'Story Generator' vs 'Skill'

[jerel]

I've logged hundreds of hours in the game, but bought it direct from the developer's site, and never tied it to Steam, so Steam shows zero.

I like the game. It can be fun. It is built well. No bugs.

BUT

I hate the fact that it is billed as a 'Story Generator'. Generally the story generator tries to give you the worst possible results and tries to pass that off as a 'good story'. It's just not.

'Community' mode is too easy. 'Adventure' has too much of a power curve, like, exponentially over time/wealth gathered, as far as I can tell. Start a ship reactor, sure, the game tells you it's gonna be hard. It doesn't lie.

Personally, I don't want to spend hours/days of my time building up a group, just to be wiped out because it's a 'good story' and I got a bad scenario generated for me. That, to me, is NOT a good story, it's stacked against me, both knowingly and unfairly, with a bit of random added in. And the random is either incredibly weak with a low percentage, or vastly stronger than I with a high percentage.

Can there maybe be a new mode built, in which you do not always see a massive increase of raids with a massive increase of units per raid, and their power/accuracy/penetration/'smarts'/etc. every time you try to either build up wealth or start a ship generator, or even just spend time on a planet?

I just want to build a community, run through the tech tree, built a ship, escape the planet - or otherwise build a strong base, send out raids, gather allies, trade, and repeat to see how long I can survive on the surface.

But I really feel that there is no mid-level of difficulty between damn easy and damn hard, and that continuously pisses me off.

[Astasia]

Its a "story generator" because there is no prebuilt story, you are on the planet, survive, make your own story. Not because there isn't skill based gameplay. The game isn't trying to kill you and isn't being unfair with anything (in the sense that if you are playing on Casandra or Phoebe it's always possible to thrive if you handle things correctly).

Scaling is mainly based on wealth and population, it's not exponential, it's a softening curve with the scaling slowing down as you build up wealth until eventually hitting a cap. If you'd like to look into the mechanics of it the wiki has a good writeup as well as covering other elements of it, like adaption which makes things easier when you struggle, and storyteller difficulty like Randy who can throw harder raids at you occasionally.

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Raid_points

The game has a custom difficulty setting, you can adjust the sliders on many things to exactly what you want, you can also adjust this mid game so if things are too easy or hard at any given time you can fine-tune it on the go to keep the game where you want it.

[X-C0brA-X]

Try Phoebe Chillax, I never had her throw anything heavy at my colony until very late game and she gave a lot of drop pods full of stuff and a lot of colonists joining my colony. I tend to play on Losing is fun but I spent a long time playing Strive to Survive mode because that is Rimworlds version of normal game difficulty.

I find Losing is Fun to be more fun because it starts hard and stays hard so no difficulty curves, the game tries from the very start to kill me so once I survive the start and get a base going the difficulty seems to stay pretty even the rest of the game.

Honestly Phoebe on Strive to Survive might be what you are looking for.

[Supahz]

Originally posted by jerel:

Personally, I don't want to spend hours/days of my time building up a group, just to be wiped out because it's a 'good story' and I got a bad scenario generated for me. That, to me, is NOT a good story,

I agree. But... there are ways around this issue, starting with setting the gameplay options as you like in Custom settings for difficulty. Example...I hate scaria, so I remove the chance in every single game I play... but I increase animal retaliation. Tweak tweak

Also, apart from crypto caskets and resurrector gadgets, there's always reload and dev mode, Character Editor etc. Death doesn't have to be permanent.

If you're playing your game, and you get a 50-man raid... just dev mode "force enemy flee" and relax. There might not ever be a way to tweak the game exactly as you want it, but there's probably a way around the issues if you look hard enough.

[TwisterCat]

It's leaned more into the story generator elements with each passing update. Continues after a colony is destroyed is the most recent.

There's a lot of skill involved, some cheese too, but what gives the game life is the stories.

I believe the reason the comment was made, is so people focus on what makes each run special, so when you do lose, it's not just "Oh well, I suck, I know what I'm doing next time. There goes another __ hour run."

[Overeagerdragon]

If you think "adventure mode" has too steep of a difficulty curve...hate to tell you but it scales based off YOUR wealth... so in essence... you're experiencing that hard spike because you, yourself, snowball in wealth :)

[Steelfleece]

I've done the spaceship thing once, on custom difficulty that was mostly Strive to Survive with tweaks on things like reducing the instant death and scaria rot chances. Medieval setting with capped research, tribal start. Had a surprisingly easy time because I'd not-totally-intentionally gone easy mode by travelling to the ship you're told about on day 20 or so rather than building one (couldn't that time anyway). Gave away most of the colony's goods to various settlements so I had a lot of allies willing to intervene, plus not a lot of wealth on the ship's map.

Anyway, you may want to go into custom difficulty and set Adaptation growth rate to 0. Doing that plus learning to manage your excess wealth make the difficulty scaling a lot... flatter.