Further Thoughts on the Update as a whole

[clickrush]

I think that this update has very interesting and positive implications on the game as a whole, that cater not only towards players who like hats and talent trees but also towards optimizer nerds.

Maybe the base movement speed has to be adjusted. But I can also imagine that we just aren't used to building bases and handling dupes in a way so it is efficient with this update. The dupes being generally slower at running but being specialized locally opens up a whole new level of base optimisation that just wasn't there before.

Firepoles and tubes suddenly make tons of sense as well as the new conveyor system and I like that. Those things are there to make up for the fact that dupes are slow now. People have kind of complained about those because dupes were so fast that they didn't matter. Now they do.

It will probably even be more impactful to design bases in a way so each individual dupe uses less travel time. For example a base could be set up in a way so the dupes live near the places they usually work. Maybe your powerplant needs toilets now. Maybe you should set up a small outpost for remote digging. These are new things that were possible before, but now they actually make sense form an optimisation standpoint. This also makes scaling bases up interesting, since you can aim either for a centralized or decentralized style to solve these new problems

Some of the specialisation boni sound very powerful and the payoff seems worth it. The increased stress difficulty adds a new layer of depth that wasn't there before. The goto solution for stress reduction was just to cluster up living areas with art, and food had a minimal impact. This solution gets challenged now, since decor based stress reduction puts pressure on space, which is more precious now in terms of travel time. Also some specialized duplicants will spend more time in industrial areas and less in living areas, so we need to think about decor in respect to that too.

Another big thing I like is the mealwood nerf and making higher quality food a real bonus. Up until now it wasn't worth it in any way to make more sophisticated food, and was usually done as a self imposed challenge. Now scaling up food will be more meaningful and thus fun.

I expect that the overall impact of these changes on how ONI is played will be super fun. I also expect that bases will look much more differently from eachother now, since this update not only gave new possibilities but also new challenges that can be solved in many different ways.

[Hechicera]

I think some of the changes were due. I now don't "rush through" certain steps. And as specialization mid-game becomes one change, you may think that is what they are going for. This does make the early game "explore" aspect much harder. Of course, having an "Explorer" job (which doesn't exist) and specializing in it at all would be shunned by min-maxers as it would be "wasted" later.

I want to try several more random maps and get past cycle 200 though before I decide how hard it made exploring. You can grow reeds for the suits very early now, in the base. But need a bit of exploration and machinery set up for exosuits, if that is the goal (iron, at least small crusher, power for that, pumped O2 for suit fill up). And the bonuses there are for Athletics, which is fine mid/end. But those tunnels aren't going to dig themselves. I was used to doing the initial explore with "naked" dupes, and handling the small bits of slimelung after fairly well. Now, not as easy. But, those tunnels still aren't going to dig themselves!

[midjones]

3 hours ago, clickrush said:

I think that this update has very interesting and positive implications on the game as a whole, that cater not only towards players who like hats and talent trees but also towards optimizer nerds.

Maybe the base movement speed has to be adjusted. But I can also imagine that we just aren't used to building bases and handling dupes in a way so it is efficient with this update. The dupes being generally slower at running but being specialized locally opens up a whole new level of base optimisation that just wasn't there before.

Firepoles and tubes suddenly make tons of sense as well as the new conveyor system and I like that. Those things are there to make up for the fact that dupes are slow now. People have kind of complained about those because dupes were so fast that they didn't matter. Now they do.

It will probably even be more impactful to design bases in a way so each individual dupe uses less travel time. For example a base could be set up in a way so the dupes live near the places they usually work. Maybe your powerplant needs toilets now. Maybe you should set up a small outpost for remote digging. These are new things that were possible before, but now they actually make sense form an optimisation standpoint. This also makes scaling bases up interesting, since you can aim either for a centralized or decentralized style to solve these new problems

Some of the specialisation boni sound very powerful and the payoff seems worth it. The increased stress difficulty adds a new layer of depth that wasn't there before. The goto solution for stress reduction was just to cluster up living areas with art, and food had a minimal impact. This solution gets challenged now, since decor based stress reduction puts pressure on space, which is more precious now in terms of travel time. Also some specialized duplicants will spend more time in industrial areas and less in living areas, so we need to think about decor in respect to that too.

Another big thing I like is the mealwood nerf and making higher quality food a real bonus. Up until now it wasn't worth it in any way to make more sophisticated food, and was usually done as a self imposed challenge. Now scaling up food will be more meaningful and thus fun.

I expect that the overall impact of these changes on how ONI is played will be super fun. I also expect that bases will look much more differently from eachother now, since this update not only gave new possibilities but also new challenges that can be solved in many different ways.

+1 I really love the new update. For the first time in forever I actually care about my dupes, the hats adds a lot of personality and for once I love giving them names.  Actually making different kinds of food growing areas for different kinds of food (never needed to care before, just mealwood), and I love that cooking provides a kcal benefit.

[Byste]

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that training a dupe on a job does not retain that job bonus when switched to a different job. This infuriates me to no end. It makes no sense and it means we're stuck forever with slow dupes that can't carry anything. I don't think "reroll your starting dupes a zillion times" is a valid counter argument either. If having something like anemic is not viable then it shouldn't be in the game. There has to be some sort of compromise between dupes that crawl around the map / can only carry 80kg and 20+ athletics by cycle 50, and it shouldn't be "roll twinkletoes".

As for farming, I'm happy with the changes for the most part, but mushrooms have no place in the current food system -- they're just outright bad.

I find it ridiculous that the tidying profession doesn't give any attribute boosts. Athletics is core to the job.

Decor expectations are bugged it seems, everyone gets +25 decor expectations which makes it extremely hard to play on fatalistic.

I'm excited by the new buildings, rooms, research, and professions in general, but please please please let us train and/or retain skills.

Lastly, if start attributes are so dang important, perhaps we should have some control over it, like being able to reroll a trait or something like that. Rolling dupes is actually not fun.

[clickrush]

5 minutes ago, Byste said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that training a dupe on a job does not retain that job bonus when switched to a different job. This infuriates me to no end. It makes no sense and it means we're stuck forever with slow dupes that can't carry anything. I don't think "reroll your starting dupes a zillion times" is a valid counter argument either. If having something like anemic is not viable then it shouldn't be in the game. There has to be some sort of compromise between dupes that crawl around the map / can only carry 80kg and 20+ athletics by cycle 50, and it shouldn't be "roll twinkletoes".

As for farming, I'm happy with the changes for the most part, but mushrooms have no place in the current food system -- they're just outright bad.

I find it ridiculous that the tidying profession doesn't give any attribute boosts. Athletics is core to the job.

Decor expectations are bugged it seems, everyone gets +25 decor expectations which makes it extremely hard to play on fatalistic.

I'm excited by the new buildings, rooms, research, and professions in general, but please please please let us train and/or retain skills.

Lastly, if start attributes are so dang important, perhaps we should have some control over it, like being able to reroll a trait or something like that. Rolling dupes is actually not fun.

I agree to some extend with you. I think the big issue the system currently has is that the skill boni aren't quite strong enough. Instead of the small, flat boni I'd rather have a combination of the old and new system, where the old system of leveling up is still intact, but has a lower cap on the skills. So the specialization will just increase the cap of a specific skillset level by level.

I disagree however that dupes should be able to learn and maintain every profession. I like having the flexibility of reassigning a dupe to a new profession while still keeping the progression itself, but not the bonus from the old one. But if the boni would still be active after switching up then the system would be completely pointless.

The complaint about athletics and anemic I find rather invalid. The numbers probably should be tuned to a degree where it is less punishing to have very low athletics, but I'am so glad that they decreased the overall speed a dupe can run around. This makes recent additions of poles, tubes and the new conveyor system meaningful, as well as the new smart storage.

The whole point is that we start thinking and playing differently with these specializations in mind. I think we have to give the designers a bit of credit here, as they to seem have a good vision or instinct on how the updates should complement eachother as the game grows with features.

[Byste]

3 hours ago, clickrush said:

I disagree however that dupes should be able to learn and maintain every profession. I like having the flexibility of reassigning a dupe to a new profession while still keeping the progression itself, but not the bonus from the old one. But if the boni would still be active after switching up then the system would be completely pointless.

It's not completely pointless because it's a way to prioritize per-dupe so they can specialize assignments. Keeping the bonuses does change what their current job is, it just keeps the bonus so when they do off-job tasks you trained for they can do them faster... the way they trained to... it makes perfect sense and the point of job system is still there.

[clickrush]

2 minutes ago, Byste said:

It's not completely pointless because it's a way to prioritize per-dupe so they can specialize assignments. Keeping the bonuses does change what their current job is, it just keeps the bonus so when they do off-job tasks you trained for they can do them faster... the way they trained to... it makes perfect sense and the point of job system is still there.

I meant pointless in the sense of making an update for it as it would be exactly the old system with a bit more fine grained priority handling, I think.

[Byste]

1 minute ago, clickrush said:

I meant pointless in the sense of making an update for it as it would be exactly the old system with a bit more fine grained priority handling, I think.

I see quite meaningful differences.

• Training up the job trees is gated by what level decor and food you can provide
• It's also gated by how quickly you're able to master the jobs
• The job system only trains one skill at a time, while before you could be learning everything at once
• Old system skills could get very high esp regarding athletics, it's not like that anymore

As you can see, even if you could retain job skills, you're still slowing down the game by a huge amount and you can't reach the same high numbers you used to be able to reach. The way I see it, if you want to invest the extensive effort of turning your dupes into super dupes, you should be able to. It's going to take a loooong time.

[The Plum Gate]

I'm waiting for all the jobs to be added, the mechatronics role is quite the grind, maybe they'll add more mid level multi requirement roles that tie common codependent attributes together.

[CobraA1]

7 hours ago, Byste said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that training a dupe on a job does not retain that job bonus when switched to a different job. This infuriates me to no end. It makes no sense and it means we're stuck forever with slow dupes that can't carry anything. 

To some extent we've been spoiled by the fast dupes, though. Having fast dupes made the advancements like fire poles and tubes somewhat unimportant for older bases. Now the fire poles and tubes will be much more important, and the new conveyor belt system will also help relieve some of the pain introduced by the changes.

7 hours ago, Byste said:

I'm excited by the new buildings, rooms, research, and professions in general, but please please please let us train and/or retain skills.

I definitely think there needs to be some sort of "multi-role" kind of system; one of the biggest complaints I've read from other people about this update is that it perhaps pigeonholes dupes a bit too much.

7 hours ago, Byste said:

Lastly, if start attributes are so dang important, perhaps we should have some control over it, like being able to reroll a trait or something like that. Rolling dupes is actually not fun.

Yeah, I think that the experience of rolling your first dupes does need a bit of work.

I do get what the developers are going for: It's supposed to be you have to "make do" with the dupes you are given, and there might be some misfits, and you're not really supposed to have the perfect dupes when you begin.

But you are right, it's not really all that fun to start the game by re-rolling dupes a million times. Something has to be done about the starting experience eventually.

 

[Steelflame]

I think at least for that first set, we should be able to craft perfect dupes with a point system.   You have exactly X points, and it is up to you to spend them.  Negative traits would give you a few extra points to spend, with a few restrictions, such as that you can't roll a -stat skill or anti-trait skill on the first dupes (So can't aim for a freeby), but you could potentially make them a Bottomless Eater or such if you are willing to increase the food cost of that dupe, in trade for having them have a few extra stat points to spend.

Perhaps you take a bit of a lumpish set of dupes with Diver's Lungs and only 1 amped up skill of what you want them to focus on where a slow start won't hurt as much because you have longer to get your oxygen setup with the 25% reduced oxygen consumption early on.   Perhaps you actually DO want dupes with the Small Bladder trait, and utilize that to make them produce PW more frequently for helping to set up the water cycle.   Maybe you even put all the points into one of the 3 dupes (With the idea of a roleplay that you are that dupe, and the overseer of the colony), and let the other two literally be lumps that you kill off or deal with, your choice.

The main thing, is instead of just clicking reroll 50 times for a good dupe, you can just streamline the process, and put a bit more player agency and attachment to the dupes you start with.

[Kabrute]

Very RPGish and right up the alley of a game that requires planning before playing......

[Oozinator]

3 hours ago, Kabrute said:

Very RPGish and right up the alley of a game that requires planning before playing......

///Code for strange behaviour, before a game starts///
#goto 10
#10 Start new game
#20 Reroll dupes a dazillion times, till you happy with 3
#30 Generate world
#40 Look around check for geyser in reach
#Goto #10

[Technoincubus]

Game became less fun with this update.

[Kabrute]

not so sure its less fun, i'm just now to cycle 60 and all is well, pretty much got it figured out and mostly sustainable Honestly all the hype about food and I'm feeding high job dupes raw berries and lice loaf without issues.

[The Plum Gate]

20 hours ago, Byste said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems that training a dupe on a job does not retain that job bonus when switched to a different job. This infuriates me to no end. It makes no sense and it means we're stuck forever with slow dupes that can't carry anything.

You are correct, the job title carries the buffs, but they should remember their experience. The upside to this is that you can have instant gofers.

Now are you saying that the forget ever having attained the level of being a courier? or has a tenured scientist forgotten that he's able to be a tenured scientist after being put in the junior chef position?

[Saturnus]

10 hours ago, Kabrute said:

...i'm just now to cycle 60 and all is well, pretty much got it figured out and mostly sustainable 

Then you're just around the point where everything grinds a halt.

I've made 5 separate runs now. The first 20 cycles seems even easier than before. Especially if you keep the hat dance to a minimum. The next 40 rounds is all about getting a steady food supply going for 12ish dupes, getting research done and some basic exploration. Then you hit the wall. between cycle 60 and 100 everything slows down to a crawl, and here I don't mean in FPS term but because the dupes are overwhelmed with tasks and only frantic hat dancing gets anything done aside from those basic task. After cycle 100 where things should be well on the way to have the basic oxygen and power production nailed down nothing gets done. You basically have to hat dance the dupes constantly and make heavy use of the highest *-priorities. On every play-through up till now I've lost the will to live and considered throwing the laptop out the window between cycle 120 and 150. It's not that there's any emergencies. It's actually extremely easy, it's just that the dupes flat out refuse to do anything you want to besides the basic maintenance and upkeep of the base. Exploration and setting up more advanced features like conveyor belts and such that we ought to be testing is completely out of the question because the dupes are so feeble, in both mind and body, now compared to how they used to be.

[Kabrute]

Yeah I'm being very careful to arrange the workload so that dupes have nothing to do as much as possible and its still getting grindy with 15 dupes o.o

[Hechicera]

On my second run that got past 100 now (126 current). The existing has stable food and with a steam geyser literally 2 tiles from the edge of the starting biome, it should be fine. I'm about to tap it. I will make another game to try some other layouts on the way to 100+. Things I used to leave unenclosed (machinery/power/plants depending on atmosphere) now need walls to make rooms for new station/room bonuses.

Food just takes some getting used to, as do the new item priorities. I have become better at shinebug herding in the early game.

One thing is that 96 tiles when you have the station + quality of life items, air vents, space for conveyor on/off/arm and either space for plants to grow into, or bulky machines is *very* limiting. I am not sure how to see the bonus with farming (they do make an item in their "station"). But with power the bonus is noticeable. You can't have one guy easily cover multiple stations without a lot of micromanagement, as it is one dupe per station, and assigning to a new one de-assigns them from the first.

One thing I noticed, farmers make the best medics. They are near base, and seem to have plenty of extra cycles.

That and Groundskeepers really need Athletic as much if not more than Deliverer/Gophers. Mild bonus maybe, but much need early. Either that or fish for +Athletic 5 dupes that will only do the other job part-time (Research/Art/Operate). Farmers also benefit from Athletics since they don't have all that much work to do inside their measly 96 tile plot, so they are de facto Gophers/Groundskeepers as well. And you will need more than one, going back to the one per station.

So more choices and trade-offs, but only one choice is a clear winner, and the others are all trade-offs between also-ran outcomes. That is a less fun choice structure.

[SheedLa]

With that in mind I think that the problem with the new update is that poles and tubes are kinda endgame and before you get them you're stuck with slow and not-so-strong dupes.

Poles require quite a few resources and heat management to be deployed in enough places and tubes are the last in research tree (which now takes tons of water) AND requires plastic, which in turn requires exosuits (with grinded hat), which in turn requires refined metals, which in turn requires heat management... you get the point.
To get to plastic you have to have all the systems in place already, so when you actually get your tubes, you typically have already dealt with almost all difficulties without them.

Now before the update you could do that ok, while after the update you have to grind hard just to get to that point.

 

TL;DR: I'm all for the optimizations, but I'd rather have the right tools at the right time instead of grind and only refine your systems when actual problems are already solved.

[BlueLance]

Meanwhile I am sitting here and enjoying it all haha. No longer do my dupes destroy and build entire areas withing the space of a few cycles. I do agree with the Anemic dupes being hit really hard, they either need to be sped up, or become farmers or something that requires them to hardly move because they are otherwise worthless. 

1 Miner and 1 Gardener at the beggining ensure you can get yourself a food supply as well as expand (Miner mines harder materials and normal dupes mine softer ones) Excluding the fact that I feel the food takes longer to roll in I am no daunted or suffering from the new systems, but my one anemic dupe literally crawls and was forced to become the gardener. Which is fine thankfully.

I agree we have been spoilt with speed, 50 Athletics and a dupe will literally fly through anything. At least now poles have a bigger use (Although I already loved them) and the tubes do too. 

[The Plum Gate]

1 hour ago, BlueLance said:

I agree we have been spoilt with speed, 50 Athletics and a dupe will literally fly through anything. At least now poles have a bigger use (Although I already loved them) and the tubes do too.

And then there's the tube network to consider as a transportation system.

[Saturnus]

1 hour ago, BlueLance said:

I agree we have been spoilt with speed, 50 Athletics and a dupe will literally fly through anything. At least now poles have a bigger use (Although I already loved them) and the tubes do too. 

Welcome back. You must have been away quite a while since the dupe stats was capped to 26 athletics (33 with twinkletoes) in early November or there about. 

[Maciej75]

3 hours ago, BlueLance said:

 No longer do my dupes destroy and build entire areas withing the space of a few cycles.

Yes yes yes.

I am a new player that is just finishing my first big base (~400 cycles, 10 dupes, remote Oxygen creation and AC, about RL week of building) and I just wanna ask in "suggestions" to add have half-pause, slower peace. Because of dupes building faster then I am drawing. And I do not want to make everything on pause, this is not Matlab.

[Byste]

21 hours ago, The Plum Gate said:

You are correct, the job title carries the buffs, but they should remember their experience. The upside to this is that you can have instant gofers.

Now are you saying that the forget ever having attained the level of being a courier? or has a tenured scientist forgotten that he's able to be a tenured scientist after being put in the junior chef position?

I mean that, say, you train a dupe to 100% mastery of farming and gofer. They only get the +farming OR the +athletics, depending on which job is active... or neither if they are unassigned. 100% mastery only enables them to train the next tier of that job. I think it should confer the training gained to the dupe permanently once they reach 100% of something.