Newbie player bugs

[Xephyr]

No it isn't. A reasonable method is to have them run into the limit after getting used to basic controls (IE: After one or two upgrades) so they aren't immediately running out of power when they start out.

In the case of the Wolfen, the missile launcher has limited ammunition so even if they're too dense to clue in that that's the issue, they'll run out of ammunition fast enough that it will stop being an issue, if it is still caused by using everything at once.

[Aury]

Mining in its current state is... my words can only allude to how enormous of a problem it is because i have no words capable of directly stating just how much fixing it needs... and would make newbies who try it out thinking it would be fun quit the game in frustration. (Seen this happen before. Convinced person that the game is fine if you completely avoid mining at all costs, or get a mod to make it fun)

On the topic of mining, it would also help to let them know its ok to fly over other things (namely asteroids, other ships) - collisions dont exist in the game (Except with projectiles and the arena walls)

[Song]

Mining in its current state is... my words can only allude to how enormous of a problem it is because i have no words capable of directly stating just how much fixing it needs... and would make newbies who try it out thinking it would be fun quit the game in frustration. (Seen this happen before. Convinced person that the game is fine if you completely avoid mining at all costs, or get a mod to make it fun)

On the topic of mining, it would also help to let them know its ok to fly over other things (namely asteroids, other ships) - collisions dont exist in the game (Except with projectiles and the arena walls)

Mining partly suffers from what seems to be a completely broken mining table. It starts out making it so that most ores cannot turn up, and when they do they're in far too low a quantity. Personally, I would say 'Roll it back to the old system, then redo from scratch later". It's that broken.

[JohnBWatson]

Mining in its current state is... my words can only allude to how enormous of a problem it is because i have no words capable of directly stating just how much fixing it needs... and would make newbies who try it out thinking it would be fun quit the game in frustration. (Seen this happen before. Convinced person that the game is fine if you completely avoid mining at all costs, or get a mod to make it fun)

I'm probably going to be burned at the stake for this, but I feel like mining should be removed until we can come up with a good way to rework it. AI ships don't mine the same way the player does, so at present the entire setup just feels off. It doesn't really have a big role in the economy, and, Transcendence being a roguelike at heart, it kinda clashes with the nature of the game.

On the topic of mining, it would also help to let them know its ok to fly over other things (namely asteroids, other ships) - collisions dont exist in the game (Except with projectiles and the arena walls)

Noticed that when I saw AI ships flying over them. I feel like most people would do the same fairly quickly, but the current way in which planets are both in and out of the foreground simultaneously is a bit bizarre.

I wouldn't say no to Parallax Worlds getting implemented as a fix for this.

[Song]

Mining in its current state is... my words can only allude to how enormous of a problem it is because i have no words capable of directly stating just how much fixing it needs... and would make newbies who try it out thinking it would be fun quit the game in frustration. (Seen this happen before. Convinced person that the game is fine if you completely avoid mining at all costs, or get a mod to make it fun)

I'm probably going to be burned at the stake for this, but I feel like mining should be removed until we can come up with a good way to rework it. AI ships don't mine the same way the player does, so at present the entire setup just feels off. It doesn't really have a big role in the economy, and, Transcendence being a roguelike at heart, it kinda clashes with the nature of the game.

Burn the unbeliever!


Mining is basically the Transcendence equivelant of pudding farming. Only different. The balancing fact is that it exists and you have to do it in order to use it.

[pixelfck]

Mining in its current state is... my words can only allude to how enormous of a problem it is because i have no words capable of directly stating just how much fixing it needs... and would make newbies who try it out thinking it would be fun quit the game in frustration. (Seen this happen before. Convinced person that the game is fine if you completely avoid mining at all costs, or get a mod to make it fun)

Yeah, mining is a non-feature at the moment. It should indeed either be fixed or disabled in the Steam release.

Newbies may not be aware of the damage curve or immunities. For example, newbie who sees no laser/kinetic resists on high level armor may think it has no laser/kinetic resists instead of very high resistance and/or immunity. Similarly, newbies may not be aware of innate immunities of high-level armor. For example, heavy blast plate does not mention radiation immunity, which it does have, but the newbie may not think so.

The armour level curve is 'somewhat' non-transparent. Since there is no method at all to find out about it, other than reading about it on the forums or wiki. I think this will be the cause of major confusion for new players. What is more, they don't even realise this: they will be making the wrong decisions, based soundly on the information available to them.

It took me a looong time before I found out that the 'Hardened reactive armor' and 'Hardened plasteel armor' are not as special as the description made them look; I still have to look up inherent armor resistance to know at what levels they kick in.

~Pixelfck

[PM]

Re: mining
Mining in the early-game was viable before 1.5. It was definitely a fallback option if I could not get enough money from missions or loot.

Today, mining is unbalanced. There are too few ore in early systems (and maybe too much in high level systems). If I want to mine today, I would probably use the silly "get jumpdrive ASAP and dive to Heretic (and backtrack and search for Teraton fabricator)" strategy.

Mining is basically the Transcendence equivelant of pudding farming. Only different. The balancing fact is that it exists and you have to do it in order to use it.

This is quick compared to stingy XP/leveling runs or luck-based item runs in various commercial games such as Diablo II, where getting what you want may take weeks, months, or even years. Not saying it is good (I think it is evil), but people who have been trained on such games will grind for (what they see is) a relatively short time on anything that will help them.

In the case of the Wolfen, the missile launcher has limited ammunition so even if they're too dense to clue in that that's the issue, they'll run out of ammunition fast enough that it will stop being an issue, if it is still caused by using everything at once.

Player may buy more cheap missiles or get some freebies from Raisu. In any case, it is good idea for the Wolfen to have no chance of an overload until after an upgrade. Do what it takes to fix this, whether it is changing the shield to a class II or raising default power to 12+ MW.

[kay.py]

Benedict will sometimes send the player to a weapons store to install stuff. Installation cannot be done at a weapons store.

Edit: So I went to see how bad mining was these days. Cleaning out Eridani wound up getting me less than the price of the mining gear. Ouch...

[PM]

Another problem that has been brought up before:

Missiles with starburst or similar effects, such as Qianlong or Lamplighter shots, have extremely large hit areas, much larger than the shot itself, allowing them to absorb (and get absorbed by) other shots.

Edit: Early-game mining should have about double or triple the ore to get something resembling yields from pre-1.5 versions. Before 1.5, mining Eridani yielded from 5,000 to 20,000 credits worth of ore. Today, higher than 5,000 credits worth of ore is a generous spawn.

[SolarGalaxy]

Correct me if I'm wrong but Transcendence on steam is being released as a bundle of CC and EP right? So I think that vanilla missiles need to be rebalanced in cost and price to be viable in comparison to CC and EP missiles or else newbies who end up buying a NAMI or Mag launcher as their missile launcher will feel ripped off compared to the Burak, Takao, or Archura launcher (Burak's missiles are so cheap and powerful that I buy Burak 600s as soon as I can and dominate any capital ship I run into in CC, until the outer realm of course.).

[NMS]

The early Eurasian Diarchy missions seem very difficult now: http://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=3660

Correct me if I'm wrong but Transcendence on steam is being released as a bundle of CC and EP right? So I think that vanilla missiles need to be rebalanced in cost and price to be viable in comparison to CC and EP missiles or else newbies who end up buying a NAMI or Mag launcher as their missile launcher will feel ripped off compared to the Burak, Takao, or Archura launcher (Burak's missiles are so cheap and powerful that I buy Burak 600s as soon as I can and dominate any capital ship I run into in CC, until the outer realm of course.).

I think the base game prices are closer to reasonable than the Takao, Burak, and Orkan, but maybe they could meet somewhere in the middle. The player has the opportunity to loot a lot more ammo in total than they're likely to use, so higher ammo prices actually are good financially, even if they have to buy ammo for the weapons they use. I think Archura ammo ought to stay fairly cheap for now since it's unguided and bad against compartments and stations, but if WMD gets rebalanced, then it should be priced more like unguided NAMI missiles and MAGs.

Edit: I wrote more about ammo prices (and other balance issues) here: http://ministry.kronosaur.com/record.hexm?id=2947

[Watch TV, Do Nothing]

Not a bug per se, but the defective visual display ROM is very nasty and it's usually one of the first ROMs that a player encounters, which leads them to believe that even worse "bad surprise" items will appear in later systems. It would be better if the "TV snow" effect was slightly transparent- just enough to make out movement and large shapes- rather than completely obscuring the screen.

[Atarlost]

Removing mining is not an option if the steam release bundles with EP. The EP armor fabricators assume not just mining, but mining with rates of return like it used to get.

[snafu]

Not a bug per se, but the defective visual display ROM is very nasty [..] better if the "TV snow" effect was slightly transparent- just enough to make out movement and large shapes- rather than completely obscuring the screen.

I'm not so sure about the very nasty bit: the player can navigate & dock from map mode after all, but your suggestion has some merit..

However the lag within nebula should be reduced if possible IMO, as this was originally designed as a non-(PC) resource-hungry game

[JohnBWatson]

Removing mining is not an option if the steam release bundles with EP. The EP armor fabricators assume not just mining, but mining with rates of return like it used to get.

Ore sellers are incredibly common in the form of the UAS. I've seen stations with upwards of 2,000 tons of titanium.