Initial Thoughts From Learning The Game

from Offworld Forums

Overall, I've really enjoyed the game (single-player) so far. I really enjoy the economic RTS aspect, and the game is pretty much what I expected from watching the online videos.

Understanding the Game: Watching the online games, Soren often says things like "I think water is going to be really tight this game so I'm going to go this direction...". It turns out this sort of understanding/prediction is really hard to do. Perhaps it will come with the game. But there areas that might help understanding:

  • Make resource production and resource history graphs available for a resource in game. So I can glance at carbon and see that there is a total of 100 Carbon/s being produced by all of us (and only 10/s being consumed), and that it has dropped precipitously over the last 60s. Or I can glance at the power and see that although we only have 20 / 30 power, that's largely because 50 power has been destroyed, EMPed, or frozen. Thus I can anticipate that the current power spike is short-term. Technically this information is available from looking around the map, but it isn't intuitive (at least without more experience).
  • It is hard to tell why I lost: Was I too slow getting to level 2? Did I lose too much money to the power spike? I don't expect the game to tell me how to play, but it'd be nice to have a better idea of why I lost/won. 

Gameplay

  • The Mars colony itself seems to grow (assuming that oxygen / food / water aren't too expensive) and partially drive the market for those goods. This is really cool, but it is hidden from the players and the players aren't motivated to see the colony grow. It'd be nice to see the colony be a more significant factor that the players care about (perhaps all players lose if the colony shrinks below a certain amount? perhaps the colony offers exclusive deals to players who supply it with the most resources?). Along with this, more visibility into what the colony is doing (and why) would be great.
  • Terrain: I want it to have more impact. There are a lot of terrain types (river beds, lake beds, craters) but these don't make much of a difference. I really like the way wind and power work and it would be nice to see other terrain types have an impact as well other than just being filler.
  • It'd be nice to have a more tangible sense of where my opponents are at. (Do they have a cash making machine? Are they efficiently leveling up but running low cash? Which resource are they likely to be most dependent on?) The stock price doesn't seem to be a very good "at a glance" indicator of what strategy my opponent is taking, or how worried I should be about hindering them.
  • Underground Nuke: Making a claim effectively useless seems excessively severe, given how tight claims are. I wonder about allowing players to renounce claims on nuked squares. (You don't really expect me to keep that radioactive piece of ground, right?)
  • Autosupply + Debt doesn't seem right: Sometimes autosupply charges purchases to debt; sometimes stuff simply stops working because cash runs out. I *think* that the way it is working is that life support goods are charged against debt, but other purchases are made against cash. This leads to some weird situations when in low cash scenarios. This might be simply resolved with a clearer explanation, but I wonder if allowing all charges against debt and/or autoselling of goods to auto-supply would be cleaner.

UI/Oddities

  • Auction: List the height and wind conditions on the auctioned tile in case it is valuable for those qualities as well as the listed resources.
  • Building shortages are hard to detect, especially when intermittent. It'd be nice for this to be more visible in the UI.
  • Factories resupply oddly with blimps, especially at long distances from HQ. Resupply blimps are only 1/4th full and launch when the factory is at 5 goods or so...which means that they don't arrive in time if the distances are large. I suspect the answer to this is "Don't put factories at long distances from HQ", but it'd be nice to have this better documented.
  • Events could use explanation (clicking/hovering over them doesn't bring up a tooltip)
  • Tooltips (e.g. Farm produces 0.5 food) do not account for handicap settings, which is odd (especially since the handicap settings themselves don't seem to be visible or have tooltips). It'd be nice to see something like "+20% from handicap".
  • Tooltips are generally missing in game creation (how does difficulty impact game?)
  • Error message: Trying to build a non-geothermal building on a geothermal vent returns the message "Must be built on a geothermal vent", which is the wrong message (it should be "Cannot be built on a geothermal vent").
  • New game options: There are two "New Resources" options, the subtext clearly implies it should be something like "No events".
26,451 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Offworld Forums Top

I really like the idea of some effects other than just increased consumption once a colony grows. Also it seems this community is very good as there is s lot of good feedback already :) (Including this post above)

Reply #2 from Offworld Forums Top

    • Make resource production and resource history graphs available for a resource in game. So I can glance at carbon and see that there is a total of 100 Carbon/s being produced by all of us (and only 10/s being consumed), and that it has dropped precipitously over the last 60s. Or I can glance at the power and see that although we only have 20 / 30 power, that's largely because 50 power has been destroyed, EMPed, or frozen. Thus I can anticipate that the current power spike is short-term. Technically this information is available from looking around the map, but it isn't intuitive (at least without more experience).

Getting a more macro-view of what's going on in the world, with you, and with your opponents is something that we need to work on. It's not going to come soon, but we're thinking about it and making plans.

    • It is hard to tell why I lost: Was I too slow getting to level 2? Did I lose too much money to the power spike? I don't expect the game to tell me how to play, but it'd be nice to have a better idea of why I lost/won. 

I completely agree. The charts and graphs at the end of the game are about a year old at this point and we need to take another pass on them and help provide more useful data. This game could have a million visualizations, but we don't have a big team nor as much time needed to do a million. Your question ("why did I lose") is one of the most important that those charts need to answer and we'll try to help answer that the next time we make a pass.

 
    • The Mars colony itself seems to grow (assuming that oxygen / food / water aren't too expensive) and partially drive the market for those goods. This is really cool, but it is hidden from the players and the players aren't motivated to see the colony grow. It'd be nice to see the colony be a more significant factor that the players care about (perhaps all players lose if the colony shrinks below a certain amount? perhaps the colony offers exclusive deals to players who supply it with the most resources?). Along with this, more visibility into what the colony is doing (and why) would be great.

I agree. That's a relatively new feature for the game and Soren's been toying with it a bit. I'll point him to this.

    • Terrain: I want it to have more impact. There are a lot of terrain types (river beds, lake beds, craters) but these don't make much of a difference. I really like the way wind and power work and it would be nice to see other terrain types have an impact as well other than just being filler.

Noted.

    • It'd be nice to have a more tangible sense of where my opponents are at. (Do they have a cash making machine? Are they efficiently leveling up but running low cash? Which resource are they likely to be most dependent on?) The stock price doesn't seem to be a very good "at a glance" indicator of what strategy my opponent is taking, or how worried I should be about hindering them.

Yeah, I think that's part of the meta view that we're considering. I make a short-term band-aid with the "Quarterly Reports" to help reveal the situation of other players, but you need more information than that at times.

    • Underground Nuke: Making a claim effectively useless seems excessively severe, given how tight claims are. I wonder about allowing players to renounce claims on nuked squares. (You don't really expect me to keep that radioactive piece of ground, right?)

Honestly, that's unlikely. You can't underground nuke a spot so that it doesn't provide resources any more, buildings will produce them much more slowly. I also think that could lead to exploits. Underground nuke an early an now useless aluminium spot to get another tile for a research lab!

    • Autosupply + Debt doesn't seem right: Sometimes autosupply charges purchases to debt; sometimes stuff simply stops working because cash runs out. I *think* that the way it is working is that life support goods are charged against debt, but other purchases are made against cash. This leads to some weird situations when in low cash scenarios. This might be simply resolved with a clearer explanation, but I wonder if allowing all charges against debt and/or autoselling of goods to auto-supply would be cleaner.

I really dislike autosupply. It's hard to track and it can destroy your economy without you knowing. That said, I'll tell Soren about this confusion and try to convince him to remove the feature!

    • Auction: List the height and wind conditions on the auctioned tile in case it is valuable for those qualities as well as the listed resources.

Good idea. 

    • Building shortages are hard to detect, especially when intermittent. It'd be nice for this to be more visible in the UI.

What do you mean by that?

    • Factories resupply oddly with blimps, especially at long distances from HQ. Resupply blimps are only 1/4th full and launch when the factory is at 5 goods or so...which means that they don't arrive in time if the distances are large. I suspect the answer to this is "Don't put factories at long distances from HQ", but it'd be nice to have this better documented.

That's Soren! Hey Soren! Lookie here!

But, yeah, in most cases build your factories adjacent to your HQ or next to buildings that supply it resources.

    • Events could use explanation (clicking/hovering over them doesn't bring up a tooltip)

I assume you mean Marsquake and the like? Or are there other events that are confusing?

 

    • Tooltips (e.g. Farm produces 0.5 food) do not account for handicap settings, which is odd (especially since the handicap settings themselves don't seem to be visible or have tooltips). It'd be nice to see something like "+20% from handicap".

Ok, I'll look into that.

    • Tooltips are generally missing in game creation (how does difficulty impact game?)

Agreed. I will definitely fix difficulty soon. Will probably be in 2 updates from now.

 

    • Error message: Trying to build a non-geothermal building on a geothermal vent returns the message "Must be built on a geothermal vent", which is the wrong message (it should be "Cannot be built on a geothermal vent").

Ah, great catch. Thanks!

    • New game options: There are two "New Resources" options, the subtext clearly implies it should be something like "No events".

That should be fixed in the next update.

Thanks for all the notes & suggestions! This is great stuff!

-Scott-

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Reply #3 from Offworld Forums Top

Autosupply does not use debt to buy resources. Debt will only be used for life support resources.

As for supplying buildings, unfortunately, the code has to make a judgement call about when to send the blimp and how much to fill it. (Do you always want it leave full? What if you only have 5 units of X? Should it factor in distance?) It's the type of thing that is hard to get exactly right, and I think the answer is usually better building placement. Have said that, if you have a video that shows a really bad resupply thing, please post it! thanks...

Reply #4 from Offworld Forums Top

Quoting DeftMunky, reply 2

Quoting ,

quoting post
      • Building shortages are hard to detect, especially when intermittent. It'd be nice for this to be more visible in the UI.
What do you mean by that?

I run into this problem in three ways:

  1. My experience is that I get my chemicals going - say a 1 chemical factory and then build an electrolysis plant to provide the fuel. But then I build another chemical factory (so now I need 2 fuel), but I'm only producing 1, so I'm slowly losing fuel. Then I get distracted by something and another something and yet another something. Then I glance back down at my chemical factories and notice they are only intermittently making chemicals because they don't have enough fuel.
  2. Same as above scenario, except I set the chemical factories to autosupply, so everything runs normally until fuel spikes and I spend all my cash to buy another claim. Suddenly my chemical supply dries up, but I don't notice.
  3. I end up mining water from a long distance away, and then build an electrolysis plant. I have a little bit of water (say 5), and my net gain says marginally positive (say, 0.1). Great, my electrolysis plant is all set to go, right? Well no...because the supply chain isn't constant, yet. So there will be these (long) periods between barge arrivals where the electrolysis plant doesn't have any fuel. Or I sell my water down to 0 because I'm net positive water -- but that water wasn't really surplus: It needed to be shipped to the electrolysis plant well before the next water barge arrived.
  4. #1 and #3 can combine if you are running factories at a net deficit such that when the supply barges arrive, everything seems to work, but the factories will stop producing well before the next barge arrives.

One idea I have is to color the resource on the left (e.g. yellow) when a factory can't build that resource because of a supply shortage. I'm already tuned to pay attention to that column for market shortages and deficits anyway.

 

Quoting DeftMunky, reply 2

Quoting ,
quoting post
      • Events could use explanation (clicking/hovering over them doesn't bring up a tooltip)

I assume you mean Marsquake and the like? Or are there other events that are confusing?


 
Dust Storm and Solar Flare took me a long time to figure out (which I did by hovering over the respective power sources at the right time). Marsquake was actually easy as the mass shortages very visible.


Quoting DeftMunky, reply 2

Quoting ,
quoting post
      • Tooltips (e.g. Farm produces 0.5 food) do not account for handicap settings, which is odd (especially since the handicap settings themselves don't seem to be visible or have tooltips). It'd be nice to see something like "+20% from handicap".

Ok, I'll look into that.

To clarify, I'm referring to the tooltips that appear when click the resource and hover over the building that is needed to produce it. The tooltips when you go to build are correct, and hovering over the building after it is build gives the correct value, but the initial tooltips seem to be hard-coded to 0.5, regardless of the handicap. (Mostly I was confused when I was looking at how engineering lab and adjacency interaction and trying to figure out how 0.5 * 100% * 50% was resulting in 1.8. The math worked much better when I realized the that in that scenario, there was a 20% handicap and so my buildings were starting at 0.6, not 0.5.)

Reply #5 from Offworld Forums Top

Quoting Soren_Johnson, reply 3

As for supplying buildings, unfortunately, the code has to make a judgement call about when to send the blimp and how much to fill it. (Do you always want it leave full? What if you only have 5 units of X? Should it factor in distance?) It's the type of thing that is hard to get exactly right, and I think the answer is usually better building placement. Have said that, if you have a video that shows a really bad resupply thing, please post it! thanks...

 I wouldn't worry about that, it should only really matter for scientists. The code has to factor those things in and it seems fine really, more explanation below - relating to both this and the autosupply.

 

Quoting Soren_Johnson, reply 3

Autosupply does not use debt to buy resources. Debt will only be used for life support resources.

Soren - I am aware that this is probably a design decision, would it be possible to change your mind on this? I would assume its there to make sure a player who isn't paying attention doesnt spiral into a deathtrape debt rate? --- An explanation could help in the discussion

 

The real problem scenario is that especially early when you have no money or resources, having those factories spew out glass is absolutely crucial.
This gets made worse if you have a faction that shouldn't have any real money maker at that point, like the Scavengers. If carbon drops to 1 you're pretty much screwed.

It gets even worse as the difficulty goes up, like playing a CEO game for example. 

 

 

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About all of the macro things from the OP, not having that information makes you have to check the map and see what your oponents are doing, since this is a macro intensive game, and there is almost zero micro management, its kind of one of the things you want to be doing. The graphs do show enough as to why you lost, sure they may not have a lot of data, but the resources tab shows who got rich on what. Usually the best indicator, that with you checking the map.

On that note, I believe that the fundome earnings are not on those stats.