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[Broseph Stalin]

Randy throws stuff at you regardless of whether it will help or hurt you. Cassandra fucking hates you. Every challenge will be a little worse than the last until she can finally break you.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Feeding the animals has also been hard. I discovered that a large field of dandelions is fairly quick to plant, quick to grow, and can hopefully provide ample nutrition for 30+ grazers. That it requires constant replanting should also raise some Plant skills for the growers.

A grown dandelion provides 0.18 nutrition, and grows in 4.5 days. That's 0.04 nutrition per day.

A haygrass tile provides 1.05 nutrition, and grows in 13 days. That's 0.08 nutrition per day. Two times more efficient than dandelions.

That means that you need double farm space for dandelion growth, so if you see my earlier post about farm size, for 30 muffalos that would be 1080 farm tiles (33x33 farm). For haygrass that would be 540 farm tiles (23x23 farm).

Dandelions are also twice as quick to plant, and provide far less nutrition per tile. Given that a lot of smaller grazing animals consume less than a full haygrass tile's 1.05 nutrition per feeding, yet still use up the full tile when they do so, dandelions are a far superior grazing animal foodsource unless you also take the time to wait till the haygrass is fully grown, harvest it, and move it to the animal zone so that it's only consumed in regular 0.05 nutrition pieces.

Haygrass actually gives 21 pieces of 0.05 nutrition, not a single 1.05 feeding. It's the dandelion that gives a flat 0.18 nutrition per plant.

You need to wait for dandelions to grow, same as with haygrass. They cannot be eaten until they are mature.

Dandelions are a lousy animal food. They cannot be harvested or stockpiled, while hay can be gathered for later use. Double farm size means double the amount of sunlamps and power generators, all of which is vulnerable to random events. With dandelions, any time you cannot grow plants will wreck your animals. Instead of a double farm size for dandelions, you could have a double haygrass farm and stockpile all that hay instead.

[Akura]

Where are you getting this information from? Steam boards are saying dandelions are better for grazing than haygrass; I started planting dandelions before checking that though. The wiki for haygrass may be outdated so I can't rely on that info, but the wiki and ingame information put dandelion's growth time at 2.5 days, not 4.5, and I have witnessed this myself.  Also, haygrass only provides its 1.05 nutrition only if grown to harvest(and if the grower doesn't botch the harvest), it only gives 0.2 nutrition if grazed on. I need them grazing now, I can't afford to wait for the haygrass to grow and harvest. The speed at which it can be planted and grown offsets the significant land use, and I have plenty of open land to use.

Also, why would I use sunlamps on an outdoor farm? Those are only useful for an indoor greenhouse - speaking of which I have one producing rice for chemfuel which is currently providing half my power needs(thermodynamics be DAMNED). Sunlamps no longer provide 24hr light for growing; they shut off at night when the plants sleep.

[EnigmaticHat]

If you need food now I would honestly put all of your animals in a caravan and go graze in an appropriate biome.  Or... you know, slaughter some of them.  If you need constant planting that's gonna be an inconcience and what happens if your planters get knocked out of commission.

Randy throws stuff at you regardless of whether it will help or hurt you. Cassandra fucking hates you. Every challenge will be a little worse than the last until she can finally break you.

Agreed; Randy Random is def the easiest storyteller.  He doesn't scale at all and if he decides to help he can give you almost infinite colonists while the other two vanilla ones don't want you going over 18 ever.  The main thing that makes Randy hard is that he can have negative events literally overlap, and he can also send events at you way earlier than the other storytellers would.  So early mechanoids basically.  He's got that xcom difficulty curve.

I've had fun with Phoebe on rough.  I appreciate that I don't spend most of my time recovering from shit, and when there are raids they've been difficult.  I wouldn't say she's particularly punishing tho.  I think the other storytellers can be a bit spammy forcing the player to react to problems.

[Blue_Dwarf]

Where are you getting this information from?

I launched the game and tested it.

Plant growth time is not the same as real growth time, because plants rest at night. Dandelions grow in 2.5 days, but with resting factored in that becomes 4.5 days. Haygrass grows in 7 days, but actually in 13 days. If there are suboptimal growing conditions, like heat/cold or low light, that time increases even more.

Also, why would I use sunlamps on an outdoor farm?

An outdoor farm? That explains this problem you've been having: "Feeding the animals has also been hard.". Instead of setting up proper farming, you are relying on hacks like dandelions.

[Culise]

To be fair, sun lamps don't give 24-hour benefit anymore due to the aforementioned plant resting cycle.  Sun lamps are wonderful in areas with marginal or extreme temperatures, regions with low amounts of sunlight, or if you expect large amounts of toxic fallout or the like.  In temperate regions, though, outdoor farms are far from inadequate, and sun lamps are not really necessary for "proper farming."

As for dandelions versus haygrass, I agree that dandelions are better for grazing.  Haygrass is a long-term solution, and one that favors harvesting over grazing.  That said, in the long run it is better to transition to haygrass over dandelions, and unless you need animal food urgently, I'd tend to favor haygrass.  I've never considered the caravan trick before, though; that's an interesting one.  I barely use caravans so I'm not sure how much I'll ever get to use it, but it's an interesting one. 

[Blue_Dwarf]

To be fair, sun lamps don't give 24-hour benefit anymore due to the aforementioned plant resting cycle.

Nobody said they do, and I don't understand why everyone is mentioning this.

Sun lamps provide a consistent growing environment, and actually grow plants faster than sun. With a sun lamp, the plants grow at 100% between 6:00 and 19:00. Outside plants grow below 100% between 6:00 and 9:00, as well as between 16:00 and 18:00, and stop growing entirely between 18:00 and 19:00.

Unless you are playing at a low difficulty, planting dandelions for grazing is a quite poor strategy, which contributes to all sorts of problems.

[BurnedToast]

Randy throws stuff at you regardless of whether it will help or hurt you. Cassandra fucking hates you. Every challenge will be a little worse than the last until she can finally break you.

That's not how it works.

All storyteller difficulty is primarily based on wealth (there are other factors but wealth is the biggest one). If you don't change your wealth, every challenge will be more or less exactly the same, and if you decrease your wealth they will get easier. The pre-game storyteller thing is a lie. There is no time-based challenge increase, except that the first month quadrum is scripted to be a lot easier.

Personally I wish there was a time-based storyteller, the current wealth-based system gives you a perverse incentive to live in abject poverty as long as possible and distorts balance in strange ways (for example archotech implants and legendary weapons/armor are probably not worth it)

[ventuswings]

While purely anecdotal, I found time-based enemy raid strength increase to be far more noticeable in Cassandra compared to Randy. Maybe I should take a look at Storyteller.xml to see if there are actual differences...

[BurnedToast]

IIRC cassandra weighs wealth more than randy (randy being more, well, random). So since wealth accumulates over time naturally unless you purposely control it, it would make it seem like cassandra gets harder more quickly.

[hector13]

Randy’s a dick though. Mostly just because there is the potential to have multiple things happen very close together.

I remember getting a raid from the robots (faction name of which I can never remember) followed shortly after by a pirate raid, which fought each other, and then man-eating huskies finished it all off.

Another time I can’t quite remember what the sequence was, but it took out my main doctor, back-up doctor, and back-up back-up doctor, and then a group of man eating cats finished me off.

[EnigmaticHat]

I'm like 80% sure that storyteller is based on wealth *and* time.  Its easiest to observe with Phoebe earlygame.  Beat a raid, and then just don't build anything till the next raid (which should be over a week).  The next raid will be significantly harder regardless of wealth.

Also several people who have played very long games have reported Cassandra infinitely ramping up the difficulty until every other raider has a doomsday rocket.

[Culise]

That would also explain why the AI default includes threat points for time elapsed in the XML, if I'm understanding pointsFactorFromDaysPassed correctly.  On the other hand, even if I am, the code that parses that tag could be knocked out in the actual game, so in-game activity is more useful. 

I also did rummage up this while trying to find a better understanding of Storytellers.xml. 

The idea that storytellers use only (or even primarily) wealth to determine how to scale threats is a myth.

The algorithm is quite a bit more complex than that and takes into account wealth, population, defensive strength, and several factors related to the time since the colony has taken damage, had people downed, or been at given population counts.

It would probably be a waste to spend a bunch of time trying to cheese wealth lower. Just enjoy the game.

[BurnedToast]

I'm like 80% sure that storyteller is based on wealth *and* time.  Its easiest to observe with Phoebe earlygame.  Beat a raid, and then just don't build anything till the next raid (which should be over a week).  The next raid will be significantly harder regardless of wealth.

Also several people who have played very long games have reported Cassandra infinitely ramping up the difficulty until every other raider has a doomsday rocket.

I double checked the relevant thread and I was misremembering, the time factor is actually 40 days, so almost 3 quadrums not 1 quadrum. After 40 days it hits 1.0 and stops increasing. In other words, raids are artificially easier at the start and gradually scale up until the 40 day mark at which point they are full strength.

Relevant forum thread discussing the code here

People who have played very long games probably have massive amounts of wealth so they get massive raids.

Edit:

I also did rummage up this while trying to find a better understanding of Storytellers.xml. 

The idea that storytellers use only (or even primarily) wealth to determine how to scale threats is a myth.

The algorithm is quite a bit more complex than that and takes into account wealth, population, defensive strength, and several factors related to the time since the colony has taken damage, had people downed, or been at given population counts.

It would probably be a waste to spend a bunch of time trying to cheese wealth lower. Just enjoy the game.

1. This is from 2016 and things have changed quite a bit

2. Even in the thread you linked, the guy who's disagreeing with tynan posts code segments that seem to prove him wrong, and tynan never replies to counter it, or even tell him that he's wrong/misunderstood something. You can argue he has no obligation to (which of course he does not) but a simple "you're wrong because x" would have cleared things up quite a bit.

[EnigmaticHat]

Raiders (and manhunter packs) have a point buy system for obtaining units.  According to the source code you linked they get an "adaption" bonus which scales with time and is reduced if raiders down or kill your colonists.  The adaption bonus ends with this code:

Code: [Select]

unfactoredpoints *= Find.Storyteller.difficulty.threatScale;
//2.6 for merciless, 1.6 for savage and 1.0 for rought
//in case of savage, this line will contribute much more points then wealth and pawns combined multiple times