The attack system emulates Freeplays pollution system. If you pollute hard, you are attacked hard. The only difference is that the 'price' of a biter is lowered inversely to how far you are through the final research.
Ooh, then it's *both* !
I thought that it couldn't possibly be pollution based, considering how fast the attacks were scaling up !
Faark wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 6:07 am
I also fell into the "veteran sets up big factory and gets suddenly overrun" trap. It's not a serious problem, since this might not affect the target audience. But it wasn't really enjoyable in the end... felt like I could not do anything to get out of that mess once i realized what's going on. Placed more labs... enough to get the ending screen before they had eaten power & labs. Got the finish screen in time, but the game was practically lost. No time to re-work the base to produce more ammo & strengthen defense (while that seems to be a vital part of factorio). This didn't feel like victory. Even more so since I didn't expected that to be the end.
Biters go tame again when you win. So it's easy to reconquer your base.
However, I've seen a lot of players that didn't even know that you could continue the game after dying !
Perhaps this should be emphasized in the tutorial (rather than the campaign, where it would break immersion too much...)
I wonder, did you balance the ending on purpose that you win while your base is getting wrecked ?
Are you planning a NPC-character driven tank arriving at the last moment and saving you ?
Faark wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 6:07 am
Just played the new tutorial campaign (v0.17.3), am disappointed. Not that it is bad, I just expected more. Some examples:
Short & No Story.
For it to replace New Hope, it is neither long enough yet nor does it have decent story / longer term goals except survival and research.
I don't know why you expected it to replace New Hope ?
AFAIK, it's designed to replace First Steps... it's the Tutorial, not the Campaign !
Selvek wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 8:41 am
Campaign thoughts:
1) I don't like the "gather some of your equipment and escape east". I wound up picking up my whole base at that point (I wasn't sure if I would keep my inventory or not), and I'm really glad I did... it would have been really unfortunate not to. There's probably a way to streamline this so you don't have to guess whether you get rewarded for spending the time to pick everything up.
Yeah, Compilatron should be clearer that you should pick *everything that you can* !
Faark wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 6:07 am
- The "evacuation"... like the idea, but hardly felt like there was a threat. Better AI would be nice, maybe shoo'ing away the player.
Yeah, in practice these seems to be no rush... and the biters/worms are very tame, only attacking if you hit them -
I actually went out and killed some (and that poor worm in the forest)... *with my "bare" hands* !
This seems to be a very good point to teach melee attack to new players -
(Which is even less clear now that you can't see how much damage a pickaxe does.)
Just send one (1) small biter pestering Compilatron, and ask the player to kill it ?)
Then maybe after he learned that : 2 - 3 - 4 ... (waiting until the player kills the previous batch, then some time) - until the player realizes that he *really* should get going !
(I don't remember, do you already get the gun in the first part ? You probably shouldn't...)
Selvek wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 8:41 am
2) I think underground belts, or at least long handed inserters, should be unlocked near the end of the campaign. Aside from the fact that it's just limiting in terms of how you can effectively lay out smelting, I wouldn't want new players to get the impression that the game will continue with just having to route more and more, long awkward belts around your base.
They *are* unlocked when you win. Limiting the complexity for the new players at start is good.
Selvek wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 8:41 am
3) Maybe a permanent autosave when you move to the new area? After I beat the campaign, I wanted to give the survival section another go to see if I could do it better. But alas, I would have had to go back through the (boring) tutorial section, so it'll have to wait until I'm willing to play through that again.
It's already there, how come you haven't seen it ?
Selvek wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 8:41 am
4) Related - there is a level selection menu inside the campaign... with only one level ("arrival")... I was hoping a second level to start at the "East" area might show up there, but no such luck.
Yeah, maybe loading the relevant autosave ?
5thHorseman wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2019 10:40 pm
I don't understand how the tutorial being harder for experienced players is a good thing. Experienced players are - presumably - playing the game more correctly than brand new players.
When was the last time that you enjoyed the tutorial
again ?
Low-level player balance tends often to be wildly different than high-level game balance...
Ranakastrasz wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2019 6:56 pm
gyorokpeter wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2019 6:45 pm
Now I understand why the biter situation in the campaign was so "hard". I even had a faint feeling that somehow it is related to the research progress so I was proven right. However I think there should be something to indicate that the game is deliberately doing this to you and you are supposed to figure out how to overcome it, and this is not representative of the "real game". Otherwise a new player might get the impression that Factorio
is a tower defense game and decide that it's not their game.
I also felt the lack of encouraging the player to try everything in the beginning part, as if I could only carry on with the game because I already knew how to play.
yea. Its just.... I thought it was scaling up over time, and most likely scaled to research. So I kept increasing bullet production to keep up, made thick walls, etc. With the idea that, because this was a Tutorial, for new players, that it wouldn't actually throw enough at you to, ya know, deal with 20+ turrets on each side and 4 or 6 or however many assemblers I had making bullets. I had no idea that pollution was a factor here. If I had, well. I would have shut down my green circuit production and most of my copper mines, shut off my stone mines, and basically minimized my pollution profile. I had no idea that it was scaled such that at x% research, x% of your pollution budget had to go to making bullets. Seriously, who does that?
If it had said, "The pollution is agitating the biters. In this situation, minimizing unnecessary pollution is highly recommended" or something, I would have known what was going on.
In the normal game, if you ramp up your pollution, attacks increase, yes, and especially now. But nowhere near to the point where 100% of your production must go to military spending....
Yeah, this first impression is a big issue currently.
It's great that the tutorial part 2 incentivizes you to automate bullet making and feeding turrets with belts -
though on one hand, there's Compilatron helping you, maybe at some point he should just stop and tell you to set it up?
And on the other hand, placing turrets on cliffs is very tempting, but problematic for automatic insertion !
- but it should be made VERY CLEAR to the players that the Default settings Freeplay (and the Campaign) is NOT like that !!
astroshak wrote: ↑Sat Mar 02, 2019 3:17 pm
I think the lesson that defense phase is trying to teach is ... Overproduce or Go Home.
Its not hard to survive when you have a lot of furnaces taking one belt of ore and converting it into a belt of plates, feeding 12 assembly machines making ammo, 6 of which are going west, and the other 6 are going east.
Uh, no, if you do that, you're going to need walls and dozens of turrets to finish the mission !