My Super Long Feedback and Suggestions

[Mythoss]

Initial Impressions and Balancing Issues

First let me start by saying this game is awesome. I've lost more hours in it than I care to share. I was blown away by the level of detail and how vast the game is but easy to pick up. The intro campaign levels are great at slowly introducing concepts and the minor story is fun. Reminds me a bit of "The Martian." I hope this game really takes off on Steam so it can get a lot of down the road support.

With that being said, there are however, a few balancing issues that stood out. I've generated countless maps where there is no iron ore in the starting base. Since I need to make ammo from iron to kill the biters guarding the ore outside of the starting area, I would get stuck. Often, I would have regenerating the map until I got a setup with Iron ore. Ideally I'd like to see a decent amount of the three ores inside the starting area always. Not too much as to promote train usage and map exploration.

Even when I set the ore frequency to very low it spawns all over the map. It looks like this setting needs to be tweaked to further reduce ore scarcity. Getting ore in this game is just too easy. Less ore everywhere but with larger deposits makes more sense for the encouragement of train use. Unfortunately no setting combination of the ores could achieve this. Additionally the normal bitter difficulties are really easy. They don't present much of a challenge and evolve too slowly. When I try to up the game difficulty by increases bitter bases from normal to big there is a huge spike in difficulty. There needs to be an in between. I suggest reevaluating these settings. I realize this game is intended to be a “builder’s” game first with some mini tower defense second, but I was unable to find a combination of bitter settings that was challenging but not impossible. The jump from normal to big is just too much.

The car has weird timing issues. If you wait a bit on resource, you can skip it altogether and go for the tank. It takes too many resources for the utility it provides. I’d suggest making it a little “tankier” so it’s an in-between or reduce the resource costs so its early game accessibility increases. Modular vehicles (car) could be a really neat gameplay feature to bring some long term use into it. Armor upgrades, different gun mounts, faster engines, ect. Basically it could be a much faster endgame scout to the tank.

Trains are really resource heavy and a pain to build. Laying tracks are a bit of a chore. I spent two hours trying to get a double headed train to work without a loop. I used two signals next to each other, all sorts of combinations, looked up google images. I still couldn’t figure out how to make it work so I ended up with a loop system. The loops take up a lot of base room and are not always feasible. I find signals super confusing, tried to figure them out as well so my trains wouldn’t run into each other and loop intersections. There has to be a more intuitive way to do these. Fluid tank cabs for trains would be a really neat addition for transporting oil instead of the barrels we have now. Basically some kind of pipe station that hooks up with the train docks would be cool.

Some Additional Ideas

I realize some of these may have already been discussed, planned, or in a mod. If so, just consider my feedback an echoing statement to wanting the feature!

Since I got all my friends into playing the game, we all felt like water was a missed opportunity. We need to at least be able to build bridges over it. Pipes and belts should also have some kind of water option. There is a lot you could do to expand with water. Oil extractors, ships, underwater bases (Anno style), and floating base platforms. Underwater ore extraction or geothermal. Rivers and hydroelectric dams. Tidal generators. If food ever gets introduced fisheries and seaweed farming.
More power options would be great, geothermal, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, maybe natural gas if it could be different enough from coal, ect.
Flying bitters could add a whole other dimension to the defense aspect. Rockets could get more use in the form of SAM sites. Tunneling bitters is another idea. Water based bitters if that area ever gets expanded upon.

More defense options: Artillery turrets, flamethrower turrets, electrified walls. Wall mounted turrets or emplacements. Cannons, SAM sites, shields, ect. Permanent combat robots or drones. These could be tied to a CPU to limit the amount produced for balancing reasons (as opposed to the on use drones).

The environments are pretty and the art design is fantastic, but they don’t always feel alive or alien or different. Some alien creatures or different biomes (alien) that are unique could really add to the atmosphere. I realize elevation probably isn’t possible on the current engine but fake elevation through the use of cliffs like in StarCraft or command and conquer could be a welcome addition. Stronghold Crusader actually does a good job of 2d 3d if you are looking for some inspiration.
I think food could be another interesting resource to manage if it wasn’t overly annoying or time consuming. Maybe just left to a separate game mode? Some kind of corporate game mode could be interesting with managing colonists and exports. Maybe this is too crazy of an idea for the base game. Expansion?!

Multiplayer Scenarios!! This is a really popular idea among friends. Survival mode with waves of enemies to see how long you can survive. A whole co-op campaign. Hell, make the single player campaign co-op. I’d even love to see the single player campaign expanded upon.

We need more reasons to explore and get players out into the world. Randomized crumbling bases with loot chests? Maybe rare modules you can’t make? Rarer resources that only spawn further out (plutonium)? Maybe food in the form of berries, alien animals, plants, ect.

That’s all I can think of for now. Hopefully someone finds this feedback or suggestions useful. I can’t emphasis how awesome this game is. It really hits the spot of feeling fresh and different. What a talented team.

[Serenity]

Yeah, the map generator seriously sucks. Also frequency and richness influence each other in a weird way. Definitely needs to be changed. I'd suggest the RSO mod (Resource Spawner Overhaul). That is firstly meant to put resources further out to encourage train gameplay. You are guaranteed to get some in your starting area, but you will have to expand. And resources further away will get richer.

But you can also control everything to not necessarily have to use super long rail lines. The main settings are in config.lua. And in you can set settings for individual resources in resourceconfigs/vanilla.lua. There you can control for example the amount of patches per region. And since you are guaranteed to get starting resources, you could increase those. Just save the default file.

For easier rail laying get the FARL mod. Load everything into the FARL locomotive and start driving. Automatically builds rail via blueprints and clears trees and stuff. Also builds "bridges" over water by just adding land under it. The rail laying will be improved in future versions though. You will be able to move the endpoint around and the game will automatically generate a path.

There is a RailTanker mod. I think I read somewhere that tank wagons are planned for the main game though.


The car is for exploration and quick movement. Not so much for fighting, despite its use in the campaign. Again the RSO mod will require you drive around more and far further.

I found the tank weapons a bit underpowered and the main gun very hard to control. It's got great durability though and you can drive over smaller worms. I also had the modular armor/weapons idea. That will also make the vehicles scale better and keep up better with power armor for example.

Otherwise I agree. There are so many ideas for more content and options. Especially energy generation seems a bit limited. Overall I'd like more choice and ways to do things.

[Xterminator]

Always interesting and good to read feedback like this.

I agree on almost all your points actually.
The resource generation on maps is kind of weird and certainly doesn't always work how you think it will, and could be improved for sure. In fact the Devs so plan to rework it in a future patch to spread things out more and make distribution a bit more even, etc. For now though I suggest the RSO or Train Outpost Mod.

The car does seem a little bit out of place based on when you can get it. It is great for exploration though since it is fast and a bit more nimble thn the Tank. However I do agree it should probably be more durable cause after hitting a few trees (which, lets face it, is inevitable lol) you have to get out and repair it.

Trains are pretty confusing and can take some time to build, but once you understand them and get them set up, they are amazingly fun and great at hauling resources over long distances. I suggest checking out this video for a very good train tutorial that covers pretty much everything you would need to know: https://youtu.be/3ZiL7_vfJtQ

In regards to your other idea, I completely agree on most fronts. The water think I really hope they take advantage of before the game is considered complete. The amount of awesome stuff you could in regards to boats or barges and eater enemies and bridges, and under water oil drilling, etc is crazy and would add a whole other demnsion to the game.

As for the other stuff, you can find mods for most of it actually. Electrified walls you can find in the Forcefield Mod I believe, same with some great mods for combat stuff. I suggest checking out the Mod Spotlight post here to find tons of video demonstrations of different mods: viewtopic.php?f=88&t=16042

[Serenity]

I don't have such a problem with hitting trees unless it's a dense forest. But those damn rocks everywhere are pure evil and do far more damage. I always manage to hit some. It's especially bad at night because the headlights are pretty weak.

[Mythoss]

Thanks for the heads up with the resource mod, so much better now. Yes the car is a great scout but it can be pain to use with trees and they can't take many hits. I don't expect it to be a tank but if it could be upgraded to be somewhere in between (modular) it would get a bit more use.

[Serenity]

Oh and a correction. If you want to make resources scarcer, who should decrease absolute_resource_chance rather than increase the region size. The region size is used as an exponent, so its effect becomes more pronounced the farther out you go. I think this can be done in a running game too, as chunks are only generated as discovered.

Of course you can also lower the settings in the main menu. That applies a multiplier to the mod numbers.