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Really where you first land just needs concrete. Water is nice but if you have to range a bit for it that's fine. First landing will be infrastructure and groundwork leading up to your dome. Outside of challenges/cheevos/sponsor goals there's zero time pressure or competition for land--it's all yours. Now, when you lay down your domes you want them to be near metals/research bonus and ideally close to water.
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Jan 3, 2019 08:01
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Just picked this up and I'm building babby's first Mars colony with the International Mars Mission which seems like the extreme easymode start. What's the typical base layout? One big dome surrounded by littles, or more of a hodgepodge? I'm unclear on how far colonists will walk inside domes to get to jobs and services. Is it just their own dome plus any that are directly connected to that dome, or can I set up a chain of connections to have people walking two or more domes away to get to a service? Also, is fusion power worth it without the upgrade to reduce the worker requirements? It kinda seems like it's not, but that might just be because I have an engineer shortage.
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Jan 3, 2019 22:55
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So having taken some ideas and hints from the replies above, I restarted with the Inner Light mystery, as Brazil. Just saved past noon on Sol 99, on a colony with two Diamond Domes, the centrally-located of which got three Vista deposits, so its apartments are something like 60 comfort. It branches off to my original Basic Dome and another one, both of which got one Vista and a science deposit, so I've got the advised two labs and two Institutes running, all of them on all shifts. Actually, with 412 colonists, even with every service building always staffed I've got some unemployment. Touchdown was on a plateau so metal has been an issue; the first expansion dome was one of the two other unconnected Basics, to tap a high quality deposit of like 800 rare minerals in an effort to hit the sponsor goal of exporting 60 before the end of Sol 50 (missed it), and the next was to actually spend colonist labor on mining normal Metals. That extractor is going full tilt at all times with Amplify and Fueled Extractor and it's not enough to take care of both maintenance and machine parts construction. Fortunately between having just one rare metals extractor going, plus three of the Brazilian "turn garbage into money" plants, I actually just don't have enough rockets to move the surplus of rare metals back to Earth, and am also airlifting waste rock up onto the plateau to be processed. So I've been buying rockets full of just Metals and then sending 30 rare metals back for a net profit, enough to have a bit of a reserve and start the first of a series of domes in the lowlands, there's two Metals and a Rare Metal deposit spaced such that I can have a Basic run a mine on one of each, with a central Medium to make electronics and more machine parts. So yeah, on Sol 100 I will have 7 domes instead of 3, and actually be able to slam down almost 3k research per sol without outsourcing, a number that previously seemed like a huge ask. I can restart that Paradox map when I want to start a new game and be ready-ish to deal with Wildfire...maaaaybe.
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Jan 4, 2019 01:42
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keep in mind that tunnels are great for sharing power and life support grids across huge distances--especially from the ground to a plateau. Doesn't help resource movement (unless you use shuttles or transports) or colonists, but sharing power and O2/Water makes things way easier to branch off.
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Jan 4, 2019 07:28
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What the gently caress are you supposed to do when you get 2 small and 3 medium domes up by Sol 80 and then Metatron spawns ion storms directly atop 3 of them immediately before, and then AGAIN, DURING a dust storm. Do you reload? Do you bend over and enjoy seeing 2/3rds of your colony die with no recourse? Do you just not build large domes that can have random events happen to them? I'm not sure what to do besides "not settle a colony on Mars, its a dumb idea" I've got over a thousand food stockpiled so I think I can bounce back, but its a kick in the nuts to see a really good colony get FLATTENED like this e; nope. there's a third ion storm after it. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 08:34 on Jan 4, 2019 |
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Jan 4, 2019 08:19
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Willie Tomg posted:Listen homie. I'm worked up on-line. drat it. The map will always reveal a tile with concrete and a bunch of surface metal. Honestly what you'll really want to look for is a convenient rare metal deposit or two. Getting set up with metal to sate both metal and machine part needs is tempting but getting some exports up to buy more stuff is a lot more flexible. Also electronics are more expensive to import than machine parts, and it only takes 0.1 rare metal to make electronics while metal to machine parts is 1:1. Also Metatron's an rear end in a top hat event. You seem to keep getting all the dick events while you're still learning.
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Jan 4, 2019 09:15
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Gadzuko posted:Just picked this up and I'm building babby's first Mars colony with the International Mars Mission which seems like the extreme easymode start. What's the typical base layout? One big dome surrounded by littles, or more of a hodgepodge? I'm unclear on how far colonists will walk inside domes to get to jobs and services. Is it just their own dome plus any that are directly connected to that dome, or can I set up a chain of connections to have people walking two or more domes away to get to a service? Also, is fusion power worth it without the upgrade to reduce the worker requirements? It kinda seems like it's not, but that might just be because I have an engineer shortage. pre: School/Research/Needs
/ \
Housing/farms ------- Housing/farms
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Industry & Misc
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Jan 4, 2019 17:39
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I put my original basic domes near metal/rare metal deposits, with an eye toward linking them to a hub after Medium Domes are researched. Once a deposit is mined out, I like to repurpose its dome for research and luxury living. I'm very kind to my Loners. I don't usually have dedicated-farming domes; more often each dome has its own farm for that sweet Comfort boost.
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Jan 5, 2019 23:25
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Alkydere posted:The map will always reveal a tile with concrete and a bunch of surface metal. Honestly what you'll really want to look for is a convenient rare metal deposit or two. Getting set up with metal to sate both metal and machine part needs is tempting but getting some exports up to buy more stuff is a lot more flexible. Also electronics are more expensive to import than machine parts, and it only takes 0.1 rare metal to make electronics while metal to machine parts is 1:1. Verloc posted:I usually shoot for a setup like below early on: Mechanical Ape posted:I put my original basic domes near metal/rare metal deposits, with an eye toward linking them to a hub after Medium Domes are researched. Once a deposit is mined out, I like to repurpose its dome for research and luxury living. I'm very kind to my Loners. These posts helped the Brazillian Space Program reach greatness after Metatron scratched the first run (I'm just gonna avoid random mysteries if Metatron is on the table, that poo poo is NOT survivable when it overlaps dust or ice storms). The farm comfort bonus helped boost comfort/birth rate (I still think that's a really dumb concept that misconstrues Why Folks gently caress, but it makes a game of the game so whatever) and I transitioned out of it once pop got so high I required an Ag dome to consolidate vaporator use. That was the other big thing! There was only one Low water source and it was still a billion miles away so I reaaaalllly had to stretch things out with vaporators, which worked because now the colony is over 1k people and that original deposit is now only just under half. Turns out I was perfectly inverting the importance of rare metal vs. metal metal, and was able to domestically manufacture enough electronics I could import vaporators for long enough. Farming domes with water reclamation, combined with the fact that dome water use doesn't increase with population wtf is that pretty much made the map for me. OOH, that, and also setting up self-sufficient drone hubs powered off a small turbine. That helped a lot for maintaining a tempo of expansion, establishing those remote concrete mining operations so I could opportunistically build in more productive areas. OOH and also also using/abusing tunnels, even in places where they're not strictly necessary, and merely super truncate pipe/cable logistics. Tunnels own, and are my friend.
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Jan 7, 2019 21:10
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Metatron is pretty bad but the Spheres one is what hosed me over in one run because I had no idea they'd start freezing everything. Suddenly I had to start retooling my colony for cold weather, haha.
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Jan 7, 2019 21:24
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Yeah, going for metal -> Machine Parts first is tempting but only really viable for nations who can generate funding somehow (US, EU, Blue Sun, Paradox) or those that can generate an excess of metal early on (India's junk to metal converter, Russia's RC miners, Japan's ability to spam automated metal mines). As said aiming for Rare Metal is a far more flexible start, especially since the map is covered in surface deposits of metal at the start. If/when you get a Mohole set up metals are suddenly a non-issue. Also I feel kind of the opposite with water. I far prefer building Vaporators everywhere since each one is a flat 1 water (before bonuses) that never runs out and only turns off during sand storms. I find they make a great bedrock while water deposits, which run out, are better for some flex between day/night water use. The that the maintenance material for Vaporators is metal instead of polymers to replace the fancy bag they use to condense water onto seems silly from a technical perspective. Obviously it's a gameplay thing, but still feels goofy.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:23
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Yeah I just did the Spheres mystery as Russia and I could see it really loving you over if you aren't ready for cold waves, especially when they start trying to terraform Mars by absorbing all the heat and creating a permanent cold wave (until you do research and create buildings to deal with them). The bonus at the end that cuts the subsurface heater power usage in half is pretty sweet if you're running the level 5 cold waves game rule, though! I really wish they would do mysteries as a checkbox so you could avoid the more "gently caress you" difficult ones but still not know which one is coming - a friend of mine got this game over the holidays and asked if he should do a random mystery to start with and I was all, "Oh god no!" I think I recommended the Inner Light mystery for him to start with, that one is pretty cool and fairly harmless.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:33
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Alkydere posted:Also I feel kind of the opposite with water. I far prefer building Vaporators everywhere since each one is a flat 1 water (before bonuses) that never runs out and only turns off during sand storms. I find they make a great bedrock while water deposits, which run out, are better for some flex between day/night water use. I rely on vaporators mainly because water deposits run out, and always at the most inconvenient times. And I'd rather build a vaporator-based colony right from the start, than be forced to transition to one at Sol 90 or so while hundreds of colonists dehydrate. The ideal would be for me to never have to tap ground deposits at all, except to fill my tanks initially and to tide me over during dust storms.
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Jan 8, 2019 01:16
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Mechanical Ape posted:I rely on vaporators mainly because water deposits run out, and always at the most inconvenient times. And I'd rather build a vaporator-based colony right from the start, than be forced to transition to one at Sol 90 or so while hundreds of colonists dehydrate. I find Vaporators more of a long term thing, especially if I lack the funds/tech to get more. However I'll gladly reach out to tap an aquifer, or a cluster if I find them. They're great as a backup for sandstorm heavy maps or if your water supply bounces up and down, but as said it's always a matter of time before they run out. They're great early and mid-game but long term it's better to build up vaporators over time to take care of 99% of your need.
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Jan 8, 2019 02:54
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Dust storms happening every week was precisely my situation, so I'm still gonna preen somewhat about stretching out on vaporators without tapping out that first initial aquifer (please let me have this im so bad at the game oh god!!!) and now that colony has over a hundred shuttles chugging along, $50B in capital reserves that'll never be used ever, project morpheus, a mohole, and the concrete excavator all humming along and I'm at the point where I'll send an RC rover to a distant plateau to setup a drone hub, pump a hundred drones into it because I have the prefabs sitting around doing not much, and power out 4 mega domes in a sol just to prove I can do it, and watch at the lowest speed as the godforsaken slums my inner domes have become thin out and get to 85ish% comfort again just because all the homeless people have somewhere else to go shop for art. That sentence ended so stupidly, this game is so bad, and its without contest the most compelling "city" builder since freakin' Pharaoh and/or Simcity 4! I'll just watch. Zoom in as much as possible, watch my botanists tend the Nothing But Farms megadome. Watch a martian hobo leave the Nothing But Apartments, Polymers Jobs and Universities dome. Watch folk shop for their bullshit art as other folk work out across the street in the service dome. Just watch. No game made that so rawly enjoyable since Tropico 3. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 03:39
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Oh no, I never said aquifers are outright bad, I'll gladly stretch out to them. It's just that they eventually wear out unless you get the breakthrough were deposits work at something like 10% efficiency forever, even when depleted. Aquifers are simply just temporary, even if it's over the space of 100 or so sols and you have to plan for that. And I agree. Game is janky as gently caress and weird as can be...yet at the same time it's got more heart and soul than just about any other city builder around and pretty much guaranteed to keep getting more and more work as it's a Paradox game.
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Jan 8, 2019 09:33
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If you're tired of constantly having to move poo poo around and redesign domes after your miners burn through the paltry <1k deposits you may want to check out Deposits Resource Multiplier to make them a bit more reasonably sized, or Deposit Auto Refill if you're tired of dealing with it altogether. Another interesting mod that's a bit less immersion-breaking is Martian Ice Melt, which replenishes water deposits after cold waves end and the surface ice melts. It's good to have at least some kind of reward after surviving 6 1/2 sols during a single cold wave.  Edit: About the game having heart, some of the events are pretty hilarious including this one that Haemimont must've patched in fairly recently. I didn't expect them to take a swing at Michael Bay.  I also got one earlier where a colonist asked me to spend $10M on fireworks to make a romantic display during which they'd propose. 
Strabo4 fucked around with this message at 10:10 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 09:59
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Strabo4 posted:Yeah I just did the Spheres mystery as Russia and I could see it really loving you over if you aren't ready for cold waves, especially when they start trying to terraform Mars by absorbing all the heat and creating a permanent cold wave (until you do research and create buildings to deal with them). The bonus at the end that cuts the subsurface heater power usage in half is pretty sweet if you're running the level 5 cold waves game rule, though! If you don't do random it notes the difficulty of each of them. I'm glad you mentioned this I didn't realize that some were really hard.
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Jan 8, 2019 14:50
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Strabo4 posted:
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Jan 8, 2019 14:52
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Groetgaffel posted:That's a reference to upcoming movie Mortal Engines, directed by Peter Jackson. Got nothing to do with Michael Bay. There's also the books that the movies are based off of. And the movie is definitely not "upcoming" it's very much "currently out" and "an utter financial trainwreck" (Made back less than half of what it cost to make)
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Jan 8, 2019 15:34
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Huh, could've sworn it was due for February. My grasp of time continues to slip. 
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Jan 8, 2019 15:45
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So I decided to let the secretive group test their bomb near my colony. Pretty good cash! And the combo dust storm and meteor shower that blasted my colony infrastructure into scrap was ultimately survivable, so net plus?
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Jan 8, 2019 17:44
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One silly thing about the Metaton event is placing a rocket pad directly beneath it. Rocket just flies right through it.
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Jan 8, 2019 20:30
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Started a playthrough as the Church of the New Ark for the first time, picked City Mayor as my build for lack of any better ideas. Was a good idea too, since I didn't realize they don't get any sponsor research at all by default, since he's got a bunch of extra cash for outsourcing. Usually I open up by outsourcing 5000 science for $1B once, then rely on the trickle science from my sponsor / that one tech for Explorer rovers. Also I play with Chaos Theory pretty much always now. So, my very first social tech is Martian Copyrights starting at 1000 science  I feel like Miriam starting next to Zakharov here.
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Jan 10, 2019 04:27
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Has anyone ever had any issue with drones seemingly bugged out and refusing to repair? I have 20 solar panels all broken, sitting next to piles of metal, and my drones are flat out ignoring them to go pick up waste rock.
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Jan 13, 2019 02:48
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They might have been out of power. Send a command rover there to charge them up.
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Jan 13, 2019 02:52
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BitterAvatar posted:Has anyone ever had any issue with drones seemingly bugged out and refusing to repair? I have 20 solar panels all broken, sitting next to piles of metal, and my drones are flat out ignoring them to go pick up waste rock. I had this happen. It was during the Long Winter event and I chose to take the free maintenance at the start of the event, after that none of my power producers were ever maintained again. After I realized what was happening I rebuilt them all and the newly built ones were maintained normally after that.
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Jan 13, 2019 02:57
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Groetgaffel posted:That's a reference to upcoming movie Mortal Engines, directed by Peter Jackson. Got nothing to do with Michael Bay.  I'd watched a review of it about a week before, guess my memory is going faster than I thought.In other news, I've been trying out China to get the achievements for playing them (200 colonists by sol 100 and 10 Tai Chi gardens by sol 100) and I wasn't expecting their RC Generator Commanders to be of much use but they generate 30 power from the dinky little solar panel mounted on the roof.  I now have 9 of them and haven't bothered to build a single drone hub so my only electronics consumption are my research centers and machinery factories. And without having massive fields of solar panels to maintain I've found myself with a metals windfall, which is a weird place for me to be because I generally build a solar farm early on so I'm not spending a bunch of machine parts that would be better used for tunnels or keeping my extractors and vaporators running. It's nice being able to close down the metal mine to run triple shifts in the rare metal mines, which has been very useful with the 3x slower rocket travel game rule. Chairman Strabo needs his spacebux!Tai Chi gardens are also pretty rad - their comfort bonus is 70 iirc, and they recover a bit of health and have the same "Visitors may become fit" modifier that the large gyms have but they only cost concrete like the other decorations.
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Jan 13, 2019 05:21
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Gadzuko posted:I had this happen. It was during the Long Winter event and I chose to take the free maintenance at the start of the event, after that none of my power producers were ever maintained again. After I realized what was happening I rebuilt them all and the newly built ones were maintained normally after that. gently caress that's exactly where I was at too. I've had to rebuild most of them so hopefully this fixes the issue. Edit: and now my game has encountered a dust storm with no countdown to ever ending, so I can't land ships or use solar. gently caress this goddamn scenario and gently caress cold waves. BitterAvatar fucked around with this message at 18:04 on Jan 13, 2019 |
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Jan 13, 2019 17:54
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this is why I have started either just turning off disasters or only going to zones that have meteors and maybe dust devils. Cold waves and dust storms are such a collossal pain in the rear end. Makes me long for the days when we had tsunamis in Tropico.
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Jan 13, 2019 22:13
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Eh, cold waves and dust storms aren't that annoying to me. Meteors are worse, but at least you get free stuff from them so they're not all bad. Now dust devils however are the worst. They basically make parts of the map mostly off limits because the only way to deal with them is the rather silly method of building dust-devil-proof buildings where they spawn. And god help you if you start near a spawn point, they'll make your early-game hellish.
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Jan 14, 2019 11:56
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I find cold waves the worst because they'll destroy stuff buy freezing it and you can't repair it until the wave is over. At least meteor impacts can be fixed right away. Also realized I did not enjoy Europe as a sponsor at all, but India is pretty nice so far despite seemingly slow research.
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Jan 14, 2019 17:36
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Dust storms suck, but at least your turbines are guaranteed to fill up your accumulators and once you realize an empty dome and a dome with 400 residents have the same O2 usage rates you can plan a 48 hour reserve of water and air relatively easily. Cold waves suck, but as long as you aren't also dealing with meteors you can centralize your outbuildings, storage, heaters, and generators together so as long as you offset more than 15-ish worth of power penalty per heater then you're mostly fine if you overbuild power. Meteor storms aren't terrible as long as you don't be unlucky and get pegged right in your only drone hub early, so don't be unlucky prior to MDS tech and be lucky and have MDS available reasonably fast and you'll be fine. Dust devils make your life really easy: you don't get to build there, so now you have that drama totally taken care of for you and you can relax. The disasters aren't the difficult bit, the difficult bit is what also happens during the disaster. 
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Jan 14, 2019 22:47
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Yeah. Meteors and dust devils teach you to slap valves and buttons on any stretch of cable/pipes. Makes sure each dome can be cut off from the grid and has a battery, water tank, and O2 tank attached directly to it. That way even if your poo poo gets wrecked your domes can still limp along until things stabilize. The worst is the power surge event. Turning your batteries into bombs or shutting down most of your power generation/storage is a hell of a choice.
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Jan 14, 2019 23:36
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Dust devils are the only disasters I hate and refuse to play with since it's just such a colossal pain in the rear end to have to be continuously repairing your rovers all the goddamn time. If you don't get Subsurface Heaters early game (or you're playing Chaos Theory and get really unlucky to have it at the end of the tech tree) cold waves can be pretty rough if you don't have a water extractor setup anywhere - it's very possible to have a cold wave and a dust storm at the same time and if you don't have any water extractors it's a potentially colony-ending combination. The Lakes Contain Water mod makes this survivable though, you just have to dedicate a bunch of space in your domes for them (and ideally remember to turn off your water towers so the lakes get filled up first). I find myself really enjoying the challenge of having to selectively turn things off at certain times of the day so I can stagger my power juuuust enough to keep things running often enough so they don't freeze and stop working altogether. Level 5 cold waves and the 3x power requirements they bring are intense - they can last up to 6 1/2 Sols, too.
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Jan 15, 2019 01:23
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After hitting critical mass, in order to solve a homelessness problem exacerbated by kids kicking people out of their residences, I set up a complex of mega trigon domes to house all the kids in the colony. Makes sense, right? You have 400 kids, set up 400 houses for kids. Something about the per-dome age filters gets weird, though, possibly because the filters start to break at the 2k/3k mark, because when the children age into youths, they don't move OUT of the dedicated kid dome even if there are hundreds of free residences in domes they'd be taken into, so rather than solving the homelessness problem, I've merely shoved every martian born child into a warehouse where they age into homeless depressed manlets after being displaced from their childhood residence by another kid in turn.
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Jan 18, 2019 18:02
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Willie Tomg posted:After hitting critical mass, in order to solve a homelessness problem exacerbated by kids kicking people out of their residences, I set up a complex of mega trigon domes to house all the kids in the colony. Makes sense, right? You have 400 kids, set up 400 houses for kids. Something about the per-dome age filters gets weird, though, possibly because the filters start to break at the 2k/3k mark, because when the children age into youths, they don't move OUT of the dedicated kid dome even if there are hundreds of free residences in domes they'd be taken into, so rather than solving the homelessness problem, I've merely shoved every martian born child into a warehouse where they age into homeless depressed manlets after being displaced from their childhood residence by another kid in turn. If you have that high a population, you need to do a hard rejection of all non-kids and then create an accompanying filter for "unspecialized youths" for your university dome. But yeah, at that point the game breaks horribly. That's the only weakness/complaint I have about it, really--there's no late game content after you get over that hump.
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Jan 18, 2019 18:32
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OAquinas posted:If you have that high a population, you need to do a hard rejection of all non-kids and then create an accompanying filter for "unspecialized youths" for your university dome. Oh I definitely did that. The settings just get ignored, apparently. e; even the Mohole stopped working, because it doesn't recognize vacancies in metal storage so it just idles forever. There's so much moving around and happening all the time I'd be more surprised if the game held up tracking a thousand drones and 2.5k people, but yeah, stuff gets a little wacky at a certain point. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Jan 18, 2019 |
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Jan 18, 2019 18:35
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Does anyone know why my drones are refusing to repair my wind turbines? I've already had and completed the event where you have to research the redesign breakthrough. I have a machine parts stockpile with plenty of stock right next to several turbines that need repairs, along with a drone hub and several idle drones, but they won't repair the turbines. I've even tried manually telling them to repair but that's not working either. No active disaster events.
Wafflecopper fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Jan 23, 2019 |
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Jan 23, 2019 05:46
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Wafflecopper posted:Does anyone know why my drones are refusing to repair my wind turbines? I've already had and completed the event where you have to research the redesign breakthrough. I have a machine parts stockpile with plenty of stock right next to several turbines that need repairs, along with a drone hub and several idle drones, but they won't repair the turbines. I've even tried manually telling them to repair but that's not working either. No active disaster events. Are they totally broken? You may need to reconstruct them. Other than that I dunno.
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Jan 23, 2019 05:56
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