Yet More First Impression

I've played about 8 hours so far (according to Steam). Finished all four of the tutorials and play a handful of quick games against the AI. I probably won about 1/3 of those games against the AI, but it's usually a pretty close race in the end. I've played quite a bit of RTSs and economic cities builders like Anno. This actually feels like a delicious mix of both and I really like it. These notes are mostly on the things I found confusing, but generally, I like the game a lot and am really stoked to keep playing it.

I didn't record thoughts right as I was playing, unfortunately, so this is probably more scattershot than it should be. Happy to clarify anything that doesn't make sense though. Okay, enough preamble.

 

• I think I finished the first four tutorials on the first go (maybe the 2nd with the Scavengers) but it took me maybe 10 attempts to win as Scientific. It's way harder, or at least it was for me. The upside is it forced me to learn a lot about how the game actually works. I hadn't ever even build an offworld trading launchpad until then.
• In all the Scientific tutorial games I played, I felt like I was always accruing massive debt. With only 3 claims to start, there's no way to satisfy my colonies needs, stay out of debt and not get horribly behind the other colonies in terms of resources needed to expand. It seemed like if I used one of my first 3 claims to build a power structure I would always lose, so it was almost always a steel mill on an iron tile, an aluminum mine and a 02+fuel plant (forget what it's called) on a water tile.
• When I finally won in the Scientific tutorial, I think I was somewhere over $200,000 in debt and just selling every resource offworld that I had as quickly as possible to buy out the last remaining AI.
• Generally (and maybe this is just me not knowing where the alternatives are) but it feels like I'm almost always in huge debt. It never seems like I have enough claims to satisfy all my colony's resource needs, so I end up losing cash on all the ones I can't afford. I'll try to manually buy 10-20 increments of whatever is almost out, but that's not an option with power.
• Speaking of, I turned off auto-selling power, but that didn't seem to actually do anything? Because solar panels don't work at night (makes sense), if all your power is solar, you end up taking on huge debt at night. I thought that turning-off auto-selling extra power would let me stockpile energy from solar panels for nighttime, but this didn't actually seem to work. So I now only build wind (or geothermal where possible).
• I played a couple quick games where I wanted to play as Scavengers, but the resource distribution on the map seemingly had only two carbon hexes on the entire map and they weren't even adjacent to each other. Of course the solution to that is just to quit and roll another map or play another faction, but it felt like the game had randomly forbidden me from making my desired choice of faction by the resources available.
• I rarely bought or used anything from the black market. I finally started using mutinies and goon squads (only to ever protect my offworld trading launchpad) in the last couple of games.
• Of the extra buildings at the bottom, aside from the offworld trading launchpad, I think a built a pleasure dome once, not sure what it did (made me more money?). Of the others, only ever built the patent lab, since researching those patents can be huge.
• It's unclear what some of the patents do. I think I won at auction or build the superconductor a couple of times, which says +100% energy when attached to HQ, but it seemed like that didn't happen automatically and there wasn't a way to "attach" it manually ...
• Once all my claims have been used, my play often ends up in a bit of a lull where I'm just waiting for enough resources for the next HQ expansion to come in and manually buying any resources I'm about to run out of. If there's a shortage, I'll generally dump as much of that resource as I have. But mostly at that point I'm just waiting until I have enough resource to expand. Then it's quickly build enough things for my new claims, and then wait again. Keep doing that until level 5, at which point it's build offworld trading launchpads and sell everything as much as possible and start buying up other stock.
• If there's a general (i.e. not a specific resource tile) claim up for auction I always buy it. Since I'm almost always in huge debt anyway, another $5-10k is nothing.
• There's a structure that kind of looks like another colony that's already on the map when the scouting starts. No idea what it does.
• The scouting phase is really enjoyable and interesting, although aside from getting into good spots before the other players, I'm not sure what the benefit of going faster is, if there is one.
• Maybe it's just me, but performance seems to degrade a bit in the late game. Or at least, it seems like it's in the late game, since the menu to launch goods off-world feel sluggish and unresponsive.

 

That's most of the confusing stuff I can remember offhand, but again, I really dig the game and will keep playing more. Gah, it's good. It just feels like I'm only understand about 50% of it and I'm not sure how to figure out the other 50%. I deliberately didn't watch any streams or tutorial videos until writing this up, but I will know and will probably have about a dozen forehead slapping realizations.