Pollution needs some fine-tuning (4.1 beta)

[ZakTheFallen]

I've been testing out the new 4.1 beta, and some things aren't quite right. I'm used to the pollution mechanic now, but the whole sickness thing needs some tweaking. Here's my scenario:

All 3 of my starting survivors will get sick at the same time, because all they have to eat is polluted fish. So every few days they all pass out for half of a day, no matter what needs to be done for their imminent survival. In most games, they'd get sick, have some stat penalties (like working/moving slower), but they can still get up and do something if they need to.

The problem here is that there's no other way to get rid of pollution, my team of 3 get locked into this cycle and can't break out of it. I hoped that the fish cleaner would make it easier, but all it does is remove a puny 2 pollution from the fish... What is even the point then? Sure, I can clean the oil fish too, but I can't use it until I have a grill.

Seaweed is also polluted, so there's no clean food source in the early game. But there's also no way to treat sickness, all I can do is wait while everyone wastes part of the day resting. Is it intended for me to plan around this and just have a bunch of food and water ready ahead of time? That's really hard to do early on, because it takes so long to dry fish and purify water.

My suggestion here is to give the option to force a survivor to work, even if they're slow and take longer to do anything. I suggest making their recovery take longer in this case. That's better than waiting around with nothing to do. The point is that taking away the player's ability to do anything isn't fun. I understand that it's for the sake of actually making sickness a challenge to deal with, but there has to be a way to avoid this cycle of "no one can do anything, wait a few minutes on speed 3".

[Cthonyxa]

I had a similar experience when I gave the beta a try (although I didn't make it far enough to grow seaweed before I got frustrated and quit). Given the patch notes, I honestly had the expectation that the fish washer would completely remove the pollution and so I was unpleasantly surprised when, after spending a lot of time researching and building the workshop, I realized it was basically useless.

That, combined with the fact that:

1. Now there are potentially harmful food recipes with no way to ban the drifters from making (unless you specialize your fish sticks each to a single craft, which takes up too much of the already extremely limited space)

and 2. The fish washer is HUGE, has 3 (or was it 4? i forget) separate recipes, and therefore needs to either be micromanaged or you need to build 1 workshop per recipe in order to have the drifters craft the item when they have the fish in stock.

...well, if I'm being honest, this is the first time I've played an EA game that was more fun before the updates.

Don't get me wrong; it's not that I don't think that the additions are bad (I do think that research is much improved, scouting was a needed feature, the electricity mechanic is interesting, and that idea of pollution/sickness can be a good addition), but they're coming at the expense of QoL and balance changes. That, combined with not considering stopgap mechanics to help make stable patches playable (ie. Why You Shouldn't Have Taken Out The Fish Sticks, Even Temporarily) makes it extremely hard to enjoy playing the game for long enough to give meaningful feedback.

In terms of the pollution mechanic itself, a few things to consider that might help make it a challenge rather than a frustration:
1. Add research for pollution medicine (reduces pollution when taken) that's cheaper to research than fish washers (completely gets rid of pollution) and easier/cheaper to make, that way players start off by having to manage pollution and its consequences, instead of just being a victim to losing their drifters at set intervals.

2. Instead of being triggered by a pre-determined constant, the illness should be a random chance, with the probability starting at 0% until X amount, and then increasing as the amount of pollution in a drifter increases. That means that drifters should get sick at different times, even when their numerical pollution amount is the same.

And, devs, please for the love of little green apples, before you add any more buildings with a bunch of unique recipes, can you make it so that players can use a single workshop to repeatedly craft multiple recipes? (Also, that probably means there needs to be a way to set the priority for recipes, so the player can ensure that they have enough of a vital material before the drifter begins producing a less-necessary item.) Believe me, the more content you add to the game, the more necessary that QoL change will become.

[stretch]

As if the game wasn't enough of a struggle at the start with all the mind-numbingly slow drying and water desal and whatnot. Now your guys are sick because there is just no way around it. This game has always had an exceptionally grindy and unfun start trying to get something functional established. Getting enough food and water has always been shockingly tedious and tiresomely boring. Now they toss in something that makes it even more of a chore.
I doubt I will be trying this for long. It's just awful.

[Nebelbiber]

I agree that the early game is quite tedious and a constant struggle. I like the survival aspect of the game and I do want the game to be challenging. But the problem I see is that in the beginning of the game you have to struggle A LOT to get enough food and water while trying to get enough resources to get the buildings and research you need, and having the crew poisoned just adds to it. And then, after some time of constant struggle, you suddenly have a decent town with enough food, water, people and only little pollution and then it gets boring. Only challenge would be to have a really large crew, because a larger crew of course consumes a lot more while not really being able to GET more. More people doesn't increase the resources you find on the map and does only to an extent speed up the process of producing water and food.

I think my main point or concern here is that the game should be challenging throughout the game, one way or another, but it should not be hard in the beginning and then boring afterwards. And the fact that you really have to speedily try to research, build and gather a lot of basic stuff to survive in the beginning is not really fun. It definitely needs some balancing.

But just to be clear: I like the game and see a lot of potential. As it currently stands though, I think it needs tweaking and possibly some rethinking.

Edit:

One thing that comes to my mind is that there could be fewer resources on the map, making it more important to think about where you should move your ship. On the other hand most buildings should cost less than the do now. Also resources: A sushi roll needs 3 algae? A plank needs 3 wood? The Unbottler needs 50 energy? And not every basic building should be locked behind research, that is quite tedious too. I think that the player should only research the more advanced stuff.

[stretch]

I think my real issue with pollution is that there is no upside to it that I have seen. It is purely adding negative elements that there appears to be no way of avoiding. What does it add to the game? What is positive about it? Nothing that I can see. It's purely punishing us for simply trying to exist and there is no way of avoiding it.
There is not enough food options early on to allow you to avoid it. If nothing else it should have schools of fish that are not polluted and the matching drying recipes/structures.

The other thing I thought I noticed (and I could be wrong because I had actually logged off when I thought of this and have not checked) is that you eat in the morning yeah? So you sleep, there's a chunk of time gone, then wake up and eat so you are down for the day, and then you heal and sleep for the night. So it isn't just the time spent in bed ill but the 2 nights as well that the worker is down for. If you ate in the evening and spent some of the night recovering from the illness it might not be such a downer.

Is there some medication? Cure? Anything in game you can do to mitigate it? I get that it's less of an issue later on but it's extremely punishing early on when you don't have a clue what you are doing.

Pollution should be later in the game and only in 'industrial' maps where there are maybe oil slicks drifting out of ruins or wrecked tankers that will pollute schools of fish that spawn in their slick. Later on when you can research some sort of hospital or treatment for it so it isn't so crippling. I only have the unbottler and not the washing station but even that just makes the production of dried fish take twice as long without actually adding anything but difficulty to it.

It's not game breaking as it is. It's an unnecessary annoyance. I think I have enough built now and a good enough idea of what I am doing to survive even with this pollution but it just seems a poor concept to toss at new players in an already difficult situation.

[Szymonux626]

To make sure that this game wouldn'tlose its potential, I suggest adding more diseases. I'm thinking about four accidents with health, so they could make the play more challenging. In the first place, Plastic Tapeworm, drifter suffering from this disease would have to eat two food rations instead of the one for one week. Second disease, pulluted stroke, if that affects the drifter, will be drinking more water than earlier but only for 3 - 5 days. Third disease would be Pollution rash, so the drifter would get 1,5 more pollution from the comsumed food until the fullfilling the pollution bar. And the last, Weakening, that means the drifter would have the -5 modyficator for the all statistics until the end of the day. That's all from me for now, I hope these ideas will be accepted and introduced in the game.

[Ghostlight]

I've had the opposite experience. The pollution had no impact on me nor the way I played. I just ignored it (didn't really have a choice) and everything went fine. I didn't even notice any impact of sick crew. After 5 or 10 mins on a new save with the new patch, the pollution might as well not have been in the game, I no longer noticed it, nor cared (short of building a few cleaning stations).

A knock-on effect of this is that moving to the top-tier recipes feels unrewarding now. It used to be that top tier foods were more efficient and delivered more actual food per ingredient than lower tier. That's gone now; all food is worth "1" and only the pollution content changes. So now we have the top tier recipes delivering less pollution than lower tier. Since I completely stopped noticing or caring about pollution after 5 minutes, getting the Food Truck and the top recipes that came with it fell so completely and utterly "meh".

[stretch]

Αναρτήθηκε αρχικά από Ghostlight:

I've had the opposite experience. The pollution had no impact on me nor the way I played. I just ignored it (didn't really have a choice) and everything went fine. I didn't even notice any impact of sick crew. After 5 or 10 mins on a new save with the new patch, the pollution might as well not have been in the game, I no longer noticed it, nor cared (short of building a few cleaning stations).

A knock-on effect of this is that moving to the top-tier recipes feels unrewarding now. It used to be that top tier foods were more efficient and delivered more actual food per ingredient than lower tier. That's gone now; all food is worth "1" and only the pollution content changes. So now we have the top tier recipes delivering less pollution than lower tier. Since I completely stopped noticing or caring about pollution after 5 minutes, getting the Food Truck and the top recipes that came with it fell so completely and utterly "meh".

And this is my point precisely. What does it add to the game? Nothing.

You obviously know your way around the game but if you take it from the perspective of a new player it is just grief that doesn't add any value.
As a part of the larger picture that may be coming in the future it might very well be a good thing. But as it is now it isn't. It does prove that the mechanics work so it's a good field test but it really needed something positive at some point in the process to be added as well to make having it obviously worthwhile. If that comes later then so be it.

There really needs to be clean fishing spots and polluted ones so that with a modest amount of effort you can nullify it's effect. Having every single spot polluted sucks. There should be sunken oil tankers that release huge oil slicks and any fish that spawn in that slick are polluted, but they also need to be caught faster and/or provide more nutritional value once cleaned as compensation for the extra handling. Maybe the oil can be used for something so it can be a viable source of fuel earlier in the game before you process plastic for oil.

Once you get 4 or more crew then having one drop a shift isn't a big deal. If you are struggling for food and water then it becomes a fair irritant to have one fall over with no possible chance of avoiding it. You either willingly eat bad food and get sick or starve. The whole concept needs to be fleshed out more. It works I guess. It does what it was designed to do. I just don't see the point of it as it is now.

I hope there is more to come with pollution. I thought I saw the 'eel-ectricity' update and expected to catch electric eels as a power source but I missed that completely in my play through. Not sure what I interpreted, missed, or straight up read wrong with that. Did the entirety of that update go live?