The game might be slightly too hard for new Players

[Rucki]

I think the game might be slightly too hard or lets say too fiddly on some aspects in PreLaunch state.
As a new Player it takes hours of hours to understand some game mechanics and a lot of time to tab out and google or watch YT videos to learn the game mechanics.

Maybe for the Launch the game could have some basic Layouts integrated into the ingame Wiki, like f.e. a basic Electrolyzer Layout and the ingame Wiki should also warn or lets better say mark out important things, like that the Electrolyzer is putting the Oxygen always out in 70c (unless the water is hotter than 70c), which will destroy every beginner Base quite fast. Some short and easy hints how Heat Transfer works in the game, which and why some gases/liquids are better coolants would be also appreciated from new players.

The Power aspect might be the biggest hurdle as we need so much power for the different machines and tools, but also for Heat Transfer and Heat Deleting. Compared to the needs, the Generators gives not a lot Power. Not forgetting that we need Automation and Smart Batteries anyways to make the best use of the minimal Power we get. I would propose to buff every Generator at least for +200 Watt.

Or maybe decrease the Power needs of some tools. Do Automatic doors really have to take 120 Watt ? Even when they take it only at Usage. Its not only how much power they need but also that if we go over 1kW per normal Wire line, the line will break. So we need a new Transformer which brings problems with it like the fiddle to find a place for them and to get the new power line to that place, also does it generate more Heat which we need do delete afterwards somehow. 
 

Maybe 1 Wire line should be OK with 2kW ? Or maybe just give us more Peak time, so that if it goes only short over 1kW no wires break, but more than 30secs or 60sec and the Wires will break.

Oh and the "Airlock" doors should really get a rework. Either make them so that the powered version never lets air through or give us a whole new Airlock asset for this. Does a new player really needs to learn how to make a Waterlock ? Waterlocks shouldnt be better than the Airlock Doors. I would be ok with building big Airlocks like in Stationeer, but then the power costs and much more important the Time costs for the Duplicants should be buffed. 

Since the Rocket Update I wasnt once to an other Asteroid. I got all the needed materials for that produced in some quantities, but looking at rewards we get from Rockets and huge grinding time it was never fun to me to grind more and I rather restarted a whole new game to try a different strategy in building a self sustainable base. The huge amount of steel needed f.e is not in a good relationship with the rewards we can get out of all that Rocket building in my opinion.

These are some examples. After like 50 hours these things are no problems anymore, but as a Beginner the game might look quite complicated and some might refund it over steam because of that. Although I dont really believe that someone can even understand how big and complicated the games scope really is after the first 2 hours, but anyways.

What do the other here think ?

[CannedSmeef]

Honestly the only idea I support here is a true airlock door.  Everything else is something that needs to be learned by doing.  If new players are really going to quit because his grid is drawing too much power or because his first base got too hot, why would Klei spend the extra effort to lure in people with no perseverance?

[Gurgel]

Don't forget that new players are supposed to start on "no sweat" on Terra. Anyways, making it easier will just increase the grumbling by the experienced players and that may prevent a lot more sales that the occasional buyer that finds out they are, after all, not as smart as they though and takes it out in the game.

[ONIfreak]

We all started this game at some point. We all had to learn a lot and discover new ways. We all lost colonies. New players are not different in any way. 

[wronny]

2 minutes ago, ONIfreak said:

New players are not different in any way. 

Well maybe except for the fact that they get the whole package at once and don't get to learn it step by step as it develops.

On the plus side, they will not have to re-learn certain things.

[chemie]

the least obvious mechanic is steam "generator" being the heat deletion machine...should at least rename as it us not for generating

[natanstarke]

Energy costs seems imba agreed especially the pointed doors that actually do not protect all that much against gases.

[ONIfreak]

5 minutes ago, wronny said:

Well maybe except for the fact that they get the whole package at once and don't get to learn it step by step as it develops.

On the plus side, they will not have to re-learn certain things.

And have forum full of info. And have quite huge community ig players. And have ecery system explained in details on youtube and here. Something i didn't have when i started play this game. Everyone who start to play needs to understand that this is complicated game. It is not fps or some fantasy rpg. It is full blown sandbox survival game with many aspects and quite steep learning curve. But after some time spent it is very rewarding and in my opinion money well spent. There could be some tutorial with basic aspects - that is true. And probably will be when game will be released. 

[Heister]

OP has valid points.

I disagree with the power issues, the power part is already the easiest part of the game to understand and build IMO, unlike everything else it seems this is the most straightforward and easy to learn part of the game.

The gas/liquid pipes are much harder to understand, even worse when you see that your pipes are not working as they should, then you have to google and discover that magic of bridges to control flow, the game does a terrible job at making the flows work properly and only the bridge can fix this, and the bridge is not even supposed to be used for this, it's supposed to let pipes cross! Note that nowhere in the game this use is mentioned.

The waterflow really shouldn't exist and there should be a airlock building to replace it, it doesn't make any sense that this is still the best way to prevent gas flow.

The output temps of things, the game does a terrible job at presenting it to the player, in fact it doesn't do this at all, you put a electrolyzer on your base and then you see your base is hot and have no idea why, nowhere in the game it explains that the output temp is minimum 70, this is not an issue to ignore and say that new players should suffer, this is bad UI and bad UX when you have to constantly minimize the game to see what a building really does because the game does not explain it at all.

Hidden or badly explained behaviour does not make the game better by making it more challenging, it makes the game worse and boring because of constant need to minimize and google.

[Yunru]

I think we need to wait and see what the tutorial videos will be like.

[Xuhybrid]

I disagree. Back when i first started, granted there were less features, but the games core problems were all the same. Food supply, water supply, heat management. I took my first colony to cycle 700 tearing stuff down and putting it back up in different ways. I had no idea what i was doing but i had the freedom to try things and adjust them. That same freedom is still here. You'll die if you ignore food, water and heat for too long so i guess the only difference is that i don't ignore problems until it's too late. If your argument is that new players ignore or don't recognise the problems, THIS IS A PROBLEM SOLVING simulation game...

Outside of these 3 things, nothing else is a requirement or urgent. While it may look like so much, most of it you can ignore.

[Majorchubby]

There are a lot of awesome games with a steep learning curve. Kerbal comes to mind, I have 2k hours and still havent landed on more than 3 planets.

[Harlequin80]

I have only had the game for about 3 weeks.  Bascially just before the launch testing opened.  I have watched exactly zero youtube vids and each base death has been a straightforward thing to compensate for on my next base.

I'm on my 5th base now, it's coming up on cycle 400. My previous base was mid 200s when I decided to restart.

I've only had 1 full blown colony collapse and that was because I boiled my base by digging into the magma zone at about turn 30 and hadn't even researched insulated tiles.

The only thing I would change from a new player perspective is how much gas a storage tank can hold.  It can then help you stop drowning in CO2 before you get plastic.  That and I also think their balance is wrong as you are more efficient filling a room with a high pressure vent then using tanks, and thats ignoring the infinite storage exploit.

[lilibat]

REALLY would love proper air lock doors. I mean I do my best to make an airlock but it's a pain and takes up a lot of space.

 

[Xuhybrid]

28 minutes ago, Harlequin80 said:

I have only had the game for about 3 weeks.  Bascially just before the launch testing opened.  I have watched exactly zero youtube vids and each base death has been a straightforward thing to compensate for on my next base.

I'm on my 5th base now, it's coming up on cycle 400. My previous base was mid 200s when I decided to restart.

I've only had 1 full blown colony collapse and that was because I boiled my base by digging into the magma zone at about turn 30 and hadn't even researched insulated tiles.

The only thing I would change from a new player perspective is how much gas a storage tank can hold.  It can then help you stop drowning in CO2 before you get plastic.  That and I also think their balance is wrong as you are more efficient filling a room with a high pressure vent then using tanks, and thats ignoring the infinite storage exploit.

Yeah it's pretty ridiculous how big the gas storage is and how little it holds. You can cover a huge area with them and still have a fraction of what you need to cover natural gas vent downtime. I hate having to lean towards infinite storage but it feels necessary. If filling a room with a high pressure vent provides more storage than the official "gas storage", you dun goofed.

[wronny]

6 hours ago, Xuhybrid said:

Yeah it's pretty ridiculous how big the gas storage is and how little it holds. You can cover a huge area with them and still have a fraction of what you need to cover natural gas vent downtime

The current reservoirs have multiple benefits that more than justify their size:

• can bemade from basic materials (metal ores; no refinement, no plastic ...)
• straight forward to use
• act as buffer → pump only once

Would it be nice to have (powered) storage tanks for the purpose of storing things long term in a smaller area? Certainly.

6 hours ago, Xuhybrid said:

If filling a room with a high pressure vent provides more storage than the official "gas storage", you dun goofed.

Klei ensured that the player made contraption still serves its purpose, while offering a simple, cheap and less space efficient alternative with an added benefit. That's the polar opposite of "you dun goofed".

 

9 hours ago, Heister said:

The output temps of things, the game does a terrible job at presenting it to the player, in fact it doesn't do this at all

While this piece of information is hidden a bit too well, it is there:

Spoiler

While the game does have an ingame database, some information can only be found elsewhere, like in the build menu tooltips. That's far from ideal. When the information is this scattered and well hidden, it may as well not be there at all.

 

10 hours ago, Heister said:

The waterflow really shouldn't exist and there should be a airlock building to replace it

Liquid locks exist in every household. At similar pressure levels on both sides, liquid locks are fine. The game currently doesn't support the underlying mechanics to break liquid locks under more extreme conditions. (I'd rather not take the pefromance hit that the additional calculations would cause.)

Nonetheless a proper airlock building would be really nice to have.

[Harlequin80]

The only 

6 minutes ago, wronny said:

The current reservoirs have multiple benefits that more than justify their size:

• can bemade from basic materials (metal ores; no refinement, no plastic ...)
• straight forward to use
• act as buffer → pump only once

Agree to disagree on this one.  They have benefits, no doubt, the biggest for me is they clump elements into full packets on a mixed input stream.  But compared to a box room with a second pump in their they lose across the board.  Personally I think they should either be way smaller, like 2x1 / 3x1 with a smaller capacity.  Or they should store 3 or 4 times as much.

[ONIfreak]

7 hours ago, lilibat said:

REALLY would love proper air lock doors. I mean I do my best to make an airlock but it's a pain and takes up a lot of space.

 

You have every part already available to build proper airlock doors.mechanized airlock in game works on 95% for now leaving some gas to pass - less if powered. If you want additoonal 5% - building pressure chamber is the way to go, or visco gel. Good enough for me for this game. Water vacuum exploit should be removed allowing gas to pass through small amount of liquid - this is only thing i would change

[bobucles]

New players only have two challenges to worry about- Include Oxygen and Don't Starve. No other challenges are required, newbies will find plenty of ways to die all on their own.

The old map generation had some good low difficulty traits. Algae was abundant, temperatures were moderate, creatures are safe and there's very little you can do to outright die. Even the most tragic of colonies can last 50+ cycles with not much trouble. The old map only lacks in renewable dirt and easy water renewal, but otherwise has plenty of time to goof around before being forced into self sustaining.

Cool slush geysers are extremely useful and extremely safe geysers. An easy map would do well to have a guaranteed spawn. Other low difficulty geysers might include something that just makes fresh oxygen or temperate water or piles of dirt. There's no need for EVERY geyser to be an obstacle. Some of them can be nice and thus serve as an entry point into learning geysers. 

Gases aren't dangerous, so I don't see any purpose to a perfect airlock. Enemy gases can be kept out by placing oxygen generation near your exits. The high pressure will push it out.

Remember that difficulty isn't about how well you can avoid danger, as how much effort you need to deliberately put into losing. An easy map should be very difficult to lose.

[xialeth]

12 hours ago, Harlequin80 said:

It can then help you stop drowning in CO2 before you get plastic. 

If you have algae, Algae terrariums work pretty well to manage CO2 (to the point where I lost all the CO2 that was supposed to make my food sterile xD)

That said, the steep learning curve is something I appreciated. I have more than 100 hours now, and I still have the early game somewhat under control, might be able to survive the early-mid game, and am totally lost about the mid and late game. And that's fun! After 100 hours, I still have so much left to learn and uncover, it's not like some games on Steam where you spend ten hours and have solved all problems.

On the other hand, some more guidance might not be amiss, though it forces people like me who are scared of experimenting (and possibly losing a base) to just try. (And I still have the option to google, to try stuff out "safely" before trying it in a full run).

So maybe having dedicated, pre-selected maps might be an idea? Like, "Use this map to learn how to use Electrolyzers without worrying about the heat as it has a cool slush geyser nearby, so you can focus on setting it up, getting the water supply and harness the hydrogen and tackle the heat issue once you have that down" (thanks again to @DemainaNyxfor doing exactly that for me), or "on this map you don't have to worry about water straight away because it is below your printing pod", but for the most part, this is covered quite well by the new starting asteroids (and hooo boy am I not ready to broach those, so something else to look forward to!)

So I think the steep learning curve but also the tangible progress (i.e. once I have early-early game down, I have it down) is really rewarding and has managed to suck me in quite a lot -- I had ten-ish hours on ONI about a month ago, and have since put on almost 100 more, as I said above. I think that's pretty well done.

[avc15]

you're not supposed to be successful the first time on survival. You'll run into a difficulty, take too long to navigate it, and run out your clock for heat death, starvation, or suffocation.

You have options. Accept the loss and adjust your strategy. Start over on a more relaxed difficulty. Plug the gap with the sandbox tools.

There's really no harm in avoiding a loss by painting in some water, or food, or air. That or start a new colony with a new strategy. Your choice.

I disagree with making the start easier. Printer care packages have already massively reduced survival mode difficulty.

 

[bmilohill]

I disagree that it is too hard, especially when compared to Don't Starve. 

And I certainly disagree that we need a perfect airlock. This game is about bringing order to chaos. Errant gas packets should be expected. Mini pumps in the corners of rooms should be part of the design if you want to have a perfect base. 

I will agree the game is much more complex now - we had the opportunity to learn as we go. But on the same token, there is now 4-5 different easy ways to do anything, not even getting into perfect ways. You can win the objectives without ever having a SPOM. You can just let H2 drift into space if you want. I think it being hard to learn all the things needed to make a perfect base is not the same thing as the game being hard. 

[badgamer123]

17 hours ago, natanstarke said:

Energy costs seems imba agreed especially the pointed doors that actually do not protect all that much against gases.

liquid filter 240W......mini pump cost so much for so little......etc,and a weaker aqua tuner 1000W (1200W just eat up the whole line)

[Hedning]

19 hours ago, Rucki said:

As a new Player it takes hours of hours to understand some game mechanics and a lot of time to tab out and google or watch YT videos to learn the game mechanics.

As a new player I spent much time reading the ingame info. I only needed help with two things from the community: How to deal with the 40° water the sieve were spitting out to my plants, and how pipe junctions worked (I had problems with packets just going back and forth and packets losing 50% flow at a split). The time I as a new player spent tabbed down to find info was like 10 min total. Almost all info is in the game already and now with the sieve being more noob friendly there is very little left a new player needs help with from outside sources.

Also the steam engine and heat deletion in general is a lot simpler, disease is less deadly, seeds can be turned into wild plants, etc. I'd say a lot is easier now then when I was new. The steam engine info needs to be updated though to show new planers that it's primarily for heat deletion.

[Lurve]

My preferred tweaks for new players:

1) Rename storage tanks to buffer tanks.  They're not very good at storing things, when they hold less than an empty room their size at normal pressure does.  Optionally: add some high-pressure storage tanks made from refined metal, with the complication that they need power to accept material, and they leak when they get too full.

2) Reduce the electricity cost of pumps and filters.  A common newbie design is trying to filter everything.  I know I used to.  The ensuing spaghetti is fun but the power to run it all becomes prohibitive.  Make pumps electrically cheaper, and electrolyzers more power-hungry to compensate for SPOM balance.

3) Shorten the "drying feet" animation after stepping in a puddle, or add a threshold for when it occurs.  I know it's there to discourage water locks but it REALLY slows down your average messy newbie base.