My thoughts so far on the DLC

[Singularity42]

Hey all, just thought I would share my thoughts so far.

Context: I have only done one playthrough so far, and am currently just starting to colonize my 3rd asteroid at around cycle 200. I also don't have access to the game at the time of writing, so I can't fact check.

 

What I Love

So I love having multiple asteroids. I love the vanilla version, but my biggest bugbear was that space always sounds so exciting, but when you get to that stage the game really slows down and turns to a grind. I almost always give up on the colony and start a new one at that stage, because grinding out the large amounts of steel needed to set up lots of spaceships, just gets kind of boring.

So I love that this part of the game has been reimagined, and is now more midgame.

I also think having more asteroids naturally makes the difficulty profile better too. In most games you want the difficulty to grow over time as you play the game (to match the fact that you are getting better, and are getting access to more resources). By making it that you have to manage multiple colonies at once, this makes the difficulty scale nicely over time.

 

Feedback

Difficulty

I have seen a few people on the forums saying that managing multiple colonies is too hard. 

My opinion of this is that the target audience for the DLC is probably mostly for players who have already played a fair bit of the vanilla version, so I think it is OK for it to be a bit harder. For the most part, it feels like it is sitting at the right difficulty level for me.

I think the correct difficulty curve it to keep the starting asteroid fairly easy to get up a mostly functional base (food, water, temperature), and then let the difficulty curve go up as you try to colonize more planets.

Exploration & Asteroids

This might be just a side effect of it being in alpha, but I find that the progression of traveling to other asteroids at the moment feels kind of linear.

I think the most exciting thing in the new DLC is stepping through a teleporter without knowing where you are going, or discovering a new asteroid with the telescope.

What I would like to see, is either the telescope range getting a buff, or another more powerful telescope which you can research (maybe it is harder to make) which gives you more range. Currently it feels like each asteroid you get to, only gives you one option for the next one to travel to. I think it would be better if you could see 2-4 new asteroids for each planet you are on. This way you would get the choice of where to go next, based on your current needs.

I think this might also let you add in some creative or high-risk/high-reward planets. E.g. a planet too hard to fully colonize, but has some really valuable resources. So you just send an expedition there, but don't colonize unless you are really brave. Or a planet that is really tiny (mini-base style). The player would have the choice between multiple planets, so they could choose to go to the safer option, or the higher risk (higher reward) option. I think this could really add to the emergent narrative.

I think also it would be nice if the planets are somewhat randomized, so that each play though ends up being quite different (maybe this is already the case?).

Late game goals

I think this is probably just another side effect of the alpha. But currently the tech tree feels very board but not very deep. There are currently no 'late game tech' which you can only research when you get some difficult to obtain material.

I am guessing this will come later when the radioactive stuff comes in. But currently there are no real long term goals, which are hard to achieve.

I won't say much more here, because I am guessing this is already planned.

 

 

I might do another post later, when I have some more time.