[0.17.4] Campaign (Intro Mission) Feedback

[Lightmanmage]

So my first attempt at playing it, tried to play it like a new person, so minimal production spam and just afking through research until the biter waves happened later on.

Managed to do it with 4 turrets on each side after removing my copper+stone mines when I didn't need them anymore. Ended up losing the base after finishing the logistics research due to running out of ammo from the multiple waves of biters that came in the last 5 minutes.

1.2k biter kills by the end. (I did not research lights, or faster bullets). I had 2 labs for half the logistics research, and made 2 more for the second half because of how slow it was.

I noted that you could hand-craft for the per-minute requirements step as that counted it, thus not needing assembly lines to produce the required goods.


Pushing ahead/knowing hotkeys or combos seems to jam Comp's lines and actions somewhat, there's also apparently no log if you miss what he says. I don't think I was ever told how to pick things up either. There's no message of 'oh hey you're feeding into the wrong loader for repairing the assemblers' if you try feeding both/the other one than you're supposed to.

It'd be nice if there was some sort of counter when you had to pack up and leave, a "The hostile aliens will get here in 5~ minutes, pack up what you can in that time and meet me over here, I sense a good fallback location to the east". Something like that to give you more quantifiable urgency (I was tempted to just afk and see if the biters would ever come during that step).

I don't think Compy/the objects ever gave me optional objects or noted the other possible researches when they unlocked most of the time. I might've missed that. I recommend for the re-build the base part for Compy to show off automated miners, setting up 1 or 2 electronic miners and inserters and ask you to power them. And a note that "That was all I could scavenge to work together, you'll have to research the missing parts of their blueprints yourself." and note that as an optional/recommended task.

A note that pollution agros the biters would be nice as well. "Hmm, according to my sensors combined with your radar there's more of these aliens farther out... calculating... it looks like they only seem to take note of us when the pollution from our base reaches their location. We'd better keep our defenses parred up with our production. I'll keep track of which ones are within range to detect our pollution."
(Have the bases which can absorb and spawn biters from the pollution flagged on the map somehow?)

A note about auto-loading turrets, maybe even have a chest where players can feed Compy mags to help refill turrets that drop to low numbers? And after the first few times he does that, he'll say "Hey why don't we use an inserter to load ammo into our turrets from a belt or chest?"