Day 3, no nomads?!?!?!

[MrGowdy]

I played this game forever ago, wanted to pick it back up as I remember enjoying it.

HOWEVER, I've deleted/reset the world twice now trying to get what I would consider a reasonable start...

TWO of the three times, I got to day/night three and no nomads joined the map, I had my starter 16 or so people still.

One of the tree times, I got 2 to join after 3 days.

To top that off, I have 9 food stored in the first few days, and I have had people starve to death multiple times....

What is going on? Are Nomads really so RNG that you can go days in the very beginning without getting any? Also why are people starving to death when there is food available?

I know people like difficult games, but this is just pure frustration and stupidity vs "wow this is hard and I should be making different decisions to do better...."

[ZeroGravitas]

I believe nomads are more likely to turn up (in greater numbers) if you have plenty of excess food and housing space and a desirable village.

Do you have spare housing?

9 Food isn't a lot. Where is it? Can all your 12 (?) starting villagers even access it?

Have you got a farm so you can go harvest more veg patches?

Have you been grabbing extra manually, to drop off with them? (Or with Havest + Recall spells, when you have enough influence.)

Can you cast Holy Potatoes, somewhere they can harvest them (preferably when it's raining).

Are you working towards clucker coops and/or animal pens, so you can make rations in a kitchen? 4 times the food value of a raw vegetable. Although you should be able to get a really long way with just veg.

[MrGowdy]

By end of day 1, I had 2 full farms going, plenty of water and 2 or 3 spare housing.

By end of day 2, I had 3 farms, one wasn't yet full/watered, and 25 total housing I believe, so a lot spare.

By day 3, all 3 farms were going in full swing, still plenty of housing, all resource buildings running, but only 4 builders at this point as I didn't have enough people to do anything else really....


I just started up a 4th game and on DAY ONE, I had nomads spawn (3 of them) and on day 2, I had another 3 I believe?

The RNG of nomads spawning is honestly making me not interested in playing right now. It's one thing to manage colony and build properly and setup defense... and it's another to be slogging through extremely slow gameplay, literally wanting to leave the game AFK for long periods of time because I simply am not getting nomads are a reasonable rate....

[Tiberiumkyle]

Originally posted by ZeroGravitas:

I believe nomads are more likely to turn up (in greater numbers) if you have plenty of excess food and housing space and a desirable village.

Nomad RNG is affected by empty housing space, jobs (filled or not), food, water, defenses (towers and combobulators), and desirability. More = better RNG (till the cap is hit for each thing).

Since I already know how you like to dig into the game mechanics, you're in luck, I've got a copy of the nomad RNG code, at least as it was as of mid 2019. I don't recall any changes to it since, you'd need to check update notes, or decompile the current class file to see if things match up. https://pastebin.com/7FM5e5Vy

[Veldrin]

For those who struggle to read the code, you can increase the chance of a nomad spawn event with:
Up to 200 positive desirability points (negative desirability points are ignored)
Up to 100 unoccupied housing slots
Up to 70 more jobs than villagers
Up to 50 towers and combobulators (includes recombobulator and crystal motivator)
Up to 200 more food than villagers (each type of food is considered equal here)
Up 10,000 full water buckets (or 40,000 units of water)
Unlimited amount of villagers
Every 3 ticks during dawn, morning and midday on days you don't get nomads

However there are some things that decrease the chance of a nomad spawn event:
Up to 70 less jobs than villagers
Up to 200 less food than villagers
Unlimited amount of villagers more than total housing slots

Focus on ensuring there is enough housing slots, jobs and food for every villager first (the housing penalty is massive so prioritize that).

[MrGowdy]

From everything I'm reading here (and other places) it all makes sense...

Does "more jobs than villagers" mean if you have 1/6 for a building (meaning 1 requested worker) is that 5 extra? Or do you have to request all 6 for it to count as an extra 5 for bonus?

Ultimately it feels like the RNG is punishing and.... really not enjoyable for me? Considering I have restarted multiple times and I've had games where I got nomads before I finished building my first house on Day 1... and I've had really bad experiences of having an empty village built and still no nomads by day 3

[Veldrin]

For more jobs than villagers it is simply the worker slots provided by the building that count as jobs.

No nomads in the first 3 days is not punishing RNG. 15 elder nomads in the first 3 days is punishing RNG. Anyway that is the nature of RNG - it is random. It will randomly generate randomly sized runs of overall favourable/balanced/unfavourable outcomes.

[MrGowdy]

Alright, after a few restarts and some annoying RNG luck, got up and running, walled off the corruption, pushed it back to a small corner, built a a large base and population.

I remember liking this game (I must have had decent RNG the first time I played)... but I also remember why I stopped.... I "beat" a level such as the one I'm in and I just didn't see a reason to keep going. You get all the "tech" and buildings from day one and there isn't really any progression that I can tell beyond some slight perks on the world map.

Really like the idea of the initial map you select and play but without progression, tech tree(s), or unique resources only available on some maps, there just doesn't seem like a good motivation to keep going (for me).

Anyway thanks to all those who tried to help with the RNG stuff!

[Sterling]

Originally posted by MrGowdy:

I remember liking this game (I must have had decent RNG the first time I played)... but I also remember why I stopped.... I "beat" a level such as the one I'm in and I just didn't see a reason to keep going. You get all the "tech" and buildings from day one and there isn't really any progression that I can tell beyond some slight perks on the world map.

The core gameplay loop is to build a village and then bunny hop to a new region. Progression involves making that loop easier to setup. "Winning" is surviving for a year in each region. Unfortunately, if you're looking for a city sim that just involves one map and continually improving that one map, R2R probably isn't going to completely scratch your itch. You can potentially survive indefinitely, but it starts requiring a lot of micro managing the monsters.

I think a lot of people are put off by this revelation, but to me it makes R2R more of an RTS-TD-City Sim hybrid and that's a unique experience all on its own.

[ZeroGravitas]

Originally posted by Sterling:

The core gameplay loop is to build a village and then bunny hop to a new region.

It's not, though. That top level goal is a misdirect, as I've said to Ray, and he's removing that goal when he overhauls this to integrate with Steam achievements.

The core, fun part of the game is seeing how long you can survive in one map. "Winning" is surviving indefinitely. And once you understand enough of the game's key mechanics, this can be essentially automated.

Or you can push the corruption too much and *have* to use spells every night to contain the monsters. How Ray's designed the game, especially with the deliberate awkwardness of the Fire Elementals, is as you said: to make sure the player is always having something to finesse and do (like an RTS/TD). But in practice there are a couple ways around that. :-)

[Sterling]

Originally posted by ZeroGravitas:

Originally posted by Sterling:

The core gameplay loop is to build a village and then bunny hop to a new region.

It's not, though. That top level goal is a misdirect, as I've said to Ray, and he's removing that goal when he overhauls this to integrate with Steam achievements.

If that's true, then I'll be really disappointed to see that goal go. Hopefully he decides to keep it in some form for some players to work towards, even if the game design is changed to encourage the player to just survive in a single region for an indefinite amount of time. "Solved" maps are unfortunately a bit boring, though that's really just my opinion.

It's like one of my other favorite games, Project Zomboid. Sure, you can survive for years of in-game time, but why would you? Eventually there's nothing to do. A game like 7 Days to Die has the same issues, but at least there you can fall back to base-building and multi-player. R2R has a sweet spot right now. The game pushes you to start the gameplay loop over before your village gets stale, and promises to reward you later if you do it enough, though my guess is there's not really much of a reward aside from a buttload of GXP and maybe a perk to go with it.

[ZeroGravitas]

Originally posted by Sterling:

If that's true

To be fair, he's still musing on if he can have the "1 year on every map" acknoweledged somehow, without it being a Steam achievement.

It *could* be a compelling thing to work towards, if there was *increasing* challenge with successive maps. But currently, it's the reverse: Every map has identical challenge. And progressing through them gives you perks that make that *easier*. So once you've survived one map for a year, there's nothing else to conquer. It's a formality of grinding it ~47 more times.

I've pushed pretty hard to take another go at having corruption spread between maps, or something, like we talked about 4-5 years back. But he's already tried one global threat system that didn't work out and had to be removed, and is resigned to only relatively minor content updates now. (To be fair it's been a long development process.)

[Sterling]

It really seems like that's a problem that can't be solved with the current game structure. Which is rather unfortunate, but I'll be interested in seeing how Ray decides to go with the next step. Maybe that will open up some opportunities to fine tune some of the threats.