Overall game flow after Rancher II

[WanderingKid]

So, I have a particular perspective on the game and its timing.  For a number of reasons, I'm testing 100 cycle game play at normal speed.   This is basically ~ 18 hours of game play from start to 'reasonable base', if you include some decent lengths of pause time.  Double that if you're really spending your time sitting on all the different parts and pieces and getting everything nailed down.

So, what can you do in 100 cycles?  I'm glad you asked.  ... well, at least I hoped you did.  This is of course opinion based and ymmv.  Some people are *very very* good at this game, others are newbies who are still staring at 1.2 kW aquatuner and wondering why you'd ever use it.  There are also different play styles.  I should mention my 100 day runs pretty much do everything possible to *avoid* local geysers, volcanos, and other events.  I consider those to be options for mid/late game once you've gotten your self-subsistence down.

I've found that the main parts of the game you can get nailed down in a solid fashion as follows:

• Mushroom farming as a main source of food.
  • It takes 20-30 days to get a farmer over the 'hump' of getting to be able to even start ranching.  You can convert to ranching for hatches/bugs around that point if you've intested a lot of time and building infrastructure to begin doing omelette frying, but in general I'd say it's realistically a cycle 75 change.  Ranchers can be hard to get in the RNG and they'd still need to get through the farming path.  It's mostly an upgrade for later path you can take if you want to drop Mushrooms.
  • Until ranched, tamed, and fed Phosphorite, you're not going to be able to keep your dupes in bug eggs.  You can't even do anything except stare at the bug for over 20 cycles, and that's if you go off schedule on your dupe jobs from the standard miner/builder/researcher.  You don't even know if you'll GET a farmer or a rancher.
  • Eventually, you can get *1* chef going full bore on keeping you in fried mushrooms.  Usually start them up around day 30-40, depending on where things have gotten to.  The occasional massage chair until then will keep your dupes from losing it completely.
• On the subject of farming, throw out your fertilizer.  You won't need it.  It takes too long to do for anything but your most special farms, and it's not worth fighting the CO2 for your mushrooms for a population boom.  You'd be better off with another miner finding more spores than a farmer able to halve growing time.
• Main Water usage can drop to about half before you're usually in a good enough position to start refilling your main water with sieves at around cycle 50-60
  • This assumes you don't use any of the water wasters:  Berries, showers, etc.
• O2 production can switch to Electrolizers reasonably fast, helping to support early power production from the coal systems.  This does require getting into cooling systems earlier however.  After which you can use algae to support outposts or feed your suits directly.
  • It takes your dupes around a week of time to really setup a strong Electrolizer setup, if you include the cooling shell (actually cooling it is another project).
  • Getting to Electorlizers early however also gives you access to easily piped and used Hydrogen for other side projects.
• Cooling systems typically expand.   There are a number of approaches to cooling, but in this I've tried for the least time intensive methods. 
  • It starts with protecting the inner heat core with hydrogen on the battery chamber for the main power area, and then a few wheezeworts.  3 is enough to keep 3 coal and 3 hydrogen generators cooled down.
  • After your Electrolizers start going full steam, you have a few options.  I've taken to using a power intensive but lower dupe time solution of cooling down the main water tank, and using the main water tank to fill in heat sinks near the Electrolizers.  I know there are a number of options to cooling Electrolizers, but I've purposely attempted to avoid water locking the Hydrolizers for gas separation and using wheezeworts as O2 pumps.  This limits your number of approaches.
• You can *start* to get plastics.  With a small ranch of dreckos, a pile of mealwood trees, and 40+ cycles of grooming, you can *start* to get plastic.  Maybe.  If you get the right egg and then wait 20 more cycles.  You'll have some plastic around cycle 80-85.  Not much, mind you.  You'll have also pretty much invested an entire dupe just to keep the dreckos happy enough to get there.
• You can lay down a secondary power system.  Either PH2O/Fertilizer/NGG setup, or the strong beginning of an Oil Setup. 
  • I usually have to leave a dupe down in the power system tuning your generators until I'm able to switch over.  Without it the coal resources just burn up too quickly.  I've tried a few times using more generators and less dupe requirement, and it was too resource expensive.
  • Oil can take a LOT of time to drill with the way ladders behave now, and have almost abandoned the idea of trying to get to it in my 100 cycle limitation.
  • I've found the choice based on how quickly I have to get off coal.  I've had a few maps where there just wasn't enough coal in the ealy/mid game to support Coal/Hydrogen alone, and had to switch faster than I prefer.  I've also had a few test runs where I can drive for oil at a leisurely pace.  It's very map dependent.
• Some control of your CO2 issues.  CO2 is a major issue if you don't have ways to control the load.  It's a borrow now/pay later problem.  My games typically start relying on a 3 coal generator system by cycle 20-25.  However, NGG has a similar concern if you go for early Gas systems, that CO2 really builds up quick.
  • Option 1 is the easy method.  Burn your water and clean up the mess.  This is the newbie solution and is a viable one, but it's expensive long term.  You have to switch to sieving earlier, and invest in the infrastructure (Skimmers) or dupe time (Terrariums) to get there.  You also lose a lot of material you'll want for slicksters one day.
  • Option 2 is the one borrow/pay plan, which I typically use.  Just keep digging.  Dump the CO2 in the bottom right corner of the base and do what you can to overpressure your mushroom farms with it.  This you eventually have to pay for with...
  • Option 3 is getting strong control over your CO2 volumes.  This has a few different methods. 
    • You can use high pressure vents if you've managed to get your hands on plastic.  Not usually a reasonable choice before cycle 75/80. 
    • You can liquify/solidify CO2 in a hydrogen radiator.  This requires a ton of dupe time to dig, build, and then wait.  It is, however, a strong long term control technique... if you know it.  Bubblers, LOX systems... they all run on the same general set of principals.  They require a rather serious time investment now, particularly in drilling out enough Abyssalite.
    • You can drill out HUGE swaths of land and just dump it off for a rainy day.  This can be semi-useful for a storage area, and is basically how you dealt with the CO2 the first time.  This runs into other problems, though.  You have to be able to empty the gas that you want to replace, which means you need Chlorine/Hydrogen management, or solutions for PH2O offgassing, because the PO2 *will* eventually overpressurize.
  • All of this means you're a lot more likely to be fighting CO2 gas management instead of O2 management.  Every time (until you have exosuits built, gassed, and stationed) your dupes need to work in a CO2 area, it stalls down work because they have to keep running out for air.  Even when you HAVE Exosuits, without the particular job assigned/mastered they go half speed. 
• You can get a small med bay and a small research room, including enough art work to keep everyone from going bananas.
  • Even a lousy artist can start carving good statues until they're allowed to start painting.  By swapping your artist on and off the job lists, you can have them swing by, do some stuff, then head back to work in a cycle or two when they're done.  With this and keeping people on strong O2 support, you can cure most of your stress if you keep food in the fried mushroom levels.
  • Every now and then I miss a door control into a PO2 area, or get there too late, and I get a slimelung infection.  This can be overcomplicated by the first time rotting food is available as an option in the storage menu.  A small med bay keeps things from going ballistic.
• You can get refined metals, but you're most likely not going to be using refinery.  The granulator is going to be doing some heavy lifting.  You have to decide where you can take the power hits.  The heat from the refinery can actually be helpful to purify your water dump, but 1.2kW for 100 kg of refined vs 120W for 50 kg of refined makes for a near no brainer here. 
  • I haven't found a way to get that level of strong power up AND control the CO2 load... yet.  Because of that I consider my one aquatuner the only 'end game' high power component.  Oil doesn't count, it powers itself.  The difficult part of the Oil setup is knowing what you're doing and the amount of time/material it takes to build it and your exosuit populations.
• Mess tables are pointless.  Well, mostly pointless.  150% stress change based on food value... -5% for being in the mess hall.  Um... yeah, no?
• Mechatronics are possible around cycle 60 or so if you used your operator heavily for metal refining, usually, so you can get some eventual components out of that as well if you switch back and forth between Mecatronics and Electrical engineer.
• Everyone becomes a gofer eventually.  Once your dupe has a main job... they get gofer training.  +400 kg is no joke, +1200 kg is too powerful.  Whatever you used to do... you're a gofer now once you've advanced. Two reasons:
  • They aren't worth the food/décor costs once they've 100% a job.
  • Almost everyone eventually ends up in an exosuit if you'd like to get stuff done this year.  The cook and the rancher(s) are about the only one who doesn't end up like this, but there's always odd hauling jobs they do in the meanwhile.

So, why did I go through all that?  Because it took too long, and I wonder what if this is truly the goal of the game.

The early and mid game components that will keep or quit new players need to be reviewed.  In roughly 20 hours of game play, knowing (kind of... ;)) what I'm doing, I can barely get enough power up to run an aquatuner AND a metal refinery.  Creature morphing is a long term goal, so you're playing with the basic ones... and ranchers are overly hard to be able to skill up anyway. 

If you use too much early water, you will kill yourself before you can recover from the choice.  That leaves out your 'good' early crop, bristle berry, almost completely.  You could plant that with diamonds for all the good it would do you until you were at that point.  A lot of your early power will be sent to moving that water around to a sustainable place, or you end up just working off whatever local lake you have.  Not pushing that water into a tower however leaves you hogtied trying to setup the rest of your base trying to avoid cave ins, sand slides, drowning hatches and bugs, and other concerns, so it's pretty much a 'go get it done' kind of thing.

Food is still really at Coal Generator + Mushrooms.  Ranching hasn't really changed that for me during a reasonable time frame in the game.  Sure, I can occasionally get a few drecko eggs while I wait for a glossy or two to appear, but the dupe time price costs for ranching is equivalent to the price cost for fertilization... not worth it except for the rare concern, and that's late game.  Other choices, other than protecting the wild sleet wheat, aren't worth the effort.  They're DEFINATELY not worth the water, as until you've hit a slush geyser or something else you can manipulate, you're going to be starving for electrolizer and latrine water when the PH2O in the swamp biomes run out and you're staring at frozen Polluted water wishing you could get that a lot hotter faster.  Yes, Petro Slickster + NGG/Petro generators will help mitigate it, but they're WAY the heck down the road.

O2/CO2 controls are still all or nothing.  Long term O2 requires either insane exploration for enough algae or heavy investment in cooling systems for electrolizers.  Long term CO2 controls require either massive digs as a dumping ground, water use, or another... heavy investment in a cooling system.  Both of these are primary early/mid game components but the tools and options we have to adjust them are in very strange places in the research trees.  You're practically forced to open up Temperature Modulation (Insulated Tiles) and HVAC (Tmperature gauge and thermos regulator) to be able to get this under control.  So, to get your cooling system up, you've... completely cleaned out an entire tree branch?  Cleaning up the water problem long term requires sieves (end of tree).  Also a pretty significant heat spike until you're used to the set temperature of the outputs of sieves... which aren't listed... anywhere...

And all of these components and pieces don't even involve yourself in geysers, volcanos, and other components... like the storyline we're supposed to be invested in eventually learning.  The end game has a REALLY long play time, and requires some pretty heavy time and knowledge investments to get there.  Is the early game *supposed* to have this high a curve?  No single system is the problem, it's the complexity and time investment to control all the moving parts that concerns me.

To take an example from a different game that I enjoy that's from you guys, Don't Starve, in a single winter and a single summer you can pretty much have full control of your future destiny and invade the ruins with pride and joy... if you've learned and understand the systems.  I don't feel like that balance exists here yet.  I don't feel that it's hit that "And.... BREATHE!" moment.  You're constantly uphill for a huge time component of the game.  Demanding, absolutely.  Fun?  For me, yes.  Don't think I don't like the challenge.  I wonder if the pacing of the systems and game play expectation is as well considered as it could be though.

[Oozinator]

You got a +1 from me, for the amount of work, you took into this wall of text!

[Mjello]

Brilliant work. I don't agree with everything. For instance I run the heavy duty metal refinery just fine by excluding all use of gas pumps for oxygen transport. That leaves me with just two coal and a natural gas generator. The electrolyzers more than power themselves with hydrogen. And the coal generators only kick in when I use aquatuner for cooling and refinery for metals.

Finicky to get the electrolyzers placed right though. Some areas of my base is in the below 500 pressure range.

Currently working on a passive radiator in a cold biome but the nullifiers are too far away and its irritating to move the radiator all the time. And then I ran in to the pipe cooling breaking bug. And paused playing for now.

CO2 is just solved with sieve and sand for me. Am trying out liquid co2 though. But pipe bug keeps me from doing it right now.

Big thumbs up to the devs for all the new pipe and gas sensors. Very fun to play with

Worst issue with the game. I love and hate this game. It steals your time. Way too much time for me to actually allow myself to keep playing.
But it would not be so much fun if it did not take so much time. It is just because there is so much to do

 

[WanderingKid]

5 hours ago, Oozinator said:

You got a +1 from me, for the amount of work, you took into this wall of text!

Hey, I used punctuation and everything!  ... Okay, yeah, it's still a wall.

4 hours ago, Mjello said:

Brilliant work. I don't agree with everything.  <snip>

I'm reasonably sure everyone will disagree with something here.  There's a lot of it and there are different approaches to a lot of parts.  For instance, I use definitely use a gas transportation system from a bank of electrolizers to make it easier to fill exosuits and to centralize the power components.  You use the 'drift' method?  I don't know if that's a name. XD

CO2 via sieve and skimmer is definitely *a* solution.  It destroys all that CO2 you might want later, but it certainly fixes the problem for now.

I agree, all the fun parts of the game are definitely time eaters, but that's my concern.  Is it eating time in the right places?  How long should it be eating your time once to get to a reasonable level of sustainability so you can play with the *other* stuff that's out there?

[Mjello]

1 hour ago, WanderingKid said:

Hey, I used punctuation and everything!  ... Okay, yeah, it's still a wall.

You use the 'drift' method? 

Floating to the left and up you mean :-)... naah. I capture the hydrogen of each electrolyzer and pump it with the gas detector as a switch. The oxygen flows out of the bottom.

It is very efficient. And don't leave a mess of hydrogen everywhere. But placing new electrolyzers every so often is needed. And I use a 7 tile tall structure to avoid all unwanted oxygen in the hydrogen intake.

1 hour ago, WanderingKid said:

I'm reasonably sure everyone will disagree with something here.

Yeah ... oki ... good point.... No further comment (:

[WanderingKid]

6 minutes ago, Mjello said:

Yeah ... oki ... good point.... No further comment (:

By all means, comment away!  I'm certainly not going to argue about a discussion on the premise of my concern.  I might disagree, but hey, that's why we're here.

[eloy2030]

Hey, good thoughts... But, I don't know if u played factorio, im gonna assume you did. It reminds me of what u r talking here about "breath". In factorio, too, is a matter of how fast u want, or can, play the game. I like to take things slowly, im on cycle ~220? and just now im setting up a decent ngg setup. I had them, before, but just the two. But, anyway, for me is "breath" from cycle 10-20. I've discovered there's absolutely no rush in this game. Except, maybe from time to time, heat. 

All in all I agree with most of what o say here, but u have to have in mind that still EA and I, personally, think that it is shaping just fine. A lot of content is added every update and it is only natural that all those components take time to balance and interconnect with each other.

[clickrush]

I don't agree with everything you wrote there. In my first ranching 2 base I fed my dupes berry sludge exclusively which is about 1-2 berries and 5 wheat per dupe. I never even touched mushrooms. I also used showers very early on, because I tend to rank up my dupes fast. And I actually like the initial boost of polluted water for a fast reed production.

I think a lot of players completely neglect the fact that there is *tons and tons* of water on the map in form of ice and polluted water. Polluted water puddles are insanely powerful for generating fresh water and natural gas *en masse*.

However those are details and don't address the core of your post. I think you make a good point here, because it is so accurate. ONI is a slow paced, very complex game. But it has become one of my favorites exactly because of that. I still remember how challenging my first trial and error runs were. Those runs were what actually got me hooked into the game.

For me ONI strikes an almost perfect balance of external pressure and lighthearted fun gameplay. The new geysers in ranching and the food rebalance in occupational were exactly what the game needed to have a more continuous feeling of progression. I hope Klei continues on this path.

[Oozinator]

21 minutes ago, clickrush said:

For me ONI strikes an almost perfect balance of external pressure and lighthearted fun gameplay. The new geysers in ranching and the food rebalance in occupational were exactly what the game needed to have a more continuous feeling of progression. I hope Klei continues on this path.

-1

[clickrush]

5 minutes ago, Oozinator said:

-1

Yeah we all know that you want the game to be much more challenging and complex. But the recent upgrades actually go in that direction w/o making it too stressful. When I want my heart rate go up I don't play ONI, I play a competitive title like Overwatch/SC2/Battlerite/CS:GO or a twitch reaction game like Hyper Light Drifter/Super Meat Boy/Furi.

[WanderingKid]

9 hours ago, eloy2030 said:

Hey, good thoughts... But, I don't know if u played factorio, im gonna assume ...

I admit I haven't played it in a while, but I have thoroughly enjoyed that game.  In particular I enjoyed the rail systems.

8 hours ago, clickrush said:

I don't agree with everything you wrote there.

...I think a lot of players completely neglect the fact that there is *tons and tons* of water on the map in form of ice and polluted water. ...

ONI is a slow paced, very complex game. But it has become one of my favorites exactly because of that. I still remember how challenging my first trial and error runs were. Those runs were what actually got me hooked into the game.

Sorry to cherry pick, but it makes it easier to read.  I don't disagree with your comment on water, but I don't feel there's as much as you're implying.  A quick poke around my local ice biome roughly averages 550kg/tile, which will end up halved when mined, so around 225 - 250 kg.  That about four squares of ice/polluted ice = 1 square or water (1 ton).  There's a lot more 'free' PH2O up in the swamp biomes there for the taking, and it doesn't require any major time sinks to get it to convert to liquid form.  A few miners and gravity does the work.

I think that's part of my concern, is just HOW slow it is.  I've taken to tackling projects in 7 - 10 cycle chunks.  There's only so many of those you can fit in an hour of game play (6 cycles) before you start to wonder if you're ever going to get *done* with a sustained baseline.  I guess part of it comes down to the question of "what is the expected time/game?".

[Fenixix]

I tested in sandbox, if you mine ice\polluted ice you get half as usual but if you melt it you get full mass. Don't know about co2, i don't have problems with that. i Just made a tank 14x4 with 2 gas pumps and high pressure gas vent. You have to ignore co2 for some time before you will be able to build a tank like that but it's pretty easy just dig a pocket for co2 as a short term solution. It will pay off later i think(didn't get to that moment yet) because of slicksters. Also if i remember correctly i had all technologies at cycle 41 so it's not even that long. The tank like that will be able to contain 1120 KG of co2. There are even more advanced storing strategies like cooling it down (read comment above).

[Ambaire]

On 5/17/2018 at 7:34 PM, WanderingKid said:

Oil can take a LOT of time to drill with the way ladders behave now

As opposed to what/when? Were dupes once smarter about how they dug out and built ladders?

[WanderingKid]

29 minutes ago, Ambaire said:

As opposed to what/when? Were dupes once smarter about how they dug out and built ladders?

Miner has to come by to drill any hard rock (granite, obsidian, abyssalite).., which means you end up having to send a builder down there to supply the ladder dig, then wait for a miner to come down, who then leaves and you wait for the builder to come down.  Each ladder tends to require an entire cycle of the process, because once the miner comes down, the process starts all over just one ladder down.  So, instead of one dupe coming down, dropping off the stuff, digging the hole eventually, then building the ladder, it has 3 different entire components to a single ladder.

So, yeah, they used to be smarter.  If you set your miner to build priority 2 and digging priority 2 they current end up building everything they can until they get around to digging the one hole you really need.

[Ambaire]

9 hours ago, WanderingKid said:

Miner has to come by to drill any hard rock (granite, obsidian, abyssalite).., which means you end up having to send a builder down there to supply the ladder dig, then wait for a miner to come down, who then leaves and you wait for the builder to come down.  Each ladder tends to require an entire cycle of the process, because once the miner comes down, the process starts all over just one ladder down.  So, instead of one dupe coming down, dropping off the stuff, digging the hole eventually, then building the ladder, it has 3 different entire components to a single ladder.

So, yeah, they used to be smarter.  If you set your miner to build priority 2 and digging priority 2 they current end up building everything they can until they get around to digging the one hole you really need.

I did discover a workaround for this, after seeing someone use it in a screenshot on here. If you dig alternating columns of 3, the dupe can stairstep down with no pausing. Then you can come back and build the ladder in one pass with no messing around.

[vovik]

53 minutes ago, Ambaire said:

I did discover a workaround for this, after seeing someone use it in a screenshot on here. If you dig alternating columns of 3, the dupe can stairstep down with no pausing. Then you can come back and build the ladder in one pass with no messing around.

Did this all the time.

On 18.05.2018 at 3:34 AM, WanderingKid said:

O2/CO2 controls are still all or nothing.  Long term O2 requires either insane exploration for enough algae or heavy investment in cooling systems for electrolizers.  Long term CO2 controls require either massive digs as a dumping ground, water use, or another... heavy investment in a cooling system.  Both of these are primary early/mid game components but the tools and options we have to adjust them are in very strange places in the research trees.  You're practically forced to open up Temperature Modulation (Insulated Tiles) and HVAC (Tmperature gauge and thermos regulator) to be able to get this under control.  So, to get your cooling system up, you've... completely cleaned out an entire tree branch?  Cleaning up the water problem long term requires sieves (end of tree).  Also a pretty significant heat spike until you're used to the set temperature of the outputs of sieves... which aren't listed... anywhere...

Just goddamm allowing dupes to EXXHALE oxygen after they breathe in to addition of co2 is a goddamm solution for oxygen problems, also this will allow to give bigger germ outbreaks + allow for rebalancing temperature, power requirement and other stuff of oxygen generation + being realistic atleast.

- right now dupes delete ~60 Kw of heat every cycle with 60 kg of oxygen, meaning dupes are black holes for oxygen, giving very little amount of material in return -about 2,5 kgs of polluted water/none polluted dirt and 1,2 kgs of co2 in return... whaa? 10 dense dupes/oxygen blackholes of 10 :/

[Ambaire]

6 hours ago, vovik said:

Just goddamm allowing dupes to EXXHALE oxygen after they breathe in to addition of co2 is a goddamm solution for oxygen problems, also this will allow to give bigger germ outbreaks + allow for rebalancing temperature, power requirement and other stuff of oxygen generation + being realistic atleast.

- right now dupes delete ~60 Kw of heat every cycle with 60 kg of oxygen, meaning dupes are black holes for oxygen, giving very little amount of material in return -about 2,5 kgs of polluted water/none polluted dirt and 1,2 kgs of co2 in return... whaa? 10 dense dupes/oxygen blackholes of 10 :/

Yeah. Based on a quick google, humans inhale 20% oxygen and exhale 15% oxygen and 5% carbon dioxide... if a dupe inhales 1kg of oxygen, they should exhale 1kg+ of carbon dioxide. We'd need a better way to deal with the co2, and I could see reworking the quantity of oxygen consumed since 100g is a LOT.

Based on another google, it seems the average adult human consumes 19 cubic feet of oxygen per day, or roughly 770 grams. Dupes in ONI consume 100g of oxygen a SECOND.

Yeah, this needs reworking.