Kola Peninsula is EVIL

[NuclearToast™]

I would love to see the stats on player completion rates starting with Kola. That set of maps is so evil, I can practically feel the level designer constantly slapping the side of my head, "How about now? How about now?"

With over 250 solo hours into the campaign, I understand challenge. But the Kola maps seem to go out of their way to make you suffer in the worst possible way. Maybe it was an attempt to appease players who thought the base game was too easy, but it's about to drive me away for good. I certainly don't want to buy a Season 2 pass if the maps continue like this.

[Malidictus]

mendel a écrit :

you need to do way better scouting

So "git gud." Yeah, I think I've had enough of that.

[Izargon]

Indeed

[mendel]

Malidictus a écrit :

mendel a écrit :

you need to do way better scouting

So "git gud." Yeah, I think I've had enough of that.

you NEED to scout Snowrunner maps when they're hard
thoroughly
as a matter of strategy

then you find the missions that give you "access to location" as a reward
and when that location is the warehouse opposite the garage, that's one of the FIRST missions you should do

also, learning from Kola, you need to absolutely find out in Amur where you can use use the ice

once you have done both, *all* of Ixia's issues with Urska River go away

and IMO this does not require technical skills


and btw, the spot where "anything wider than a particularly skinny bicycle will roll off the side" is fine for scouts, and I've even got a Twinsteer past, but you don't actually need to go past it with anything bigger than a small scout

[Steelkaiser]

Malidictus a écrit :

Ixia Irisborne a écrit :

The Amur and Kola maps are *clearly* designed that way.

Out of curiosity, what IS the issue with Amur? I've heard a lot of people trash-talk it, but I've yet to go there, myself. Neutral question here - just curious what people have problems with.

Urska River, the first map you start in is intimidating at first, I'd recommend taking the Tatarin and just explore at first. The difficulty is mostly due to the broken bridges at the start, once you fix those, it gets a lot better. Finding and completing the warehouse troubles quest makes this a lot easier.

The cosmodrome isn't that bad, it has some broken bridges, and a tricky river crossing via Ice and rocks, but nothing too bad. Also, get the Zikz605 ASAP. It makes life much easier. Like a KOLOB With a flatbed.

Chernokamensk starts out pretty far away, but once you unlock the garage and fix some of the bridges it's actually pretty doable, I had the most fun on that map, even with the somewhat repetitive quests.

Northern Aegis installation is the evil map of the region. No garage and it's a pain and a long way to get to from both Urska River garage and Cosmodrome garage. Basically Imandra if it didnt have a garage at all. There are bridges and roadblocks to fix but you need te bring the cargo from the other maps all the way there. The Ice on the map is also really strange, in places where it seems stable it actually behaves like deep mud with ice. Basically if you flip or get stuck, you go all the way back or have to rescue from all the way back. Maybe best to bring a fuel/rescue truck when you go there first.
I hated this map more than Imandra by a lot and couldn't wait to be done with it.

On all the other regions I like to use different trucks for fun, like the US trucks even though they're less competent than the russian ones, I avoided the Tatarin because its too OP. On Amur I recommend you use the best you have to save yourself the frustration.

Good luck! :)

[mendel]

Steelkaiser a écrit :

On Amur I recommend you use the best you have

sound advice
there's a reason that the game gives you the 605r in that region

[Malidictus]

Steelkaiser a écrit :

Northern Aegis installation is the evil map of the region. No garage and it's a pain and a long way to get to from both Urska River garage and Cosmodrome garage. Basically Imandra if it didnt have a garage at all. There are bridges and roadblocks to fix but you need te bring the cargo from the other maps all the way there. The Ice on the map is also really strange, in places where it seems stable it actually behaves like deep mud with ice. Basically if you flip or get stuck, you go all the way back or have to rescue from all the way back. Maybe best to bring a fuel/rescue truck when you go there first.

Sounds like my experience with Island Lake in Michigan the first time around. Granted, not a great comparison as that was caused by my own inexperience at the time compounded by poor gear. "Imandra without the garage" sounds awful, although I'll be honest - I did most of that without a garage myself because... I didn't know there WAS a garage. There's a reason for that "mission to open the garage is so hidden" rant from before :)

Thanks for the explanation, though. That puts things more in perspective.

mendel a écrit :

you NEED to scout Snowrunner maps when they're hard thoroughly as a matter of strategy then you find the missions that give you "access to location" as a reward and when that location is the warehouse opposite the garage, that's one of the FIRST missions you should do also, learning from Kola, you need to absolutely find out in Amur where you can use use the ice once you have done both, *all* of Ixia's issues with Urska River go away

Yeah, and if you'd opened with that instead of "I don't see the problem" and "scout better" then I wouldn't have said anything.

Mind you, that doesn't always help. I can't speak to Amur, but it certainly doesn't help in Imandra. No amount of scouting will reveal how to unlock the Garage due to the way it's set up. The only option to find it naturally is to do what I did - run all of the missions, eventually stumble upon the one that unlocks it by sheer chance. About the only plausible way to approach that map is to use out-of-game sources like Maprunner or having other people tell you where to go or what to do.

Long story short, the word "find" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that bit of advise. You can't really "find" which missions unlock access to locations when none of that information is available until after completing the mission, which itself might be locked behind another set of missions. You can "find" where to cross the ice, but that tends to similarly involve driving through all of it and seeing where you get stuck. In a zone without a garage, that takes a prohibitive amount of time.

Or I suppose save-scumming. I noticed that Alt+F4ing the game doesn't save, so it's a good way to go back 1-2 minutes and avoid a fall or a roll. I've started waiting for the autosave before attempting difficult crossings in case I fail, so I can try it again. Yeah, it's technically cheating but my solidarity for playing the game "as intended" is inversely proportionate to the malice in the game's map design :)

[mendel]

Malidictus a écrit :

Yeah, and if you'd opened with that instead of "I don't see the problem" and "scout better" then I wouldn't have said anything.

I never said I didn't see the problem -- I do see it, which is why my advice targetted it.

If you don't know what to do, or how to get around, scout more.

If there is no garage in a level, bring some fuel and service trailers and establish a forward base of your own. A rescue vehicle may also be useful.

[Dee]

Malidictus a écrit :

Or I suppose save-scumming. I noticed that Alt+F4ing the game doesn't save, so it's a good way to go back 1-2 minutes and avoid a fall or a roll. I've started waiting for the autosave before attempting difficult crossings in case I fail, so I can try it again. Yeah, it's technically cheating but my solidarity for playing the game "as intended" is inversely proportionate to the malice in the game's map design :)

yup. although i avoid alt+f4 as i read somewhere (reddit methinks) it could cause save file corruption and i ain't never in the mood for that.

what i do is keep one or two hilariously op mods in the garage and whenever the designers flip me the bird, i am ready to return the favour.

[NuclearToast™]

And... it broke me. Entertainment (to me) shouldn't be so frustrating. I'm just glad I didn't buy another season pass. I salute the rest of you!

[Dee]

NuclearToast a écrit :

And... it broke me. Entertainment (to me) shouldn't be so frustrating. I'm just glad I didn't buy another season pass. I salute the rest of you!

the ridiculous airplane parts mission which mandates taking the idiotically long and wide trailer is when i said hell to the no to kola.

yukon was better but it's, as others said, a cargocalypse and still sports some really stupid sections.

wisconsin is where i fell back into the groove, completed it yesterday and is my favourite map, second only to taymyr.

then came amur, where my tatarin got completely stuck twice within the first ten or so minutes into arriving to the map. once it was some snowy murdermud(tm) because of course it was. second time the tatarin bounced randomly off a rock and got bottomed out on another one with all eight wheels not 3 inches off the ground. for the record, i have never, not once, got the tatarin completely stuck before.

yeah. no, thanks devs.

[Malidictus]

Dee a écrit :

the ridiculous airplane parts mission which mandates taking the idiotically long and wide trailer is when i said hell to the no to kola.

Yup. That right there is the capstone to an awful experience. See, I started out trying to play this game by its own rules. Boring over-long logging missions were the first thing that made me crack, but that mission? Yeah, screw that. I'm driving the Berliet the entire way :) I mean granted - that may have made the mission even harder, but at least I didn't have to worry about deep snow or giant rocks.

Kola as a whole reminds me of "I Wanna Be The Guy: Gaiden." It deliberately railroads the player into worst-case scenarios and deliberately puts the player into non-intuitive failure states. I've already talked about this so I won't repeat myself, but there you go. I just lost at least one Snowrunner buddy over it. It really is a pity, because Yukon and especially Wisconsin are so much better designed.

[Hans Meiser]

Dee a écrit :

the ridiculous airplane parts mission which mandates taking the idiotically long and wide trailer is when i said hell to the no to kola.

What was your problem with that mission if I may ask. I found it to be absolutely easy. I did it with the Kolob 74760 and it went smooth without a hitch.

[Ghost]

Hans Meiser a écrit :

Dee a écrit :

the ridiculous airplane parts mission which mandates taking the idiotically long and wide trailer is when i said hell to the no to kola.

What was your problem with that mission if I may ask. I found it to be absolutely easy. I did it with the Kolob 74760 and it went smooth without a hitch.

I used a good old Azov on that mission and it went well. Now, Kola requires planning, wrong truck choice or path, and it can turn into a disaster. Other than that, no problem. Playing Amur and on the last map (Aegis). That one is no fun at all for me. Some of the towers in that map are in ridiculous locations. I really like the cosmodrome and Chermiz (something). The other two maps of Amur, not as much fun.

[Malidictus]

Hans Meiser a écrit :

What was your problem with that mission if I may ask. I found it to be absolutely easy. I did it with the Kolob 74760 and it went smooth without a hitch.

My personal issue with that mission is ideological. Imandra appears predominantly designed for scouts and small trucks. Paths are narrow and windy and often covered in boulders, pitfalls or other hazards. To push players through those paths with a gigantic truck towing a long heavy trailer both limits approaches drastically (down to ostensibly just one reasonable route) and further highlights the deliberately hostile design of the map.

I completed the plane mission myself. I didn't have very many issues, other than my choice of truck (the Berliet mod truck) being extra large and thus extra difficult to squeeze through the narrow paths. Doubly so with the large fuselage of the plane catching on everything, although there's some amount of leeway there with tail and wing sections clipping through trees without resistance.

As I've mentioned multiple times before across multiple different threads - this isn't a matter of "difficulty" or "my ability to accomplish it." It's entirely possible for a run to be both easy and still thoroughly unpleasant. Pretty much everything in Kola but especially in Imandra fits that descriptions. The routes are unpleasant, the terrain is not fun to navigate and there are no apparent "clever" ways to accomplish anything because the map makers meticulously closed off all of them.

Above all else, that's my biggest issue with Kola. Every time I come up with what seems like a clever idea, I discover that the map maker has thought of that before me and placed trees/rocks/ice/fences specifically to prevent me being smart. The result is an on-rails experience where you only ever go where the map maker wants you to go, which results in a lot of holding W with one hand and holding my chin with the other.

[Hans Meiser]

Malidictus a écrit :

Hans Meiser a écrit :

What was your problem with that mission if I may ask. I found it to be absolutely easy. I did it with the Kolob 74760 and it went smooth without a hitch.

My personal issue with that mission is ideological. Imandra appears predominantly designed for scouts and small trucks. Paths are narrow and windy and often covered in boulders, pitfalls or other hazards. To push players through those paths with a gigantic truck towing a long heavy trailer both limits approaches drastically (down to ostensibly just one reasonable route) and further highlights the deliberately hostile design of the map.

I completed the plane mission myself. I didn't have very many issues, other than my choice of truck (the Berliet mod truck) being extra large and thus extra difficult to squeeze through the narrow paths. Doubly so with the large fuselage of the plane catching on everything, although there's some amount of leeway there with tail and wing sections clipping through trees without resistance.

As I've mentioned multiple times before across multiple different threads - this isn't a matter of "difficulty" or "my ability to accomplish it." It's entirely possible for a run to be both easy and still thoroughly unpleasant. Pretty much everything in Kola but especially in Imandra fits that descriptions. The routes are unpleasant, the terrain is not fun to navigate and there are no apparent "clever" ways to accomplish anything because the map makers meticulously closed off all of them.

Above all else, that's my biggest issue with Kola. Every time I come up with what seems like a clever idea, I discover that the map maker has thought of that before me and placed trees/rocks/ice/fences specifically to prevent me being smart. The result is an on-rails experience where you only ever go where the map maker wants you to go, which results in a lot of holding W with one hand and holding my chin with the other.

All of that differs alot from my own experience. I had 0 problems fitting through anything when doing the mission with the Kolob and that's not exactly a small truck either.

I'm gonna be honest and say using an oversized mod truck kind of disqualifies you from criticizing the devs for making paths "too narrow". Using something that is much larger than the largest vehicle ingame will obviously not fit through passages or on roads the devs intended to be used.

I also strongly agree with them limiting you to drive only one exact way. There are always options and I've found shortcuts on every map, especially on Imandra there are a few very significant shortcuts that make navigating the map alot easier.

I enjoy navigating tight spots and scouting routes to use, this in my opinion is exactly what a game like this should be. If the game offered 0 challengess driving cargo from A to B, I fail to see the appeal for a game like this. If you want carefree driving, a different game like one of the truck simulators might be more down your alley. This game is all about struggling, solving the problems that present themselves on a route and executing your plan carefully. If you don't enjoy the struggle, I don't think this is the right game. Criticizing the devs for making challenging sections in Snowrunner is like eating a steak and then criticizing the chef for making horrible food, when you actually just don't like Steak.