Feedback and thoughts on the game after my binge

[asmallrabbit]

I picked up ONI 10 days ago, and since then i've put in 130 hours. Unfortunately, I only started keeping notes more recently, and may have forgotten some of the things that stood out to me during my time playing. I would like to preface this by saying I really love the game, and it does far more right then wrong, most of the things I want to touch on and just things that I think could be improved or tweaked, or systems that I liked from other sim like games. Klei has done a great job so far, and its hard to remember sometimes that this is still just EA and not complete, so many of the things I mention could be being worked on or plan to be overhauled for the future. Since I'm probably going to take a break from playing for a bit I wanted to leave my feedback.

Anyways here goes:

Skills

 Athletics seems to level too fast. It easily outstrips all the other skills, and is a major factor in how quickly you need to push for better food and decor for your dupes. It adds a kind of natural timer to the game which I think is detrimental when you should be more focused on sustainability and survival first. I always found that athletics was easily 2 or 3 times higher then my other skills, and would just rush towards getting sleetwood grain asap to compensate for food expectations, more or less ignoring the earlier cooking options.

Dupes

Dupes can be very inefficient with their tasks and movement, bouncing from one side of the map to another to do a job rather then picking up something nearby, leading to a lot of uneeded travel time.

Having a minimum size to pickup something unless forced by a sweep command could do wonders for terrible interaction with endless tiny water or clay deliveries. Otherwise a dupe can spend a whole cycle bouncing back and forth with insignificant deliveries.

Deliveries seem to be limited to 2 tasks from what I witnessed, IE: If a dupe is carrying materials to a build task, they will take only 2 "sets" instead of the max that they should be able to carry.

Speaking of carry weight, dupes don't always seem to pick up as much as they can carry. There are time when a dupe will take their full carry weight,, even taking from another pile if needed, and other times when they only pick up a small amount. I'm not sure why but it can add unnecessary trips. Seems like they can only carry one "type" at a time.

Movespeed bonus only applies when going up and down ladders, or travelling on a flat surface. Every hop or climb is done at the same base speed which is a HUGE drawback later on, or if you want to make a natural tunnel incline/stairs.

Tasks done far from "home" are incredibly painful. Digging a tunnel all the way down or up means your dupes will go a long way to work one tile, then usually go all the way back. 

Seed carrying seems very inconsistent. I've had dupes pick up almost a full harvest, while others carry only a couple of seeds at a time.

 

Buildings

Please fallow flipping of buildings! I want my stuff to match when im building mirror rooms on either side, but right now you can't and it makes me sad. Would be nice to see!

Flipping kinda ties in to decor bonuses. Since its usually the bottom left tile that counts for the bonus when a dupe is using something. Leads to weird situations where the same layout has different bonuses depending what side you build it on.

More options for decor! I like to try and mix it up with plants and the different tiers of paintings and statues just so not everything looks the same with pictures or statues spammed everywhere. A way to get more briar seeds would be lovely. Sometimes i start with tons, and sometimes i get almost none.

Having a recycle or trash building would be lovely as well. I hate having piles of resources around my base, but i equally hate having storage lockers spammed everywhere. I don't really think ill ever use those 20 lockers filled with sandstone and dirt.

Show the material type in the tooltip so i dont have to check the detail tab for every single tile/object to figure out what material i made it out of.

When deconstructing, have the reclaimed resources added to the Dupes inventory. When trying to tidy up, its imposible to clean up your ladders etc without having stuff fall to the bottom of whatever you were trying to tidy up in the first place (pool of water, vent shaft, etc)

 

That's all I have recorded! Again, I really enjoyed playing the game, and being in EA i'm aware a good deal of this stuff could be planned for the future or already being worked on, just wanted to give my thoughts on what affected me while playing that stood out. Cheers!

[Masterpintsman]

2 hours ago, asmallrabbit said:

Having a recycle or trash building would be lovely as well.

That one is called 'Hatch', it recycles into Coal.

[Kasuha]

7 hours ago, asmallrabbit said:

Athletics seems to level too fast.

I would agree with that. But it's also tied with the dupe inefficiency in executing tasks - they just spend way too much time running around while they could be doing something. So I would guess the game needs some job selection optimization first, and balancing skill leveling second.

8 hours ago, asmallrabbit said:

Dupes can be very inefficient with their tasks and movement, bouncing from one side of the map to another to do a job rather then picking up something nearby, leading to a lot of uneeded travel time.

Yep that's an old problem. It is likely possible to improve even without major rework of the job system but nobody knows when will devs get over to it. 

8 hours ago, asmallrabbit said:

Having a minimum size to pickup something unless forced by a sweep command could do wonders for terrible interaction with endless tiny water or clay deliveries.

The size to pick up is limited by capacity of the delivery target and size of the item to pick up. They already try to collect more if there's more around, there's even been complaints from players that they marked something for sweeping and the dupe picked also nearby pile that wasn't marked. It's just not successful.

8 hours ago, asmallrabbit said:

Deliveries seem to be limited to 2 tasks from what I witnessed,

Not when it comes up to building wires, pipes or wall tiles. I have seen them bringing material for way more than two. Again it's probably limited by how much they can pick up around where they get the material, and how much they can carry.

8 hours ago, asmallrabbit said:

When deconstructing, have the reclaimed resources added to the Dupes inventory.

That's not very good idea. The dupe only picks things up when he's on a delivery job. The dupe may not even have delivery jobs enabled. Or he may not have where to deliver. And you may want him to continue deconstructing or perhaps do more digging/building at the place rather than going across the map to store the material.

Apart of that, I agree with many of your observations and wishes. Building flipping would be awesome, both from aesthetic and from engineering point of view. And yeah, optimization of job scheduling, the game cries for it.

[avilmask]

The most problematic thing about dupes inefficiency I find is common for games like this (Rim World, for example): dupes, after they finish their job, can't take someone's else job if they're happen to be closer. Way too many times dupes just come there, place resources for craft, and leave, because another dupe on another side of the map queued for building. I don't even talk about starting the job until better skilled dupe comes here, it would be close to rocket science

[Masterpintsman]

5 hours ago, avilmask said:

Way too many times dupes just come there, place resources for craft, and leave, because another dupe on another side of the map queued for building

This would be nice if it could be fixed. And it would be possible:

5 hours ago, avilmask said:

dupes, after they finish their job, can't take someone's else job if they're happen to be closer.

This (job stealing) should be implemented. It wouldn't even be that hard on the computing, as quite some statistics about the queued job (of the other duplicant) are already known (or could easily be made accessible to the planner by storing it after planning of the job schedule has completed):

• who is currently selected to do it (to be able to abort it easily, I guess this is already tracked)
• what distance is left to travel for that one (most likely available in the duplicant data pointed to by the prior)
• from whom this job was already stolen (new list to attach to an order, to prevent loops of job theft)

with this a duplicant would look at the closest job available (by job permissions) to him and -in case it could execute it quicker than the one currently assigned- take over the assignment from the other (which would then, instead of continuing his path to the no longer existing target, do a planning phase to look for the closest job).

Also: removing a natural tile where a planned building is located should count as a 'digging' job (not construction) so dedicated diggers could clean out an area that is marked with buildings instead of only processing the tiles without planned buildings that have been marked to dig.

This both would massively increase duplicant efficiency.

[Nidhoggur]

On 2 Июнь 2017 г. at 6:09 AM, asmallrabbit said:

I picked up ONI 10 days ago, and since then i've put in 130 hours.

Excuse me, sir, but... did you quit your job, or quit sleeping?