Mirraj

Join Date 01/2009

Feedback after completing the tutorial and a couple campaign missions

I won't talk about the bugs since I wrote about those in the support forum here: https://forums.offworldgame.com/461396/page/1/

The game is a lot of fun. It has huge potential. Here is my feedback after playing for the better part of a day

I learned through watching a youtube video that you get an extra claim for being the last person to place their base. This seems like a big deal and I'm not even sure if it was mentioned in the tutorial. At the very least, it should tell players in the event log that the person got the extra claim. Well, maybe it already does, leading me to my next point...
The event log is super hard to read. If you get the time you could make it like hearthstone's log, with icons and hover for details.
Sometimes, there is a "surplus" or a "shortage" which puts a little green or red arrow next to a resource indicating it is about to go up or down. The second I see the green arrow, I drop whatever I'm doing and buy a ton of that resource. If I see the red arrow, I sell it all. Ten seconds later, I do the opposite which gives me free money. In my opinion, this feature is cheeky as it seems to have no relation to the actual economy and it's just so easy to make a bunch of extra money.
I have one annoyance with the exploration part of the game -- when I click on a resource area to explore it and I hit all the resource nodes except 1, I have to either move on or waste another scan to see that last resource. I wish that it did something where if you scanned a bunch of resources, it will auto-show you any resources that are right next to a resource you scanned. It would make exploration a little less tedious.
The fact that the pleasure dome's tooltip doesn't give any kind of indication of how much money it makes frustrates me to no end. How am I supposed to know if it's a good investment?
In the campaign, I'm not really sure why I'm presented with a bunch of different choices of where to go. Maybe it's my inexperience, but they all seem the same to me, so I just choose whichever one gives me the highest income.
I probably shouldn't be talking about balance since I'm so new, but it seems like the blackmarket's +1 Claim is priced too low at the beginning. It becomes a race of who can click it first (which is no fun). I think it starts at like $2000, yet when a claim comes up for auction people will pay like $8000+ no problem
The black market is very unintuitive. How you have to click on something like the EMP, THEN you have to click it again, THEN you have to target an area. I understand that the first click is you "buying it" and the second click is you "selecting it for use", but I feel like most players aren't going to be stocking up on black market goods. The 99.99% use case is going to be they want to buy and use a blackmarket good immediately. I think the correct model is you "click to select a black market item" (which does NOT buy it), then you click the map where you want to target it. Once you click the map, it launches the EMP and charges you the fee.
I often get into a situation where I see that a certain resource that I'm making is trading at a very low price, so I want to find those tiles and put something else on that space. Finding those tiles has been a pain. I either end up scanning the whole map or I click on my base and start tracing lines out. I think there should be something where when I hover over a resource icon in the trade window, little arrows pop up which guide me to those resource nodes on the map.

Hopefully this is useful for you!

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horridevil
DeftMunky

The income on the pleasure dome can change during game play. After you plant one it does have the current income amount printed on the structure itself.

I suppose it could give you the current amount on the tool tip, but that's as much as you'd be able to know. I'm not sure what all influences it but I do think having more of them will lower the amount you get on each one.

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Campaign: The choices also tell you the resource amounts, which can make a mission easier or harder. It also grants perks. For example +1 claim gives you an extra claim every mission after if you won that mission. Patents become yours too. The income is nice, but the perks are sometimes better.

I completely disagree with the black market thing. I hoard blackmarket items for later and I'm certain players will learn to do this too over time. I don't want to accidentally use it because the item was selected for use immediately after buying.

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Like @Mirraj, I also find the current black market UI/UX unintuitive -- I always seem to have to figure it out again. Click… wait… click again… okay NOW click the target tile. Of course it's not helped by the current general slowness/lagginess of the UI. I understand how buying/saving black market ops is interesting, but I'll bet there's a more elegant way to make that possible…

(Really enjoying the game overall.)

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quoting post

I learned through watching a youtube video that you get an extra claim for being the last person to place their base. This seems like a big deal and I'm not even sure if it was mentioned in the tutorial. At the very least, it should tell players in the event log that the person got the extra claim. Well, maybe it already does, leading me to my next point...

We had that in our old scanning system and was an oversight in converting to our new system. I will add it to my task list to add that to the scan display.

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The event log is super hard to read. If you get the time you could make it like hearthstone's log, with icons and hover for details.

We have long-term plans for the event log, but we'll try to get it drawn bigger in the next update.

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Sometimes, there is a "surplus" or a "shortage" which puts a little green or red arrow next to a resource indicating it is about to go up or down. The second I see the green arrow, I drop whatever I'm doing and buy a ton of that resource. If I see the red arrow, I sell it all. Ten seconds later, I do the opposite which gives me free money. In my opinion, this feature is cheeky as it seems to have no relation to the actual economy and it's just so easy to make a bunch of extra money.

Noted. I'll pass that along to Soren.

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I have one annoyance with the exploration part of the game -- when I click on a resource area to explore it and I hit all the resource nodes except 1, I have to either move on or waste another scan to see that last resource. I wish that it did something where if you scanned a bunch of resources, it will auto-show you any resources that are right next to a resource you scanned. It would make exploration a little less tedious.

Noted. Soren controls scanning, so he'll have to address that.

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The fact that the pleasure dome's tooltip doesn't give any kind of indication of how much money it makes frustrates me to no end. How am I supposed to know if it's a good investment?

I'll add a note to myself to include that in the tooltip now. Good idea!

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In the campaign, I'm not really sure why I'm presented with a bunch of different choices of where to go. Maybe it's my inexperience, but they all seem the same to me, so I just choose whichever one gives me the highest income.

Soren's in charge of that, so I'll pass that along.

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I probably shouldn't be talking about balance since I'm so new, but it seems like the blackmarket's +1 Claim is priced too low at the beginning. It becomes a race of who can click it first (which is no fun). I think it starts at like $2000, yet when a claim comes up for auction people will pay like $8000+ no problem

Yeah, we've been talking about that internally. Getting access to the first few claims on the black market is huge. I also think that paying $8000 for one in an auction is not a bad deal either. You're taking on debt rather than paying with "real" money, so you can pay more.

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The black market is very unintuitive. How you have to click on something like the EMP, THEN you have to click it again, THEN you have to target an area. I understand that the first click is you "buying it" and the second click is you "selecting it for use", but I feel like most players aren't going to be stocking up on black market goods. The 99.99% use case is going to be they want to buy and use a blackmarket good immediately. I think the correct model is you "click to select a black market item" (which does NOT buy it), then you click the map where you want to target it. Once you click the map, it launches the EMP and charges you the fee.

Yeah, the current was is a bit clunky. We need another pass on that. It's already in our task list. Thank you for suggesting another way to do it - we will consider it.

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I often get into a situation where I see that a certain resource that I'm making is trading at a very low price, so I want to find those tiles and put something else on that space. Finding those tiles has been a pain. I either end up scanning the whole map or I click on my base and start tracing lines out. I think there should be something where when I hover over a resource icon in the trade window, little arrows pop up which guide me to those resource nodes on the map.

Another thing that we need to address. This won't be a quick fix.

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Hopefully this is useful for you!

Very! Thank you for the detailed feedback! I've added the major things you've mentioned to my notes.

-Scott-

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Regarding the black market, I had the same though. I can perhaps imagine the value of hoarding black market items for later, though. Perhaps a second, attached and adjacent button or tab for using purchased black market attacks might solve this problem. Like, once you've bought an item, a little tab pops out of the existing buy button - maybe with a number, indicating the number of uses available. You click this to use it.

With the existing interface, it didn't even occur to me that black market items COULD be saved for later - I just assumed they had to be used immediately.

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Just checked in a fix so that the Pleasure Dome's tooltip will tell you how much money it will generate. Should be in the next update.

Thanks for the tip!

-Scott-

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Great, thanks Scott!

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Tutorial:

The map for the Scientific tutorial seems like the worst map you could ever get for that "tree". In a real game I would NEVER pick scientific for that type of map. Given that the tutorial would be how brand new players learn to play to the strengths of a "tree", it seems like the Scientific tutorial does just the opposite. It took me many times to complete it and even then I had to go well out side of "playing to strengths" to complete it. Others have complained about this as well on youtube for that tutorial. The rest of the tutorials I thought where very good.

Campaign:

The concept of the campaign system is rock solid. I would like a little more clarity on difficulties between maps. Also seems the randomness of the starting things you can "buy/Hire" can be troublesome. Example. Scientific, you start with solar panels, but no quarries. which mean 10 minutes into most maps you are paying 100+ for power and no way to change that. you can't expand cause it will use more power, so you can make anything or do anything, and you lose. I would suggest some conditional statements to go with the "randomness". If A is a starting item, then B needs to be an option for purchase. Then it is up to player to decide. Otherwise several times for all the races I load in with gaps too big to over come. I understand the need for make A and sell it to buy B in an economic game. You do need to at least be able to MAKE something to sell with the given starting options. Otherwise the player is left with exit/refresh over and over till they can get something that works.

Obscurous

Keep up the good work. The game is already super fun.

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Quoting Obscurous,

reply 8

Campaign:

The concept of the campaign system is rock solid. I would like a little more clarity on difficulties between maps. Also seems the randomness of the starting things you can "buy/Hire" can be troublesome. Example. Scientific, you start with solar panels, but no quarries. which mean 10 minutes into most maps you are paying 100+ for power and no way to change that. you can't expand cause it will use more power, so you can make anything or do anything, and you lose. I would suggest some conditional statements to go with the "randomness". If A is a starting item, then B needs to be an option for purchase. Then it is up to player to decide. Otherwise several times for all the races I load in with gaps too big to over come. I understand the need for make A and sell it to buy B in an economic game. You do need to at least be able to MAKE something to sell with the given starting options. Otherwise the player is left with exit/refresh over and over till they can get something that works.

Yeah, the concept is nice. More like a tournament than a campaign per sé but hey, who's counting. Another very large problem with the campaign as it stands are the rollover buffs that artificially widen the gap between 'best' and 'least-best' which only serves to create a giant snowballing effect. One suggestion to tackle this is to keep the accumulation of buffs but only allow a choice of one (or two) to take into the next match.

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