General state of the game (APR 02 2017)

[Daikataro]

So, been playing for a while, have had a couple of fairly booming colonies full of dupes, and wanted to share with ya devs some thoughts, observations and issues on current game:

 

First of all, I love what you did with electricity in the sense that you actually have to think how much more you can add before you have to start layering heavy watt wire or start throwing away resources on repairs. That said however, as base starts to grow more, even heavy duty wire is insufficient, and you have to split power generation to avoid overcharging circuits, when you seldom would see that in a real world scenario. I would like to see heavy duty wire carrying more power (seems a bit low on my point of view), and also a new building: substation. It would basically allow you to run heavy wiring for the main power supply (single one, except for maybe 40+ dupes colony), substation taps from that main circuit, and allows subsequent buildings to function with regular wire, as it does not compound them into the total load the same way; it would effectively reduce voltage and increase amps just for that circuit, just like building block substations work.

On that note, with the heavy duty wire, copper supply (that is also used for most electronics and most tiles you would have in your base anyway) has become too scarce, as you will spend a king's ransom just in heavy duty wire and gas permeable tiles, also mesh tiles became much more important in ice biomes, so more metal spent. It would be nice to either see a more generous amount of copper tiles generated, or just increase the amount of resources each tile gives, either will work.

On the thermal topic, there is currently zero temperature transfer between different gasses, which is not how it's supposed to go. Will make a bug post about the specific issue as well, but thought I might be as well mentioning it here.

Algae has also been dissapointingly low on my last 6 generated worlds, with 2 of them not even reaching 8k after harvesting every single block that was not in a swamp biome and, with electrolyzer now so far down the research line, oxygen becomes a way too big issue too early on; idk if it was intentional or an oversight, but deoxidizers are not viable for more than a few cycles now.

Also I don't know if it's an issue or just design, but thought I would remark it either way; I heard a lot of people saying that with this update, water had the opposite problem, where it would literally flood your base if you were not careful; have had 3 geysers "tamed" and still water keeps to reasonable to low levels.

[AlexRou]

If you have 3 geysers and are still running low on water then you're not condensing enough steam. 3 geysers are enough to keep like 5 pumps busy.

[Kasuha]

Not criticizing, just adding my own experience:

2 hours ago, Daikataro said:

First of all, I love what you did with electricity in the sense that you actually have to think how much more you can add before you have to start layering heavy watt wire

I hate how the electricity works. The idea is good, the implementation is horrible. Not only that's not how electricity works, it also prevents us from having centralized power generation - you have to break the base into multiple independent circuits with independent generation, and the generation never meets the demand since most devices don't run full time. Also, hamster wheel seems to be the only generator which stops running when batteries are full so if you run other generator, you either waste resources and generated power, or need to keep eye on batteries and switch the generation on/off as needed, even multiple times per cycle and grid. And the wheel blocks a dupe.

2 hours ago, Daikataro said:

Algae has also been dissapointingly low on my last 6 generated worlds, with 2 of them not even reaching 8k after harvesting every single block that was not in a swamp biome and, with electrolyzer now so far down the research line, oxygen becomes a way too big issue too early on

I didn't use a single piece of Algae in my last world - even though Electrolyzer is "deep" in the research tree, I was able to research it easily before all the oxylite around the base ran out.

2 hours ago, Daikataro said:

Also I don't know if it's an issue or just design, but thought I would remark it either way; I heard a lot of people saying that with this update, water had the opposite problem, where it would literally flood your base if you were not careful; have had 3 geysers "tamed" and still water keeps to reasonable to low levels.

I guess that depends on how many dupes you have. I am used to running with four and at cycle 100 I'm still by far not done with clean water I had in the world from the start.

[Daikataro]

Thanks a bunch for your experience, and well, I do like the added challenge in electricity, because the way it used to be, you could feed an entire 50 dupes colony's electrical needs with a 16 AWG instalation, which makes no sense. I do agree however that the implementation leaves a lot of room for improvement, which is why I would like to see more power being run thru heavy duty wire without it breaking. A regular 2 gauge AWG wire (which, considering how much 1 strand of wire cost to make in the game, seems like a fair comparison) can stand a whooping 95 amps without an issue, and assuming our dupes use regular 110V 60Hz AC that's almost 10,5kW worth of juice, enough to power a Kwik-E-Mart. The series-parallel implementation is also halfway done, because if you have a main strand of heavy duty wire, and connect each electronic via regular wire, said wires will still take the stress of the full circuit, when they should just draw whatever current they need.

I also skipped Deoxidizers entirely (still did use algae for terrarium in zones I did not visit often), but that's because I knew what I was doing. When game ships, it will need to be a lot more welcoming for newcomers, i.e. more room for mistakes and some more time to use the deoxidizers.

Yeah I still have my original water in this new colony I started (think cycle 65 or so), with an evergrowing 16 dupes population, and have so far isolated one geyser, that will eventually fill a reservoir. Just thought I would comment on it, because everyone was saying this update literally flooded you with water, so I was expecting to rely entirely on algae terrariums to be able to keep all the water in check, yet it's barely a few extra kilograms every now and then.