Feedback on the early game from a new player

[kerosene]

I like how complex the game is, and how many different approaches there are to obtain the resources. The art and animations are good and made me laugh.

I do however tend to get bored once I have power, food, illness, stress and oxygen under control. I learned to do this even on the highest difficulty settings. I reroll once I get bored, which is still fairly early in the game as far as I understand. I haven't seen the later parts of the game. I think I would reroll less if there were fewer resources in the starting area and more pressure to expand into other biomes. I guess what I'm asking for is more mid game challenges, of a different kind than the ones present in the early game.

Medics seem like a waste of time. The best way to deal with illnesses is to prevent them with good hygiene and by avoiding slime. Artists seem to be entirely optional at least as far as I have played, as morale bonuses are easy to get through other means than art. Having a good researcher on the other hand is invaluable. They are maybe too good? (if starting with more than a few points in research)

The difficulty sliders don't seem to do much to increase difficulty, except for the food one. Maybe there should be a slider for resource richness in the starting area, and/or in general?

All considered the game is good. There is one part that I really dislike and it's the duplicates interests, traits and skills system. It has shallow complexity in it that doesn't translate into satisfaction the way the complexity of the economy and physics does. It translates mostly into frustration that a randomly generated duplicate is so random, and that interests and skills rarely align, and that both interests and skills seem to want to nudge me into different directions as far as character development is concerned. I also find some traits really annoying and don't want to deal with them. Most RNG duplicates are incoherent (as in, they are someone who is decent at tinkering and art but really wants to be a rancher and medic) but some are just too good. Or at least this is what it feels like. I know that interests, traits and skills don't matter that much in the end, but they are a minigame of sort and I can't help but play it, only to end up frustrated.

[Sasza22]

The skills system was overhauled recently and most people agree it needs work. Previously the morale requirement was gating higher tier jobs like to get the master artist or the astronomer (previously known as tenured scientist) you needed 20 morale. The downside was once achieved you could master all skills with lower requirement without extra morale needs. Definetly the morale requirements need a balance pass.

Disease was also changed recently. Before it was based on immunity and amount of germs consumed. It was easy to avoid all disease except on hardest difficulty where immunity wouldn`t regenerate. Now it`s all chance based so technically you can`t avoid all disease unless you keep the base 100% sterile (which is possible). Previously dieases were hitting harder (food poisoning caused vomitting and slimelung was lethal if untreated) and lasted longer even when treated. People dislike the change but it made medical stations more relevant since it`s harder to prevent infection.

So basically the systems that have been changed recently and aren`t really there yet in terms of balance concern you. I`m pretty sure they will be altered at least a bit before launch.

As for mid/later game goals there`s always rockets. Getting enough steel to create them is often a challenge. Also stuff like getting a stabile power system for continous metal refinement and for transit tubes(those things use up a lot). Creating a sleet wheat farm might be a goal. Later using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as fuel for rockets is quite a challenge. What i like about the game is that each upgrade to the power system needs a different layout and there are always more things to do after you intially stabilize. Often times i thought i got a stabile base and run into power problems 100-200 cycles later.

[kerosene]

A few more thoughts on the current interests, traits, skills and attributes system. I reroll duplicates a lot to get the ones that meet the following requirements:

- Does not have the mouth breather, anemic, narcoleptic, allergies, flatulent trait. Mouth breather's double oxygen and anemics -5 athletics are too penalizing. The other mentioned traits are too annoying to deal with.

- Does not have attributes and interests that suggest a medic or artist role because these are useless in the beginning.

- Has attributes and interests that align with roles that I want them to perform. For example: I want my researcher to have an interest in research, and I don't want them to have attributes that they'll never make use of, like creativity because what they're going to do is mostly research, and later supply jobs because they'll be taking the skills needed to become an astronaut. It makes sense that researchers would become astronauts because once you've researched everything you can do stuff with rockets. So researcher/astronaut is really a single role that will make use of only a relatively narrow set of attributes. Meanwhile the fact that duplicates are randomly generated seems to be based on the idea that any combination of traits/interests/skills/attributes is a good one. There are other roles in the colony like miner, farmer where the same concept applies. Miners will eventually want to wear an exosuit (for which they require the supply skills), and they shouldn't also be cooks or farmers because these are jobs that need to be constantly performed which leaves little time fo actual mining. My cook and farmer are busy doing cooking and farming almost the entire time. They are unsuitable for any other jobs that are time consuming.

What I'm trying to say here that the randomly generated attributes and interests rarely align to support the roles that my duplicates will actually perform in practice.

Does it matter that much? Not that much but I really dislike the way all this works.

[kerosene]

Now for some constructive suggestions, where I play the armchair game designer and try to come up with a simpler skill/interests/attributes/traits system that should make people like me stop rerolling their duplicates out of frustration until they get good ones.

- New duplicates start with all attributes at zero and a randomly assigned skill point (chosen from the skills that have no prerequisites).

- "Interests" no longer exist.

- The skills system is expanded so that each attribute that previously only had 2 corresponding skills that increase that attribute by 2 now has 3. Also add 3 skills that increase athletics by 2.

- Adjusted the experience required for skill points so that the first, say, 4 points are gained a little more quickly (can be adjusted as needed, but reason is that dupes are now more reliant on skill points).

- Ranching no longer has a farming skill as prerequisite, and exosuits no longer has a supply skill as prerequisite.

Medics need to be more useful also.

Traits need to be rebalanced a little and aren't that interesting currently but I think the idea behind them is right.

These changes should make artists a little more useful early on since interests are no longer a thing.

With this system I'm taking nearly all the randomness out, giving the player more control over the development of the duplicates. This is after all a game that's a lot about building, planning, and optimizing complex systems.

[Gwido]

On 07/05/2019 at 12:28 AM, Sasza22 said:

As for mid/later game goals there`s always rockets. Getting enough steel to create them is often a challenge. Also stuff like getting a stabile power system for continous metal refinement and for transit tubes(those things use up a lot). Creating a sleet wheat farm might be a goal. Later using liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen as fuel for rockets is quite a challenge. What i like about the game is that each upgrade to the power system needs a different layout and there are always more things to do after you intially stabilize. Often times i thought i got a stabile base and run into power problems 100-200 cycles later.

I'm getting bored of the game after launching my ifrst rocket.

The game definitively needs something to push players to send rockets so that the base can survive !

In a survival game, having a base without any real threats, and no dead duplicants... it's just not normal for a survival game.  

 

In my current game, my only challenge was to refill the oxygen in the main base, because it had fall to "breathable" due to a power shortage while I was focused on building surface rooms. And it was not hard to get back to normal. :-/