Midgame, Usability and Balancing Woes

[drbest]

Just got into this game a week ago and it's amazing. However after I managed to get a sustainable base I'm hitting a brick wall (playing on no sweat btw). I put a ton of time into the game and am heavily invested in it so sorry for the text wall:

• Exploration is a bit of a drag the further away you get from your base and often slows to a crawl. This is because your duplicants have too little carrying capacity (even when fully upgraded) and seem to do weird stuff like: deposit metal, return to home base, next duplicant returns builds the actual thing. Tube transportation system at that point in time is a non option because of the material and power requirements.
• My map spawned only one natural gas geysers and a useless chlorine one leaving me starved for power
• Second steam geysers spawned between space vacuum and cold biome which means almost all steam just vanished into space before it became water. I couldn't even lock it in since the vacuum was behind the geyser itself. I'm kinda maxing out one geysers so that's unfortunate
• Power costs (especially for utilities like gas pumps and filters) are too damn high. Very often it's nice to have a setup with various pumps and gas filters but the game kinda wants you to tune it down to the bare minimum which leads to time intensive tear downs and rebuilds if you made a mistake. This drags out the game a lot especially if things are farther away from your main base. Optimizing can be fun but everything happens just so slowly in the mid game.
• Hydrogen generators are useless except for getting rid of Hydrogen. You probably need more than 2 steam geysers to satisfy even one machine and then you can't even fully power your setup. Similarly electrolyzers have a too low max gas pressure making them a nightmare to fine tune.
• Some buildings like the natural gas generator and oil refinery leak material into the environment instead of using clear outputs. I find this to be a massive pain which requires power hungry water pumps or even more power hungry gas pump and filter setups. I see no reason why this couldn't be streamlined into separate outputs instead.
• Oil refinery: why, oh why do I need a dude to turn the damn wheel. I know you can generate Petroleum differently but why make it so tedious to set up and operate? Why not simply cut it from the game instead if you shouldn't use it?
• Mechanized airlocks say: "Blocks Liquid and Gas flow, maintaining pressure between areas." which is simply not true. Sending a duplicant through a fully powered door still pulls in gases from the other side.
• Power spikes are difficult to handle especially because there are no sensors that allow you to cut off power for certain parts if you exceed or go below a wattage for instance. When possible you have to emulate that sensor with finicky smart battery setups.
• Gas vent sensors are unintuitive to use (you need to place them before the junction to work properly, no in game explanation provided)
• Gas and water bridges and their priorities are great but the mechanism isn't explained anywhere in the game
• Automation symbols for input and output are poorly designed. Why not color code it white and green similarly to all other in and outputs (or maybe use I/O symbols).
• Almost got screwed over by not realizing that dirt actually powers research. Luckily I didn't mine everything in my base yet.

[lapantouflema]

Quote

• Power costs (especially for utilities like gas pumps and filters) are too damn high. Very often it's nice to have a setup with various pumps and gas filters but the game kinda wants you to tune it down to the bare minimum which leads to time intensive tear downs and rebuilds if you made a mistake. This drags out the game a lot especially if things are farther away from your main base. Optimizing can be fun but everything happens just so slowly in the mid game.

i actually agree with that, the power requirement of some building is way too high. 240w for the liquid pump is okay because liquids are heavy, but for the gas pump ? this thing doesn't even compact the gas, and the energy cost of the gas filter is even more ridiculous ; 120w drained all the time ? basically you'd need a dupe running in his hamster wheel all day long to power that mess :-/ 
 

what i found out however, is that if you put a gas element sensor immediately followed by a shutoff, the shuoff becomes active only long enough to extract the one particular block of gas from the pipe, which makes a much more less power-hungry gas filter (but that requires refined metals)

but to come back at the power consumption of some buidings, yeah, some tweaking is necessary.

[SharraShimada]

You´re doing it all wrong buddy!!!! (just kidding)

1. yes it takes a huge effort to explore in the early stages. Later, use the tube system. Thats what its there for. Use the firepoles to speed up traveling down. Ladders are slow in both directions.

2.maps are random. Either you deal with what you´ve got, or you use this: https://toolsnotincluded.net/

3. you can build backwalls behind volcanos and geysers. Yes its somewhat stupid with geyers in space, but one can manage.

4. Power ist to be managed, just thrown in in vast amounts and forget. If you feel the need for several pumps in one pool, automate them, so they wont run all at the same time. And keep in mind, only 2 gas pumps can feed the same pipe, and one liquid pump is enough to max out the liquid pipe. 

5. Hydrogen generators are far from useless. Your geysers are not there to produce hydrogen. Its just a byproduct, nothing else. But if you build eletrolyzers, you have an excess of hydrogen, you need to move anywhere. 

6. since when do doors block while open? Its a door, no miracle. Open door = stuff moves. 

And yes, there are some issues with explanations and such. Maybe the devs will fix that with release, we will see. 

On the other hand, they do like us to explore and investigate on our own. They also had some recpices hidden, unlocking after you found the ingredients. But that confused to many people, so they reverted this. They do listen, but they can work just that much in given time. Making a game is not fun, its work. We´ll see what they do until july.

 

[drbest]

Thanks for your replies.

It wasn't obvious to me that you can build tiles behind the geyser, good to know. Yes maps are random but you can always fine tune the map generator.

I know that the hydrogen generator isn't useless but it requires too much hydrogen for it to be used a power generator. It would be great if it could run off a single electrolyzer (or at least come close). Too overpowered? Simply cut the wattage down then to 400W or something similar.

As for the doors: the description is probably worded badly but what advantage  does the door have when compared to the cheaper ones? It sounded like a double door system that uses a vacuum to get rid of any contents while a duplicant is in between both rooms thus cleanly separating rooms while you pass through.

 

[Sasza22]

11 minutes ago, drbest said:

It wasn't obvious to me that you can build tiles behind the geyser, good to know. Yes maps are random but you can always fine tune the map generator.

To be clear. You can`t build normal tiles but there are special drywall tiles that are designed to block gasses from ecaping to vacuum that can be placed there.

13 minutes ago, drbest said:

what advantage  does the door have when compared to the cheaper ones?

There are 4 types of doors. Basic doors don`t block gas. They are just for making rooms. Manual airlock opens slowly and blocks gas when closed. Automated airlock works faster when powered (unpowered it`s like the manual one) and it can opened and closed using automation wires which is useful for many reasons. Bunker doors are bigger and resistant to meteor hits. They powen slower but they are not designed to be a room door anyway.

Sadly doors can`t be a full seal not letting gas through without a more complicated system. Liquid locks are an alternative. So are transit tubes if you can afford them.

[Nightinggale]

13 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Basic doors don`t block gas. They are just for making rooms.

And block critters. They can be useful to prevent hatches and shine bugs from eating your food without also blocking air flow.

13 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

Sadly doors can`t be a full seal not letting gas through without a more complicated system.

There is a mod, which makes doors block gas, but it's one of those mods, which fuels the debate about wether mods are gameplay addons or cheats.

On 6/15/2019 at 3:19 AM, drbest said:

Oil refinery: why, oh why do I need a dude to turn the damn wheel. I know you can generate Petroleum differently but why make it so tedious to set up and operate? Why not simply cut it from the game instead if you shouldn't use it?

There is a concept called "petroleum boiler" where you without dupe interaction heat crude oil to turn it into petroleum. You can also extend it to crude oil->petroleum->sour gas->liquid methane->natural gas. The oil refinery is ready made and simple to use for the player, but it's not the most efficient and it's part of the game to design advanced setups to do stuff more efficiently than the base buildings.

On 6/15/2019 at 3:19 AM, drbest said:

Power spikes are difficult to handle especially because there are no sensors that allow you to cut off power for certain parts if you exceed or go below a wattage for instance. When possible you have to emulate that sensor with finicky smart battery setups.

There is a mod to measure power usage on a wire (and no, I didn't make it. Somebody beat me to it). I agree that a lot of the modded sensors should be in the base game though.

On 6/15/2019 at 3:19 AM, drbest said:

Automation symbols for input and output are poorly designed. Why not color code it white and green similarly to all other in and outputs (or maybe use I/O symbols).

When you have wires attached, they are colored green and red. Having unconnected ports be colored green is confusing.

[LegioXV]

A little help for fellow starter

1. pipes and bridges to make a smart flow of liquids / gases. Using these you can significantly reduce the amount of energy for pumping things and else. Also, if you build a sealed room for gas, do not forget to pump it into gas reservoir first and only after that (when gas reservoir is full) into the vent - gas reservoirs are a kind of energy-free pumps for a small amount of gas

 

2. Actually there is also a water-lock, that helps gas glow. You can read it here

 

3. There are plenty of power resources in the mid game, so if you are low on natural gas, just use coal, hydrogen or petroleum to burn. 

4. Dupes do behave irrational and unorganized in middle game and later. The good way to 'organize' local works (like building big room or digging big amounts of something) is to build a door and lock everyone inside until work is done. Make sure dupes don't suffocate there though

 

The magic of ONI gameplay is that you keep finding new and new ways of dealing with stuff as you learn gameplay more

 

[abud]

After reading all the conversation here, I realized that I forgot when I last time using liquid/gas filter. Pipe element sensor replacing those filters in my knowledge base. Unless they reduce power consumption to the same number (which still takes more space), I don't think ever need to build them again.