0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post your ideas and suggestions how to improve the game.

Moderator: ickputzdirwech

Post Reply
User avatar
CDarklock
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 342
Joined: Sun Dec 03, 2017 2:17 am
Contact:

0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by CDarklock »

This is all very train-of-thought, written as I played through the campaign.

Sometimes player reach distance isn't the full 10, or even the full 6.

You've fixed the "alt-tab changes display view" problem. That's nice.

Poking around the area, I got some solid fuel from the wreckage and used it. This might cause problems down the line, I was trying to break things. ;)

The goal display is strange, with goals listed from larger to smaller. Takes some adjustment. Instead of being "do this, then do this" it's all "do this, but first do this" which seems backwards.

After piping the materials into the gear assembler, I had to add another belt and an inserter to produce the gears. This wasn't entirely clear.

When adding the gears to the assembler for red science, I could not use an inserter from the side. I had to side-load a belt into the arrowed entrance. This was confusing.

During evacuation, I couldn't get "collect some of your equipment" to tick off. I spent a lot of time poking around trying to place and remove things in an effort to get the green checkmark, but it never happened. This may be where I was supposed to collect the solid fuel.

Jumped the gun and researched electric inserters here.

I hate the new toolbar. It doesn't work like I expect. "Set Filter" doesn't make any sense if you don't recognise the terminology. It took me a while to figure out it's middle-click to clear something out of the toolbar. It is weird that I can put the same item in my toolbar multiple times. It is difficult and non-intuitive to reorder items in the toolbar.

But it also has this nifty little menu where I can turn various things on and off, which I like. So mission accomplished on putting a carrot with the stick, I see that there's a tradeoff and I do feel like it's probably worth it.

After evacuation, I had trouble setting up my steam power, because the shape of the water blocked me from placing a boiler where I wanted and then prevented me from placing a belt where I needed it to feed the boiler. This may or may not be a Good Thing in terms of teaching players where they can and can't build.

It drives me crazy that there are rocks on the little island over there and I can't reach them.

Jumped the gun again and researched electric miners before personal tech.

Aliens destroyed one of my power poles on an ore patch. When I pressed Q to select item on the destroyed pole, it selected a burner drill instead. This is probably just because it was on an ore patch.

The hint to make more labs is very welcome - I ran on one lab for an embarrassingly long time in early games.

Having to produce a certain number of everything per minute is a little overwhelming, so I'm taking a break. It feels like a lot, and I'm not entirely new to this.

Okay, I'm back after the break, and my paranoia is suggesting that I need to research and build walls... along with researching the bullet speed upgrade. I'm also anticipating that once I meet the stated goals, I'll get attacked a LOT, so I feel like I need to have about a half-dozen turrets before I get my automation running.

Essentially, I am putting off the automation to artificially delay the rise in attack strength, because that is how games work.

Once I got two turrets up on one side, protecting my iron from the biters on the left, I was surprised to have biters attacking from the right and destroying my copper production. This has now doubled my base protection requirements, so I need an entire dozen turrets and probably a double-thick wall because they're doing a lot of damage.

I'm researching everything, because I feel like the temptation to hurry through the scenario by not doing research is a trap. A lot of games will give you an optional path, and if you only took that path, you would find the awesome thing that makes the whole quest easy.

So I'm suspicious that when you don't SAY to research repair packs, you're trying to trick me into getting my stuff damaged before I have any, and then I have to research it while I still have damaged stuff, and that will give the biters a chance to destroy it. That feels like it could become a death spiral.

I'm already feeling the benefit of electric miners and inserters, which don't need me to put fuel into them all the time, so I just have to worry about furnaces.

I'm keeping my furnaces right next to the miners, because I "don't know" it's more efficient to smelt in a separate location. So the mining operation is a mess, and there are power poles everywhere. When biters attack, they're managing to take down power poles and furnaces and miners and it's a real pain.

At one point, biters attacked my copper production and stopped attacking after they took out a couple things. I couldn't tell these were living biters, so I merrily walked through the area to replace the broken stuff, and a pack of biters suddenly mobilised to attack me. I feel like they should have an idle animation? I thought they did? Maybe they froze up during an attack, when they shouldn't have? Honestly idk what happened and I haven't been able to replicate it.

This is, of course, why I want walls. Which I've automated up in the little stone area, but it's slow, so I'm derping around collecting walls every so often and gradually walling things off. Eventually I get a single wall up each side, and I feel a little safer. I feel even better when I double that wall up and expand to a whole dozen turrets.

Somewhere in here I needed to upgrade power and add another boiler and steam engine, but I was distracted by ongoing defensive stuff and didn't make a note of it.

It is a really Good Idea that you made me automate ammo. I always either forget to do that, or don't do ENOUGH automation. Setting the bar at 25 magazines per minute gives me a realistic picture of how much ammo I need to be producing. It also gives me a solid hint at how many enemies you're going to throw at me.

By the time I've got all the walls and turrets I need, I've got saturated belts full of copper and iron plates, and my furnaces are idle because they've buffered a hundred each. That's not a lot for copper, which only has one electric miner, but iron has four.

This makes it really easy to set up the automation, which initially isn't doing the job because of factory insertion limitations: one factory making research packs and feeding straight into a lab won't do six science a minute. But if you feed it into a chest, and then feed from the chest into the lab, it will.

Similarly, you have to feed the electric circuits somewhere and not just pile them up in the assembler. I don't have a standing location to send them, so I again use a chest.

Once I get tasked with researching green science, I notice that the biters are pathing to specific parts of the wall, so I shore up each side with another turret right there and move the turrets around to put that spot in range of more turrets. This leaves some weaker areas in the northern half of the grid, so I want to add another couple turrets on each side, which will take me to eighteen.

That seems like a lot of turrets for a space this small, but it occurs to me that without the bullet speed research I did, I'd need even more of them. And without the long delay while I built walls, I wouldn't have as much research done. Without these walls, I'd be in serious trouble, and it would be really hard to research and build them during these attack waves.

I feel like if I were just doing the minimum I was told to do, and finishing as fast as I could, this game would be really incredibly frustrating. And I keep running out of wood, so I have to chop down trees, but there aren't a whole lot of trees here. It seems like it would be possible to run out, and then I wouldn't be able to make power poles.

There's a real sense of danger here, as if the scenario could become unwinnable should I mess up the wrong thing. I don't really like it. The whole thing feels... unsafe. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because unsafe is exciting.

But I'm feeling this very real concern that it isn't unsafe because of the dangerous game elements, but because I am not supposed to know what I'm doing yet. I feel like there are insidious little psychological traps set in several directions, and troll-faced devs have sat around snickering about how if I don't do the Secret Thing I will lose and that will be a good joke on me.

Walls and bullet speed make the scenario comfortably safe, in terms of the alien attacks, and having repair researched means fixing things is easy. But I didn't get told to do those things. (Maybe I would have if I didn't do them. I don't know yet.)

About 50% of the way through the research, a group of biters spawned on the west side, but just sat there doing nothing. I guess they were too far away to detect my base. This was oddly helpful, as they stood there getting in the way of other biters... who spawned farther away... but could still attack? Don't know what was going on there.

After a while it offended my sensibilities to have them out there, so I took down a bit of the wall and went out to kite them into the turret array. Took substantial damage, but of course researching everything included building some heavy armour, so it was not as bad as it might have been.

Observation suggests they have a waypoint there, where they can potentially get stuck. A lot of later biter swarms go to that spot, mill around for a bit, and then continue the attack. Appears to be maybe a pathing thing?

Around the 75% mark of the research, I doubled ammo production to keep up with the biter attacks. I didn't really need to, I was just being paranoid. I have this vague sense that the attacks will get worse when research is done. I feel like I should have gone ahead and done Bullet Speed 2.

In fact, the attacks did get worse right before research was done, and SIX of my nine turrets on the east side of the base ran out of ammo while I was madly throwing ALL of my ammo into the turrets on the west side. Even 50 magazines per minute isn't enough to keep up.

I completed the campaign, so I've attached the screenshots, converted to JPEG for size reasons. I was still under attack and wanted to keep playing, so I managed to hold them off by repairing the walls while they were breaking them = then raced off to get some magazines from the chest, and reloaded the turret, which effectively carved them up. When I went to get some walls from the chest up north, though, the game crashed. (Log and dump files attached.)

I may have other thoughts to add about the campaign later. I want to go through it another couple times. Overall, I like it; there are things that could be done better, and the combat is a little heavy for my taste, but it's a great introduction to the game. My biggest criticism is that this is not at all representative of the combat you'll face in a freeplay game - you don't need this much defence for your base, you won't be attacked this often, and the biters won't be this numerous. So if you like this level of combat, you're probably going to find the game boring, and if you don't like it you may be scared away from the game when you would actually really enjoy it.
Attachments
campaign_base_screenshots.zip
(13 MiB) Downloaded 71 times
npe-crash.zip
(180.6 KiB) Downloaded 65 times

abregado
Former Staff
Former Staff
Posts: 282
Joined: Sat Aug 30, 2014 9:43 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by abregado »

Thanks for playing!
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
Sometimes player reach distance isn't the full 10, or even the full 6.
there are actually several different player reach values in the game. The one you read about in the changelog was "open gui" i beleive
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
The goal display is strange, with goals listed from larger to smaller. Takes some adjustment. Instead of being "do this, then do this" it's all "do this, but first do this" which seems backwards.
Yes, it will feel strange. The concept is that if you just create an ordered list of tasks, the student will just complete them in order and not consider what they are doing. With the list backwards, the help for the next step is there if you need it, or you can skip it if you already know how to do the top item.
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
When adding the gears to the assembler for red science, I could not use an inserter from the side. I had to side-load a belt into the arrowed entrance. This was confusing.
confusing yes, but it forced you to make a T-intsersection with the belts, something that is important for a new player to see and do themselves.
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
During evacuation, I couldn't get "collect some of your equipment" to tick off. I spent a lot of time poking around trying to place and remove things in an effort to get the green checkmark, but it never happened. This may be where I was supposed to collect the solid fuel.
Going to fix this one soon. Actually most people I watched did not read that quest and just left all their items behind!
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
After evacuation, I had trouble setting up my steam power, because the shape of the water blocked me from placing a boiler where I wanted and then prevented me from placing a belt where I needed it to feed the boiler. This may or may not be a Good Thing in terms of teaching players where they can and can't build.
You got it. If there is an obvious place to build the power, then new players dont think. It is amazing to see all the different builds i was sent.
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
Jumped the gun again and researched electric miners before personal tech.
There is no wrong way to play this scenario!
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
The hint to make more labs is very welcome - I ran on one lab for an embarrassingly long time in early games.
Sadly i have two choices here. Force the player to build more labs, which they will just remove if they want, or make them get bored waiting so they automate more themselves... probably better they learn the hard way before they get to blue science.
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
I'm researching everything, because I feel like the temptation to hurry through the scenario by not doing research is a trap. A lot of games will give you an optional path, and if you only took that path, you would find the awesome thing that makes the whole quest easy.
Im adding a "Tutorial part complete" message, so only the brave will continue from this point. Gamers automatically be lazy if they think it is a tutorial which leads to them destroying their own play experience. By this stage, the scenario is NOT a tutorial and is about to kick your butt.
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
There's a real sense of danger here, as if the scenario could become unwinnable should I mess up the wrong thing. I don't really like it. The whole thing feels... unsafe. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because unsafe is exciting.
I wanted that feeling to be present but it currently lasts for too long. Balance will come. Compi should probably give you a thumbs up every now and again if you are on track.

The biters are buggy at the moment and it is hard to get them to do what i want. Nice to see your attack rate curve was smooth, some others were not so lucky (no attacks, or to omany)
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
My biggest criticism is that this is not at all representative of the combat you'll face in a freeplay game - you don't need this much defence for your base, you won't be attacked this often, and the biters won't be this numerous.
Try desert deathworld :D Because this is the demo i need to show off all the possibilities. I agree it is not very representative for default freeplay. Your feedback will help make it more aligned.

Thanks for pushing through and winning. Afterwards if you win, the map expands and the level continues.

vaendryl
Inserter
Inserter
Posts: 25
Joined: Mon Apr 02, 2018 4:21 pm
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by vaendryl »

jumping on this thread to add my own thoughts. the game asked me to share the ending screenshots in any case.

in the beginning the game asks you to open the 'character screen' I believe. I don't think the game explained before that what it meant by that or how to do so. it just meant to press E.

the robot destroyed my existing iron mines to show an example layout. wasn't a big deal as I only had 3 mines but that doesn't seem like a great way to go about things. I'd recommend having the robot do this on a new iron patch that previously was not accessible or visible.

just before having to evacuate the initial base it says something like 'grab your equipment' or something. totally unclear what was meant there. turns out you should just grab as much of everything you can as you start anew on the same map. I think that could be communicated more clearly.

the game does emphasize that you need plenty of defence before walking close to the robot helper after building your first or so turret, but I went all out for fun and thought I'd be completely impervious with the insane amount of defences I had (giving it's the first level of a tutorial). turns out it was no-where near enough and I actually lost - as you can see on my final screenshot. I was completely overwhelmed as I just wasn't making ammo fast enough. it was pure luck that green science research completed when it did, and that that just happened to be the finish line of the tutorial so far. if it wasn't, I'd have had to restart.

maybe I was making a lot more pollution than the tutorial was tuned for and in order to give even novice players a bit of a challenge it's set in such a way that minor pollution still spawns a few decent waves. result of that though is that a bigger base gets completely destroyed lol.

screenshots made by the game are like 30mb big. 4kx4k png. yeah, I can upload that nowhere. had to resize and comress them.


Image
Image
Image

User avatar
CDarklock
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 342
Joined: Sun Dec 03, 2017 2:17 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by CDarklock »

abregado wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 10:30 am
Thanks for playing!
I love NPE work. It's so often neglected. I railed about this at MIcrosoft for years. You guys are doing great.
CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 5:13 am
When adding the gears to the assembler for red science, I could not use an inserter from the side. I had to side-load a belt into the arrowed entrance. This was confusing.
confusing yes, but it forced you to make a T-intsersection with the belts, something that is important for a new player to see and do themselves.
I agree it's important, but it's very frustrating to be sitting there going "why doesn't my inserter work?!" for a really long time. It honestly felt like a bug. I was tearing down and replacing that inserter over and over again. I changed out the fuel from wood to coal to solid and had no idea what was going on. Then I thought I had to add all the copper first, and then the gears would go in. So I'm compelled to wonder: how many people will actually sideload, and how many will just tear down the copper belt to reroute the gears into the entrance?

I'm sure you're gathering stats on that, and I would love, love, LOVE to hear some of them about how different people play the game. That would make an awesome FFF entry. We had a discussion earlier about how surprised people are that other people play the game differently, and that seems really weird to me - because there are so many ways to play this game. I feel like knowing more about how other people play can only give people ideas and make them excited about playing in different ways.
Actually most people I watched did not read that quest and just left all their items behind!
I noticed at some point while collecting my stuff that it didn't count. Like it says to get three assemblers, but when I picked up the assemblers I already made, that didn't update the achievement. I wonder if that makes people think they're not supposed to pick up their stuff.

Next time through I'm just abandoning everything, to see what that ends up meaning. I feel like a rush playthrough may be in order, since a lot of people do that. "How fast can I do all this?"
There is no wrong way to play this scenario!
I actually think there is a wrong way - the biter attacks later become impossible if you haven't put enough time and effort into military research. I see a lot of people saying the scenario is too hard, and even though I don't really like combat and am not really good at it, I never felt like the attacks were too hard.
Sadly i have two choices here. Force the player to build more labs, which they will just remove if they want, or make them get bored waiting so they automate more themselves... probably better they learn the hard way before they get to blue science.
I like that you chose the third path, of telling them to build more labs if it's too slow. "I can have more than one lab?" was such an epiphany for me when I first saw someone running a network of half a dozen early in the game.
Im adding a "Tutorial part complete" message, so only the brave will continue from this point. Gamers automatically be lazy if they think it is a tutorial which leads to them destroying their own play experience. By this stage, the scenario is NOT a tutorial and is about to kick your butt.
"Tutorial part complete" = "No longer safe, reload your autosave and stockpile." ;)
Thanks for pushing through and winning. Afterwards if you win, the map expands and the level continues.
Yeah, I saw it expand. And I've saved that bit, so I can continue later. I'm about to go play the NPE again, while pretending to be even dumber. Should I put added feedback in a new thread, or just update this one?

abregado
Former Staff
Former Staff
Posts: 282
Joined: Sat Aug 30, 2014 9:43 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by abregado »

Drop it here. I already have many many threads to check.

On the second run, try running this command

/Compi wait_time 0.01

At the start.

User avatar
CDarklock
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 342
Joined: Sun Dec 03, 2017 2:17 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by CDarklock »

abregado wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 1:23 pm
Drop it here. I already have many many threads to check.
Problem: I went into "ooh shiny" mode and chopped down all the trees. Then I made chests with all my wood. Soooooo yeah.

I looked around the map and confirmed there's no wood anywhere, just in case you pulled a sneaky on me and regrew some of them.

I was sure someone reported this already, but I couldn't find the bug report. In any case it's not necessarily a bug, as "doing weird things can ruin your game" is a lesson players should learn at some point.

EDIT: Giving the player an odd number of wood bits would solve this, because I'd still have one left over after making all the chests.
Attachments
nowood.png
nowood.png (281.8 KiB) Viewed 1754 times

abregado
Former Staff
Former Staff
Posts: 282
Joined: Sat Aug 30, 2014 9:43 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by abregado »

elegant solution.
Ill give them a single piece of wood when they cut their first tree.

User avatar
CDarklock
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 342
Joined: Sun Dec 03, 2017 2:17 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by CDarklock »

Started a new campaign, got to the part where I feed iron into the feeder. Two thoughts.

1. After the initial fifty plates are fed in, they just... disappear? That doesn't seem right.

2. Having successfully fed the plates in, the input lane disappears and I don't continue feeding iron into the assembler. I have to construct another belt and an inserter. It may be better to have the player construct the inserter for the initial feed process. Compy does show up and tell me to do this, though, so maybe it's okay.

Immediately after this, Compy tells me to feed copper and gears into the other assembler, and basically stalls. He stops giving me useful feedback on what I'm doing now, and instead just sits there. Which means he couldn't tell me to use an inserter to get the gears out of the assembler, even if he wanted to.

My impulse upon being told to put copper and gears into the other assembler is to start with the mostly-completed gear insertion, and then worry about setting up a mining operation for copper. Maybe Compy should suggest these in that order. Also, maybe there should be a second loading alley for gears. But since we want players to learn sideloading, per previous discussion, maybe Compy should explain this?

Sideloading directly next to the assembler doesn't work.
sideload.png
sideload.png (291.52 KiB) Viewed 1737 times
Sideloading one more space to the left does, though.
sideload2.png
sideload2.png (138.85 KiB) Viewed 1737 times
Mentioned earlier that running the belt up to the assembler and using an inserter doesn't work at this point, either. It will work later, but not now. And, again, if your first cut at putting gears into the machine should work but doesn't, the natural conclusion is that this is because you have to feed all the copper before feeding any of the gears.

Also, these two processes strongly imply that you can only feed ingredients into an assembler from the centre of one side, not from literally any space around it. Maybe the magic sidelanes should go away entirely, and progress should be achieved purely by the desired materials ending up in the assembler by any means at all.

Meanwhile, I am merrily feeding gears into my assembler while I am setting up copper, and they are disappearing into oblivion because I have already sent in fifty. It seems like the magic sidelane should stop taking my gears (or copper) once I have given it the necessary fifty.

This is arguably a lesson, since I "learned" it when I sent iron plates into the gear assembler and they were just gone. So I pretended to learn that and interrupted the flow of gears by removing a single belt segment. Just wanted to raise a hand about that being a lesson that gets taught here, it's not necessarily bad.

User avatar
CDarklock
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 342
Joined: Sun Dec 03, 2017 2:17 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by CDarklock »

CDarklock wrote:
Wed Feb 27, 2019 3:51 pm
1. After the initial fifty plates are fed in, they just... disappear? That doesn't seem right.
After some thought, it occurs to me that these plates are being used to repair the damaged assembler. That makes sense. Okay, no problem then.

So now... why does repairing the second assembler need copper and gears? Logic suggests it would require the same fifty iron to repair. But since we need copper plates... maybe require just copper plates at this point, and then ask for gears once that's done? Thet would give you a three-step process:

- Pipe iron from the automated mining setup Compy made into the first assembler
- Make your own automated mining setup to pipe copper into the second assembler
- Pipe gears from the first assembler into the second to make science packs

This seems like it would create less confusion, while still accomplishing the necessary goals and removing the potentially-infinite resource drain of assembler #2 continuing to consume the first resource you give it, while you work toward giving it the second.

User avatar
CDarklock
Filter Inserter
Filter Inserter
Posts: 342
Joined: Sun Dec 03, 2017 2:17 am
Contact:

Re: 0.17.1 NPE campaign thoughts

Post by CDarklock »

Also, here's Compy sitting around with his digital thumb up his exhaust while all of my burners and one of my inserters are out of fuel. ;)
Attachments
fuelout.png
fuelout.png (427.17 KiB) Viewed 1735 times

Post Reply

Return to “Ideas and Suggestions”