Slower Printing Pod recharge, Longer cycles and Faster Max Speed

[ZombieDupe]

One of the things that makes a single duplicant's death almost trivial is the fact that every 3 cycles a new duplicant can be printed. Alternatively if you are doing more than well enough, you can just take a care package, which just piles on extra ease to the game.

I would like to propose that the printing pod should take 10 cycles to recharge and be ready instead of 3. This seems like a small change, but it is significant in the way you are able to maintain your colony. This means you have to work with what you have and each duplicant's life suddenly becomes much more valuable long-term.

Additionally each cycle should last longer (maybe 24 minutes instead of the current 10 to align with the default seconds = minutes, minutes = hours done in some other games, at the slowest speed of course), and the nights should be longer as well (as suggested before), while all the hunger drain per cycle would still be the same per cycle, as well as the movement speed being the same and so forth. Duplicants could require longer to sleep as well, like 6 in-game hours (6 minutes), which would be the total length of night time per cycle. This means the first cycle isn't a race against the clock to set up bathroom, you have some time to familiarise yourself with the basics and the night time is that extra amount of time when you can look at and familiarise yourself with game's layout and your surroundings while all the duplicants are asleep until you get into scheduling.

Finally I think the game's debug runtime peed should be the default max runtime speed, and the second speed should be as fast as the current max. I find myself and other players often play on max almost all of the time once they know the ropes at around the first time they get into mid-game. There is never really any reason to run at mid-speed specifically otherwise and the max speed just isn't fast enough at times and the game feels like a slog, particularly when building large contraptions. You could also introduce mech suits to help duplicants jump higher, require more space to navigate, but most importantly carry much more (like x10 the amount of resources) as has been suggested before. This would mean that later in the game, you would play with slow speed when you need to investigate the logistics of what is happening in a specific area, play on mid-speed most of the game, and max speed if things are really slowing down, but not too often as it can become unmanageable at micro-management situations. Performance can be affected, but that hasn't stopped me from using debug speed regardless, so this would just be making it all 1 click less.

[NeoDeusMachina]

I get why you are suggesting this, but in my opinion, the solution would not solve the problem you are trying to solve and some of the things you are suggesting here are in contradiction.

Increasing the timer between new duplicants as well as increasing the actual length of cycles (in real life time) would make it so that I would personally save/reload to get semi decent duplicants everytime instead of rejecting all and hoping for something better next time. It would become a duplicant grind festival. There are so many traits now that I rarely get a satisfying duplicant. I can't imagine having to wait 10 cycles, 10 longer cycles, which means 8x longer in real life time than what we currently have (according to your suggestion). The early game would be more grindy, it would take forever to increase your duplicant count or we would need to accept horrible duplicants that are not viable for anything and be stuck with them because of how long it takes to get offered new duplicants.

Where things get contradicting is that you would like to make cycles longer in real life time, but at the same time offer a faster fast forward? I really don't see what this would accomplish. Making cycles longer means everything needs to be rebalanced or all the information needs to be updated in game, on the wikis, and so on, for example: dupes calories depletion, plants growth time, egg incubation time, dupes oxygen consumption and co2 production per cycle, etc.

The question I am asking myself is why? So I get more time to build a toilet on cycle 1? Only for the very first cycle on an entire playthrough? This is not worth all the changes in my opinion. Plus, it's not like we have to setup our bathroom on the first cycle, we can build outhouses pretty much right next to the printing pod temporarily and move it later on.

 Would it make it more punishing if you lose a duplicant? Maybe, yeah, but would it make it easier to lose a duplicant? Not at all, and that is where the problem is. Duplicants never die, or rather, I never lose duplicants. I'd rather have things that threaten my dupes more severely (looking at you radiation), this would make me play more carefully and fear losing my duplicants more.

I see that this could potentially make for a decent mod, but I think there would be repercussions on pretty much anything that consumes or produces some sort of resource per cycle. I am not convinced that this would be a good addition to the game itself or that it would get the results you are hoping for in terms of making the loss of duplicants a more severe consequence. But, that is only my opinion

[Sasza22]

5 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

One of the things that makes a single duplicant's death almost trivial is the fact that every 3 cycles a new duplicant can be printed.

The loss of a duplicant early isn`t an issue that`s true but it shouldn`t be. Otherwise newbie players would be severly punished for mismanagement up to the point they might as well restart when losing a dupe early game.

Now losing a dupe lategame is already punishing as the dupe has usually multiple needed skills. That might take 20-30 cycles for a new dupe to achieve not to mention the passive stat increase most importantly running. Lategame dupes can have athletics in the 15-20 range. Try printing a dupe with 0 and watch him struggle to get around your base let alone do something productive.

[ZombieDupe]

6 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

I get why you are suggesting this, but in my opinion, the solution would not solve the problem you are trying to solve and some of the things you are suggesting here are in contradiction.

Increasing the timer between new duplicants as well as increasing the actual length of cycles (in real life time) would make it so that I would personally save/reload to get semi decent duplicants everytime instead of rejecting all and hoping for something better next time. It would become a duplicant grind festival. There are so many traits now that I rarely get a satisfying duplicant. I can't imagine having to wait 10 cycles, 10 longer cycles, which means 8x longer in real life time than what we currently have (according to your suggestion). The early game would be more grindy, it would take forever to increase your duplicant count or we would need to accept horrible duplicants that are not viable for anything and be stuck with them because of how long it takes to get offered new duplicants.

So the whole bad trait thing is a balancing problem in and of itself. If there are traits that are never going to be acceptable to be taken by a player who understands the game well enough, there is no reason for the trait to stay, or at least in the way that it is. This is especially true for the flatulent trait, there is never a good enough reason to keep one around when all it would do is mess things up even more. You want all your duplicant choices to be useful for some specialisation from a development perspective, but some being more useful than others in a given colony depending on the scenario. So this is really a topic outside the scope of this discussion. For the sake of argument assume all duplicants are balanced and specifically desirable as intended.

I forgot 2 more extra points to add to the suggestion. One being that if you reject the printing pod, it should recharge faster, perhaps in the next cycle, so you have a risk-reward scenario. As for reloading save, I used to save scum printing pod for shove voles myself until I got bored. You might be in the loop to do this for longer, and I completely understand that. There is a semi-complicated way to fix this and it has to do with the way the printing pod selects printables, which right now is way too simple because of the printable scumming problem. One method I can think of to fix this is taking the seed of the map and timing it by a randomly generated number at the beginning of your save file (to make sure the printables are different even if you take the same seed number in a different world). Then these 2 numbers will be used by an algorithm to calculate what will be in the printing pod depending on the amount of printable times the pod recharged, whether you reject the printables or not. This way, no matter how much you try to save scum the printing pod, it will always give you the same printing options even if you saved before the activation of the printing pod. Given that I have done this and that you do this, or at least would do given the circumstances, it is a worth while investment to code. And yes, I know enough about programming to make the statement that this would be very much achievable.

6 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Where things get contradicting is that you would like to make cycles longer in real life time, but at the same time offer a faster fast forward? I really don't see what this would accomplish. Making cycles longer means everything needs to be rebalanced or all the information needs to be updated in game, on the wikis, and so on, for example: dupes calories depletion, plants growth time, egg incubation time, dupes oxygen consumption and co2 production per cycle, etc.

The question I am asking myself is why? So I get more time to build a toilet on cycle 1? Only for the very first cycle on an entire playthrough? This is not worth all the changes in my opinion. Plus, it's not like we have to setup our bathroom on the first cycle, we can build outhouses pretty much right next to the printing pod temporarily and move it later on.

To build an outhouse on cycle 1 without it being as massive of a race against time plus the addition of the cycle number becoming less meaningless. What you would accomplish in 100 cycles could now be accomplished in 30 cycles. Maybe even faster given that duplicants will get less interruptions and more total time to do tasks within a given day. Because of these reasons it is worthwhile to me. In the DLC it would be particularly useful as you can have duplicants stay in rockets longer and prepare a new planetoid settlement for longer before they have to take a break.

6 hours ago, NeoDeusMachina said:

Would it make it more punishing if you lose a duplicant? Maybe, yeah, but would it make it easier to lose a duplicant? Not at all, and that is where the problem is. Duplicants never die, or rather, I never lose duplicants. I'd rather have things that threaten my dupes more severely (looking at you radiation), this would make me play more carefully and fear losing my duplicants more.

I see that this could potentially make for a decent mod, but I think there would be repercussions on pretty much anything that consumes or produces some sort of resource per cycle. I am not convinced that this would be a good addition to the game itself or that it would get the results you are hoping for in terms of making the loss of duplicants a more severe consequence. But, that is only my opinion

Making it easier to lose a duplicant due to germs, radiation, unbearable temperatures, needs not being met, etc I totally agree with, that isn't what I'm trying to tackle with this. Tougher loss means your colony's survival is much more imperative. Losing 2 duplicants in a few dozen cycles is almost nothing right now. You could create a colony system of printing expendable dupes even, which is morbid and not something the game should encourage or allow doing by default I think. Repercussions be damned. If this makes the game better, then it should be done to make the game better. Don't settle for mediocrity, demand quality.

2 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

The loss of a duplicant early isn`t an issue that`s true but it shouldn`t be. Otherwise newbie players would be severly punished for mismanagement up to the point they might as well restart when losing a dupe early game.

Now losing a dupe lategame is already punishing as the dupe has usually multiple needed skills. That might take 20-30 cycles for a new dupe to achieve not to mention the passive stat increase most importantly running. Lategame dupes can have athletics in the 15-20 range. Try printing a dupe with 0 and watch him struggle to get around your base let alone do something productive.

Losing a duplicant early on won't punish you too hard. When your last duplicant is on bad feet, that's when your game would be set on restarting, which I think is fair. High stakes to lose your last duplicant, but if you manage to save them, the extended work time gives you more leeway to process things and potentially even get the colony back on its feet. And part of that is what the x10 speed would allow for. You get access to more content faster once you understand it because of the faster speed every now and then, which makes losing the game due to your continued mistakes that much less of an issue, because restarting won't take away days worth of progress, only hours. And you will still have learnt all the important parts of the game to do better next time from that. The intention being restarting a few times if you fail to finally succeed but not restarting dozens of times because you did something way off to never get past mid-game.

[Coolthulhu]

14 hours ago, ZombieDupe said:

Finally I think the game's debug runtime peed should be the default max runtime speed, and the second speed should be as fast as the current max. I find myself and other players often play on max almost all of the time once they know the ropes at around the first time they get into mid-game.

I'd love to support this, but current AI just can't handle it.

The game breaks down at current max on any but the smallest colonies, causing critters to become terrible, dupes take tons of extra time between jobs and so on.

[NeoDeusMachina]

11 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

I'd love to support this, but current AI just can't handle it.

The game breaks down at current max on any but the smallest colonies, causing critters to become terrible, dupes take tons of extra time between jobs and so on.

That is the only point i would personally support from the OP, if and only if the performance was improved enough for it to be viable.