Is Randy all random in every way?

[Flight]

The description says Randy is truly random, but is that in the sense of difficulty level of things he sends? Or is the amount of events fully random too?

I mean, if he is all random, he could send a raid and a mech cluster during a solar flare in a heat wave while insects crawl up, as the skies dimms and everybody gets malaria. Did that ever happen to anyone?

[Khan Boyzitbig of Mercia]

Randy does have no cooldowns for major events (unless the event itself does), malaria and other disease is not controlled by the storyteller (aside from Phoebe and Cassandra blocking them in a colony's early days) but he can absolutely send two raids back to back with a mech cluster thrown in.

[CloudSeeker]

Originally posted by Flight:

The description says Randy is truly random, but is that in the sense of difficulty level of things he sends? Or is the amount of events fully random too?

I mean, if he is all random, he could send a raid and a mech cluster during a solar flare in a heat wave while insects crawl up, as the skies dimms and everybody gets malaria. Did that ever happen to anyone?

The odds for that happening is very tiny, but it can happen. However. Randy might be one of the easier storytellers as he is slightly biased towards minor events rather then major events. Cassandra is the hardest.

[Steelfleece]

From what I'm told, Randy has an odd behavior when raid points near the cap. Apparently his random raid point modifier of x0.5-1.5 is applied prior to the cap being applied, resulting in a span where his raids are on average a little easier than the other STs. Only applies to wealthier colonies, but it can happen.

Also the bastard can have stretches of a year or two where absolutely nothing happens. Screw you, Randy.

[MadArtillery]

Randy is .5-1.5x threat size, no cooldowns, no garenteed events, and no early game safety nets. Could get 3 raids on map at once or none for years. Generally easier than Cassandra.

[Flight]

From what you guys are saying, he's the ultimate challenge early game, but not much on late

[Doomdrvk]

From my experience I get a lot of back to back raids. He can have down times but tbh he hasn't done that for me for a while.

[Kasa]

He tends to be easier in the sense that the other two will do stuff on a schedule whether you're ready or not.
Randy has no cool downs and so you never know what and when he will do something.

But at the same time Randy is the ST that will most often end with the game deciding you have played enough when they send 2 raids plus a mech cluster immediately after just having a raid just after getting hit with malaria (true story).

[X-C0brA-X]

Originally posted by Flight:

The description says Randy is truly random, but is that in the sense of difficulty level of things he sends? Or is the amount of events fully random too?

I mean, if he is all random, he could send a raid and a mech cluster during a solar flare in a heat wave while insects crawl up, as the skies dimms and everybody gets malaria. Did that ever happen to anyone?

I use Randy most of the time just because it is like rolling the dice, you never know what he will do. I have had good Randy runs where lots of good things happened like colonist drop pods, food drop pods, very few raids and no illness. I have also had total hell runs where no drop pods came at all, colonist got sick right at the start and died, animal attacks, horrible weather, crop blight a lot and multiple raids that were way more powerful than my tribals were.

With the other 2 your game will move along pretty smoothly and after a few runs you will start to see the pattern of events the other 2 use on you but with Randy it is really random. The other 2 are pretty forgiving at the start and ramp up the difficulty pretty evenly as your colony grows but Randy can hit you hard right at the start and not stop until it is game over. I like that randomness and not having a clue what is coming or how soon it will come.

When I play Randy I always have this feeling disaster is just on the horizon and my colony will quickly crash and burn, sometimes it does and sometimes Randy is forgiving and lets them live. If you do not want anything major at the start just go with Phoebe then once your colony is settled in switch to Randy.

[Rio]

The reason to play randy is mad animal or caravan events destroying a raid for you. Or funny interactions (I used to love a horde of mad boars or elephants killing the raiders or siege). I really don't enjoy him giving diseases. I've never in all my years of the game enjoyed a week 1 illness from randy like plague, malaria, etc (Even rich explorer with glitter medication it used to be death because self tending wasn't a thing). Its like yeah, I picked tribal start to lose 1-3 people (The main advantage of that start is more people). Or yeah I picked naked brutality to die after 10 minutes setting up my ideology and everything to something I can't do anything about by day 2-3.

Randy is like "You should min/max bro, roll that pawn dice until you get a medical strong one, or risk losing"

Or just getting really lucky and not getting anything terrible for a year.

I don't think he's as random as he used to be. I remember getting an entire year of like no raids and countless transport pod crashes and crashed supplies. But then again theres all these Quests that got added to the list. I get refugees a lot.

Though I do still get playthroughs where its raid after raid after raid.

Back before they gutted the difficulty from toxic fallout SADLY you could get it early on from randy and it last a year or more. I used to keep large stockpiles of food just for it. Back before toxic fallout caused corpse rot. Which WAS FUN, the mad rush to kill every animal on the map for food. Not knowing how long the fallout would last. Knowing that your risking your colonists health each moment with toxic buildup that they are out hunting and hauling.

I used to really love how he could give you tons of "animal joins" events, specially when I started as lone non-violent pawn. But most animals are useless now except as food and coats. Now they just annoy me. I auto slaughter a lot of them or just wait until I can sell them. Unless its one of the few animals you can still train.

I don't think randy is as fun as he used to be. Because so many things have been balanced or changed., even if he himself is the same. But he's no where as bad as a few updates ago when I came back and it was every playthrough early game trying to get me to leave my colony to fight a weather/psychic controlling mech cluster base. And when like every transport pod crash had the lengthy paralize illness.

[Aranador]

Randy is coded with a bigger variance to the raid strength he will send, but, a 100pct difficulty randy will never send a raid stronger than the weakest 500pct randy raid, so he is constrained by the overall game settings.

[Flight]

Originally posted by ⛧⸸Black⸸⛧:

The reason to play randy is mad animal or caravan events destroying a raid for you. Or funny interactions (I used to love a horde of mad boars or elephants killing the raiders or siege).

This is actually the most fun thing in the game for me, when enemies run into a mech cluster, or animals eat a siege alive.

But I have to share here, i once had the Dimming Sky event, and a raid at the same time. Was really excited, but ended up finding out that the darkness things that damages your pawns will not affect human raiders. That was a bummer.

[MadArtillery]

Originally posted by Flight:

Originally posted by ⛧⸸Black⸸⛧:

The reason to play randy is mad animal or caravan events destroying a raid for you. Or funny interactions (I used to love a horde of mad boars or elephants killing the raiders or siege).

This is actually the most fun thing in the game for me, when enemies run into a mech cluster, or animals eat a siege alive.

But I have to share here, i once had the Dimming Sky event, and a raid at the same time. Was really excited, but ended up finding out that the darkness things that damages your pawns will not affect human raiders. That was a bummer.

Ya darkness is super dissapointing. Had a shuttle crash during the event and being the only one effected was irritating.

[Grayfang]

As many have said, randy *can* be the easiest story teller. But whereas you can predict the others, Randy can, at any moment, just say "nope, you're done" and send an unmanageable combo of events. Every Randy lover has also had those games where he sends a raid every 2-3 days for an entire year.

[Lord Freedom]

I've stopped playing Randy lately, because I don't like the stress of having a downed colony after a heavy battle, knowing that he might just strike us again at any moment. At least with Phoebe or Cassandra you know you'll have some recovery time.

[di eshor ribly]

I stopped using Randy a few years ago when he decided to go on one of his meme runs. I quite literally and without exaggeration had to deal with back to back to back plagues and diseases for several in game years. The entire time that was going on Randy was air dropping milk on me. Every cargo pod event was milk, every 2-3 days. There were no raids, no world events like toxic fallout, no psychic waves.... just disease alerts and milk.