The devs asked for feedback on the campaign so I have just finished playing and wanted to give my thoughts. Overall I like the direction of campaign. You have clearly thought a lot about how to introduce various concepts to players without overwhelming them. And you left enough space for people to build their own factory set ups and get a feel for the game. However, the campaign feels very unfinished at the moment and needs some work.
This list is a mix of bug reports and change requests.
1. At the beginning of the game Compilatron give the first instructions / objective (move using WASD). But then Compilatron stops talking and the next objective is given by the box at the top. This was confusing. I spent a little bit of time waiting for Compilatron to tell me what to do next before realizing I was supposed to be following the objective at the top.
2. I think there should be deeper story elements in the campaign. A lot of the time I felt I was simply doing whatever the Objective box told me to do without really knowing why. Maybe have Compilatron give more explanation of what we are doing and why we are doing it or have the Objective box have higher level goals like "repair the damaged space ship parts" or "rebuild the factory". Here are a couple areas a story element would help:
2a. I think at the beginning it should be explained that you are the survivor of a crashed ship and you need to repair things. I would state at the beginning that the goal of the scenario is to research the Logistics technology. With this in the back of their mind it will help players understand what they are doing.
2b. I eventually realized that feeding iron plates into the broken assemblers fixed them but that was not clear at the beginning. Right now the Objective is something like "feed in iron plates" but I think it should be "fix the broken assembler by feeding in iron plates"
2c. The camera panning to the biters when they first appeared was a little awkward. Maybe have Compilatron say something like "Oh no! Aliens detected" before panning to give some context and add some tension.
2d. When getting to the second area the technology costs jumped significantly. I spent awhile sitting around waiting for my 1 lab to finish the technology because that was my only objective. I eventually realized you were intending for me to start building out a factory here but that wasn't clear. Maybe add some story element letting us know that we plan to stay in this area for awhile and we are going to need a lot of coal/iron/copper soon so we should start automating things.
3. I might have missed it but I didn't see anything teaching the player how to pick up items from the ground/belts (the F key by default). I think this is an important element for new players who might end up putting everything on belts and then won't know how to use them in crafting
4. When biters first start appearing there is a bug that causes them to just stand around until you start shooting at them
5. Compilatron was constantly telling me my gun turret was damaged. After the first few times it was annoying since by that point I was well aware that I needed to keep checking my turrets and repairing them.
6. I clicked a blank box on the new toolbelt and it gave me a large list of items, most of which hadn't been introduced. It would be great if this only showed items available in the campaign.
As opposed to other commenters I did not find the campaign too hard. I had a total of 5 turrets that did a fine job of keeping the factory safe. I ended up not automating too much which might have lead to less pollution. For example, I manually moved all the coal to where it was needed rather than using inserters.
[0.17.4] Campaign feedback
Re: [0.17.4] Campaign feedback
Yeah, you missed it, I totally got that help from Compy. You may have missed it by doing it yourself, before Compy thought it should be taught; that basically sets an internal flag that you know how to do this and shouldn't be bothered with it.
I think that's a mistake, myself, since it's reasonably common to do something and not remember what you pressed to do it. "I did pick something up, once, but it was on accident." Like you are trying to move right and there just happens to be something on the ground when you fat-finger the F key.