New geysers are awful

[Rotintin]

@turbonl64 some of the most fun I've had is creating a way to automate morb farming. It pushed me to think in new ways.

 

I agree the disparity between geysers needs tweaking,  but if the median were to fall below previous outputs I'd be more than ok with it. 

Also, critter output should 100% be reverted or put back close to where it was. Having 100's of pufts is ridiculous, not to mention the surplus of eggs you'd get. 

[Guest]

5 minutes ago, Saturnus said:

By a factor of 100. So multiply the number of critters needed by 100!

Oh that draws an effective end through that. Even if somebody was crazy enough to try that, I imagine that'll make the game unplayable.

@Rotintin Yeah I can agree with a lower amount of geyser water than before too. Or better combinations of geysers where you end up with a fixed amount of water altogether throughout the seeds. I would be happy to tackle the issue of food poisoned water for instance.

[Rotintin]

@turbonl64 I don't mind the idea of a fixed total output, and varying the "challenge" of utilizing the water.

Wether it's germed, polluted, hot, ice, or polluted ice- by varying the source / amount created, it would challenge players to create systems that would utilize the different water sources / amounts in non modular, and potentially unique ways. Although a great deal of dialing this in would be through automation, it would still present new problems for the player to solve on every seed. Also, there wouldn't be seeds with inherent disadvantages when it comes to quantity of renewable water. Only varying degrees of difficulty in refining it. 

I'm not sure how these principles could apply to nat gas though. Normalizing that and creating unique challenges would be difficult. Offesetting it with more polluted water or oil could potentially work.

[trukogre]

5 hours ago, turbonl64 said:

 

And yes, you can say "but you don't need plants with the new update". Sure, but then it's not creative anymore. Then it's replacing plants with eggs. And guess what the developers will nerve the next time round? I'll give you 3 tries, but you'll probably guess it with one.

 

Food has never been creative in this game.  First sleet wheat was the best choice, then meal worms, then berry sludge, now omelettes.  I agree, a system that rewarded creativity would be great, but pretending that we've had creativity isn't the answer to obtaining a creative system in the future.  The reality is, the food system in the game is not creative anymore, but it never was, so we haven't lost anything.  The developers weren't able to come up with a system that rewarded creativity in the old water/power surplus environment, so now with the geysers nerfed a bit, perhaps they will be able to.  At least they're trying something new.  I think we should be in favor of them at least trying, sticking with the old system where we had a huge surplus of water and power from overpowered geysers and trying to reward creativity under those conditions despite failing at it in repeated attempts seems like it would have been giving up, to me.

[Oozinator]

6 hours ago, trukogre said:

..The reality is, the food system in the game is not creative anymore, but it never was..

Wrong, when you ask me sorry!
Do you remember the time, when you had to grow perfect crops to get seeds and it was no way easy?
Game did not force the player to do it, or follow a specific way.
Sure metas existed, but more optional stuff was around.
ONI feels more and more like a game, where lore gets more important, then gameplay.
Many roleplayer likes such stuff and build a big fanbase from DS.
When they get what they want, oni will shapeshift for sure.
I am not complaining about that, i see myself always as minority and i follow the majority stream, even when it makes me sad sometimes.
 

[trukogre]

1 hour ago, Oozinator said:

Wrong, when you ask me sorry!
Do you remember the time, when you had to grow perfect crops to get seeds and it was no way easy?
Game did not force the player to do it, or follow a specific way.
Sure metas existed, but more optional stuff was around.
ONI feels more and more like a game, where lore gets more important, then gameplay.
Many roleplayer likes such stuff and build a big fanbase from DS.
When they get what they want, oni will shapeshift for sure.
I am not complaining about that, i see myself always as minority and i follow the majority stream, even when it makes me sad sometimes.
 

yes, I remember that, and the meta was to just grow sleet wheat. there was optional stuff then, and there's optional stuff now.  Your basic point seems to be that the old optional content of "trying to get perfect growing conditions" allowed for more creativity than the new food systems less meta options.  I have a few reactions. 

A. I kinda agree with you, the system with the perfect growing conditions thing was fun and I miss it.  You're kinda moving the goalposts here, but your new spot is probably where they should have been all along, so we'll pretend not to notice.

B. I think we need to give ourselves time to see if the new geyser system adds creativity to the game, once we adapt to it.

C. So far I can't grow eggs or use the new ranching mechanic at all since it crashes my game so much, so I can't judge that system yet either.

Conclusion: it seems like everyone misses the old 'perfect growing conditions' system.  I think Klei removed it because it was too hard for new players, and the real problem with the old system was that you had to hit perfect growing conditions at least a good portion of the time or you'd just fail at farming eventually--and most people just grew sleet wheat  while ignoring the perfect conditions system most of the time, so can we really blame them for changing the system?  We brought this on ourselves, sad to say.

What if they added back in a real narrow band of 'perfect growing conditions', but made the bonuses for achieving it smaller so that failing to achieve them hurt your efficiency but wasn't quite so necessary to mostly hit them? E.g. if you can hold bristle blossoms in a very narrow range of temperature in the middle of their current larger spread checked at the end of each growth state to minimize computational load, you get a relatively minor boost at the end, maybe a slightly faster maturation, or a 20% calorie/size boost at the end, something around that level, not the huge bonus you got before that ended up feeling mostly mandatory, but still something to add that fun back in.  Is that a sensible compromise?

[PhailRaptor]

1 minute ago, trukogre said:

Conclusion: it seems like everyone misses the old 'perfect growing conditions' system.  I think Klei removed it because it was too hard for new players, and the real problem with the old system was that you had to hit perfect growing conditions at least a good portion of the time or you'd just fail at farming eventually

This follows what seems to be the general Klei pattern with regards to game development.  Fantastic concept, but with atrocious number balance.  With regards to the Agriculture Upgrade food system specifically, the system was salvagable and should have been explored further.

[trukogre]

3 minutes ago, PhailRaptor said:

This follows what seems to be the general Klei pattern with regards to game development.  Fantastic concept, but with atrocious number balance.  With regards to the Agriculture Upgrade food system specifically, the system was salvagable and should have been explored further.

I agree.  Also, I edited the exact sentence you quoted to add in that we, the playerbase also contributed to the problem by growing so much sleet wheat to evade the perfect condition system, and I think maybe Klei took from that the idea that we didn't like the system, but that's not true, players just take the easy way out first and then expand to the harder things later as a bonus, in general.  I like a lot of things about the new system, except omelettes seem super OP, and like I alluded to before, I think a good compromise is to add back in some of the narrow bands as an optional bonus to the current system, could be the best of both worlds; interested if you see a potential problem with that.

[PhailRaptor]

5 minutes ago, trukogre said:

 interested if you see a potential problem with that.

Frankly, I don't believe the systems are compatible.  The entire point of the Agriculture Upgrade system was that the plants die after a certain number of harvests, and that in order to get Seeds to sustain or expand your crop yield, you have to be tending to the needs of the plant.  Without that need to replace spent seeds, the purpose of fulfilling multiple needs of the plant is pointless, as long as you get at least 1 Seed back.  The extra effort spent attempting to get the maximum yield from the plant was rendered irrelevant for anything other than Mealwood, which was already not worth the effort to grow.

[Technoincubus]

The very idea to use game crashing or slowdown as a "soft cap" is absurd. But here we are.

[trukogre]

9 hours ago, PhailRaptor said:

  The entire point of the Agriculture Upgrade system was that the plants die after a certain number of harvests, and that in order to get Seeds to sustain or expand your crop yield, you have to be tending to the needs of the plant.  Without that need to replace spent seeds, the purpose of fulfilling multiple needs of the plant is pointless, as long as you get at least 1 Seed back.  

I don't agree that the entire point of the AU system was that.  I don't think Klei would agree with that statement either.  That was the most restrictive system, and therefore the most important thing to consider, but 'the entire point' is pretty broad. However, there's no point in arguing about it.  I'l simply rephrase my statement:" Regardless of what the entire point of the AU farming system was, the part of the AU system that people say they miss the most, in general, is the narrow band of temperature you had to reach for perfect yields.  What about adding that back in as a small bonus to the current system" etc.

[Guest]

So the last update improved the active period; my fumaroles produced previously 935,42kg/cycle  and 213kg/cycle. That jumped up to 1359kg/cycle and 319kg/cycle.

I don't know; it's an improvement for sure, but still well below the 4800kg/cycle in total you'd get from your 2 geysers, especially on my map where the only other renewable source of water will come from an oil fissure. What I'd like to see are more guaranteed sources of water, around 3600kg/cycle.

[goboking]

On 3/13/2018 at 5:12 AM, PhailRaptor said:

This follows what seems to be the general Klei pattern with regards to game development.  Fantastic concept, but with atrocious number balance.  With regards to the Agriculture Upgrade food system specifically, the system was salvagable and should have been explored further.

I was immensely disappointed when the yield system was abandoned.  If they would have kept the yields and just made plants grow perpetually as they do now it would have been perfect.  Players who can't or won't build elaborate systems would still be able to grow food provided they meet the minimum thresholds and players who want to go all out with climate control, fertilizer production, irrigation, etc could still be rewarded for ingenuity.

[BlueLance]

2 hours ago, turbonl64 said:

So the last update improved the active period; my fumaroles produced previously 935,42kg/cycle  and 213kg/cycle. That jumped up to 1359kg/cycle and 319kg/cycle.

I don't know; it's an improvement for sure, but still well below the 4800kg/cycle in total you'd get from your 2 geysers, especially on my map where the only other renewable source of water will come from an oil fissure. What I'd like to see are more guaranteed sources of water, around 3600kg/cycle.

I am not even gonna tell you what mines was before the update, i started a new colony incase i needed to forbthe update, and I now have a steam geyser outside my base which produces just 3360kg per cycle. (Havnt gotten a tenured scientist to it yet to check its dormancy, but considering how they reduced the natural gas geysers to low double digits on my worlds i assume this geyser will probably be active for 70 and inactive for 20 or soemthing. 

[Supraluminal]

35 minutes ago, goboking said:

I was immensely disappointed when the yield system was abandoned.  If they would have kept the yields and just made plants grow perpetually as they do now it would have been perfect.  Players who can't or won't build elaborate systems would still be able to grow food provided they meet the minimum thresholds and players who want to go all out with climate control, fertilizer production, irrigation, etc could still be rewarded for ingenuity.

I started playing sometime after that stuff was all rolled back, and when I watched some older videos of gameplay from that time I was a bit staggered that they didn't do exactly this. All the yield stuff to reward better growing conditions seemed perfect as a semi-optional layer on top of the existing, basic farming mechanic.

[Technoincubus]

i've yet to test new patch but at least devs realized how bad initial decision with long dermancy periods was

[BlueLance]

9 minutes ago, Technoincubus said:

i've yet to test new patch but at least devs realized how bad initial decision with long dermancy periods was

Yeah but now some geysers are literally inactive for like 20 cycles, they might as well never be dormant.

[Exa]

2 minutes ago, BlueLance said:

Yeah but now some geysers are literally inactive for like 20 cycles

20 cycles is enough to force you to find alternative solutions without being ridiculously long

[Technoincubus]

20 cycles is very much tolerable compared to 120

[BlueLance]

1 hour ago, Exa said:

20 cycles is enough to force you to find alternative solutions without being ridiculously long

20 cycles is nothing though, The Hydrogen in my hydrogen tank lasts more than that, then I still have a tank the same size which fills with natural gas, sure the natural gas wont be there as quickly, but that tank in the old one never ran out, it might now, but again that would be long after 20 cycles.

Both would probably last a lot longer now with smart batteries etc stopping them wasting resources and with the new design I have my base will most likely run off of only 4 batteries, so less power wasted through battery discharge. Also less heat. but considering there is Hydrogen, Coal, Petroleum, Natural Gas, Dupe Power and Steam. 20 Cycles is nothing (Although Dupe Power is kinda blergh but in larger colonies it has its perks)

I am not saying they shouldn't reduce them natural gas was higher than needed. and now everything has a higher yield. so they can easily cover their dormancy period. they may as well not have one.

Edit - Just checked it doesnt last the entirety of 20 cycles unless my Electrolyzers are running and pumping gas in at the same time. Still on my old set-up, might change depending on my new one but my colony isnt as far at the moment.

[Exa]

Consider that the need to store gas or liquid because of dormancy is a creative solution you choose because of dormancy, it looks fun to me. other seed with other dormancy could force you to change the storage solution though

[BlueLance]

1 minute ago, Exa said:

Consider that the need to store gas or liquid because of dormancy is a creative solution you choose because of dormancy, it looks fun to me. other seed with other dormancy could force you to change the storage solution though

I will admit it causes some people to think of a storage solution, because you would want to store as much as possible so the geyser doesn't overpressure. 

I also know things will be adjusted again and chances are again in Mk2 because this is a two part update, I just dont want it to be a case where things like power become a no brainer etc. at the moment (Non experimental) natural gas geysers can power so much and I think that is why they reduced it to 1 guarenteed and a 50% chance of a second because of it

[Technoincubus]

Ok I tried it and It got worse. Far worse.

The problem is not that geysers were active 20-50% of the time and now 50-75% of the time, but the insanely unbearably long periods. Every 200 cycles, every 400 cycles, every 150 cycles.

 

[trukogre]

24 minutes ago, Technoincubus said:

Ok I tried it and It got worse. Far worse.

The problem is not that geysers were active 20-50% of the time and now 50-75% of the time, but the insanely unbearably long periods. Every 200 cycles, every 400 cycles, every 150 cycles.

 

I bear them easily, so they're not unbearable.  I seriously don't understand your objections here. ONI is a game that takes a long time.  Why are you complaining about long periods?  If you were playing some twitch based game where everyone died in 5 minutes, and you were complaining about long queues, that I could understand.  But ONI is all about the long game.  What is so bad about a 215 cycle period?

[Guest]

So long the average for each cycle or indeed each second is ok, I'm fine with this too.

For the record, just asking: I am reading myself correctly right? I assume that,in the instance of above example, out of 215.7 cycles there are 152.7 active cycles, and not 215.7 dormant cycles followed by 152.7 actifve cycles?

@trukogre: do give the person some credit. It's fine to point out you can work with it; no need to make him or her feel bad. Don't attack people like that.