BETA 53 List of grievances from a new'ish player

Hello all,

I bought the game a few months ago and briefly checked it out, learned the assignment system etc and getting the basic hang of the game. But I put it back on the shelf, satisfied that the game in this early stage was looking to go in a very good direction. Since Beta 53 hit this week, I have invested quite a few more hours into it, and am really enjoying the large amount of improvements! However, there are a number of issues that I encountered repeatedly, that work to rather quickly kill the mood for this (rather new) player, in no particular order:

• Designate Trade Goods only affects one stack of items, rather than that specific type of item. This is especially a problem because the pops are incapable of stacking stuff properly as they fabricate, so your designations might be overwritten when they do stack stuff.
• Building on top of the above, designating trade goods does not seem to prevent local consumption (or the items just tend to disappear randomly!). In my latest game I had produced a nice stack of tinned caviar, designated as trade goods, they were kept in a well defended area, but they were all gone long before any traders arrived. With nothing telling me what happened.
  
• Too many events seem to have no positive outcome, and the ones that do only show the positive stuff in a tiny tooltip with hardly any visual or auditory cue. This is largely an interface thing, please draw more attention to the occasional good stuff that happens in your colony!
• Colonists ignoring upkeep, letting workshop burn down. Even with all workcrews set to perform hauling and construction, people keep letting their own workshops burn down, despite plenty of upkeep packs being available. Its perfectly fine to have an upkeep cost, but you are punishing the player too much for something they have no control over with the system as it is now. Also, I have never seen a bed require this many stones/logs to keep being comfortable
  
• Inability to tell soldiers to patrol areas. I want to scout out bandit camps with my regiments before sending foragers. Even if there are never any bandits there, it's so very counterintuitive that the people I have least control over are the most disciplined ones.
• Glitchy menu for assigning work crews to shops; the scroll bar works so poorly that I often have to navigate down 3 or more times to select the crew I want. Please give a toggle to not show currently assigned crews, and fix the scrolling function?
• Wood is not renewable, and traders bring far too little of it. I dread reaching end game in my current save, as I have already consumed at least half the wood in my swampy area, and nothing seems to be growing back. Even if it does grow back, it is too slowly to notice, and the inability to plant trees in a set area for foresting is frustrating. This issue is probably amplified by the smaller map sizes in B53?
  
• You cannot make roads or designate paths! Makes the citybuilder in me a bit sad...
• In one of my saves, that I can no longer load without crashes, a lot of workshops seemed to never advance jobs, even though they made the items. My metalshop would be stuck at 0/4 iron ingots, even after it had made 20.
• When food is stacked, you cannot see if its good enough for overseers, and recipes do not seem to tell you either. This is an example of a number of systems that are a bit too much "play by wiki", which could and probably should be shown ingame instead.
  
• Fences do not show building costs.

These are the issues I can think of right now, not sure how useful it is to have them lumped together like this, but there you have it I have attached 2 save files, 006 is the one I cannot reload myself without the game crashing, and 008 is my latest where tins of caviar are disappearing.

 

That's a damn solid list. It's precisely these sort of things that keep me from playing the game just yet. The first 8 points, and the 10th, are in my eyes essential core functionalities that needs to just work. Having to fiddle with work-arounds and tricks learned by dealing with the faulty behaviour many many times already, is something that the current state of the game has waaaay too much of.

That's not inherently bad, unless it's not a priority to get it fixed. I sometimes worry that these completely baseline functionalities are put on the backburner because the core playerbase are so used to working around them that the never mention it, and barely notice it themselves.

This sort of "new player impressions" is pretty damn identical to the comments I've gotten back from people I have convinced to try out the game. Perhaps it's time to put new features a bit on hold and get the core gameplay to work in a way that's tolerable to non-veterans?

 

I could imagine that refers to the same bug that i reported for 52a, about production counters not increasing correctly, this happens quite often when producing multiples of an item in one order, i have seen this at the carpenter with beds with stacks of more than 5 more than once now.

So the complaint is about production orders producing more than requested (and sometimes less, too )

 

The bug is:

Set a production order to produce #n of an item y.

Sometimes the progression counter will stay at 0/n although item y is produced because of available materials, so stockpile contains #x of item y.
In other circumstances it may stay at m/n produced items with m < n although the commodity windows shows x items in stock with x > m.

And the most frustrating one is of course where n/n items are supposedly produced but actually less than n are available as seen in this screenshot.

In the savegame ClockworkEmpires-007.zip attached i ordered 12 beds at the carpenter. In one game start the discrepancy as shown in the screenshot occured.

After reloading the very same save the production counter remained at zero although one bed is available in the stockpile as you can see in save ClockworkEmpires-008.zip

 

I have just started the application, loaded CE-007 and the bug with the production counter not increasing occured too, save game attached, so it seems to happen without saving and loading within the same process instance...question is of course if CE-007 is already in a broken state.

But it seems to happen only for the first produced item. Afterwards it's counting upwards as expected

 

A few other possible contributors to the mismatches in production vs stockpiles:
-Prior mentioned bug that if you change the production order mid-job, when the colonist is finished with the current job, it will count one of the new jobs as completed. In other words, if you had ordered planks, and change it to 5 cots mid-job, the colonist will complete a plank, and will count 1/5 cots as completed.
-I 'think' that a module does not disappear from the stockpile or count if it is being moved from a stockpile to its destination. So if you are keeping track of stock and a worker is hauling a module box to its destination, it may double count.

 

Hello everyone, first of all thanks for the hard work, the game is amazing, and i believe it will be better and better..

I totaly agree with the list with these sort of things that keep me from playing the game and wait till further changes.
but the real reason that i stop playing and it is not on the list, was the cult event .. i have a game with more than 10 hours which i start perfectly , everything was going well, lots of food, trunks, beds and furnititure for all my colonists, .. them the cult event starts
its is ok happens once , but its happens repeatedly, and everytime i cant avoid it , with priest, nco, even kill the colonist when he starts behaving oddly, but anyway the oblisk aberration comes out and wipe my colony.

i just have a single question..

how avoid it ? how prevent the monster to spawn ? i dont have more space for another cemetery.. lol