Long-time newsletter lurker & former Dredmor player. I got bored of Elite Dangerous and bought CE the other day. Gameplay over about 5 or 6 goes was challenging and not in an entirely fun & engaging way - I appreciate that this is pre-release but I thought I'd share in case anyone is interested. Challenge 1 - not enough trees/logs Starting out there are often trees and things near by. Easy enough to chop those down and start building. After a sort while though there are no trees left and I need to go further and further out to get anything. Fine, but two problems: 1) the people move really slowly! 2) they are fish people bait and often never come back (they're off running around the map for 10 minutes until they eventually get killed) Suggestions: ability to build a "forestry" like you can in Prison Architect, have people run back to the town instead of into the wilderness so the soldiers can help, build roads so that walking miles is quicker. Challenge 2 - invincible floating black tentacle monster This has happened in about a quarter of my games - everything is going swimmingly but out of nowhere this black floating tentacle thing appears and kills everyone. The soldiers shoot at it non-stop until they either run or are killed but it doesn't die. Suggestions: offer a way to either prevent the rando-spawn of this thing or at least offer a means to kill it. Challenge 3 - farming & general workgroup micromanagement It seems like I cant get the balance right here - sometimes two farms seems to be enough to feed a 30 person town, other times it seems like I need everyone permanently farming 4, 5 or 6 farms and yet still people are starving and eating raw stuff. Once I throw all-hands onto farming the rest of society collapses and its a slow spiral into rage quitting. It also feels like I am super micro-managing the people. Assigning teams to workshops, unassigning teams to workshops, fiddling around moving people between workgroups so that I have a supervisor and 4 workers on a "hard" task like farming, then moving people around so that I only have supervisor+1 worker on easy tasks etc. Should I need to be micromanaging the workgroups so much? It seems like it is a far superior tactic to only ever accept supervisors from the dropship and just have single supervisor workgroups on everything apart from farming? If you have workgroups consisting of supervisors+2/3/4 workers, nothing seems to get done very quickly. I spent an annoying amount of time doing mental arithmatic when building - "Right ok.... so thats 28 planks I need for the bunk house beds - now I just need to assign a work crew to the carpenters, click on this button 28 times to queue up 28 planks, then unassign a work crew from the kitchen to let them go chop down 28 trees. Then once they have finished getting wood I can assign the kitchen guys back to the kicthen and unassign the capenters and they can build the building! Simples!" Bit of a chore. Similar for the kitchen, can I not just say "make strew as long as there are ingredients" instead of just assigning finite amounts? Suggestion: make farming less hard! less micro-management of workgroups and commodities Challenge 4 - "runners" People run off into the wilderness (getting chased by something) and there is no way to get them back. If you see someone get even slightly out of the town, they are gone forever as they will get killed. Suggestion: have some way of rescuing these people. Perhaps vehicles will solve this? Challenge 5 - cults I cant work out how to stop people building shrines everywhere and murdering each other. Perhaps it is just me missing something? I tried to build a brewer to keep people "happy" but they just stand around drinking instead and not doing any work, but people still get murdered. Challenge 6 - crashes Yup its early access alright I'll keep submitting the dumps All good though - I wont want to sound negative. You have done a great job so far devs - dont take this negatively (I have tried to be constructive!). It is fun (if immensely frustrating) as it stands! Looking forward to the next few releases
About cults, are you sure all your people are working? In my first two games they started building shrines in like 3 minutes. However, afterwords as I got better at distributing tasks...they were too busy to even talk/think about that kind of stuff! (or at least it didn't come so fast).
The large majority of the suggestions which you propose are coming in due course I would imagine It is after all still in development and the majority of the assets are already present in the game, just not activated in that sense from what I can see. In regards to your challenges: 1. I have never encountered running out of trees in that sense for production and what not, always had plenty to use. I agree with your suggestion to have a forestry like in PA and I imagine such things will be made over the course of CE's development. 2. Have yet to encounter this surprisingly although I can quite believe it. Military is slowly getting better in terms of AI, but as it stands, if they are on their own or in pairs, they are pretty much stuffed due to morale shocks and the running away :S I could see this part of the cult scenarios and for visual purpose for the devs to show what cults can and could be like but again will get better over time. 3. Farming has always been challenging from day 1, although it is getting better in my view. I tend to have like 4 farms and a dedicated work group to do just that, usually my crew who are tied to the kitchen. Try not to have to many jobs going on in that sense because as it stands farming has priority over most things but due to the nature of things it can be a bit "iffy". The tending crops part is what gets most people because in order to successfully grow crops you have to tend to them every now and then to stop them spoiling and so on. It takes getting accustomed to so you will grasp the concepts eventually. Don't get me wrong though, improvements could totally still be made. Certainly not as bad as previous builds, or awkward in that sense. 4. This is an issue or challenge that does "do my head in" in that regard haha. Take soldiers for example or anyone to be fair. They should make a simple change to allow soldiers to be able to actually respond or even get to your way-point to save the person. Simply allow the person being chased or fleeing to change direction. Instead of running off in the same direction, allow them to double back or randomly etc. 5. As I understand this now, Cults have influence and the like which affects the way your colonists react and how much it holds over your colonists. There is no way to rid your area of shrines yet I believe. As for the crimes which are committed by cultists. Killing them via Frontier Justice and killing monsters and pleasing colonists reduces this influential impact on your colony and thus reduces the cultists power. Currently though I think the devs just wanted to show people the basic framework of what cults can do and what effects they can cause and naturally you will be able to have more ways to deal with them in future builds. Waervyn makes a good point about tasks. I had same thing happen, but if your colonists are occupied they cannot continually socialise and spread the idea of cults quickly thus you won't have like 4 shrines being built at the same time :S 6. Yeah, they are still present for some, although you are doing the correct thing. Keep submitting them and they will get bashed out eventually. They have certainly got rid of many bugs and crashes from Steam launch build anyway.
3. The farming is a tough one to get the hang of. But since somewhere in revision 31a-z it improved immensely. Nowadays I tend to make two farms and that is enough up to at least the inevitable crash. I always start the two farms with the crop that can be mauled down to 'stew'. Then I build the carpentry and then the kitchen with four ovens of all kinds. After that I just queue up a lot stews and once of the cabbages or similar should start coming in the stew comes out. Nowadays I even have a surplus of stews! It seems like too many farms or too many projects at the same time and they can't keep up. Try build one building at the time while you farm and forage and cop down etc.
