General Feedback

[Troxism]

Feedback after playing alpha a while, in no particular order:

Overall didn't really encounter much in the way of bugs, and things seem pretty stable on that front, but it's likely I just didn't notice things.

-Research menu being open causes a noticable FPS drop and is 'stuttery' to scroll around, even in the early game where there isn't really anything going on to slow the game down. Not sure why it would be causing a massive performance drop. Pretty sure this happens in vanilla too, but I don't remember.

-Not sure why the ',' to denote thousands/millions in calories at a glance was dropped.

-The new resource menu really needs a way to have categories (either custom or at least the vanilla game ones), it's honestly kind of worse to use then the old one currently.

-Seems there are still issues with dupes having weird traits: had a dupe with interest in decoration, but with the unpractised artist trait. Not game breaking, but strange (I don't think this case was supposed to be addressed in the patches, but it still probably shouldn't happen). Also it is sort of weird to see dupes with a learned skill but none of the related attribute/no interest. Certainly could be argued either way if that should be the case or not, but it looks strange.

-Currently a lot of the critters start off in chambers that leave them cramped, meaning they will die off if you don't hurry to 'rescue' them.

-I really like the buff to farming skill, as it was basically useless before even in the early game. It's still not that great, because ranching is stupidly overpowered
with all the exploits for it, or wild farming later on, but it's at least mildly useful at the start of the game, and taking a farming dupe to start MIGHT be a decent
strategy on max difficulty on some maps now.

-Not the biggest fan of getting 2 100% spawn cold water geysers, seems like a little much (don't get me wrong, water should be renewable, but I don't like this much free cooling always existing). But I assume geyser balance hasn't really been considered much yet beyond providing the basics.

-Solar is also pretty OP, but I assume that will change and space won't be as easy or solar will have some drawback (maybe generating heat and needing coolant to be piped directly through the building to keep it cool? Something like taking in liquid and outputting the same liquid but with some DTUs added, to avoid the whole 'can't cool things in a vacuum' problem). It takes very little effort to make and run a glass forge for a while.

-I ASSUME this is already in the works since it seems pretty obvious, but there needs to be some way to automate supply runs back and forth to actually make the idea of having many colonies work out in practice. As it stands, it seems blatantly intended to make constant supply runs from various asteroids to your core base (and some runs the other way to provide oxygen/food for workers while they are there), but that doesn't really work, as unless I am missing something there isn't really any way to fully automate refilling your capsule with things like water for the pilot (maybe add the ability to send automation signals out from the capsule to the pad or something so you can check when things are ready? Or some other system?).

And tbh to actually make the above work, cargo bays probably need some rebalancing, due the whole 'can store an infinite amount of stuff in the capsule if you do it manually' while cargo bays are even worse then in vanilla (where they were already only useful for rare resources).

-This isn't strictly 'needed' but might be worth considering: One way to make space flight less annoying for high skill dupes (ie not encouraging you to scrub astronauts for minimum morale req) would be to have a buff while travelling to another planet in a capsule to temporarily suppress extra morale requirement from learned skills (maybe only to a certain extent). Or at least something like that for when you make your first landing on another planet. Would probably need a second effect that lasts longer and prevents this from being reapplied for a while, but the need for that would depend on the specific implementation. Either way it's mostly an idle thought.

-Exosuits seem a little bit too gated now, esp considering oxygen masks are god awful (obviously they aren't supposed to replace suits, but atm it's a little ridiculous how bad they are). Pushing exosuits back a little is probably a good idea, but this feels like a little too much, or at least oxygen masks should be a little bit better as a stopgap (honestly just make them reusable via a mask 'dock' or something, they already don't have the other benefits of exosuits and so would hardly be a permanent solution).

-Speaking of exosuits, now that they are delayed a lot more, I would suggest making them use some other non local resource instead of reed fiber (and making reed fiber easily available again), or changing clothes to use something other then reed fiber. As it stands, even with delayed exosuits, you still can't make use of the hot/cold clothing because you don't have reed fiber for those either, and by the time you do, you have exosuits which are better anyways. If you could use an oxygen mask + sweater in the early game, that might actually be something you bother with if exosuits are delayed. Would fix the long standing vanilla game problem of 'nobody ever uses any clothes except the snazzy suit'.

-Math on Grubfruit is weird. The basic version gives 1200kcal/4 cycles, or 300kcal/cycle per plant if cooked, while the 'upgraded' version from the critters gives 2000kcal/8 cycles or 250kcal/cycle if not cooked, and only goes up to 300kcal/cycle like the basic version if cooked. The problem is the cooked version of the upgraded fruit also requires sugar to cook, which means using another 8kg of sulfur per ration, and having to set up a Sweetle ranch (so added labour as well). Just doesn't seem like it's really worth it, as the upgraded version is less sulfur efficient overall, and the only advantage is higher food quality. This might be intended, but it doesn't feel right that 'upgrading' the plants is only situationally better.

-This isn't really 100% needed, but there probably should be some way to either renew or at least convert another more plentiful resource to sulfur in the midgame as a stopgap measure before you get to sour gas refining. As it is, you have to use sulfur for your first rocket, which discourages using it for food, and in theory you can end up wasting all your sulfur and then having to rely on dupe exhalations to launch a rocket to get access to other forms of rocket fuel. If nothing else, it would be nice to see more new production chains.

-The current 'progression' is just strange. You can warp to the oil asteroid, but don't have exosuits to tap oil (yes you don't ABSOLUTELY need exosuits for oil, but it's an utterly miserable and clearly not intended experience to try to tap it without them). You basically either need oil or lumber to produce large amounts of CO2 for CO2 rocket engines. So instead you have to make sugar engines, and travel to the OTHER nearby asteroid and pick up some reeds/trees to make exosuits or grow some lumber to make CO2. Which forces you to ranch Sweetles to make enough sugar, and forces you to rely on a limited resource (sulfur) to accomplish all of this. It just turns the early game into this very linear (and only ONE way to do something doesn't fit this game well) and round-about hunt for random things just to start progressing up the tech tree. Stretching the midgame compared to vanilla probably isn't a bad thing, but this feels way too linear. And after you are done you basically have no reason to ever come back to the asteroid with reed fibers.

I do assume many of the above 'progression' problems are because of content that is yet to be implemented (ie more routes to accomplish things, or just more branching progression), but I think it is worth mentioning regardless. 

-This is technically a vanilla game problem, but it is relevant since new content is being added: salt, and to a lesser extent rust were really underused in vanilla (yes there were some uses for salt, but you ended up producing way more salt then you could ever really use unless you really went hard on deoxidizing all the rust on the whole map for some reason, and not every map even had rust), and it would be nice to see more production chains added/things to do with them. Sort of how sulfur actually has various uses now. Would also be nice to see more late game uses of plastic, maybe insulated plastic pipes as a better but expensive alternative to ceramic pipes, but obviously a new production chain would be even better (but I imagine it's not likely).

-Not sure what I think of the food balance of the new start biome. It's certainly survivable on max difficulty food wise, if you just hold off adding dupes (but the game is always super easy if you do this, so it's a bit of a cop-out), but it feels like you can't expand your population as fast as even Aridio (which is probably the most food tight map early game in vanilla) on max difficulty. Which doesn't feel right for what appears to be a basic Terra equivalent map. Even going mushbars as a stopgap is annoying since you have to dig to the surface to get a decent amount of dirt (Mushbars are already so labour intensive that having to also use the press to get dirt is just not really viable), and there aren't that many seeds to start. I guess the tradeoff is that oxygen is a total joke, and once you get going the Bog Buckets are a lot better then Mealwood, if water intensive. I wouldn't mind seeing a few more seeds, unless this map/start biome is supposed to be harder then the vanilla game average.

[Steve8]

The CO2 situation isn't really that bad. There is also a large amount of ethanol that can be easily burned for lots of CO2. As a somewhat temporary solution that's fine as there also other options to complement that.

The early game rockets are weirdly balanced though. You'd think the sugar rocket would be longer range since it requires a more complex, permanent setup to sustain. It can carry more modules, but there are workarounds for that at the moment. CO2 -> sugar -> petroleum would be a good progression

[misotoma]

10 hours ago, Troxism said:

This isn't strictly 'needed' but might be worth considering: One way to make space flight less annoying for high skill dupes (ie not encouraging you to scrub astronauts for minimum morale req) would be to have a buff while travelling to another planet in a capsule to temporarily suppress extra morale requirement from learned skills (maybe only to a certain extent)

That's why I found it weird that the skill tree requires more burden for what it used to be. We all had dupes that could pilot a rocket but were mostly used to supply/sweep commands.. now it feels you do either sweep/supply or pilot the rocket. It's too cumbersome now.. Means it would be better to have one dupe for supplying only and one for rocketry. Also your suggestion to suppress the morale hit is a good idea they hopefully look into.

[Troxism]

12 hours ago, Steve8 said:

The CO2 situation isn't really that bad. There is also a large amount of ethanol that can be easily burned for lots of CO2. As a somewhat temporary solution that's fine as there also other options to complement that.

The early game rockets are weirdly balanced though. You'd think the sugar rocket would be longer range since it requires a more complex, permanent setup to sustain. It can carry more modules, but there are workarounds for that at the moment. CO2 -> sugar -> petroleum would be a good progression

True, although I didn't find the ethanol to spawn very consistently (the maps are so small you can actually just get barely any of a specific biome and not have a specific thing spawn). As for rockets in general.... well as I said they have a lot of problems; it's a massive hassle to launch missions in general, esp for long distances, which is fun the first time but obviously awful the 20th time. In some ways it's a lot worse then the old system. And cargo needs a serious look because the modules are 100% useless when you can carry infinite cargo in the pod (yes you can automate cargo, but IMHO that is sort of the problem; you shouldn't feel incentivised to constantly micromanage every rocket).

 

5 hours ago, misotoma said:

That's why I found it weird that the skill tree requires more burden for what it used to be. We all had dupes that could pilot a rocket but were mostly used to supply/sweep commands.. now it feels you do either sweep/supply or pilot the rocket. It's too cumbersome now.. Means it would be better to have one dupe for supplying only and one for rocketry. Also your suggestion to suppress the morale hit is a good idea they hopefully look into.

Yeah as I said, while it's not 100% required, it seems strange to incentivise having dupes that only know piloting (to make it easier to manage stress on long trips). It's not really how other things work, and frankly since it's easy enough to scrub dupes, you might as well just assume that people are going to do that and suppress extra skill morale reqs while flying rockets (can have a floor on it, equal to the morale req of the piloting skills).