Oxygen, Research & New Dupes Feedback

[Jigsawn]

Back again with a 4th base under my belt (it's about to go pear-shaped at about 150 cycles). I have a lot more feedback on helping make the game more accessible and fun to play. This time I am splitting it between topics to avoid an uber-thread. Original feedback from my first few attempts is in this thread.

This time: Oxygen issues, Research feedback and dealing with new dupes.

Oxygen

Insufficient Oxygen Warnings -  Up until now, my 4th base, I hadn't realised I was building far too many oxygen producing machines. That is, until the forum pointed out my error. The reason for this? The game continually gives you Insufficient Oxygen Warnings. As a new player, if you get that warning - the obvious solution is to build more oxygen producing machines, right?

Fast forward to my latest base where I had about 10 algae deoxidisers, 3 electrolyzers and a bunch of C02 reducing devices and still getting the warnings occasionally. Then I go onto the forum and find out I had no need for so many. It led to me running out of algae very quickly in the early stages of the game, not to mention the water, power cost and time taken for dupes to supply them.

Whilst oxygen warnings are important, perhaps they could be structured in a different way, or only trigger after a longer threshold has been reached. If a base is popping up warnings, according to the knowledgable folk on here, it's likely that it's usually due to pressure maxing out, or other factors - when in reality you still have plenty of oxygen and plenty of supply to fill up any shortcomings. 

Another thing which might help is to give players a better visual reference for how much oxygen is needed per dupe, shown on both oxygen creating machines and on dupe screens - maybe not just with quantities but reference to the number of dupes a machine can typically support in a closed environment.

As a new player when I was getting these warnings, I was also never really sure about what was causing them. Were new dupes causing a lot more oxygen to be consumed? Was it because I was digging out new caves from my base, causing more space for oxygen to fill. It was never very obvious at what point I should actually be worried that my oxygen wouldn't just fill out the gaps eventually - so the safest bet was always to build more oxygen machines - better safe than sorry!

 

Pressure Indicators 

Currently as far as I know, there is no way to visualise gas pressure in the game aside from clicking on squares on the map and looking at incomprehensible sciencey numbers. A big problem I faced in my first few bases was maximum pressure being reached with my algae deoxidisers. However narrowing down where I had pressure issues in the base was hard with no way to visualise how the oxygen was flowing around my base. Why not have a pressure overlay where you can see in a colour coded way how dense the pressures have become in different parts of the map. This would make troubleshooting much easier and help with base planning. I also suggest adding tips or hints when you reach maximum pressure with oxygen machines, about using airflow/mesh tiles to promote airflow around your base. I'd completely missed this use of them in my first few attempts, and again the forum identified the problem for me. An overlay would really help here.

Research

Starting Out

When starting out, the research tree is daunting and its very hard to know where to start. A lot of starter research available is actually pretty useless to all but the most advanced players (like automation tech). The game could do a much better job of steering newer players in the right direction about what tech to research first and where their priorities should lie. Maybe stuff like automation tech should be gated off until the later stages, at least for players on the default game mode. This would make things clearer and stop players making awful, game ruining choices by accident off the bat.

More Information needed in Research Screen

When trying to decide what to research next, there isn't a lot to go on. The research categories could have better descriptions to aid new players. Another big problem is that hovering over buildings in the research screen only gives you a brief overview of them. It would be much better if you could click on the building and get the full description. This would help much more with planning ahead, and deciding what you will actually benefit from right now.

Another issue with the lack of information in this screen is that it's possible to research tech that you currently can't even construct, or have the correct resources to run. Its very annoying to research stuff like clothing, or exosuits, only to discover you need refined metals and so on - which of course you need to research on a different branch! Full building descriptions would help with this. Maybe the research categories should mention such dependencies too. Tooltips would also help in this regard - if you click on a building in a potential research category, you can hover over "refined metals" and realise, oh, I can't build that yet.

No Current Research Warnings

When managing bases early on, it's quite common to have to pause or stop research altogether in order to concentrate on surivival or expansion. But those No Current Research warnings continually pop up, and it gets quite irritating. Maybe do it once or twice per instance, and then cease them. Rely on icons over the research stations to keep players alerted that their research is stalled out instead.

 

New Dupes

Start Of Game

At the start, your dupe choices are critically important to your short and mid-term survival. For new players though, they don't know what stats they'll need at first. It's all too easy to choose an art lover, for example, or a guy with good stats but -5 athletics. Such choices can cripple players before they even start the game. I would suggest that for the default game mode/new player game/tutorial - that the types of dupes available at the start are limited to those useful in the early game. Maybe some tutorial text pointing out the importance of early stats like digging, athletics, and the need for a researcher early on. This would really help to counteract losing before you even began. For more advanced game difficulties/modes, include the full roster of dupes from the start as normal.

Acquiring New Dupes

As we all know through experience, simply bringing a new dupe into the fold whenever a new one pops up in the fabricator is a recipe for disaster. Yet of course the instinct for new players is to take every dupe available to them immediately. And why wouldn't they? Without the knowledge that resources are so tight, and with a notification that pops up and then stubbornly sits atop your screen reminding you of the fact - you feel actively encouraged to keep adding dupes to your colony. And again, in the early stages its quite likely you will make bad choices without the knowledge of what stats are good. Failing to get a researcher early can be catastrophic.

To curb this, better educate/warn the players about the demands that a new dupe brings. "Be aware, new dupes mean more workpower, but you'll need more oxygen and food to support them. Sometimes, it's better to hold on until you can safely support a new recruit." - an example blurb you could find in the fabricator menu.

Additionally, perhaps scale back the frequency that new dupes appear for players, just for on the default difficulty/new game/tutorial. This gives them time to learn the mechanics of the game whilst slowly adding dupes, rather than just taking them so rapidly and failing without probably realising that overpopulation was the cause.

 

[Kasuha]

49 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Insufficient Oxygen Warnings

I guess it could be demoted to white text level warning (such as unreachable bed). Especially in the early game there's plenty of gas for duplicants to breathe.

And/or maybe the wording could be changed, from 'insufficient oxygen generation' to 'watch your oxygen'.

There's no really good and reliable way to remind the player that he indeed has insufficient oxygen generation. There's pre-existing oxygen and polluted oxygen, polluted oxygen is created from polluted water and there's no real issue letting duplicants breathe them out. They can even spend extended time in areas with low oxygen concentration or even holding their breath and the generation could still be fine.

56 minutes ago, Jigsawn said:

Currently as far as I know, there is no way to visualise gas pressure in the game aside from clicking on squares on the map and looking at incomprehensible sciencey numbers

You can see oxygen pressure within certain limits in the oxygen overlay. It's the most important gas a lot of the time but it would definitely be nice if it could be extended to other gases. Perhaps the overlay could let the player choose which gas does he want visualised in the overlay. Pure pressure without being restricted to certain gas would not be as useful.

 

[Jigsawn]

Yes agreed that maybe the oxy alerts could be lowered in "severity" if not frequency. It's a tough one to quantify for the devs, because there are so many variables into what constitutes "dangerous" oxygen levels. Maybe at the end of each day would be an appropriate time for it to warn you if oxygen production is below par (an exclamation mark next to the daily report, perhaps?).

I hadn't considered that different gases will have different pressure distribution around the map. That makes it trickier, but as oxygen is the most important it should definitely be the default. Just have an overlay with a tickbox info window listing the different gases, simply tick the gas you want to see the pressure of, with oxygen displaying by default.

New Request - Wires Overlay Should Show Broken Wires

Currently if a wire is broken and awaiting repair, it doesn't show in the wires overlay. Recommend having it appear with the broken icon and red for the broken wire tile. EDIT: Correction - it does show this but only sometimes - maybe once the wire has broken completely? It would be better to see all damaged wires via the overlay regardless of how badly damaged they are.

New Request - Dead Dupes

When dupes die from disease, if you click on the body, it doesn't tell you what disease killed it. This would be useful to know. If you click on them and they have starved to death, it says Dead from Starvation. Can we get the same for diseases?