Plague with Naked Brutality

[Tubey]

Look, I love Rimworld and the randomness as much as the next person, but seriously... after losing two runs to plague happening within a few days and self-tend not being able to keep up with it, can't that one event be patched out?

It's not fun to just waste my time when there's absolutely nothing I could have done about it no matter how well you play.

[MadArtillery]

Well it is naked brutality and if you use randy he doesn't even have a timer until he can put plague on you. Then the biome disease factor as well to consider. Just make sure to take a super immune or improved immunity xenotype prefably either with decent doctoring skill to make up for self tends if you want less disease rng on solo starts. I suppose save scum is also an option.

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

You can disable any event when creating a scenario, note that sickly pawns can randomly get illnesses even if the event is disabled.

[schnappkatze]

A question that someone with deep knowledge about the game's numbers night be able to answer:

Is plague with naked brutality even survivable, and if so what medical skill would your pawn need? Assuming that you were able to build a bed, have food and tend yourself with herbal medicine until you pass out.

Because, if plague is basically not survivable unless you have a pawn with medical skill 18+, then it actually would be a nice QOL feature to tone its frequency down for the first week, since it effectively has the effect of random death which is a bit boring.

If it is survivable with a reasonably skilled pawn and proper preperation, I'd think it is just right as it is.

[Tubey]

Originally posted by Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia:

You can disable any event when creating a scenario, note that sickly pawns can randomly get illnesses even if the event is disabled.

I'm aware of this but I like to play generally vanilla with no mods/adaptations from the base experience.

I think even as @schnappkatze suggests that if a pawn with 18 medicine could survive it (unsure to be honest) I still think it's unbalanced because you'd be forced to use a pawn with 18 medical to guarantee not wasting a few hours on doomed gameplay. I play it strictly using the pawns offered on the choice screen without re-rolling; you can argue that's my problem, but I honestly think it'd be silly to have to select a pawn with that high a skill just to ward off instant death an hour or so in.

Re: biome disease factor I was temperate forest both times, and I understand how Randy works but it's not 'random' to have a game killing completely unavoidable thing happen inside the first few hours, it's just frustrating.

It just feels to me that it should be something disabled until a certain wealth as there's quite literally nothing you can do 99% of the time, which feels against the ethos of the game. Being hard is what I want, being impossible isn't.

[whatamidoing]

I force superimmune (and tough) for my starting pawn in the scenario to save a lot of trouble. If you don't want to do that, you could savescum it or remove the disease in godmode.

[xicewindex]

Naked Brutality

You went under anesthetic for a minor surgery. Now you've awoken in a drop pod crashing into a distant planet. You're naked, alone and totally unprepared. Can you survive?

Warning: There is nothing fair about this scenario - it is extremely difficult and death can happen for any reason.

Is it just me that find complaints about fairness a joke?

[MadArtillery]

Randy does not have the disease timer other storytellers have at the start of the game and yes, getting plague randomly as soon as the game starts, is indeed litterally more random then scripted lack of disease. Just run another storyteller for the first week because randy doesn't care.

Dieing randomly to the random man on the mode explicitly stated to be an intentionally unbalanced deadly start is litterally what you signed up for. It has a warning against playing it for a reason. Perhaps try a lower disease zone if you want randy not to kill you. Can go somewhere with a disease reduction instead of the baseline.

[Tubey]

Originally posted by xicewindex:

Is it just me that find complaints about fairness a joke?

I get the concept, but there should be limits.

If it were possible for ten mechanoids to pop by day 2 and murder you, would that be a viable game mode?

Plague is the same consequence. The problem isn't that it's unfair; it's that it's all but impossible to do anything about it whatsoever.

It's not possible, even with Randy, to have a mechanoid cluster drop on your head first few days. My point is plague should be subject to the same sort of restriction. How is that a 'joke' of a suggestion?

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Tubey:

I'm aware of this but I like to play generally vanilla with no mods/adaptations from the base experience.

Naked Brutality is not the base experience. It's a highly RNG unfair scenario with a warning on it. The only alterations that have been made for it are ones to make it specifically more difficult, like preventing the stranger in black from showing up until your population reaches 3. The scenario is never going to be tuned to be "fair" because that's the opposite of what it's meant to be.

Originally posted by schnappkatze:

A question that someone with deep knowledge about the game's numbers night be able to answer:

Is plague with naked brutality even survivable, and if so what medical skill would your pawn need?

Yes it is, and the minimum skill is 0. It's very RNG though. Plague can sometimes roll "lucky" and a pawn can survive without any treatment as long as they stay in bed.

The baseline plague requires only an average tend quality of 15% to survive with bedrest, without meds and while self tending this can be done with 6 skill which would average 16.8% tend quality, there's is a 75% to 125% variance though, 8 skill would be required for that minimum tend to be above 15%. Diseases have a luck roll though of -20% to +20% immunity gain, with +10-20% luck plague doesn't need to be tended, just bedrest will be enough to survive. With -20% luck you need like 45% average tend quality which isn't even doable at 20 skill without meds while self tending, not even with bionics. It's pretty easy to manage with herbal meds while tending another pawn, but self tending and no meds plague is just sometimes impossible to survive, because it's not balanced to be survived in that situation. This is why you start the normal scenarios with meds and multiple colonists so you can ensure one of them has some medical skill.

The only way to ensure survival on naked brutality is with immunity boosting traits or genes. You are just as likely to get raided while sick though and die anyway, because Naked Brutality is that kind of "fun" by design.

[Tubey]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Randy does not have the disease timer other storytellers have at the start of the game and yes, getting plague randomly as soon as the game starts, is indeed litterally more random then scripted lack of disease. Just run another storyteller for the first week because randy doesn't care.

Dieing randomly to the random man on the mode explicitly stated to be an intentionally unbalanced deadly start is litterally what you signed up for. It has a warning against playing it for a reason. Perhaps try a lower disease zone if you want randy not to kill you. Can go somewhere with a disease reduction instead of the baseline.

I've played 3,500 ish hours of Rimworld, I'm aware of diseases being more common in different biomes. But this happened twice in a temperate forest.

I'm also aware there's ways around it by modding, save scumming etc. but these are workarounds I don't think you should have to do with something this fundamentally broken. If there's literally no way you can mitigate against something happening in the base game, no matter what you do, unless you mod/turn options off, then the mechanic at base game level is broken - that's my point.

I actually love dying in Rimworld when it's a skill issue, as I get annoyed at myself and remember for next time to play around what happened - but you can't play around this.

[VitaKaninen]

If you play Randy, it says he is not fair, but you are asking for a fair start. If you want fair, then don't start with Randy.

You were ejected from a ship while under anesthesia and then caught the plague while your immune system was compromised, and then you died from the plague.

I think this would be the most likely and realistic outcome. If you want a storyteller to protect you from certain doom, then you chose the wrong storyteller.

Randy is trying to kill you, and he succeeded. Nothing is broken here.

[Tubey]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by Tubey:

Naked Brutality is not the base experience. It's a highly RNG unfair scenario with a warning on it.

It absolutely is a base experience. It's a game mode right there in retail for the base game.

As said, I can accept 'unfair'. I can't accept 'impossible'. I can accept getting flu and then being raided, or going into a sad wander and then getting murdered by a turtle etc. etc. This is 'unfair', but you can play around it with some foresight. It's difficult but not impossible.

But plague is different. As you say yourself:

"... self tending and no meds plague is just sometimes impossible to survive, because it's not balanced to be survived in that situation."

... that's poor game design to me, an oversight. Again, if it's impossible for 10 mechanoids to raid you first few days, then why is it unreasonable to suggest plague be subject to the same restriction?

[Tubey]

Originally posted by VitaKaninen:

If you play Randy, it says he is not fair, but you are asking for a fair start. If you want fair, then don't start with Randy.

You were ejected from a ship while under anesthesia and then caught the plague while your immune system was compromised, and then you died from the plague.

I think this would be the most likely and realistic outcome. If you want a storyteller to protect you from certain doom, then you chose the wrong storyteller.

Randy is trying to kill you, and he succeeded. Nothing is broken here.

This is just illogical. In that case when you pick Randy he should have the option to hard crash your PC and corrupt your save file.

There's obviously limits to what should happen in any game mode for any game.

[The Yeen Queen]

Originally posted by Tubey:

Originally posted by xicewindex:

Is it just me that find complaints about fairness a joke?

I get the concept, but there should be limits.

If it were possible for ten mechanoids to pop by day 2 and murder you, would that be a viable game mode?

If I knew that was a risk before I started? Yeah. It's brutal. As the name indicates. Plagues that early are rare, especially if you're not playing someplace like rain forest that has high disease rates. But the level of bad luck to have two runs in a row get hit by them that early is just staggering. But not impossible. You "won" the reverse lottery. The UN-lottery, if you wil.

Plague is the same consequence. The problem isn't that it's unfair; it's that it's all but impossible to do anything about it whatsoever.

It's not possible, even with Randy, to have a mechanoid cluster drop on your head first few days. My point is plague should be subject to the same sort of restriction. How is that a 'joke' of a suggestion?

Plague is FAR more manageable that early than a mechanoid invasion that size. And it's definitely not "all but impossible" to do anything about it. Prioritize medical on picking your starting pawn, harvest some wild healroot ASAP, and be prepared for the risk.

The dangers of the two scenarios aren't even close to the same. The risk of an early plague is already pretty slim. But, unlike the mechanoid scenario you describe, it's not impossible to overcome if you were smart with your pawn pick and initial priorities once you started.

But, chances of getting hit with no-win situations are exactly why some people find Randy fun. You have just as much chance of getting showered with blessings from him. Don't play Randy if you don't want those risks. Simple as that. It makes no sense to complain about what a game mode throws at you when you're warned up front you're on a brutal setting with a storyteller that can be bat-poop crazy with what he throws your way.

[VitaKaninen]

You are playing a random mode, and complaining that it is random.

That is about it. Stop rolling the dice and then complaining when you get a critical fail.

You are asking for them to remove the 1 from a 20 sided die because you don't like it when it hits 1.