Disappointed with late game

[Crimsontide]

Took a year off to hopefully give time to work out bugs and fix things up.  Come back and... everything still is broken.  Dupe AI is still terrible, we still have heat deletion/creation bugs galore, and late game is still a mess.  This is also the second time I've gone through a map without a frozen zone only to hit space and not have a single glimmering planet.  I again have zero ways of getting wolframite or playing with any of the fun end-game builds...

You guys are talking about DLC and the base game is still a mess.  I'm disappointed, I expected that from Paradox, not Klei.

[Gurgel]

Well, I agree that the list of things that must be there on any map should be extended, and in particular any material should be renewable in the late game. 

[SharraShimada]

See ya next year

[Crimsontide]

Yeah, I might try again in a while.  Its too bad, there's a lot to love.  The graphics are great, the UI is fantastic (seriously its better than most professional software UIs, I'm working in EDA programs and I'm thinking I wish this was more like ONI), everything so lush and inviting.  But I just can't stomach another 300+ cycles simply to make it to a broken end game where nothing works.

[Nebbie]

Overall, I find many of ONI's early design decisions glaringly flawed.

One of the most obvious things is ONI loves deleting mass. Plants and critters delete mass like crazy. Even your dupes delete mass, producing far less carbon dioxide than the oxygen they take in! You can tell with stuff around release that they really wanted to walk this back, as pufts stopped being crazy mass deleters and oxyferns actually counteract dupe mass deletion, while giving lumber-related stuff actually reasonable carbon dioxide waste products, unlike earlier buildings.
It would be so much better if as the game went on, you had better recycling systems. Instead, the game is hugely focused around gaining resources by having them dumped on you from random geysers, but this results in giant maps to fit them all reasonably, which is a laggy mess compared to if you could make compact industrial setups.
One really telling thing is that Francis John recently did a series in a tiny map...and it actually went way better than normal ONI, with few issues with lag, and he mostly dealt with resource issues by ranching and using the new tree-related stuff. Perhaps it's not optimal size (he had trouble with his sour gas boiler, about a double the map size would probably be idea), but something is seriously wrong with the game if cutting the map into about a hundredth of normal size makes it better in general.

On some other things... Copper, gold, and diamond having unrealistically low thermal conductivity to provide room for thermium and not stress heat exchange calculations might've sounded great at first, but in practice, it just means that thermium is stretched too far in uses. Aluminum got added with realistic thermal conductivity (near thermium) and...it's fine. I'm also really not a fan of the lack of any sort of heat loss in space exposure, necessitating really really awkward systems to use space.
Also, leaving it up to players to figure out ways to do airlocks? Sounds great, but then you end up reliant on pools of crude to separate your damn volcanoes, which makes early game frustrating. And mechanized airlocks are stupidly bad; basic unpowered metal doors in real life beat them hands-down.

And then all rocketry does is provide (most of the time) some magic materials to solve some problems...by just sort of magically acquiring them from alleged other asteroids. Gassy Moos are interesting...but completely pointless. The DLC I think is mainly to make there be something to do with where your rockets go, which is quite something.
My hope is that the devs also take a serious look at old stuff for a revamp (at the very least, literally everything to do with production and use of chlorine, cause holy hell is that a mess, and ties right in with the Gassy Moo problem).

Oh, and don't even get me started on the utter joke that is the stress and disease systems (in short, they used to be way too aggressive, and Klei instead of adding good mechanics/systems to manage them efficiently scaled them back and now even when you turn them up like crazy it just is an annoyance), or how annoying it is you can't do stuff with the printing pod later on.

[TheMule]

9 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

Took a year off to hopefully give time to work out bugs and fix things up.  Come back and... everything still is broken.  Dupe AI is still terrible, we still have heat deletion/creation bugs galore, and late game is still a mess. 

I wonder how many of such bugs you are able to trigger w/o copying designs from this forums. Designs that people here spent litteraly hours if not days in optimizing, and serve no other purpose than showcase the bugs themselves.

AFAIK, no major heat deletion/creation bug exists that affects normal gameplay. You really have to try hard before you can make those bugs visible.

10 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

This is also the second time I've gone through a map without a frozen zone only to hit space and not have a single glimmering planet.  I again have zero ways of getting wolframite or playing with any of the fun end-game builds...

So what? You choose the asteroid and the traits when you start the game. Wolframite is not guaranteed on all maps. If you want to play with wolframite, stay away from starting conditions that do not make sure you're going to find some. Don't blame the game for the choices you've made. There are very few things that are almost guaranteed on all maps, and wolframite is not among them.

That said, there are other ways to get not wolframite, but tungsten, at end game.

10 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

the base game is still a mess. 

which allowed me to play 2,300 hours w/o encountering any major bug. The game is rock solid, all the crashes I had were mod-related, and the mod community usually solved them within days, if not hours, after an update.

[Crimsontide]

Quote

AFAIK, no major heat deletion/creation bug exists that affects normal gameplay.

Not at all.  You can't tame a volcano without coming across one.  The entire 'drip' volcano system is to get around the heat deletion bug (where a liquid drips on its solid counterpart and loses all is heat).  On top of that I regularly come across a heat multiplier bug with metal volcanoes where-by a sweeper arm picking up solid metal while more is coming out can cause the heat to be multiplied.

Quote

So what? You choose the asteroid and the traits when you start the game. Wolframite is not guaranteed on all maps. If you want to play with wolframite, stay away from starting conditions that do not make sure you're going to find some. Don't blame the game for the choices you've made. There are very few things that are almost guaranteed on all maps, and wolframite is not among them.

That said, there are other ways to get not wolframite, but tungsten, at end game.

What that's basically saying is that a good chunk of end-game is just not available for 3 asteroids.  It should have a spoiler at the bottom... have fun, 1/3 the game is missing.  And abyssalite melting is as exploity as it gets.

[degr]

11 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

Dupe AI is still terrible

100%. And I think nobody will work with it, lol.

11 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

map without a frozen zone only to hit space and not have a single glimmering planet

Life is not fair thing.

Spoiler

 

 

4 hours ago, Nebbie said:

ONI loves deleting mass

But you have geysers, which produce not unlimited amount of new mass. Problems come when you can't convert "that" into "this". But think it is still not a blocker.

[Baer]

Klei works on it and maybe next year, we get the DLC and a promising endgame. 

And yes, it should not be that effort, to get rocket access to every resource in the game. 

I decided to get rime another shoot and surprise, surprise, i have no access to wolframite.

[Gurgel]

I think ONI is basically early and mid-game at this time and in principle, it works well. All the bugs some people are complaining about are minor or annoyances, nothing game-breaking. (Yes, some people like to call annoyances "game breaking", but that is just hyperbole, because some people like to use hyperbole to destroy their credibility....). I think the problem is these people have is mainly one of unrealistic expectations and of inability to adjust to another physical model than the "real" one. Some people need everything to match just one "true" model and ONI unsurprisingly causes problems with them. (I should probably add that the "real" physical model currently in use is badly broken with the missing Quantum-Gravity and some other more subtle really bad flaws that its users come up with really interesting suggestions about what could _actually_be happening regularly. Just remember when they really considered FTL recently, and it turned out to be a broken connector.)

What _is_ missing in ONI is an end-game that went through real revisions. Current space did not. It still works, mostly, but it is not polished or optimized. One example is the need to block space at an arbitrary time which is not clearly signaled, or get flooded with masses of hot Regolith. An other is the problem of dealing with that Regolith. Shove Voles are the only real mechanism, and they suck. Then there is the luck-factor with planets and the far too long rocket flying times that cannot be brought down. Or the rocket silo automation which is broken enough that I just gave up on it and always open silos actually work better. All this is unfinished on a conceptual level. It is not really bad, but it does not match the excellent state of the rest of the game and that grates. 

That said, I do agree with the decision by Klei to fix the end-game in the 1st DLC. Although they never said that, it is clear that this is what they are doing. The alternative would have been a release at the very least 1 year later and there are also economic factors to consider. I doubt they are getting rich off ONI, but they do need a revenue stream. It will be very interesting to see what they will do in a likely 2nd DLC though. Fortunately, this game is timeless enough that they can continue to work on it and add to it for a long time and hopefully get new players. ONI is far too demanding to match the mainstream, obviously, so it will stay in its niche. 

[cpy]

We definitely need ONI 2 where mass will be conserved. But right now even energy is being deleted (heat).

There should be like difficulty options based on what resource is missing while not having charity pod enabled.

Like no wolframite or gold or something. Maybe even geyser count setting game difficulty feels like it should have way more options than we have now and planet features feels more like casino rolls than choice.

[Steve8]

The big problem with space is that most space missions are pointless. You are really after three rare materials: isonresin, fullerene and niobium. Most of the rest you just can't bring back in useful enough quantities to be worthwhile. Cargo modules only bring back one ton. Even if you could bring back one ton of diamond that's enough for one temp shift plate. Getting back seeds is more of a luxury. Sure you can get some bristle blossoms or sleet wheat for example, but they are far out and by that time you don't need them anymore. In my last game I had a few trips that brought back solid methane as a byproduct. I melted that and it helped out with power generation when the gas geysers were dormant. But that's a rare exception and you still wouldn't design your power around that.

Hopefully the DLC can manage to address that. We'll see

And yeah, the stress and disease systems are completely pointless even if you increase the difficulty for them. Morale is extremely easy to get. The food system is also a bit unbalanced with barbeque from hatches being such a great option that you don't even need any or much agriculture in the mid game. Shove voles are ridiculously overpowered in the late game. Even if you don't feed them. And starving critters still drop the full amount of resources, which leads to some workarounds like grooming, but not feeding, or having a fed breeder stable and not feeding the rest.

The basic ideas in the game are great. But the balance is just way off in many areas and there are way too many workarounds for certain things. Some convenient and some more necessary. And I'm not really talking about physics here, but stuff like unsustainable algae consumption of tame pacu (leading to using a breeder fish).

[degr]

2 hours ago, Steve8 said:

The big problem with space is that most space missions are pointless. You are really after three rare materials: isonresin, fullerene and niobium. Most of the rest you just can't bring back in useful enough quantities to be worthwhile

From my opinion, you need only fullerene. You will got niobium once, and after it you will have thermium (niobium+volframite= thermium; thermium = niobium; volframite = thermium); isoresin did not worth it.

But I did not feel that steam or energy leaks is a real problem, it force you to do something new. Such kind of sandbox is new genre for me, I still miss for some kind of challenge or enemy.

My main point - game extremely easy and lazy. Normal asteroid should have same amount of metal as with "metal poor", and "metal poor" should make stone age, with stones, sticks and sand. There should be some kind of "late game problems" such as random encounters, when printing pod suddenly become mad, and print chlorine gas or bloody-acid mutants (in the middle of your base), some wild ants who made their hole from nowhere and stole all your food, aliens intrusion from outer space who will stole your discovery or something similar. Also, very important to force player make more dupes, at least my game still hold me in constant tension. Something like constant tuning (or cleaning) for energy generators.

Temperature below 20C should freeze dupes into ice, making them extremely slow, and temperature above 30C should force them to drink water and run toilets each 30 sec. Something like this.

[Yoma_Nosme]

2 hours ago, Steve8 said:

Cargo modules only bring back one ton. Even if you could bring back one ton of diamond that's enough for one temp shift plate.

Hahaha...thanks bud...you made my day...soo true 

I also agree with all the rest you've written! I play this game since before thermal upgrade...soo, eons in Gameplay time... and enjoy most of it in good and bad times...but the late game just bores me to hell because the whole rocket thing gets so boring so fast...it's just grinding....wish we would start of with a steam rocket on cycle 1 and use it for real progress instead of a prolonging of grinding....I love the engineering aspect...tinkering...but rockets are so straightforward they bore me...build them once you've built them all...

Edit... I think DLC will be building spaceships not just stupid phallic spacenoodles that fly of and bring back trash that I nowadays rather treat myself via debug

[Crimsontide]

ISS Phallic Spacenoodle reporting for docking.

Commence docking procedure... anything to report sir?

Yes, we have acquired enough diamond to build a single tempshift plate!

 

[Nebbie]

9 hours ago, TheMule said:

I wonder how many of such bugs you are able to trigger w/o copying designs from this forums. Designs that people here spent litteraly hours if not days in optimizing, and serve no other purpose than showcase the bugs themselves.

AFAIK, no major heat deletion/creation bug exists that affects normal gameplay. You really have to try hard before you can make those bugs visible.

...

I had crude oil in a one-tile step-up liquid lock get wiped from existence before my very eyes last week while doing a bog-standard steam turbine setup. Only just recently was said bog-standard setup fixed to not lose heat (bit of a pain when its entire point is to recycle heat into power). And of course, someone using a design meant to avoid that heat deletion bug just posted yesterday about how instead they had mass deletion, losing almost all the steam in hundreds of cycles...
I've also seen repeated losses of salt water in my wild waterweed areas that can only be caused by polluted dirt offgassing deleting the salt water. It's rather annoying that literally letting ONI wilderness sit there will see it ruin itself by mass randomly being lost.
Take any base past cycle 200 and you will see some effect of bugs involving mass not being properly preserved.

8 hours ago, degr said:

...

But you have geysers, which produce not unlimited amount of new mass. Problems come when you can't convert "that" into "this". But think it is still not a blocker.

And that's bad. The biggest problem ONI has is that maps are too big, making ridiculous amounts of lag and wasting dupe time like crazy, but they're that big in order to (almost) guarantee you access to necessary geysers, after accounting for the near-useless ones like carbon dioxide vents. If the game were switched to having mass be generally conserved with longer processing chains, then maps could probably be halved in size vertically, and the lategame would be much improved.

6 hours ago, Gurgel said:

...

... One example is the need to block space at an arbitrary time which is not clearly signaled, or get flooded with masses of hot Regolith. An other is the problem of dealing with that Regolith. Shove Voles are the only real mechanism, and they suck. Then there is the luck-factor with planets and the far too long rocket flying times that cannot be brought down. Or the rocket silo automation which is broken enough that I just gave up on it and always open silos actually work better. All this is unfinished on a conceptual level. It is not really bad, but it does not match the excellent state of the rest of the game and that grates. 

...

I think it's no longer the case actually that eventually the meteors will break in. That said, everything to do with space is stupid. Correctly automating it all so that it doesn't break horrifically every 100 cycles or so is a huge pain. What's kind of telling about things again from how game design shifted is that prior to the tree-related stuff, you basically absolutely needed regolith to keep your water sieves going, but then pokeshells and salt water got added, so sand is basically a non-issue if you can get either going.

[degr]

8 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

Correctly automating it all so that it doesn't break horrifically every 100 cycles or so is a huge pain.

I did not face it. I set 3 meteor sensors and it close always in time. I have small amount of doors, may be luck

12 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

The biggest problem ONI has is that maps are too big

17 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

then maps could probably be halved in size vertically

Think I use around 80% of standard map, lol. Not so big. If it would be halved, there will be not enough space for beds.

13 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

making ridiculous amounts of lag and wasting dupe time like crazy

That is another different problem, it is not related to map size. Because physics work fine, only dupes become terribly slow. Most probably it is possible to optimize game, but look like just nobody care about it (in management and dev).

16 minutes ago, Nebbie said:

after accounting for the near-useless ones like carbon dioxide vents

Think carbone dioxide vent is most useless from all, however I use them to fed slicksters and produce free oil.

 

[Nebbie]

1 minute ago, degr said:

I did not face it. I set 3 meteor sensors and it close always in time. I have small amount of doors, may be luck

Think I use around 80% of standard map, lol. Not so big. If it would be halved, there will be not enough space for beds.

...

The problem isn't just closing in time, but being able to deal with heat issues. Before thermium, cooling anything in space is an absolute pain, because ONI has no mechanic to replicate radiators (you would need both buildings to exchange heat with pipe contents directly, and something like radiant pipes to head towards a low temperature in space exposure).

As for map size, sure you can cram in hundreds of dupes, but at that point, you're just showing off. The normal map is far too big for most gameplay. In addition, systems that recycle resources could cut down on how much of the map you need to use to support dupes.

[TheMule]

11 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

Not at all.  You can't tame a volcano without coming across one.  The entire 'drip' volcano system is to get around the heat deletion bug (where a liquid drips on its solid counterpart and loses all is heat).  On top of that I regularly come across a heat multiplier bug with metal volcanoes where-by a sweeper arm picking up solid metal while more is coming out can cause the heat to be multiplied.

I said major. A lot of people (basicly everyone taking inspiration from Francis John's videos) had been taming volcanoes w/o even realizing a bug was occuring. After the fix, some builds (those based on self cooling turbines) might have failed, due to the extra heat.

11 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

What that's basically saying is that a good chunk of end-game is just not available for 3 asteroids.  It should have a spoiler at the bottom... have fun, 1/3 the game is missing. 

Not that's not even close to what I'm saying. That's completely twisting reality, too. It's totally possible to have wolframite on all asteroid. I've played all of them multiple times and I never had a zero wolframite situation (well, I might have consumed it all).
What I'm saying that the lack of wolframite is one possibile outcome of certain conditions you chose.

11 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

abyssalite melting is as exploity as it gets.

Only because you decide so.

It's totally in the game because someone (the devs) added it. Someone decided that:

1) abyssalite melts

2) it melts into tungsten

It's not a glitch, not a bug. It's intended, no, more than that, it's documented behaviour.

A lot of stuff melts in ONI, why abyssalite should be different? Why is it ok to melt ice to get water and not ok to melt abyssalite to get tungsten?

[Nebbie]

8 minutes ago, TheMule said:

...

It's totally in the game because someone (the devs) added it. Someone decided that:

1) abyssalite melts

2) it melts into tungsten

It's not a glitch, not a bug. It's intended, no, more than that, it's documented behaviour.

A lot of stuff melts in ONI, why abyssalite should be different? Why is it ok to melt ice to get water and not ok to melt abyssalite to get tungsten?

Abyssalite's purpose on the map is to provide insulation between biomes and make it harder to explore around. It melting into tungsten is a kind of default, as everything in ONI has to melt into something. The problem is that it is specifically designed to be nearly impossible to heat up, so that making it into tungsten should be out of reach, but a separate mechanic (flaking) that's probably primarily meant to make ice biomes thaw and freeze in more gradual ways interacts with this to make it quite possible to melt abyssalite.
Note that they made it so you can't flake-melt artificial tiles anymore (no more insulation -> tungsten), so it's pretty clear they don't want us to turn abyssalite into tungsten.

As to the difference from ice, ice is put in with the assumption you can quite easily heat it to its melting point, to become a useful, but not exactly game-breaking, resource. Abyssalite is not.

[Gurgel]

4 hours ago, Nebbie said:

I think it's no longer the case actually that eventually the meteors will break in. That said, everything to do with space is stupid. Correctly automating it all so that it doesn't break horrifically every 100 cycles or so is a huge pain. What's kind of telling about things again from how game design shifted is that prior to the tree-related stuff, you basically absolutely needed regolith to keep your water sieves going, but then pokeshells and salt water got added, so sand is basically a non-issue if you can get either going.

They should not break in now, but when you trigger the meteor start, hot Regolith starts to accumulate. Before the surface is not as hot at the top and cold at the bottom above the Abyssalite layer. True, not as bad as finding masses of hot Regolith in an Ice Biome (as could happen before), but still a factor. 

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

The problem is that it is specifically designed to be nearly impossible to heat up, so that making it into tungsten should be out of reach, but a separate mechanic (flaking) that's probably primarily meant to make ice biomes thaw and freeze in more gradual ways interacts with this to make it quite possible to melt abyssalite.

Exactly. In fact, Abyssalite should probably not melt at all. 

[watermelen671]

5 hours ago, degr said:

Temperature below 20C should freeze dupes into ice

...what? What kind of tropical region do you live in where 20 degrees Celsius is enough to freeze?

1 hour ago, TheMule said:

It's not a glitch, not a bug. It's intended, no, more than that, it's documented behaviour.

A lot of stuff melts in ONI, why abyssalite should be different? Why is it ok to melt ice to get water and not ok to melt abyssalite to get tungsten?

Because melting abyssalite into tungsten is just a holdover from early days when it was called "tungsten diselenide".

Disregarding the fact that back in the day the default for materials that didn't have a liquid state implemented state yet was tungsten.

[Steve8]

1 hour ago, Nebbie said:

 but a separate mechanic (flaking) that's probably primarily meant to make ice biomes thaw and freeze in more gradual ways interacts with this to make it quite possible to melt abyssalite.

This principle is something a lot of people seem to overlook when they claim that everything in the game is working exactly as designed and that every weird mechanic is fully intended. Some of these things are just side effects of other mechanics. For example infinite storage. Teleporting materials around may sometimes make sense in general. But the game doesn't check the pressures to see if it should be possible in a specific situation. It's likely that that was done for performance reasons just to cut down on the number of calculations. Maybe infinite storage just wasn't foreseen. Or maybe it was accepted as a compromise where the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. In any case that doesn't necessarily mean that the developers put it into the game on purpose and that it thus can't be criticized.

[Gurgel]

1 hour ago, Steve8 said:

It's likely that that was done for performance reasons just to cut down on the number of calculations. 

It is an absolute certainty this was the case. A real flow simulation is probably more effort that all the things ONI does now combined.

[nakomaru]

If abyssalite was not meant to melt it would be trivially easy for them to make it not melt. See also neutronium, genetic ooze. Foreseen? Probably not.

Infinite storage, bypass pumps, mechanical filters, and liquid locks are probably all counter-reality emergent gameplay elements that came from more fundamental design decisions (tile physics), and they are also ones that have been maintained for years for whatever reasons. Alchemy, mass loss and huge thermal imbalances have also come from this, and yet they work hard to try to fix those. I don't think the differences here are a coincidence.