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These people went from crafting hi-tech armor, flatscreen TVs and advanced powerplants to "make stick to throw rock at". I even took the guy who researched everything with me. This is really demotivating.
You also lose all progress with relics....
It's worth noting that in the Crashlanded or Rich Explorer scenario, they already had all that high-tech stuff before the game started in their home planets or on the ship. They they got dropped off by a ship in a new place on this planet. Then they have the research everything. This is basically the same situations as the archonexus restart.
Not that it's exactly clear what 'research' means in this game physically anyway. It never made sense. Is it peoples' memory? That makes no sense because many of them have backstories about being scientists so they should already have the tech, plus you keep your tech if your researcher dies. Is it some kind of document or blueprint? That makes no sense because no such object exists in the world - you can migrate naked to a new map and still keep your research. In truth it's just an abstracted game mechanic, like so much else, and if you want you can pick it apart a hundred ways but there's no point because it's not harming peoples' play.
Because of the above, "realism" arguments here can arbitrarily go either way as desired. So it comes down to what makes sense for the gameplay itself.
Since the entire game progression is built around the research tree, your second and third games will play better if it is still intact. So that's what the game does.
It's just a better alternative to restarting from the main menu, and it helps give players in ultra-lategame a "next step" besides endless growth and the inevitable breakdown in game mechanics and performance that goes with endless growth.
I'm going to look at altering the text to pre-warn and justify this a bit - I think some advance warning and a bit of a fictional fig leaf would help.
Thanks for the reply! I think it's fine for gameplay purposes to reset the research tree, lets you have something else to work on whilst still having continuity and having fully kitted out pawns and animals is a great help.
I also don't really mind harder raids since well, having valuables means you are a more attractive target but I would suggest if it's possible maybe soft capping expectations of your new colonists so they don't immediately demand stuff that's impossible to build. They were the ones who probably made the decision to sell so having high expectations and desire for rituals in a brand new place seems strange. Maybe a separate expectation category like slaves have that caps out expectations to low for some time to show the pawns are optimistic for having made a very successful colony.
I'm going to review how expectations play out here.
It would be good if I could get a savegame just after archonexus restart to inspect the game state. It'd be great if you (or anyone else reading this) could join the official dev discord and post one!
I haven’t gotten to this point in 1.3 yet, but I’d have to say that starting from zero research is probably going too far (if that is how it works), considering that in every scenario you at least start out with something. Maybe keep some randomly selected low tier research, or let the player choose a few to carry over. Just as long as it’s a reset to the equivalent of a new colony, not a reset to being even farther behind than tribals.
You're right. I am planning to have research go back to more or less something like a classic crashlanded start. Zero is a bit much.