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General Discussion / Experience so far: Confusion about branches and exits
« on: August 17, 2016, 07:34:10 PM »
I've been playing Cogmind for a couple weeks now and feel like I'm starting to get a handle on the basics. This seems a good time to share my some of my thoughts and impressions from the initial learning experience. This necessarily focuses on areas that that were unclear or confusing to me, though the overall experience has been good.
I had trouble getting my head around branches, both in terms of presentation and mechanics. I'd skimmed some of the devblog and other online information before buying the game, so I had some idea there was a main path and alternate levels, but I don't think I entirely grasped how that was meant to work. I understood from information in the forums (and my own unpleasant encounters) that the mines and other branches were dangerous, and I should try to avoid them, so trying to avoid going to the mines became the focus of my early game strategy. Initially I was only aware (learned from the forum, I think) of the contextual clue that exits with mining equipment likely lead to the mines, so my strategy was limited to only taking innocent looking exits, which did not seem to work very well.
After a few games I learned from out of game reading that signal interpreters could identify where a exit led, and by extension, distinguish between the main path and branches. This seemed a clear solution to my branch problem, and so my new mission in life became to acquire a signal interpreter as soon as possible in the Materials. Once I found one I would hoard it in my puny starting inventory until I found a potential exit, then equip it (sacrificing one of my two utility slots) and leave it there. Eventually I realized I could deactivate it when not standing next to an exit to conserve power. This worked well enough for avoiding branches, but hampered my effectiveness otherwise. If I also managed to find a storage unit, this meant that both my utility slots were tied up until my first evolution.
Quite recently through further out of game reading I learned (finally!) that branch and main path exist use a different glyph. I play in ASCII, and branch and regular exits don't generally appear on screen at the same time, so I had never noticed that they aren't the same symbol. So I can now cast aside my signal interpreter dependence in the early game. However, even knowing that they are different, I cant seem to reliably remember which is which. I have to toggle over to tile view to check what kind of exist I've found. In my most recent game I forgot to do this (thinking I had the glyphs figured out) and ended up in the Caves by mistake. I was well geared up and supplied, so this actually turned out pretty well, and I found some interesting new lore, but it
This may represent purely my own idiosyncratic experience, but I feel like a more explicit UI callout would be helpful here, perhaps for example the tool tip could read "Main: ?" or "Branch: ?".
My general confusion on this topic was somewhat compounded by not being aware of the world map for a while, so that when I did find my way into a branch it was difficult to piece together the connectivity between levels and understand when I was going up a depth. This is particularly important because of the relationship between taking exits and evolving; initially it was entirely unclear when taking a particular exit would lead to evolution or not.
As a much more minor suggestion, something like a game to game persistent version of the worldmap that would populate with discovered branches as you explore the complex would be helpful to me. It would fill a role as a spoiler-free crutch for meta-game knowledge of which branches connect where, how deep they go before they connect back to the main complex. As the community grows this kind of information will probably be available via Wikis and guides, but those sort of resources tend to hard to use as references without encountering accidental spoilers.
Though on reflection I suppose if this a feature I really desire, I could just parse the "Route" section my score files and then use a graph visualization library to display them an external utility.
I had some other thoughts and a few more minor issues, but I think this post is sufficiently long as is, so I will leave it at that for now.
I had trouble getting my head around branches, both in terms of presentation and mechanics. I'd skimmed some of the devblog and other online information before buying the game, so I had some idea there was a main path and alternate levels, but I don't think I entirely grasped how that was meant to work. I understood from information in the forums (and my own unpleasant encounters) that the mines and other branches were dangerous, and I should try to avoid them, so trying to avoid going to the mines became the focus of my early game strategy. Initially I was only aware (learned from the forum, I think) of the contextual clue that exits with mining equipment likely lead to the mines, so my strategy was limited to only taking innocent looking exits, which did not seem to work very well.
After a few games I learned from out of game reading that signal interpreters could identify where a exit led, and by extension, distinguish between the main path and branches. This seemed a clear solution to my branch problem, and so my new mission in life became to acquire a signal interpreter as soon as possible in the Materials. Once I found one I would hoard it in my puny starting inventory until I found a potential exit, then equip it (sacrificing one of my two utility slots) and leave it there. Eventually I realized I could deactivate it when not standing next to an exit to conserve power. This worked well enough for avoiding branches, but hampered my effectiveness otherwise. If I also managed to find a storage unit, this meant that both my utility slots were tied up until my first evolution.
Quite recently through further out of game reading I learned (finally!) that branch and main path exist use a different glyph. I play in ASCII, and branch and regular exits don't generally appear on screen at the same time, so I had never noticed that they aren't the same symbol. So I can now cast aside my signal interpreter dependence in the early game. However, even knowing that they are different, I cant seem to reliably remember which is which. I have to toggle over to tile view to check what kind of exist I've found. In my most recent game I forgot to do this (thinking I had the glyphs figured out) and ended up in the Caves by mistake. I was well geared up and supplied, so this actually turned out pretty well, and I found some interesting new lore, but it
This may represent purely my own idiosyncratic experience, but I feel like a more explicit UI callout would be helpful here, perhaps for example the tool tip could read "Main: ?" or "Branch: ?".
My general confusion on this topic was somewhat compounded by not being aware of the world map for a while, so that when I did find my way into a branch it was difficult to piece together the connectivity between levels and understand when I was going up a depth. This is particularly important because of the relationship between taking exits and evolving; initially it was entirely unclear when taking a particular exit would lead to evolution or not.
As a much more minor suggestion, something like a game to game persistent version of the worldmap that would populate with discovered branches as you explore the complex would be helpful to me. It would fill a role as a spoiler-free crutch for meta-game knowledge of which branches connect where, how deep they go before they connect back to the main complex. As the community grows this kind of information will probably be available via Wikis and guides, but those sort of resources tend to hard to use as references without encountering accidental spoilers.
Though on reflection I suppose if this a feature I really desire, I could just parse the "Route" section my score files and then use a graph visualization library to display them an external utility.
I had some other thoughts and a few more minor issues, but I think this post is sufficiently long as is, so I will leave it at that for now.
2
General Discussion / Behemoth cannot shoot through door?
« on: August 16, 2016, 07:31:06 PM »
I ran into a surprising situation today in the Factory. I encountered a behemoth. Initially I thought it was a group of enemies, but if I understood correctly from the data screen, its actually one larger enemy. At any rate, I retreated to a nearby side room to fight the "group" of enemies and stood diagonally from the door and waited for it. Eventually it showed up outside the door and I started shooting at it. I noticed after a few turns that it wasn't firing back, and also wasn't coming through the door.
It seems to have placed itself so that it cant actually bring its weapons to bear on me through the door, even though I have a clear line of fire to it through the open door myself. I've attached a screenshot showing the situation. I don't where its weapons are actually located in the grid, so I cant tell if it should be able to hit me from there, but I would expect it to either move so that it could, or perhaps just blast the wall down to get at me if not.
I've just started playing Cogmind recently and am quite enjoying it, I just registered with the forum to mention this.
It seems to have placed itself so that it cant actually bring its weapons to bear on me through the door, even though I have a clear line of fire to it through the open door myself. I've attached a screenshot showing the situation. I don't where its weapons are actually located in the grid, so I cant tell if it should be able to hit me from there, but I would expect it to either move so that it could, or perhaps just blast the wall down to get at me if not.
I've just started playing Cogmind recently and am quite enjoying it, I just registered with the forum to mention this.
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