[0.17.1] intro too hard

[abregado]

More like >200%.

Well i said it reaches 100% at that point... I never said it didnt go above 100%
New version will have a rework of the algo which will be smoother and only kick you in the butt if you try to be either lazy or rush through with 30 labs... or something.

[abregado]

2. Change the final science to making something demo-specific that really angers the biters. That'll telegraph that things are going to get harder as you progress along the technology progress so the player knows to expect it. It'll also keep from teaching bad habits for freeplay in potentially making the green science acquisition seem like a bad idea to do early. Just in general show that it's abnormal and tutorial specific.

This is most likely what will happen. Moving the quest chunks around and giving the player a really massive heads up "Hey, umm, you're done here but if you REALLY want a challenge then stick around". Also showing the sweet massive area as a reward before asking if the player wants to continue.

[abregado]

One huge thing he has that I don't is an automatic supply line for his turrets.

Yes, this also limits the number of rounds that are lost when a turret explodes. A lot of fail states will come from losing 200 rounds in a turret. I'm working on a fix for that.

[bobucles]

A lot of fail states will come from losing 200 rounds in a turret.

A good hotfix is don't allow 200 mags in a turret. It's obvious that a 200 turret is WAY more ammo than it will ever live to use and ends up being a noob trap.

A good short term number is around 20'ish, with long term deployment up to 50'ish. Beyond that level of combat turrets risk blowing up. If a player needs more ammo it's better to use more guns, and if they need extreme ammo it is time to use a belt loading system.

[sunnyskies]

Hm… The only thing that left me upset was that the Compilatron bulldozed my burner drill and furnace to set up his mining belt demonstration. On one hand, I was pleased that the items stowed away in the quest chest weren’t lost to the void of NPC fetch questing, but rather, put to good use. But on the other hand it revised my threat categorization from Zelda’s Navi to Halo’s Monitor. It’s not my friend who will abandon me long after proving itself a nuisance. It’s a hostile NPC pretending to be my friend.

Which meant that after spending a minute to mourn my scrap heap, I spent the next three vindictively trying to bug out the Compilatron and crash the scenario. It occurred to me while writing this up that I hadn’t tried fencing it in with furnaces, so I took five to go do so. It demolishes anything in it’s path. Evil.

One huge thing he has that I don't is an automatic supply line for his turrets.

Yes, this also limits the number of rounds that are lost when a turret explodes. A lot of fail states will come from losing 200 rounds in a turret. I'm working on a fix for that.

Oh? Salvageable turret scrap heaps?

[CDarklock]

But on the other hand it revised my threat categorization from Zelda’s Navi to Halo’s Monitor. It’s not my friend who will abandon me long after proving itself a nuisance. It’s a hostile NPC pretending to be my friend.

I was halfway expecting to find out that Compy crashed the ship on purpose because he was the real villain all along. And then we would have to fight Mega Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Compilatron.

[pichutarius]

...

No. The newbie is the intended audience.

...

You don't. You could have worked it out on your own.

It became reasonably obvious to me that ...

indeed the newbie is the intended audience. find how many newbies are confused and frustrated, one special case isnt representative enough.

if new demo is what work for you, good. i could have worked it out on my own, if it was old demo.

the old demo showed partially destroyed layout and rubble and let me figure out how to rebuild it, the process silently taught me how to set up production line. it took me 5 hours to trial and error, i enjoy every second. i though it was a brilliant tutorial, i bought the game.

this demo doesnt even show how to properly set up power production, and kill players for over production. if this demo is my first experience, no thanks.

i have not finish it, i read people about cheesing the game by purposely halt objective progress, that is dumb design (in my opinion).

until i finish the demo, im still open to change my opinion, for now, old demo is better.

[CDarklock]

indeed the newbie is the intended audience. within the forumjust find how many newbies are confused and frustrated

Um... one, that I've seen. Just about everyone I've seen confused and frustrated has been a longtime veteran of the game. I could be wrong; I don't read every single post in every single thread, so there may be other newbies confused and frustrated.

But it doesn't seem like there are a lot of them.

[wahming]

indeed the newbie is the intended audience. within the forumjust find how many newbies are confused and frustrated

Um... one, that I've seen. Just about everyone I've seen confused and frustrated has been a longtime veteran of the game. I could be wrong; I don't read every single post in every single thread, so there may be other newbies confused and frustrated.

But it doesn't seem like there are a lot of them.

But how many newbie reviews have there actually been?

As somebody who currently has two friends learning the game? I introduced them to 0.16 last week, and I have not told them about the update due to just how newbie-unfriendly I feel the tutorial is. In my view the previous tutorial currently does a much better job of teaching and is way more predictable. Somebody else mentioned they had a friend try out the tutorial for the first time, and he was so frustrated he gave up. I can envision that happening to my friends too.

[Lithane]

After sitting and watching my mom try the game for the first time ever on the intro map, I can say that it's definitely not too hard for anyone who has some experience gaming. She never plays pc games and her biggest involvement in video games is playing civ revolution on the xbox. With some gentle guidance from me she managed to beat the intro in roughly 4 hours, which I don't know, to me it was slow and grueling but for a new player trying to grasp the mechanics it's probably about right. She only died one time and it was because she didn't keep her turrets full on one side.


She has issues seeing anything that isn't in the center of her vision due to a head injury that occurred some time ago, so she was playing with none of the visual indicators that are at the edge of the screen, a biter just ate something? Didn't see it, didn't hear it either since she didn't want to wear the headset -_- Besides all that, she was able to finish up the intro with a base that had 0 belts, yea belts not required apparently. So I don't know, seems like the intro is just fine on difficulty, though she was totally lost at the beginning on what she was supposed to be doing, and the arrow deals that are placeholders for inserters confused her to no end, I think those can be thrown out or explained better, there is no indication that you are supposed to run a belt to them. A couple minor little bugs and some extra helpful nudges here and there and the intro would be great for first timers in my opinion.

[Lithane]

But on the other hand it revised my threat categorization from Zelda’s Navi to Halo’s Monitor. It’s not my friend who will abandon me long after proving itself a nuisance. It’s a hostile NPC pretending to be my friend.

I was halfway expecting to find out that Compy crashed the ship on purpose because he was the real villain all along. And then we would have to fight Mega Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Compilatron.

I just beat the MINAC today with my friend for the first time, that's too funny!

[CDarklock]

But how many newbie reviews have there actually been?

One, that I know of. And one secondhand. Only the secondhand review was bad - the firsthand streamed playthrough (five hours of it) was a rough time but ultimately positive.

I am not sure how much to believe the secondhand review. "My friend doesn't like this game. He goes to another school, you wouldn't know him."

I mean, the guy was having trouble figuring out the different ways of opening different containers, and would button-mash on them.

There are no different ways of opening containers. Left-click opens every container. Something else was going on there, and if I were to speculate, it would be that the player had trouble understanding you can't open a container when you have something in your hand.

But that is just me speculating. It is not data. I'm confident that this was the problem, because we have a second report - Q to clear hand is confusing - which would align nicely with it. But you should never, ever, ever mistake speculation for data.

As somebody who currently has two friends learning the game? I introduced them to 0.16 last week, and I have not told them about the update due to just how newbie-unfriendly I feel the tutorial is.

Maybe you should let them decide for themselves whether to play it, and tell us what happens. I mean, right there, your two friends would double the amount of data we have on how actual newbies experience the campaign. It would be helpful to everyone. Even if they decide not to try it, that's useful information.

But speculation is not data. Data is real. Speculation is just something you made up in your head.

[CDarklock]

With some gentle guidance from me she managed to beat the intro in roughly 4 hours, which I don't know, to me it was slow and grueling but for a new player trying to grasp the mechanics it's probably about right. She only died one time and it was because she didn't keep her turrets full on one side.

That sounds like me. Four hours, turrets ran out of ammo on one side. I didn't die, but almost. I think I lasted four seconds or so after the win screen?

Wait, that was because the game crashed. I didn't actually die. The game crapped the bed when I tried to get more walls to replace biter damage.

I just beat the MINAC today with my friend for the first time, that's too funny!

I kept expecting some weird obscure pop culture reference and I was honestly disappointed there weren't any.

OMG the statue of liberty! It's Earth! We've crashed on Earth! Oh, DAMN YOU, COMPILATRONNNNNNNNN

[malventano]

More like >200%.

Well i said it reaches 100% at that point... I never said it didnt go above 100%
New version will have a rework of the algo which will be smoother and only kick you in the butt if you try to be either lazy or rush through with 30 labs... or something.

Was the behavior changed in 0.17.4 at all? Asking because I tried redoing the defense part of my prior save, but this time building the base significantly prior to starting the last research. Then when I was all locked and loaded I started up the same 4 labs I had before and even with research paused at 99% and intentionally placing a dozen radars to get power / pollution way high, the rate of biters never seemed to get anywhere close to where it was before when I was getting overrun with a crazy number of them. I also noted that three large clusters of biters were pooling to the east but they would never attack in a wave - only trickle out from the blobs of hundreds of them...

[dee-]

My humble opinion on the first campaign "Introduction" (0.17.4).

Disclaimer:
- I have played Factorio before but it is at least two years since I really counted some hours, HD-graphics and the reactor are totally new stuff for me, so I am not in the shape I used to be.
- Also in my previous plays I always had biters set to peaceful, so this will be the first time I really have to defend myself.
- I have not read any of the spoilers or tips or hints for the campaign.
- In fact, this is the first time I play a campaign.

And from my personal opinion -- it's waaaaaaay too easy. Really simple stuff and the biters are no challenge at all.
I felt pity for them as all they achieved was biting a small chunk off a single wall in a more difficult to defend corner, and for that thousands of them died.
Edit: Oh, and some stuff took a minor scratch because suddenly two/three biters stood inside my base; did they teleport there? Serious question.
I know YMMV but I had more problems fitting my base into the area than fighting off the biters or refilling my turrets.

Some impressions from the base:

At night - lightshow

At day - here you can see the whole base and the east defense, to the west is just another wall in the same fashion

Upon completing the campaign I got notified about some screenshots that were created during my play.
This was a bit unexpected.
I have no idea what they are for and why they have been done at the time they have been done. Anyone?

0-39-57 -- Base 2

2-56-33 -- Base 2 -- on the right side you can see the boxes with resources which I took over to the next base

6-53-1 -- Base 3 -- somebody forgot to zero-pad the seconds

7-7-47 -- Base 3 -- and forgot to zero-pad the minutes

At the end I noticed I haven't even used the new quickbar at all - silly me! I really am out of practice...

Overall I think the campaign was enjoyable!

It felt a bit clunky sometimes and I did not rush and always packed up all my things behind me and played safe.
Having no underground belts or splitters felt really weird at first but I managed somehow by rerouting belts around stuff and using inserters to split off resources. Also no lane balancing >_<
Actually I found this quite interesting and nice, keeps the more experiences players in check
I took around 1500 red science flasks from the previous base and used up nearly all resources there. This made the second base really easy as I had no need to automate this but just throw it into a box and put it onto a belt.
The task to produce green circuits and red science flasks felt a bit out of place and did not fit IMHO.

In case somebody is interested I uploaded my save a couple of minutes before the campaign ends. Just abort the research to keep playing.

Game finished

[Koub]

A community member has correctly pointed me out that I didn't move this topic to the subforum created for this purpose.
I have been quite hesitant until now, but I'll move it, and leave a shadow topic within Balancing for a few days, so that people used to finding it here won't be too baffled by its disappearance.
[Koub] Moved to Ideas and SuggestionsCampaign / Scenario suggestions

[TheRaph]

What did you all do?

I had placed only 5 turrets at each side. And I put them on the clifs, so I don't need to protect them.

I had built a second line with 3 turrets on the cliffs to the left hand side near Iron patch (that was my first line, that 5 turret one was built later).

It works very fine. I had only one brake trough on left hand side caused by ammo low. But the bugs was eliminated by second line. And I had to fight a little bit until I could close the gap in main line.

The only things I had automated was ammo and science packs. Gree circuit was automated by demand (wooden box to put iron inif circuits needed).

[sunnyskies]

But on the other hand it revised my threat categorization from Zelda’s Navi to Halo’s Monitor. It’s not my friend who will abandon me long after proving itself a nuisance. It’s a hostile NPC pretending to be my friend.

I was halfway expecting to find out that Compy crashed the ship on purpose because he was the real villain all along. And then we would have to fight Mega Interplanetary Ninja Assassin Compilatron.

Haha, I firmly believe that Compy deliberately crashed the ship.

The rest of the narrative though... So many opportunities, so many places to go. A boss fight does sound fun! As does fending off the Mega Interplanetary Corporation that build him Albeit, considerably unFactorio-freeplay-like. But a Command and Conquer campaign has little in common with a matchup. The same holds true for a thousand other games. Who can say where it will go? Guessing the whole story from the second draft of chapter one is quite a feat.

[Nulluhrzehn]

I have played 1200h of Factorio.

I remember when my friend first played factorio and I told him to start with the campaign. He got totally hooked and addicted, like he never gets with video games. I have never before or afterwards seen him so glued to the screen as he was back then. That all changed when he hit mission 3/4 where you had to attack an alien base. He tried and he started like some sort of trench war with the aliens and he got extremely wound up and frustrated and asked me to finish the mission for him, but the damage was already done and he felt extremely wierd about the game because of the combat mechanics he didn't understand.

I think it's similar with the new intro. It's too much about combat and giant waves of biters.

I played it today and failed. I thought, "this is a tutorial. it can't be that hard". I was very surprised when I saw the giant factories other players have built around the lake in the second half of mission 1. When I had researched Turrets I built 3 of them on each side of my factory and started to research green science. I was producing bullets with a single factory and distributing it personally. This would have been enough for a game of freeplay in classic factorio. Over the course of like 10 minutes the number of biters increased like crazy. I realized I needed a lot more iron plates to meet the demand of bullets, but I hadn't guarded the stone deposits let alone automated mining stone there so I had no chance to get more stone and expand iron smelting, because every time I went up there there was a huge army of biters camping there. Loading the earliest autosave was no solution. So I have to start all over again. great.
Also: Why would you put up such a challenge to a new player? I don't think a new player will build like 10 turrets on each side and then build a massive bullet production and THEN start researching green science. I think a new player would want to have some fun and research some really freaky tech. And when told to build turrets, he will think "alright compilannoy I will build some" and after building a few he will think "let's just see how this works out and adjust the factory when I can see errors coming up".

Also I read in the FFFs that the amount of biters spawned by a certain amount of polution is increased the further you get. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. It sounds to me like "If you build a magazine in minute 10 it will produce the polution which is enough to spawn 1/100 of a biter. If you build a magazine in minute 60 it will produce the polution which is enough to spawn 2 biters." This sounds to me like the game punishes you for making progress and forces you to 1. build a giant fortress and then 2. actually advance through the tech tree. Who want's that? When someone buys factorio, he want's to tech. He doesn't want to wallow in the stone age for ages. Also this effect of pollution being more and more dangerous is something I don't really recognize from factorio 0.16. I always put efficiency modules in every building in my factory the first chance I had and that pretty much made the biters barely attack me at all, even after 20/30 hours. So don't tell me I play lazy in the tutorial and Freeplay is just as hard.

I also noticed that whoever designed the tutorial made it this way on purpose to create a scenario where science production and ammo production were supposed to compete with each other and eventually both not be satisfied. That is way too much for a new player I think. He should be learning how to use both sides of a belt and stuff like that. At that point in the game he just learned how to build up a electric grid, mine with electic drills and automate electric energy production. Now you expect him to handle this kind of "the more you try, the harder it get's"-scenario ?
This is aweful.

You claim that the experienced players are at fault here, because they are unable to think like a newbie.

So you devs who work with the game for many years and have more insight into it's mechanics than us die hard heavy duty players ...
YOU think you can think like new players? You think we players are too distant from new players but you devs are closer to them? I don't think so.
I think you tried to design the ultimate tutorial(which includes every single aspect of the game, like scarcity of resources and production bottlenecks and hard concequences when not taking biters seriously), which is stupid, because a tutorial should simply be a kind of easy-as-pie/sand-box -scenario where you can learn the game's mechanics without pressure and in a peaceful or extremely easy scenario.

When I first learned the game a few years ago, it took me quite some time to learn everything. This game is deep. I learned about train signals when I was already 40/50 hours in, and I learned about curcuit networks about 80/100 hours in. Don't throw challenges at new players. Give them a digital blow job of a tutorial. Don't challenge them with this kind of "the iron is not enough for both of your productions so you will have to choose and make priorities! Isn't this fun?" No it's not. I don't see a newbie succeed here while learning one of the most complicated video games of history where those who have played it for 1000h+ will fail "because they are lazy".

If you want to see good tutorials, play one of Blizzards. Their tutorials are basically unlosable and look at their success.

I really love factorio and I think building a good tutorial for such a complicated game is a huge challenge. I don't blame anyone for not succeeding at it.
I just think whoever designed this one has failed.

Edit: Sorry about my anger fueled post. I want to apologize for calling compilatron names. He's cute and a cool addition to the game. I would have made him a little more like Cozmo. Cozmo is much too childish of course, but compilatron is just a little too cold.

I did manage to win the mission now. But I still think it's hard. Namely because the player is never told that production produces polition and polution produces biters. The worst thing you can do in this scenario is building tons of turrets and walls. I had 8 turrets on each side which was totally enough. Walls will just cost you extra pollution(Mining drills(+Energy), smelters) and they won't be able to reduce the amount of bullets((=iron(=ore(=mining) + smelting) +production) (=POLLUTION)) it takes to kill biters. So to make a long story short, building walls is a mistake in this mission, because it requires you to produce polution and thus increases the biter numbers but it doesn't make it cheaper to kill them off.

The (new) player has no chance to know that! Compilatron should tell him. Of course compilatron has no chance to know that either. But SOMEONE has to tell the player!!!

[bayoublue]

Add me to the chorus of people who might not have bought the game with the current NPE.
I started playing a year ago, and loved the 1.6 tutorial though the part where you repaired the half-destroyed base and then had the build up a train system.
It kept my attention and entertained me while teaching me everything I needed to know to win in freeplay.

I hated the 1.6 mission where you had to fight your way through biter bases, and if that one had been earlier I probably would have quit the game.
Instead, I quit that mission and went on to enjoy hundreds of hours with the game, some on normal settings, some on peaceful, and some with watered down biters.

For me, Factorio is about building and expanding, with fighting as a minor part.