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I just got the double spire breakthrough on a new campaign, so like an idiot I immediately beelined it without reading the fineprint. That uh ... that's a lot of polymers
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Mar 24, 2018 17:17
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I expanded too much too soon and didn't make enough electronics and metals factories. Then I ran out of resources. My colonists started committing suicide en mass, and then I just said gently caress it and reloaded from like an hour ago. Then I ran out of power and am bottle necked by loving rockets upon rockets coming in to take my poo poo from mars back to earth. gently caress my life. I just want a huge, functioning colony with a bunch of domes!
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Mar 24, 2018 17:22
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Pirate Radar posted:It doesn’t make sense that Mars colonists would just grow a bunch of soybeans at first to minmax their soil quality, like, realistically there are better ways to take care of your soil. Crop rotation should have more benefits, the way they represent soil quality right now is weirdly abstracted. Does that make sense? Sorry, it’s past 10:30 on a Saturday for me. Does one round of ground cover and one round of soybeans, then alternating potatoes and soybeans sound like a better feeling crop rotation?
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Mar 24, 2018 17:45
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I mean I agree in a sense, but sort of the problem is that Surviving Mars is a multiplatform release for a more wide population and what the heavy grognard Rimworld/DF/etc player sees as QOL is probably the opposite for your average “building a colony on mars sounds cool” player. I mean reassigning drones one by one and not being able to set quotas seems more like tedium than challenge, but you're correct. I didn't realize it was for console as well, I should have just gone in with lower expectations.
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Mar 24, 2018 17:48
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I think if I was going to improve farming I would suggest maybe adding a food variety mechanic where your colonists are happier with multiple types of crop being supplied, and with earth imported supplies being particularly desirable. You can track it still as just "food" but add a mouse over or something that just shows how much of the various types you have in the colony and if you have any it's assumed to be shared between all food units. So in starvation it doesn't matter but once you're more established you will want a mix of farms, fungal farms, and hydroponics bays growing as many different types as you can, choosing between efficient crops and luxury crops. Also gives you a reason to rotate your crops.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 18:02
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Food variety would also bring up things like aquaponics, and your colonists could take a negative from eating all fungus or a bonus from earth-imported food.
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Mar 24, 2018 18:17
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OwlFancier posted:I think if I was going to improve farming I would suggest maybe adding a food variety mechanic where your colonists are happier with multiple types of crop being supplied, and with earth imported supplies being particularly desirable. You can track it still as just "food" but add a mouse over or something that just shows how much of the various types you have in the colony and if you have any it's assumed to be shared between all food units. So in starvation it doesn't matter but once you're more established you will want a mix of farms, fungal farms, and hydroponics bays growing as many different types as you can, choosing between efficient crops and luxury crops. Also gives you a reason to rotate your crops. Yea Banished has a mechanic like that and it would be a nice incentive to mix things up. Also if you could make things with the different foodstuffs, like beer or cider to increase comfort that would be cool too.
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Mar 24, 2018 18:17
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Although I can make a colony and expand to like 250 people by Sol 100, there is no way I can pass the Evaluation or a Mystery. I tried with Europe or Space Y. What is a good strategy for rapid expansion at the beginin ? I'm thinking of making a small dome with small housing and a lot of amneties so my early colons will gently caress quickly, baring that I don't have many ideas. Maybe load scuming to get a start with a decent water suply on the first tile...
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Mar 24, 2018 18:21
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OwlFancier posted:I feel like they're possibly a bit overpowered if I'm honest, given that they eliminate all maintenence costs. I think they'd be better if things still needed maintenence regardless of dust but dust makes it tick up a lot faster. I agree with this. My understanding of Mars tech is that you can make it go a long way if you just brush off the dust on a regular basis. Unlocking the "damp rag" tech should make the stuff going a lot further. It makes more sense for the stuff to be breaking down naturally, as all things do when they are constantly running.
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Mar 24, 2018 18:22
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I've reached every milestone in my current game and I'm just sort of running it on autopilot so I can finish the spheres mystery and get the cheeb for it and man this thing takes forever. Gives me some time to do math though, since I figured out that with the mohole and the space elevator I can make enough money daily to import all the advance materials I need so I don't need any factories going. If only I had that breakthrough in this game that automates service buildings I could have a full space communism utopia where everyone can walk around in domes and complain that they're unemployed.
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Mar 24, 2018 18:31
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Food variety is a Tropico mechanic isn't it?
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Mar 24, 2018 18:57
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Bedurndurn posted:Food variety is a Tropico mechanic isn't it? I think so now that you mention it.
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Mar 24, 2018 20:13
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I mean I agree in a sense, but sort of the problem is that Surviving Mars is a multiplatform release for a more wide population and what the heavy grognard Rimworld/DF/etc player sees as QOL is probably the opposite for your average “building a colony on mars sounds cool” player. Ehhhhh. I’d really like to know how many people/Power I need for that machine parts factory, but the only thing the game tells me right now is that I need a prefab My power usage in a dome completely changes shift by shift because of building operations but I don’t know that at all unless I’m directly watching it How much food do I need for my new dome? *shrug* I dunno, I’m sure it’s fine, nothing tells me food consumption except one screen which may only be giving me recent information given how much it fluctuates Is it better to add a second shift to a factory or build another one? Dunno, I guess I just spend the resources and see I mean, if this were an easy no-fault city builder then sure, hide all the information and expect me to write notes if I want to min-max, but this game is also “oh, hey, you’re out of machine parts, time for cascade failure to kill everything”
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Mar 24, 2018 20:13
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skeleton warrior posted:Ehhhhh. I’d really like to know how many people/Power I need for that machine parts factory, but the only thing the game tells me right now is that I need a prefab There’s definitely some info missing, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I don’t think we’ll see queues and things like the Rimworld job matrix and stuff like that. Graphs and more clear “you are using this many of thing” charts are necessary.
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Mar 24, 2018 20:29
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OwlFancier posted:I think if I was going to improve farming I would suggest maybe adding a food variety mechanic where your colonists are happier with multiple types of crop being supplied, and with earth imported supplies being particularly desirable. You can track it still as just "food" but add a mouse over or something that just shows how much of the various types you have in the colony and if you have any it's assumed to be shared between all food units. So in starvation it doesn't matter but once you're more established you will want a mix of farms, fungal farms, and hydroponics bays growing as many different types as you can, choosing between efficient crops and luxury crops. Also gives you a reason to rotate your crops. Oh absolutely this would be a great addition especially, if as mentioned by someone else you could make alcohols and such or other happiness booster out of some crops. Obviously have everything, or at least nearly everything, eventually grow-able on mars, ideally with some Mars-only crops to mix in as well. I could see it being some sort of research option, maybe a breakthrough or two. I'd love to see how they handle apples: make it so you can either pay a lot of water for a "specific" brand of water or less water for a crop with a random yield (in a certain range)? Apples are not naturally the fixed flavors/breeds you see on the grocery aisle. Genetically they're a rather LOLRANDOM plant and you only get stable Granny Smith or Red Delicious crops via aggressive use of pesticides and grafting. Let them grow naturally and chances the fruit by new trees won't taste nearly as delicious to the human palette (though you can generally bet on them being fairly good to make ciders out of).
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Mar 24, 2018 20:49
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Anime Store Adventure posted:I mean I agree in a sense, but sort of the problem is that Surviving Mars is a multiplatform release for a more wide population and what the heavy grognard Rimworld/DF/etc player sees as QOL is probably the opposite for your average “building a colony on mars sounds cool” player. It's the opposite, this feels more casual than rimworld, yet rimworld has so much more qol stuff that makes it accessible. I think this game will get there and it's not like it has 5 years of patches adding content like rimworld does under its belt.
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Mar 24, 2018 20:59
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I just think it's hilarious how much the devs were blindsided by everyone going "We need more information" and even louder "Where are the loving tutorials!?"
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Mar 24, 2018 21:02
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I mean I haven't really found either of those to be particularly lacking, more information could be useful in some circumstances but I didn't have any difficulty at all getting into the game or understanding how it works. If the game just naturally clicks for you (or you have been working around it a long time) I can see why you wouldn't expect people to have such trouble with it, I still think it's strange how many people are having trouble with it.
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Mar 24, 2018 21:04
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Yeah it's ironic in light of people bringing up rimworld that this feels very similar to how early rimworld was intended, eg. a fun building simulator with dark/whacky storylines where you don't have to obsess over gathering 50 different kinds of ores and materials, but not a ton of depth to it, either. Owl, you either have to watch a bunch of streams of this or invest 20-30 hours into learning everything by playing and that's really, really ineffective and largely inexcusable in 2018. The only saving grace is that there are mods now that add basic resource counters and other useful UI stuff to the game. I've played a lot of games like this previously and this one is specifically counter-intuitive.
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Mar 24, 2018 21:12
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Having to go into the options to turn off that stupid hint bar was the only thing that wasn't immediately obvious to me. And needing a free place of regular housing for kids to move to the nursery dome I guess.
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Mar 24, 2018 21:14
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The game doesn't even make it obvious that your 3rd dome should be a euthanasia dome for all your seniors/idiots, much less that you can trivially make euthanasia domes that save you 40% of your food production. You don't realize how many seniors you have until you go to kill them all.
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Mar 24, 2018 21:17
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Yeah it's ironic in light of people bringing up rimworld that this feels very similar to how early rimworld was intended, eg. a fun building simulator with dark/whacky storylines where you don't have to obsess over gathering 50 different kinds of ores and materials, but not a ton of depth to it, either. Eh, I would say that this one is probably more counter intuitive if you've played other games in the genre and expect this one to be like them, stuff like the dome system I think works well in its own right but people expect it to work differently, so they have trouble. For the amount of actual content in the game I think there's a lot of mechanical depth to it in the way the different things interact with each other, it's a very elegantly put together game I think in a lot of ways. You could change the UI though there's not a great deal I find myself really needing to access that I can't, you can get resource overviews and that in the overview panel if you want them and I generally play it flicking through tabs on that depending on what I'm trying to plan out at any given moment. I suppose if I was going to make any UI changes, it'd be including a couple of extra statistics such as average food consumption per colonist (changes with the amount of gluttons you have, obviously and based on your techs) better averaging of the food production tracker because it doesn't handle multiple-day growth times very well. Also separate maintenance costs between idiots breaking things and general upkeep so you can figure out which is pushing your costs up because it's not immediately obvious. Some historical graphs of all those things plus already tracked stats would be good so you can get an idea of how they've changed based on changes you've made though that's more just curiosity on my part probably. Otherwise I can't say I've had any issues with the UI? Oh I guess shift click to queue things would be nicer if it worked on orders for rovers maybe. Maybe 5 segment markers when drawing power cables? Just small stuff really. Most of the changes I'd make are expanding the later stage content by maintaining resource scarcity and better siting existing parts of the game, and making colonists more willing to switch domes even if they're all full, or just generally adding some kind of population control mechanic, ideally honestly by depressing the natural birth rate a bit though that might be an issue with the ark people more than anything. I don't think a high birth rate should ever really be an uncontrollable problem like it is in my current game though. Herstory Begins Now posted:The game doesn't even make it obvious that your 3rd dome should be a euthanasia dome for all your seniors/idiots, much less that you can trivially make euthanasia domes that save you 40% of your food production. You don't realize how many seniors you have until you go to kill them all. You don't really need to do that and I don't think the game intends for you to go full eugenics. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Mar 24, 2018 |
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Mar 24, 2018 21:29
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I don't think you're wrong, but unless you are really into the genre, this is a pretty obtuse game to pick up, especially with no wiki out there yet on what anything does. The inability to queue things up and the lack of hotkeys is a peculiarly large oversight. This game def is just 2 or 3 good patches from being an extremely solid game and I'm excited to see what modders do with it, too. And how are you meant to have a colony building game without jettisoning your useless members of society? plz add a patch that makes it easier. Maybe a researchable social tech called death panels Herstory Begins Now fucked around with this message at 00:39 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 00:37
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Oh yes some things could use hotkeys, there are actually hotkeys for a bunch of things you can bind yourself but I think there were a couple of things I couldn't find mappings for that I wanted.
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Mar 25, 2018 00:48
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Hmm. How about require seniors to work schools and universities to share wisdom? Or give a bonus to research? Maybe there should be cultural choices in addition to sponsor and commander. Values like "Reveres their elders" or "Hates unnatural food" or "totally okay with polygamy"
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Mar 25, 2018 04:50
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I'm stuck on the Dreamers / Mirage mystery: I've had several visions, the last one was where your dream sister asks you to take the poison cure with her, and when you wake up she's dead, along with one of your colonists. After that, I've had several green spells with no other progress. The game said something earlier about having more dreamers makes the visions stroinger - I've expanded, but I'm playing with robots only, and out of ~500 pop I have about 23 or so dreamers. Do I need more dreamers? I guess I could keep cycling the euthanasia dome to try and distill a higher % of dreamers in my population...
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Mar 25, 2018 05:28
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metasynthetic posted:I'm stuck on the Dreamers / Mirage mystery: I've had several visions, the last one was where your dream sister asks you to take the poison cure with her, and when you wake up she's dead, along with one of your colonists. After that, I've had several green spells with no other progress. The game said something earlier about having more dreamers makes the visions stroinger - I've expanded, but I'm playing with robots only, and out of ~500 pop I have about 23 or so dreamers. Do I need more dreamers? I guess I could keep cycling the euthanasia dome to try and distill a higher % of dreamers in my population... Yup, you need more dreamers. It's probably not the best mystery to have in a biorobo-topia since the dreamers trait is heriditary and one of the best way to get more dreamers is have your colonists gently caress
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Mar 25, 2018 05:57
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Man, I dunno. I just put another five hours into it to start a colony that finally was about to break 200 people before Sol 100 when Spheres came down and I feel like I’m supposed to deal with an end-game situation when I’m barely a third into the tech bar. :/ Is that normal timing? If so, it seems pretty lovely of the game to imply that the water and metal mines are going to run out when you have so little time before the game’s over. I feel like half my time in this game is making GBS threads out windmills to try and get the huge energy costs everything has, and the other half is staring at the screen running 5x waiting for anything interesting to happen. There are a million techs and breakthroughs, but maybe 1/3rd are any good, and it’s all luck whether they show up or not. What am I missing?
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Mar 25, 2018 07:15
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Does anyone else think the Dreamer message comes from the future instead of the past?
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Mar 25, 2018 10:09
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:Does anyone else think the Dreamer message comes from the future instead of the past? My first impression was it was happening in real time from a different universe or alternate reality ...
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Mar 25, 2018 10:19
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I got the Spheres mystery on my latest playthrough, I just didn't do anything to the Sphere I found until like day 200 when I was basically playing in sandbox mode with 500+ colonists and at least 1k of every rare resource. At the end I took the spheres apart which seemed to be my only option, but the last message I got seemed to chide me for doing so because now we'll never know what they really were. What was the other option, just let them fly around forever?
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Mar 25, 2018 15:30
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I have a problem with logistics. This is where I originally landed, for simplicity I decided to keep my machine parts here because of the heavy maintenance for wind turbines:  But the plateau was pretty devoid of rare minerals, so I set up shop quite a ways north. The problem is that there is no automated resupply for maintenance stuff, as you can see by the disabled mine. I built a shuttle bay hoping they would deal with that part of logistics but it isn't doing anything useful in that regard. How do I fix this? 
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Mar 25, 2018 16:13
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double nine posted:I have a problem with logistics. This is where I originally landed, for simplicity I decided to keep my machine parts here because of the heavy maintenance for wind turbines: Dumb question but do you have a mechanical parts depot up north? In my experience shuttles are great at getting materials where they're needed, even if they aren't super quick about it. Maybe build more of them if you can afford to? If not, it doesn't seem to actually be that far and your transport can get them there.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:22
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huh. Restarting the game fixed it. Weird bug. I did have a generic depot behind the dome set up so that wasn't the cause. what do you do for housing? in my first game, I had the arcology unlocked from the start which I pretty much packed all my domes with. Is the morale penalty from apartment blocks severe, and/or is there a technology or setup that mitigates/cancels its drawback (like the air conditioning and iirc a spicific edict in tropico) double nine fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 16:26
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I can't see how anyone could play without Inventor. Being able to daisychain drones without power or upkeep just seems too good. Though maybe that's because I am in the bad habit of storing everything in one central location, and letting them trickle it out to the edges of my influence... ...which is becoming more of an apparent problem when I have to build my 3rd dome like 5 squares away because it's the only Rare Metal deposit I can find. Lil dudes take forever to get that concrete over there. Do you guys build separate power grids for segregated domes like that? Do you have to logistics a whole second base if you're not doing the drone daisy chain? I'm curious because this seems to be my new plateau. Without rare metals, the whole thing starts to break down unless you're importing electronics constantly.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:45
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use the transporter rover to ferry over resources more rapidly than drones can. For remote locations, I tend to build tunnels. If it's too early in the game to do that, I have a detached network of solar power/batteries (to save on machine parts) and water condensors. But I try to integrate them asap, with tunnels and a shuttle bay.
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Mar 25, 2018 16:49
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building a ton of windmills in the early game is a trap, use large solars to power everything you can afford to turn off at nightDoctor_Acula posted:I can't see how anyone could play without Inventor. Being able to daisychain drones without power or upkeep just seems too good. you can just put a windmill or large solar next to it in the middle of nowhere. without power the drone hub just wont issue new orders to the drones so it will still work 2/3 of the time Doctor_Acula posted:Do you guys build separate power grids for segregated domes like that? Do you have to logistics a whole second base if you're not doing the drone daisy chain? I'm curious because this seems to be my new plateau. Without rare metals, the whole thing starts to break down unless you're importing electronics constantly. absolutely, i read that the larger a pipe/cable network is the more likely it is to break. distinct grids also helps simplify things, like if i have a fuel refinery complex based around a water deposit it'll usually just be the extractor, a tank, up to three refineries, and as many power sources as it takes to keep everything running
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Mar 25, 2018 17:03
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I guess that makes sense. I've been playing so much Cities over the years that I think I'm used to trying to network EVERYTHING together. I never even considered looping off an extractor just for fuel manufacturing. Though that does make me think I might be good enough now to try a tougher sponsor, since my first good colony had like 200 surplus fuel (then got hit with Wildfire).
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Mar 25, 2018 17:09
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boner confessor posted:building a ton of windmills in the early game is a trap, use large solars to power everything you can afford to turn off at night I think this depends, actually, if you're on low ground I can see the appeal but a windmill uses 0.5 machine parts while solars use 1 metal, windmills are also mostly made of concrete while solars use quite a lot of metal, and windmills generate much more power especially on high ground. Metal processes directly into machine parts so once you have a factory it's probably far more efficient to use windmills.
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Mar 25, 2018 17:18
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OwlFancier posted:I think this depends, actually, if you're on low ground I can see the appeal but a windmill uses 0.5 machine parts while solars use 1 metal, windmills are also mostly made of concrete while solars use quite a lot of metal, and windmills generate much more power especially on high ground. Metal processes directly into machine parts so once you have a factory it's probably far more efficient to use windmills. once you have a factory yeah, which isn't too hard to set up, but by then you'll usually want to use windmills to power new expansion rather than keep less critical infrastructure running. like a fuel complex, once you've got a stock of fuel and can constantly keep two rockets cycling back and forth you dont need to run all the refineries at night to keep up with fuel demand. i'd rather concentrate windmills around things that always need to be on, like domes Doctor_Acula posted:I never even considered looping off an extractor just for fuel manufacturing. one water extractor produces 9 fuel per sol, or three per 'hour' which as far as i can tell is one of the three parts of the day. so if you put three refineries on one extractor your water production and consumption will be balanced. or, you can run an extractor for one hour/shift to fuel one sol's worth of water for one refinery, etc. running at full blast will get you 36 fuel per sol, so you won't need to run it all of the time unless you're using more than two rockets. since you dont need to run it all the time you can keep it powered by using one large solar for each extractor or refinery, and save on machine parts - you can replace the solars later with windmills if you want to run it full time. once you're done you have a self contained little system you can completely ignore and which won't ever have power or water issues boner confessor fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Mar 25, 2018 |
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Mar 25, 2018 17:40
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