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[PTTG??]

Apparently it's out now.

Also I just got this game a few days ago. Guess I timed it right.

I've been having fun making a self-powering burner array to build up crates of iron plates.

I feel like the main reason for automation is to power research, since it eats so much material. How does one balance the production of red science and green science?

[MagmaMcFry]

How does one balance the production of red science and green science?

Hover over the recipe to see the work required (the stopwatch icon). Red science requires 5 work, green science requires 6 work, so you need 5 red science assemblers for every 6 green science assemblers if you want to produce red and green science in equal amounts. Note that assemblers 1 have a crafting speed of 0.5, which means they do 0.5 work per second.

[lordcooper]

10 red, 12 green, 24 blue, 10 military, 15 production, 15 hightech is the perfect ratio, and produces two packs per second.

5, 6, 12, 5, 8, 8 will suffice if you're okay with 1/sec and/or having plate supply issues (you will in your first attempt).

Leave room for expansion!

[lemon10]

I feel like the main reason for automation is to power research, since it eats so much material. How does one balance the production of red science and green science?

Yeah, research is probably the first area where you need automation, but as you get further in you will find that resource costs go up so much that you want to have basically everything (all circuits, wires, inserters, transport belts, turrets, ammo, walls, ect) automated due to how much time it saves.

That feeling when you turn on rampant AI on a factory that was built without that mod...

Hurm. This sounds like a fun mod. It would actually mean that my standard strategy of having a equal amount of turrets literally everywhere along the wall wouldn't be a huge waste of resources.

[umiman]

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:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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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.

[Mephansteras]

Sounds epic! Been ages since I took a real shot at this game. I should try again.

[umiman]

Sounds epic! Been ages since I took a real shot at this game. I should try again.

It's pretty intense how much time it sucks from you. I honestly felt I was married to my friend on like... the 4th day we were playing together in a row. We were playing at least 10 - 15 hours each day nonstop.

Even though I knew it was a fucking awful idea, we couldn't stop putting hours in.

At least now with the rocket launch I can finally say no more.


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It was very memorable and very compelling though. The intensity of the defense crisis and power crisis are things I'll probably remember for a damn good long time. It's really different from other games where you can just... do the thing and boom, you solved the problem. Here you need to accomplish so many things yourself and do everything without anything handed to you to solve problems. So it's really taxing on the mind as you work out solutions to all these complex problems while in crisis high-stress situations.

In Dwarf Fortress you also have a lot of complex problems to solve, but you don't really have to deal with a neverending horde of enemies that get stronger so it's actually more relaxing I think.

The nuclear part especially felt just like a goddamn bomb defusal. We had no frigging idea how to set it up and were just throwing shit at the reactor to see what works. All the while the base was screaming at us that everything was being destroyed and I could see more and more red encroaching on the borders of the minimap. We literally had no other options. There was no more coal for steam, and the solar panels only provided 20GW. If we didn't get the nuclear to work, we were fucked.

I'm not joking but we had to think "okay, how do nuclear reactors work in real life? They take heat from the nuclear process and use it to boil water to make steam to rotate some turbines." "Alright. we have a reactor, heat pipes, heat exchangers, and turbines." "So we probably need to connect the reactor to the pipes to the exchangers then to turbines." "It's not working". "Oh fuck". "Do it the other way around!". "Not working." "Oh fuck!!!!" "Do we need water? How do we connect water to this?" "There's no water connection!".

It was bloody nutty.

[MrRoboto75]

My last start-to-rocket run in .14 was rather peaceful, all things considered.

[umiman]

My last start-to-rocket run in .14 was rather peaceful, all things considered.

I'm fairly certain my friend upped the enemy spawnrate and aggression in the world gen. He won't tell me, but I never faced such hordes in my games before.

[MrRoboto75]

My last start-to-rocket run in .14 was rather peaceful, all things considered.

I'm fairly certain my friend upped the enemy spawnrate and aggression in the world gen. He won't tell me, but I never faced such hordes in my games before.

I think my run was mostly default settings.  It was .14 so no nuclear stuffs and research was different.  By end game biters came in small groups, and had evolved up to "Big".  I had some areas blocked off with walls, but I mostly relied on a row of gun turrets, which by then were well upgraded by tech.  Directions of attack were very predictable, so defenses really only had to be in certain areas.  The entire main factory had stone or concrete flooring as well as my armor having an exoskeleton, so alerts aren't hard to respond to either.

It'd probably helped that by the time I had the car I make a habit of exploring a good chunk of the map, and by extension a whole lot of biter bases.  Evolution hasn't happened yet, so a basic smg and heavy armor is sufficient, as well as the gun mounted on the car itself.  By endgame I had a tank, but never bothered using the main cannon much, just the machine gun, mk I power armor with one or two shields and a leg upgrade.  SMG was fully or near fully researched, and I made a rocket launcher and research for that just because of big worms.  All of that was just for offense, especially by then as I needed train lines for iron and copper.

I skipped the flamethower, mostly because its silly powerful, and I never bothered with laser turrets really.  I built grenades just to murder trees.  Processing units weren't being made fast enough to bother with most of the power armor stuff either.

[umiman]

Yeah, that's totally different from what happened to us.

For us, we faced hordes of 30+ medium biters and spitters at around the blue research stage. They would come from every side and even if we cleared the camps, they'd resettle nearby within 20 minutes or so anyway... making it kinda pointless. We tried discouraging them from resettling by dropping down belts and walls at old bases, but it didn't really do anything.

We started with 2 guns with armour piercing ammo every few electric poles apart, but it didn't take long before we needed at least 4 everywhere. This was where the insane amount of running around reloading them came about, as we couldn't even hope to build enough automation to reload all those guns, let alone produce the ammo fast enough to begin with.

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We also learned some neat tricks to help fight against unceasing hordes. I'll share some for people interested, though we were noobs so maybe there's better ways:

1. Multiple layers of walls is incredibly important. When starting out, just having two double-walls instead of one buys a lot of time for your turrets to kill things. Later on, when spitters appear, we found that you can build an external wall just slightly further than spitter range but inside turret range. This will smash those pesky spitters into ground alien paste.

Walls are stupid cheap, so it helps to just throw down walls everywhere.

2. Get construction bots ASAP and automate repair packs, turrets, and walls. With a good construction network setup, all the defense headaches will basically go away as the robots repair and replace everything for you. Except ammo.

3. Once you can support it, lasers are hands down the best. Simple, no fuss, easy. Only problem is they eat up so goddamn much power.

4. You can kinda funnel aliens into death zones with proper planning. Aliens like to beeline for radars and turrets, so if you set those in vision range of them, you can build walls with intentional holes in them that all the turrets face some distance back. All the aliens will try to path through this hole only to get mowed down by the turrets.

5. Personal defense lasers are stupidly overpowered. Once you get those, shields, and exoskeletons, you basically become invincible. Also they barely use any power, so they even work with portable solar.

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In the end game, the bases would regularly (by regularly, I mean every 20 seconds or so) fight hordes of 100+ large and behemoth aliens. And we'd go around exterminating enemy bases just by walking into them and letting the personal lasers annihilate everything while shields make us invincible. Buys a little time to give our power network a break and let the accumulators charge.

I don't understand why there are portable fusion reactors for your power armour but no fusion power for your base. How does that make any sense?

[MrRoboto75]

I don't understand why there are portable fusion reactors for your power armour but no fusion power for your base. How does that make any sense?

I guess they wanted base power to have some sort of sacrifice.  Either you have steam that pollutes like hell, or you have solar that's clean but you need a billon of them and they take up all of the space everywhere.  Fusion would have neither of those problems.

[TheDarkStar]

I just bought this game. Any advice?

[andrewas]

1) Set aside time to eat, sleep and go to work. Maybe set an alarm.

2) Press ALT. Makes it much easier to see whats going on.

3) Figure things you for yourself. My brother has a beautiful factory full of elegant, efficient designs mostly copied from katherineofsky, and is bored of the game.

[sluissa]

Yeah, most of the fun is making a design, realizing it's shit, and trying to make it better. If you just go find the "most efficient" design and copy/paste, then yeah, it gets boring.

Also don't be afraid to tear it all down and start from scratch. Always be stretching to make things flow faster, produce more, and to find and exploit new resources on the map. Past the first hour or two, if you're sitting there waiting for something to finish, you're doing something wrong. There's always something you can be building, rebuilding, or studying to figure out how to rebuild it in the future.

Honestly? Just play. There's a few things you might end up needing to look up how they work. Some systems can be complicated. Trains especially. The fluid systems aren't 100% intuitive when you first hit them. But beyond looking up basic mechanics, try not to spoil yourself. I don't think anything is too complicated to just explore on your own and figure out through just trying everything until it works... but it can be frustrating, especially in a game that has a time pressure (even as lax a time pressure as this has on its easy levels)