New biomes unbalanced for hard difficulty

[Satyrical364]

So I've tried and failed too many times on hard difficulty with this new biome and finally just gave up and play on normal. There just aren't enough calories on the map to sustain 3 dupes at 6,000 kcal per cycle until a large enough farm can be started.

The main issue I believe is the significantly long grow cycle of the bog bucket plants together with the lack of seeds. In general, I can only get together about 6-8 bog bucket seeds from the swamp biome before I run out of foraged food, which is basically enough plants to feed one dupe. It's impossible to scale enough seeds quickly enough from harvesting to outrun inevitable death, unless I were to start exclusively pumping mud and making mush for a long time. And I'm not really willing to do that (it's just not fun).

Mealwood, which is the basic plant food in the other starting biomes, grows in less than half the time and there are generally dozens and dozens of seeds available in the starting biome. Besides which, its must easier to dig for seeds in the forest and sandstone biomes because you don't have to worry about getting wet. If you allow your dupes to get wet on hard difficulty you'll be maxing out your stress in 5 cycles, so you need to avoid walking in water.

I really hope this will be addressed in time for the early access release. In the meantime, I'm playing normal and having a blast with the stuff I could never get to on hard.

[Hellshound38]

Taking a dupe with mining and digging to a teleporter might work.... The linked planet for me had tons of food 

If your taking random dupes just ignore that idea though obviously.

[Sebastiangperez]

I do not have any drecko in the planet that i can teleport ... so no reed fiber, so no suits ... 

[AddTheJuice98]

Just make mush bars and thats all you need to do.

[Satyrical364]

50 minutes ago, AddTheJuice98 said:

Just make mush bars and thats all you need to do.

Yeah mate, I already said I don't want to do that because its not fun. I'd need one dupe splitting mud, another dupe running the musher and the third will be on the hamster wheel. None of them will be working very well because of food poisoning making them run 3x to the bathroom every day. It might take 20-40 cycles of that hell to get enough bog seeds for my dupes depending on how good of a farmer I can roll.

[Primalflower]

19 minutes ago, Satyrical364 said:

Yeah mate, I already said I don't want to do that because its not fun. I'd need one dupe splitting mud, another dupe running the musher and the third will be on the hamster wheel. None of them will be working very well because of food poisoning making them run 3x to the bathroom every day. It might take 20-40 cycles of that hell to get enough bog seeds for my dupes depending on how good of a farmer I can roll.

Then dont play on max difficulty

[Satyrical364]

1 minute ago, Lbphero said:

Then dont play on max difficulty

Dear God... do you guys even read? The last two posts are people tossing out inane one-liners telling me things I already acknowledged. 

I've clearly already switched to normal difficulty. This thread is about the balance being off for hard difficulty. Compared to the base game, this DLC starter biome does not provide adequate calories compared to other starting biomes. 

Klei clearly do not intend for mush bars to be the go-to strategy, which leads me to believe this was perhaps just not considered. I'm hoping this thread will be seen by them and they take the feedback. 

20-40 cycles of maintenance, pumping out bars, waiting for seeds, and being unable to do anything else, is horrific game design. 

Hopefully the next reply will be constructive...

[Primalflower]

7 minutes ago, Satyrical364 said:

Dear God... do you guys even read? The last two posts are people tossing out inane one-liners telling me things I already acknowledged. 

I've clearly already switched to normal difficulty. This thread is about the balance being off for hard difficulty. Compared to the base game, this DLC starter biome does not provide adequate calories compared to other starting biomes. 

Klei clearly do not intend for mush bars to be the go-to strategy, which leads me to believe this was perhaps just not considered. I'm hoping this thread will be seen by them and they take the feedback. 

20-40 cycles of maintenance, pumping out bars, waiting for seeds, and being unable to do anything else, is horrific game design. 

Hopefully the next reply will be constructive...

The thing about it is that there is a clear line to success for those who are willing to do it, and to me that is all you need to account for with regards to max difficulty, especially since its not the default. I do not think that the game putting you through the wringer and squeezing as much out of you as it can when you're literally flipping asking for the most it can throw at you, is in fact, bad game design. Its like asking someone to punch you in the face as hard as they can, and being surprised and complaining about it when you need to go to the ER afterwards

[Trego]

Whether or not it's bad game design, it's certainly relevant to bring up the difference from the other biomes and ask whether the difference is intended.  Since he already acknowledged the mush bar strategy in the original post, a one liner response 'just make mush bars', on the other hand, is not a relevant response.  I tend to agree with lbphero in the larger sense, I don't see anythign wrong with the difficulty between biomes being a different ratio at different difficulty settings.  there are other strategies to increase food supply.  Let 2 dupes die, now your seed to dupe ratio is 3 times higher in the early game.  Voila we've just created more seeds, in a certain ratio sense.  The OP here doesn't want to do that strategy either, I'd imagine, but it's still a strategy available to the player.

[AddTheJuice98]

3 hours ago, Satyrical364 said:

Yeah mate, I already said I don't want to do that because its not fun. I'd need one dupe splitting mud, another dupe running the musher and the third will be on the hamster wheel. None of them will be working very well because of food poisoning making them run 3x to the bathroom every day. It might take 20-40 cycles of that hell to get enough bog seeds for my dupes depending on how good of a farmer I can roll.

Point of the max level of difficulty is to force player use everything that he have. If you dont wanna use the only choice that you have, fine, but dont complain here about the possobility that you dont wanna use coz you dont like it.

[MiniDeathStar]

How do you survive on Aridio and Rime max difficulty? I've never managed to avoid mush bars on those planets. Sometimes mushing is just a fact of life.

How much muckroot do you think would make the difference between having to and not having to mush in the swamp?

[FlatTiger]

As it's still a closed Alpha this is what supposed the alpha is about to test the game and give feedback as I suppose Klei can't test every possibility outcome by playing and testing the game. As Klei mentioned they released the Alpha for specific the early game mechanics. As OP mentioned in his feedback which is what Klei would like to see so they can act and change some game balancing issues.

[AddTheJuice98]

42 minutes ago, FlatTiger said:

As it's still a closed Alpha this is what supposed the alpha is about to test the game and give feedback as I suppose Klei can't test every possibility outcome by playing and testing the game. As Klei mentioned they released the Alpha for specific the early game mechanics. As OP mentioned in his feedback which is what Klei would like to see so they can act and change some game balancing issues.

This is not matter of balance, this is just personal ops matter. He just dont wanna use everything to survive.This game too easy.

[qda]

I've been able to stabilize food on max difficulty, but it required massive critter slaughter and straight barbeque. Might have add an above average start too. As it is currently, I agree that foraging and waiting for a decent bog bucket farm probably isn't viable on a vast majority of the maps.

However we should wait, mapgen and numbers will most probably be tinkered with in the next few weeks !

Edit : without mush bars

[chemie]

3 hours ago, MiniDeathStar said:

How do you survive on Aridio and Rime max difficulty? I've never managed to avoid mush bars on those planets. Sometimes mushing is just a fact of life.

How much muckroot do you think would make the difference between having to and not having to mush in the swamp?

Agree  Aridio has the same characteristics that OP complains about.

[Dupe_Noir]

I have a colony 200+ cycles with all difficulties on hardest (food, morale ,disease). Early game was hectic due to lack of food as was already mentioned. My tips:

1) Dig out starting biome for fast seeds and that new edible plant

2) Get as many wild food as possible. As soon as your digger dupe gets lvl 2 break into other biomes. Get all grubfruit and sleet wheat that you can

3) Have one of your starting dupes have high cuisine. Don't eat raw food you will need every little bit of calories you can get. Cook them all at grill.

4) Rush hydroponics. Plant all bog bockets that you have. Also dig out the wild ones. Their wild growth is just to long to have any point to wait for it.

5) For you cook dupe use next two skill points to get ranching skill. Bring grub grub to your farm. 50% extra growth is life saver.

[Alexandr Block]

I have never played on new asteroids on normal difficulty, started twice on hard. Never fried dirt. Surviving is pretty hard, but possible. Dig, collect wild plants. Problems begin later, it is very difficult to master the third asteroid. The duplicate's stress grow  up quickly. I think there should be a morale buff from space flight. It's very tedious to play without it, but I'll try anyway. The first time I lived more than 100 cycles with 6 duplicates (tired). Second time more than 150 cycles with 12 duplicates.
Sorry for google translate.

 

[chemie]

13 minutes ago, Alexandr Block said:

I have never played on new asteroids on normal difficulty, started twice on hard. Never fried dirt. Surviving is pretty hard, but possible. Dig, collect wild plants. Problems begin later, it is very difficult to master the third asteroid. The duplicate's stress grow  up quickly. I think there should be a morale buff from space flight. It's very tedious to play without it, but I'll try anyway. The first time I lived more than 100 cycles with 6 duplicates (tired). Second time more than 150 cycles with 12 duplicates.
Sorry for google translate.

 

You need to skill scrub dups that are moving planet.

[blash365]

15 hours ago, Sebastiangperez said:

I do not have any drecko in the planet that i can teleport ... so no reed fiber, so no suits ... 

Send a scout rover to the third asteroid. Dig around a bit. Wait. Take drecko care package. Success.

[Satyrical364]

11 hours ago, MiniDeathStar said:

How do you survive on Aridio and Rime max difficulty? I've never managed to avoid mush bars on those planets. Sometimes mushing is just a fact of life.

How much muckroot do you think would make the difference between having to and not having to mush in the swamp?

On Aridio or any hot map, you put your mealwood farm in insulation and pump your starting water (which spawns at a fairly cold temp) around the farm until you get an aquatuner going. On Rime, you again put your mealwood in an insulated farm (should grow fine for quite a while) and pump warm water from a tepidizer when it gets too cold. Rime in particular is quite easy to survive because there is far more than average amount of muckroot (and even some Hexalent.)

 

[MarcinW]

Hard should be hard Or even harder. Many of us already maxed game and hope for new even harder challenges.

[chemie]

1 hour ago, Satyrical364 said:

On Aridio or any hot map, you put your mealwood farm in insulation and pump your starting water (which spawns at a fairly cold temp) around the farm until you get an aquatuner going. On Rime, you again put your mealwood in an insulated farm (should grow fine for quite a while) and pump warm water from a tepidizer when it gets too cold. Rime in particular is quite easy to survive because there is far more than average amount of muckroot (and even some Hexalent.)

 

I have had arido seeds with <10 tiles of starting water.  No way to get research to insulated tiles, farm insulated, and still have that water for cooling.  Yes, you can get aquatuner up by ~30 cycles but that still means mush bars for a period of time.  I used to hold at 4 dupes but later found 6 was better to manage the mush bar production and building queue vs trying to keep food demand low.

[Satyrical364]

17 minutes ago, chemie said:

I have had arido seeds with <10 tiles of starting water.  No way to get research to insulated tiles, farm insulated, and still have that water for cooling.  Yes, you can get aquatuner up by ~30 cycles but that still means mush bars for a period of time.  I used to hold at 4 dupes but later found 6 was better to manage the mush bar production and building queue vs trying to keep food demand low.

Yeah I had one like that one time too. It was tight, I think I had to use mush for 2 cycles before I got my aquatuner up. I didn't use insulation on that one, just pumped the water which kept the farm cool for a good bit while I rushed the tuner. I think I found some hot water somewhere I used for research. That's a pretty rare seed to have that little water but it does happen.  

[DarkMaster13]

This isn't anything new.  Badlands and volcanea also have bad seed numbers and aridio is too hot to grow mealwood.  On all of them you are absolutely forced to use mush fries for at least a little while on max difficulty.  It's completely unavoidable.  However I think that's fine because mush fries are the worst food choice in the game, costing massive amounts of dupe labor and using resources very inefficiently.  So you want to get off them as soon as possible anyway.  Just make sure you cook everything else you can first, every single other recipe is better.  I always start with a digger, a researcher, and a cook for this reason.

I still think that there aren't enough bog bucket seeds in the current start and the massive amounts of mud and polluted water scattered around make it hard to get to those seeds.  Our first critter isn't exactly easy to feed, nor a good option to raise for food.

[irOninfernO]

I don't know what to tell you. Did you try nabbing a grubgrub? It makes food grows 50% faster than a meal wood.

Why you think mush bars is boring? It make your dupes live while you can focus on other aspect in the game. I mean it hard mode so you need more time to balance your base than worrying about food. There has to be more pressing matters that would generate fun for you to fix/solve. I mean if it just feeding your dupes make this fun then why not find other parts of the game interesting?

Did you try to filter out food poisoning? It seem like you are blaming the food situation but hard mode is hard. Find your own solution is what I'm saying to keep your dupes alive and not yell for help from the developers.

They already trying to fix the bugs for NORMAL gameplay  :/