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So Aven Demo. I just started playing the campaign and some things are annoying me.

[edit]: after playing some of the sandbox mode im going to update this a little.

1. Battery Mode. The whole battery policy bothers me. This policy, like drone auto-repair (or any policy for that matter, should stay ON if it is clicked. Instead it turns itself off completely in the policy menu via unchecking itself. This is just bad. What should actually happen is the Battery Mode when turned on should go into discharging if there is a shortage, and go into charging if there is no demand. As it is now the policy is extremely annoying and makes the only reason to place a battery (a single level 1 battery) to build lightning towers for protection.

2. Game Paused. I dont know what happened in campaign... maybe it was some unfortunate set of events. It went something like this though. Plague detected (pause)... Plague entering building (Pause)... Plague infecting people (Pause)... Plague detected (Pause).. and so on. No that second plague wasnt a while later either. It happened directly after the first one. I found all the constant pausing annoying as hell because I couldnt just play the game. Every time I would unpause and try to do something a big red lettered window would no doubt show up saying some catasrophe was happening.

Now dont get me wrong or anything I dont mind the "explaining" things aspect which should happen on first events. But enough is enough. Pop up once and then go away. A good warning sound along with the flashing red icon on the side which are all unique to the type of even is enough. If you click the event it will bring up a window with the "select" to take you to it anyway so I dont see a point in all these game pauses breaking immersion.

3. Cannot Deactivate. Why? It says "Cannot be deactivated while zone has sufficient power". Well if I am doing things right then that should never happen. Right?

4. Immigration/Emmigration. This is just broken and here is why. Immigration Ban prevents all immigration. The cost for this is (-1 to -3 Freedom). Emigration Allowed allows colonist to leave if they wish. There is no benefit to pushing this button. 

Emigration Allowed needs to be changed to the opposite effect of an Immigration Ban. So this would be (+1 to +3 Freedom) since you are allowing people the FREEDOM to go if they choose to.

Posted by: delta318

So Aven Demo. I just started playing the campaign and some things are annoying me.

[edit]: after playing some of the sandbox mode im going to update this a little.

1. Battery Mode. The whole battery policy bothers me. This policy, like drone auto-repair (or any policy for that matter, should stay ON if it is clicked. Instead it turns itself off completely in the policy menu via unchecking itself. This is just bad. What should actually happen is the Battery Mode when turned on should go into discharging if there is a shortage, and go into charging if there is no demand. As it is now the policy is extremely annoying and makes the only reason to place a battery (a single level 1 battery) to build lightning towers for protection.

It unchecks itself after a certain amount of time only if:

• Your batteries run out of power, in which case it HAS to turn off because it can't continue, or
• The power zone has had enough power for a long time.

As it is now the policy is extremely annoying and makes the only reason to place a battery (a single level 1 battery) to build lightning towers for protection.

Though I disagree that it's the only reason to build Energy Batteries -- they're great protection against accidental power imbalances and they're also necessary to power colony boosts.

Sorry you find it annoying.  We'll take a look at the amount of time before it automatically switches off and whether there's anything else we can do here to resolve it.

2. Game Paused. I dont know what happened in campaign... maybe it was some unfortunate set of events. It went something like this though. Plague detected (pause)... Plague entering building (Pause)... Plague infecting people (Pause)... Plague detected (Pause).. and so on. No that second plague wasnt a while later either. It happened directly after the first one. I found all the constant pausing annoying as hell because I couldnt just play the game. Every time I would unpause and try to do something a big red lettered window would no doubt show up saying some catasrophe was happening.

I agree, that's annoying.  I'll look into it; popups should not be pausing the game constantly like that.  I'll try to repro that and fix it.

3. Cannot Deactivate. Why? It says "Cannot be deactivated while zone has sufficient power". Well if I am doing things right then that should never happen. Right?

Right, it should rarely happen if you're playing well.  But we wanted to avoid a situation where you could build a bunch of buildings and then just switch them off indefinitely.  For example, turning off Farms in winter to 

4. Immigration/Emmigration. This is just broken and here is why. Immigration Ban prevents all immigration. The cost for this is (-1 to -3 Freedom). Emigration Allowed allows colonist to leave if they wish. There is no benefit to pushing this button. 

Emigration Allowed needs to be changed to the opposite effect of an Immigration Ban. So this would be (+1 to +3 Freedom) since you are allowing people the FREEDOM to go if they choose to.

Good thought -- that would certainly be a bit more consistent, though I don't know if we'll be able to change this before launch.

Having said that, there are definitely benefits to letting people leave; sometimes you find you accidentally accepted more immigrants than your colony can support, and letting them go reduces food/water consumption and reduces the Crowding morale penalty and crime levels ...

Thanks for replying!

 

Posted by: Paul Tozour

 It unchecks itself after a certain amount of time only if:

• Your batteries run out of power, in which case it HAS to turn off because it can't continue, or
• The power zone has had enough power for a long time.

This is part of what I was saying above that I believe the policy itself should be able to run continuously without turning off. When the battery is empty (at zero) it should not deactivate the policy completely in my opinion. A possibility is a delay to let it charge back to a minimum of 10% before it can discharge again. The important thing here is that it not turn off the policy since having to go in all the time and turn it on is very annoying. Which its not because its a hard thing to do. Its like two clicks. Its because it doesn't emulate expected results. 

Expecations of results for this is the equivalent or better than what is a known reality. If you bought an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for computer and it told you that every time there was a power brown out or outage that you had to turn it on manually.. how would that make you feel? Thats just not how they work is it? They detect an outage or dip in power and supply necessary energy to keep your equipment running for as long as they can manage or until power is restored to normal.

Since Aven is suppose to be the future colonization of other places its not at all unreasonable to assume they have better methods that we do currently. That's a lot of what makes this annoying for me. Having to always turn it on seems like a big disconnect from what it really should do.

Posted by: Paul Tozour

Though I disagree that it's the only reason to build Energy Batteries -- they're great protection against accidental power imbalances and they're also necessary to power colony boosts.

Sorry you find it annoying.  We'll take a look at the amount of time before it automatically switches off and whether there's anything else we can do here to resolve it.

Thanks for looking into it.

Posted by: Paul Tozour

I agree, that's annoying.  I'll look into it; popups should not be pausing the game constantly like that.  I'll try to repro that and fix it.

Thanks!

Posted by: Paul Tozour

Right, it should rarely happen if you're playing well.  But we wanted to avoid a situation where you could build a bunch of buildings and then just switch them off indefinitely.  For example, turning off Farms in winter to

Your explanation cut off there 🙂

However, I see what you were saying. After I made the post I realized that this particular thing would create a couple problems.

Posted by: Paul Tozour

Good thought -- that would certainly be a bit more consistent, though I don't know if we'll be able to change this before launch.

Having said that, there are definitely benefits to letting people leave; sometimes you find you accidentally accepted more immigrants than your colony can support, and letting them go reduces food/water consumption and reduces the Crowding morale penalty and crime levels ...

Thanks for thinking about adjusting it.

Posted by: delta318

This is part of what I was saying above that I believe the policy itself should be able to run continuously without turning off. When the battery is empty (at zero) it should not deactivate the policy completely in my opinion. A possibility is a delay to let it charge back to a minimum of 10% before it can discharge again. The important thing here is that it not turn off the policy since having to go in all the time and turn it on is very annoying. Which its not because its a hard thing to do. Its like two clicks. Its because it doesn't emulate expected results. 

 

OK, I thought about this some more, and remembered why we don't do it this way.

We used to have it stay on, and found in our user testing that it caused people to build out their colonies without regard to electricity supply and demand.  That would accelerate the strain on electricity supply, your batteries would run out of power faster, and then you'd REALLY be in trouble because now you have no power in your batteries to save you.

Batteries are intended to help you survive tough winters, generators breaking down, and other events that can put a strain on your electricity supply or demand.  They're an insurance policy, and are designed as such.  Leaving them on makes it INCREDIBLY easy for players to overbuild the colony and paint themselves into a corner.

We can certainly increase the time before we have the policy turn off automatically, but keeping it on when your colony is already in power supply/demand balance is, in my opinion, not an option.  We deliberately WANT you to have to decide, "OK, should I turn on Battery Power mode right now?  Or should I build more Solar Panels, upgrade a Geothermal, or sell some buildings I'm not using, or something else ...?"

Expecations of results for this is the equivalent or better than what is a known reality. If you bought an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for computer and it told you that every time there was a power brown out or outage that you had to turn it on manually.. how would that make you feel? Thats just not how they work is it? They detect an outage or dip in power and supply necessary energy to keep your equipment running for as long as they can manage or until power is restored to normal.

Since Aven is suppose to be the future colonization of other places its not at all unreasonable to assume they have better methods that we do currently. That's a lot of what makes this annoying for me. Having to always turn it on seems like a big disconnect from what it really should do.

Understood, but we're not aiming for a realistic simulation.  Gameplay always comes first for us, and if there's a choice between gameplay and realism, gameplay will always win.  For the gameplay reason listed above, keeping Battery Power on is not really feasible (and my apologies for not remembering the history of this feature in my first reply -- I'm getting a bit burned out these days!)