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.
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.
