I would say for this type of game that avoiding the catastrophe’s/death spirals is actually missing the fun. Don’t restart/reload - try to recover and break the spiral! This is a settlement building game where Things Go Wrong, and you end up with Fun Stories at the end of the day about how you looked death in the eye and lived…
I happen to like having a challenge thrown at me that forces me to recover or else - a game where you can fail, but can puzzle out a solution - like in Tropico*. So far as I can see in CE you can break out of a death spiral, or it can bottom out just short of a complete wipe… and you can recover. You’re always a few in-game days away from a new wave of colonists to fill the empty spots.
In short, if you don’t like things going catastrophically wrong, regularly, stay away. This is not a happy building sandbox game.
*that’s actually one of my beefs with the new Tropico series. The original one forced you into do-or-die scenarios. You have to work hard to lose in the new Tropico.
When you have a population of 30 and every single person is either angry, insane, or afraid because they feel recklessly endangered despite being provided a fully staffed barracks, and now they’re not making enough food to feed everyone, so they’re further getting hunger penalties to whatever shreds of happiness they might have, which shuts down the farms that provide the raw materials for food, I’m not sure I’d call that finding the fun.
Now if you’re talking about the random events that you get with a raised disturbance, I can see what they’re going for. The horror element is exactly what should set it apart. Too bad they didn’t put it into a better resource management game.
I’ve been playing this a lot, and while it took a few tries to “get it”, I finally did and have had several successful colonies now. My highest is in the 70’s and I’m pushing towards 100. The only thing that stops me lately is a major infestation that I won’t spoil, but it has taken my population down to single digits twice now. It’s frustrating, and somewhat infuriating, but it’s also just as rewarding to bounce back from that and keep going.
There are definitely bugs, and there are absolutely some poor development choices. Did it come out of EA too early? No doubt. One look at the “options” screen will confirm that. No volume control, no way to turn sound effects off, no way to hot key anything (a crime in this type of game, imo), no way to change resolution from within the game, no way to play in windowed mode (that I’ve found) etc, etc. However, there is enough game here to be enjoyable. At least to me, as a die hard city builder fan. I’m just hoping they make good on continuing to support and fix the game post release.
Tom, I agree that they were sincere with the desire to produce “a game”. I suspect the EA usage was part of the model to fund the development - as opposed to using it to flush out design and implementation flaws, and from my observations that is a bad idea regardless of your intentions as EA puts you in the market and you begin to get judged by consumers differently (and deservedly so)…
Looking at the forums and the fact that the developers last posted back in November that they were working on a patch, it seems Gas Lamp Games died and no one noticed.
This looked like it was going to just be amazing when it was first announced, and right up until I bought into the early access and played it I really believed it might end up being one of those “desert island” games I’d pick away at on and off for years to come. But then I played it, and it was… well, very early. Rough. But that’s okay, it was early access, so I put it away and checked in every so often. The amazing blog updates kept me really excited despite the game not clicking for me each time I fired it up to give it a try. Then after launch I booted it up and… ugh, it’s just not really very fun. Such a shame, as their previous game (Dungeons of Dredmore) is just a shining example of brilliant game design.
