Beta v0.6: Thoughts on progression, capacity

[mauve]

So, I played a lot of v0.5. Like, a lot a lot. "Level 100 Expert researched" level. It was something to relax and explore for me, finding new and interesting/creative ways to progress in the game.

I've played v0.6 to more or less completion of what's up there now and... Overall I like the new flow more, there's a lot of good things in there. But I'm finding myself falling off it in disinterest already, and I had to think about it for a bit to pinpoint why.

My issue is that there is exactly one way to get meaningful progress in any part of the game: Capacity.

This comes from a few things, and here's my thoughts on it:

1 - The only way to get Advancements is through upgrading Attributes.

This is the biggest issue, I feel.

Research is the only means of actively progressing through the game, and because all research upgrades are now linked directly to attribute advancement, it means that your decision making is going to optimize for anything that allows you to get more attributes.

And virtually all attributes are limited by non-material resource capacity. The ones that are limited by, say, only crafting or only alchemy, are so sparse that they are basically irrelevant for progression. You'll get to them when you get to them, because once you've got everything else upgraded, it will be easier to upgrade them.

Spellcasting? Artifacts? Do they help you reach new capacity breakpoints or fill up to them? Because, if not, they are not useful in any way. They're just kinda there.

Crafting feels like a minigame that you click several buffs in sequence and then put out an astronomical quantity of them, then forget about it for another hour or three. Alchemy feels the same; past a point it's so much more efficient to do One Thing Very Good for a short while than it is to spread yourself out.

Druidry feels underwhelming because it produces mostly nice-to-haves outside of its own little sphere. Magicianry is the best upgrade, by far. Ability Advancements are the primary reason to invest in the rest of the tree, and, again, this comes basically naturally with general capacity upgrades.

(This is probably a balance issue, but pretty much all Druidry growth upgrades are made irrelevant by Emblem of Formation, as well. Just throw 1x Reverberate and a full bar of Emblem in, and you can simply max all your resources out in under a minute. Easy.)

This all even makes picking attributes to upgrade less interesting! Instead of trying to pick and choose, you're just clicking everything! What does it do? Who cares, number go up. Number go up makes other number go up.

Also, as an aside, Magical Advancements are by far the easiest to get, due to Wizardry attributes, and I have far more of them than the others. The upgrades they fuel are simply not as valuable across the board as Ability or Cognitive Advancements, so it is frequently difficult to justify spending them at all.

2 - Expert Expansion is just plain better than the rest.

There comes a point where you're looking at the research trees, and you realize the best bet for improving Alchemy is to invest in Expansion instead. And the best bet for improving spellcasting is to invest in Expansion. And the best bet for improving Druidry is to invest in Expansion.

Because Expansion directly gets you capacity, which lets you upgrade more Attributes, which gets you more Advancements.

Because Expansion gates Technology upgrades, which are _good_ and all of them depend on Expansion and Expansion alone.

Because Expansion gets you more potion space, which lets you stock more buffs.

Compared to any other expert, it's just such a comically good investment to reward ratio. Scholar and Alchemy come reasonably close, as both help you, respectively, to increase quality and to fill capacity.

3 - Research is just very unbalanced.

Technology is just plain the best way to proceed. Improved Learning, Improved Laboratory, Improved Artifacts, Improved Casting, Improved Gathering, Improved Brewing... all of these are just plain solid, and you want them as high as you can get them.

And as noted above, Expansion, and only Expansion, gates Technology upgrades directly.

Innovations are nice but they are not just limited but also often kind of a lousy value trade. Far more often than not, it's much better to save up your Advancements to burn on Technology than it is to buy further Innovations.

There is just no world where I can justify spending further points on Druidic Generation, Arcane Development, Parallel Casting, Parallel Minds, instead of saving the more valuable Cognitive and Ability Advancements for Technology.

Heck, even Casting Mastery, Augment Resonance, and Faster Charms are hard sells.

(...Echo Build legitimately seems comically useless. Getting an extra attribute level or two occasionally is not at all worth the investment.)

4 - The resultant gameflow just isn't fun.

So I found myself doing the following, on repeat:

- Using alchemy, cantrips, and potions to max non-material resources.
- Full-upgrading every attribute I could, on every page.
- Using the resultant Advancements I got to further raise capacity.
- Repeat.

There was very little variation or even reason to diverge from this pattern, because there's only the one way to get the Advancements necessary to do research: Upgrade Attributes.

Spellcasting felt like it took a deep backseat, put into a supporting role for boosting Attributes.

Crafting is just something I do once in a while to gain a massive pile of material resources; It isn't a main thing and it can't be one.

Scribing is effective but largely tedious, and once you've got scrolls on a lot of things it's hard to tell what needs _better_ scrolls, to the point where I often just kinda stopped caring after a while.

Etc. Everything just flows backwards from capacity being the most important factor by far.

Conclusion

This is not my game, of course, I'm just giving my thoughts on why I feel it's less engaging than the previous iteration.

[Mylon]

"- Using alchemy, cantrips, and potions to max non-material resources.
- Full-upgrading every attribute I could, on every page.
- Using the resultant Advancements I got to further raise capacity.
- Repeat."

Grats, you distilled the game down into some simple steps. There are some fun strategies to explore as there are different means to generate resources effectively throughout different stages of the game, but yes, this is the core concept.

Some some of us like that.

[RawCode]

grind gated expert books is disaster.

[Meta]

I agree that I don't like the progression in 0.6. I preferred 0.5 by a long shot. The innovation/tech gatekeeping just feels terrible if you made "bad" choices.

[MariMarthiel]

I agree, I like this version, but I prefered old research
>need 130 attributes to earn Orb xp
>grind it, not even looking at the upgrades I get, just clicking on the cheapest one
>get Orb xp
>mfw I need 5 lvls of Alchemy book to get potion I want

[FDru]

I kinda like echo build. Yeah, it's just a free level here and there but sometimes it chains over and over getting you way beyond your current cap for whatever you're buying.

[Razuhl]

If you don't like the development cost you can just mod it out.

Open "..\Orb of Creation\Orb Of Creation_Data\Managed\Assembly-CSharp.dll" in dnSpy
Search "ResearchSO.GetDevelopmentCostAtLevel"
Open the result
Rightclick that name and select "c# Edit Method".
Change Code to

if (!this.researchCost.IsEmpty())
{
	this.researchCost = new ResourceCostList();
}
return this.researchCost.SetToLevel(this.researchCostPerLevel, levelN);

Hit compile
File -> Save All -> Ok

Now you can research like before.

[mauve]

The thing about echo build is that the math on it is just really, really underwhelming. It is pretty cool when it works.

If we are to only count echo builds that go above your capacity limit, meaning only the ones that actually gain you anything you wouldn't get normally, then we need to work out how much gain each level of echo build actually gets you.

Fortunately, the math on repeated echo builds is a geometric series, and the summation works out trivially from +15 echo rating to a flat +15% increase over base. So +30 is +30%, +45 is +45%, etc. Easy!

There are 123 attributes in the game, so each level of echo build gives you +15% of that, or an average of 18.45 attribute levels over what you would have normally.

And this isn't something that compounds throughout the game, it's a flat bonus that never scales, and never improves. But your attribute levels continually go up, so its effective value depreciates over time, requiring more and more investment just to reach the same +% effectiveness you had before.

And it requires more investment in Expert Arcane, which is already kind of a hard sell a lot of the time, and spending Technology and Cognitive Advancements, both of which are already in the highest demand of all non-Orb Advancements.

So.. yeah. It's just exceedingly underwhelming. Other investments scale multiplicatively upwards, while it does not.

[Shau]

Well, you can't make every research equally useful. In that case, you would end up clicking anything without looking.

I like the new system. There is basically no waiting involved. You do need caps, because otherwise, you beat the game before it even started.

Alchemy still kicks in once you level it. You can fill your attributes within a few seconds. We do need more alchemy slots!

About crafting: Is it a bug? We receive resources before the crafting ends. If I understand it correctly, crafting speed is one of the most useless attribute. Furthermore, we do have auto craft slots. Why would you ever use them?

Equipment: in 0.50, I really liked the staff that gave all resources. Right now, this staff seems to be useless. I just pick one set of equipment and stick with it. I don't see a need for switching yet. Concepts that give resources become useless very quickly too. At the point of time, where I unlocked the energy one, The bars didn't move at all when developing attributes.

What's missing is a breakdown for each resource explaining where I consume the resource and where I produce it. Sometimes, it's hard to track. E. g. I'm getting plants and trees which I'm currently not harvesting and I have no idea where I get them from.

I'm at about 100QA resources now. Potions and equipment don't feel that useful yet. I wonder how rituals will shift the focus of the game. Btw. will there be a wipe? My old save wasn't compatible, so I created a new one. Will both saves work when 0.6x is released? Do we lose the new one? The old one?

[CptR3dB34rd]

Originally posted by Shau:

About crafting: Is it a bug? We receive resources before the crafting ends. If I understand it correctly, crafting speed is one of the most useless attribute. Furthermore, we do have auto craft slots. Why would you ever use them?

I only found two scenarios where this might be useful: you can ensure that spells that give a bonus to crafting magnitude (like Mana Forge) last for the whole duration in which you craft. If your crafting times are too long, you will only benefit in smaller quantity from the spell you just used.
The second case would be to quickly get it over with: suppose you have am equipment set specifically dedicated for crafting: you don't want to waste a lot of time "locked" with that equipment that serves no other purpose. You would rather have the crafting condensed in time.

Originally posted by Shau:

Equipment: in 0.50, I really liked the staff that gave all resources. Right now, this staff seems to be useless. I just pick one set of equipment and stick with it. I don't see a need for switching yet.

I don't know if you have yet to unlock a bunch of artifacts to equip yourself with. Many of them are really specific and I can understand not wanting to keep the equipped at all times. As I mentioned above, there are artifacts that give interesting bonuses to crafting. Doesn't make much sense to use those if I'm not crafting anything. The same concept can be applied to many different resources: you can get an equipment to optimize the generation of a very specific type of resource. Realistically, you will know when you need more than one resource rather than the other.

Originally posted by Shau:

What's missing is a breakdown for each resource explaining where I consume the resource and where I produce it. Sometimes, it's hard to track. E. g. I'm getting plants and trees which I'm currently not harvesting and I have no idea where I get them from.

I'm fairly certain that clicking on a certain resource breaks down everything you want to know (specifically, in your case, resource generation and consumption rates)

Originally posted by Shau:

I like the new system. There is basically no waiting involved. You do need caps, because otherwise, you beat the game before it even started.

I have to agree with this. Overall, the grind is not that bad and, if anything, it forces you to really think about the optimal solution in any circumstance, especially when it comes to researches. Certain phases of druidry and alchemy feel really slow. However, nothing major that a few balance patches can't fix imo.

[Mylon]

Originally posted by Shau:

I like the new system. There is basically no waiting involved. You do need caps, because otherwise, you beat the game before it even started.

Caps merely enforce active play. And there's no in-game support of automated buying of attributes so the caps feel mostly like a way to push aura or idle based play. As raising the caps is a large part of the content, it feels like artificial content.

The game is still good, I just feel pressured to switch gears too often because I don't want to waste resources sitting at the cap.

[isomorphic]

Originally posted by Mylon:

The game is still good, I just feel pressured to switch gears too often because I don't want to waste resources sitting at the cap.

At some point "wasting resources sitting at the cap" becomes irrelevant. Passive generation rates are totally dwarfed in orders of magnitude by what you can do with powerful combination of spells and other gameplay loops. On my save 5 minute of active play is going to generate more than like, a year of letting it sit there

Originally posted by mauve:

Innovations are nice but they are not just limited but also often kind of a lousy value trade. Far more often than not, it's much better to save up your Advancements to burn on Technology than it is to buy further Innovations.

Weird, I thought it was pretty obvious that innovations are more powerful than technologies! Like if you compare say, attunement mastery to improved artifacts... (agree that cognitive and technology points are worth more)

Granted my highest expert level right now is 25, but it seemed to me that stuff like parallel minds, auto-scribe, extra artifact slots, and research scaling (i.e. mind mastery) are really where it's at for the super late game. My gameplay loop at the moment is mainly just psionic forge x6/mana biscuit spam/reflective scaling, plus autoscribing

I also found many of the technologies to be irrelevant because generating garden and crafting resources are never limiting factors, at least for the way that I play. The ones that buff auras and generators are just.. pathetically weak

[Cheshire]

I really like the idea of Research being gated behind progression, with limited quantities that make you consider what you want to focus on.
The problem is that you get way, way too few points to spend. You have to know exactly what you want to buy, since one wrong purchase could set you back hours of playtime. There's no room for experimenting, or getting minor quality-of-life improvements.

A simple fix would be for each attribute "area" to give more points with each level. But the higher-tier research upgrades require more points. Overall you get more points to spend, but are incentivized to spend those points on a few low-tier research upgrades that aren't related to your build.

[Razuhl]

@Cheshire You can edit the growth per level and try out different models. Just make a copy of your save beforehand.

Open "..\Orb of Creation\Orb Of Creation_Data\Managed\Assembly-CSharp.dll" in dnSpy
Search "ResearchSO.ApplyMaxQuantityFromLevels"
Open the result
Rightclick that name and select "c# Edit Method".
Change Code to

if (this.resourceType != ResourceSO.ResourceType.Experience)
{
	return;
}
		this.maxQuantity.Add(this.maxQuantityLevelMods.MultiplyScalar(1).SetReference(this), ModifierRecord.ModifierType.Passive);

Hit compile
File -> Save All -> Ok

The number 1 can be replaced with various models. For example keeping the scaling at a fixed level is not a good idea, since you unlock more resources which you earn in parallel and therefore level more things up as you unlock new parts of the game. Limiting it to a specific level would allow the earlygame progression but then transition into late game freedom.

this.maxQuantity.Add(this.maxQuantityLevelMods.MultiplyScalar(Math.Max(this.appliedLevels, 20)).SetReference(this), ModifierRecord.ModifierType.Passive);

In this example it would cap growth at lvl 20 scaling.

[Cheshire]

Originally posted by Razuhl:

@Cheshire You can edit the growth per level and try out different models.

Holy hot damn that's amazing. You're a saint for coming up with that from just a quick "what if" suggestion.
I look forward to when I'm awake enough to even try to parse this.