Let Tte Bodies Hit the Floor

[maebeknot]

So I just started this game and got a good 1+ hours getting my feet wet. I barely got through the tutorial hints as I took it super slow and tried to break a few things along the way. I've seen in other threads that you want some initial impressions and the thing that stood out to me most was all the dead people.

People die so fast, at least it felt that way till I noticed I had already passed 30 days and didn't realize it. After I realized it hand been about a month (and how quickly time passes) and kind of made sense that their were a bunch of dead people because I didn't even have most of the basic support buildings.

Me personally accepting the bodies aside this created a bad first impression. Initial I couldn't help but think "What am I doing wrong?" Since most games don't start piling the bodies so quickly with so little warning and noticeable messaging. Plus they started dying before I even had a chance to prevent it. All together just didn't sit "right" with me. I'll have to double check if it's already there but an quick and effective way to view all populations needs oppose to clicking them individually would go a long way to help understanding why people are dying.

I believe a "honey moon" period to make initial survivals longer could go a long way. It was shortly after my first store house was built that their was a dead person laying in front of the building, making other people sick. Gave me a whole "WTF the game screwing me over before I have a chance to counter it". So giving me ~30 days to setup the basic buildings and get my bearings should be fair. Counter the people dying later with delaying the people randomly joining (should have to have a town worth joining first before they show up anyways. Something as simple as a "Prestige" or "Fame" number to influence who is joining can be a start but that is another system and another discussion). 

For obvious reason I'm still largely unsure about build orders but after reviewing what buildings I could make, one of the first buildings I made was a crematory. At this point with so many bodies all around and me addressing dead body disposal over food and water production I've now been trained by the game that these people are VERY disposable and very fragile. It will be really hard to develop a connection with any of the town people or care if they die. They are all just numbers to me now. While it's not uncommon for NPC's to be just numbers in simulations games, here they feel like a fairly disposable number.

Maybe the throw away nature of people is on purpose, it seems like they are designed to come and go (at least for now). Yet if this is normal it should be more clear. Some explaining that the player is not trying to prevent people from dying but instead minimizing deaths. Some data and analytics to show these stats would help drive this goal.

I'm sure my impressions on death and managing in this game will change with experience. Yet I hope my initial reactions are helpful when looking at the big picture. Good luck and keep at it!

[ScottFarRoad]

Thanks for the detailed and constructive feedback!

Working out how to how a corpse-free town is the main challenge and puzzle of the game in this post-apocalyptic world, so some of what you've mentioned is intentional. There's no way at the start to keep everybody alive. It's a race against time and death has the head start.

But you can turn it around. It's satisfying as you slowly form a happy and relatively corpse-free town but it takes time.

I'm kind of like you. When I first started playing Atomic Society (when we'd basically got it to prototype level) the huge numbers of people dying alarmed me. I thought it could turn players off, and I generally don't like brutally hard games. But for whatever reason the more I worked on AS, the more it felt right, in this post-apocalyptic world, to slowly take on death and overcome it.

What's key to making that work though (and this is not explained in the tutorial) is that you cannot fail. There's no game over. Migrants will keep coming. You can lose a 1000 people and still prosper in the end. The only "punishment" for doing badly is that your town looks unpleasant, it's visual. But you can slowly, one by one, remove the causes of death (except old age!)

You've made me think I should probably add that to the tutorial in 0.0.9 to calm players down a bit, and also explain - as you say - that minimising death is the best you can hope for. I'll give this some thought. 

I could also type up a couple of big gameplay tips that make keeping folks alive a lot easier, but I'm worried of spoiling the game so I'll keep quiet for now. 

You sound like a player who likes to work at their own pace and take their time so I'd strongly recommend the "relaxed" difficulty mode if haven't already. It still offers a decent challenge for newcomers but gives you more breathing space.

The Town Hall stats screen (mentioned briefly in the tutorial, just build a Town Hall and press the stats screen button, which is down by the 5 need bars) hopefully shows the information you want on needs, etc. It collates everything. Try and keep the numbers on that screen as low as possible and use it to identify areas you're weak in.