Observations / Suggestions

[callmedave4]

Hello devs and anyone interested.
Loving the game. I've played every mission and every sandbox map. Really looking forward to future developments.
Here are my thoughts, for what they are worth. Probably many of them are obvious and already in your pipeline and some may be personal taste so take it with a pinch of salt.
Good luck with growing the game.



Executive summary:
Tech tree needs an overhaul
Make culture/knowledge/wellbeing scores mechanically meaningful
Need mid to late game challenges/escalation
Quality of life improvements
Suggestions
Bugs





Tech tree 
The only part of this game that I found frustrating is the tech tree. In most games I race the tech tree. I find it really satisfying to climb the tech ladder. Each "Research Complete" feels like a mini-accomplishment. In this game, as it stands now, I dislike having to go to the tech screen. Click, dragging around and around to find out what I can research. It's visually muddled. I have to click and click to find out 1, Is it researchable? 2, Do I have the resources? 3, Is it tech or culture? I find the tech screen a chore and I wish I could ignore it completely. I understand there is an art style, and it looks nice, but it fails to communicate necessary information.
This could be improved with something as simple as rings around each tech which are clearly colour coded and intelligible at a glance.
e.g.Grey = Not yet unlockable
Black = Researchable
Red = Insufficient resources
White = Researched

Either give every project a very clear icon for Culture versus Tech or make a Culture / Tech switch which will make all Culture projects or Tech projects pop out / fade back.

Make research queueable.

Zoom out so entire tree is on screen at once to avoid all the dragging around.

On Main screen, the research icons on the bottom left should have pop up when hovered over which reminds you of current research or resources required (if queued but not started due to lack of resources) to avoid needing to click into research screen.

The 2 research boost buildings come at the end of the tech trees. The research boost they offer is largely pointless. The score bonus they offer (by granting higher occupancy to main research buildings) doesn't mean much in-game.

(Excuse me while we have a little detour into suggestions as it fits in here quite well)
Knowledge score does not currently impact research which is thematically odd.
If certain techs required knowledge levels to research this would push the player to construct knowledge enhancing districts. If the highest techs require very high knowledge scores, this would push the player to focus on knowledge at the expense of other scores. These districts could be replaced afterwards (switch to culture, etc) which would fit the theme of a society that risks forgetting how it made things. Can you do everything at once? What needs to be sacrificed? This means mid to late game the player has incentive to modify the layout. The layout evolves as the needs evolve.

Other scores
Make the culture/knowledge/wellbeing scores mechanically meaningful. Currently the points system is not compelling. As it stands, I only pay attention to these scores because the preset missions tell me I have to achieve a score of X.
Push player to increase scores by giving consequences for low scores. Low societal cohesion leading to:
Decreased production
Theft
Alcohol use (resources diverted to make alcohol which further lowers productivity)
Vandalism
Reduced birth rate
Illness
Education penalty (very low scores in one area will negatively impact scores in other areas e.g. education can never be maxed out if everyone is bored and depressed.

Vice versa, bonus for high scores or at least having all scores moderately fulfilled.
(/Detour)





Late game challenge / scaling

Exploration lacks weight in mid/late game as it does not scale (other than by sending out larger group of explorers which is capped). Rewards of exploration can be meaningful in early game but are largely meaningless in later game, unless you have a specific shortage due to bad planning.

Add external challenges and random events to stop late game becoming a linear path.
Random events optional (Off, low, medium, random ala Rimworld)
Requests from outsiders in exchange for diplomacy / culture boost
Help build up other settlements (This could be a multistep quest of delivering materials and conducting specialised research projects with various outcomes depending on how you choose to help them).
Interconnect the wasteland by helping other groups (granting culture boosts as reward or opening up other quest options where you can call in favours).
Difficult choices. The demand for a quest could be high with no substantial immediate mechanical reward but more of a moral/philosophical one.

Random plant disease reduces output from a species for several cycles. This will disrupt a production web which is on autopilot and forces the player to react.
Research to treat it
Expedition to retrieve cure / bring back specialist
Or you can clear cut the whole crop on the map and replant

Random weather events
e.g. Sudden humidity which leads to mushroom season and stagnation of species that prefer arid conditions. Explosive growth of fungi that cause a drain on the soil and requires effort to restore soil.
Again, disrupts production web which is on autopilot and forces the player to react.

For players who like the long game, there could be options to make permanent improvements by sacrificing artifacts and huge quantities of resources. e.g. Expensive permanent alteration of soil. Causes a modest improvement on minerals or biomatter which permanently elevates the baseline. Gives players a long range goal to make things as perfect as possible / never ending end game.





Quality of life

Remember last used sub-recipe when switching production items e.g. so I don't have to select dirty water option over clean water option each time I change production from Composites to Glass.

Be able to have multiple recipes queued at each building. Currently this is especially problematic in kitchens where recipes have to be micromanaged when an ingredient runs low.

Instruct building to produce X until 40 units are in stock, produce Y until 30 units are in stock, etc. This could be downstream of some sort of Stock Taking cultural research and requires a worker to be assigned to checking stores.

Be able to zoom out more to see whole map.

Hover over expedition button to get pop up to show available population for a mission, rather than having to click into expedition screen to find out you don't have enough spare people.

Click on stock item to see all active consumers and producers and change in stock level per cycle.  

Set up auto rip zones to keep invasive plants contained. Set a region on map and choose allow / disallow for each species. Unwelcome species will be ripped out by the appropriate worker (requires appropriate harvesting building in range). Currently, manually ripping up areas of invasive plant each cycle is repetitive without any feeling of progress.





Suggestions
(Ok so it has pretty much all been suggestions so far but these below are increasingly subjective).

Have bigger map options for sandbox which allow decentralised housing groups (allowing for multiple different specialised hubs).

Option for randomised plant characteristics for sandbox mode. This way the player can't meta game. Only after research is done is it known which plant does what. This can throw up combinations that make the game very strange/challenging so a seed* system would be ideal, allowing players to choose an interesting challenge advertised by other players sharing seeds.
*Not the plant kind.

Soil changes being temporary (and reverting instantly) feels a bit gamey. It would have more impact if changes to soil had longer term impacts. They can be reversed by other processes, but they don't disappear instantly by themselves.
e.g. If a mushroom drains the biomatter from the soil, it should stay drained when the mushroom is removed rather than instantly resetting. A subsequent mushroom should drain it further. When a soil enrichment building adds minerals to the soil, these should stay in the soil until a mineral draining plant removes them. This makes it more interesting to balance things and makes the tactic of cramming 20 of the same plant in a tight grid less appealing.

In late game many of the researchers are close to useless. Allow researchers to be assigned to buildings to give a bonus.
All plants will be researched by midgame which leaves Field Lab researchers with nothing to do. They can be assigned to harvesting buildings to boost the harvest (or lower percentage chance of negative plant random event / boost chance of positive random event).
Assign Hall of Wisdom researchers to buildings that generate culture/wellbeing/social e.g. Analyse harmonics in Music Workshop to give a bonus to range.
Assign Research Center researchers to knowledge/health/production buildings e.g. Foundry speed boost.

A goal for people who like to play without a fixed endgame can be to make everything as efficient as possible to be able to give as much as possible to an end game resource sink e.g. provide more goods at the embassy, exchanging goods for higher culture scores.

Give expeditions a use which continues after all of the map has been explored. Assign citizens to open ended missions. This gives players an incentive to grow population to have more citizens available for ongoing expeditions.
e.g. Assign citizens to tech scavenger duty. Scavengers consume tools to randomly return artifacts
Assign citizens to ancient discovery duty. Discoverers consume artifacts and may return tablets (Set this to low, med and high risk rate. Better chance of material success but at risk of deaths).
Exchange standard goods by assigning citizens to merchant groups. Merchants return semi-random goods in exchange for other assigned goods. 
Diplomatic groups. Small chance of a culture boost.
Good Samaritans. Consumes food and medicines, giving them to others in need. Perhaps offers a very rare benefit or is only here for moral roleplay.
The more locations already explored, the better the % chance of scavenging success.

Give player more choice (including bad options).
At the moment all the choices are somewhat positive or at worst neutral (as in, I don't have the X to spare so I will leave things as I found them).  
Make bad/negative choices possible! Possibility of consequences to bite the player later.
These can be as obvious as stealing (e.g. a tablet from a group that doesn't want to share it) to something which is more philosophically bad / at odds with the theme of the game (e.g. option to fill in ponds or flatten rocks to create bare ground to make building a grid town easier but comes with a permanent culture penalty).





Bugs

Research cannot be cancelled. Gets stuck if culture score drops mid-research.

Having shift as the default rotate key causes sticky key warnings in Windows.

"!" (exclamation) float remains over a building if you have the building selected while building construction is completed, even if you assign workers.





Clarifications

Are all plant modifications of soil temporary?
How does shade and temperature interact? Outdoors? In houses? Is shade purely an environment bonus?
Which temperature modifying plants stack? With other species? Hatted tree reduces temp, I think, but does not have that in description.
(I had to play for hours before the answers to these were clear. Needs expanded tool tips or a glossary page.)



If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

[17_Leikir]

Hello,

Thank you so much for your feedback! It’s always a pleasure to read such detailed and thoughtful input.

The next update, arriving in just a few days, includes many improvements related to the points you’ve raised!

You can check out a summary of the changes here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/1989070/announcements/detail/4532402556909912103?snr=2___
If you’d like, you can even test the new version before its official release.

While some of the issues you’ve mentioned aren’t fully addressed in this update, rest assured we’re already working on them for future ones.

Feel free to join us on Discord if you’d like to discuss further: https://discord.gg/gsph9hqdSt

[callmedave4]

I'll be sure to check out the update. Definitely following this game with interest.
It has a Ninth World feel to me.
I enjoy a post-post-apocalypse setting. I really like the concept of culture/society being another form of technology (as we think of technology today). Something to research, understand and deliberately modify. True sustainability can only be achieved when resources, technology and culture work together (in synergy?).