This game's already good, and I'm eager to see where it goes in the future.
I didn't notice until partway through my third run that there's a button to auto-take resources from ships. It's off of the stockpiles button in the lower right.
Buggy as heck in its current state (don't do buses! - they seem to work great at first, but then your colonists start dying of dehydration waiting for their ride in bumfuck nowhere).
I expect that bigger colonies want airlocks as bus stops. I haven't tried yet because they're annoying to place and I forgot to leave space for them in my current run.
It would work better if the game warned about bus logistics being overloaded, instead of having to watch bus stops to see if people are still waiting at the stop after the bus leaves. As it is, I think the best bet is building enough houses everywhere that people don't have to walk far.
I'm afraid to try building streets. They block the path, so I think you want to build the streets first and then build everything around them, which means building an entirely new, and expensive, district if you want to use them.
I don't quite get how, but it nonetheless feels very relaxing.
Supplies are surprisingly forgiving after steel, concrete, and laminated glass, and stockpiles seem to fail at a varied enough rate that you only really have to scramble to boost production of one thing at a time. Which isn't even a scramble if you occasionally check what's getting low in the stockpiles.
If you try it out, some tips to avoid the first death plunges:
1) Try to be self-sufficient with energy as much as possible. Turning on the reactor when you must is okay, but the fuel is finite.
I like the fuel resource. It's a
powerful consumable that's very helpful, but I don't feel like I need to hoard it and never use it. Normally I'm the guy who plays a JRPG and refuses to use full elixirs even on the last boss.
Things I've learned from my losses, spoilered in case anyone wants to figure the game out for themselves:
Game 1: Everyone knows that the first run doesn't count.
Game 2: I turned on baby boom as soon as possible. Production ground to a halt and I eventually gave up.
Game 3: I tried to grow my population slowly and keep food sustainable. I over-expanded my buildings, and learned that people prioritize jobs by education, which means that construction yards are among the first to be emptied. Around year 10, hope ran out. It's actually not crippling, and I think +1 housing quality cancels out the morale hit. I stabilized, but then built a tier 2 life support on a second pipe network that already had 6 farms. Logistics collapsed and people started dying.
Lesson learned: Either keep life support and farms on a giant pipe network, or prepare for a new one with a logistics sub-building dedicated to tankers.
Game 4 is going well, but the save is getting bloated and hard to load. I restarted a few times looking for a big enough flatland to build a snaking pipe, with plans to build houses and industry inside the first giant V shape.
I now have a feel for how hard I can push the resources from Earth. I delayed building the 3D printer until stored electrical cables fell to 100, was about 5 farms behind until my recent food stabilization, and need to build more power next because it's been long enough that I'm having to turn my reactor on about half the time. This is fine.
Storage for concrete is not fine. I've started placing down concrete roads with no priority to deal with it.
Storage for potatoes is not fine. I'm going to have to change away from only growing one type of food per greenhouse to balance them.
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Topic: Alien Horizons - Dwarf Fortress of colony survival sims? (Read 1388 times)