Change to Meteor showers

[Sarythian]

Hi there,

first time around for me, but I registered because I recently ran into issues that I thought justify some feedback and also some suggestions for change.

The "doomsday clock" aka Meteor showers, have been quite a topic around here. Finally yesterday I reached the surface of my current asteroid only to find it devastated by the obviously abundant meteor showers. Before even having ANY chance to couteract the showers destroyed several biomes, and a fourth one got clobbered while I scrambeld to strike up a pacu farm in the desperate attempt to procure enough steel to protect my colony from inbound doom.

I am not through yet in saving my colony, and it is kind of frustrating to not be able to do anything and just having to watch how the meteors smash deeper and deeper into my colonies space and the debris cooking everything that's left since I currently measure 4,5 KILOtonnes of Regolith at app. 250C melting phosphorous evaporating water, and cooking slime biomes into dirt within the matter of a few cycles. Not to mention the sheer inability of getting rid of such enormous amounts of regolith, with the showers providing more and more of the junk.

I derived from other forum postings that there have been some tweaks already but I seriously doubt they are sufficient. I would have a few suggestions (some might have been made before, my apologies).

- The beginning of showers: Currently I suspect they start once you get somehwere near the surface. Since you don't know how close is too close, you usually end up triggering the doomsday clock without being ready to act on the threat. I would request that the start of the showers is postponed to the moment you breach the surface of the roid. Since there is a dedicated event (and a pop up message) associated with it, it should be possible without major changes.

- Shower composition and frequency: Currently there are WAY to many of the big ones exploding, obliterating a dozen tiles and spewing regolith everywhere. I would request the frequency of the "big ones" be reduced drastically and the penetration depth of the smaller ones be reduced. Seeing a tiny bit of roid going through several layers of igenous rock is just too much for my taste. Also the showers should be a very rare event, and the rest of the time should pass a long with an occasional random hit.

- Debris: Your patch notes for cosmic update say: "Good news Free resources, bad news, they travel 16 klicks a second". Better revise that:

Bad news: "Kilotons of trash headed your way, even worse it's scalding hot and desintegrates your home in less than 200 cycles."

My suggestions here would be: Variance. Iron, Gold, Copper, maybe even a ball of ice every once in a while. The latter could also counteract some of the heat problem In any case the damage done by the meteors needs to be toned down WAY more. No more mega piles of Regolith that pile up in the Kiloton range within a mere "month" of game time. I know the Regolith deposits are probably there to offer some head start protection from orbital bombardment but the midterm consequences are almost as dire as the destruction of entire biomes.

Also you might take a look at alternative and less expensive methods of defending against the meteors. Like simplyfying the procurement of Lime. I hope it is not intended that since cosmic upgrade the long term survival of a colony is solely depended on PACU farms since they are the only source providing enough of the stuff before half of your habitat is either cooked or atomised.

Which brings me to the issue of temperature: Sure the impact of a meteor releases a lot of kinetic energy as heat. So far it is probably realstic to have the remnants of such an impact be hot. But since the heat is invariably trapped within the map and builds up to enormous amounts due to the regolith deposits it is another nail in the coffin of any colony that can't procure 25.6 tons of steel ( the amount to cover the whole width of the map) within short term of the beginning of meteor showers.

My suggestion here: Thermal radiation. In most cases space is a cold place. Due to background radiation it's somewhere in the low 2 digit Kelvin Range. All hot matter radiates heat into it's surroundings even if vacuum is a perfect insulator. So the stuff that is exposed to space should as well radiate it's thermal energy into space (the hotter the faster). If we can loose gases to the space tiles, why not heat? Would also make for more creative heat management methods along the way.

Sorry for the wall of text, thanks for reading, otherwise I really love this game but I don't like doomsday clocks ticking in the back of my head.

 

[ImpalerWrG]

My recommendation would be to fix the core issue, that the bombardment is having an ERODING effect on the surface.

But it's very hard to set a rate/type of bombardment that is neither eroding nor deposing on the surface IF it was a single fixed rate.

So make the nature of meteor bombardment adjust based on the DISTANCE from the maps maximum ceiling.  Strikes close to the ceiling erode material, strikes landing deeper have a net building effect.  This can be done very easily by just computing the mass of material in a strike AFTER it's hit a location and adjusting it appropriate.

The net effect of this is that no matter how long the system runs, or what ever the player might dig out the regolith surface will return to a stable median range.  Thus it is not an issue at all to have the bombardment going on in all the time, and you can even run a few hundred cycles of bombardment in the world gen to create the surface from a blank slate.

[Sasza22]

1 hour ago, ImpalerWrG said:

The net effect of this is that no matter how long the system runs, or what ever the player might dig out the regolith surface will return to a stable median range.  Thus it is not an issue at all to have the bombardment going on in all the time, and you can even run a few hundred cycles of bombardment in the world gen to create the surface from a blank slate.

Maybe make asteroid hits vaporise some debris. Having thousands of tons fo regolith in debris isn`t exactly useful so maybe some of it should get destroyed after direct hits. It will handle the insane debris mass porblem as well as performance.

[ImpalerWrG]

I prefer to think of it as getting blasted away at escape velocity, but yes the effect is the same.  A strike an either add or subtract mass based on the elevation it strikes at higher elevation subtracts, lower adds, it's as simple as that.

[yoakenashi]

@Sarythian, thanks for joining the forums and providing your feedback. You have some good suggestions.

Personally though, I actually enjoy the meteor showers the way they are right now. I like the doomsday clock and the heat (yes, I realize I'm in the minority with that opinion). I wouldn't be upset if Klei changed the meteor shower mechanic, but I would hope they maintain some late-game (environmental) challenge.

[NGMZero]

7 hours ago, yoakenashi said:

@Sarythian, thanks for joining the forums and providing your feedback. You have some good suggestions.

Personally though, I actually enjoy the meteor showers the way they are right now. I like the doomsday clock and the heat (yes, I realize I'm in the minority with that opinion). I wouldn't be upset if Klei changed the meteor shower mechanic, but I would hope they maintain some late-game (environmental) challenge.

+1

I enjoy the doom day clock, and the fact there is something I am worry from since this game don't have many outsid threats once you stabilize the heat. I also agree that regolith is more annoying than useful currently and that need to be fixed.

[Evis03]

I'd also prefer the doomclock to go away. Once the upper layer of abyssalite is gone, the heat alone starts to cause serious problems. I'm with @ImpalerWrG, An upper layer that could resist meteor strikes would be helpful. Once you break through it though, you'd better have some way to protect the guts of your colony!