Played the campaign some feed back

[blavek]

My biggest issue and one which runs contrary to getting people to produce more is that the map is entirely too cramped. I would have really increased my production if there was room too. As a side effect to you have limited places to put the underground pump burners and steam engines. Something else I had a problem which is more a veteran problem than newb problem is not being able to craft intermediate products automatically until I unlock a research. However, if it was explained better or more obviously I wouldn't have run into the problem of making new mining drills w/o gears. Also if I recall correctly the reason I found myself in this situation is because I took all the gears I had collected from the beginning and stuffed them into the lab making red science. A new player wouldn't hit necessarily hit this problem but you do come away with the thought that the recipe for a burner miner drill is 3 iron plate. I had even assumed that, for this campaign, to simplify the scenario it was a simplified recipe. In the end though this isn't even remotely representative of the freeplay experience and it also doesn't make a huge amount of sense thematically. I can build this big complicated machine to drill up ore in my inventory but I can't make a comparatively simple gear? I think a system which forced a player to explicitly make the first couple of subcombines would be better. You could even have compilatron spell it out for the player and then tell you in the future this will happen automatically. Then he can show you on the UI where subcombines and combines happen.

I did find the waves of biters to be a bit much. They were fairly constant and if you tried to shoot them manually your pistol is junk. Also the game says you can feed them by hand or auto feed them with belts and inserters implying that these two actions are equivalent. The game should push you toward automation. Say something like you can manually add items but a more automated approach is preferable for the long term. Also I would have the player at a minimum make an assault rifle. Maybe I missed it as a possibility.

The UI is very different. From the main game. A player leaving this tutorial might expect all of the buildables to be in a single menu ordered seemingly randomly line and then they will get tabs and unfamiliar sortings and so on when they go to freeplay. Introduce that much earlier you can even keep it as two tabs like a production tab and intermediate products. That will at least prep players for the future. I understand that the tutorial is incomplete but I would suggest requiring that the player set up some green science be more of the victory condition now. Its the first actually complex recipe that you get in the early game. Its important, I think, to get players to know that sometimes you need a real chain or more like a web of machines to get to a single final product.

Finally I think to teach the "There is never enough" theme you should instead of having an objective that says make 15 something per second, have one that says fill a belt with something. This would serve, in my opinion, to prepare players for how we generally thing about the game. I don't usually think I need 45 items per second to do a thing but I do think I need 3 yellow belts.

Also I agree with other posts that you may be trying to get this campaign to do too many things, as a result it feels haphazard. I appreciate that this could go into freeplay but it would be a non standard free play. You have research which wouldn't exist in standard play, since as you have said, you have a map unique research queue. The world could end up quite confusing for a new player who just learned "I need to do all of this" and then get to a fresh freeplay and, boom, its a very different start.

All in all I think it is a good start but needs some iteration.