Balance adjusts and annoyances

[TheTT]

First of great DLC and thanks for the alpha access. 

 

Power

Between power slugs and solar panels with zero downside at all, other power plant structures are just pointless.

Solution
Remove all glass from Warp and Teleporter rooms, it is simply too easy to gain access to unlimited free power.
Also reduce power slugs output significantly, and give happy tamed slugs a buff instead, so they have a maintance cost. 

 

Swamp start planet (current)

The start is pretty rough, with polluted water and mud everywhere. The initial challenge is hard compared to other ideal worlds. It is extremely hard if you don’t ranch power slugs, as you have no alternative for power, with almost no coal, wood, natural gas or ethanol to power your base otherwise. 

 

Solution

Reduce mud and increase normal water in the close proximity of starting area, so the world does not overwhelm you right away. Give a healthy alternative to power slugs for power, so the player can have options in the starting world. 

 

Warp gates 

I love the idea and concept, but they are too easy to access and use. It takes power to use a deodorizer, but you can blast anything between planets for free. Unlike Teleporters with cooldown, Warp gates have no downsides. 

 

Solution

Make them require power or at least require materials to activate.

 

Reed fiber and atmo suits

Unless getting dreckos there is no way of obtaining reed fiber in this alpha playthrough, maybe it is meant this way as space travel should come before petroleum. But i still feel like atmo suits should be attainable in each playthrough somewhat manageable. 

 

Solution 

Make an alternative recipe for atmo suits or reed fiber, needing more other or alternative materials.

 

Unecessary annoyances

POI should be deconstructable; it should simply not be needed to install a mod for that. 

 

If you manage to get all the morphs and variants of the shinebug you should get an achievement. 

 

There should be an end game tier door that acts as a liquid / gas lock.

 

Missing room for Kitchen, it just does not make sense that we can’t get a minor symbolic buff for having such a room needed every playthrough.

 

Thanks for reading

[pether]

I'm not sure, first you say that slugs provide too easy power and then you say that swamp is hard because it has no power source other than slugs.

I think you should be thinking of swamp biome as of different start than previously. IMO 400 Watts 3 hours per day is not OP. I might agree on glass however, somebody suggested to reduce glass cost of windows, so salvage didn't provide that much of it.

IMO it is fine not to have fiber, you can use oxygen mask. Again, dont try to copy vanilla playstyle, adjust to alpha experience

BIG BIG BIG +1 to POI deconstruction. I am so mad at this broken lightbulb...!

BIG +1 to the missing kitchen and laboratorium rooms... Massage table has its own thing, but most basic buildings don't...?

[TheTT]

2 minutes ago, pether said:

I'm not sure, first you say that slugs provide too easy power and then you say that swamp is hard because it has no power source other than slugs.

I think you should be thinking of swamp biome as of different start than previously. IMO 400 Watts 3 hours per day is not OP. I might agree on glass however, somebody suggested to reduce glass cost of windows, so salvage didn't provide that much of it.

IMO it is fine not to have fiber, you can use oxygen mask. Again, dont try to copy vanilla playstyle, adjust to alpha experience

BIG BIG BIG +1 to POI deconstruction. I am so mad at this broken lightbulb...!

BIG +1 to the missing kitchen and laboratorium rooms... Massage table has its own thing, but most basic buildings don't...

The DLC alpha planet is labeled with ideal in survivability, comparing that with other ideal world's, it is not ideal, but a lot harder to say the least. 

The ONI experience i love, is the creativity and endless possibilities. Removing choice by forcing the player to play a certain way ruins that. That is why I suggest alternative options such as more ways to do certain things.  

 

And yes slugs are OP in their current state. Lock them in a room with no food and you have free power. 

Don't get me wrong i love the critter, but it should not provide that much power wild. It needs the same nerf as wild plants versus grown.

[foosda]

most of these suggestions are rubbish, but I'll address some of them:

wild slugs produce 400w of power for 3 hours of the 24 hour cycle. averaged out thats 50w of power, IFF you have the power storage (batteries) to last the entire cycle to when they produce again. There's clearly nothing OP about wild slugs.

the lack of meteors and easy availability of glass is pretty silly I'll agree.

reed fiber is most certainly attainable without printing pod, you just have to get to the third planet w/ a rocket. even before that, you can make jetsuits, skipping over the atmosuits.

[Steve8]

I don't think the environmental conditions are too difficult. It's certainly messy, but that's the interesting thing. There is enough clean water around for research and maybe a little food. But also plenty of polluted water to sieve. And you're supposed to turn the mud into water and dirt.

As said instead of full atmo suits you're supposed to use oxygen masks. Maybe those could be balanced a bit differently, but making atmo suits more difficult and putting them later in the game isn't a bad thing

[blakemw]

I think there's definitely a problem with the solar panel ease.

A few possibilities. The first would be to remove the free glass. The second would be to add a second, harder to acquire, ingredient to solar panels, such as steel or plastic. The third would simply be to reduce the sunlight intensity on the starter world so solar panels only produce like 100 W.

I'm a bit torn on Slugs. If I'm not mistaken you have 4 wild slugs (at least both games I've started had 2 pairs of slugs). That's not very much power, but it is enough to get you to Solar Panels. And it makes the Swamp start a pleasant experience by more or less eliminating the requirement to operate a Hamster Wheel: in my second playthrough I simply didn't build a hamster wheel and it went very well, I had occasional blackouts late in the day  but I felt it better than having some idiot run off and waste time on the hamster wheel (given that without Smart battery the dupe will run until the batteries are fully charged, which the slugs will do anyway).

The real question of Slugs is how abusable they are via starvation ranching. FWIW, I despise the starvation ranching game mechanic, there should be penalties for malnourished and starving critters, or at very least, for being unhappy, since generally starvation ranching relies on glumness to work well (massively reduced metabolism, for no reduction in production), an 80% penalty for being glum would sure hamper things.

[pether]

36 minutes ago, blakemw said:

The real question of Slugs is how abusable they are via starvation ranching. FWIW, I despise the starvation ranching game mechanic, there should be penalties for malnourished and starving critters, or at very least, for being unhappy, since generally starvation ranching relies on glumness to work well (massively reduced metabolism, for no reduction in production), an 80% penalty for being glum would sure hamper things.

Currently there is 75% penalty. Happy slug will produce 1600 W, if you want to starve them you will get 75% less

[chemie]

10 hours ago, Steve8 said:

I don't think the environmental conditions are too difficult. It's certainly messy, but that's the interesting thing. There is enough clean water around for research and maybe a little food. But also plenty of polluted water to sieve. And you're supposed to turn the mud into water and dirt.

As said instead of full atmo suits you're supposed to use oxygen masks. Maybe those could be balanced a bit differently, but making atmo suits more difficult and putting them later in the game isn't a bad thing

Well, I have some oil reservoirs but one is 110C and the other is 500C.  Kind of need suits for that.  Without suits, no oil or dead dupes.  This means no plastic, which means no steam turbines, which means no heat management....

[deepblue12]

Power

I agree with your assessment and experienced the same in regards to the slugs. Power slugs are simultaneously difficult to work with before you have a rancher and too easy to use once you can move them around at will.

Swamp Start

Again I agree with you in regards to the power. I like that it feels different without coal, but I don't like feeling forced into ranching skills as if I were playing on Arboria.

That being said, I don't feel this start is especially difficult. It's certainly "icky" and has me subjecting dupes to more extreme conditions than I like, but nobody's dying. Perhaps the only complaint I could make is that the new buildings that were introduced to help us exploit this biome are all fairly labor-intensive when compared with their vanilla alternatives.

Warp Conduit

Correct me if I'm wrong, but these are only on the starter asteroid and one other. If that's the case, it doesn't seem OP.

Reed Fiber

Unless something's changed, you can deconstruct the carpet tiles around the starting asteroid for reed fiber.

Annoyances

These don't seem relevant to the DLC. Not to say I wouldn't love many of them

[nonchalant86]

The large glass POI and plug slugs could be kept as features of easy planetoid starts. Harder planetoid starts could force you to ranch hatches or tame power geysers (natural gas, hydrogen, hot steam, volcano, etc).