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Well, the Positronic Watney is working... wellish. I'm into the 60s and have 14 biorobots and a single micro dome. My original colonist has hit Elder, so I kicked her out of the housing (She has Rugged, it's kinda okay. All hail the new flesh). It's definitely viable, but I think I'll go back to the save I made before calling the first settlers and do it more traditionally. My ADHD means I occasionally get enamored with a slow burn approach, but rarely stick with it. Things I learned: -Biorobots count as Martianborn, including for the purposes of the First Martianborn milestone. -Artoo Detoo is in the martianborn namelists. -gently caress dust devils. -It's hard keeping the literal babymaker crewed when there's cushy retail jobs available. -USA/Astrogeologist is a great combination. I had the Fast Scanning rule on and had 30 sectors deep scanned before getting colonists. Although two Hawking Institutes and a drone printer basically means I go through circuitry faster than I go through food. I was a little confused when I finished scanning and the deep scan all sectors achievement didn't pop, then I remembered the Philosopher's Stones are blocking my scans.
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May 25, 2019 14:21
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You can put the drone fabricator on a higher priority (the three arrow icons) which applies to both colonists and drone priority as well as power/life support.
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May 25, 2019 14:38
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 Game owns. I ran out of money and resources as I was getting my first rare metal factory up, but got it making money at the last possible minute and now it's pretty smooth sailing with two running at full capacity and enough resources to go around (for now). My plateau of wind generators really paid off too, it's powering everything and I still have room to expand. I'm also love the terraforming stuff, it's really cool seeing your green patches expanding over time.
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May 26, 2019 02:54
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Dareon posted:Things I learned: I just found out that Project Phoenix revivees also count as Martianborn. Nice. Though it's probably better for androids anyway since they don't die of old age to begin with.
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May 26, 2019 07:32
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explosivo posted:
That's a really nice landscape, I don't think I've seen so much continuous natural flat space before.
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May 26, 2019 08:26
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Explosivo did some extensive flattening judging by the ground textures. Flattened ground has this kinda greyish texture by default.
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May 26, 2019 08:38
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Explosivo did some extensive flattening judging by the ground textures. Flattened ground has this kinda greyish texture by default. Flattening terrain can be immensely profitable as India or Brazil. Especially when you get the tech that increases the amount of rock you get.
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May 26, 2019 08:44
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so it seems that this game is now... good? I passed at release cause it had a bit of a mixed reception
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May 26, 2019 08:54
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It was a very solid if basic skeleton of a game at launch. Since then the game has added random events in addition to the mysteries, unique units/buildings for each faction, AI partners to trade with (they're offscreen so don't worry about fighting for land) and now the latest update has added a long term goal of terraforming Mars. SO basically they took the skeleton at launch and slapped a whole bunch of meat on it.
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May 26, 2019 08:57
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Yeah I think the base game even at launch was good for fans of the city / base / minor survival elements building genre, and it's really good now. I've been kinda surprised at how mixed the reception was / is, but I think it's because it's appeal is less mass-market friendly than your typical builder game. If you're very into them, it's great, if you're not, it's just good after including the recent DLC. It's more of an actual game, with pass / fail states and gamey mechanisms, more like Banished, than a more freeform bonsai thing like Cities Skylines.
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May 26, 2019 09:23
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One thing that's absolutely great is the spectrum of difficulty, which is something I often find lacking in city builders. Here you can go anywhere between chill bonsai building game and getting constantly slammed with problems so you have to build frugally around disaster prep and emergency protocols with multiple redundancies. It owns, especially coming from the creators of Tropico which was always ruined by being absurdly easy.
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May 26, 2019 09:53
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Also it makes perfect sense because you're trying to colonize a planet that is not at all accommodating to life, and thus really need to put real work on life support.
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May 26, 2019 10:02
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metasynthetic posted:Yeah I think the base game even at launch was good for fans of the city / base / minor survival elements building genre, and it's really good now. I've been kinda surprised at how mixed the reception was / is, but I think it's because it's appeal is less mass-market friendly than your typical builder game. If you're very into them, it's great, if you're not, it's just good after including the recent DLC. It's more of an actual game, with pass / fail states and gamey mechanisms, more like Banished, than a more freeform bonsai thing like Cities Skylines. Eh, I felt it was a bit dry. As I said: a very solid skeleton to be built on. The awesome thing is they're apparently not done. Which is great because the game could always use more sponsors, more building skins and such. Or a randomize all button the radio. But yeah, I'd even be up for sequels of this game for the moon or the moons of Jupiter or something. Also I just discovered something: the unique solar arrays for Space Y are entirely unaffected by thickening atmosphere.
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May 26, 2019 10:14
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One QOL thing I'd love is being able to save some kind of presets/macros/whatever for valves, switches and turning buildings on and off. Designing disaster-proof systems and planning ahead to emerge unscathed from them is fun, but in practice once you have a decently sized colony it's kind of a pain to go clicking a bunch of switches by hand when you get a disaster warning. And then invariably spring leaks or have shortages because of course I forgot one or two  It would be great (and feel cool as heck to boot) to be able to set up a dust storm setting, a cold wave setting etc while waiting for stuff to happen, and then just press one button when the time comes to watch the colony go into hunker down mode.
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May 26, 2019 11:08
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Welp, apparently in the load of Refugees I took in, I snagged an Idiot. Who went Rebel...and when that happens you get a special event where the idiot rebel's sabotage goes...well someone certainly died. Let's leave it at that.  Also, woo, got blue skies/no more dust storms! the entire lighting of the map changes when you reach that point which is cool. Though the atmosphere loss at that point is intense enough that two gas plants just can't keep up without any magnetic plants.
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May 26, 2019 13:16
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Something that annoys me is that flattening ground often doesn't actually flatten it and won't let me build on it.
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May 26, 2019 13:42
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I'm only just getting to play with the new features, and I noticed that - figured I'd just not gotten good coverage on the flatten.
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May 26, 2019 13:51
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Tbh I haven't had to do that much flattening, I obviously did on the left there to take advantage of a 3x research spot but other than that the biggest landscaping project was a ramp up the opposite side of that plateau. I really did get most of that from the beginning.
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May 26, 2019 15:28
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Piell posted:Something that annoys me is that flattening ground often doesn't actually flatten it and won't let me build on it. you can flatten an area from two subtly different heights and so the area where they meet won't be flat as it will have a tiny incline of an inch or whatever i've had the most success when i flatten entire areas all from the same starting point of where you place your initial zone
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May 26, 2019 17:22
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Honestly I’m not sure what more I’d ask for at this point, beyond “more of what we already got” (more mysteries, more radio stations, more building skins). Zoological gardens? Monorails? Exploiting Phobos and Deimos somehow? If there are more expansions to come then that’s great, but with terraforming, landscaping and animals most of my wish list has been fulfilled. Birds and fish, maybe.
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May 26, 2019 19:16
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I'd love some monorails/transit tubes for truly huge clusters. Basically let it be passages with no distance limit.
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May 26, 2019 19:18
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Mechanical Ape posted:Honestly I’m not sure what more I’d ask for at this point, beyond “more of what we already got” (more mysteries, more radio stations, more building skins). Zoological gardens? Monorails? Exploiting Phobos and Deimos somehow? *bangs knife and fork on table* The ability to create colonies that have mutual regional economic impacts like Simcity 4. Especially if it came with a larger late-game mystery/event chain to test your group of colonies. The game's already got a trancelike hold on my brainstem, if that got implemented it'd require an FDA warning straight up.
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May 26, 2019 19:36
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luxury handset posted:you can flatten an area from two subtly different heights and so the area where they meet won't be flat as it will have a tiny incline of an inch or whatever This is my method and it's pretty good, I used it to flatten the area between the launch pads and the plateau here:  If you do get the invisble flatten mismatch, you can usually just place down another minimum sized flatten command in the area, and it will instantly complete without drones and fix the problem. You might have to do it a few times, moving it around, before you flatten out the invisible bump.
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May 26, 2019 20:53
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Now that is a hell of a wind farm. I can't imagine getting things THAT big without a mohole to provide a constant stream of resources. Every other mine eventually runs out.
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May 26, 2019 21:07
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I wish I could just start dumping water into terrain features instead of purpose-digging lakes. I've got this cool set of canyons near my base that would make a really neat lake.
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May 26, 2019 21:25
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Dareon posted:I wish I could just start dumping water into terrain features instead of purpose-digging lakes. I've got this cool set of canyons near my base that would make a really neat lake.
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May 26, 2019 22:30
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Speedball posted:Now that is a hell of a wind farm. I can't imagine getting things THAT big without a mohole to provide a constant stream of resources. Every other mine eventually runs out. I run for the artificial sun usually if I can, with large panels around it you can get about 1500 power with full upgrades. That plus your initial power infrastructure means you are basically set power wise unless you go massive whole hog on teraforming plants
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May 26, 2019 23:12
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Chaos theory wasn't nice to me as far as power goes, no breakthroughs for it at all and most of the better options were lateish. I did get tribos kinda early though so I invested in them fast. I was playing with the max storms rule so wind was the way to go.
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May 26, 2019 23:30
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Just after making my last "everything's great" post I got a warning about my food stocks being dangerously low. I hadn't really paid any attention to food because I had so much stored from all the passenger rockets and uh I'm kinda boned. Like 6 domes and double digits food at this point, I basically have no time to get farms going so this may be the end for me!
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May 26, 2019 23:41
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Supply pods travel faster than rockets from earth. 25 tons of food each pod isn't too bad. Assuming ofc you can afford the 100K+food costs. Colonists eat 0.2 food per day (double for gluttons or starving people) so basically 1 food will feed 5 people a Sol or one person for 5 Sols. So if you got 100 food and 50 colonists, you've got 10 sols worth of food.
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May 26, 2019 23:47
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UCS Hellmaker posted:I run for the artificial sun usually if I can, with large panels around it goddammit how have i not thought to do this. and don't say i'm extremely simple and basic and brute force dumb solutions to every problem in this game because i know that already. I'm having a ton of fun in my Brazillian Doctor game but haven't really touched terraforming yet beyond a few forestation plants putting out lichen just to give the comfort farms something to do--there's just too much else that needs to be done! It's only sol 81 still I suppose, and when I pivot to terraforming it's gonna be a HEAVY pivot with 5k research per sol, but I have no idea how people are rushing terraforming progress before sol 100. metasynthetic posted:Chaos theory wasn't nice to me as far as power goes, no breakthroughs for it at all and most of the better options were lateish. I did get tribos kinda early though so I invested in them fast. I was playing with the max storms rule so wind was the way to go. Chaos theory is insanely fun but that's one of the necessary downsides to it, I suppose. For every 3k research moisture vaporator tech, there's apartments costing 25,000 and the psionic dream breakthrough costing 1,000 (hey cool, that'll be real useful when i have a hundred power and 300 electronics to spare lol)
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May 26, 2019 23:48
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Mechanical Ape posted:Honestly I’m not sure what more I’d ask for at this point, beyond “more of what we already got” (more mysteries, more radio stations, more building skins). Zoological gardens? Monorails? Exploiting Phobos and Deimos somehow? I'd love for colonists to have more depth, maybe not full family trees but at least parents and grandparents. Also some policies to govern the colony would be nice, ala force arrest/banish. I'd also like some synergy breakthroughs that are automatically awarded if the prereqs are researched. I.e. positronic brain and Phoenix project give an Immortal Machine breakthrough that gives you the ability to turn existing colonists into immortal biorobots, or factory automation and extractor AI let you upgrade extractors to directly produce machine tools or electronics directly
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May 27, 2019 00:14
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Heard this game is very shallow c/d?
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May 27, 2019 00:53
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Arglebargle III posted:Heard this game is very shallow c/d? Initially c, but as of this dlc a definite d. It still kinda lacks an ultimate point to building all your stuff once you've researched everything and totally terraformed mars, but getting there is enjoyable enough as a citybuilder that I've done it half a dozen times pre-Green Planet and will probably do it another half dozen times going forward until the next expansion comes out. I would describe the game currently as an extremely prosaic (read: you cannot be evil) Tropico 3, that scales its agent simulations 50x harder than Tropico 3 ever did.
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May 27, 2019 01:11
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Willie Tomg posted:I'm having a ton of fun in my Brazillian Doctor game but haven't really touched terraforming yet beyond a few forestation plants putting out lichen just to give the comfort farms something to do--there's just too much else that needs to be done! It's only sol 81 still I suppose, and when I pivot to terraforming it's gonna be a HEAVY pivot with 5k research per sol, but I have no idea how people are rushing terraforming progress before sol 100. I'm running with a Geo Engineer commander and that goes decently. Just plop your ploppables and let them go, GHG plants are very fuel-efficient. Mostly it's a side job as you have research or materials available. Barring the ancient terraforming device there doesn't seem to be much in the way of rapid progress.
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May 27, 2019 01:21
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Special Projects are how you advance terraforming rapidly, though you have to research most of them mid-to-late game. Ice asteroids are a good jumping off point since you only need to do that a few times to get enough water for plants to proliferate, and of course you can nuke the polar ice caps (be careful with this one, I caused a dust storm, haha). Atmosphere-makers actually work pretty quick by default, their limitation is that the more atmosphere you have, the more gets stripped off by solar wind so you need more magnetosphere generators or an orbital solar shade. You can either ignore terraforming entirely until the late game or go easy on it as a process throughout the game, which is how I do it, since you get those rolling benefits along the way like squeezing out more water from vaporators. Also if you spread a lot of lichen around early (followed by grass) it makes it that much easier for trees to gain purchase later on and that becomes a powerful seed factory. Grass will spread on its own (slowly) so if it can get a foothold on Mars the sooner, the better. Mars doesn't have a lot of renewable resources by default, which is probably why all those wonders that make various resources from almost nothing are included in the regular tech tree instead of in Breakthroughs; you pretty much NEED a mohole or an artificial sun or both to keep up with the need for a growing colony's maintenance. Speedball fucked around with this message at 01:56 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 27, 2019 01:52
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It'd actually be pretty nice if they set up the long game a little better, so that deposits last longer or just decay in output a little bit. You could do something like a surface deposit is grade high which nets 12 metals per sol but degrades to 8, then 4, then 2. Researching deep metal extraction can bump them back up for a while but eventually they'll bump back down again, this way you always have a trickle and you can plan around it with your infrastucture instead of a deposit, and potentially an entire area of your base, becoming unsustainable because the only reason it existed was the rare metals deposit. I'd also like it if the early terraforming parts relied more on earth imports, at least for the early stages. Seeds work really well and eventually become sustainable because Mars based plants start producing their own seeds. But the heaters just run off fuel infinitely and fall off after 25%, at which point liquid water becomes possible. If instead heating the planet required solid investments from earth and plants weren't even possible until liquid water, you'd be able to design a more robust economy inside the game itself. Edit: In fact something I'd like is a more story and event based system for terraforming. Simply disallowing the player from constructing the early terraforming buildings entirely and make them a pre-fabricated unit you have to purchase from earth, or earn from your sponsor by hitting certain milestones. On sol 10 your sponsor might give you a heater and tell you to run it until Mars is heated to 10%, running it requires some maintenance imports from earth and a few specialists (scientists) to keep running. When you hit this goal you'll be given a new objective and more tools to accomplish it, with some variety based on sponsor. Demiurge4 fucked around with this message at 02:07 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 27, 2019 02:01
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Arglebargle III posted:Heard this game is very shallow c/d? Actually y'know what see for yourself as I dig my 200-ish populated colony into relevance here. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 08:15 on May 27, 2019 |
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May 27, 2019 02:09
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Idk if this is common knowledge or not but if you draw an area over a scorched part of the landscape from a ship with the "change surface" tool, it removes the scorch mark immediately and you can just dismantle the area you drew. It's pretty handy!
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May 27, 2019 04:13
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I think (?) you can do the same by plopping a dome, then cancelling it.
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May 27, 2019 06:01
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