Germ Learning Curve

[IanV]

You guys were doing very well with the learning curve until the outbreak update.  I feel like in the beginning you have a small set of concerns, oxygen, water, food. As time progresses you start layering other concerns on top of that, running out of algae, water, stress, etc. This is a nice gradual ramp up that is lots of fun.

The germ update is a big heaping of caring really early in the game. It's not very gradual and it's not very rewarding when you start dealing with it. I'd just like to point out as you apply updates, make sure the learning curve stays reasonable. 

(As a side, I enjoyed the agricultural learning curve of you could easily get basic food working, but needed skill to get the best yields / expand your crops)

[BlazeNightash]

It is reasonable? before all the hotfixes it was plenty reasonable people were just way way overreacting to the germs and it ended up ruining a good chunk of the update because klei goes back and hotfixes a bunch of **** and makes it pointless now kinda sad actually

[Sevio]

I think @IanV does have a point, the germ system does add pretty seriously to a new player's learning curve in the early game, necessitating specific pro-active strategies to avoid getting your dupes sick. You have to know about how to lay out your toilets and wash basins in a dead-end to avoid dupes slipping by a wash basin already in use (spamming multiple wash basins doesn't scale well when you get more than a couple dupes), and you have to heavily prioritize Sanitation research to get to Lavatories early on. This also means getting your plumbing and polluted water dump set up early in the game.

This competes with the more natural progression of going for farming first and setting up a mealwood farm, as well as some lights and algae terrariums to deal with that scary dark gas building up in the bottom right of your base.

The latter part of the game still has plenty of room for adding new things to learn, goals to achieve and and problems to solve but the early part of the game has gotten a bit crowded now with Oxygen, food, power, decor/stress, water and now germs all demanding the player's attention at the same time. I don't know if it's too much yet (and some fine tuning of Food Poisoning early on could fix that), but going forward new challenges added would probably fit in better if they only become relevant after the player has had some time to get set up and learn the ropes.

[brummbar7]

It might help if the diseases were reshuffled.   They put food poisoning as the introductory disease, but the consequences are pretty severe - vomit everywhere, polluted oxygen everywhere.  It can be a mess.  Something less severe might be better perhaps, as the introductory disease.  Something that slows the dupe way, way down, and/or severely weakens them, but doesn't involve fluids or death.  The vomiting of food poisoning, it really demands mesh tile to deal with best.  And that's a very late technology in the tree.  I also think it'd be better if all the diseases were totally separate from reality name-wise to keep people from complaining about relations to 'reality', and free Klei up to use them in more game-appropriate ways.  "Food Poisoning" kind of limits what you can do with the disease without really confusing people.

[Sevio]

7 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

It might help if the diseases were reshuffled.

Maybe. I like Slimelung where it is, its name perfectly covers where it lives and what it does. It's also not something you have to deal with at the start of the game so I don't think any changes are needed there.

7 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

Something less severe might be better perhaps, as the introductory disease.  Something that slows the dupe way, way down, and/or severely weakens them, but doesn't involve fluids or death.

Other than the vomiting, this is pretty much Food Poisoning right now. Severe stamina loss, forcing regular bed rest, frequent outhouse visits. Even though the vomit causes polluted oxygen floating around the base, that's not deadly early game as there shouldn't be any slimelung in the base yet.

It could use a different name to make it feel game specific rather than a real world analogue to... I guess E. Coli would be the closest one? I think the main problem with Food Poisoning for new players is that it appears very early (on first outhouse visit), at the same time outhouses are also the worst possible source of it. If it could be delayed a few cycles somehow, that would reduce the pressure to prevent it right away for new players.

At the same time, it tends to become a non-issue in the late game, so maybe a limited form of airborne transfer (coughing) and some new sources for it that appear later in the game could keep it relevant there.

[BlueLance]

9 hours ago, brummbar7 said:

It might help if the diseases were reshuffled.   They put food poisoning as the introductory disease, but the consequences are pretty severe - vomit everywhere, polluted oxygen everywhere.  It can be a mess.  Something less severe might be better perhaps, as the introductory disease.  Something that slows the dupe way, way down, and/or severely weakens them, but doesn't involve fluids or death.  The vomiting of food poisoning, it really demands mesh tile to deal with best.  And that's a very late technology in the tree.  I also think it'd be better if all the diseases were totally separate from reality name-wise to keep people from complaining about relations to 'reality', and free Klei up to use them in more game-appropriate ways.  "Food Poisoning" kind of limits what you can do with the disease without really confusing people.

I do agree if you want to keep it on a similar curve to the rest of the game that this would be an idea, but it is pretty simple to deal with, I do agree if it gets out of control the consequences do take a while to fix, but the same goes for stress, before people used paintings etc. its the same sort of thing.

Also yeah changing its name might be the better idea XD

[Michi01]

I don't think the learning curve was that hard. On my third or fourth colony with the update I wasn't having any problems anymore, all that was really needed was setting up enough wash basins at the right places. I don't think there was any need to rush lavatories either, I used outhouses for quite a while without problems, I just switched to lavatories because I didn't have a reason not to.

[BlueLance]

Yeah, i sat with outhouses until cycle 30 or so when i finished digging out the living quarters etc.

[Reaniel]

Like Michi mentioned, it also took me about 3~4 restarts in this update, but I no longer have any problem with either germs, and wouldn't have any problem even if I'm to start over.

One thing this update taught me is to stop being so anal about gases, especially chlorine, except to prevent it from getting into your starting area/living quarters.  I used to explore the toxic biome last because I had to do an air lock at every gas pocket and suck out all the chlorine and hydrogen before moving on.  Now?  I would do the toxic biome first and actually let the chlorine pockets flow into the slime biome.

I personally think that the learning curve isn't THAT bad, maybe a little bit harder than before, but with the way mealwoods had been redesigned, it's more of substituting pressure on water/food to focusing on doing building placement in your starting area as well as planning ahead.

It'd be nice though, if they can force 1 of the two capped steam geyser spawn in the immediate surrounding biome.  Also, to have the 5 geysers spawn all the time instead of having possibility to get just 4 or even 3 geysers on the map.  That way, people wouldn't have to restart because of lack of geysers, both for short term and long term.

[Michi01]

1 hour ago, Reaniel said:

Also, to have the 5 geysers spawn all the time instead of having possibility to get just 4 or even 3 geysers on the map.

Weird, I thought it's always five, I've heard of people creating a bunch of worlds to test it and always getting five

[Reaniel]

16 minutes ago, Michi01 said:

Weird, I thought it's always five, I've heard of people creating a bunch of worlds to test it and always getting five

This happened to me on the first day when I did the test myself and posted the question of geysers being capped at 5 on the general forum.  And I observed that it would spawn some maps with 4 or (with 1 being with just 3) geysers.  According to Risu, the current system would have each Place of Interest spawn once per map, and there are 5 geyser files at this time, so 5 is the limit.

My guess is that "very rarely" would the geysers get crowded out and not spawn due to whatever reason, but on those new map generations with less than 5, I actually combed through the whole thing several times to make sure I wasn't missing it because I'm blind, and there were indeed instances where I got less than 5 per map.

It could be caused by the same problem that's leading to initial location (along with your dupes) being buried right in the beginning.  Who knows...  But there's a chance to get a map with less than 5, and that's why I've been using debug mode to make sure I got 5 whenever I start a new game.

 

[brummbar7]

58 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

It could be caused by the same problem that's leading to initial location (along with your dupes) being buried right in the beginning.  Who knows...

My interpretation from what Risu described is that there is a list of points of interest.  Each ruin is it's own specific point, and each geyser, and probably that abyssalite-oxylite spiral.  Now maybe each biome can spawn only one point of interest.  The list is finite - lets say 20 for example.   So, if your map has more smaller biomes, you'll get more POIs.  If it has 20+ discreet biomes in this example, you get all of them.    But if your map has more big and rambling biomes, you'll get fewer.   Since geyser in this example are only 25% of the POIs, you're much more likely to be missing some ruins.  But, in some unlucky cases you will miss one or two geysers.  If you had fewer 16 or fewer biomes you could even be missing 3 geysers, but it'd be extremely rare. there's probably a practical floor of the numbers of biomes.   It would be interesting to get some experimental counts of maps, on numbers of geysers vs numbers of discreet biomes, and a count of the actual number of potential points of interest.  You should be able to compare those and get an idea what's going on.

I, too, often use outhouses way beyond when I've researched lavs.  Mostly because I wait until I have the 'ideal' outhouse area excavated (I have a pretty standardized base plan) and an area outside my base to dispose of the diseased polluted water.

Regarding food poisoning being easy, ya, same here.  But judging from reading the forums, it is a problem for some.  It's easy for us the experienced (especially those of us from closed testing) to say 'but this is so easy'.  But it seems  quite clear that Klei is balancing things with the intent of making it not too hard for the utter newbs - even to the detriment of the experienced players, many of whom are pretty bored with disease now.  The thing that disappoints me most is that the most interesting consequence - vomiting - is part of the easiest to avoid disease.  I *want* to have to deal with vomiting in the later game.  I *want* to have to design a clinic with mesh floors and a vomit sump, and lock my dupes in there lest they wander around messing up the base.    That was the thing that excited me most in closed testing - a new base design imperative.  Now the later disease that you *might* have to deal with is slimelung, and all that is is the dupe sitting in bed, maybe breathing out the occasional PO and germs.  Big yawn.  I now just tack two medbeds and a fridge on the back side of my regular lavs, and that's it. I don't even bother locking them in because their sneezing is non-consequential as long as your base is not infested with PO (and they never get used now anyway).

They also need to code it such that more serious diseases appear farther from base, and perhaps in association with desirable resources, like geysers, metal, and algae.  There could easily be a disease that spawns in algae in hot biomes, and is NOT killed by chlorine.  Easy-mode chlorine storage won't help there.  Also make it not killed by cold levels found naturally, and now you have an actual need an use for the ore scrubber.  Which you will probably have by the time you run out of disease-free starting biome algae.   Klei needs to give a lot more variety and thought to diseases, consequences, and the ways to get rid of them, to make *all* the game additions useful, imo

  There's still a lot of work that needs to be done on disease, and I'm interested to see where they go.  But it really needs improvement in several other aspects as well, and imho the food system needs to be revamped to work better with the disease system. 

 

 

[Reaniel]

4 minutes ago, brummbar7 said:

I *want* to have to deal with vomiting in the later game.  I *want* to have to design a clinic with mesh floors and a vomit sump, and lock my dupes in there lest they wander around messing up the base.    That was the thing that excited me most in closed testing - a new base design imperative.

 

I choked on my coffee when I read this part

But food poison induced vomiting would indeed be much more efficient than stress induced crying/vomiting in terms of H2O/PH2O generation.  I'll definitely play around a bit with that.

As for the difficulties of the system, I just feel that it's not THAT much harder than the other elements for beginners.  I mean this game is all about trial-and-error and learning from mistakes/failures, and if you apply that to OU's germ system, it shouldn't be as hard as people's making it out to be.

I think many just had the mindset of "I'll beat the system on my first try" or "my base layout is flawless and needs no modification" that they've boxed themselves in.  The matter of fact is germ system is much more forgiving than, let's say, heat death or water death, in that they actually gave you a tool for a reset (disinfect).  Imagine the devs giving you the ability to conjure water out of thin air or lowering the temperature with the power of a dupe's mind...  Yeah, that's what disinfect is from my point of view.

[brummbar7]

35 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

But food poison induced vomiting would indeed be much more efficient than stress induced crying/vomiting in terms of H2O/PH2O

lol, ya, I wasn't even meaning in terms of reaping the fruits of dupe suffering.  I don't really care about the whole 'infinitely sustainable' thing.  I just felt that the vomiting portion of the disease required some thought and design, and added an interesting component to base design that was not just stuff sitting on a flat platter.  It's far more interesting than just sitting in bed for 4 cycles.  But that is basically lost right now.  I'm just placing medbeds on a platter.

37 minutes ago, Reaniel said:

I The matter of fact is germ system is much more forgiving than, let's say, heat death or water death, in that they actually gave you a tool for a reset (disinfect). 

It is now, ya - it reached that state via successive revisions in the easier direction.   Toward the end of closed testing it was rather different - slimelung was highly infectious (Food poisoning was inconsequential even then though) - much more so than now, and yet I thought it could work even for newbs (as long as they gave us medicine to counteract it, which did not happen).    But the naivete of newbs was beyond what I imagined, apparently.  You and I can speculate all we want on how easy the current state of affairs 'should' be for newbs, but I'm presuming Klei is going off of metrics we don't have access to, and perhaps a wider commentary pool that you or I care to sample.  They're in the game design business.  I'm trusting they have data and a goal in mind that's guiding their decisions, rather than only listening to the squeakiest wheels on the forums.

[BlueLance]

You can have multiple geysers in a single Biome Brummbar7, I had a nat gas and chlorine geyser both spawn 5 tiles away from each other in a causic biome right next to my starter biome.

[Michi01]

4 hours ago, Reaniel said:

But food poison induced vomiting would indeed be much more efficient than stress induced crying/vomiting in terms of H2O/PH2O generation.  I'll definitely play around a bit with that.

Didn't they make vomiting reduce the dupe's calories in the AU? Because if that's the case that isn't really a viable strategy

[Reaniel]

1 minute ago, Michi01 said:

Didn't they make vomiting reduce the dupe's calories in the AU? Because if that's the case that isn't really a viable strategy

Yeah, but you're forgetting that we got unlimited calories in... Mealwood

That would translate into converting meal lice mass into polluted water I guess?

[brummbar7]

3 hours ago, BlueLance said:

You can have multiple geysers in a single Biome Brummbar7, I had a nat gas and chlorine geyser both spawn 5 tiles away from each other in a causic biome right next to my starter biome.

Ya that's true I guess, I have all 3 types in the same biome in my current save, you can see them all on the same screen.   The point remains the same though; maybe there's a limit per biome or something, and the list of POIs can exceed the available POI nodes.  It could be that each hex region has a POI node, but only has a *chance* for it to actually produce a POI.  So with bad ROG you might not have enough POIs populate, better luck many.  Idk.  I believe Risu did some magic in another thread and caused tons of the exact same ruin to show up.  That kind of makes me lean toward the latter case as the more likely guess.

[Oozinator]

i have one water geysir in range, 60% uncovered.. ^^