Am I being naive for enjoying the game as it is?

Unless it is a completely game killing issue (like crashing mines), I don't really get worked up about the flaws in the current builds. I guess I trust Nicholas and crew to fix the bad and create new good in a steady fashion.

Perhaps it is because of games I've played in the past where the communications with the developer was not as good, or the time between updates was mind-numbing.... like Godus....

 

No, you're fine. Don't worry about it. I'm pretty sure most people realize they are playing early access and understand what that entails. Also, pointing out flaws is part of the feedback process.

 

You don't want to be the maniac who makes massive posts. I know this because you (presumably rationally and optimally) decided not to in the past.

I actually really like the game, and I also happen to really like writing a lot about it.


Frankly, there are a lot of things to do/fix of course (even before "Access") but as the changes seem to be meaningful and important, it's a question not of "is this going in a right direction?" (it is) but more of how are things prioritized.

See the feature vs fixes discussion.

 

I'm fine with the flaws myself, will gladly play new colonies over and over again each experimental and just see where things go each time, if something happens that felt off, just throw a post onto the latest build thread about it happening, or do it again and see if the outcome is typically always the same or if it's dependent on colonist reactions or some other factors.

Though I do get somewhat annoyed when it's suggested that the flaws aren't problems with current implementations but rather are 'working features you just need to figure out how to avoid'.


And let us not speak of Godus.

 

Sounds like you want to call out someone about that directly.

 

No, I don't want to be the maniac who does all of the work required before the massive posts can even be written. I save that for the things I get paid to do, rather than the things I do to NOT think about my job.

 

Not really, it applies to anyone equally as it's the stance itself that annoys. You'll find reactions to such thing on the Steam boards and these forums on occasions going back many months.

But it's certainly something that does apply to cases when you do it yes. But that's not to say it's specifically just about you.

Though you only need to look at some of my posts to devs when they're discussing something and mention ideas for existing systems being throw around that if there's any indication that I feel it's a case of treating a design problem as something that's actually working and just needing to figure out how to bury it around everything else to avoid people hitting the design problems, then I also react to that just as much as from anyone else.

 

About getting owned by bandits vs 1 mission, see the following regarding bandit updates:
https://www.gaslampgames.com/2016/02/03/our-friend-the-bandit/

Sadly, it's a little harder to brag about avoiding invasions even if I wanted to because unlike the Bandits they're not around for me to endlessly talk about avoiding, unlike the bandits.

Though, I will point out we went from "1 mission to neutralize bandits" to "2 (or so) missions to ... get raided peacefully by them (or fight)" which is a nice in-between point from "1 to neutralize vs get owned on day 12".


Now for foreign nations, hopefully we can be given a nice mid-point. Now, back to writing about black box farms.

You are reading a stance into it and reacting to that. I'm not on Steam. I'm asking because there is/was a bug where neutral factions still ended up invading and it's been mentioned.

Regarding the larger diplo feature, I am simply checking to see if you were aware of it, as people were not aware of the bandit diplomacy for a long time after it came out. And it got changed to not be so reliant on rushing a foreign office, jolly good.

About the other one, yeah, I am wondering what you mean by "rush", because again there are day 15 invasions which you can literally not do anything about, and you didn't specify when it happened, just that the option implies "rushing".


After various reports of day 12, 15 invasions, actually I think they did modifiy it a bit so that it shouldn't happen so much. So again, a smoother "in between". I don't know how the current (or planned for 48B) changes work out, and it's actually sort of important. With randomly generated events like this, it's good to have people talking about it with the details, as otherwise I'd have to sit around incolony and even then it is a small sample size.

============================================================

EDIT: Yeah that change should have gone in already by ver48B: Balance issue? Time to start looking about and seeing how this change pans out.

Seriously, people were getting hit by day 10 invasions in the past, ouch. Old-school bandits were shooting up people at day 6 before, too. It's good we got smoothed out a bit by being able to negotiate the moment they appear on map (and then foreign office, which then lets you choose between "let them take stuff" and "fight").

 

Even if you were well built up, the invasions are also just ridiculous, just in a different way from the "flood of bandits" thing we had way before the Foreign Office.

Actually, not just when the invasion happened, how many soldiers and what did they have? This is an interesting thing to take a look at now... I shall poke about and see what invasions look like currently.

Oh goodness, it looks like the following:

• Either 4 or 5 invasion squads form
• size of each squad is random, but on day 10+, it will be between 3 and 6 people

So you're looking at minimum 12 people all the way to 30 (?) average of about 20. This looks a bit off... it is possible not all squads successfully spawn in though.

 

The core gameplay is there: build stuff, drown in cabbages, watch colonists gradually lose their shit, frontier justice.

If you find it enjoyable then I don't see why it would be naive. I hope the devs get the full development cycle they need because it's really fun, even in the alpha stage.

 

Not to be alarmist, but I think you can't grow cabbages in ver48B

Maize, though, yeah~~ golden food of the go-- I mean colonist.

 

Originally my main issues with the game is that i felt it has lost its focus from the early designs and announcement, to mutate in something else. It felt like they decided to use a small, barely working prototype as a basis for their full game. Basically when the EA launched.

It was supposed to be a steampunk city builder-ish kind of game from the early announcements and now it feels more like a lovecraftian sims cross harvest moon cross dwarf fortress. And even the lovecraftian aspect is in the background while all the attention of the player is required to plant cabbage and make sure every colonist can eat his stew.

I don't mind the "new" (it's been years since that switch in focus so not really new) game design centered on characters but i don't feel it has evolved that much from the barely working prototype. It still has the fun first few hours or so of gameplay, then you hit a wall and you wait for the next release. Each release there is a bit much more to do but additions feels tacked on and doesn't involve you very much in terms of gameplay. There's no new production lines to set up, no new items to produce. At best a new office to build.

Nowadays i still have two issues :
1) The obvious one is we still have yet to see many cool things that were promised such as megaprojects, actual factories, metagame involving your career as imperial bureaucrat, naturalist discovering new fauna and flora, conduits with pipes and steam around your colony, madness powered factories and sanatariums, poets and urchins in the streets of your colony, airships and aether powered stuff, colonists owning things, relationships between colonists, Army stuff ...
Meanwhile we're still iterating on the 2354th design for growing cabbage. Suffice to say that's quite underwhelming and this slow pace make me wonder if the devs will ever achieve their vision for the game (do they still have a vision of what 1.0 should be like ?). If we get one of the above thing working in the next 6 month that would be a cause for celebration.

2) It doesn't scale well. As pointed out by many people After you reach a certain population size, the individuality of characters stop mattering, you can't really keep track of them (and you don't really need to either) but the simulation of all those people hurts your computer and possibly the game engine.
Which is the same as the common DF population issue. Past X dwarfs in your game it becomes unplayable because the engine and your comp can't handle 200 simulated agents with their memories and toe injuries, the UI doesn't allow you to manage them effectively, and everything is such a soup of complexity with systems underlying systems underlying systems on which the player has basically no control.

DF still is fun despite those issues because it's inherently fun to build things in DF. In CWE, not so much. You don't even have that much to build. All you do is growing cabbage.

 

This. It's not naive for some people to enjoy CE as it is right now, but it's not wrong for others to be unsatisfied with the progress that has been made so far, notwithstanding the obvious amount of work and time that Gaslamp has put into the game.

 

There is definitely a huge amount of work and passion going into the game, the devs are awesome and communicative and explain everything they do.
But i feel like we're getting bogged down by details while the larger picture is lost. Do we really need to achieve perfect balance for food production right now while it feels like half the game is still missing ?

 

I have had the impression recently that the dev's main focus at the moment is to get the basics completely nailed down. Its worth bearing in mind that the most critical features, like not staving, will get progressively harder and harder to balance the later they are left because it has knock on effects on every other feature currently in the game.

 

Exactly, this kind of stuff needs (or needed) to get nailed down before the various other things are thrown in.

Though my impression of the devs recently is the opposite of yours, as things were proceeding with locking down the fundamentals solidly for a long time until later last year when the shift seemed to suddenly refocus on pushing out as many new core features as possible and in the space of a month or two we got 2 or 3 entirely new mechanics that are rather unbalanced and due to their ease of abuse, if anything distract from focusing on the fundamental balance of systems.

For example:

"It's impossible or at least very difficult to recover from a food problem once it has built up momentum" being met with "You can exploit food drops via Foreign office" solutions.

"Hostile military raids are way out of whack compared to the tools and unit logistics planning for the player" being met with "You can turn off their raids through the Foreign office" solutions.

"It's sometimes a drawn out process to acquire a stable source of core fundamental resources if you have bad luck with surface nodes" being met with "Just rush trade office and get higher grade construction material from there" solutions.


After a lot of time working and reworking the fundamentals to try and come up with a foundation that was self-sufficient and stable that seemingly stopped in favour of introducing new aspects to the game and having parts of those new aspects serve as work arounds to avoid core balancing issues to make their significance less noticeable if you want to adopt those workarounds into your core colony strategy, but if not then being faced with the full brunt of the problems still as present as before.

Which may or may not be related to Gaslamp mentioning plans for releasing the game under the label "Access", and presumably tackling other stuff post-release.

But if it is signs of a release scheduling push approach to just lock down as many new core features as possible, get everything semi-standing and wrapped around each other as crutches and then address actually getting aspects self-sufficient after the games released... then I dunno, personally I wouldn't hold much hope of whatever situation it hits 'Access' under ever really changing... because once it is 'Released' the scope of people playing and the expectations of what's to come next will drastically shift with people more expecting new content and features, rather than expecting nor being happy with having a released game having fundamental features shifting under their feet over time making up a lot of the development work of their "Finished game" they bought.

So whatever Gaslamp have planned, I really do hope it involves making sure the core fundamentals are completely and utterly locked down and stable with nothing being held together with precision application of duct taped secondary features, before the game hits 'Access' or whatever they may decide to call their release milestone. Even if it means pushing some of the "Cool stuff you'd normally expect" features to be a later addition to the game.

 

Huh, didn't know that was a thing.

I guess since you can use foreign office to ask for trade groups to come perhaps... but they seem to like bringing some really unneeded things *and* you have to pay them so it doesn't seem worth playing the RNG on that.

 

You can trade pretty much anything for high resource return though.

So if you have a carpentry just churning out modules for 2-4 raw wood or planks which are both a easy resource to replace (And planks themselves being a output still at a 1:2 ratio despite the incorrect tooltip) you can easily get thousands of value in trade goods, and just get everything offered in trades to build a reserve.

In other words you're not trading with a specific trade in mind, such as needing iron so hoping the traders arrive with iron, instead you're trading early in order to obtain everything they offer so when you may need it you already have it.

And by having such an active carpentry just churning out what's needed plus surplus for trading, your overseer immigration skyrockets which means you can handle more construction jobs quicker, expand your colony and staff the new the essentials easier with less of a spare manpower hit, and have extra left over for hauling during the lulls.

 

What they need to nail down is features actually working, for instance colonists performing their jobs correctly and in timely fashion, job queue not being clogged by confession jobs, not having modules disappear for strange reasons etc. Then comme user experience.

Issues of balance (ie do i need X or Y farmers for Z colonists) can be ironed out when all or principal features are in place. That's my point : you don't balance a game when half the features are missing, and that each one of those missing feature will most certainly upset greatly that balance when they are implemened.
It's a fool's pursuit, because everytime they introduce something new they'll have to balance it again,

So yeah, maybe now that the game fundamentals are working, it's time to push out the features that have been stuck in the development pipeline for a while and worry about balance later.

 

Can't say I've had any problems with colonists performing their jobs correctly other than a few of the misc office jobs where the colonists are simply reacting to job order as they're created, so when there's no jobs in the queue to do with their office they revert to idle/social behaviours. But that really only applies to a few buildings which aren't overly critical providing their jobs get done eventually (E.G. Chapel, barber).

And modules actually disappearing seems to be resolved now (assuming modules vanishing was ever really a thing rather than just being a entirely unimportant cosmetic problem), with just one or more causes for entirely cosmetic invisible construction ghosts and the like, where even though you can't see them they're still entirely functional and filling their capacity.

Of the things you listed I've not had a single problem with any part of the game that's stopping my colony from doing what they need to do, so have actually found the complete opposite in that my colonies always tick over quite consistently within a certain margin for social interruptions.

The rest don't really come across as things that get in the way of the game carrying on and are just player comfort niggles that have zero impact on activity outcomes... AKA "Beta Polish Fodder".

At the end of the day, throwing all the new features onto non-working foundations then trying to figure out how to make it all work after implementation would be a massive recipe for disaster.

Ironing out what's there and knowing with almost absolutely certainty that it can sustain itself across whatever typical approaches players may throw at it, and in doing so then knowing the exact state of what everything else to be added off of that is working within is heck of a lot more of a healthy approach, if somewhat less productive from a developer morale perspective as it's always easier to dream of how great new stuff is and wanting to throw all the cool ideas into implementation then it is to spend time ironing out and identifying where your previous efforts still fall short... so it can feel like no progress is being made, whilst if the other direction had been taken which would offer up a better sense of initial sense of progress, things would actually have less movement progress wise long term.