Campaign Feedback - Basic Cloakbots

This thread is for feedback for the following campaign missions, initially released Sunday 22 October 2017:

• Folsom: Tutorial, unlocks Cloakybot Factory, Glaive, Mex, Solar
• Im Jaleth: Unlocks Reaver (cloakriot), Conjurer, Lotus, Radar
• Beth XVII: Unlocks Ronin (cloakskirm)
• Myror: Unlocks Imp (cloakbomb), Picket (turretmissile)
• Cygnet: Unlocks Sling (cloakarty)

Useful feedback you can give us includes:

• Did you experience any technical difficulties? (If so, it would be great to get infolog, screenshots if appropriate, etc.)
• What difficulty level did you play the mission on? (The options are Easy, Normal, Hard and Brutal.)
• How difficult did you find the mission? (On a scale of 1-10 or something.)
• Were the optional objectives all too easy? Too hard? (The aim is for each mission to have some easier and some harder ones.)
• What were your biggest challenges in completing the mission?
• Were the main objectives, optional objectives, and hints clear? Were they useful?
• How enjoyable was the mission? (On a scale of 1-10 or something.)
• Any other specific feedback about the mission.

Other Feedback Threads

[Spoiler]

Known technical issues

• If your lobby crashes when you open the campaign options menu, you may have an antiquated and invalid savefile. Go to /Saves/campaign and delete the contents and see if that fixes it. This should be fixed now, let us know if it happens to you.

Sorry for being so superficial, but where do I start? I think it would be great to have a little animation highlighting the starting planet. Alternatively I'd suggest a more subtle background image that doesn't drown the foreground.



Otherwise, it looks great already! I love the tutorial!

Okay, so:

First mission (Tutorial) - is pointless and once U R in, it should be skippable.
Second Mission - So easy even braindead can win that, enemy com just came and suicided into my units.
Third mission - Still no challenge. It can be only my opinion, but I would say making it bit harder would be more enjoyable even for new players.

Clicking OPTIONS after second mission switched to black screen with no way out. (had to close whole program with Alt+F4)

Btw. whoever chose name "Ronin" for freaking RPG unit... ah, well.. nevermind. Even good old Scythe is more Ronin than this Taliban troopah.

Writing as I go:

1) I agree with DeinFreund I didn't know what to click at first, consider also putting the first planet in the top of the screen rather than the bottom

2) First mission was nice, when I did an attack move, my commander started reclaiming crap, which can confuse a new player.

3) There's a small lag whenever an objective is met and a new one is presented. Do we know what the cause is? Models and textures can be preloaded nowadays if that's needed.

4) Mission two starts, I'm looking in the objectives but I've already forgotten where and how I can build mexes. It's good that the map has visible mex spots, but you can count on the fact that the player doesn't read anything ever if they can get away with it.

5) Cool! I have new units, I have now built one of each. While doing so, an enemy glaive went by and was fired at by my lotus.

6) I have sent lots of units to attack. I also tried to send the conjurer and it assists my factory, that is cool! Enemy commander killed my first reaver, second reaver was killed by commander explosion, third reaver killed their base. My com and con were busy reclaiming trees instead of getting to the enemy base. I guess I shouldn't use attack move with my com.

7) While placing my factory, it rotated most unintuitively (this one is for real, I had no clue what was going on). I sent a ronin to attack the visible stardust and the stardust died.

8) I made some mexes (excessed like mad, I've built 0 solars) I should've lost my com to a stardust but couldn't be arsed to restart, imagine I have.

9) A few ronins and reavers on attack move did the job nicely. One glaive made my ronins entirely useless in attack move. When trying to manually target it I missed all the time and they were butchered.

10) It's a shame I don't know about rally points.

11) I have won by ~8:14 but one stardust (the one which should've killed my com) stayed standing. I also haven't built a single radar.

12) What are all these servos that I've unlocked? Oh, there's a commander button which is green. I chose 2 damage boosters and 1 armour.

13) I chose EMP bombs because it sounds cooler than slings.

14) This map is horrible, even the mexes are not on the mex spots.

15) I've suicided all my ticks. killed the impaler with a glaive when it was no longer shocked. Continues to attack move random units.

16) I accidentally shocked 5 enemy cars! OMG, this is awesome. (AI is pretty generous, I should've been socrched to death ages ago)

17) I won by attack moving (or just moving with my com, because it just stupidly reclaims otherwise) to the enemy base.

18) Sling mission - I've immediately sent my reaver attack-waltzing to the enemy base. The conjurer moving to the right spot on mission start is brilliant, I hope people get it.

19) Holy laser! My reaver is dead. An enemy bot attacked me, my slings were mostly useless but when it fired on solars they killed it. Disaster averted.

20) My slings fired and missed on a dot I can't see, I've moved my con and they killed everything.

21) OMG, there's another holy laser! And another! but they die fast.

22) Damn! I've lost a mex while attacking. I've brought my units back, but anything that wasn't a sling or a com was killed by the holy laser so I didn't get there on time. OMG, while looking for it, it came behind my lines and killed more stuff, but this time I built some new reavers and glaives so I sent them there. Another bot killed my spotter :(

23) Those slings can't hit any units amirite?

24) All my units trying to climb died (because I didn't build a new spotter) until I sent my com which killed the enemy base.



General notes:
25) I didn't build any radars or solars after the first mission.

26) Attack move directly to the enemy base worked every time.

27) I may have used my com too much.

28) I've payed zero attention to economy beyond the bonus objectives.

29) The console's "Good fun have luck" and "player has joined game" shouldn't be there and slightly obstruct the "Continue" button. Btw, can we rename Continue into something more poetic? even a greenish "Go!" may be better. God bless you if you make one for each mission: "Rockets away!", "Let's shock some bots!", "Sling-along!"

30) I want to see in the campaign screen where I did the bonus objectives and where I didn't. Rewarding the player by drawing stars around a planet or on a planet according to whether they 100%ed it could be very nice.


31) Real good job guys! :)

As I see now, it is set to Easy (by default?). There was no choice on the campaign start (there probably SHOULD be), so I was not looking for any setting.

You should ask some friends that don´t play ZK to try out the campaign. I doubt that Hokomoko and Dein are good persons to examine the difficulty of the missions :)

I expected some sort of popup when hovering over the mission planets, so I would see things like mission name, unlocks, perhaps short description like "Learn the basics of Zero-K".
Start button was missing on the other one (not grayed out or anything) so I was wondering what to do. Then clicked close and selected the other planet.
The other planet had a start button, but pressing it said map will be downloaded. However the screen with the planet has no download indicators, they are only in the downloads tab thingy which is partially hidden by the planet screen thingy.

When I played the first mission it said well done, I have learned the basics of Zero-K, but the mission did not end. I had to exit to lobby. That did not open up the second mission, so I'm thinking the mission is broken.

Update: on the second try I did get the victory popup. Then I got a nice looking experience bar. Then the Commander section is highlighted so I click it. But there is nothing to do there. Perhaps the first mission should lead to some sort of level up directly.

The campaign screen looks nice, and I like how the progression is shown by planets getting visible as they become accessible. Like was said before, a stronger highlight for at least the starting mission would be great.

Thanks for the feedback. Aquanim has designed almost all of the missions while I've implemented the UI. Histidine (KingRaptor has fallen victim to renames) made the tutorial and I gave a lot of feedback on it.

In response to the common feedback I have released a new version with UI updates. There is also a ZK stable which should fix a tutorial bug.

quote: Sorry for being so superficial, but where do I start? I think it would be great to have a little animation highlighting the starting planet. Alternatively I'd suggest a more subtle background image that doesn't drown the foreground.

quote: Like was said before, a stronger highlight for at least the starting mission would be great.

Should be fixed. The campaign view starts zoomed in on the start area and there is a tip telling you to click on the planet. I may need to add better resolution image for the zoomed in area, give feedback here.

quote: First mission (Tutorial) - is pointless and once U R in, it should be skippable.

I agree that unskippable tutorials can be annoying. However, there is also a great risk that people who would benefit from the tutorial would skip it. As a compromise I have tried to cut down the tutorial as much as possible, only teaching you what is necessary. Someone who knows what they are doing can complete it in a few minutes (this is partially why Assist was added) so I think the cost to them is not too great. I agree that a compulsory tutorial would be terrible if it were much longer.

quote: Clicking OPTIONS after second mission switched to black screen with no way out. (had to close whole program with Alt+F4)

I've added more sanity checking for save files. For future reports about saves I'd really like an infolog.

quote: Oh, and the first mission does not seem to work on my computer. I can see the map, but there is no UI.

This should be fixed by the recent ZK stable.

hokomoko thanks for the detailed feedback. I think "Good fun have luck" is being removed by circuit. Alternately I could just disable the chat part of the console widget (perhaps until the player first presses enter?). More poetic continue would be nice, needs some design though. This would also need designing and mocking up:

quote: I want to see in the campaign screen where I did the bonus objectives and where I didn't. Rewarding the player by drawing stars around a planet or on a planet according to whether they 100%ed it could be very nice.

You raise a good point about unexpected difficulty cliffs that can appear due to a lack of player knowledge. We think that the first two missions make players aware enough of economy (especially Solars) so that they will be able to make economy when it is required later. However, the first few missions don't really require economy. Players could hit a wall because they forget that the economy exists. We'll have to remind them later or make it more important earlier on.

quote: As I see now, it is set to Easy (by default?). There was no choice on the campaign start (there probably SHOULD be), so I was not looking for any setting.

This may be a save issue. The popup screen defaults you to Normal.

quote: I expected some sort of popup when hovering over the mission planets, so I would see things like mission name, unlocks, perhaps short description like "Learn the basics of Zero-K".

I added a small tooltip showing how many bonus objectives you have completed. I am wary of overloading the tooptip too much.

IM JALETH [2nd] mission normal difficulty I have the feeling that the AI raid too early and skirm too well. I mean I have some minor difficulty chasing those raiding party and I am a veteran. Maybe dumbing down the AI at least this mission.

Just my 2 cent though real new player may think differently.

Vermind first mission end normally for me are you using linux? [I am windows]

Past infologs can be found in Spring/log.