So I'm downloading that demo...

[chemical_art]

Since you are almost finished, I'm giving the game a whirl.

What would ensure an enjoyable start?

[x4000]

Just playing a normal start and going on from there should be all that's needed!  You may wish to tweak the difficulty if you wind up getting killed a lot, but that's about that.

[Oralordos]

I would recommend making yourself familiar with all aspects of the planning menu except the encyclopedia as well. There is a lot of information in there and I find myself looking at it quite a bit. Although I'm looking more at the crafting section of the encyclopedia than any other spot.

[BobTheJanitor]

I would recommend making yourself familiar with all aspects of the planning menu except the encyclopedia as well. There is a lot of information in there and I find myself looking at it quite a bit. Although I'm looking more at the crafting section of the encyclopedia than any other spot.

This brings up a good point. I think the crafting recipes should be more front and center. Going planning, encyclopedia, crafting seems a bit roundabout for something that I'm going to bring up every few minutes. Not like it's terrible or anything, just a little out of the way.

[chemical_art]

In my first experience:

7 deaths (bloody skelebots trapping me)

Out of mana! Out of mana! Out of mana!

Bats are death.

Out of mana!

Hero mode is for heroes!

Finally killed the mini boss.

Out of mana!

[keith.lamothe]

In my first experience:

7 deaths (bloody skelebots trapping me)

Out of mana! Out of mana! Out of mana!

Bats are death.

Out of mana!

Hero mode is for heroes!

Finally killed the mini boss.

Out of mana!

(Makes note to give the skelebots and bats a raise)

[x4000]

I would recommend making yourself familiar with all aspects of the planning menu except the encyclopedia as well. There is a lot of information in there and I find myself looking at it quite a bit. Although I'm looking more at the crafting section of the encyclopedia than any other spot.

This brings up a good point. I think the crafting recipes should be more front and center. Going planning, encyclopedia, crafting seems a bit roundabout for something that I'm going to bring up every few minutes. Not like it's terrible or anything, just a little out of the way.

Someone suggested adding unbound hotkeys for all the major categories of the planning menu, and I think that would really address the bulk of it.  To a very large extent, I don't want to have new players getting overwhelmed by too many top-level categories, and I think that crafting is just one too many things at the top level (since there really isn't any reason it belongs outside of the encyclopedia other than frequency of use for some players).

I do still want to do the "shopping lists" thing, and I think that will be easy, though.  So in that regard we'd have another way to more quickly get at certain spells you're working towards.

In my first experience:

7 deaths (bloody skelebots trapping me)

Out of mana! Out of mana! Out of mana!

Bats are death.

Out of mana!

Hero mode is for heroes!

Finally killed the mini boss.

Out of mana!

If you're getting lots of out of mana messages, then probably you're playing with a character with very low mana; you can always choose characters with more mana, and if you still have trouble you can even use upgrade stones to get more mana.  But in general this is about precision firing not spraying the room with shots, so unless your character has just super low mana or you're holding down the fire button a lot, there's no reason to be getting that popup a huge amount.

Anyhow, hope the experience was fun, despite the deaths and mana troubles.

[chemical_art]

The reason I put the out of mana spells was because of how quickly it occurs. Using ball lightning or throwing rocks I throw 3 or 4 shots then empty, and a few enemies take that amount or less but even in the intro the second enemy type I saw (skelebots) took 6 or 7 each and they came 3 or 5 at a time. I know the fire shots take less mana, but with the fast movements and the very short range and the extreme flinging after being hurt (in addition to so quickly become trapped) made it useless to me.

I'm not complaining, per se, since I choose hero difficutly. But I was surprised at the shock of how quickly things scaled up. I was expecting to fight them to have more space to dodge, but it was super quick melee fighting and since it was the intro I had no choice but to slog through it (because I was too stubborn to switch).

We'll see. I very quickly glanced at a nearby area after finding the settlement, and now that I can move and not bring a musket to a knife fight it feels more complex and enjoyable.

[Donfish]

Since you are almost finished, I'm giving the game a whirl.

What would ensure an enjoyable start?

Wait, when you enter an area you are invulnerable so use that to look around and get your bearings.

Pause is your friend, you can hover over enemies and see their resistances and weaknesses and you can change enchants
so when you fall in that pool of acid water, pause, put on your gills and you're good to go.

Die, die a lot, use death to learn the mechanics and don't waste upgrade stones till you get the mechanics of the game down,
used upgrades  don't carry over at death. heck once you get comfortable with the game you can start a new world if you want and make that the real game.

Learn what your spells do, there are definite  combinations that work better in certain areas than others.

Learn to read the map at the bottom, when you do  this you can actually have the knowledge of where you are going and what you are going to do there.
Every color and every line means something, hover over each section for an explanation also check the wiki section "What are all these maps for?".

There are a lot of things to "get" in this game, at first it seems like a mish-mosh of random things happening but as you learn each aspect of the game
you get those "ahh now that makes sense" moments and what once seemed neigh but impossible becomes possible.

The game sometimes seems cruel but keep at it and it becomes extremely fun and there are tons of little tricks to learn.

[x4000]

The reason I put the out of mana spells was because of how quickly it occurs. Using ball lightning or throwing rocks I throw 3 or 4 shots then empty, and a few enemies take that amount or less but even in the intro the second enemy type I saw (skelebots) took 6 or 7 each and they came 3 or 5 at a time. I know the fire shots take less mana, but with the fast movements and the very short range and the extreme flinging after being hurt (in addition to so quickly become trapped) made it useless to me.

I'm not complaining, per se, since I choose hero difficutly. But I was surprised at the shock of how quickly things scaled up. I was expecting to fight them to have more space to dodge, but it was super quick melee fighting and since it was the intro I had no choice but to slog through it (because I was too stubborn to switch).

What those parts of the intro mission are trying to teach you is the tactics of fighting in caves: there's no speed to melee combat with most of those enemy types; rather, what you want to do is use wood platforms to stay out of their way and dance around above them, firing death from above.  Sometimes you can't get an angle of fire on the enemies, and you need a wooden platform then, too. 

I should add this to the "fast facts" section at the very least, but in the tutorial that's something I was hoping most people would figure out through experimentation and practice rather than my telling them.  You're taught how to use wood platforms to get higher, and when you jump down into a mob of skelebots you're quickly taught that that's death, so it's kind of hoping you'll put the two of them together.

Don't take that as a slam on you -- everybody sees things in a different way, and in the much-lauded Megaman X intro level that teaches you wall sliding in a clever oblique way such as this, I got permanently stuck.  So it's not like it's something related to intelligence or even experience with gaming, it's just sometimes a given person makes a connection and others do.  That's particularly challenging to deal with during a tutorial phase where people are ideally figuring a lot of it out for themselves, but where they can run into a frustrating situation (like you did) if they miss some vital clue (such as use platforms to stay above/away from enemies, rather than fighting them on their own terms).

We'll see. I very quickly glanced at a nearby area after finding the settlement, and now that I can move and not bring a musket to a knife fight it feels more complex and enjoyable.

Outdoors you do indeed have more freedom of movement, and your wooden platforms aren't usable there.  So you have to employ different tactics, which is sometimes easier, sometimes harder.

[chemical_art]

What those parts of the intro mission are trying to teach you is the tactics of fighting in caves: there's no speed to melee combat with most of those enemy types; rather, what you want to do is use wood platforms to stay out of their way and dance around above them, firing death from above.  Sometimes you can't get an angle of fire on the enemies, and you need a wooden platform then, too. 

You see, in my game at least, the 5 skeles were in a tunnel. You could not jump above them. There was a tiny alcove where you could go up before it hit a pool of water, but there was no room to do as you describe.

I should add this to the "fast facts" section at the very least, but in the tutorial that's something I was hoping most people would figure out through experimentation and practice rather than my telling them.  You're taught how to use wood platforms to get higher, and when you jump down into a mob of skelebots you're quickly taught that that's death, so it's kind of hoping you'll put the two of them together.

See above. When I could, I did.

Don't take that as a slam on you -- everybody sees things in a different way, and in the much-lauded Megaman X intro level that teaches you wall sliding in a clever oblique way such as this, I got permanently stuck.  So it's not like it's something related to intelligence or even experience with gaming, it's just sometimes a given person makes a connection and others do.  That's particularly challenging to deal with during a tutorial phase where people are ideally figuring a lot of it out for themselves, but where they can run into a frustrating situation (like you did) if they miss some vital clue (such as use platforms to stay above/away from enemies, rather than fighting them on their own terms).

Are we playing the same map? One group of skeles had plenty of space. The other group was in tunnels.

[x4000]

You see, in my game at least, the 5 skeles were in a tunnel. You could not jump above them. There was a tiny alcove where you could go up before it hit a pool of water, but there was no room to do as you describe.

It's always the same map -- I hand crafted all those.  I'm not sure which one you're referring to, but perhaps it was the one where there's that long narrow deathtrap behind a red slime?  The one with the green crystals and the workbench?  The red slime protects you from the skelebots unless you kill it, and there's no concrete reason to definitely kill it (the stuff you want is on the other side of the pond).  In that case, yes, there is no way to jump over the heads of the skelebots where they are.  But there, either one of two things happens:

1. They chase you and you lead them to the edge of the water, where you jump up on wood platforms you've pre-placed or that you place as you run (or you scamper up the ladder to the tunnel above that one).  There's no reason to stay in the tunnel to fight them without fleeing; you don't have room to maneuver, so to not tactically retreat is suicide without better gear. 

2. Alternatively they don't chase you, and you fire on them from range and kill them before they get you.

Again, something it's trying to get you to experiment around with.  There is room in every chunk somewhere for you to dispatch all the skelebots without having to take any damage; there is no room anywhere in there that is short all the way through.  It's trying to get you to experiment with the tactics of drawing dangerous foes out into parts of the chunk where you can dispatch them more easily, and using the terrain to your advantage, rather than letting them use the terrain to their advantage.

I was presuming you meant the earlier rooms when you first meet the skelebots, where the natural tendency is to jump down into the skelebots and get murdered the first time; then the second time they are more cautious and need to put the wooden platforms.  Then finally you reach that room where there's no space for wooden platforms right where the skelebots are, but there's loads of room right where you just came walking from (and even some handy water the skelebots can't cross).

Again, I'm not trying to slap you around for not instantly seeing all the intricacies of using terrain or similar; it can be nonobvious, and playing on a higher difficulty means that if you don't figure it out right in your first encounter or two, you probably die.  And I've no doubt you'd have seen all that really soon without my mentioning it.  But there's actually quite a bit more tactics to the constrained spaces, I feel like, because there is more risk and you have to draw your enemy out.  Of course, there's some good tactics to all of it and it really varies in style; so what works outside doesn't tend to work indoors, and what works indoors often doesn't work quite the same underground. 

Fighting in each of those three areas has a distinctly different feel to it, but at no point are you expected to be a fast-clicker that just whales away on enemies that are whaling away on you, at any rate.  Hope that helps!

[chemical_art]

I see. It makes sense. But a few things:

1. There were skelebots on both sides of the slime. The very moment I entered the room I found 4 skelebot guards and a sniper.
2. Placing those platforms help, yes, but if you placed them in the water the guards stopped right on the edge and became immune. So it was a net negative because I had to very narrowly (because they are so tall) jump over them. No more then a sec after my feet land above them, they move under me and guard.


Maybe I just need to "jive" into the world I am in, but I still must confess I was enjoying the game thoroughly until those skelebots. I was started to become engrossed, getting lost in the world. Then those bots came, 7 seconds I was dead, then I scratched my head. I ran back to the bots, I lasted 30 seconds, then mistake then died. Third time I cleared, then entered the room described. I died another 5 times before attrition and error allowed me to kill them through what I felt were "cheap" tactics (the head bot is immune to damage when still, but the ones behind him keep running and are not. But in my mind it felt like a bug, they should all guard.) The point is that if the goal is to make me view my character as not "me" but a vessel of my will then that is fine, because that is exactly what I feel. It sort of felt epic that I killed that miniboss by not dieing, but by that point my suspension of belief was broken and I felt. "Boss dead. No who-ho. Just ho. Glad I didn't have to go through tediousness of coming back. Moving on..."

[x4000]

I am starting to feel that the skelebot guards are annoying, myself, actually.  That whole mechanic makes it so that you have to keep moving in a way that is proving uncomfortable, I have to say; when those levels were designed, they did not work that way.  Probably just taking away the invincibility tactic for the skelebot guards will be enough.  Make them "Skelebot Grunts" instead, and then for later in the game have them replaced by elites that actually have some ranged power to them.

All in all, the whole guard-invincibility thing just really throws off many parts of the game, as you're saying -- it sounds like you figured out all the tactics just right, just like the tutorial was supposed to silently train you to do, but the damnable invincibility mucked it all up and led to 7 deaths.

Will put on the chopping block tomorrow.

[chemical_art]

That would be great! Make a HUGE difference. Here was what I concluded after playing a little more, with the current state:

The introduction, which cannot be skipped, worked around, or otherwise "come back to later", is harder then the areas surrounding the settlement.

Havin later skelebots be elite and immune to damage then would be perfectly fine. Just not at the very very beginning.