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The Campaign Mechanic


corona_wind

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A few comments.

  • The threat mechanic is arbitrarily random and unfun.  It lacks cause and effect.
  • Resources are just different flavors of space-money.  The flying factory has little use for them.
  • The part-finding mechanic is nonsense.  How exactly does Nimbatus convert the culling of bees into a new fuel tank?

Please, please, please rethink this, or at least make the old mode an option.  You've turned Nimbatus into FTL with less special effects, a purely luck-based mission where you fly from system to system hoping to find the bit which lets you win the game...

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More problems:

  • The first piece you break, ends the game.  Drag it out all you want but you're doomed.
  • All enemies outrange you, now and forever.  Related, point 1.
  • Shields are a joke.  Related, point 1.
  • Shotguns, despite the flavor text, are not devastating at close range.  See point 1 again.
  • We can see the enemy's health, but not our own!  See point 1 again.
  • Heavyweight and engineer captains lack the efficient plasma weapons necessary for relic missions.  The odds of finding or purchasing them by the time they're needed are nearly nil.
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Thank you for the feedback. It takes some time to digest through it, so I will answer at a later time. But a question before hand:

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make the old mode an option

Isn't the creative mode like the "old" gameplay? I mean it does not have the sumo and racing tracks, but otherwise it should be roughly the same?

So the campaign (or survival or whatever we would call it in the end) would be just an alternative mode to the one we already had. And the creative mode now has more settings which allow you to customize the experience. Do you miss some features in the creative mode compared to the "old gameplay"?

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Another suggestion:

  • Remove the per-planet threat increase.

I know you're preventing people exploiting the same planet over and over, but in practice this means any single mistake of any sort is game over, being barred from checking if a planet even has resources before sending a miner, etc. Raise launch costs and prevent people from going back after the mission is successful perhaps.

A bug:

  • Researchers find fuel tanks.
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Quote
  • Researchers find fuel tanks.

This is already fixed in 0.7.1. You can still find fuel tanks in shops, but that will only be fixed in 0.7.2, sorry :) 

Quote
  • Remove the per-planet threat increase.

We have a new thread system in 0.7.1 and with that new mechanics which stops you from exploiting re-harvesting planets infinitely. I hope the new build works better :) 

What is your opinion about the creative (sandbox) mode?

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Mixed feelings on creative mode.  Some new missions are interesting, but the advancement mechanic is still nonsensical, and a lot of the game's color has left without the racetracks.  Unless there's a mission I haven't seen yet (quite possible) neither career nor creative have a use for automated drones.

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Yes. The campaign mode is currently in a state, that straight forward player-control (meaning no automation) is the better way to go, because you can't freely iterate without cost. Also it is still not possible to fully automate everything, because you don't have the necessary sensors yet.

What we ultimately want to include is a captain where you can't press any keys, so you have to fully automate everything. To help you with that, you probably wouldn't have to worry about deploy cost or threat increase in any way. But before we can include that captain, we have to implement all the needed sensors for you to actually really be able to solve the missions properly.

It would be interesting to have missions which block your input and you have to automate things, but we haven't implemented any yet.

We haven't decided how we will handle progression in the creative mode yet. 

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Sumo is quite difficult enough on a quarter-ton per binary one...  People will need more than better sensors for "real missions", they'll need a full-out programming language.  If you have something like that already in the works, awesome.  If you don't, a few automatic missions would be better than abandoning what used to be a large slice of Nimbatus' gameplay.

And I still think excluding logic and sensors from any captain is a bad idea.  Automation wasn't invented by ivory tower geniuses.  It was invented by a bored little boy who had to pull the same two levers all day.  Adding two ropes let the water-lifter operate itself.

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I see what you mean. We don't exclude logic parts for any captain, it's just that for some captains it's a more viable option than for others. According to our data, part-automation or even full-automation is something a lot of player struggle with, except the hardcore players and experts like you :) 

So we can provide a fun experience for a lot of players with a certain amount of captains, and for the rest who wants more challenge and focus on automation, they have other captains which make that aspect more interesting.

As I said before, we're not there yet :) We were thinking of node-based visual programming for example to make logic more approachable and powerful, but haven't decided what the final route would be. I think you can go a long way with the bit-logic we have, even though it's a lot of hassle to make something big and powerful. But on the other hand, if it would be "simply programming" then it would be too easy for experts and might put off beginners.

Automated missions will very likely come in the future when we add more content.

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Perhaps people avoid logic because its really awkward right now?  Please don't write it off yet.  Inverted inputs and output-enables alone will halve the number of gates, or in many cases, eliminate gates entirely.

There's also plenty of ways to implement "logic" without using gate elements.  Duplicate engines on different keys to implement 'or' logic for example.  Your metrics won't catch that.

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Good point. I agree that it is awkward to use, so I can see the chance to improve the attractiveness of it for more people. The inverted inputs/outputs is a great idea, but I hope we can find an altogether even better version of logic implementation :) Not the focus currently, but definitely something we have in mind further down the road.

Sumo and automation is still my favorite part of the game, so it's close to my heart :) But for the time we have to focus on other things.

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  • 2 weeks later...

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