Training Expeditions should yield rewards

[Nanako]

The new TE feature sounds like a breath of fresh air, until I read the part where they do not yield rewards, because "it would be a nightmare to balance". This is a wrongheaded approach

The point of such a feature surely, is to allow the player to play the game in a manner they enjoy most.
This is, after all, a singleplayer game. I'm not competing against anyone but myself

But the meta progression features are part of that game too. I want to gather bread/machinery/artifacts and build up the central city. Giving us a mode that doesn't do that is just wasting our time.

You're letting us play the game the way I want, but punishing us for daring to do so. It means that this mode will not get as much play, and be largely wasted.

Ultimately, it's about respecting the player's time. If the player is going to spend an hour playing this instead of normal mode, thats an hour spent playing the game anyway. Which is good for you and your overall metrics. The details of how they spent that time are unimportant, time spent should be rewarded

I appreciate that you want to show off the game "as intended", and that this mode goes outside of the game's normal balance. But not everyone shares that view. If you, the developers, insist on having that kind of balance, then you should put in the extra effort to balance this mode properly. Even if it is a nightmare. Have bonuses or penalties to the score based on various modifications and advantages selected, so that the rewards somewhat reflect the conditions the player has chosen to play under.

But again, not everyone shares that view and this is important. There are many people who feel that the game is not perfect in its intended state, and that it would be better with some small change to make it fit their tastes. I personally would like runs to be longer, with more reputation points required (but without getting harder and adding more negative modifiers too)

And there are even some people who would honestly just like to cheat their way to the end, to make everything really easy and just unlock all the content quickly.

And you know what? They're all valid. This is a singleplayer game. Who are you to dictate how it should be played? If you feel that allowing this mode to have rewards would ruin the game, then so be it, those players are only ruining it for themselves, and harming nobody else

Surely a significant amount of effort has already been sunk into this feature. Yet in its current state, that effort is wasted. To fix this situation then, please either do one of the following:

-Relinquish control, let players play and be rewarded how they want, don't worry about what people do in private in a singleplayer game

OR

-Put in more time and effort to fix up and implement this feature properly, integrating it with the existing game's reward systems in a manner that you'd consider balanced

[Skaarphy]

I've brought this up in the announcement thread for this update, made the same kind of argument, and the same suggestion of a bonus/malus point system to determine rewards. Someone from the dev team replied with saying that he sees the point and suggesting that it's not a settled matter yet, but they feel they need to concentrate on progressing the core game first.

[DG]

"You're letting us play the game the way I want, but punishing us for daring to do so. It means that this mode will not get as much play, and be largely wasted."

There is no punishing. It's all your choice. It's really no different from a combat game which has a trainer mode where you can practise fights against different enemies. The combat game doesn't give xp for those either.

[Usage Critic Bilge]

Devs are right. You are wrong. Simple as.

[Tresh]

I've never heard of a training mode in a singleplayer roguelite allowing you to unlock progression. Usually, even if you just have mods enabled, progression gets halted, because you could make the game laughably easy.

You don't get punished for playing training expeditions, you just don't get progression for playing outside the bounds of said progression.

I do have a different proposition though: Unlock all features for training mode regardless of the players progression in the main game, since it is an inconsequential, play-as-you-like mode that doesn't get you XP.

[Skaarphy]

@Tresh: Call it custom mode instead of training mode, and one such game is Thea: The Awakening where you can customize your game according to more than a dozen parameters, and your final score is determined by these parameters. Another one is Dead in Vinland where you have even more options.
Conceptually there really isn't any reason not do it. The only issue here seems to be the balancing, and the time it takes to get it right.

[Narandia]

The way I see it, if it has rewards, it should be generally part of the core game systems in some way. Much like daily expeditions, it should impact the cycle. Thats practically the only way the game has to actually punish failure anyway (besides getting less rewards). Then again I suppose its not like people who just want to play the game this way would care about the cycle system in the first place.

I think part of the issue, though, is that people were asking for a "custom mode" and what we got with the training expedition is kind of similar in structure, but with a different purpose. It's not even really the kind of freeform play some people wanted to see, so they could play AtS just as a traditional City Builder. You still get the normal gameplay loop first (though you can turn off Impatience growth over time) and then you can keep playing the settlement like you already could with normal runs.