Earliest Access Feedback and Reactions

Few issues. It seems to have my 3D card running insane hot (90'c with the fan at 90%). Runs fine and no problems with it crashing on closing though but that's kinda how it is. The heat thing is my worry though. I've not had a problem with this before and this is the first to spike my card so much (ATI Radeon HD5830 XFX version)

Edit - To add context : I did try turning everything down to low but other then shadows, not much changed. Just to say.

 

Yea. I'm trying to work out what is going on. I know the XFX is a overclocked card as standard. Maybe it's that.

 

Same here, good catch!

 

1st - The game runs great for an earliest release - I am sure there is a premature joke in there somewhere.

2nd - one crash to desktop on my 14th day (in game day) no big deal since I learned a lot on my first attempt

3rd - Food: It would be great to have a concept of volume of food you need to maintain and then of course how many extra days of food you currently have on the screen some how. I am often surprised by how little of food I have when I actually thought I had a ton. If bakers or people tasked with food production have an abundance of wheat or cabbage you should be able to set a "Maintain" food ratio to populace and then when food dips for some reason - lack of farmers, too many people, a house burnt down - a warning would notify you.

4th - you could expand that alarm system to all the tasks in houses so that you get notification that you need X resources for current build orders. I end up with people standing around because and I am sorta guessing here, but something is halting them from finishing their work. For example I had a guy trying to cut trees for 40 minutes but couldn't because a fish man kept patrolling by him and he'd run away. I had no idea so I couldn't send soldiers. I had another spot where I needed copper to build something and the house sat useless forever but I had no warning saying resource low. Perhaps another bar on the top that opens showing outstanding tasks and the reason for them.

5th - resource pads I have so many right now is that the way it's suppose to work?


I am enjoying the game so thanks and keep up the quality work. Currently - Day 35, 6 stars, 35 people

 

Thanks for the quick response but I still don't know how food equates with 600? So what I would be asking for is a # value for food available to make - aka 300 wheat, 44 cabbage etc tied to cooked so divide by 4 and then a # of days.

so

• Raw - 2 days
• Cooked 8 days

Or maybe it's easiest to task - foragers and farmers with Kitchen staff and order "food for 7 days" at current population
and then receive alarms if either farmers/foragers or Kitchen staff are unable to perform that task. At that point as a player I can step in and solve this serious problem and then go back to city (big picture) management.

Sorry I have to get back to the game some woman keeps going on about communism and we'll have to do something about that trouble maker.

 

Now your reading my mind so tell me does beer count as food?

 

The thing is, I like charts to tell me things. Tool tips over tiny little food packages that I can't tell if it is a bag of wheat or a bag of sulfur or if those mushrooms are actually caviar... that doesn't help me. There's a lot going on, onscreen, and not quite knowing what I am looking at makes me get really frustrated my people are starving. So I have to be lucky enough to see the loaf of bread that my baker randomly decided to make out of the list of commands I gave her... oh wait, by the time baker makes the food, my people are so hungry that I don't get a chance to see it.

You don't want to hand hold us when it comes to keeping our people alive, I understand that. You want us to know if we see an image of a food product on screen that we will have a general idea of how long food will last. But rewriting a tool tip does me no good if I start slowly, you know? Have a resource screen for people who think with letters and numbers over images and isometric space.

Plus, if I was dumb enough to build around my resource zone, the buildings can't be "leveled" to get a clear view of the goods on the pad. Rotating was a solution, but not a very good solution.

Now, onto my experience and reactions as I played today:

1. Delightful game. I have no idea what I am doing.
2. My people are really, really dumb. No, wait. I am really, really dumb. Let's start over, I seem to have murdered all my colonists by trying to close the window. I feel very British right now.
3. Wait, why is no one moving? Oh, I paused it.
4. Holy cow, the micromanagement is extreme here. And the tools are not there to let me micromanage properly. IF I WANT YOU TO BAKE BREAD UNTIL THE ROOF FALLS OFF, BAKER, YOU WILL BAKE BREAD!!! No, wait, don't pout, I was only kidding. Why don't you make one of the seven hundred other orders I clicked in anger into your queue? WHY ARE YOU SHUFFLING THEM ALL OVER THE PLACE ON YOUR QUEUE?
5. Oh, how cute. The + and - button doesn't work. Maybe if I obsessively press the + button my people will stop starving.
6. WHY WON'T THAT TREE GET CUT DOWN? Seriously, all the others were cut, that one is mocking THE MONARCHY!
7. Dude. Why can't I have a colony of Fishmen, I hate them less than my own colonists.
8. I have audibly expressed my merriment many times. They don't feel pain, indeed.

There were a few times were the system chugged a little. At other times, the UI seemed not to register my choices, and it lagged a bit in changing direction (either camera or object placement). It would be seriously nice to see a list of items that we have and how many of each one. (Not the menu that opens in the upper right - that takes up a lot of screen space for "at a glance")

It would be stellar if I could physically pick up my colonists and hurl them to where I would want them to stand. In the beginning, they chose the resource pad to hang out at. Then, eerily, they started hanging out in one persons house, and when that person went to sleep, the others would stare at them until they all lay down on the floor.

I really like the idea, and can't wait to have the ability to pit my colony against the world. As it is, I feel like I am pitting myself against the UI... and if I wanted to do that, I'd try to browse any federal gov't website.

I am still very excited.

 

That sounds like I should say, "At the end of the semester, there will be a test."

After posting it, I realized the tool tip may not be on the small image on the ground/resourcepad what have you, but actually exists in the drop down menu. With that knowledge, that works for me - eventually 600 food per bread will mean something. It'd be nice to be able to bring up at a glance type things.

Seriously, though, any frustration I had was because I was sitting in the chair of a world you created, and the rules are a little different than I am used to. I still had loads of fun, for which I thank you guys for letting me play in your sandbox.

 

I return! So...i update my drivers on my card. They are the most updated ATI/AMD/They change the name too much now i have no floor. ^_^ The floor has become demons and has dropped it's mortal guise as to drop trees, people and random objects into a eternal night to which there is no escape.

 

Yeah auto clearing would be nice (and I assume its planned) but for now you can mouse over the grass and manually remove it if its clipping through and is selectable, in my experience at least.

 

What is Whiskey made from? The ingredient looks like a treasure chest with flowers growing out of it. If one was to try and get all their colonist hooked on laudanum, one would need whiskey. Asking for a friend...

 

So far, so good. Started a run and it was choppy at 1080 running off of Integrated Intel 4600. Changed my preference to my GTX 765M and everything went better, although the graphic detail zoomed at out is a little disappointing.

As for feedback:
1. Wish there was a "build fence" command so I could keep my oxen away from trying to enter every building by the service entrance. And then maybe I could milk them or breed them and have veal for dinner.
2. Animals (oxen and dodos) and fish people don't pay attention to terrain. The seemed to go up and down some local cliffs like they were mountain goats or something.
3. Inventory management - I'd like to see some better descriptions on building requirements. Like, I can see that I need some pipes to get my forge going. But I'm not really sure what kind of pipes, or tubes or whatever and I can't seem to figure it out since there are no descriptions.
4. No real issues with attacking fish people. My 3 soldiers were enough, and somewhere along the way I got a 4th.
5. I get messages for new immigrants arriving, but only once did I get a popup on the left side to accept them.
6. Way too many middle managers. Can I demote them to get them to actually do some work?

 

I've had the same problem (demon darkness claiming terrain, trees, colonists etc.) and tried updating drivers and what you've suggested to no avail. Halp? (System is a Intel Core i5-2410M 2.30GHz 64-bit, 6GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GT 520M)

 

Well... Essay time. LOVE the game so far, very light-hearted black humor. However, it does still feel more like an alpha than a beta (I suspect the lack of game continuity is probably the main reason for this.). Heck, I don't even know what the developers consider it to be at this point

Starting off is a bit of a mission. In your first game you'll probably lose half your colonists before you figure out what button does what and by then it's too late because everyone is starving. The pause feature (which shows up as a blank space in the config menu, but is actually the spacebar) is essential. Once you get off the ground though, good fun, lots of laughs. I have, however, come across some bugs though.

Hopefully, I'm not repeating too much of what's already been pointed out.

1. Changing a keymap in the menu works... Sort of. If you exit to the main menu, and then start a new game, some keys get remapped to the default, and others get remapped to... Well, nothing.
2. The key entry for pause shows up as text. That is, an empty space. It's not particularly obvious. A dedicated pause/resume button in the GUI would help resolve this issue as well.
3. When drawing plots for farms, houses, etc, the grid seems to 'snap' to corners rather than tiles, even if the GUI shows the tiles being highlighted. I was very confused to find my 6x6 farm plot somehow ended up a rectangle.
4. My colony got dumped in the middle of a forest and all I can click on is the trees. Not a big deal, as I can just chop them down, but a 'hide tree' button could be useful.
5. Slaughtered aurochs and some other creatures have a clickbox as if they were still alive and standing.
6. I er, can't remove jobs from the job queue. Also, some jobs seem to be taking precedence over others, so it would be nice to be able to at least reorder the queue.
7. Jobs don't get assigned when the game is paused. Not a big deal, but then you go "Hrm, did I click that?" and end up having the same job queued twice. Or thrice. Or six times, if you keep forgetting.
8. 'Exploring' seems somewhat pointless, as I can just tell my soldiers to rally there and they do it twice as fast. Maybe explorers should have a wider sight radius, or some other perks to make it worthwhile?

I'll probably have more of these later. On to the praise!

a. Game performs wonderfully on my system. I don't actually quite meet the minimum requirements (I have an AMD X2 6000+ and am on Vista), but it seems to be okay anyway.
b. Love the art and interface. Looks well polished. And then there's David's face plastered all over the steam grenade launcher.
c. The things those little colonists talk about. A sudden topic change from the necessity of murder to monarchy. It all makes sense now!
d. Response! You guys are quick and fast to respond, and that's good. It's nice to see the developers actually taking player input for a change.

There's also some features I'd like to see in the future:

i. The option to select corpses of humans and fishpeople for 'foraging'. Probably only certain types of people would carry these out, and probably only if everyone in the work crew agrees.
ii. Cemeteries: I'd like to be able to get rid of all those corpses lying around. Also, it would help stop people from cannibalizing them. Or worrying that they saw a dead body. Maybe there would be ghosts? Maybe the cultists will gather at the crypts?
iii. Exploratory mining. I'm a Dwarf Fortress fan. I expect this feature is already up and coming, since I recall seeing an explosion somewhere in the teaser trailer.

That's all for now. Keep up the good work!

EDIT: Oh lord, the =P faces are pink? XD