The game is too forgiving

[Vincie]

Well... You screw up, your dupe gets submerged with boiling water (that should provide dupe soup), another one falls from a large heigh and... Nothing happens. Many dupes suffocate, but the urge to load a save is too strong, so... Nothing happens but frustration. Chlorine is being combined with hydrogen (that should actually explode) and... Nothing happens. I think that the game should be more lethal... Like covered with bones and skulls lethal. Maybe fry a dupe with an electric spark, when too near to an overloaded cirquit? Or make diseases more lethal? Or, as I suggested earlier, make dupes simply die (or explode like morbs) after being stressed for too long? I don't know. And I have a strong feeling, that the game saving should be more like Don't Starve. And maybe even the number of dupes, that can be printed, should be somewhat limited? Like by requirement of bringing them water, coal, electric energy and phosphorite to synthetise all the dupe's components? And so loosing all the dupes combined with energetic failure would lead to the sad end. And one more thing... Please, make the geysers a finite thing that would eventually explode, when dug out. That would spice up the thing.

[Darkarma]

In other words you want a Hardcore mode, correct?

Would make sense. All saves delete themselves all resources have have higher costs and more is lost when processed. Finite source.

[Coolthulhu]

9 hours ago, Vincie said:

Well... You screw up, your dupe gets submerged with boiling water (that should provide dupe soup)

It shouldn't. Dupes being dumb should not result in extra player frustration. Dupes should not kill themselves as soon as you stop micromanaging them.

9 hours ago, Vincie said:

Maybe fry a dupe with an electric spark, when too near to an overloaded cirquit?

This sounds like a bad idea. It penalizes mistakes and being new to the game rather than bad design and cutting corners. A good player would not be hampered by it, a bad one would get even worse.

 

The proper ways to increase difficulty in a game like ONI would be more like:

• Nerf infinite food options, requiring more and more strict and specific farming setups as the game goes on. Energetically costly fertilizer production (say, extracting sulfur from natural gas), problematic designs involving recycling renewable but costly resources (nitrites). Those would be easy to mine early on, but costly to produce from renewables.
• Buff temporary food options (muckroots), but keep them to early game. Emergency mushing should be costly, using resources that are hard/costly to renew (algae).
• Drop seed storage. It hurts early game (before proper farming is set up) while providing a buffer for late game. Seeds should be infinite and balanced with infinity in mind.
• Nerf automated systems. Natural gas generator requires no supervision (and it shouldn't require any, that would be tedious), so it should produce low power and significant problematic outputs. Coal generator requires dupe supervision and so doesn't need much nerfing. Player supervision (other than setting up) should never be required - that's an inherently bad idea.
• Buff algae, nerf hydrolysis.

Give difficulty to those who earned it, not to noobs who will perish immediately. Punishing but easy is the worst possible combination - tedious but not challenging.

[Kasuha]

I think it's too early to start tightening up the game's difficulty as many things that will be behind difficulty in the final game are not implemented yet. For instance I believe that in final game, research will not be matter of first few cycles, and a player will have to live with "temporary" solutions for a number of cycles before research of better technology is finished. How many intermediate stages there will be and how long each of them will be depends a lot on how many things are there to research.

[BlueLance]

At the moment research only uses dirt/water, I think they will introduce that different research options would require different items forcing players to explore to get the materials needed, for instance one thing might want copper, another gold amalgam.