Trailblazers detailed feedback

[rootsrat]

Hi! Here goes another wall of text from yours truly. Sorry not sorry As usual, these are just my opinions and it's OK to have different ones. Don't fight or I'll ban you all I'm joking of course! I won't ban you all!

Yaffle will do it for me

Anyway,

MORE INFO PLEASE!

I didn't really post any proper feedback so far, because I was waiting for Trailblazers Beta to mature a little (I'm guessing we're still in beta...?). Also I was busy.

I'm a big fan of the last update and - finally! - much more clear instructions of how Colonisation works. And my feedback goes pretty much strictly still towards the lack of full manual for System Colonisation.

WHY THO?

Colonisation content is way too time consuming to do it on trial-and-error basis. We are building an entire star system from scratch! It is weeks, if not MONTHS of constant hauling and hauling and hauling and hauling. This isn't a 5-day local war or 15% of influence to regain.

Additionally there is no Undo, let alone something like Demolish action available - and personally I can understand why, this is not a plea to introduce one! But whatever you do is final. Regardless if Beta or Release. And you can very easily screw up a lucrative system if you make only one small mistake. With all of the rules clearly known and careful planning based on that knowledge, you could avoid one much more easily.

BGS was fun as a Black Box. But this is very different to BGS, where it was actually part of the fun to discover how the galactic politics work behind the scenes. With the consequences being reversible there was no fear of "one mistake and it's over" situation. Additionally, with BGS there is no incentive to do it on your own, rather than with friends to speed things up - as opposed to Colonisation, where most would want to colonise their own system of course.

DON'T GET ME WRONG

I am NOT saying by any means that colonisation takes too much time or is too complex! It is well balanced IMO and the game of strategic planning your system COULD be a lot of fun - personally I absolutely LOVE this kind of gameplay and this is definitely what keeps me engaged with Trailblazers, even though I am not a massive fan of hauling there and back over and over again.

But without knowing all of the rules this kind of strategic planning really isn't fun. Imagine playing Planet Zoo without seeing the animal stats. Or Planet Coaster 2 without knowing how much each ride will make the guests happy, or what are the schedules of the workers. Imagine not knowing at all what the Maintenance Guy do and how the rides breakages work! Imagine playing F1 Manager 2024 (love this game!) and not knowing how the team happiness works or how what do the different car stats do

More than that - imagine playing all those games like that on forced Iron Man mode!

And this is how Trailblazers feel to me. Not time-consuming, not too complex - but frustrating for being forced to play the guess game and fear to fail with zero chance of correction, not because I made a mistake, but because the game didn't explained to me what the game is.

Saying that - it feels much less like that after the last update! I personally loved the that patch! What was described in the forums post and what is now in the Codex is perfect. But it still does not cover all of the rules. So

LET'S GET CONSTRUCTIVE

(see what I did there?)

What I'd like to see more information/explanation/manual for (these partially come from my community actually, so it's a collective effort):

• What do all of the system statistics actually do and what are they for? Things like Max Population are self explanatory, but Development Level or Tech Level not so much. All of this stuff basically:

• We need to see exact full actual system "Colonisation Stats", meaning the points for above stats plus anything else that may be hidden, like any "points", "metrics", "sliders" whatever else we can't still see. There is lots of unused space here with minimal information being presented. Begs to be filled with actually meaningful stuff!

• What decides on the type (economy) of the strong link "sent" from a Planetary Port into an Orbital Port. (Example: a Planetary Port located on a Rocky planet with Biologicals - so Refinery/Agri/Terraforming economies - sends Terraforming economy via a strong link into the orbit. Why not Agri or Refinery?)
• How do we raise Happiness of a system?
• How do the weekly points system work? What drives the +points, and is there anything that detracts points from the total score?
• How do we get a dedicated economy station interior model? Some stations have generic "default gunmetal grey" interior, despite having an economy - Agri, High Tech etc., and some stations have interiors corresponding to their economy.

FINAL THOUGHTS

FDEV, I genuinely like your other games for their complex simulations of economy, animal behaviours or other things (love F1 2024 manager!). You have clearly used your experience in this area and introduced a tycoon-like gameloop (with the usual Elite twist ) that requires strategic planning, building up an economy, looking after a population and quite a few other related things, but you gave us very vague instructions. Again, it got better with the last patch, but there's still room for improvement.

I understand why you wouldn't like to make it a full white-box, but the more black this particular box is, the less fun it is to play - I think it would be fair to say not only for me, but for many others.

Thanks for listening to my ED talk.

 

[Doctor Dread]

Amen to all points, especially the need for Undo/Demolish option.

 

[rootsrat]

Amen to all points, especially the need for Undo/Demolish option.

I actually said this is not a plea to add one in the post

With all of the rules clearly known and careful planning based on that knowledge, you wouldn't need one

 

[Doctor Dread]

If I knew it all from the start. Which I haven't. Therefore I need one.

 

[SlickPBW]

I agree with the OP. I have paused my colonization efforts because of the two points mentioned. 1) it’s not obvious or clear how to go about building a system towards a desired end state. How exactly would I build a specific economy? How exactly would I get certain goods, services, etc. to exist? 2) Then, when you are learning by trial and error, with no way to undo/redo mistakes, I’m not willing to invest the huge amount of time and effort toward what may be a poorly designed system. So I’m waiting for what the OP is requesting. And I’m pretty sure there are a lot of folks that feel the same way.

 

[metatheurgist]

Isn't there a thread specifically for this?

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

• What decides on the type (economy) of the strong link "sent" from a Planetary Port into an Orbital Port. (Example: a Planetary Port located on a Rocky planet with Biologicals - so Refinery/Agri/Terraforming economies - sends Terraforming economy via a strong link into the orbit. Why not Agri or Refinery?)

A station can create more than a single strong link. In this example it should create strong links for all of them. Do you have an in-game example that demonstrates otherwise?

• How do we raise Happiness of a system?

It's based on how much of the past week was spent with a positive BGS state happening, like boom or public holidays. Similarly bad states like bust or famine will make it go negative. 0% happiness isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means nothing happened over the past week.

• How do the weekly points system work? What drives the +points, and is there anything that detracts points from the total score?

The system score is just based on how much you've built and what tiers they were. The payout is 10,000 x system score multiplied by (100+happiness)/100.

• How do we get a dedicated economy station interior model? Some stations have generic "default gunmetal grey" interior, despite having an economy - Agri, High Tech etc., and some stations have interiors corresponding to their economy.

Now this one I'm not sure of.
I've managed to get multiple stations to transform their interior to extraction/refinery (it's the same appearance for both), in some cases with very low system populations and other stats, but then I've got other systems that are far more developed where the stations have other dominant economies and none of those seem to want to change. So either requirements are different per economy or it's just bugged.

 

[PilotB]

The current tools for finding markets do not support the colony economies. There's no way to permanently filter colonies off the map to make the map search work and 3rd party tools require a level of completeness that isn't practical. This is a case where colonisation has made missions and activities unrelated to colonisation worse.

There's no progression to the construction starting small and simple and building up your system economy and tiers. If you can build an outpost you can build a t3 it's just more but you already found all the stuff.

There's nothing that colonies provide that we didn't have before. They're less useful than NPC systems because the markets are compromised. I can buy ships cheaper elsewhere. I can source goods better in markets that aren't missing things and navigate easier in systems that don't have 20 installations. There's no storage to offload our collection of maybe we'll need those items from our carriers. No markets to buy or sell those hard to get items. No control over the bartender to trade ground goods.

They're just a lot of work for something that's now making the way I normally play in the bubble worse. I do not want to constantly have to jump around and visit market after market just to figure out who actually has the 12t of gold or 400t of grain I need now that nothing is predictable. Rewards didn't go up it's just taking more time for the scant rewards we can scrape out. Colonisation is leaking and just like the leaks from powerplay by itself it might not be the nail in the coffin but they're adding up to pushing me away from a game as each update just makes the game harder to play even if you're not engaged in the new content.

 

[rootsrat]

A station can create more than a single strong link. In this example it should create strong links for all of them. Do you have an in-game example that demonstrates otherwise?


It's based on how much of the past week was spent with a positive BGS state happening, like boom or public holidays. Similarly bad states like bust or famine will make it go negative. 0% happiness isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means nothing happened over the past week.


The system score is just based on how much you've built and what tiers they were. The payout is 10,000 x system score multiplied by (100+happiness)/100.

Now this one I'm not sure of.
I've managed to get multiple stations to transform their interior to extraction/refinery (it's the same appearance for both), in some cases with very low system populations and other stats, but then I've got other systems that are far more developed where the stations have other dominant economies and none of those seem to want to change. So either requirements are different per economy or it's just bugged.

I am genuinely grateful for the information and I thank you! But this should be in game, not a word of mouth on the forums. Not for Trailblazers at least

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Things like Max Population are self explanatory

You say that But it seems like even then there's at least a non-obvious interaction between the raw chevrons and the type of planet the port is assigned to (i.e. an Orbis over an ELW gets a much higher population than one over an ice moon)

With all of the rules clearly known and careful planning based on that knowledge, you could avoid one much more easily.

Even that's - as was discovered recently - only true so long as the rules remain constant.

And that includes bug-fixing: there's at least one point where the in-game behaviour doesn't match Update 3's documentation. At the moment that's actually helpful for a lot of potential system builds, but anyone relying on it being a documentation bug rather than an implementation bug might get an unwanted surprise later.

It's based on how much of the past week was spent with a positive BGS state happening, like boom or public holidays. Similarly bad states like bust or famine will make it go negative. 0% happiness isn't necessarily a bad thing, it just means nothing happened over the past week.

It seems to be measured instantly at the Thursday tick, rather than summing over the week.

(And there's also reasonable evidence - though I still need to test more if possible - that it only checks the controlling faction, not any of the others)

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

It seems to be measured instantly at the Thursday tick, rather than summing over the week.

(And there's also reasonable evidence - though I still need to test more if possible - that it only checks the controlling faction, not any of the others)

I had a system that went into lockdown, stayed that way for an entire "tick week", then came out of it - they were less "unhappy" during the weeks either side of the full week, but were still affected.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I had a system that went into lockdown, stayed that way for an entire "tick week", then came out of it - they were less "unhappy" during the weeks either side of the full week, but were still affected.

Interesting. I had a system go into Boom on the Wednesday night, get +5% from that, then stay in Boom the whole week and still only get +5%.

 

[Factabulous]

Curious if true. I've only seen a few numbers for positive states - 5% for Booms, 8% for Boom + Civ Liberty. Neither lends itself to a daily tick. OTOH the CR payouts do seem to be maybe day based (I see different payouts on different weeks for the same system in the same reported happiness). Maybe Negative states work differently

Edit: my system that has been a steady +8% has gone to 13% this week - and I have a War elsewhere that's given me a -8%. More to work on!

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

OTOH the CR payouts do seem to be maybe day based (I see different payouts on different weeks for the same system in the same reported happiness). Maybe Negative states work differently

Pretty sure they're based on the time between the weekly tick epochs, like fleet carrier upkeep. Occasionally a few extra seconds/minutes slips from one week to the next.

 

[rootsrat]

Isn't there a thread specifically for this?

Yes, in hindsight I should have posted in there. Truth be told, this post was WAY longer and initially warranted it's own thread.

I have cut out a lot of text from the final version

 

[AngryAntz]

Yes, in hindsight I should have posted in there. Truth be told, this post was WAY longer and initially warranted it's own thread.

I have cut out a lot of text from the final version

If this is the TLDR version I would hate to see what you had planned

 

[rootsrat]

If this is the TLDR version I would hate to see what you had planned

Most of the stuff I cut out was already fed back elsewhere by other players, so i didn't want to dilute the main message

 

[Kira Goto]

I see different payouts on different weeks for the same system in the same reported happiness

That may also depend on if you're building things in the system. I have noticed that the credit amount for the first week of a structure coming online (getting completed) will maybe have a lower amount awarded if it isn't active from Thursday to Thursday (this at least is at most noticeable with building new colonies along a chain where an already finished outpost from a prior week will offer the - rounded up - 30k payment, but one that is created only say, a Wednesday before the weekly tick will award 3k, or thereabouts).

Maybe this same mechanism applies to when a system is fully colonized/primary port complete? Looking at a system where I've been building that has had some stuff built throughout the last week, it has a score of 24, happiness 0, and 201,673cr payout.