VERY little combat, mostly consisting of building guns to shoot flying aliens. Old trailer covering the hazards of Aven Prime.
I think perhaps Rod was asking about Kingdoms and Castles which is a bit more combat focused.
I like city sims and always wanted to play one in alien planets, but this one is kind of tame. I got it because you guys warmed on it, but is taking the place of “something superchill to play” a glorified screensaver with resourcemanagement. Anyway I just started, so maybe it gets messy later on.
I was indeed asking about Kingdome & Castles!
Thanks though @lordkosc , agreed about Aven colony. Its a nice sweet spot.
Haha it gets VERY NESSY later on. Halfway through the campaign I was on the kush world thinking, “dang this is too easy, I’ll just enjoy my time and move on to the next mission”. 6 hours later my colony has no water, no spaces no electricity, the people refuse to work, and the entire thing collapses spectacularly. It took more tries to get it right, as I found in that mission you have to use every credit sparingly or suddenly you’ll find yourself with no revenue, no way to get to that last iron mine, and everyone’s too mad to convert your alien sludge into credits.
Enjoy the easy of the campaign, they go away when you least expect it to happen.
Probably - I’ve played 3-4 hours, and love it - its simple, its beautiful and I love watching the small going-ons in the village. But sure, it is not a very deep game I guess. Its quite cheap though, and good value for money. The developers are working on an update with ports and trade though to add to the games depth.
@Rod_Humble I play on the middle complexity - I had same fears as you, but I had a dragon come over twice, set fire to one building which was promptly extinguished and then leave again. All in all, it was a more curious experience that threatening in any way.
Thank you!
I am so happy with this purchase, here have some pics of map 2 where I spent 3 hours tonight.
No. I may check it out again at some point, but currently I am spending all my time with 7 days to die. I sure hope they improved it though. I am not sure what is in the content patches, I was not even aware of them until very recently.
Are the maps challenging now? That was one big thing I remember, that there was no challenge. Then I remember on one iron poor map, the trade hub would only offer deals for iron (meaning you had to trade it away for goods). That made no sense. Finally the thing that pissed me off was that the game had me build things I didn’t need, and refused to tell me the end goal. I would much rather just be given an end goal and then be left to my own ends to figure it out. The only time it should give me a specific task is to introduce a new game-play concept. Like build a missile tower because there are these spore things you need to shoot down.
Yeah I am finding them challenging, spores infect, the little sucker aliens stick to your buildings, winters can be extra harsh, I am still finding it hard to get proper food production so I have to over grow in the summer to make up for shit growth in winter.
End game objectives are still drip fed so on the sandy map I just finished I had no idea when I would win until I build the last building they wanted. Then they told me I’d move on to the next colony after I completed that goal.
Nice pics!
I ended up caving and the game makes a good first impression. Played the tutorials and the first real mission.
I thought I’d be sneaky and build the final objective before they explicitly asked for it, but the scenario didn’t end until they asked for the historical center (or whatever it was called).
I like making stuff and storing it in a warehouse much more than Anno 2205’s method of just needing to build a surplus without storing the excess. I also like there is a commute time factored into happiness.
For the rest of the campaign, do we always need to follow every intermediate objective to win or so they loosen the leash a bit?
Azara Falls is a huge jump in difficulty, having to import most of your food is a challenge. :)
Everything went to shit on my current attempt when spores took over near one of my geothermal plants, I ran out of nanites at about the same time. Doom spiral at that point.
I picked this up in the sale. I think it’s a fine city builder, fairly pretty, a little dull in translating theme to mechanics (I ignored a giant sandworm spraying acid over my colony - nobody even seemed alarmed!) - but when it does, it’s well handled. For instance, I enjoy that alien crops work as mind and mood-altering drugs as well as food-stuffs - but only after processing, and nobody really likes them. And the inhospitable atmosphere makes the game-constraint of forcing a joined up colony thematic.
There are significant micromanagement issues that work against an otherwise interesting mechanic of winter. For instance, farms do not grow in winter. Solar panels are only half as efficient. But instead of shutting down all your farms in winter and sending the workers elsewhere (typically a geothermal plant, to make up for the power shortfall), you are forced to do this manually every single winter. Most players are unaware of this option, and a great many probably don’t care for the tedious process of doing so (even with a fairly undocumented ‘select all’ button). Both prefer to instead build surplus power and greenhouses that produce food all year round - ultimately divorcing themselves from the interesting game mechanic of seasonal food and power production, and storage. Pharaoh managed seasonal farms back in 1999 (with workers moving from working the fields to building pyramids), so it’s disappointing that this hasn’t been handled as well almost twenty years later.
I feel the oldest I have ever felt after writing the end of that paragraph.
There are other micro-issues (batteries, production surplus management), UI issues on the new ‘overmap’ screen, trade is handled poorly, and residences being basically all the same is a bit bland). But I actually think it’s an enjoyable city-builder, and I’m looking forward to trying some of the harder maps.
I am starting to get that sinking feeling that I should not have re-purchased Aven. It has improved since startup but I am not finding myself compelled to play it. I got through the first scenario and started the second. It seemed like I was doing the same thing over again with no real joy of seeing the colony develop. It is not awful by any stretch of the imagination but it comes across as a bit meh. I think most every city will look exactly the same when done as a series of jumbled buildings that solves a problem rather than creates a beautiful colony.
Fifth_Fret hit the nail on the head on winter. It just feels like the game stops at those moments. Time to put it on 8x speed!
I needed something fairly chill to play today as I started having a bout of vertigo this morning. I felt weird getting out of bed and when I was walking to the bathroom my body kept wanting to veer right.Then when I sat up from putting on my socks the room decided it wanted to start spinning. I took an anti nausea pill that I had from last time and did the epily maneuver right away and got things to stop spinning - so hopefully I nipped it in the bud.
In any case, this made me tired and not wanting to try and learn anything new or play stuff with a lot of movement on the screen (I learned that last one after trying to play some Horizon Zero Dawn). So I fired up Aven Colony.
I like the pace of the game. There usually isn’t a lot of down time, but I don’t usually feel that rushed. So far there have been moments of challenge, but it hasn’t been very challenging. I only finished the 4th campaign - where you need to build around the lake. I like how commute time matters. It’s nice to look at.
I still don’t like how they feel like they need to give the player tons of baby step objectives. Just tell me the main objective and let me have at it. It you want have a couple intermediate steps where the player can get some rewards. Too much hand holding so far.
Still, I like the game enough. No regrets of buying it.
Yes! I love this as a chill game. This and Planetbase are fantastic for that.
This game can be brutally unforgiving if you lose track of your food supply. I was two hours into the final campaign and will have to start over (I might have a savegame to go back to, thankfully). I frantically tried to fix things, but it didn’t take long before I got a screen saying all my colonists were dead from starvation. Whoops.
Rationing! Potash! Oh god everyone’s dead!