Going back to a old feedback format I used to do awhile back, going to write initial impressions and add to them as and when things crop up as playing so the post will get expanded over time. To start things off, some things that jumped out immediately right from the start. ------- 1) The new UI - To put it simply, it strikes me as cleaner for the sake of being cleaner but at the expense of being significantly less user friendly as there's very little "At a glance" information access any more where before the amount of information was just about right. The most notable two culprits: Culprit A) The event log covers only the single most recent thing and if you want to see anything else it's a player action to first expand the log, see the events then close it again before resuming play because of the sheer amount of central screenspace the expanded log takes up means keeping it expanded simply isn't practical.... this isn't to suggest "Make it expand less" is what is being put forward. Instead the collapsed event log needs to display more than just a single entry.. otherwise you might as well replace it with a ticker system that just cycles through the last 'n' events and remove the log from the central UI completely and make it a isolated menu window. Culprit B) Checking workcrew best skill now requires going through each and every crew and expanding them all individually to expose that information. By default, the workcrew window now tells you pretty much nothing at a glance except name and scheduling. The new UI layout in 48B is some steps backwards from how it was before in terms of information access and reducing the amount of slogging about the player has to do with the interface... instead in places it feels a lot more clunky. It's not quite in the same inaccessible state as examples like Maia where for those that aren't familiar with that game there has for a long time been NO information at a glance intentionally due to a preference quirk of the developer who wanted to make a point of not including information upfront (but since started adding some means into the game in the form of buildable room monitors) and instead you have to figure things out through lots of subtle buried cues that often only hold meaning if the developer is there to point out what he wanted them to suggest. But the reason I bring up Maia specifically is because a lot of the less-buried information you do get in that game is handled through colonist E-mail reports that each have to be clicked, read and then dismissed one after the other and some give you information whilst some are just junk mails but with no way of knowing until you click and read them, and I couldn't help get that 'Maia feeling' of superfluous clicking with the event log and workcrew window in 48B. -------- 2) Farming - Not far enough into a colony to form a impression of how the new farming mechanic works within the scope of the economy yet, however right off the bat I was put off by enforced sizes for fields as my initial location was full of un-usable terrain. Where before I could adapt my field sizes to work around crap early colony terrain generation, the enforced sizes are meaning if I want to place any fields early on I have to double or even triple the amount of terrain flattening I have to do in some early colony scenarios as I'm not only flattening lots of terrain for workshops now, but also now needing enough surface area for both workshops and static enforced large chunks of farm land. It's not exactly 'game breaking', but it does mean that the randomness of embark location terrain has some additional importance now due to less of player adaptability and wanting to layout farms early on can mean having to spread your initial workcrew very thin to handle multiple cases of terrain flattening in different locations. ---------
I'm not a fan of fixed field sizes although the current system works pretty well so I can live with them. The UI looks better over all but like Tikigod says its not as intuitive. I think that the new materiel cost for cots (2 planks) should stay. Setting up the infrastructure required for bed manufacture was always a huge bottleneck. The current build allows you to make crappy beds pretty easily while allowing you to manage your colony much better in the early game. By the time that you will need middle/upper class beds you should be a better position to actually make them.
I agree with almost all points, but I want to single this out as the biggest issue for me. Didn't realize how much I looked at the the event log until I had to open and close it all the time, and leaving it open in the top-middle of the screen is terribly obtrusive.
I have to agree with the general sentiment re: the event log - it's nice that it's collapsible, but it's not really useful if it only shows only the most recent single line.
