A few minor tweaks I think might make the game better.

[quadrapod]

Hello everyone, I've been putting off posting here until I'd gotten all the research and beat the game with the rocket defense to finish free-play. I loved every hour of resource hungry production and while I may not have as much experience with the game as some I think from my 50 or so hours of play I've come across a few things that while small, could possibly improve the game play.

1. Enemy spawns. These have been brought up a lot around here it seems and I feel they need some tweaking. I think a rather fun way of doing it might be to focus spawns around major resource nodes. With some placed more randomly as noise in between. I noticed myself in normal play adopting a very goal oriented strategy. I'd secure resources, then tech and build, but always with my eye on the next resource patch and how to expand my rail lines to incorporate it. In the earlier stages of the game I'd always have a little concern as to whether I'd be able to research and build enough to clear out the biter camps around the next iron node or if I'd just have to concede and find a way to defend myself from their constant raids, risking losing the mine and all the resources that went into it in the process.

2. Stone. Maybe it was just bad luck, but this resource was odd for me. I'd find it always in tiny little piles, never more than a few hundred in one place. It made building walls and fortifications rather difficult, and I often felt it cheaper just to put down and power enough guns to vaporize anything that approached than to fortify a position with walls, until later on when I spent a good while mining all the stone off the map. I'm not sure how common it is currently, but I feel stone needs to be more plentiful, an increase in cost might need to come with that.

3. Ammunition based weapons. I found that once medium biters became common, gun turrets became useless. As well rockets while packing a punch just didn't do enough to make a dent in the number of tanky enemies I was facing. In my first attempt at this game I basically lost after 10 hours because I tried to use gun turrets to defend myself. Even with an unlimited feed of ammunition though they simply don't do enough to stop big biters. That being said I'm not sure what the right answer here is. It was mentioned elsewhere that more ammunition types and weapons are in the works so I'll just trust that those patches will address the issue when they come out.

4. Descriptions for everything. This is a big one. Some of my research I had no idea about, and other things are easy to misinform yourself on with testing. Particularly the bots. When I first spawned a destroyer capsule I had no levels in robot followers, so I never would have known it spawned more than one from any initial test. As well things like rail signals and the distractor capsule do things you can only learn through testing.

5. Solar panels are overpowered in my eyes. I feel they need a more obscene starting price or lower output. 27.5 copper, 15 iron and 5 steel is way too little for 60W of power, even factoring in the accumulators so you can run at night I think it's too low. There is very little reason to use coal over them once you have a decent amount of iron and copper coming in, and any other fuel based power source will have the same issue. You just can't compete with a set-it-and-forget-it solution in a game like this.

[ssilk]

Very good watching and good suggestions.

#3 I think it is planned to give the guns more usage. Now they are useless, I use them only in some cases at start.


#4 well, the wiki is a big building lot. And cause I'm currently the only, who constantly makes changes and don't have much time for that, this might last longer.

#5 solar panels have been much weaker, since 0.6 they are stronger, to enable faster building. With introducing blueprints, this might be a smaller problem and can be reduced again.

[BurnHard]

I also thought a lot about weapons and turrets. Personally I would like to see advanced ammunition-feeded weapons (inkludes rocktes, etc) to be way more effective than laser-based weapons. Once build, lasers have no further cost than an little bit of energy.

It would be a good thing for gameplay, if you can decide if you want very effective ammunition-based weapons, that need constant supply. Or maintainless laserweapons, that are "ok" for defence, but you'll need a lot more if you want the same killing-power.

As for solar power, yes too cheap, but needs to much space. 10times the cost, 2 times the power output, same space would feel right.

BUT i think the complete (re)balancing should be a thing of the BETA, when no new things for the release are going to be implemented.

[kovarex]

Hello, thank you for the feedback, it is always helpful. Mainly the feedback of someone playing for the first time, because it is hard for us to guess what is understandable and what is not.

We will definitely try to make the game more understandable natively to make the late game content understandable the same way as the beginning.
One way would be to put helpful advices (with pictures maybe) to tooltips of some items (rail signal, capsules etc).
Other way is to have actions that trigger special tutorial messages when triggered for the first time. (You create destroyer robot for the first time? Message dialog with explenation of the count with arrow showing the indicator of robots counts is a good example).

We also agree, that the defense and ammunition based turrets need to be tweaked, and we plan to do something about it, but as it was said, we first need to set up the basics of the production methods which will change a lot with the oil update.

The balancing of solars, enemies etc is now just very rough, because a lot of stuff will change.