Speed increase, & endless

[[CPC]Feuby]

Hi, I played the first game with friends and family. We ended up doing quite a nice score 2 weeks ago (4000m with 2 crashes only 1 real one, I somehow lost my save and had to load back to checkpoint).

Some kinda problem with engine choice vs checkpoints

When we tried the 2, it was sooooo nice. Especially the fact that we can now get back to the last station with toy engine, versus going back to biome start. I really liked the fact that you could check a box for checkpoint in the first game, and I'm somehow let down knowing that if we want to play casually, we have to stick to toy engine.
To be honnest, we almost left the game because there was confusion on "restart" versus "restart to last station/biome". We didn't like the "one rush, no retry" options, we are not really hardcore.
The fact that we cannot try other engines is kinda sad. As you offered players way to choose the path, you should also let them choose if they want chekpoints at station or not. You could even leave them making this choice at the end, on the first crash (if no security issues for high scores).

Please aknowledge first that english is not my mother tongue (sorry if any errors). Then that me and my sister are both deaf, so no vocal. We can only rely on IG written communication (even if we are in the same room), or emotes.

Here some comments :

Tutorial

We spent way too much time at the "swap with bot" task. WAY TOO MUCH. The same way you put the key when the player get the "toss" cartridge, please put the keys needed on the tutorial, especially for this kind of things. I had somehow to get to parameters, see the keys, and then get it right. After being stranded.

Emote & communication

Unrailed 1 communication was kinda fun. I mean, really. It felt so akward at start but at some point, it kicks in, and works like a charm. Easy, clean.
Unrailed 2 : it is PAINFULL. I really like the fact that there are hotkeys for it, but it cannot be modified. I have 12 buttons on my mouse, (utechsmart venus) and I had a razer naga (with 6 buttons, yes, moba player here lol) but it's kinda hard to make it work.
Oh, and in the 1 we could use the direction to put the correct emote, but we somehow have to click on it on the 2... Make both options, especially when moving high speed i do not really have time to do my job and click properly and precisely on the screen to give orders to the bot. At lease for humans, they understand even if I kinda click in the general direction.

The bot

-The bot, on one player has some troublesome behavior sometimes. When tasked to put down tracks, he should go lay them down FIRST thing. No refilling if there are some to drop, take them, drop them. Refill only if there is nothing to lay. And second : if he has some in hand, it should lay it (some kinda tweak can be made). What I saw is the bot laying one track, moving aside to get one more track on his pile because he had space, lay another one, etc etc.
-The bot should have a kinda "give way to player". I somehow find myself blocked by the bot and I have to force push it out of the way. The easier should be like on really close contact, try to get around, and if no way around, follow the player move direction then when he get away, resume. It is kinda frustrated.
-When swapping player with bot, it is quite great that the default behavior is "fill wagons". Perfect, except in situations where players are split due to the train, and you are trying to toss tracks to the other. If you swap, drop items, then reswap to toss, the bot immediatly picks the items and try to fill the train which prevent you to toss. It does not drop it either. Maybe if we put the bot on "hold" (zzzz) then the bot stays on hold when swapped. Could do the trick.
-Please please please allow us to specify what items to put into the carriage wagon. I'm sometimes using it to automatically store torpedos/dynamites on the train end, and this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ bot putting all the tracks at the end of the train never getting them when needing to lay it... That infuriates me way too much. I should calm myself on that but... omg if you had ONE THING to change in that whole post, that'd be that.

Engine speed on endgame

I do not really know how to balance things between "unlimited run" for pro gamers versus "hardly doable" for casual players. What I would really, really suggest you is simply to allow the player to configure it himself. Like just a slider, between 0% and 300% of the regular increase would do the trick.
Almost all my fav games allow the player to choose his difficulty (yes, I'm a HUGE fan of the path selection. REALLY HUGE. And I take the hardest difficulty I'm confortable with, to get the best reward).
But let's be more precise : I'm a real fan of Deep Rock Galactic (1100h played here). You can choose between hazard 1 (for noobs) to Hazard 5 (good players) and they even added a "Hazard 5+" which basically gives you 4 more modifiers (2 variants : + and ++) : ennemies number, ennemies health, ennemies damage, ennemies speed. With each choice, harder the game, better the reward.
Another example I'm a huge fan of : Factorio (1100 hours too...). Here you can fully customize your game, from the resource spawn, abundance, and size. Ennemies agressivity, and pollution, you can tweak it as you wish. Some people like it harder, others like to build gigantic factories with train (yeah I'm a train fan... "world of rail", my fav settings....)

But honnestly I managed to get to like 3000m solo with the bot, but as soon as I get back to the first biome, it's doable but the second biome, impossible. The train is way too fast to play with the bot, giving him orders, and doing the job is impossible over about 0.5.

It's a shame because of all the possibilities, I'd like to get a full automated train, see what I can do, what I cannot, explore other engines. I'd like to test things, but with the bot being itself, I cannot play solo with anything else than the toy engine.

Oh and no, I cannot really play with random people. First, the game take quite some time if you are good, and second : I may have to pause anytime when someone talking to me, needing me, or work to do, I just have 30 minutes like.

Anyway I think there should be a cap on the speed, probably a factor of player lowest speed. I mean if you need running cartridges just to keep up with the train... lol

Some additionnal notes/thoughs

Here some random though from playing. I do not know if that's any good. Just take it with a grain of salt here. It may completly throw the balance off, so it's not forced to be something to do. It does not even mean something has to change. That's just a though.

-The collector is quite good, I'm not gonna lie. We were huge fan of unrailed 1 collector. I'm not quite a great fan of this one. It works great, but if the "auto fill" extension is here, it may totally throw your run when you have some lack of wood. Any wood you gather will be taken by it even before the crafter can do it. It could not be an issue if the stack size was put down to 1 with auto fill (then it only takes what it needs when it needs) but on higher levels it's quite stupid. By the time you get some additionnal wood if it's scarce, it will be burned through. The same can be said for ANY wagon that consume iron or wood with auto-fill as soon as the stack starts to be higher than 2-3.

-I think wagons requiring iron/wood to work (collector, magtractor, supercharger) need some tweak to their consumption. I feel like they burn the resources at high speed. On like 75% of the maps it's good, but as soon as the map is a BIT scarce, you done. Oh and the "active time" extension doesn't work enough, if you ask me. I almost never used the magtractor so I cannot speak about it, but getting the collector to consume only when picking should be a start, and lowering the supercharger would be good too. If not, they will mostly be reserved for high speed players/or high player count) that can go through the map fast enought not to lack anything.

-I have quite a love-hate relationship with the hexnut wagon. I mean 60 seconds the nut ? as soon as I unlocked it for the first time, I was "coooool". Then I upgraded it to 60seconds and unlocked almost everything in the game. It's cool idea, but 60sec is not enough. And the 300 secs at start is too much. I'd suggest something like 180 sec, and then going -15 sec per level. Cap to 90sec, then lower it enough so that's not interesting pursuing.

-printer wagon should probably print random extensions instead. Would probably be more worth. 20 tracks is way too much if you ask me. I mean there is litterally a challenge "stack 20 resources". And 20 tracks is like 40 ressources for something that you will have to trash most of the time lol.

-Turret wagon is unbalanced IMO. Totally useless at low level, quite OP later. Considering the investment for it to become good I'd say it's balanced, but the first levels until like total level 6 (2/sec) is trash.

-Compactor wagon is a great idea but the time to compact makes it not worth at all. Or I'm missing something (maybe I should store the compacted thing into a carriage instead of sending it back to storage ?) Anyway at 0.5 speed, you burn items like crazy, so compacting them is useless.

-Would be nice to be able to give an order to the bot "earn me time, we are going there" so he starts laying tracks back and forth while you do your thing, and preping the way to get there.

-cartridge eraser : would be nice to know what was taken away when using it.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk reading all this.

Bugs

At some points during the game, mostly in the island biome, animals stop spawning, you need to exit and re-enter the game. Even "more animals" modifiers do not spawn anything.

[Stencil]

Thanks for all the feedback! I do agree that is a complicated balance between less experienced players and the more pro players like me.

Just to note that we have a very active community on Discord if you don't wish to play with randoms and the upcoming update will provide an option to link your Discord profile in games.

[[CPC]Feuby]

Originally posted by Stencil:

Thanks for all the feedback! I do agree that is a complicated balance between less experienced players and the more pro players like me.

This is kinda my whole point by saying "just let the user adjust it to his convenience. When speaking about highscores, having filters (max crashes, engines, etc) allows to satisfy hardcore players. Like you know, setting a "0 crashes" is something quite impressive. Even with toy engine. I mean, like, 0 crash with toy engine is like the hardcore mode because you only have 4 wagons.

I'm quite impressed by experts/pro players, but honnestly when you have a rough day, chilling on ez mode is still quite good : we are here for the fun, just let us having the fun we want you know ?

Want go extreme map ? great, have a better reward. Balance it for yourself. No need to impose the difficulty.

Oh and BTW I just got why it was this hard : speed increase is exponential : +10% per station. It works quite good until 0.5m/s after that it's way too much I think.