Events - What controls them?

[Miradus]

Stuff like escape pods, traders coming to visit, raids, etc?

What controls that activity? Seems like I get a lot of visitors at first and then nothing.

[Kennedy]

Originally posted by Miradus:

Stuff like escape pods, traders coming to visit, raids, etc?

What controls that activity? Seems like I get a lot of visitors at first and then nothing.

It's very aleatory , and the visitors can appear with beacons and other stuff .

[Ficelle]

Mostly how well you are doing (wealth, total colonists, time on map...)

At start, you are considered doing poorly, so many good stuff, some weak bad ones.
The more you advance and grow, the more you will get bad and harder events.
If, for some reason, you lose alot of your colonists, it is easy again for a while.

Growing too fast is not always the best thing.

Randy is way more random (still scaled to your colony...), can be very easy for a while, then suddenly, horrble stack of the worst events.

[Miradus]

Ah. That explains it. Thanks.

[muzzy]

Various incidents are considered "population increase" events and the storyteller will adjust their chance of occurrence depending on your current population, potentially reducing the odds for such events by 95% if population has reached certain pre-determined levels.

If you are below the minimum desired population, the population increase events will have their odds bolstered up to a maximum of 4x if you're down to one last colonist.

After critical population amount is reached, the population intent actually drops negative and there used to be "population decrease" events which would then enable. They population decrease events are disabled though, as apparently it wasn't all that much fun when the game simply informed you that one of your colonists was revealed to be an agent of an enemy faction, followed by the said ex-colonist fighting his way out of your base and fleeing...

[Miradus]

I like that they're disabled. I have enough trouble keeping people alive and sane. Or at least alive and not going berserk.

Berserk is by far the largest base killer. Even raids and other such events are just finishing moves when I've got some berserker running around naked or in the hospital after being beaten down by everyone else.

Thanks, muzzy. Do you know the population limits?

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Cassandra:
<desiredPopulationMin>4</desiredPopulationMin>

<desiredPopulationMax>13</desiredPopulationMax>

<desiredPopulationCritical>18</desiredPopulationCritical>

Phoebe:
<desiredPopulationMin>4</desiredPopulationMin>

<desiredPopulationMax>13</desiredPopulationMax>

<desiredPopulationCritical>18</desiredPopulationCritical>
Randy:
<desiredPopulationMin>4</desiredPopulationMin>

<desiredPopulationMax>13</desiredPopulationMax>

<desiredPopulationCritical>50</desiredPopulationCritical>

[Miradus]

So if I'm reading that, below 4 the storytellers will throw pop_add events at you (except Randy, the heartless schmuck) and after 13 they reduce the occurrence of that?

How are people getting those extremely large pops I've seen in screenshots? I could swear that one guy had three bars worth of colonists.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Originally posted by Miradus:

So if I'm reading that, below 4 the storytellers will throw pop_add events at you (except Randy, the heartless schmuck) and after 13 they reduce the occurrence of that?

How are people getting those extremely large pops I've seen in screenshots? I could swear that one guy had three bars worth of colonists.

Modding the storyteller xml file and increasing those limits is one way. Downloading other storytellers with much higher limits is another. Being in the favour of The Dice Gods being the vanilla method.

[Miradus]

Ah. Cool. The game slows down considerably for me later on. I think it's the junk and debris laying around ticking down its quality, not the actual number of colonists. It happens even if I only have 2-3 colonists.

Normally I can't seem to keep a population past about 5-6 unless I start with that many using scenario editor.

[Grishnerf]

also an easy way to get more colonists is the hospitality mod.

[muzzy]

Looks like I misread the question earlier and answered only about things like escape pods :P

Things like raids are controlled by a threat cycle, except with Randy. Cassandra and Phoebe both alternate safe and dangerous periods for the bigger threats.

Traders and visitors should keep coming unless it's far too cold. It doesn't happen to be below -45C or above +45C around your place, is it? :P

Oh, and one notable thing about Cassandra and Phoebe is the "classic intro" component that generates the first 4 game events. After 54 hours, you should have a small visitor group, possibly only just one guy. After 78 hours, there will be a random minor threat - well, not so minor because it's guaranteed to be a mad animal unless you have mods adding more minor threats. After 102 hours, a wandered will always join, and after 126 hours you will have your first raid. These always happen around the exact specified times and they only become random events afterwards.