Not liking the DLC at all.

[Crimsontide]

Picked up the DLC not too long ago, I understand it's alpha so I expected bugs or weird balance issues... but I do not like it at all.

I know I'm going to get flak here, but I feel you're making a game that will only be enjoyable to a few streamers and maybe one or two of the 'regulars' who just want to see how many ways they can break the sim.  You're committing the same mistakes you did in vanilla...

While there's much to love (the art style is great, the music fantastic, the biomes interesting, I like the multiple planet approach, etc...), one of the big problems is that of difficulty and gating.

What do I mean?  Heat is a perfect example of this issue.  There's so many neat and interesting contraptions that will never be built or used because they generate heat.  So how do you handle heat?  Well the AQ/ST combo is the sledgehammer to any nail in this game.  Completely unparalleled in efficiency and effectiveness.  So apart from a few wheezworts in the 100-200 cycle range, it's pretty much just race up the tech tree ignoring 90% of it till you hit the AQ/ST and then build 100 of them.  But then.. what's the point of all the other builds?  The game's practically 90% over at that point.

Almost all the major systems in this game have this sort of 'all or nothing' approach.  Hydrogen vent... AQ/ST because otherwise it's too hot to pump.  Natural gas vent... same thing... volcano's... same thing.  Steam vents hot/cold... same thing.  Electrolysis... same thing...  It's always the same thing because there's nothing tech-wise between spamming insulated tiles and AQ/ST for heat management (apart from wheezeworts on same maps).

This applies to many of the other systems as well.  It's all or nothing, there's no real mid game, it's just early and late skipping 90% of the stuff in between.  and mostly because it seems you want to add 'difficulty' and so make all the devices and contraptions artificially annoying for no reason other than to piss players off. 

From wire/power/transformers to the mess that was solar panels and endless regolith...  These 'issues' don't make the game more challenging, and certainly not more interesting.  They don't force creative builds or reward 'outside the box' thinking.  They're mostly just annoying, for no reason but to be annoying.

Radiation is this 1000 fold.  Radbolts are just... one of the dumbest things I've had to deal with in a video game.  And then, of course, almost the entire game is gated behind this annoying mechanic, forcing me to use it...

 

On the bright side I'll get more work done this summer than the last two...

[Yunru]

No-one's forcing you to use, or even play the DLC at all.

(This also applies to the base game, since it sounds like you have issue with that too.)

 

But as an aside, you're not going to win a lot of support, or even unbiased acknowledgement, when you open with trying to minimise the scale of theoretical opposition.

[chemie]

I have never had to cool H2 or Nat Gas geyers....ever. Just dont insulate around them.

I do agree with the two many niche things are so OP they become "they only way"...like food storage exploits as an example.

 

For me I like the concept of planets but the implementation is not good.  You end up jumping around too much and having to micro manage food, mess table and bed assignments, deal with CO2 in the nose cone, and other annoyances that do not add fun.

[Crimsontide]

36 minutes ago, Yunru said:

No-one's forcing you to use, or even play the DLC at all.

(This also applies to the base game, since it sounds like you have issue with that too.)

No one's forcing you to respond in this thread either...

[Lacero]

There's alternatives for generating plastic or reed fibre, alternatives for getting sand (lots I think), alternatives for food and even electricity (petrol, gas, ethanol, solar), there's only really one way to handle heat.  

I don't think this is a failing of the DLC, I actually think there's some small improvements in the DLC, but I think it is a problem with the game in general.

The DLC added cold geysers on the start planet give the first real alternative to a turbine for handling quite a lot of heat.  You can make a build that will grow sleetwheat, or even some nosh beans, without any AT or turbine at all.  You can actually do this extremely early now.  This is a great change!

But still basically when you want to cool lots of stuff down you have to build another AT/ST.  Any other solutions inevitably involve exploiting the sim (lumber temperature deletion, deletion of heat in input materials in a lot of machinery), or just venting hot stuff into space.  But stuff is a valuable resource!  it's hard to say that approach is a viable option unless you're doing a challenge run.

I'm not sure what other options should exist, one obvious one would be something like a radiator in space.  Given space visibility it could delete heat slowly, leaving the player to find ways to heat it up using metal tiles under it or something.

Anyway I do think there's room for improvement here

 

edit: I am enjoying the dlc and I mean to write up what I like in the suggestions forum eventually but it keeps changing faster than I can experience the later planets.

[Crimsontide]

10 minutes ago, Lacero said:

The DLC added cold geysers on the start planet give the first real alternative to a turbine for handling quite a lot of heat.  You can make a build that will grow sleetwheat, or even some nosh beans, without any AT or turbine at all.  You can actually do this extremely early now.  This is a great change!

Interesting, it was more an example of the issues with the game than a problem I was having.

 

11 minutes ago, Lacero said:

edit: I am enjoying the dlc and I mean to write up what I like in the suggestions forum eventually but it keeps changing faster than I can experience the later planets.

Fair enough, there's nothing wrong with enjoying it.

[NeoDeusMachina]

I feel like no matter how many options there are, there will always be number crunchers who will find "the most optimal" solution, it will get attention, maybe some popular streamer or youtuber is going to disseminate the idea, and then it is going to become "the" new solution for cooling. It is very difficult to create multiple solutions that are all equally viable, and if they did, then there will be those saying "what is the point of this if it does the same thing than that other thing?".

In any case, it is up to you to decide what solutions you want to play with and if it is okay to use sub-optimal solutions.

There are alternatives to AT/ST, even more so in the DLC than in the base game. For example, I have built a full Rodriguez rather early and the oxygen is cooled down by a cool slush geyser before it is sieved and turned to oxygen by the 4 electrolyzers. The cold oxygen is transported in my base and cools down pretty much all the heat my colony is generating. Also using a thermo regulator to cool down a rather simple freezer for food preservation at low energy cost, but I could not find that many uses for it in the base game.

If you post anything on public forums, you unfortunately have to be prepared to get any kinds of answers, even the unwanted kind.

[Crimsontide]

2 minutes ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

I feel like no matter how many options there are, there will always be number crunchers who will find "the most optimal" solution, it will get attention, maybe some popular streamer or something like that is going to disseminate the idea, and then it is going to become "the" new solution for cooling. It is very difficult to create multiple solutions that are all equally viable, and if they did, then there will be those saying "what is the point of this if it does the same thing than that other thing?".

I understand.  I used heat/cooling more as an example of needlessly complex systems and gating.  Rather than looking for explicit solutions to cooling.  Maybe I wasn't too clear.

My issue is that it seems Klei's approach to increasing difficulty is to make things more annoying/restrictive; which I feel leads to less creativity rather than more.

[Lacero]

I think the dlc improves this with both heating (cold geysers) and the grugrub making farming more productive for a little more effort, giving more viable builds that are more complex and combining more systems.  

[NeoDeusMachina]

3 minutes ago, Crimsontide said:

I understand.  I used heat/cooling more as an example of needlessly complex systems and gating.  Rather than looking for explicit solutions to cooling.  Maybe I wasn't too clear.

My issue is that it seems Klei's approach to increasing difficulty is to make things more annoying/restrictive; which I feel leads to less creativity rather than more.

From my experience, the Klei games that I have played (DS, DST, and ONI) are not made "intuitive". What I mean by that is that they do not hold us by the hand, there are no elaborate turorials, you kind of have to figure things out along the way and I think this is not for everyone. The radbolt system, for example, is really not intuitive at first, but then when you spend some time playing with it, it is rather simple.

You know this, you have point it out, the DLC is not yet released. The game mechanics can still change. Perhaps as time goes by, more people will have figured out those systems, maybe made some tutorials, and made the more obscure mechanics more accessible to players who just wanna have a blast without having to figure every little detail out themselves. I hope that you can find resources to help you get passed those frustrations, ONI is a great game, the DLC is also great even if it is a WIP, so I hope you can find a way to enjoy it at some point

[Electroely]

I've been loving the DLC so far, personally. Grubfruits & grubgrubs are my favorite plants & critters now, space travel has gotten me addicted to this game and the addition of radiation just gave me a lot more to do.

I do think that cooling options are... limited... but I feel like that's not a DLC-exclusive issue. I don't really mind less-than-top efficiency solutions, but it feels like in many cases nothing is strong enough to properly handle the heat other than the Steam Turbine and Aquatuner combo.

45 minutes ago, chemie said:

For me I like the concept of planets but the implementation is not good.  You end up jumping around too much and having to micro manage food, mess table and bed assignments, deal with CO2 in the nose cone, and other annoyances that do not add fun.

For me, it's been the best part of the DLC. I do not mind jumping between colonies a bit, and as long as everything in order my colonies can usually survive multiple hours without being checked on at all, so I don't usually worry about then until diagnostic warnings or alerts show up to tell me something's going awry.

As for rockets themselves, I think micro-managed rockets are most efficient, but I don't think they're necessarily the only way to make rockets. Ever since the separation of cargo ports and the module limit change, I've been using a Gas Cargo Module to supply oxygen to my base, which is completely automatic and takes no input from me other than waiting. I have a fridge set to store 15kg of grubfruit preserve so my dupes automatically supply the food when possible, and the restrooms either use a storage bin of dirt or a liquid cargo module to store water and polluted water (both of which require no micromanagement from me).

1 hour ago, Crimsontide said:

Radiation is this 1000 fold.  Radbolts are just... one of the dumbest things I've had to deal with in a video game.  And then, of course, almost the entire game is gated behind this annoying mechanic, forcing me to use it...

I don't really have a problem with radiation other than the lack of consumers (which the diamond press is shaping up to be a good solution for, if not a bit too late into the game). There's quite a few options for making strong ambient radiation to collect, and routing the radbolts themselves presents a cool design challenge of getting it where it needs to be without it hitting anything important on the way.
I'm not a fan of the "automate firing a radbolt when the researcher is done researching" approach because it feels too finicky. I instead have radbolts be fired over a timer, with extra research stations to catch excess radbolts:

If all 3 stations happen to be full, then the radbolts are routed to heavy-duty sinks like the Interplanetary Launcher, the Radbolt engine and finally, the radbolt black hole that is the Diamond Press. I think this setup has made radiation research headache-free for me; In past runs I manually flicked a switch everytime the research station was empty and I hated that. Now it's practically automatic.

[Crimsontide]

Just now, NeoDeusMachina said:

From my experience, the Klei games that I have played (DS, DST, and ONI) are not made "intuitive". What I mean by that is that they do not hold us by the hand, there are no elaborate turorials, you kind of have to figure things out along the way and I think this is not for everyone. The radbolt system, for example, is really not intuitive at first, but then when you spend some time playing with it, it is rather simple.

Well take regolith/meteor showers in the original game.  I put together a dozen different builds to try to handle it (I liked using solar power).  Everything that I saw online plus a half dozen of my own versions.  I came up with a few that were amazing.  In the end though, the only build that worked was using doors as compactors, because the game produced so much regolith, that any other solution would inevitable cause the game to grind to a halt.

It's not that I have a problem with meteorite storms, or compactor door setups existing, but that a weird borderline exploit was the ONLY way you could realistically solve the problem.

[QuantumPion]

Personally I like to dissipate heat by boiling water off into space. I think it is more realistic as it doesn't violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics like the steam engine does. But in real life, dealing with waste heat is a huge deal in every aspect of technology from computers to space shuttles. The movement of heat energy is the foundation of all technology.

[Brian.oni]

1 hour ago, Crimsontide said:

But then.. what's the point of all the other builds?  The game's practically 90% over at that point.

Might do well to offer some specifics... that paragraph paraphrased sounds like, there's a bunch of interesting things to build, but don't get built for the heat they'd generate, so you build the heat control stuff, but by then you don't want to build all the interesting things?

 

1 hour ago, Crimsontide said:

Almost all the major systems in this game have this sort of 'all or nothing' approach.  Hydrogen vent... AQ/ST because otherwise it's too hot to pump.  Natural gas vent... same thing... volcano's... same thing.  Steam vents hot/cold... same thing.  Electrolysis... same thing...  It's always the same thing because there's nothing tech-wise between spamming insulated tiles and AQ/ST for heat management (apart from wheezeworts on same maps).

This is where the argument loses ground I think.   IMO it's important to ask is this a game specific thing or a player specific thing?  There are other alternatives to the stuff you're talking about there.   You definitely do not need an aquatuner to handle a hydrogen, with some creativity you could probably avoid a steam turbine.   Natural gas I think most people don't cool at all.   Steam vents will typically employ a AQ/ST setup but I've seen so many variations on how to handle those.   Electrolysis, I'm not sure that I've ever used a AQ/ST to handle that, or wheezeworts for that matter.  And this one in particular is made better/easier with the DLC b/c you're much more likely to have a cool water geyser that can be used to chill the outgoing o2.   In short I've seen this multiple times where people think there's only 1 answer to the challenges the game presents, and then don't like the box they've put themselves in.

 

1 hour ago, Crimsontide said:

...and mostly because it seems you want to add 'difficulty' and so make all the devices and contraptions artificially annoying for no reason other than to piss players off. 

Again specifics would be appreciated.   Offhand I've seen this from people complaining about stuff like the nerf/fix to food storage and it seems like an argument contrary to the argument they claim to make.  Example: If you consider food storage changes as one of these added difficulty changes, how does comport with your complaint about a bunch of neat buildings never getting used?   Prior to the change how many times have you seen thermo regulators used as an example?   B/c they look a hell of a lot more common now.  Likewise, I never powered a fridge prior to that patch, now I'd 100% power one fridge fed from a metered line coming from a dedicated freezer room.

 

1 hour ago, Crimsontide said:

These 'issues' don't make the game more challenging, and certainly not more interesting.  They don't force creative builds or reward 'outside the box' thinking.  They're mostly just annoying, for no reason but to be annoying.

There was a thread on the ONI reddit the other day where a player was complaining about liquid locks saying, "They take so much effort to set up for something that should be in the game already", and then argued with every other reply saying liquid locks aren't challenging, and what they wanted was more ways to play the game when the only solution they offered was a solution that would trivialize a plethora of alternative solutions that were put up by other players.   I'm sorry, but this just reminds me too much of that.

[spkthed]

It's okay to not like the game. It's weird if we try to convince someone they should like it when they don't want to. Those of us that love the game aren't being attacked by someone saying it's not for them even if the language is tainted by frustration.

One thing I will offer though - mid-game cooling is utilizing cold biomes, or pools of water. It's slightly better in the DLC because the edge of space is all very cold, and that can easily cool down the base. 

There probably is an argument here for making blocks of ice more powerful without the temp-shift loss for example. 

[NewWorldDan]

3 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

Almost all the major systems in this game have this sort of 'all or nothing' approach.  Hydrogen vent... AQ/ST because otherwise it's too hot to pump.  Natural gas vent... same thing... volcano's... same thing.  Steam vents hot/cold... same thing.  Electrolysis... same thing...  It's always the same thing because there's nothing tech-wise between spamming insulated tiles and AQ/ST for heat management (apart from wheezeworts on same maps).

I can certainly cite examples where I've taken other approaches.  Aridio in the early game, I used thermo regulators to cool crops while feeding heated waste water from the bathrooms to pincha peppers, and that was an effective strategy.  I generally don't cool the gas from the natural gas vent.  I take advantage of other mechanisms as well.  The AETN will get your sleet wheat farm up and running much earlier than would be possible with the AT/ST combo.  

There's all manner of techniques for removing heat wherever possible.  Dump heat into water before it hits the electrolyzer, heat exchange your water with the crude oil from the oil reservoir, and so forth.  If you really want to test your ONI kung foo, get a mod that disables steam turbines.  You can do an incredible job of heat management without them if you try.  It can be done.

[Nebbie]

Before I get into my little rant, I must note that on electrolysis in particular, it actually is massively heat-negative, you just need water coming in below 75 C to absorb heat from the bottom portion, so that its deleting its own heat output instead of that of the input water.

This is very much a base game problem. The DLC actually makes heat less of an issue because it provides cold guaranteed geysers, a bit more cold areas to work with, makes space not a stupidly-crazy heat source, provides Beetas as cold critters (critters can passively delete heat from their environment if it's warmer than their normal temperatures), and offers plant mutations that can stand greater temperature ranges.

Now as to the base game's problem, it basically has 3 components:

1. The AquaTuner is the only decent heat pump ONI offers because polluted water has a ridiculous SHC available in the range of temperatures you normally need. The only competitors really are Ice Makers and Thermoregulators; the former are labor-intensive to use while the latter with hydrogen are just over half the efficiency at 1/10th the scale (only useful in the DLC for freezing food...though I have to consider if maybe an AT with small water packets is actually a better idea).
2. The Steam Turbine is just insane at how quickly it deletes heat. Nothing compares. IMO it really should have much lower throughput but a higher temperature range.
3. Heat production is scaled up by weird amounts from real-world machines but not heat pumps; DTUs are just a fancy name ONI applies to Joules in the context of heat. This means your 10W lightbulbs are producing 500W of heat. Many things you need to run a basic base produce too much heat (batteries and transformers being egregious offendors), and it all adds up over time. This was a deliberate design choice by the devs to make heat be a midgame issue, but I think they went too far in general and thus it can be rather hard to cool everything down without rather industrial solutions. The stupid icing on this imbalance cake is that Thermoregulators and AquaTuners are impossibly 100% efficient heat pumps, so you don't even technically need heat deletion on them as they can eventually be recooled by their own output.

Just a few tweaks to each of these would probably leave us in a state where Ice Maker heat deletion is a serious consideration as the devs likely intended. The problem is that it deletes only 3700 DTU/s, which means it often can't keep up with base heating without multiple...which then takes too much labor to bother with versus just spending research time to get an AT/ST.

As for the DLC's nuclear...I do find it a bit of an issue it tries to foist itself on my base, and without proper tools to easily automate it. Radbolts for research shouldn't be pretty much a pre-requisite for early space travel. I really think we need automation outputs on things that consume radbolts to request them at the least, and I'd like crop mutations to be a bit more useful and actually possible to breed.

[gabberworld]

i dont know. for me seems atm DLC mutch easier than base game,

if talking heat, my problem usually is more like where i get it more as i run it out ,LOL

but im guessing not many played to 7000 cycles

[Solon64]

I definitely understand the frustration behind a seeming lack of heat management tools, with the AT/ST combo being so strong as to make everything else pale in comparison.

That said, it's not like it's a crippling issue in most cases: many things like geysers don't really *need* to be cooled, you get to a point where your dupes spend a lot of time idling (because you've automated most stuff) so who cares if a few of them run an Ice-e-fan, and so on.

A lot of players seem to hate the thought of dumping stuff to space. I get it, that stuff could be useful eventually. But my current playthrough, I'm using a "flare stack" to get rid of the CO2 from my petro gens: column connected to space with a door at the top. Dump CO2 in, transfer waste heat to it with an aquatuner, when it gets hot enough, dump it all and start over. I goofed up and didnt insulate it, didnt build the AT yet, and the CO2 liquified, so now if I ever unlocked the bottom door, I've got... something like 5,000 full tiles of CO2 (gas) that would choke every dupe to death in minutes...

But the theory is sound, damnit! I'll get around to fixing it later. For now, the condensed CO2 isn't an immediate threat, and it's not like I was using it anyway. And now if I want to, I've got a handy "base self destruct button."

[gabberworld]

19 minutes ago, Solon64 said:

I definitely understand the frustration behind a seeming lack of heat management tools, with the AT/ST combo being so strong as to make everything else pale in comparison.

That said, it's not like it's a crippling issue in most cases: many things like geysers don't really *need* to be cooled, you get to a point where your dupes spend a lot of time idling (because you've automated most stuff) so who cares if a few of them run an Ice-e-fan, and so on.

A lot of players seem to hate the thought of dumping stuff to space. I get it, that stuff could be useful eventually. But my current playthrough, I'm using a "flare stack" to get rid of the CO2 from my petro gens: column connected to space with a door at the top. Dump CO2 in, transfer waste heat to it with an aquatuner, when it gets hot enough, dump it all and start over. I goofed up and didnt insulate it, didnt build the AT yet, and the CO2 liquified, so now if I ever unlocked the bottom door, I've got... something like 5,000 full tiles of CO2 (gas) that would choke every dupe to death in minutes...

But the theory is sound, damnit! I'll get around to fixing it later. For now, the condensed CO2 isn't an immediate threat, and it's not like I was using it anyway. And now if I want to, I've got a handy "base self destruct button."

but thing is you can keep all also sealed as that for walls is. yes there is allot CO2 in DLC, i have tons off that in my second asteroid, atm they in freeze point soo they as solid , also that maybe kives you idea cool the CO2 down what makes trouble  

[Solon64]

4 minutes ago, gabberworld said:

but thing is you can keep all also sealed as that for walls is. yes there is allot CO2 in DLC, i have tons off that in my second asteroid, atm they in freeze point soo they as solid , also that maybe kives you idea cool the CO2 down what makes trouble  

Yeah, it's all sealed off and not giving me trouble right now.

Wouldn't bother cooling CO2 intentionally: it doesn't hold much heat, and there's no good use for cold CO2 that hot CO2 doesn't work just as well for. It chilled because it's in uninsulated space biome, not by any concious decision on my part.

Also, who *doesn't* want a "press this button to kill every dupe in the asteroid"?

[gabberworld]

37 minutes ago, Solon64 said:

Wouldn't bother cooling CO2 intentionally:

 

only thing is i think transfer solid co2 is faster than gas one

 

[yoakenashi]

I feel that the DLC paces the player and prevents jumping or skipping large chunks of the technology tree. Some may see this as bad and restrictive; others may see it as a new challenge without significantly changing one’s gameplay.

I agree with Klei’s thinking (as determined by their posts) that they want to keep people interested in playing. Changes are necessary when doing that.

[Gurgel]

8 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

Picked up the DLC not too long ago, I understand it's alpha so I expected bugs or weird balance issues... but I do not like it at all.

I know I'm going to get flak here, but I feel you're making a game that will only be enjoyable to a few streamers and maybe one or two of the 'regulars' who just want to see how many ways they can break the sim.  You're committing the same mistakes you did in vanilla...

So "basically nobody will like it"? Have you even started to look at the forum comments? It is ok if you do not like it, but speaking for basically everybody like this is not ok. In particular, you do not speak for me. I speak for myself, I like the DLC and looking how to break the sim has never been a goal for me and I am not a streamer either. 

I think after that initial crass redefinition of observable reality, I can safely ignore the rest of the comment.

 

[DolphinWing]

Some people may not like where DLC is going, but still many others like me love it. I'm just so surprised that so many responses in a short time.