Phew, after 60 hours of gametime, my friend and I finally launched a rocket into space.
Bear in mind we entered this having no idea how to play the game, and we agreed not to use any outside sources to learn how to play, so we had to figure everything out from scratch.
This was such an achievement. Felt so good.
Have some screenshots:
Highlights:
1. The entire first 30 hours or so were pure chaos as we tried to defend ourselves from the neverending alien hordes. My friend was teching us up to lasers while I ran around frantically for hours shoring up defenses, reloading guns, and repairing walls.
2. After that came the (never actually solved) power shortage problems. The entire game was spent right on the border of power consumption. No matter how many accumulators we built, solar panels, steam engines, it was never enough. There was one particularly tense few hours where we tried to piece together our nuclear power despite the entire base being ripped to shreds around us due to the complete and total power outage. It was a really vicious one as the extended power outage meant the coal mines stopped working, and since the coal mines weren't working, the steam engines didn't have power. And because we had no power we couldn't mine up any coal to regain it. It was really bad.
We managed to figure out how to run the nuclear reactor at the very last minute as the biters punched through all our walls, turning all the lasers back online (we were stuck for a damn long time until we figured out you needed to attach something to store the steam to get nuclear to work). So for another few hours our entire base was running on a nuclear reactor and two turbines since we had no space or resources to expand it. But at least we were safe. For awhile...
3. When the ores we started with finally started giving out, then came another crisis. Even worse, we ran out of uranium. We hastily threw together another few dozen steam engines as a temporary fix (that we still haven't replaced). Now we had to figure out how to get trains to work and how to get distant ores back home. We built power armour, loaded it up with personal lasers,, flamethrowers, and hopped onto a locomotive with no tracks. Then we placed tracks and plowed forward in our makeshift assault train, carving through gigantic alien nests to built a satellite base. It was glorious, as we fought on and off our train.
4. My friend went to check on our uranium supplies, which we decided to stockpile when we learned from the tech tree that you can essentially get an unlimited supply of them if you have 40 of the good ones. He then accidentally carried them into his inventory and didn't realize or forgot that he did. A few hours after that, he went to go test out his power armour mk2 and ran off into a humongous horde of aliens. He didn't realize you kinda need more than one fusion reactor to power all those shields and he ran out. Then got slaughtered. Then he realized he lost 30 of our good uranium. So we had to launch a rescue mission to try and recover our precious uranium that we spent days refining. Unfortunately, no matter how many aliens we killed, we couldn't find the body and basically our power supply plans were completely wrecked. I still bug him about how he lost all our uranium constantly.