[0.8] Campaign too difficult

[ssilk]

The problem is, that a player doesn't learn how to pick up anything.

[immibis]

That might be it. I remember having to look through the controls menu to find out how to pick things up - long before I saw any alien artifacts.

[slpwnd]

The problem is, that a player doesn't learn how to pick up anything.

The picking is actually introduced in the very first level (when the player has to pick up the mined resource from the burner mining drill). Maybe it is too early or it should be reinforced later in the campaing.

Making levels not to be overloaded and still teach the player something about the game is really hard

[hipscumbag]

I think the campaign has been excellent up until this part. I thought the previous mission was very well-designed in that the player's need for iron compels her to follow and rebuild the railway network. However, this mission is pretty aggravating.

I appreciate that the developers are striving to make this mission an introduction to raiding biter spawns. However, combat is not Factorio's strong suit, and would seem to require some very fiddly tactics (e.g. driving circles around gun turrets while firing desperately) or else powerful equipment which is not available to the player in this mission (destroyer bots, poison capsules).

I hope that the developers find a solution which is more in the vein of Factorio's emphasis on automation, such as robot armies, siege artillery, a train covered in guns, something more elegant than getting your hands dirty yourself!

[brab]

I've recently started Factorio, and I'm trying the campaign first before I get to sandbox mode. I also find the third mission very difficult. However I've just learned about the fact there is stuff in the car, so I should go, pick it up, and try again.

The information about the robots is very nice as well. It would be good to have the same kind of information that is given when they are first found (after defeating the first nest) when selecting them in the inventory. But maybe there is an in game encyclopedia I have not found yet...

[slpwnd]

But maybe there is an in game encyclopedia I have not found yet...

There isn't. Just tips and tricks

[Snakey]

I generally agree that some tutorial or at least more explanation in the campaign would be really needed. But I think some easy measures could already help.

1. Create a log of screen messages so the player can read older messages again. This helps to get clearer on the goals and to read the offered hints again.
2. Add more hints
3. Alternatively, link explanations to special events in gameplay like researched technology - like in Civ and other games. These could be displayed in freestyle mode too.
4. The number of hints/explanations displayed may vary by difficulty:
   1. Easy: Every little thing is explained
   2. Medium: The main measures are explained
   3. Hard: The current state
   4. Extreme: No hints, figure everything out by yourself!

It should not be too difficult to add that. Suggested goal: Create medium level explanations until the beta and easy ones until release

[yanamal]

I also very strongly agree that this mission is too hard.
Not only that, it's completely out of the spirit of the game for me. I bought Factorio (and had been enjoying it) because it's a building, optimization, automation game in a tense, somewhat-dangerous environment. This mission is not about building at all - in fact I'm pretty sure there's no reason at all to set up any kind of factories. I even did a lot better if I didn't try to set up any turrets/walls, just drove around shooting and throwing stuff.

I really, really disagree with the fad of putting these mandatory "now let's switch it up and put the emphasis on the weaker part of the game!" missions. If I wanted to run around shooting things and dying a lot, I'd buy a shooting game.

Maybe if it was only the first part, with the small base, and then I could get into actual building and reinforcing, it would be more acceptable.

I'd also like to note that typically, I only play these games through the campaign, not the sandbox modes, since sandbox gets to same-y and boring for me without a variety of goals. (Prison Architect is my one exception right now, because it's such a compact yet rich system that I actually find it fun to formulate my own goals.) So this speed bump on the 3rd level of the campaign would kind of be a dealbreaker for me (if this were a finished game... and I couldn't circumvent it by modifying save files...)

[omega_haxors]

I slogged through M3 and I would have to agree, the mission is terribly designed.

Mission 2 has you spend hours collecting the resources you need to go to war. You have everything you could ever need and off you go. Mission 3 starts, however, and you're given very little to defend yourself with compared to the small armory you started off with, and to make matters worse there's no ores to replenish your supplies so you are forced into a certain game strategy.

First, it starts by teaching you how to take on a small nest and all goes well. It works as a pretty effective tutorial for the stupidest difficulty spike I have seen in a long time. The issue arises from the fact that afterwards it gives you explosives and EXPECTS you to use them going forwards. Hate to burst your bubble but explosives and capsules are nowhere near effective enough to be considered as viable raiding tools. Maybe as appetizers, but not as the main course. Having laser turrets would have been great considering you are forced to make them in the previous mission.

Now after you beat that you sort of catch your breath, set up some walls and turrets and back off for a bit. Only now do you realize that your once-loaded car has sprung a MASSIVE leak and you have nowhere near as many resources as you painstakingly worked up in the previous mission. At this point I was pretty livid since the game forced you to get a lot of resources that you DON'T EVEN GET TO USE. I understand standardized startups for each mission, but they should AT LEAST be consistent to the ending of the previous!

Okay, so once you get over that it's time to go to war. You run up to the nest and learn very quickly that's not an effective strategy, even with turrets. You are quickly over-run and game over. Fine. I've learned now not to do that so I reload my save and try again. I remember the blurb about explosives and capsules, and go ahead and use them. The capsule comes out, kills a few enemies, and then blows up shortly after. By the time this ends, a new wave of biters has already spawned. Well this clearly isn't going to work, so I reload my save again and go on foot, using my trusty rocket launcher and a few hundred rockets. Things go well... for the 3 seconds between me shooting and reloading until the game over screen welcomes me once more.

Cripes, what do I have to do to finish this!? Perhaps i'm not doing this right... So instead of going head on, I try to sneak around and avoid combat since that's clearly way too fucking hard to accomplish. Turns out great and a few stragglers notice me but that's about it. Until I reach a giant worm put by the map designer to prevent you from 'cheating' and avoiding combat. Clearly i'm intended to take out the bases, so I have to rethink my strategy again.

Now i'm really in srs-mode, taking everything I have and spamming gun turrets along a line as I go. Turns out that this is an extremely effective strategy, at least until you reach the base and then you get over-run by extremely fast spawn rates and the whole limited ammo thing.

By an extreme amount of luck, I am finally able to push on through the base only to find out there's TWO MORE BASES ALL BIGGER THAN THE LAST that I have to take out...

After hours of trial and error I finally by pure miracle managed to take out the final spawner and claim my prize: Mission 4 is a LOT more fun and actually follows the mechanics of the game pretty well, unlike this bastardized combat mission that expects you to use ineffective tools and play the game EXACTLY as the designer intended, rather than giving room for creativity as the other ones do.

That was my experience, at least...

EDIT: Replayed the mission in Hardcore difficulty, and I have to say that I actually had to adapt my strategy because the run and emplace method wasn't working. Two turrets didn't deal damage fast enough to stay safe. A blunt of the difficulty in this mission comes from the fact that turrets do not place with ammo in them, so trying to put down a line of 2+ turrets was almost impossible while under attack.

And yes, I did eventually win by nabbing the computer and running as far away as possible knowing the mission would auto-finish 5 seconds after doing so. I wouldn't have been able to complete it otherwise. That last little area has at least 20 medium biters going after you, which is irritating to say the least.

[Gravgon]

I dont think level 3 is to hard, the only reason its hard is becose you make it hard yourself. what this level teaches you is you can fight small nests head on with no problems.
but when it comes to biger nests you cannot do so anymore. you have to think about were to attack them from, were are the worm, were is a good choke point. this level makes first timers fail to teach them. if it was to easy there is nothing to learn.

My vote is to keep as is.
This is a reply of my 3ed try (First try i run into a big worm on east side of the map xD. and second try i tryed fighting them head on.)
also sorry about the background music, did not know my recorder would pick it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyi6y_WdPJY

[omega_haxors]

I dont think level 3 is to hard, the only reason its hard is becose you make it hard yourself. what this level teaches you is you can fight small nests head on with no problems.
but when it comes to biger nests you cannot do so anymore.

This is the crux of my point, here. Not that the mission is too difficult so much as it's poorly designed which adds a lot of artificial difficulty.

It leads you to believe that you can take nests head on and then drops you into the lava saying "Oh btw use the fire extinguisher to put yourself out" rather than "Oh btw don't let me drop you into the lava in the first place".

[Gravgon]

you forgot to quote the part were i say you have to think.

[bobucles]

The combat mission is pretty difficult for many reasons:

1) Limited ammo. Face it, even huge crates of ammo will run out eventually. This can be pseudo-addressed by adding a mission time limit. After 30-40 minutes or so, it's safe to say the player burned out his resources to a point where he's gonna fail the mission anyway. The death clock serves mostly to condition the player to be more aggressive and shouldn't be a serious time limit.
2) Bad tips. There are good locations for the player to hunker down and build some supporting infrastructure. Point them out and make an objective to place turrets and/or munition factories there. The best bet is to probably only worry about building walls, since they're the most directly useful for the assault.
3) Bad starting supplies. How much coal does a player really need? I don't think it's even possible to waste it all before getting overrun. A good setup is a bunch of inserters(50 slow 50 fast 100 belts), a few factories(5-10), a few walls(10-50), processed plates/steel, some steam power(200-300 coal?), and a LOT of ammo.
4) Turret management. In order to manage turrets, players have to be VERY fast in deploying, feeding, and moving turrets. Point out every hotkey that can help, because this is something that can NOT be done slow. A hotkey to place 20/25/50 ammo directly at the mouse cursor's target would help a lot.

Suggestion: Damaged turrets already take up their own inventory slot to store the health value. Do the same thing for ammo'ed turrets. This will cut down the turret difficulty a HUGE amount, since players can feed their turrets in a safe spot before hauling them into biter territory. Overall the mission would be a LOT easier.

Suggestion 2: Give the toolbelt upgrade for this mission. Explain what it does and have some slots on the second bar already filtered for weapons. It's not a bad time to learn about filtering inventory slots so the player can quickly grab weapons and move turrets.

Suggestion 3: This is a good mission to teach players about modular armor. After all the primary purpose of modular armor is to kick ass. At the halfway point give the player a set of half broken modular armor, along with 2-4 solars, 1 battery, and 1 shield. They can hunker down and begin wall manufacturing for the final push while the parts recharge.

[omega_haxors]

Suggestion 3: This is a good mission to teach players about modular armor. After all the primary purpose of modular armor is to kick ass. At the halfway point give the player a set of half broken modular armor, along with 2-4 solars, 1 battery, and 1 shield. They can hunker down and begin wall manufacturing for the final push while the parts recharge.

All my yes, even though that wouldn't fit between M2 and M3, it would be a great thing to add a new M3 and push the existing one to 4 while adding the new gear. It's not like anybody raids bases of that size without modular armor anyway, and it doesn't need to be overboard either. Just a simple thing to teach raiding and modular armor.

you forgot to quote the part were i say you have to think.

How insulting. Don't tell me you're one of those "ha ha I beat it and you didn't get good" kind of people, because I did end up beating it on hardcore difficulty. Having to think isn't a problem, but the way in which you arrive at that conclusion involves using a strategy that feels like cheating and is given absolutely no credence by the game. I've had an easier time taking out the bases on the previous missions and YOU'RE NOT INTENDED TO, IT BREAKS THE BALANCE IF YOU DO BECAUSE THERE ARE NO ENEMIES. Mission one took out the base with a pistol and some nearby fish, and for mission two I used the map's laser turrets and rushed the base. Still easier than M3's intended gameplay.

It's like this:

If it were to say "use the turret creep strategy" and you fail, it's your fault.

If it were to say absolutely nothing and you figure it out, that would be fine.

The issue is that it misleads you into a strategy that isn't effective and then it feels like cheating when you don't. That's not an example of good design and I don't feel ANY satisfaction that I beat the mission.

Now I would be surprised if you even read this considering your extremely ignorant response to my last post, so prove me wrong. Better yet, just don't say anything since you clearly have nothing to add to the conversation.

[Koub]

Hi people,
If you're being sarcastic, it's OK for me, just remember Poe's law, and act (write) accordingly.
If you're starting a public verbal fight in these boards, you're only attracting the wrath of moderators and their magic scissors, if you see what I mean.

You are allowed to disagree, but keep cool, polite, and nice, otherwise ...

[bobucles]

Does anyone else have any success using up ALL the raw resources they start with? I don't think it's possible to manufacture ammo faster than the biters chew it up. Without laser turrets or some kind of ammo reclamation, there is no way to hunker down and end up with more supplies than when you started.

I DID use factories to grind out rockets, but that's not more than a couple of minutes of building. Everything else was wall building and hand loaded turrets (which is truly suffering, BTW).