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Alright, after playing over 100+ hours, here's my feedback of the game, what's good and what's bad.

Aesthetically, the game is amazing. Again, Klei hits one out of the park as far as making a game that looks good even while completely ignoring standard conventions of what's going on in the gaming industry. Well played.

As far as the challenge. Klei likes making games that grind their players into bloody pieces, repeatedly, with learning curves that are exponential. Not necessarily a problem, but the danger of overdoing it is there.

Unfortunately, I think overdoing it is exactly what's going on. The balance is bad right now between reward versus investment. In short, playing the game well doesn't pay out as well as it should. Part of the problem is inherent in an early release, given, and right now, there are a LOT of challenges that don't have good and balanced solutions, but the challenge is in orbit over the top right now.

Again, much of this is just due to incomplete development. For instance, I've had Algae Terrariums set to Priority 9 for ten minutes, and despite numerous Red Alerts, the Duplicants completely ignore them in order to build copper wires of Priority 5. Oxygen has been depleted in the base for about 2 cycles now, and only 1 of the 5 Terrariums has been functional, even though there is more than enough available Algae and Water and multiple Dupes are assigned to the proper tasks (Build and Deliver). 3 of the 4 Duplicants are set to Build/Deliver/Dig. And only 1 of the 4 Duplicant is dedicated to Research. They HAVE been interacting with the Terrariums, they simply stopped, despite it being Priority 9. Again, I've been playing more than 100 hours, and I succeeded in making it to Cycle 80+. I know what I'm doing.

The resource requirements of doing ANYTHING in the game are pretty absurd right now. Some examples:

Deodorizers ( are nigh useless, as the amount of polluted Oxygen generated by environmental hazards far exceeds their pathetic cleansing rates.

Power constraints are strangling, especially in electrical loads on wires, which are both inconsistent and brutally high.

Cleaning water for use is almost as difficult as finding a new water source to use. For some reason, we're not allowed to boil water to clean it. (Arbitrary limitations are arbitrary)

For some reason, plants do not undergo any proper form of photosynthesis of any kind, and, equally puzzling, Algae doesn't reproduce itself. (Again, arbitrary limitations are arbitrary)

And then there's the problem with sand, in that, it ends, because, for some inexplicable reason, there's no way implemented in the game to clean it. (Arbitrary limitations remain arbitrary)

Anyhow, speaking only about the "game" itself, in a theoretical sense, it's plagued right now with immense Skinner Boxism, with the reward being eeking out another Cycle, in never ending crisis management. If you hit each note just right, you can end up in a very good spot, but if your Dupes flake out on you, waste time, get lost, get their pathing screwed up... things compound really quickly.

One very quick and easy adjustment: Have Dupes prioritize work based on Priority AND PROXIMITY. All other things being equal, Dupes should prioritize jobs that are closest to them and NEVER override another Dupe closer to a job, moving toward high priority jobs that are far away ONLY when there are no high priority jobs near them. This will solve a LOT of headaches and arbitrarily wasted time.

How gases and pressure works right now is completely and utterly wrong. I get that it's just a game, but the game is also painfully sciency most of the time, but then science gets jettisoned altogether in order to inject arbitrary difficulty. Gases mix. Pressure has to do with volume. Breathability has to do with Oxygenation. Plants generally process CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen. It isn't much, but it's still there.

And, as of right now, the amount of water needed to make food is out of control. Right now, the ability to survive is too dependent on random procedural spawning than necessarily actual strategy.

And, please, balance the cleaning equipment (Deodorizers, water filters, etc.). Make Sand renewable?

Anyhow, my observations. I may even be wrong, but after 100+ hours, I'm kind of spent on the game as it is. It was worth the money, but not all of my expectations have necessarily been met. The lack of balance and the dependency on "luck of the draw" is a bit "meh". Coupled with the flaky mechanics (Dupes ignoring crisis level jobs), only exacerbates the present shortcomings of the game at its present stage of development.

Overall, fun, but quickly devolves into frustration, which is the opposite of fun.

Cheers.

-Fist-

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2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

They HAVE been interacting with the Terrariums, they simply stopped, despite it being Priority 9.

I'll be honest with you, I never used terrariums. Their effect is so pathetic and their resource requirements so outrageous compared to the effect that they don't deserve to be used. They may be bugged or you made some mistake, I can't tell. But I definitely recommend you to discard them and concentrate on better uses for your resources.

2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

Air Scrubbers are nigh useless, as the amount of polluted Oxygen generated by environmental hazards far exceeds their pathetic cleansing rates.

Scrubbers remove CO2, they don't clean pollutied oxygen. And they're pretty effective. Did you mean deodorizers?

2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

Power constraints are strangling, especially in electrical loads on wires, which are both inconsistent and brutally high.

Until you get your large scale generation using heavy wire and transformers, you can usually go with a few separated circuits. Power may be constraining but avoiding wasting the power helps a lot. There are many ways to save power, in general just don't let things run when they're not doing something useful.

2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

Cleaning water for use is almost as difficult as finding a new water source to use. For some reason, we're not allowed to boil water to clean it.

Game's ultimate source of clean water are steam geysers. I have what I would consider pretty large base and I'm still running it off a single geyser. 

If you like boiling, there are numerous threads explaining how to exploit the tepidizer to boil water for you. But it's not necessary to make a sustainable colony.

2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

For some reason, plants do not undergo any proper form of photosynthesis of any kind, and, equally puzzling, Algae doesn't reproduce itself.

Maybe they're just badly picked names for alient plant forms. Lack of properties you'd like them to have does not make the game unplayable, they just don't work the way you'd expect them to. But that's so for almost anything about the game.

2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

And then there's the problem with sand, in that, it ends, because, for some inexplicable reason, there's no way implemented in the game to clean it.

Again, ultimate source of clean water are steam geysers. There's plenty of uses for polluted water, you don't need to waste your sand on it.

2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

Have Dupes prioritize work based on Priority AND PROXIMITY.

They already do that. But they do that usually one by one when they're up to pick a new job while other dupes are busy with other tasks and that has the unwanted effects. I can agree with you that the job selection system is not perfect and I also hope it will get some improvements over time. For now, it's in a "good enough to move on" state because there are still major features waiting to be implemented and devs concentrating on polishing details would make these take longer to come.

2 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

And, as of right now, the amount of water needed to make food is out of control. Right now, the ability to survive is too dependent on random procedural spawning than necessarily actual strategy.

.If you refer to water lost on irrigation ... you don't need to irrigate. Not all your plants at least. Yes, it depends on the map generator how many steam geysers you'll get. Because clean water is the game's ultimate source. But my estimate is that one geyser is still plenty to run a base with fifty duplicants as long as you're careful about your resources.

 

I would suggest you to take a look around the forums and check out what other players have found or invented in the game. Sustainable colony lasting potentially forever is not just possible, it's actually quite easy with some experience with the game mechanics. They're not realistic but they work together well enough.

 

 

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It's disheartening to read your 100 hour breakdown. The only thing I can say is keep trying to improve your game play. Everything you describe I have experienced as I started new colonies. I have 275 hours on record according to Steam. I finally reached cycle 200 and things are going great. There are many examples of 1000+ cycle colonies surviving with minimal frustration.

Yes the game is still in development, and thank goodness it is because it's a ******* cakewalk.

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6 hours ago, Moggles said:

It's disheartening to read your 100 hour breakdown. The only thing I can say is keep trying to improve your game play. Everything you describe I have experienced as I started new colonies. I have 275 hours on record according to Steam. I finally reached cycle 200 and things are going great. There are many examples of 1000+ cycle colonies surviving with minimal frustration.

Yes the game is still in development, and thank goodness it is because it's a ******* cakewalk.

It kinda is, and kinda isnt :)

When you spend 100+ hours on the game you learn how it works and it works :) After that it becomes kinda easy, because you know everything you need and just do it.  Until then its numerous restarts and fails :)

I can make a sustainable colony always now, after something like 20+ restarts.

The game is and feels not fully developed yet :)

My biggest annoying struggle is cooling geysers with legitimate ways. Currently the only legit way for me at least is to use Hydrogen radiator to cool it, it kinda gets old.

My biggest wish and i think the biggest end game and replayability potential is to have at least 2 or even 3 ways of doing stuff, cooling heating and etc and that should be based on the map layout. Because currently if you dont get a slime  biome and 1 cold b iome, you have to restart. And the strategy, tech priorities should be done on the circumstances. That would add a lot to the game i think

As well as more biomes, such as Oil biome mentioned in psts (To have a transition from Natural gas/oil to electricity and later maybe even a radioactive biome, to have nuclear power). And then to Robots and of course fighting Worms, and other rodents, to get another dimension on the game :)

 

 

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15 hours ago, Kasuha said:

Scrubbers remove CO2, they don't clean pollutied oxygen. And they're pretty effective. Did you mean deodorizers?

Yes, thanks for the correction...

15 hours ago, Kasuha said:

Game's ultimate source of clean water are steam geysers. I have what I would consider pretty large base and I'm still running it off a single geyser.

No, I get this. That's what I mean by "luck of the draw". If a steam geyser isn't relatively nearby your base, you're stuck groping in the dark. I've found only one relatively near my starting location in 20+ starts, sadly, that was before I had enough of a grasp on the game to get it.

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37 minutes ago, FistfulOfZen said:

Yes, thanks for the correction...

Deodorizers are not there to let you clean large amounts of polluted oxygen. They're good to help you keep the clean place clean, to get rid of traces of polluted oxygen that may pass an airlock. But we don't have good in-game tools to deal with large amounts of polluted oxygen, the only reasonable options are pufts which are pretty hard to move around and keep alive, or oxygen condensers. Which are fortunately not as restricted as steam generation.

27 minutes ago, FistfulOfZen said:

No, I get this. That's what I mean by "luck of the draw". If a steam geyser isn't relatively nearby your base, you're stuck groping in the dark. I've found only one relatively near my starting location in 20+ starts, sadly, that was before I had enough of a grasp on the game to get it.

I certainly know what you're talking about. Note that in my current playthrough, the closest geyser wasn't even much closer than in that case. Amount of steam geysers has decreased since introduction of gas geysers, I would guess the total number of geysers is similar but some are gas ones now. I did not have a major problem with it, though. It's about keeping the water usage low while you don't have a geyser supply. 

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Thanks for the replies. I know that there are many 100+ Cycle bases. The reason 100+ Cycle (and more) bases are so interesting is that it is so rare to get there. And even those bases tend to be swimming in Polluted Oxygen. And the amount of investment to get to that point is extremely high, and also requires more than a lot of luck during world gen. So maybe we dial back the level of investment that a player is expected to bring to the game.

The game is fun, but to do even passably well, it takes a large amount of time and energy watching videos and reading gamewikis that aren't, in any technical sense, part of the game. Now, that's an interesting part of Klei's games, that they are deceptively casual (because they aren't), but let's simply say that I don't generally buy games so I can spend 10 to 40+ Hours of reading wikis and watching videos on just how to play it.

Though, I think learning to play VERY well should take a certain interest in problem solving and researching, but the problem I'm having is that, as a player, I often can't find a plateau to base further growth off of. That's admittedly an idiosyncrasy of my playstyle, but there's a very limited number of ways to approach certain problems right now, and sometimes that number of solutions gets down to one, which is unlike a game like DS/DST, where there are many different ways to approach the game's many problems, and each of them can work fairly well, even if it's just brute force (which poses its own challenges).

Now, I know that ONI is a different game, and is much more strategic, but frustration comes when even when I MANUALLY send a Dupe over to a location near where I need things done, they ignore everything around them and single-mindedly head back to do what they were going to do. And they seem to choose the WORST possible locations to do things, like wandering into a clean water tank simply to vomit into it. Why is that even a thing?

Anyhow, the game IS a work in progress, and the problem I'm working through is the full transition to Hydrogen cycle, but the base I got to 80+ days on didn't have a clean water supply anywhere nearby, so starting over again, with what I learned the last time through. Then I ran into the problem of the Dupes not keeping the Terrariums up (and, I discovered that the root of the problem is that the Dupes never built the ladders all the way down to the area with water, cycles earlier, which is largely my fault, but I also took a couple weeks to play other games). So, yay, fun. Had to reload an earlier save and make sure that got done this time. (EDIT: Also, I should note that the problem I ran into on the restart is that there was a huge pocket of CO2 right above my starting location, with wild Meal Lice, so I had to open it up to get access to the food. It flooded into my base with CO2, but I'd planned on the Algae Terrariums cleaning it up, however things clearly did not go as planned...)

That said, I also have a crap ton of other games I want to play (Yay, Steam Sales), so my attention is split. The question I have face is, do I want to invest the time and energy to research the intricacies of implementing a stable base in ONI, and not play the 8 games I bought on sale, or do I want to save the time it's going to take to research all this, drop ONI, and go play those 8 other games, which, granted, have their own learning curves (such as This War of Mine and How to Survive), and then come back to ONI after the next update, which I'm really looking forward to, because, again, the game is a lot of fun, just missing some pieces.

Anyhow, the game is good, just wish that, especially on the earlier side of things, it wasn't such a haul and a dice roll on certain resources (like steam geysers), and things worked like seem like they should (Algae reproducing, plants exchanging CO2 for C+O2, etc.), because the lack of renewable resources is pretty painful right now.

-Fist-

PS - So this just happened, and it's irritating. Had Nisbet digging out an area under my current base that I want to use for a CO2 sink. She digs two blocks. Stops, climbs the ladder, walks to the portal, then picks up Meal Lice... then puts it in the box. Okay, yes, I have the box set to Priority 7, but it's no where near her. Why did she stop digging (Priority 5) to go do something nowhere near her? That's what I mean by "Proximity". Things far away should have significantly decreased Priority over things nearby, especially when there was another Dupe, with the same job on that side of the base. Either or, restarting again.

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I'm growing concerned that the devs are focusing a bit much on new "features", while not resolving old problems/bugs. I've seen it happen in a few games, where a game is developed, creating a rat nest of interlocking bugs that don't get properly fixed. This is especially concerning since the Dupe AI is just so coarse right now. For example: one Dupe (with instructions to build, deliver, and dig) will deliver material to a project, dig, then leave to do something else, and another Dup will come to finish the job. The first Dup will even end up going where the other Dup came from. Don't get me wrong, I like new features as much as anyone... but I want a game that's working without arbitrary and nonsensical mechanics.

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Now I have a Dup stress vomiting. There's a massage table. There's available power. The massage table is set to priority 9 (and has been for several cycles). The AI clearly isn't prioritizing jobs reasonably (needs over jobs).

I've noticed some patterns that probably need to be addressed.

  • (Frequently) Dupes will abandon a job at the first hint of any need (food or toilet), instead of finishing a task that can be done before they either start starving or lose control of their bowels.
  • (Uncommon) Dupes that need oxygen will freak out, pathing back and forth, right up to the point of suffocating, probably because the oxygen they were trying to get to moved or was consumed by another Dupe?
  • (Uncommon) Water and Polluted Water do not level out. Polluted water will "stack up" on top of regular water, rather than flow over it to fill a space, if the space is fairly wide (in this case about 50 blocks).
  • (Rare) Dupes will "make a mess" because out house isn't available, even if there's a functional Lavatory built and available.

Also, I am not liking the materials switching without notification. This cost me quite a bit of time and energy.

-Fist-

 

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3 hours ago, FistfulOfZen said:

Also, I am not liking the materials switching without notification. This cost me quite a bit of time and energy.

Ya, that one is definitely a terrible idea.  I mean, once you know it happens, you can watch for it, so it's not killer.  But it's a bad idea in terms of mechanics.

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12 minutes ago, Hohol said:

Could you please explain what you mean by material switching?

When you're building, the game will switch materials to that which you have the largest amount of, say from Sandstone to Granite, for example. There's no notification. The game doesn't ask you if you want to stop using Sandstone and start using other materials for building.

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It's most annoying when you're building an abyssalite pipe network, and you run out of the abyssalite and then it switches to another stone automatically without notification.  Later you notice massive heat leakage, have to individually seek out the wrong-stone pipes, disassemble them (they're full of water of course).  Terrible mechanic.

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They are planning to address dupe task issues in the next update. What happens now is multiple available dupes will often 'take custody' of specific tasks even if they are not nearby. So other nearby dupes will not go to finish a task already assigned to another.

But they are enabling premption or interception of tasks by a dupe in proximity. As of about 3 weeks ago they talked about on their stream for the new content update. They have it working on construction and digging they said at the time but they had some issue with other types of tasks. This will remedy some of your compaints.

Additionally, bugs are very important to address and they've basically have a slew of hotfixes to the game since I got it at the end of May. But some aren't worth the time because the whole system is getting replaced. Diseases have a bunch of issues but they are completely replacing that system in a month.

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i don't know if this has been suggested but my only gripe with dupe tasking besides what is about to be fixed is where they take materials from to build stuff.  

say i put a bunch of granite next to an area where i'm about to use granite for construction - i'd like to be able to tell the dupes to use specifically that material.  how it is now results in them running from somewhere grabbing the closest granite and if it's rather far they might drop it to go do something else.  resulting in material being spread around and not orderly

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1 hour ago, bopeep8hersheep said:

i'd like to be able to tell the dupes to use specifically that material.  how it is now results in them running from somewhere grabbing the closest granite and if it's rather far they might drop it to go do something else.  resulting in material being spread around and not orderly

One way to fix that would be to give containers the ability to have permissions.  I mean, they're giving us the ability to control the max capacity, which seems of minimal utility to me.  So why not also let us control who can deposit to and remove from a container?    I've suggested it before in relation to puft slime management, but it would also address this concern, although it would be easier done if you had well specialized compactors.  If you had specialized lockers you could easily forbid pickups from all other granite lockers aside from the one you want used, until your project is done.  If all your lockers have just a mish-mash of material it'd be harder to do, but you could still do it, especially if you have a focused crew that handles construction.  Pickup and deliver would be separate permissions.  This would also for instance solve @Whispershade's fertilizer problem, as he could simply have specific fertilizer lockers with permissions only for specific dupes, rather than having to section them off in their own room.   Perhaps it might even aid in reducing processor overhead, if dupes aren't having to sort through a list of every compactor in the base any time they want to store or pick up material?

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22 minutes ago, bopeep8hersheep said:

that would be awesome.  a feature like that is already in game as you almost certainly know.  permission restricted doors.  this game doesn't really have modding tools besides language but if it did - it'd prolly be a pretty quick mod to make. 

Ya exactly, the GUI is practically already done.  But, from things others have said I get the impression having lots of compactors can contribute to lag.  I just don't know if the feature would be a net help to processor load, or a net burden, from having to also sort a permission list, in addition to everything else. 

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i've heard that about compactors and lag. don't really understand it much as when it's out in the normal world - its a bunch of individual things interacting with the environment (unless it's in a vacuum chamber i guess) so how does that differ from being in a compactor?

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Yeah, I'm going to wait until the next couple of updates. It's just too frustrating right now. On Cycle 128, running out of food (even though had well over 70K calories, then food collapsed. The game was fun, but the bugs and constant crisis management gets old. Dupes never get around to doing things that I need them to do, they ignore high priority jobs, and there's so many pathing issues that it's just too rough around the edges. Looking forward to the bug fixes, but the game definitely has a long way to go as far as balance and performance. Will come back to it when it's a little more cooked.

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