MODE CLEAR the rest of the map of crap like stones and trees and chunks. yes its cheese . and so what. sometimes its just nice to have a pretty base that works.

[Vermillion Cardinal]

I personally go with "Threat Point Cap" set to 500 points max coupled with a customized low threat scale and adaptation growth. In the past I've used 20%/5% and gotten mostly a handful of humans per raid (no infestations or mechanoids) which suits my preference for low-intensity combat for my colony of 5-10 people. Make each fight personal too since I usually capture and release after converting and seeing the same raider return is a nice touch.

My current colony runs on 50%/20% and gets somewhat bigger human raids with small mechanoid clusters.

[GeneralVeers]

There is no "right" difficulty in this game.

No "wrong" one either, for that matter.

The game allows you to change the difficulty in the middle, DURING the game. And also, the cheaty commands in the development menu are accessible with a fairly prominent toggle control right on the Options menu.

From these design choices, it's clear Tynan meant for the player to be able to tune--or eliminate--the difficulty on the fly.

[Hades]

I also think the "story teller" aspect of Rimworld has been lost to a degree by escalating and often unrealistic combat focus.

- breach raids that nerf solid perimeter walls
- infestations that just randomly occur in the middle of your brightly lit base
- one-shot doomsday rockets that just wreck everything

More and more, I find that it's best to play on the storyteller you prefer, at the difficult that is *generally* what you like/find realistic....

... and use dev mode to delete parts/all of events that you find ridiculous (because ridiculous is sometimes the only word you can use to describe it)

[Cuddle_Rat]

You can do a tribal playthrough running with the Save Our Ship 2 mod, gives you a storyteller that does events based on tech level instead of colony wealth. Or do what I do, there's a mod that gives you the Holy Hand Grenade from Monty Python, I've seen one blast from that wipe out 100+ raiders, it can be used through walls, and it has infinite uses.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Watermelon Cat:

Toward the late game though, I find that the scaling mechanic becomes a problem. If you keep fighting everything off without losing pawns, eventually you start seeing swarms of centipedes appearing.

The alternative is to turn it down to community builder, but I find that the "threats" at that level are pretty much nothing, and I never get to use my killbox.

It's not about "not losing pawns," though if you do lose a pawn you get a short buffer to recover. Scaling is based essentially entirely on wealth multiplied by difficulty, with few exceptions.

I think the most simple solution here is to click that custom difficulty button on the storyteller settings, the difference between community builder and adventure story is a factor of 2, community builder is 30% scaling and adventure story is 60%, it sounds like you want something more like 45% which you can set yourself in the custom difficulty settings.

If I'm playing a low combat focus (or "casual") run I tend to start at strive to survive which is 100% scaling, and as that starts to become rough I gradually adjust it down by like 10% at a time until 60% later in the game. If I'm playing with mods that add a lot of wealth I might even drop it further to around 30% eventually.

A couple notes on other things mentioned in this thread, difficulty doesn't affect raid frequency (other than peaceful of course), and you probably don't want to mess with adaption in the storyteller settings because it doesn't do what people expect it to, generally any adjustments made to it are double-edged and make the game more difficult in some situations and easier in others.

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raid_points

[baddoggs]

If you use mods try..
Turning Bugs off and replacing them with Zombies.
I did that whist learning the game and it worked well without killing all the challenge.

[Watermelon Cat]

Originally posted by Jaggid Edje:

This mod lets you adjust all of the parameters related to raid points, exposing far more of the variables involved than the game's custom difficulty does. It also allows you to set a hard cap, which is what you said you wanted to be able to do:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2373405081

Thanks everyone who replied on this one with suggestions. This is in fact exactly what I was looking for. I've only had a chance to play around with it a bit thus far, but initial results have been great.

Originally posted by Astasia:

I think the most simple solution here is to click that custom difficulty button on the storyteller settings, the difference between community builder and adventure story is a factor of 2, community builder is 30% scaling and adventure story is 60%, it sounds like you want something more like 45% which you can set yourself in the custom difficulty settings.

This was also really interesting. I think a long time ago, I wrote off community builder as "too easy" and just stopped trying it, but didn't realize it still scaled. I gave this a try and while I find I prefer the mod Jaggid Edje shared earlier, I liked this too and will probably continue experimenting with both mechanics.