this is fun now let's make it hard

[whispered117]

love this little game but kinda falls short once the early game hump (oxygen, temp) has been taken care of so thought up some things to add some barriers to just strip mining the whole world once your colonies needs are met.

1) Predators

let's throw in some hostile mobs instead of just innocent ones you can kill. figured at least two types, one that will just attack dupes on sight, and another that will attack dupes and machinery, ducts, pipes, and power lines that are exposed (not behind base or natural tiles). this should help cut down the ease of prolific digging to resources or cold/hot zones and then piping them back to base without some planing and infrastructure to keep them safe.

2) Corrosive Microbes

while i've heard the horror stories of early slimelung, the germ situation seems to be more of an afterthought at this point than a viable game mechanic. so i figured let's have them eat basic resources instead of just debuff dupes. now not to makes this absolutely atrocious figured they could only eat and proliferate exposed resources (not still in tile form) and they would be specific to certain ones (this one eats igneous rock, this one aluminum, this one steal) also thought they could slowly damage any machinery and pipes/ducts/power lines made out of those resources as the only thing that does damage to them at this point is poor planing by the player.

3) "Boss" Mobs

when i first tried this game i watched some of the Youtuber Francis John's stuff and after actually playing the game a bit myself it's just too damn easy to stripe mine biomes. maybe once a certain percentage of a biome has been dug out have some big mean thing spawn that'll need to be delt with before any further digging/building can be done. i orignally thought about something like a cave in to happen, but with the abyssalite boundaries that seems kinda dumb.

4) Colony Types

read "Printer Mutators". this is a way to add some difficulty without having to add much but just changing the Printer a little. for example an Economic Colony would after a grace period (say 20-50 cycles) need you to spend resources to activate. the value could be based on the type of resource (steal should get you more points and aluminum, or diamond more than sandstone) and could either decrease over time or the more basic ones could be excluded after a certain point. For real gluttons for punishment a Penal Colony. after a grace period the Printer automatically prints a random dupe you have to take on. probably would need to extend the time between prints (say 10 cycles instead of 3) to make this possible to deal with but would make prolific expansion nessisary instead of just to expose resources for later.

 

[Sasza22]

Predators would be something interesting to add. In the end they will be a biome danger similar to slimelung, chlorine or high temperature that you just want to keep contained within the biome. The cool thing is that atmo suits wouldn`t protect you against those. There`s also the possibility to tame those critters (possibly requiring a higher level rancher) so they stop attacking everyone and produce something useful.

Microbes harmful for machines is also a neat idea. With how the disinfection system works it would be reasonable to combat it.

I`m not sure about bosses. In ONI it`s easy to build walls around everything so a single boss in a biome would be just dug around and separated. But mayb some sort of map mechanic that activates when mining out biomes. Like dangerouns things hidden in the rocks. Germ bombs in slime biomes and oil biomes spreading germs faster than usual, explosive gas pockets destroying nearby tiles when dug out, agressive critters hidden inside tiles (like hatches but more dangerous). The risky tiles should be visible somehow like currently they show "buried object" it would show "buried hazard".

Mutators could be fun if they forced a specific playstyle. Definetly would increase replayability.

[Meltdown]

11 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

I`m not sure about bosses. In ONI it`s easy to build walls around everything so a single boss in a biome would be just dug around and separated

One of the possible solutions is to make boss guard an entire layer of the asteroid, so it would be impossible to build around it. Imagine surface biome being separated by the real subsurface ocean - a vast space filled with overpressured salt water, so draining it or heating up would be really difficult and time consuming. And there is a giant fish roaming in that ocean, attacking dupes and everything they try to build. So if you want to reach surface you have to somehow deal with that fish.

The problem is in the mechanics to deal with such things. Currently combat mechanics are oversimplified, because they aren't meant to be a major part of the game. The mechanics for indirect boss combat (like eluminating it's food source or makling it's habitat unlivable for it) doesn't seem like something you would want from the boss fight. Creating giant combating system that would fit the game is quite a task.

[bambalad]

I am hoping to send out a group of dupes to try and survive on challenging worlds; if I fail then groom another group and send them out. But as it will be simultaneous now I don't think that is what they are going for but I hope and I think they will actually need to make the game much easier to sustain without leadership which would be a good thing because that part is just tedium.

[alexkuzmov]

On 7/17/2020 at 10:43 PM, whispered117 said:

love this little game but kinda falls short once the early game hump (oxygen, temp) has been taken care of so thought up some things to add some barriers to just strip mining the whole world once your colonies needs are met.

1) Predators

let's throw in some hostile mobs instead of just innocent ones you can kill. figured at least two types, one that will just attack dupes on sight, and another that will attack dupes and machinery, ducts, pipes, and power lines that are exposed (not behind base or natural tiles). this should help cut down the ease of prolific digging to resources or cold/hot zones and then piping them back to base without some planing and infrastructure to keep them safe.

2) Corrosive Microbes

while i've heard the horror stories of early slimelung, the germ situation seems to be more of an afterthought at this point than a viable game mechanic. so i figured let's have them eat basic resources instead of just debuff dupes. now not to makes this absolutely atrocious figured they could only eat and proliferate exposed resources (not still in tile form) and they would be specific to certain ones (this one eats igneous rock, this one aluminum, this one steal) also thought they could slowly damage any machinery and pipes/ducts/power lines made out of those resources as the only thing that does damage to them at this point is poor planing by the player.

3) "Boss" Mobs

when i first tried this game i watched some of the Youtuber Francis John's stuff and after actually playing the game a bit myself it's just too damn easy to stripe mine biomes. maybe once a certain percentage of a biome has been dug out have some big mean thing spawn that'll need to be delt with before any further digging/building can be done. i orignally thought about something like a cave in to happen, but with the abyssalite boundaries that seems kinda dumb.

4) Colony Types

read "Printer Mutators". this is a way to add some difficulty without having to add much but just changing the Printer a little. for example an Economic Colony would after a grace period (say 20-50 cycles) need you to spend resources to activate. the value could be based on the type of resource (steal should get you more points and aluminum, or diamond more than sandstone) and could either decrease over time or the more basic ones could be excluded after a certain point. For real gluttons for punishment a Penal Colony. after a grace period the Printer automatically prints a random dupe you have to take on. probably would need to extend the time between prints (say 10 cycles instead of 3) to make this possible to deal with but would make prolific expansion nessisary instead of just to expose resources for later.

 

To each their own I suppose.
Personally I view difficulty in the game in terms of the physics, not stabilizing the colony.
In that sense, you are only limited by your imagination.
Think of a crazy machine? There, the game just became more difficult.

[impyre]

I like the idea of aggressive critters, and there's already some degree of that in that pokeshells are quite ornery when they have eggs around, but I think the wasp critter pictured in the dlc teaser looks pretty dangerous too.

I really like the microbe idea though. You could even take it a step further and say that certain microbes can process certain materials... like one that might turn food items into ethanol? Yeast cultures? There's a really great opportunity here for a mechanic that involves trying to create living cultures of helpful/beneficial microbes... perhaps even ones that might be dangerous to dupes if they get too much exposure. For some of the better ones, they might have strict temperature or gas requirements to be able to survive.

[goboking]

I'm a big proponent of aggressive critters and lethal diseases.  I'd also love a chance of electrical fires with overloaded circuits or overheated flammable materials (though some liberties would need to be taken vis-a-vis fires in pure oxygen environments to preserve game balance).

[MarcinW]

Yeah... if your dupes dont die, then you really dont make a story out of it.
It should be like in rimworld, that space colony is a dangerous place (predators, pirates) and so much other dangerous random things that could impact our colony. In ONI we dont have random events

[whispered117]

well to Alex, i can do that in AutoCAD. testing is a bit harder and requires other programs but i know where you're coming from here. my problem is there no reason to. if there were limiters in the game to force you to create a need for efficient/compact or crazy machines i would have much more fun with creating them, but currently other than just "look at what i built" you can get away with horrible inefficient and expansive convoluted devices with no penalty and i don't play this game for the sandbox mode. IMO there needs to be some sort of "why" to making better mechanisms.

Also i'm trying to give Klei ideas here to make more money and appeal to a wider audience. if i want to create machines for no reason ill go load up my old copy of the The Incredible Toon Machine though it is missing the fluid and thermodynamics.

to Snaza, well i saw the bosses as being more a super form of the second kinda of predator i mention (can destroy exposed non-base player created things) and as such, would be able to tear down base tiles as well. obviously to stop a mad rampage destroying everything, especially if unprepared to deal with it, they need to not leave their biome of origin. but even if they were just isolated by walls they can't get through they would have done their duty, that is, to stop you from just easily strip mining everything with reckless abandon.

to Meltdown, love how you ran with it but wasn't thinking quite that far yet cause yeah total need to revamp combat. though i REALLY think they need to either revamp combat to be actual combat or just call it murder, or murder that gets you bit occasionally. let's get some real use out of those triage beds people.

to bumbaclad, you give me SimAnt flashbacks... (this is a good thing).

impyre. again love what you ran with. i was just thinking limiters to aggressive expansion and something to damage you stuff that time has no hold on, but man that is great idea. transformitive microbes instead of just destructive. especially the ethanol ones. makes me really sad i can't just rush petroleum generators on non-forest biome starts. maybe with this you could.

goboKing, yeah pretty sure that's why fire isn't a thing, don't want to Apollo 1 your dupes. but even just damaging the wires/buildings would be a nice touch. static environments are great for sandbox, but make a dull game.

MarcinW, well that's that and this is this. i especially considered not adding in one more bullet point, the existential threat, because yeah making one game too much like another. if the devs want to that's up to them, but i'd rather try to give them ideas to expand upon what they already have rather than telling them to make it like something else. i would love it too if they did... but like i said that's on them and their creative integrity and their legal team.

[Rainbowdesign]

On 7/17/2020 at 9:43 PM, whispered117 said:

4) Colony Types

I can do something about the printing pod and maybe other stuff, make a concept for this and i look into what is possible.

[Rainbowdesign]

A prison colony that spawn you random dupes with bad traits unless you supply resources to the pod.

[MarcinW]

Supplying resources to the pod is actually a great idea. I am not a fun of creating dupe out of thin air.