Not liking the DLC at all.

[evilcat19xx]

Your critiques are mostly not about the DLC but more about the base game. If you don't like the DLC at all, there is not much that can be done. Or maybe it is only a clickbait title. Unfortunately, the negative titles attract more attention.

Anyway, I like the DLC, and had many hours of fun. The game provides much more than its price.

However, I agree with most of your points, but I was not too fond of the way you articulate them:

12 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

AQ/ST combo is the sledgehammer to any nail in this game

AQ/ST and solar panels are the cheat codes for ONI. I have mentioned in most of my previous posts that no solution should be dominant...

These steps always work:

• Don't get too many dupes
• Do all the research
• Solar panels (now it is artificially behind some more advanced research that does not change anything)
• AQ/ST and you are good to go

 

12 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

Almost all the major systems in this game have this sort of 'all or nothing' approach.

True. You can ignore many of the available systems.

 

12 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

it's just early and late skipping 90% of the stuff in between

Also, true.

12 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

They don't force creative builds or reward 'outside the box' thinking.

True.

 

12 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

entire game is gated behind this annoying mechanic

Yeap. Solar panels is artificially behind radioactive stuff.

 

12 hours ago, Yunru said:

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

What type of logic is that...

[Elin64]

In ONI you don't have a "goal" to win the game so you just play as you want without looking at youtube or the forum to see the most optimal way of playing.

what is fun in this game is to find your own way of solving issues about food temperature, oxygen,... you learn by playing a lot and then maybe sometimes you look at youtube to see new solution and it's quite fun and amazing to see how other players solved the problem.

That's my way of playing and i don't find DLC really much more difficult than vanilla, some stuff like electricity management are much more easy in DLC than in vanilla.

[SharraShimada]

14 hours ago, Crimsontide said:

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.

Not true. I had several savegames with the base game, where is had no compactor-door setups and just transported the regolith to my vole farm via conveyors. If one does it right from the start (or orders the dupes to collect the vast amounts of regolith after building the system) if wont overload anymore. The key to success is to build the bunker doors at the very top of the world, so regolith cant stack up 50 tiles or so, but only 2-3 tiles It will never again bother you with trillions of tons.

[Coolthulhu]

I agree about ST/AQ and solar panels, but my biggest non-performance-related problem with the DLC is how "manual" it got:

• Can't automate rockets at all
• Can't vent rockets, have to rebuild the whole habitable part
• Can't automate food distribution between planets
• Can't automate transporting nearly-rotten food to the resin planet
• Tight rocket space means build storage->deliver->deconstruct tricks have to be used for solids like algae or food
• Can't restrict food types or toilets for space travel
• Can't have "fire this interplanetary payload after x time, even if it's not full", nor even use a manual "fire now" button, have to manually add current mass, set it on launcher, disable launcher, enable it. This is terrible for non-deep-frozen food that waits for delivery to resin planet
• New orbital science isn't much of a challenge, just manual deliveries, launches, then landings when plastic/oxygen/food/stress gets bad
• Radbolt automation is next to nonexistent

All of the new features require near constant player intervention to work anywhere near efficient.

Still, I'm glad that meteors are gone. This alone made me enjoy the DLC significantly more than the base game. Bunker door automation using meteor/rocket detectors is probably the worst mis-feature in history of ONI, so seeing it fixed away is a great relief.

[Crimsontide]

1 hour ago, SharraShimada said:

Not true. I had several savegames with the base game, where is had no compactor-door setups and just transported the regolith to my vole farm via conveyors. If one does it right from the start (or orders the dupes to collect the vast amounts of regolith after building the system) if wont overload anymore. The key to success is to build the bunker doors at the very top of the world, so regolith cant stack up 50 tiles or so, but only 2-3 tiles It will never again bother you with trillions of tons.

The best solution I came up with that wasn't a simple door/compactor was using diamond tiles as a base, sulfur as a coolant (lowest amount of light loss for a liquid and perfect temperature range for regolith) and placing the voles right on the platform with a complex sweeper system (well more the cooling system needed to be complex) to move any dropped eggs back onto the platform.  That was the only non-exploit method I could come up with that didn't grind to a halt from conveyor overload.

Or I can just jam some doors at the top of the map /eyeroll...

My problem isn't that zany, exploit ridden builds exist, it's that in many cases they are required or are massively cheaper/more efficient.  We never use airlocks as airlocks.  Instead we use water locks.  Airlocks are used as compactors and gas deletion, because that's cheaper/more efficient than actual scrubbers...  Nothing in this game does anything remotely similar to what it's supposed to do.  Large sections just don't work, or work in such convoluted and annoying ways that it leaves me completely scratching my head...

[NeoDeusMachina]

16 minutes ago, Crimsontide said:

We never use airlocks as airlocks.  Instead we use water locks.  Airlocks are used as compactors and gas deletion, because that's cheaper/more efficient than actual scrubbers...  Nothing in this game does anything remotely similar to what it's supposed to do.

One could argue that this is exactly what you could call "thinking outside the box" or being "creative", using things in other ways than what they have been designed for and achieving unexpected outcomes. Wasn't this one of the points you felt was not being encouraged in your initial post?

I would also just mention that the sample you get from youtube or streams, or even on the ONI forum, are not necessarily representative of the whole community. People tend to share their ideas and use other people ideas either as a copy or as a source of inspiration. Sometimes, those people may end up playing the same way, making the same builds, using the same "exploits", and it can give an impression that everyone does that. That in itself can kill creativity and thinking outside the box, more than how the game is designed. I am pretty sure that not everyone playing ONI plays the same way. I know it was only an example when you mentioned airlocks, but let me use it as an example here too: I find myself using airlocks as airlocks, especially between my base and the surface of asteroids, even if that means losing some O2 along the way. I never used airlocks to delete gases or regolith for that matter. Do I also use liquid locks? To be fair, yeah, I do, but I still use airlocks the way "they were meant to be used".

[Meltdown]

2 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Can't automate food distribution between planets

You actually can automate food distribution with this build.

2 hours ago, Coolthulhu said:

Can't automate rockets at all

AFAIK there is roundabout trip mode on rockets, and it works with automation signals to platforms, so there is a small degree of automation for rockets.

While we could use more automation (especially in cases of food spoilage or atmosuit durability), I don't feel like the situation is that bad.

On topic of heat management, I feel like "AQ/ST combo is universal solution" is a stance that oversimplifies the problem. There are several mechanics that somehow delete the heat:

• Heat deletion through mass deletion (Plants, Super Computer)
• Heat deletion through SHC changes (Electrolyzer)
• Plain heat deletion (Steam Turbine, Ice Maker, AETN)

Sure, since AQ is highly powerful and efficient heat pump, it makes convenient combo with Steam Turbine, making that "plain heat deletion" option dominant. However, even then, there is a big variety of small things that allow to assist AQ/ST combo or to keep heat at bay before it is available. It's a deeper system than it seems like.

Even if we would see new alternative methods to heat management, they would likely to use one of mechanics listed above, or come in form of a new heat pump to compete with AQ. I don't believe that in this case variety of tools is going to bring variety of mechanics. It may bring more convenient or beginner-friendly options, through.

[Lwt]

21 hours 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

A possible solution to this sort of problem is usually one of restriction. For instance, a planet doesn't have Reed Fiber so if you want early atmo suits you're gonna have to find some dreckos. Same with plastic where multiple solutions exist. Now I don't know how this would apply to the aquatuner/steam turbine setup vs. other solutions, but that doesn't mean Klei couldn't come up with some sort of restriction.

What I like about limiting resources is that you have to come up with alternative solutions depending on the map. This makes multiple playthroughs unique by presenting new challenges. 

I'm also aware that some people will not like this approach, as they want options, and they particularly don't wan't subpar options shoved down their throat. 

[Coolthulhu]

35 minutes ago, Meltdown said:

You actually can automate food distribution with this build.

It's just solid cargo counters. It works in perfect steady state, but that's it.

I can't send a signal from one planet to another without an arcane and fragile payload delivery encoding like "if ConsumptionPlanet sends less than 100 grams of hydrogen per 10 cycles, send them 2.5kg of frost buns for every missing gram of hydrogen".

It's incredibly fragile because there's no way to automatically empty a payload launcher or to make it stop accepting cargo, no way of automatically verifying that it launched a payload other than by shooting a radbolt through it and using a rad meter to see whether the bolt hit it or something behind it. The last one may be possible to do it with wattage meter, but it would require care to take cleaning "routine" into account.

A simple radio is all I ask for.

[Coolthulhu]

13 minutes ago, Lwt said:

What I like about limiting resources is that you have to come up with alternative solutions depending on the map. This makes multiple playthroughs unique by presenting new challenges.

I'd like the map distinction to be stronger. At the moment, it boils down to geysers, primarily water, salt water, pwater, sulfur, metals. Rest is mostly a wasted geyser slot.

With water sources secured, you can play every game the same way. Would be cool to have a special world where no water, including salt and polluted water, geysers exist at all, but instead there are planets with renewable slime (pufts don't count, they produce minuscule amounts), gaseous ethanol geysers, polluted oxygen vents with constant 500g/sec outputs, oil fissures with constant 500g/sec outputs and so on. Wild stuff that forces you to design the base differently.

[Meltdown]

35 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

It's just solid cargo counters. It works in perfect steady state, but that's it.

Shouldn't food production be in perfect steady state anyway? Farms and ranches can be set up in a way that would have a stable yield of food without player intervention, as long as you supply dupe labor and resources. Food consumption and spoilage also work in predictable manner. Why shouldn't it be in perfect, steady, predictable state?

45 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

I can't send a signal from one planet to another without an arcane and fragile payload delivery encoding like "if ConsumptionPlanet sends less than 100 grams of hydrogen per 10 cycles, send them 2.5kg of frost buns for every missing gram of hydrogen".

Looks like your problem is sending resources on demand, not just distributing them. While I can agree that game lacks tools to solve that problem, I should point out that it isn't the same thing as solving simple distribution problem with predictable production and consumption.

11 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

Would be cool to have a special world where no water, including salt and polluted water, geysers exist at all, but instead there are planets with renewable slime (pufts don't count, they produce minuscule amounts), gaseous ethanol geysers, polluted oxygen vents with constant 500g/sec outputs, oil fissures with constant 500g/sec outputs and so on. Wild stuff that forces you to design the base differently.

I think thats a cool idea. Especially gas ethanol geyser.

[SelenSewar]

I really wish that DLC introduced some kind of Stirling Engine Generator. Make it consume additional resources, make it require operation from time to time, maintenance, whatever. The idea itself is so cool, and it could've been such a nice alternative to AQ/ST in some cases.

[Yunru]

12 hours ago, evilcat19xx said:

What type of logic is that...

Sound logic?

If they're not liking it "at all", then they shouldn't play it, since it'll bring them no enjoyment. After all, it's not like Klei will suddenly overhaul the entire DLC.

 

Now if at all is just a massive exaggeration, my response doesn't work, but that's not on me.

[Tytan]

On 6/17/2021 at 1:10 PM, Crimsontide said:

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.

i have a map with over 3000 cycles and i have none of the 2, i have neither steam turbine nor aquaturner.
no mods

I believe that like any game in the same style, who makes the gameplay is you, I also don't have big machines, big exploits that I see that most use.

[NewWorldDan]

4 hours ago, Tytan said:

i have a map with over 3000 cycles and i have none of the 2, i have neither steam turbine nor aquaturner.
no mods

I believe that like any game in the same style, who makes the gameplay is you, I also don't have big machines, big exploits that I see that most use.

For much the same reason, in Spaced Out I play without solar panels.  Thanks to this thread, I've also come to realize that in the early game especially, I have been vastly underutilizing the heat removal potential of the electrolyzer.  Granted, I'm using an aquatuner for cooling and feeding hot water to the SPOM, but it's made out of copper ore, no steel required.  I'm somewhat left to wonder why I haven't been doing this sooner.  

The game has so much potential for elegant solutions and we often overlook them in favor of brute force industrial approaches.

[ZombieDupe]

On 6/17/2021 at 5:10 PM, 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...

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...

Good criticism, but most of this applies more to the base game than the DLC, so what are you talking about? Because of the cold slush geysers, the AQ/ST setup isn't as necessary. It's necessary for volcanoes and hot geysers, but not for your colony or the cold geysers. The only planetoid this really applies to in the DLC is the small Terra spaced out map which has awful geysers.

10 hours ago, Tytan said:

i have a map with over 3000 cycles and i have none of the 2, i have neither steam turbine nor aquaturner.
no mods

I believe that like any game in the same style, who makes the gameplay is you, I also don't have big machines, big exploits that I see that most use.

What map and how do you keep temperatures decent for your colony? Is your colony even in a sustainable state or are you being very conservative with your resources? I hear this claim every now and then. You can be very efficient with heat handling and not run AQ/ST setup, but the reason this setup is so highly regarded and seen as required for general colony stuff is because most people will not be as efficient or be able to handle such efficiency at first glance and this setup allows for a lot more of unnecessary heat generation to be taken care of than any other method. Also I don't see how you could for example tame a volcano without exploiting some other heat deletion trick, if you even have that done.

[crbd115]

31 minutes ago, ZombieDupe said:

The only planetoid this really applies to in the DLC is the small Terra spaced out map which has awful geysers.

As of this testing branch it has the same as the others, 1 salt slush, 1 polluted slush, 1 cool steam vent, and the one unique part is the natural gas vent.

[ZombieDupe]

Just now, crbd115 said:

As of this testing branch it has the same as the others, 1 salt slush, 1 polluted slush, 1 cool steam vent, and the one unique part is the natural gas vent.

Really? Hurray! Now the only problem is how the directly surrounding biomes are too hot and germy. May be if that's tweaked as well then Terra can become the recommended start again as it should have been.

[crbd115]

50 minutes ago, ZombieDupe said:

Really? Hurray! Now the only problem is how the directly surrounding biomes are too hot and germy. May be if that's tweaked as well then Terra can become the recommended start again as it should have been.

Too hot and germy? The only biome too hot for a normal game is the oil biome which is on another planetoid, the jungle biome is fine heat wise, the marsh biome is basically room temp and the germs don't do anything anyway and is apart of what makes a map terra  Then you have the sulfur biome which is basically room temperature or maybe a few degrees warmer and the cold biome. How is any of that an issue?

[Tytan]

1 hour ago, ZombieDupe said:

What map and how do you keep temperatures decent for your colony? Is your colony even in a sustainable state or are you being very conservative with your resources? I hear this claim every now and then. You can be very efficient with heat handling and not run AQ/ST setup, but the reason this setup is so highly regarded and seen as required for general colony stuff is because most people will not be as efficient or be able to handle such efficiency at first glance and this setup allows for a lot more of unnecessary heat generation to be taken care of than any other method. Also I don't see how you could for example tame a volcano without exploiting some other heat deletion trick, if you even have that done.

i use an terra-map, pre-dlc
I have many dupes, most of the food was made with meal lice, I have 3 cool slush geysers, I haven't "tamed" any geysers I just take what I need and with a transport system I put them in iced geyser water, what will warming up and I transport it elsewhere until it gets hotter and I use it to feed or Metal Refinery or Fertilizer Synthesizer or I throw it away when it's too hot

the first thing i did on my map was the separation of the biomes, biomes wanted to keep ambient and i wanted warm, the first things i run after is isolation and exosuit
so the living areas have a temperature around 27, and the work areas oscillate between 40, the hottest it was, is  my dirt production "plant" which was very hot there.

[Solon64]

6 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

Also I don't see how you could for example tame a volcano without exploiting some other heat deletion trick

Depends what you define as a "trick". You could absolutely use an AT (w/o ST) to dump the heat into a material you vent to space which is a perfectly legitimate way to remove heat, or you could set up a steam chamber above the volcano (w/o AT) and get rid of it that way, also intended. You could just box it off and run polluted water pipes through it for pincha nuts, or regular water for electrolyzers, or just double insulate and forget about it entirely.

People seem to have this idea that *every* heat source must be removed in some way. Heat is a resource just like any other (it's energy!) and can either be marshalled to productive use or built around, or isolated, or ignored, or... you get the picture.

You live in a (mostly) closed system asteroid, of course you'll have to deal with heat, and in a closed system, of course you'll have to get rid of it somehow, that's just one of the engineering challenges associated with the game, that's what makes it fun for a lot of people.

If you don't like managing heat, maybe this isn't the game for you. And that's fine.

[Yunru]

I mean hells, I used to not even tame gold volcanoes, just thermally isolate them and limit dupe access so they'd recover from scorching themselves.

[DarkMaster13]

On 6/18/2021 at 2:09 AM, Coolthulhu said:

I agree about ST/AQ and solar panels, but my biggest non-performance-related problem with the DLC is how "manual" it got:

• Can't automate rockets at all
• Can't vent rockets, have to rebuild the whole habitable part
• Can't automate food distribution between planets
• Can't automate transporting nearly-rotten food to the resin planet
• Tight rocket space means build storage->deliver->deconstruct tricks have to be used for solids like algae or food
• Can't restrict food types or toilets for space travel
• Can't have "fire this interplanetary payload after x time, even if it's not full", nor even use a manual "fire now" button, have to manually add current mass, set it on launcher, disable launcher, enable it. This is terrible for non-deep-frozen food that waits for delivery to resin planet
• New orbital science isn't much of a challenge, just manual deliveries, launches, then landings when plastic/oxygen/food/stress gets bad
• Radbolt automation is next to nonexistent

All of the new features require near constant player intervention to work anywhere near efficient.

Still, I'm glad that meteors are gone. This alone made me enjoy the DLC significantly more than the base game. Bunker door automation using meteor/rocket detectors is probably the worst mis-feature in history of ONI, so seeing it fixed away is a great relief.

I'm with you there.  Using rockets just isn't fun for me, the interiors of them are the absolute worst.  It's so fiddly and requires so much micro management.  The reason I like base management games like ONI, DF, and Rimworld is because we don't have to micromanage them.  I really wish we could go back to the old system of abstracted rocket interiors.  It would solve so many problems like stress, storage space exploits, gas management, and dupes running off to the rocket to use the bathroom.  Just give the capsules some built in food, clean water, and oxygen storage, with excess CO2 and polluted water automatically being vented in flight if there's no liquid/gas storage on the rocket set to accept them and new oxygen/water automatically pumped in if it's available in storage tanks.  Give us a bunch of automation ports on rocket parts that let us create all sorts of conditions for automating launches.  We've got automation ribbons if you need more than one output, like say a crew module's life support state (1: All full, 2: Oxygen full, 3: water full, 4: Food full).

[TuxSam123]

3 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

I'm with you there.  Using rockets just isn't fun for me, the interiors of them are the absolute worst.  It's so fiddly and requires so much micro management.  The reason I like base management games like ONI, DF, and Rimworld is because we don't have to micromanage them.  I really wish we could go back to the old system of abstracted rocket interiors.  It would solve so many problems like stress, storage space exploits, gas management, and dupes running off to the rocket to use the bathroom.  Just give the capsules some built in food, clean water, and oxygen storage, with excess CO2 and polluted water automatically being vented in flight if there's no liquid/gas storage on the rocket set to accept them and new oxygen/water automatically pumped in if it's available in storage tanks.  Give us a bunch of automation ports on rocket parts that let us create all sorts of conditions for automating launches.  We've got automation ribbons if you need more than one output, like say a crew module's life support state (1: All full, 2: Oxygen full, 3: water full, 4: Food full).

I agree with the automation sugestion, however I disagree greatly with the first suggestion. I do agree that there needs to be some better way to automate rockets, but that doesn't justify scrapping the existing system. It's literally the same as building a nice statue then throwing it in the garbage.

[NeoDeusMachina]

14 minutes ago, DarkMaster13 said:

I'm with you there.  Using rockets just isn't fun for me, the interiors of them are the absolute worst.  It's so fiddly and requires so much micro management.  The reason I like base management games like ONI, DF, and Rimworld is because we don't have to micromanage them.  I really wish we could go back to the old system of abstracted rocket interiors.  It would solve so many problems like stress, storage space exploits, gas management, and dupes running off to the rocket to use the bathroom.  Just give the capsules some built in food, clean water, and oxygen storage, with excess CO2 and polluted water automatically being vented in flight if there's no liquid/gas storage on the rocket set to accept them and new oxygen/water automatically pumped in if it's available in storage tanks.  Give us a bunch of automation ports on rocket parts that let us create all sorts of conditions for automating launches.  We've got automation ribbons if you need more than one output, like say a crew module's life support state (1: All full, 2: Oxygen full, 3: water full, 4: Food full).

I understand your pain, I really do, but I think this is sort of the point of Spaced Out, to expand on the... space system, to make it more "whole" and integrated with your colony's development. In the base game, it was so tedious to set it up, required a huge amount of steel, and you could only efficiently do that so late in the game that at that point, your colony was pretty much already sustaining itself (for the most part anyway). Maybe someone will one day make a mod to change how rockets operate and roll back to how they were in the base game, who knows. I personally hope they keep rockets interior the way it is, with of course improvements on automation along the way to facilitate space mining and material transport between asteroids. Even if things stay somewhat the way they are, the DLC is still very young, I am convinced people will find ways to automate things, even small things like locking rocket bathroom doors when there are no duplicants onboard so they dont keep running in there if you forget to disable them.