Enjoying this. Definitely dig the multi-layered approach, although honestly it seems like im either in the city view or solar system view and not often in the ship view.
The hull degradation mechanic seems a little on the harsh side currently. I dont know if there are future technologies that reduce this burden though.
Enjoying this. Definitely dig the multi-layered approach, although honestly it seems like im either in the city view or solar system view and not often in the ship view.
The hull degradation mechanic seems a little on the harsh side currently. I dont know if there are future technologies that reduce this burden though.
Build a second EVA airlock in the second sector. The the problem with this balancing the alloy cost, but it does get your hull repaired quickly.
This is a game of a great many balances I'm finding, it really does feel like it needs a balance pass or two
One of the things I both enjoy and dislike is a lot of the hidden knowledge components. Four big ones I’ve found so far are:
- Multiple Sectors increases your hull degradation rate so in theory you should maximize your first sector until you absolutely HAVE to expand
- You get a global happiness penalty for staying in a solar system for too long (I think it’s 100-120 cycles. This basically means you can get totally screwed in Chapter 1 with a bad base layout, too many open sectors, and an unhappy workforce with no way to raise it up
- Having 250 cryopods unopened makes everyone unhappy but then do you just open a tonne of them and deal with the population explosion and food crunch or live with the unhappiness?
- Several tier 2 technologies are dependent on having the policies Center unlocked. This means you can essentially get stuck with no science and a bunch of useless techs and buildings because you don’t have the appropriate policies in place (waste management)
I super super enjoy the vibes and gameplay to the point where having all the above knowledge I restarted from the Prologue and am moving forwards with a fully optimized ship layout. Feels much better. Also very nice that you can just restart a chapter. So I plan on making a save at the beginning of Chapter 2, playing through until I reach the “I’m screwed” point and then rewinding back with all my new knowledge.
Yes I agree wit this - the constant "you've got to balance everything" drain brings the game down. When you expand for example, you pretty much have to build a new EVA airlock to deal with the hull degradation. Which means you need more crew in that sector. Which means you have to house and feed them. Plus repairing the hull means more drain on alloys - which means you need yet more people to run a second steel mill. which means you need yet more people and more food and more housing. And stockpiles. And so on and so forth. There are so many feedback loops to deal with, and if even one of them gets out of line then the whole things tumbles like a pack of cards. Right now I have a real food crisis going on but I've only just been able to get to a point where I can research better food production options.
It is hard but it also feels like a lot of the game design choices exacerbate this. There's just no time to create enough slack in the system to be able to replace obsolete buildings, or properly set up and design a sector that you are clearly supposed to be specialising - something I still haven't managed to do because every sector clearly needs housing, stockpiles and food production to a level that I don't think the developers have fully appreciated.
However I am having a lot of fun with it - I wouldn't say I'm not. It's definitely a game of "Oh, I see where I went wrong a 100 cycles back, I should probably restart and do it again"
The resource transfer system is also hidious. Just let me tell the game how much I want to be in each sector rather than some weird transfer demand with minimum and maximum amounts system. I need those 2 electronics in sector 2, just send them!
The ability to move buildings would be a godsend. Space building that have to go against the wall, I understand, but there is a band of red near the center of each sector against the wall that you cannot build on, which I don't understand the why of.
I did build a second airlock and yeah my hull degradation issues went away.
I also just hit the Dead planet sickness issue Staygold mentioned as I was trying to clean up the second "section" (trying to avoid spoilers) of resources. I had to leave quite a bit behind.
I do think some balancing passes will help quite a bit here. Or maybe some difficulty levels. I absolutely love the vibe, and the aesthetic of the game. But I agree with the impressions that there is a LOT of plate spinning going on, and if things get too out of whack.....bye bye humanity.
You get a 100% refund on materials when you tear down a building. You just lose the build time. I didn’t do this on my first try but I think I should be more aggressive about redesigning neighborhoods.
You get a 100% refund on materials when you tear down a building. You just lose the build time. I didn’t do this on my first try but I think I should be more aggressive about redesigning neighborhoods.
The problem I have there is that I usually need a surpluss of whatever that building provides before I can tear things down and rebuild.
Some good tips here on the Ixion Subreddit:
Upgrades exist
For some reason, I didn't realize you could upgrade existing tech. I think I unlocked some upgrade after a planet survey and just assumed that was the only way to unlock upgrades. Take a look at any already researched option in the tech lab to see upgrades and what is needed to unlock them. Some of these are absolutely essential, like the Lab upgrade that gets you more science, and stability building upgrades. Be careful about grabbing lots of upgrades early, as you probably want to get to tier 3 first.
2. You can unassign ships in your fleet as needed without penalty.
If your science ship has nothing left to do, you can press the little eject button on the space dock to unassign it, and then build a cargo ship or miner as required. That science ship will go somewhere... but you can reassign it at any point. I also use this to remove miners when they have nothing left to mine.
3. You can right click priority icons to subtract the priority.
Yeah. I kept clicking 3 times to cancel it.
4. Use partially filled storage bays to move stuff around
For when you inevitably have to rebuild areas of the sector. As you know, buildings won't deconstruct if there is something left in it. I usually use my food storage bays which have, say 50 food. Some pesky building with 10 alloy left to collect won't go away, so just reassign the food bay to alloy. The food stays in there, but the workers will go collect those 10 alloys and put it alongside the food. Reassign the bay to food, and workers will (hopefully) pull the alloys out of there when you use them again.
5. Batteries don't need to be connected to a road (after they are built)
Great for filling in dead spots in your floor plan. Build a road to the construction site and build the battery, but you can delete the road and fill it all in with batteries and they function just fine.
6. Recycling specialized sectors are super op
Recycling buildings have double duty when specializing, namely the mushroom wall is food, and the waste reclaimer thing is industry. When using both these buildings in your recycling specialized sector, you will get all 3 bonuses. You might even pull off food/recycling level 2 in one sector, though that will need some dedicated food buildings as well. Food spec increases waste which helps your recycling. Industry spec gives battery duration which is always good.
7. Dead Earth Disease is weak af
Yeah, its fairly easy to negate the -2 from staying in a system too long. Fill up your ship with tons of goodies before moving on to the next.
8. The only thing that allows you to support more people is your tech level.
Before you get tons and tons of people aboard, consider what part of your infrastructure needs to buff up. Hint: its probably food. Those insect farms will only get you so far, and the first water-based farms will put strain on your space mining. Look at the list of tech upgrades for food buildings and center your population expansion around certain tech milestones. Don't be afraid to reduce those rations in especially populated sectors.
I'm getting better at this but really needing to resist the temptation to start again knowing what I know now. There are some really harsh calls in the game at times, and decision that have much more wide ranging consequence than they appear at first. I recommend save scumming to be honest - if you're making what looks like a big decision when your science ship is investigating something, save first! Otherwise there can be a hell of a lot of back tracking.......
Also the fleet thing - if you unassign a ship, you can build another to take it place. It doesn't have to be the same class as the one you unassign. This is really useful if you've run out of things to mine, but still need to transport stuff. Just build another cargo ship.
In Chapter 2 you can start researching upgrades - to be fair you can do this in chapter 1 I think, but you probably won’t have enough science.
One of these is to upgrade the tech factory to generate 3 science per cycle rather than just 1. That makes a huge difference. There are several occasions in chapter 2 where you’ll be effectively trading other resources for science, unlocking this early is likely to make some of those decisions easier to make. I wish I’d seen that much earlier than I did
Second, getting crops farms up as soon as you can makes an enormous difference. 1 farm with 9 fields generates 100 food every 8 cycles. That enough food for 1000 people. I have 600 right and you need the surplus.
has made me walk away for a while because f*ck that.
Over all I have been enjoying it, but I do seem to be constantly hamstrung by the drip feed of resourse a lot of time - I am constantly looking for iron to feed the insatiable demand for Alloys. That doesn't leave a lot of free slots for everything else.
I think the game expects you have at a EVA and a Shuttle port in each sector to keep things ticking over, it's kinda hard to tell. the Problem is it need so much in alloy all the damn time you can't keep up.
It's beginning to get a little frustrating. Either you know the game and can go into each chapter perfectly prepared, or you're basically going to be screwed the entire time and and game will constantly punish you.
I've picked this up again since I've got through the various gaming clubs games and I've been enjoying myself again. You really need to keep on top of the various resource streams and have things in place before you expand (generally to a new Sector or need to bring in much more population) so it really does need a lot of forward planning to do well.
I've also taken a long hard look at some sector planning guides, and a couple of "plan your sector" spreadsheets as well, which as also really helped. You still need to be prepared to change your layouts as new buildings and upgrades come online, as well as plan around clearing out new sectors as you open them up.
I just wish the game would stop trying to hurry you along at times. Yes, there is a penalty for dawdling, but it's a relatively small one and goes once you proceed to the new Chapter. It's a game that really rewards planning out your steps and taking your time.
I'
I just wish the game would stop trying to hurry you along at times. Yes, there is a penalty for dawdling, but it's a relatively small one and goes once you proceed to the new Chapter. It's a game that really rewards planning out your steps and taking your time.
I absolutely got hooked on this game at the beginning of January. It really tries to create a sense of urgency that doesn't really exist (well, in the later chapters it becomes more real). You really need to be smart about spending the science points and not expanding too quickly. I did have save scum once due not understanding that chapter 4 mechanic. Although, I have to save it got pretty exciting when
Got back into Chapter 3, managed to work out how the
Spoiler:
Space Weather
works and how to work around it, then I've just been bogged down by trying to make sure that all the necessary resources to keep everyone alive and happy are available to all my sectors.
I have to say that super specialising your sectors feels a little pointless. I am generating a massive surplus of food, but one of my sectors is regularly starving because I can't get it there quick enough? I either have to micromanage resource distribution (which turns into permanent "Whack a mole" changing which sector get priority at which moment so nobody else loses out, or needing to demolish food production buildings to get drone bays up so that they can distribute food quicker.
I love the ascetics of the game, I love how the storyline and events unfold, but there is far too much micro management and non sensical design choices - the game wants you to move on as fast as possible, but at the same time puts so many balancing acts in the way it's almost impossible to get an even keel. I researched all the mission critical research and was ready to go before I realised I couldn't because I hadn't woken the extra 1000 colonists that, before this part of the game, was always optional. I had nowhere near enough food production to support that, would have needed to open another sector that i wouldn't have been able to power or man to make that viable. Felt a bit stuck.
It does feel that unless you play it with 100% efficiency, you'll get punished. add in the frequency of accidents and such (and the bloody fires later on) it becomes too much whack-a-moling to be much fun.
The next few patches are supposed to address balance and difficulty. I have kind of shelved this for now until they come out. I totally dig the aesthetic, but right now it does feel a little punishing if you make the slightest mistake.
And as a completionist, I dont like being prodded to rush out of a system until every single scrap has been gathered. I feel like if you were the last of Humanity, that would be imperative.
The next few patches are supposed to address balance and difficulty. I have kind of shelved this for now until they come out. I totally dig the aesthetic, but right now it does feel a little punishing if you make the slightest mistake.
And as a completionist, I dont like being prodded to rush out of a system until every single scrap has been gathered. I feel like if you were the last of Humanity, that would be imperative.
Yes. I've clearly got myself into a slow slow death spiral in Chapter 3 - I can't generate enough food fast enough to keep my population sector fed, and the feed back loop of unhappiness, strikes, inhabitant death malus means I can't keep them happy and they eventually lynch me.
I was roughly following a layout guide but it feels - again - that unless everything is 100% efficient all the time you get punished for it. I get that that's the game - it would be a bit dull otherwise! - but I've spent about 20 hours now trying to fix the problems and it's not happening. I just can't get stuff done quick enough and I'm back in that death spiral. I either run out of energy to keep everything running, or space without opening another sector that I can't really support. I think some of my research choices were suboptimal as well.
I'll try again from scratch when they've balanced it up a bit I think, but for now I need to put it back on the backburner for sake of my own sanity I think.
Yes. I've clearly got myself into a slow slow death spiral in Chapter 3 - I can't generate enough food fast enough to keep my population sector fed, and the feed back loop of unhappiness, strikes, inhabitant death malus means I can't keep them happy and they eventually lynch me.
I can see how that could happen. I didn't specialize sectors at all. Didn't realize that was even a thing until certain upgrades had it as a prerequisite. In the end, I only opened 5 of the sectors by the last system. 2 were producing food, 1 for alloys. Also I doubled up on EVA ports in some sectors and none in the others. I did have at least one shuttle bay in each sector otherwise it was impossible to manage the storage situation.
My biggest problem was when I did get enough food going I could t distribute it quick enough. I needed a drone bay I think but having all the food in one area that needs a lot of water means you either need a lot of fusion stations for water, or that waste water generator that takes 100 energy to work, and a lot of waste. I just couldn’t keep up.
I’ll probably go back and restart that chapter as I was pretty self sufficient at the end of Chapter 2. Just need to change a few research options I think, but needing enough batteries for that ‘event’ at the start of chapter 3 was a right pain.
So. My death Spiral. I managed to Spiral my way out of it.
One of things this game does very badly is detail the power of some of the tech upgrades. Not the techs themselves, which are easily visible on the Tech tree wheel, but the upgrades to some of those techs. These are absolutely essential to your progress as you expand out to new sectors and massively increase your population, but the game hides them away and links so upgrades to the upgrades of other techs, leaving a spidersweb of research to conduct to get what you want out of the tree. As a concept that's fine, but the way the game displays this information is basically non-existent.
In the event, after going away and reading a lot of them, I realised that you can actually greatly increase the amount of people one unit of food will feed.
Once I'd figured that out, - and conducted the appropriate research - I could at least stop people starving and then hating me. That gave me enough time to get my power supply sorted out, rescue a bunch of colonists I'd affectedly abandoned and get ready to leave the system. Then the fires started. Oh God, the fires. In some sectors I had to tear down buildings to build fire stations, which left my population all over the place, but I got them out and thought I was ready to go.
But no. I can't leave until I've woken another 1000 cyro-pods from the spaceship that was hunting us down to exterminate us. I can't help thinking that's not the smartest idea seeing as there are several thousand more of them than what we originally started out with, but whatever. I'm mostly annoyed that despite the game giving you multiple "wake this many cyro-pods this chapter" goals, until this map they weren't critical and could be safely ignored (and rightly to be honest, that many colonists earlier in game I would never had had a chance to feed them all)
So I'm now spending a good hour or more in game waiting for all those cryopods to be woken up. It takes a certain amount of in game time to do this. It has left me time to polish up my space station though, and I'm now largely self sufficient (I'm swimming in food) and ready for the next Chapter.
I think the reason why I'm - well, moaning so much really - is that I really like this game, but it has some awful bad design choices in it that actively hinder the enjoyment of playing it. I am enjoying it, honest - but my word at times it really boils your piss.
But no. I can't leave until I've woken another 1000 cyro-pods from the spaceship that was hunting us down to exterminate us. I can't help thinking that's not the smartest idea seeing as there are several thousand more of them than what we originally started out with, but whatever. I'm mostly annoyed that despite the game giving you multiple "wake this many cyro-pods this chapter" goals, until this map they weren't critical and could be safely ignored (and rightly to be honest, that many colonists earlier in game I would never had had a chance to feed them all)
I feel you here. I can't remember which chapter it was, but I thought I was set and then I couldn't move on until I opened up 2000 cryopods. That's alot pods! I was basically sitting around opening pods for a couple hours (the music in the game makes this tolerable, it really leans into the vibe of the game). I will also say after the first couple of chapters, I started to delay completing what looked to me like the "main-story" exploration parts in case I ran into any surprises. That saved me in at least one system where the game tries to ramp up the pressure. I also didn't have any qualms about destroying existing buildings, since you get all the materials back it's a no lose proposition.
One thing I did in the later chapters was build alot of science crafts so I could explore more quickly and then replace them with miners/transport ships.
Well, after all that time spent in Chapter 3 (mostly around how long it takes to wake up all those damn Cryopods) I've just rolled credits on this having spent less time in Chapters 4 & 5 than I did in 3 combined.
Over all I really quite enjoyed it. Not sure enough to play it again any time soon, but it has a nice story and mostly keeps those story beats running well through the course of the game. The sound track, though brief, really enhanced the overall feel of the game as well and was very good indeed.
It was a little too micromanagement heavy for me I think (yes, I know it's a management game!), mostly around the controls it gives you to manage some of plates you need to keep spinning. Resource / logistics of their distribution across the sectors being a particular bugbear towards the end of the game. Still, apart from the spiral I got myself into for Chapter 3 I never quite felt like I was out of control in any of the other chapters. Just take your time really and you should be able to sort everything out.
Decided this could probably tide me over til Kerbal Space Program 2's Early Access launches next week. So far its pretty good. Enjoying the story quite a bit.
I didnt expect this game to have a boss fight, but its a clever setup and a fun event. I failed miserably on the first go but did a little prep and the colony barely registered the attack the 2nd time.
I picked this up cheap and I'm really enjoying it. The game makes it hard to move buildings around, so I've gone deep into looking at optimal layouts, though some seem to have mistakes like assuming buildings connect to roads on the other side and the like. It does seem to punish you for not knowing ahead of time what's coming.
A mechanics question - so much seems to be sector-centric but I'm seeing "population-specialised sectors" being a thing - do pops not need to reside in the same sector they work in? The guide I'm using says that sectors 6, 1 and 2 should be spaaace, industry and food, and the rest should be population sectors.
Enjoying this. Definitely dig the multi-layered approach, although honestly it seems like im either in the city view or solar system view and not often in the ship view.
The hull degradation mechanic seems a little on the harsh side currently. I dont know if there are future technologies that reduce this burden though.
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds...
Build a second EVA airlock in the second sector. The the problem with this balancing the alloy cost, but it does get your hull repaired quickly.
This is a game of a great many balances I'm finding, it really does feel like it needs a balance pass or two
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
One of the things I both enjoy and dislike is a lot of the hidden knowledge components. Four big ones I’ve found so far are:
- Multiple Sectors increases your hull degradation rate so in theory you should maximize your first sector until you absolutely HAVE to expand
- You get a global happiness penalty for staying in a solar system for too long (I think it’s 100-120 cycles. This basically means you can get totally screwed in Chapter 1 with a bad base layout, too many open sectors, and an unhappy workforce with no way to raise it up
- Having 250 cryopods unopened makes everyone unhappy but then do you just open a tonne of them and deal with the population explosion and food crunch or live with the unhappiness?
- Several tier 2 technologies are dependent on having the policies Center unlocked. This means you can essentially get stuck with no science and a bunch of useless techs and buildings because you don’t have the appropriate policies in place (waste management)
I super super enjoy the vibes and gameplay to the point where having all the above knowledge I restarted from the Prologue and am moving forwards with a fully optimized ship layout. Feels much better. Also very nice that you can just restart a chapter. So I plan on making a save at the beginning of Chapter 2, playing through until I reach the “I’m screwed” point and then rewinding back with all my new knowledge.
"What Eleima says is the final word on it and not even God could undo it"
- ClockworkHouse
Yes I agree wit this - the constant "you've got to balance everything" drain brings the game down. When you expand for example, you pretty much have to build a new EVA airlock to deal with the hull degradation. Which means you need more crew in that sector. Which means you have to house and feed them. Plus repairing the hull means more drain on alloys - which means you need yet more people to run a second steel mill. which means you need yet more people and more food and more housing. And stockpiles. And so on and so forth. There are so many feedback loops to deal with, and if even one of them gets out of line then the whole things tumbles like a pack of cards. Right now I have a real food crisis going on but I've only just been able to get to a point where I can research better food production options.
It is hard but it also feels like a lot of the game design choices exacerbate this. There's just no time to create enough slack in the system to be able to replace obsolete buildings, or properly set up and design a sector that you are clearly supposed to be specialising - something I still haven't managed to do because every sector clearly needs housing, stockpiles and food production to a level that I don't think the developers have fully appreciated.
However I am having a lot of fun with it - I wouldn't say I'm not. It's definitely a game of "Oh, I see where I went wrong a 100 cycles back, I should probably restart and do it again"
The resource transfer system is also hidious. Just let me tell the game how much I want to be in each sector rather than some weird transfer demand with minimum and maximum amounts system. I need those 2 electronics in sector 2, just send them!
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
The ability to move buildings would be a godsend. Space building that have to go against the wall, I understand, but there is a band of red near the center of each sector against the wall that you cannot build on, which I don't understand the why of.
I did build a second airlock and yeah my hull degradation issues went away.
I also just hit the Dead planet sickness issue Staygold mentioned as I was trying to clean up the second "section" (trying to avoid spoilers) of resources. I had to leave quite a bit behind.
I do think some balancing passes will help quite a bit here. Or maybe some difficulty levels. I absolutely love the vibe, and the aesthetic of the game. But I agree with the impressions that there is a LOT of plate spinning going on, and if things get too out of whack.....bye bye humanity.
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds...
You get a 100% refund on materials when you tear down a building. You just lose the build time. I didn’t do this on my first try but I think I should be more aggressive about redesigning neighborhoods.
The problem I have there is that I usually need a surpluss of whatever that building provides before I can tear things down and rebuild.
Some good tips here on the Ixion Subreddit:
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
Thanks for posting that.
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds...
I'm getting better at this but really needing to resist the temptation to start again knowing what I know now. There are some really harsh calls in the game at times, and decision that have much more wide ranging consequence than they appear at first. I recommend save scumming to be honest - if you're making what looks like a big decision when your science ship is investigating something, save first! Otherwise there can be a hell of a lot of back tracking.......
Also the fleet thing - if you unassign a ship, you can build another to take it place. It doesn't have to be the same class as the one you unassign. This is really useful if you've run out of things to mine, but still need to transport stuff. Just build another cargo ship.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
Couple of things I figured out last night:
In Chapter 2 you can start researching upgrades - to be fair you can do this in chapter 1 I think, but you probably won’t have enough science.
One of these is to upgrade the tech factory to generate 3 science per cycle rather than just 1. That makes a huge difference. There are several occasions in chapter 2 where you’ll be effectively trading other resources for science, unlocking this early is likely to make some of those decisions easier to make. I wish I’d seen that much earlier than I did
Second, getting crops farms up as soon as you can makes an enormous difference. 1 farm with 9 fields generates 100 food every 8 cycles. That enough food for 1000 people. I have 600 right and you need the surplus.
Just remember you need to melt ice first!
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
Yeah I was trying for that tech factory upgrade, and thinking about farms after that, when I ran out of incoming science in my first, doomed attempt.
*Sigh*
Got to chapter 4 and a bullsh*t in-game mechanic
has made me walk away for a while because f*ck that.
Over all I have been enjoying it, but I do seem to be constantly hamstrung by the drip feed of resourse a lot of time - I am constantly looking for iron to feed the insatiable demand for Alloys. That doesn't leave a lot of free slots for everything else.
I think the game expects you have at a EVA and a Shuttle port in each sector to keep things ticking over, it's kinda hard to tell. the Problem is it need so much in alloy all the damn time you can't keep up.
It's beginning to get a little frustrating. Either you know the game and can go into each chapter perfectly prepared, or you're basically going to be screwed the entire time and and game will constantly punish you.
One for a balance pass at the moment.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
I've picked this up again since I've got through the various gaming clubs games and I've been enjoying myself again. You really need to keep on top of the various resource streams and have things in place before you expand (generally to a new Sector or need to bring in much more population) so it really does need a lot of forward planning to do well.
I've also taken a long hard look at some sector planning guides, and a couple of "plan your sector" spreadsheets as well, which as also really helped. You still need to be prepared to change your layouts as new buildings and upgrades come online, as well as plan around clearing out new sectors as you open them up.
I just wish the game would stop trying to hurry you along at times. Yes, there is a penalty for dawdling, but it's a relatively small one and goes once you proceed to the new Chapter. It's a game that really rewards planning out your steps and taking your time.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
I absolutely got hooked on this game at the beginning of January. It really tries to create a sense of urgency that doesn't really exist (well, in the later chapters it becomes more real). You really need to be smart about spending the science points and not expanding too quickly. I did have save scum once due not understanding that chapter 4 mechanic. Although, I have to save it got pretty exciting when
Steam ID: Forbes
PSN: Forbesx
Epic ID: ForbesX
Got back into Chapter 3, managed to work out how the
works and how to work around it, then I've just been bogged down by trying to make sure that all the necessary resources to keep everyone alive and happy are available to all my sectors.
I have to say that super specialising your sectors feels a little pointless. I am generating a massive surplus of food, but one of my sectors is regularly starving because I can't get it there quick enough? I either have to micromanage resource distribution (which turns into permanent "Whack a mole" changing which sector get priority at which moment so nobody else loses out, or needing to demolish food production buildings to get drone bays up so that they can distribute food quicker.
I love the ascetics of the game, I love how the storyline and events unfold, but there is far too much micro management and non sensical design choices - the game wants you to move on as fast as possible, but at the same time puts so many balancing acts in the way it's almost impossible to get an even keel. I researched all the mission critical research and was ready to go before I realised I couldn't because I hadn't woken the extra 1000 colonists that, before this part of the game, was always optional. I had nowhere near enough food production to support that, would have needed to open another sector that i wouldn't have been able to power or man to make that viable. Felt a bit stuck.
It does feel that unless you play it with 100% efficiency, you'll get punished. add in the frequency of accidents and such (and the bloody fires later on) it becomes too much whack-a-moling to be much fun.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
The next few patches are supposed to address balance and difficulty. I have kind of shelved this for now until they come out. I totally dig the aesthetic, but right now it does feel a little punishing if you make the slightest mistake.
And as a completionist, I dont like being prodded to rush out of a system until every single scrap has been gathered. I feel like if you were the last of Humanity, that would be imperative.
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds...
Yes. I've clearly got myself into a slow slow death spiral in Chapter 3 - I can't generate enough food fast enough to keep my population sector fed, and the feed back loop of unhappiness, strikes, inhabitant death malus means I can't keep them happy and they eventually lynch me.
I was roughly following a layout guide but it feels - again - that unless everything is 100% efficient all the time you get punished for it. I get that that's the game - it would be a bit dull otherwise! - but I've spent about 20 hours now trying to fix the problems and it's not happening. I just can't get stuff done quick enough and I'm back in that death spiral. I either run out of energy to keep everything running, or space without opening another sector that I can't really support. I think some of my research choices were suboptimal as well.
I'll try again from scratch when they've balanced it up a bit I think, but for now I need to put it back on the backburner for sake of my own sanity I think.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
I can see how that could happen. I didn't specialize sectors at all. Didn't realize that was even a thing until certain upgrades had it as a prerequisite. In the end, I only opened 5 of the sectors by the last system. 2 were producing food, 1 for alloys. Also I doubled up on EVA ports in some sectors and none in the others. I did have at least one shuttle bay in each sector otherwise it was impossible to manage the storage situation.
Steam ID: Forbes
PSN: Forbesx
Epic ID: ForbesX
My biggest problem was when I did get enough food going I could t distribute it quick enough. I needed a drone bay I think but having all the food in one area that needs a lot of water means you either need a lot of fusion stations for water, or that waste water generator that takes 100 energy to work, and a lot of waste. I just couldn’t keep up.
I’ll probably go back and restart that chapter as I was pretty self sufficient at the end of Chapter 2. Just need to change a few research options I think, but needing enough batteries for that ‘event’ at the start of chapter 3 was a right pain.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
So. My death Spiral. I managed to Spiral my way out of it.
One of things this game does very badly is detail the power of some of the tech upgrades. Not the techs themselves, which are easily visible on the Tech tree wheel, but the upgrades to some of those techs. These are absolutely essential to your progress as you expand out to new sectors and massively increase your population, but the game hides them away and links so upgrades to the upgrades of other techs, leaving a spidersweb of research to conduct to get what you want out of the tree. As a concept that's fine, but the way the game displays this information is basically non-existent.
In the event, after going away and reading a lot of them, I realised that you can actually greatly increase the amount of people one unit of food will feed.
Once I'd figured that out, - and conducted the appropriate research - I could at least stop people starving and then hating me. That gave me enough time to get my power supply sorted out, rescue a bunch of colonists I'd affectedly abandoned and get ready to leave the system. Then the fires started. Oh God, the fires. In some sectors I had to tear down buildings to build fire stations, which left my population all over the place, but I got them out and thought I was ready to go.
But no. I can't leave until I've woken another 1000 cyro-pods from the spaceship that was hunting us down to exterminate us. I can't help thinking that's not the smartest idea seeing as there are several thousand more of them than what we originally started out with, but whatever. I'm mostly annoyed that despite the game giving you multiple "wake this many cyro-pods this chapter" goals, until this map they weren't critical and could be safely ignored (and rightly to be honest, that many colonists earlier in game I would never had had a chance to feed them all)
So I'm now spending a good hour or more in game waiting for all those cryopods to be woken up. It takes a certain amount of in game time to do this. It has left me time to polish up my space station though, and I'm now largely self sufficient (I'm swimming in food) and ready for the next Chapter.
I think the reason why I'm - well, moaning so much really - is that I really like this game, but it has some awful bad design choices in it that actively hinder the enjoyment of playing it. I am enjoying it, honest - but my word at times it really boils your piss.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
I feel you here. I can't remember which chapter it was, but I thought I was set and then I couldn't move on until I opened up 2000 cryopods. That's alot pods! I was basically sitting around opening pods for a couple hours (the music in the game makes this tolerable, it really leans into the vibe of the game). I will also say after the first couple of chapters, I started to delay completing what looked to me like the "main-story" exploration parts in case I ran into any surprises. That saved me in at least one system where the game tries to ramp up the pressure. I also didn't have any qualms about destroying existing buildings, since you get all the materials back it's a no lose proposition.
One thing I did in the later chapters was build alot of science crafts so I could explore more quickly and then replace them with miners/transport ships.
Steam ID: Forbes
PSN: Forbesx
Epic ID: ForbesX
Well, after all that time spent in Chapter 3 (mostly around how long it takes to wake up all those damn Cryopods) I've just rolled credits on this having spent less time in Chapters 4 & 5 than I did in 3 combined.
Over all I really quite enjoyed it. Not sure enough to play it again any time soon, but it has a nice story and mostly keeps those story beats running well through the course of the game. The sound track, though brief, really enhanced the overall feel of the game as well and was very good indeed.
It was a little too micromanagement heavy for me I think (yes, I know it's a management game!), mostly around the controls it gives you to manage some of plates you need to keep spinning. Resource / logistics of their distribution across the sectors being a particular bugbear towards the end of the game. Still, apart from the spiral I got myself into for Chapter 3 I never quite felt like I was out of control in any of the other chapters. Just take your time really and you should be able to sort everything out.
cRPG Club |Strategy Gaming Club
Decided this could probably tide me over til Kerbal Space Program 2's Early Access launches next week. So far its pretty good. Enjoying the story quite a bit.
- Buy and play more Indie games!
I didnt expect this game to have a boss fight, but its a clever setup and a fun event. I failed miserably on the first go but did a little prep and the colony barely registered the attack the 2nd time.
- Buy and play more Indie games!
I picked this up cheap and I'm really enjoying it. The game makes it hard to move buildings around, so I've gone deep into looking at optimal layouts, though some seem to have mistakes like assuming buildings connect to roads on the other side and the like. It does seem to punish you for not knowing ahead of time what's coming.
A mechanics question - so much seems to be sector-centric but I'm seeing "population-specialised sectors" being a thing - do pops not need to reside in the same sector they work in? The guide I'm using says that sectors 6, 1 and 2 should be spaaace, industry and food, and the rest should be population sectors.
BGG GR