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Okay, have to tear myself away and go to bed. I’m way past my bedtime.
You’re constantly bottlenecked by so many things, but I think the largest factor you have no control over is natural resources. You can build scanners that scan for them, but they’re really expensive to build early on, and the scanner scans about one random tile around your base every minute. And there are A LOT of tiles. You can speed it up by building more scanners, but they take 8 electronics, and 8 electronics means a ton of aluminum and silicon. And did I mention that you’re constantly strapped for natural resources?. At which point, it’s sheer luck whether you uncover more of whatever particular resource you desperately need. It’s not that you run out, but you can only mine each resource so quickly. So having multiple of a resource really helps lesson bottlenecks.
I also don’t know how to expand. My base has hit its building limit, and I know I can build other bases, but not sure how. Maybe I haven’t unlocked it yet, as I still have objectives I need to achieve first.
I was reading the steam forums and many of the posts come back to this problem. RNG on resources can be a killer that you won’t uncover until after several hours of play.
I’m holding off for now, but hopefully the devs wake up (btw - they are active in the forums, but while they seem to be accepting of many new ideas and problem areas, whenever resources come up, they are pretty defensive … eg build more scanners)
You are heavily gated by aluminum. You’re given one vein early, but A LOT of things require aluminum. You produce about 1 aluminum every minute, but you’re constantly prioritizing what gets that 1 aluminum. You need it as a building material for damn near every structure. You need it to create electronics (which is also another big building material. Joy). You need it to create spare parts. If you could find a second vein early, you’d still feel pressured to prioritize what gets it.
How’s combat? One Steam review said it falls apart. Just knowing there is combat put me off a bit.
Also, can you pause and give orders?
I haven’t even gotten there yet. I started over this morning because my first base was a goddamn mess in retrospect. Too spread out, causing me to build way too many maintenance and energy facilities.
I’m two hours in and enjoying it a lot. First colonists have landed which started me on the research tree. Moved into second tier research and working to second spaceport. Story is interesting playing as an AI.
Random resources can definitely shut you down. My colony had three legs reaching for new aluminum patches, which seemed like the early bottleneck. Now its a balance of chemicals and water for food to keep colonists happy.
There is little hand holding. Its easy to gimp yourself. I hit the first building limit and had to scrap a bunch of old building to redo my base. I love that. Being forced to make decisions and balance a bunch of competing priorities. That’s my wheelhouse.
Now I’m gearing up to launch my second base (its research and story gated I think) and find richer research outposts.
You got three veins of aluminum? You lucky bastard.
My new game I still only have my starting vein. But I’ve got like 3 veins of fricking chemicals that I don’t need.
So much jelly right now, that you guys are able to play this while I am wrapping up the end of my work day.
:P
It’s slow-enough paced that I can play the game and work at the same time.
Correction: I just checked. I have my starting vein of chemicals, and FOUR additional veins outside of my main base.
FML.
I just found the third Al supply after searching about 20 of those big boxes that make up a sector. My Al was at least 2 of those boxes apart and nothing in one half of my explored space. Al are the red spots in picture below.
I’ve had 3-4 scanners going continuously. Looks like you get a pretty good refund when you scrap buildings, although that takes a while.
The statistics screen is pretty good. I use the 100 month time period as I found 100 sols is too short to strike a good balance. Pro-top: use that allocation drop down to tweak resources. I ignored it for a long time. If you hover over a resource, it will lightly highlight that supply on the map. The devs need to make that more apparent. You can see current production, demand, and total reserves buts its really hard to track them down on the map. Especially compared to coming from Anno.
I haven’t figured out efficiency yet and that’s limiting my production. Somehow related to maintenance and the logisitcs network. That part of the UI could use some love.
You can. Not sure you need to, but you can if anyone else cares about that.
I’m liking this a lot, but I feel like they tricked me by naming the hardest difficulty level with the name of the actual game. You can either play easy, normal, or Per Aspera, but the tool tip implies the designers intended you to play Per Aspera level. So I did. Which resulted in this:
On the easier difficulty levels, you probably get more resources in the resource mines. They might even be infinite. But my campaign game is pretty borked now. So I restarted a sandbox game. Screw the stupid storyline with Nolan North or whoever constantly calling me from Houston to chat.
By the way, you have to build a “chemicals” mine in this game. Yep, you mine “chemicals” from the Martian surface. “Chemicals”. No specific chemicals. Just “chemicals” in general. You know, a little of this, a little of that. “Chemicals”.
-Tom
Do they make you deal with the problem of the solar wind at all? Reading online last night there are a couple interesting ideas for solving it.
They need to do something about resources, stat.
I’ve got 6 surplus chemical nodes that are worthless to me.
Meanwhile, I cannot progress in the story because I need Uranium, and despite having 5 resource scanners going at, I’ve found none.
Mine the chemicals, sell the surplus on the open market, then use the money to buy uranium. Except that there’s no open market? Oops?
-Tom
Having resources basically being one giant RNG is something I can’t wrap my head around. Who thought this was a good idea? How was this not caught in testing? I’m on my second attempt, and it’s bitten in me the ass both times so far.
Oh, yeah, I’m also running out of water AND CAN’T FIND ANY MORE.
Yeah, TEST YOUR GAMES
Stop playing for now.
Welcome to Mars! Hope you hydrated before you got here!
-Tom