A Brave, New World - Watching me fail at it

Channel updated with the remaining tutorials.  Plenty of salty swearing on the Win as Scientific one!  (Oh dear.) 

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3DtX1yb7BqMMkgEBGHpoX4yE0DMT9SXH

A short comment given my experiences thus far:-

The traditional purpose of a tutorial is to instruct; to educate the player in the ways of the game.  The tutorials in Offworld don't do that; all they do is provide you with a vague instruction and then leave you to figure out everything else for yourself – they're more like scenarios than tutorials.  Offworld is a tricky game to get to grips with and had I not watched the dev streams prior to giving this a whirl I'm pretty sure I'd feel somewhat abandoned!

A good case in point is the Scientific tutorial.  

The way that Scientific plays is considerably different from the play style of the other HQs and commensurate with that requires more time to play around with and – crucially – more instruction.  Instead what we get is nearly zero instruction, tougher and more AIs, and a map which is perhaps not well suited to a Scientific HQ.  I'm all for increasing the challenge in scenarios but... aren't these meant to be tutorials?

In my opinion tutorials need to instruct, and scenarios should be the place where you get to test your newly acquired mettle in increasingly challenging situations.  I tend not subscribe to the notion that the two should be combined, particularly at the expense of the “tutorial” component.

Let's not be too harsh, though.  It is very early days.  Soren, the lead developer, has produced videos of him playing through these scenarios, explaining things as he plays.  Whilst these are a valuable resource they're not actually part of the game proper, and neither are they referenced (or linked).  

In closing: Future tutorials need to tutor.

Now that's the tutorials done time to move on to the campaign!

I went back and played the Scientific mission again (and again) to try and understand /how/ I won it, and I think I'm slowly coming round to the idea that Scientific isn't underpowered per sé; it's just extremely specific and is far more reliant on favourable map conditions than the other HQ types. 

Some of the key points to getting ones noggin around playing Scientific, I would say, are:-

- found in the middle of a cluster of Fe, Al and Si, with a bias toward the Fe to accelerate steel production/transportation. 

- ensure you know where your H2O is coming from - you are the most reliant on fuel of all HQs.

- ignore the life support tree until Upgrade Level 2, or if H2O and Food are cheap wait until Upgrade Level 3.

- try to get Teleportation as fast as you are able!

I stand by my summation in my final tutorial video that Scientific is by far the least forgiving of all HQ options but that isn't necessarily reason to cry: "underpowered!"

I will say one more thing tho: it would be nice if all of the HQs had a similar level of nuance to their function.  I'd be happy to leave Expansive as the 'brute force' / 'what you see is what you get' HQ type, and see the Robotic and Scavenger HQs receive a little bit of the Scientific treatment. 

Tried to play the SP campaign.  Either I'm missing something or it's too broken to be playable.

- Several times maps have been all but barren with barely enough to keep one HQ running, let alone several.  Ends up being a diceroll as to who gets the resource that ends up being worth anything; everyone else may as well give up immediately.

- Lost count the number of times I've 'won' a Pirate auction only to see them raiding my own supply lines seconds later by AI placement.

- I'm being chain-EMP'd and Dynamited by something (presumably the AI) and yet the cost for EMPs and Dynamite isn't going up on the black market.  Where are they coming from?

- I can start a map and immediately quit a map and still have it count as a Win.

- The UI in SP campaign is something of a mess; cluttered, tiny icons with numbers obscuring what they are.

- I get bought out by Scavenger AI inside of 12 minutes and yet the tooltip states that they'd never had more than $5,000 liquid funds and all of the resources they were collecting weren't worth much at all at the time.

- The game ends instantly for no given reason, when moments earlier I'd checked that the Colony had at least 5 population.

I'm getting the impression that there's still a vast amount of work that needs to be done to make the campaign progress logically and transparently, i.e., to give the player even the faintest sliver of feedback about what's going on.

I know, I know: early access. 

With the knowledge that the devs openly admitted uppn EA release that Campaign mode wasnt finished, what I see them trying to do with it, excites me more for what they will attempt to do with league/ladder/organized multiplayer.

Quoting node10, reply 2

I went back and played the Scientific mission again (and again) to try and understand /how/ I won it, and I think I'm slowly coming round to the idea that Scientific isn't underpowered per sé; it's just extremely specific and is far more reliant on favourable map conditions than the other HQ types. 

 

Some of the key points to getting ones noggin around playing Scientific, I would say, are:-

- found in the middle of a cluster of Fe, Al and Si, with a bias toward the Fe to accelerate steel production/transportation. 

- ensure you know where your H2O is coming from - you are the most reliant on fuel of all HQs.

- ignore the life support tree until Upgrade Level 2, or if H2O and Food are cheap wait until Upgrade Level 3.

- try to get Teleportation as fast as you are able!

 

I stand by my summation in my final tutorial video that Scientific is by far the least forgiving of all HQ options but that isn't necessarily reason to cry: "underpowered!"

I will say one more thing tho: it would be nice if all of the HQs had a similar level of nuance to their function.  I'd be happy to leave Expansive as the 'brute force' / 'what you see is what you get' HQ type, and see the Robotic and Scavenger HQs receive a little bit of the Scientific treatment. 

I don't think scientific requires more fuel than others, since you spend less shipping the base resources, which ship in blocks of 20. Higher Tier resources ship in groups of 40. Therefore, if you place your buildings correctly, you shouldn't be spending more on fuel. I can see how you could be spending more, if resources are being shipped all over the place. For what its worth, When I'm playing Scientific, I'm always selling a majority of my fuel since I'm not shipping things all over.

Teleportation is nice since, but I think the fear of pirates is overblown. Just make sure you bid up the cost of pirates to an amount that roughly covers the cost of the resources. The protection is nice, but since I use less fuel as scientific than others, the patent actually has less real compared to others that would otherwise use more.

I do agree that all of the colony types should be as nuanced as scientific. Hopefully they tweak scavenger, maybe add 50% building scrapping costs or something else fitting. Robotion, I'm not sure but the play style is a bit too pidgeonholed. By removing so much (glass,life support, fuel, etc) they are pushed strongly in certain directions.

I think we need to have some relatively simple, straightforward HQ-types to play (*cough* expansive *cough*) and then we can have some weird ones. I agree that we want to get the most strategic depth out of all of them, but having a few that beginning players can feel safe playing are important.

-Scott-

I meant to write that expansive should be the generalist but I got distracted! I'm sure there's some really creative people playing now that can come up with some great ideas for colonies too

The AI players have a number of unique perks, some of which get acquired from their victories in the campaign. These perks include things like "start with an EMP" or "start with a Pirate", so you are probably seeing them lose that perk.

You can lose a campaign map if the colony population drops to 0, but it looks like you know this, so I'm not sure what you are experiencing. A lot of the stuff you are reporting (win a scenario on quitting the map, being bought out by scavs without money, game ending with level 5 colony), I haven't seen reported elsewhere. Do you think you could put a video together of what you see?

Soren,

Many thanks for your response. 

AI's starting with EMPs and the like most likely accounts for the chain EMPing/Dynamiting that I've experienced; when these things are chained back-to-back it is a very tough situation to recover from through no wrong-doing of your own - it's a bit like giving the opposition an automatic 2-3 minute head start.

I've tried to keep an eye on the Colony status throughout, and you can just about see the Colony text at the end screen so you could see whether or not it's was a colony fail state.  Now that the new Colony fail state screen has been added things should be abundantly clear.  I'm still not convinced that the Colony fail state is a good thing to have in the game because no one player can do all that much to reverse a downturn, at least not without seriously hurting their own profits, and in many ways the one player that does try to pander to the needs of the Colony is only handing a greater chance of victory to the opposition who see the Colony recovering and continue to exploit for profit unabated.  I'd say that players may consider it preferable to take a Colony fail state rather than hurting their own performance by pandering to the needs of the Colony and risking a loss at the hands of a rival Corp., i.e., I'd much rather everyone lose over letting someone else win outright.

Re being bought out by a Corp. with no cash: I'll make a point of checking the tooltip the next time this starts to happen whilst I'm recording.

Also, twice now I've seen several campaign maps that have one, low level Iron tile.  Having only one T1 resource tile on a map certainly makes for a different kind of game but what I'm not sure about is if it makes for an enjoyable one.  With everyone buying in Iron the price rises quickly and as a result the pace of the game slows right down and becomes a pretty gruelling slog. 

Not being able to change your HQ type after having scanned the map in the Campaign usually means an automatic loss if the opposition drop as Scavenger on a one-Iron-tile map, for example, and you're stuck playing any of the other HQs.  Each map should come with a defined minimum allocation of the T1 resources.

In general I don't think that the 'rare' resource maps make for good games; they tend to heavily favour specific HQ/perk options that you can't adapt to once you know you're facing that kind of situation. 

I've found I like the Scientific HQ.

And tried to play the campaign quite a bit, through trial and error.

Took me quite of time to notice the colony status hint on the top left of the screen, which allowed me to understand why i had failed a few times before.

Just lost once more because of it : the AI just doesn't care, and keeping the colony alive means that you need to make some lost investments on maps where water soruces are scarce devoting some of your claims to life support which i had pretty much ignored until late game up to now.

Regarding playstyle, and especially on maps where resources are scarce, one of my opening moves is for "scant mining" patent which gives you much more liberty in the way you can place your factories, and I think truly shines for a Science HQ, allowing to get the nice adjacency bonuses. 

I've also grown a fan of the 100% power bonus when connected to HQ one.

The more I play the more Scientific seems to be the strongest option, with Scavenger coming in second, then Expansive, then Robotic.  There are of course specific conditions where one HQ might do better than another but in the campaign at least, you're stuck with your first choice even if the conditions amount to an almost automatic loss.  From the perspective of the campaign I'd say the imbalances^Hdifferences between the HQs becomes most apparent by virtue of a measure of their adaptability to fixed conditions.  In multiplayer those same imbalances^Hdifferences will manifest themsslves in lopsided win rates, then 'most played' rates.  (It took months to get the balance mostly right in games like Starcraft 2 and I expect the same process to be a long-winded one for OTC.)

My quest to understand what the devil is going on continues ingloriously...

I finished my first campaign and uploaded a video to that effect (w/ a few opinion pieces after each match). 

- Good first stab at a campaign and the future looks bright after it has evolved.

- Not a fan of the colony fail state; I don't think that it brings anything interesting to the game and ends up being little more than a disguised time limit.

- Perk accumulation from round to round snowballs rather dramatically.  Suggestion: keep the accumulation of perks as they are but only allow the choice of one or two to be used in the upcoming match.