The new tiers of rails are awesome, big thumbs up from me on that!
However, I had some significant issues with actually upgrading them from T2 → T3 rails (I skipped T1 rails).
It seems like sometimes it “duplicates” the rails, and there ends up being both a T2 and T3 rail, and that just confuses the heck out of the game. Here’s some screenshots though that show what happened.
Weird blurry affect here:
Clearly shows the duplicated rail:
Here when I upgraded the corner piece, it caused the rail to get curved instead of being straight like it was before:
Also, the first time I attempted this upgrade, I somehow managed to delete the T1 rail that was in the station. I haven’t been able to repro this, but saw someone else reported it, so wanted to signal boost that.
Here’s the save of the game immediately before I upgraded these: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/576105705216671756/949945032100704286/Outpost_Theta-3_23.sav
(I can upload the post-upgrade save too if it helps)
Two other issues with that save if you’re up for it:
Very minor: The road is clipped here:
For some reason, some of the motor buildings here are not getting copper. The thing is there are multiple copper mines connected, as shown here, and they are actually FULL, at 30 output, but for some reason aren’t delivering. Normally this is caused because I messed up my districts, but this one has well and truly stumped me. What’s weird is eventually those buildings will get a couple of copper and will make a motor but then they run out, so I don’t think it’s a district/pathing issue. For some reason this mine just goes all anti-work and is like “nah bruh, I’m done, taking the rest of the year off”
Ok, fine, more stuff
Since I’m here, I thought I’d drop like “all” the other feedback I have lol. This is a lot so also wanted to say, big fan of the game, was a nice departure from the factorio-style with belts, and hope that early access goes well for y’all!
P1
- Performance really suffers in the late game. Personally I noticed a significant drop once I start shipping industrial robots to all my factories. Before this I try to be diligent about using one ways so that most of these factories are independent and avoid creating lots of loops, and performance is great. But once I start shipping industrial robots, inevitably there end up being “loops” in the road network now, and everything really slows down. It also leads to things taking some insanely suboptimal paths to get where they need to go. I think a potentially simple way of solving some of this is to be able to apply an item filter to a train route. Only allow a particular train route to transport certain items, and that will probably actually solve a lot of the “loop” issues that are creating issues for the “route planner”? (fwiw, I’d also love to be able to say “this road can only be used to transport X, Y, and Z, but I suspect that’s a fuck ton harder than saying a train route can only transport certain things”). I want to be in control of what goods can go where. Because if I’m not in control the car AI will do the most batshit crazy thing imaginable. But without this tool I’m somewhat helpless to control the machines : (
Probably easy to fix things:
- There is no warning if a train line stops working because a track is disconnected : ( After I finished upgrading all my rails, one train was just sitting their in a station for a while, and it was super confusing to figure out why. Eventually I deleted enough rails and rebuilt them and it worked, but man, having some warning like the “you’re out of power” warning for when a train can’t path somewhere would be a godsend.
- There is no explanation of what a building does. To this day I still do not know wtf a “holo display factory” does. Would greatly greatly appreciate a short blurb explaining that. For example the industrial robot factory could say “reduces required employees by one. lasts 60s” (idk how long it lasts, just putting a number there)
- If you are trying to replace T2 rails with T3 rails and accidentally click a road, it deletes the road. plz don’t. I get very sad when this happens : D
- (Also, wanted to say I’m a big fan of not gating research behind city level, much much better experience)
- I sometimes forget that i’m in replace/reverse road mode and make an oopsie. Would be fantastic to change the cursor if you are in those modes so it’s more clear plz.
- Industrial robots and high tech tools both report 0 consumption even though they are surely being consumed
- Click & drag to build multiple things is
. Would be great though if it only worked in a straight line if you have the grid on. Basically I will often build a straight road with the grid, and then I’ll want to build a whole line of buildings directly connected to that. But inevitably at least one of those you-know-what’s will be one tile off and I have to go back and fix it. Some kind of “snapping” or “locking” would be glorious so it builds in a straight line more often! (Factorio does this real well with belt building fwiw, if you click&drag to build a belt it’ll only go straight)
Others:
- Upgrading a road/rail is a PITA. I would be eternally grateful if I could shift-click to upgrade the whole thing at once.
- Trains take quite a while to get up to 450 speed, but are able to break nearly instantly. This seems sus to me, so for game balance, might be worth slightly nerfing their breaking speed and giving a nice buff to their acceleration speed on top tier rails.
- Districts are great, but I’d really love to be able to see stats per district. I’d love to know if in a single district I have enough green circuits, etc being made. The global stats are ok, but they aren’t sufficient for knowing if a particular factory is balanced or not.
- Districts work best IMO as a “deny list”, where you say “this district should not export X”. I think if you optimize the UI around that, it will get simpler. For example it would be cool if when you switched into district view, every district showed the resource icons with a red slash through them for each thing they cannot export, helps me visualize that faster. And then make it one click to tell a district to “not export X”. Or even better, have a “mode” for districts where it “doesn’t export anything by default” and you have to “opt in” to what you want to export. Most of the time I’m trying to make a “factory” that builds one “thing” and only want that one thing to be exported. It’s really confusing to set that up. It clicks for me now, I get it. But it took a while.
- Performance is pretty bad on high settings on this base. I have a 24 core cpu & 2080 ti and have to drop it to lowest settings, feelsbadman
- Similarly, trying to build a road over top of an existing road can be hard. Dyson sphere has a cool feature where if you hold shift, the elevated road will not try to “connect” to the road below, which makes it a heckuva lot easier to build a road directly over top of another. Would love to see something similar here too!
- There’s not enough differentiation between the various rail stations IMO. I’d love if the single-line station was actually a good bit smaller and took up less space. Maybe it should even have fewer roads leading in/out. Build some incentives for making the bigger ones.
- More in the “dream” category but being able to copy/paste regions of the map would be :chefskiss:
- Also in the “dream” category, an undo button. Holy shit an undo button would be amazing. I make a lot of oopsie’s. And misclick a lot. I could not imagine being a programmer without an undo key. Infraspace needs an undo button too.
- The glare from the sun can be real annoying. I find I often end up adjusting the camera just to reduce the glare so I can see wtf I’m doing. Would it be possible to tone the glare down a bit?
phew, ok, sorry for the wall of text, I hope that helps y’all though. As I said, big fan : )