Aven Colony - off-world city builder

I have this preordered so I will take one for the team and inform you if it is good or not.

I enjoyed @tomchick 's playthru of the beta (from early this year). I really enjoyed Planetbase as a calm off-world builder, and this looks like advanced Planetbase so excited for it.

I quickly grew bored of Planetbase as there were simply not enough options and too much wasted space to remain entertaining for long. I like the style of these games so I am hoping that Aven’s considerably larger build list will create more appeal and options. The art style is a bonus too.

I was fortunate in that I when I finally got Panetbase I totally knew what to expect so I had set my expectations low, and doing that I was pleasantly surprised how much I squeezed out of it.

Hey, this seems to be out now. Mixed reviews though, I am not impressed overly with what I read from RPS either, but it may still be worth checking out, and it sounds like support is continuing so who knows?

Yeah I sorta had a feeling it was going to be just average. :\

I have little faith in RPS reviews but after an hour and a half I cannot say they are wrong in this case. Neither is the Polygon one.

It is not a bad game by any stretch but it boils down to too much micromanagement and not providing enough of a feeling of accomplishment in creating a beautiful offworld colony. Perhaps some additional buildings, DLC and tweaking might make this a real winner but for now it is fairly mediocre.

I played the first mission last night and my feeling is “meh”. I think this will be an entirely forgettable game, but I am not giving up on it yet. You do not have any interesting decisions to make. I have a feeling that the more difficult scenarios are simply going to be figuring out the right build order for the scripted events that are meant to fuck you up.

It’s so pretty though…

It looks better in screenshots. It’s not an ugly game by any standard but to me the actual view was a bit lifeless compared to the prettier screenshots.

If anyone is playing this and on mission 2, how do you get the expedition ship to move on from the first mission goal?
Basically I sent it to rescue a stranded explorer, which it picked up and now the ship will not move. I have clicked on other things like a dead sandworm, another explorer, and the main base. All this does is add way points to the ship, but the ship never moves from the 1st spot.

Also, the fact that I can’t turn off buildings pisses me off. My farms are filling my warehouses up and my only choice is to recycle them.

Nevermind on the ship thing. Its a bug. Restarting the game fixed it.

Dev’s have been patching this weekly, anyone still playing?

I put it down a few days after playing it. There really isn’t a game there because there isn’t much of a challenge beyond your initial stabilization of food / water / power / nanos. From that point on, its just an endless series of goals handed out to you one at a time that seem arbitrary until you ‘win’ and then move to the next map.

For example, I had a fairly large population and had some of the larger dwelling types already with plenty of space. Then the game says, we need more room for people, build an outpost which is the smallest type of dwelling you can build.

In an early missions it introduces the spore things that can get into your air vents and make people sick. Ok, its something you need to look out for, now on, right? WRONG. In the next several missions I never saw them again.

To make matters worse, in later missions it wasn’t even telling me the end goal. It was saying to follow the steps as they came in. So you just sit there waiting for the next whatever until you done. You can’t even plan and work toward the ultimate goal because you don’t even know what it is.

There is supposed to be a large content drop in the next 2-6 weeks depending on how well integration goes. The one thing I need in this game is for your colony to feel alive.

That said the developer is super active. Seems like they must getting very little sleep with the amount of patching and updating going on.

Anyone play this recently? They put out 2 content drops since release, seems they are actively supporting this into 2018.

It’s pretty good now. They’ve been working their butts off to fix the initial things people disliked about the game, plus the generous content drops, and have been very open to suggestions.

Yeah I bought it, so far only 3 maps in (2 of which were tutorials) and its pretty good. Reminds me a bit of the Anno series.

I went looking for a thread on this with Tom’s inclusion on his Surprises of 2017 list and was shocked to discover I had myself created the thread for it. Sheesh. Getting older, amirite?

So I wishlisted this as it’s on sale for $18 and have been looking into getting a city builder for some time, even going so far as to booting up and putting a few hours into Sim City again (I still like playing that). Sounds like folks are pretty happy with Aven Colony these days. Nice!

$14.93 @ GMG with their extra 17% voucher on the front page. :)

Wow!

Sold! : )