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I started a new game and wanted to make something a bit more challenging and to play around with the custom rules. So I did Mystery: picked Last War since I haven't done it yet and it's perfect thematically for the challenge scenario I wanted to try Game Rule: Last Ark (can only send a passenger rocket once) Sponsor: Japan Commander: Doctor (I need my people to live longer / gently caress more since I'm not getting any more) More custom rules: Hunger (can't import food) Long Ride (Rockets to earth take 3 times longer) More Applicants (500 extra applicants, competition for the Last Ark is fierce) Chaos Theory (totally random tech tree - really changes up the game) And this isn't a game rule, but I decided for myself that I would use only 1 cargo rocket ride past the initial one, plus a couple supply pods to finish off my initial cash reserves. After that, I'm not relying on Earth for anything else - it's dead to me. Then for my colonists my only criteria was to be a Sexy non-Tourist non-Idiot Youth. (My rocket is Literally Anime.) Out of 500 applicants I got 9 which qualified, explaining why Japan is nothing but olds now. I filled the rest out with people who had good sanity / comfort traits. Did not give a gently caress about specialization since one of Japan's sponsor objectives will give you a university relatively easily. So after the probes readied the site, a rocket full of Japan's best, brightest, and most importantly horniest, landed on Mars ready to survive through sheer force of libido. Chaos theory has given me some interesting options - most unusually, I already have the techs for fusion + fusion automation, which I will be building shortly, and both mega domes and the wonder dome (but no medium). And arcologies. Anyway, here's Neo Neo Tokyo, already with 10 Martianborn: 
metasynthetic fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Nov 28, 2018 |
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Nov 28, 2018 06:50
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This cool thing is on Steam now, it's not a game but rather an interactive 3D model commissioned by NASA that shows what a future Mars base could look like. https://store.steampowered.com/app/224000/Project_Eagle_A_3D_Interactive_Mars_Base/ I kinda wish Surviving Mars had this aesthetic now.
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Nov 28, 2018 11:59
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Mechanical Ape posted:One thing I wonder is, what lets my colonists walk normally inside the dome without Mars-hopping like they do outside. I think the idea is everyone is actually using weighted clothing.
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Nov 28, 2018 12:07
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NoNotTheMindProbe posted:The season pass has been updated with the title of the next DLC. It looks like we're getting terraforming: Iirc this was known. They gave rough concepts for both major dlcs in an interview around release
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Nov 28, 2018 16:28
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Christ, I don't think going as a Doctor with the Church of New Ark was a good idea. Everyone's sanity is rock-hard due to religiousness but the birthrate is skyrocketing and I am rapidly running out of places to house people. I guess if I expanded agressively I could take advantage of how many Martianborn I'm generating but yeesh.
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Nov 29, 2018 02:03
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You can forbid births on a dome by dome basis.
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Nov 29, 2018 02:07
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Well crap, now you tell me.
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Nov 29, 2018 02:10
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Church of the New Ark's all religious trait is great for making horrible hell colonies of over population if you don't control it.
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Nov 29, 2018 04:04
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Are triboelectric scrubbers bugged? Mine seem to stop working when I up their radius.
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Nov 30, 2018 19:44
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Huh, you can put solar panels inside domes. That's one way to deal with dust storms. Too bad you can't use Moxies in there too...
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Nov 30, 2018 20:54
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Yup, it's kind of a waste (I mean maybe if you're India who gets cheaper domes/starts with medium ones) but it at least is an option you can do. Might be worth it if you start on the ultra-maximum dust-storm difficulty
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Dec 1, 2018 03:51
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Uuuugh, I had a pretty good run on this Paradox playthrough (even if the game developers are wildly inconsistent as a source of income) but this particular map I rolled up has horrendous dust storms that eat through my pipes and wreck my life support. I made sure to have plenty of O2 and water storage containers but the leaks are still chewing through the stock of that and last two storms I made it through by the skin of my teeth with domes running out of everything. Investing in valves and a redundant system only did so much because the backups were turning to swiss cheese as well. Might try Paradox out again on a different, less-bullshit map. Those jumper shuttles are pretty amazing, they just zip all over the place. I notice that the dust storm animations don't seem to reach high-up plateaus, is that cosmetic or is anything I put up there at less of a risk?
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Dec 2, 2018 03:13
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Yeah the storms aren't as strong up on the plateaus.
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Dec 2, 2018 10:12
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Here's how to design a robust system of backups: Basically, the key is valves(ideally at the extreme ends of the pipeline so there's no stray bits of piping between the valve and the end of the line that could leak) and redundancy. More than one backup, in case one fails. More than one pipeline, in case one fails. And of course you should have drones capable of repairing things as soon as they break, so that when the rest of the redundant stuff starts to fail, the originals are back online.
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Dec 2, 2018 10:52
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Also, if you're in a big resource crunch and there's a meteor storm smacking your base up it can be a good idea to delay repairs until the sky is no longer falling. I've wiped a colony because my drones were repairing the same buildings over and over. That was pre-Sagan, though. It's much better now that the epicenter moves around the map as you don't really get punishing "gently caress you get off the planet" base smashing storms. At most you only eat half a dozen meteors, it isn't too bad as long as you're spread out a bit. The armageddon rule is pretty fun and the meteors sometimes leave behind metals and even anomalies.
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Dec 3, 2018 01:17
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The time I came closest to losing in this game was a mystery that kept blowing up my water/oxy storage, which wasn't a big deal, but also primarily targeted my farms. Which they would rebuild with a soil quality back at 50%. I was desperately trading/importing food as quickly as I could to feed my 700+ colonists until I finished the mystery and my farms started producing again. I lost somewhere between 100 and 200 people to starvation before things stabilized.
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Dec 3, 2018 01:41
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The wisps from St. Elmo's Fire are on my poo poo list for stealing my water and leaving potholes everywhere. Sure, they're pretty and possibly a form of life, but man, this run would have been easier without them.
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Dec 3, 2018 21:13
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SpaceY's faster rockets are loving amazing. With Martian Engines they only use 15 fuel and are thus always ready to shoot off and explore a planetary anomaly. They may not get the best price on rare metals but they can sell a LOT of them at once, and since they get discounts on buying advanced resources from earth they can still be played like a money-maker faction. I wish there was an option to launch a rocket just to land it somewhere else on your map...
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Dec 6, 2018 05:00
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All these hours played and I'm only now realizing the value of 3rd shift. It turns out colonists don't need as much rest as I thought, and entertainment buildings open at night get lots of visitors and the dome overall is happier for it. Mars is truly the planet that never sleeps.
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Dec 10, 2018 17:57
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Mechanical Ape posted:All these hours played and I'm only now realizing the value of 3rd shift. You're trapped on an inhospitable rock where you need extensive equipment just to step outside the dome. There's no such thing as "open area" for you. Your job is more than likely directly related to the survival of yourself and everyone around you. More likely than not you'll die early due to some equipment failure or natural disaster, and if you're lucky it'll be over quick--if not, a slow gasping death. So yeah, you're gonna want to get shitfaced after work.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:30
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There's also that breakthrough tech that makes workers not take a sanity hit for working the night shift which is fantastic.
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Dec 10, 2018 22:40
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Dreylad posted:There's also that breakthrough tech that makes workers not take a sanity hit for working the night shift which is fantastic. Is that different from the one that improves performance during the night? also drat, it's hard to get certain breakthroughs early. I want Biorobots dammit.
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Dec 11, 2018 03:12
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I started a game as Paradox, pushed hard for the shuttles and slingshotted from the initial basic dome to a pair of connected mediums, set them up for loving and production, and built up a huge surplus of food because I wasn't paying attention to numbers. Then Wildfire starts, people get sick, the research project pops. I have two labs in my first dome and just completed an Arcology there so I can demolish a residence for a Hawking Institute. 90k science is pretty loving intimidating, so I prioritize all those job slots and keep going. Not researching anything new, and my applicant pool hits 0 rapidly when the first few victims die, so not only am I not expanding but I'm also shutting down production. 28 sols later, only the Institute is still running and only half-staffed, one lab is demolished and the other is inactive. I've lost half of my population to this disease, have been manually stuffing people into the Arcology dome to fill in research and service slots and still cant keep up. Colonial services have broken down such that a suicide happened yesterday, then half a dozen of them today. The cure is at 39% researched. My question is: what did I do wrong here? Seems like I was supposed to be putting out about 3k science per sol by around sol 100, and while I'm still very new to this game I'm not exactly new at colony building/resource management in general.
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Dec 31, 2018 21:06
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Sounds to me like you needed more domes
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Jan 1, 2019 09:40
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Well, Wildfire is one of the hard mysteries, and PI is a pretty hard start, but it sounds like you just didn't expand fast enough. By Sol 100 you should at least have the infrastructure in place to rapidly shift to science, even if it means temporarily making life less pleasant for your peeps or running a threadbare budget. One thing to do would be to make sure the science buildings are working night shifts, I guess? Your colonists can survive mental breakdowns, they can't survive physical breakdowns like dying of the neo black death or whatever.
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Jan 1, 2019 10:58
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Also, if you have multiple populated domes you can quarantine them to prevent people moving between them and spreading the disease. The function seems to have no use except for that specific mystery. And if you do manage to get the research done, the cure-tatos you have to produce from farms drain like 50% soil quality with each crop of them so be prepared to do an emergency switch to hydroponics when you realize that all your farms have become useless and you have to grow only clover for the next 8 sols. 90k science does seem like a bit much though, I think I remember it only costing like 15-20k when I played through it. If you don't mind cheesing it a little bit there is a mod called "Expanded Cheat Menu" you could install and use to finish that research.
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Jan 2, 2019 05:36
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Eh, since the feedback is "Haha yah you were way behind" I've elected to start over with a midrange mystery selected and also to give up my dream of hit game development in space (picked a more reasonable sponsor). On the other hand I did have about 5 unmanned farms and like 800 banked food still so I was set for the follow-on task if only there would have been anyone left who hadn't offed themselves.
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Jan 2, 2019 06:06
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After the wildfire cure becomes available to research, every medical building you make from that point gives a 5% research bonus up to 50%. You can exploit this by making a bunch of infirmaries nobody will ever work at and tear them down later just to get the research bonus.
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Jan 2, 2019 08:35
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Yeah, the infirmary build loophole is hilarious for that. Build a micro dome and pack it with infirmaries. (or if you want to be immersive, just leave/create a spot for an extra infirmary in each of your domes--you really should have 4+ domes by Sol 100) Outsourcing is a must for those big research projects, so make sure you have a few billion in the bank so you can get the top-tier 1k/sol level. Shaves off a lot of time. Hawking Institutes and Research labs don't incur collaboration losses if you operate both at the same time, so I usually aim for 2x exploration rovers (180 RP), 2x Hawking Institutes (~3400+ RP), and 1-2 research labs (600+ RP). Tack on 1K from outsourcing and you have a respectable 5K you can plow forward with. Usually when I get HI I build a new dome to be the research/university nexus. Diamond or Oval domes are great for this, but any medium+ dome works. The Nexus Node spire...kinda sucks, really. It's hard to get it staffed right since you need a lot of extra scientists sitting around to get it operational, but if you prioritize it that will draw from your active RP generating labs and actually reduce your daily total. Still, once it's up and running you can sit around 7K/sol RP. My first games I built all the luxe housing, max comfort, etc. Growth was troublesome and I kept running out of room in the domes. Now I just build apartment tenements and arcologies. You're on mars, citizen--suck it up. Here's a bar, get drunk after work to dull the pain.
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Jan 2, 2019 18:11
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OAquinas posted:Yeah, the infirmary build loophole is hilarious for that. Build a micro dome and pack it with infirmaries. (or if you want to be immersive, just leave/create a spot for an extra infirmary in each of your domes--you really should have 4+ domes by Sol 100) I really wish there was a space effective living space better than apartments. Other than arcologies the other living quarters just house way, way too few people.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:06
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FWIW, once you start increasing population density in domes through mods (there's one mod building that you can upgrade to hold 14 people on a 3x3 footprint, letting you get 500+ people in larger domes) all the services and everything start falling apart because their capacity is just so low. The game is definitely designed to encourage you to sprawl through many lower-pop domes, especially since they added passages which make it possible to have a larger work/research/services dome surrounded by small population domes. That being said, I think the arcology limit of 32 is absurdly small and should at the least be 48, I never bother using them because a med center or hanging gardens are such a better alternative and the apartments are almost as good. Strabo4 fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jan 2, 2019 |
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Jan 2, 2019 19:17
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Just started playing this. It's a very chill city builder with beautiful aesthetics. As a newbie, can someone give me a rough idea about what a good timeline looks like that won't gently caress me up when it's late game and I'm not big enough? Like, by which Sol should I have what number of domes/colonists and how should they be specialized? Also why will only a single botanist work in my hydroponic farm even when I manually assign others to the building? Am I correct that each worker makes progress on each of the 3 possible crops I'm able to select, or am I completely misunderstanding that screen?
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Jan 2, 2019 19:36
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The Bramble posted:Just started playing this. It's a very chill city builder with beautiful aesthetics. As a newbie, can someone give me a rough idea about what a good timeline looks like that won't gently caress me up when it's late game and I'm not big enough? Like, by which Sol should I have what number of domes/colonists and how should they be specialized? nope, that's crop rotation. One crop at a time.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:44
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There's not much pressure to expand to a certain point by a certain date; the only real exceptions are a few of the Mysteries, and arguably disaster preparedness. Otherwise, you can basically take as much time as you need. General order in which to ramp up production is usually Fuel -> Food + Rare Metals -> Machine Parts + Polymers -> Electronics -> Metals. You may need to mine metals earlier if you started on a cliff and your RC transport doesn't have access to many surface metals.
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Jan 2, 2019 19:58
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I think the only other time there's pressure to expand to a certain something by a certain date is a few milestones or achievements. At or around Sol 100 you should be in a good enough place to have a wonder or two and most of those transition you into a post-scarcity society.
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Jan 2, 2019 20:48
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LonsomeSon posted:28 sols later, only the Institute is still running and only half-staffed, one lab is demolished and the other is inactive. I've lost half of my population to this disease, have been manually stuffing people into the Arcology dome to fill in research and service slots and still cant keep up. Colonial services have broken down such that a suicide happened yesterday, then half a dozen of them today. The cure is at 39% researched. Wildfire is a pain in the rear end, but when it happened I survived fairly well by ensuring everyone had infirmary access and keeping them fully staffed day and night. I lost maybe 5 colonists to disease in all. Is it possible you'd prioritized research so high that no one was staffing the medical facilities? The Bramble posted:Just started playing this. It's a very chill city builder with beautiful aesthetics. As a newbie, can someone give me a rough idea about what a good timeline looks like that won't gently caress me up when it's late game and I'm not big enough? Like, by which Sol should I have what number of domes/colonists and how should they be specialized? Timeline isn't really important unless you're going for achievements or have a time-specific sponsor goal. For instance, India has a goal to build a dome by the end of Sol 5, which is very doable and you'll get a nice reward for it, but it's not strictly necessary. You can pretty much go at your own pace. Anyway it's difficult, as a rule, to say "you should have X many of this by Sol Y" when your development is in part steered by the availability of resources and the tech tree, both of which are partly random. As for your farms, colonists tend to allocate to jobs in what the AI thinks is the most productive way overall. Generally this works pretty well, although your mileage may vary. If you've only got one botanist at your farm, that could be for a number of reasons; like maybe you've got lots of farms and too few botanists to go around, so they're spread thinly. Or maybe you've got, say, a mine that's unstaffed and so the AI assigns a botanist or other non-geologist just to have somebody working it. If you want all your botanists to work in a particular farm, the best way is to set the farm to "high priority" and "specialists only". The AI will then assign as many botanists as it can (and only botanists) to that farm. It might take a shift or two for all the job transfers to sort themselves out.
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Jan 2, 2019 22:09
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The Bramble posted:Just started playing this. It's a very chill city builder with beautiful aesthetics. As a newbie, can someone give me a rough idea about what a good timeline looks like that won't gently caress me up when it's late game and I'm not big enough? Like, by which Sol should I have what number of domes/colonists and how should they be specialized? timeline isn't really important, just make sure you're keeping steady growth in your production of consumables while keeping up increasing science production and enough domes to house/employ all your citizens. otherwise there are too many variables related to sponsor etc. to say you should have X by Y sol The Bramble posted:Also why will only a single botanist work in my hydroponic farm even when I manually assign others to the building? Am I correct that each worker makes progress on each of the 3 possible crops I'm able to select, or am I completely misunderstanding that screen? sounds like the others are being assigned elsewhere. is this a brand new dome and do you have more jobs than citizens to work them? as in tropico, you can right click job slots to forbid them so you can more easily tamper with the ai job selection
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Jan 2, 2019 22:28
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The premise of this game is insanely good and scratches my deeply-seated Tropico itch better than even the recent Tropicos, but my god some of the pinch points in this game get infuriating. You're telling me that with the water systems on the verge of loving collapse, there is not a seventh engineer who literally wants to go to mars in order to work in the factory that saves everyone? That even when we take the filters off allowing for lazy, moronic, cowardly whining alcoholic cancer patients, we have no other choice than to put Deborah from accounting in charge of making semiconducters and tell her to measure twice cut once on the nanometer scale. That after sending a hundred of the nation's best and brightest to a far-away world, you can't find an extra $200m in the budget for spare parts for the one water extractor on the one water source for twenty miles in every direction after it got pasted by a meterorite and the motto of the Brazilian space program is apparently "Caveat Emptor." You're telling me that one of the first generation of colonists on mankind's first extrasolar colonization effort--who is responsible for growing the food to keep everyone alive--wants to go home now because the Space Mall On The loving Planet Mars opened today, but you really wanted it open yesterday, so now you're irretrievably sad and frankly your heart just isn't "about" the whole Mars colony anymore. YOU'RE TELLING ME. That you went up to Mars at the age of fuckin' 40, and now you're 60, and you're utterly unable to do research, watch the crops grow, tend a loving bar, or do any productive activity except produce farts and piss as you eat the colony's dwindling food and drink its finite water until you do us the literal favor of dying. YOU. ARE. TELLING. ME. That in those sixty years. You never ONCE made a kid. Because the only things that bring you happiness in the entire galaxy IN YOUR LIFE ON MARS, are: shopping in general, and shopping for luxury goods in particular. And there has been an Art Store in your dome for YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. But nobody was ever at the cash register because they were all working in the moisture reclamation spire, or the mine that gave us money with which to buy more vaporators, or the polymers factory that kept the vaporators from crapping out, or the factories that kept the drones working and water flowing and lights on and food in the grocery store. But nobody was manning the till at your store. So you just couldn't find it in you, for 60 years, to spend your sorrows in another human being. On Mars. gently caress you. gently caress you. And despite aaaallllllllllllllllllllll that, I'm still probably going to start a new map tonight, because not even Tropico scratches my Tropico itch like this game and despite every glaring problem, *IF* you can get everything working, you can pop on speed one, put on Mars Radio, and watch your bustling ant farm for hours and hours and hours. This is the first game since Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri where I've been like "okay three more things and I'm done" and then I poke away and poke away and poke away and suddenly it's 6AM and the cat's asking for breakfast and I have poo poo to do.
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Jan 3, 2019 00:44
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Extraterrestrial, not extrasolar 
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Jan 3, 2019 03:57
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OAquinas posted:Extraterrestrial, not extrasolar Listen homie. I'm worked up on-line. drat it. btw should I be restarting everytime I'm not starting next to water, concrete, and both metals? Because it really seems like 80% of this game is "don't get owned by deposit distribution"
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Jan 3, 2019 04:19
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