I owe a ton of screenshots, so I'll come back withe edits. Mostly: the way the cubes stack and combine is genius. There are hidden variants, different combinations among building types ... [spoiler] the time it took me to realize the blossoms went together was ouch but building them was fun.
If you build a tall tree, they creep up and down on the trunk. It's fantastic.
The flaw is not so much with *this* game, but this genre of game is built on formulas from a capitalist fever dream. The language that working-aged people without designated jobs are unfulfilled is telling! This site is full of people programming games and assets for fun; are they unfulfilled?
Not to mention, where are the janitorial jobs? Other games have those. Where's sanitation and toilets? That too, well, stinks of classism. Again, that's not a deliberate ploy or something, that's just how the formulas were set up since the Sims days.
The parks, gardens, and other public spaces not having superintendents: also classist. Who's maintaining the elevators? Piloting?? Somebody does it, as long as it's not me... "unskilled" labor doesn't seem real, right? If the answer is robots, trust me robotics industry will tell you someone always has to be employed to Fix The Robots. I understand that the game has to scale up from the ground, but maybe an upgrade that adds maintenance? Also, if having a little dude hang out constantly ruins the aesthetic, then assign them shorter hours, so you'll have the open space for great screengrabs. If you really, really need that Holoroom to be unmanned, at least consider ... a tech support division?
That's the biggest imbalance in the game. I only now got to 97% employment rate after like 700 years, and that's adding a whole lot of blocks that didn't contribute back into the system. If just the restaurants employed 3 people - front of house, service, back of house, that would've solved everything and allowed me my design as well.
Last but not least the art is sublime. love it.
So here's my laundry list:
- only one escape room? boo! many escape rooms! it's such a fun color scheme, too.
- this is a small thing, but alien research is over-saturated, and frankly clashes terribly (at least on my monitor). It also feels like it should have rounded or cut corners, like it's a spaceship module that got converted to research tent. once you stack octagons, those look *great*
- are the pubs supposed to look like the bar and chairs spell "inn"? also there's a mysterious pub that doesn't look like the rest, screenie coming
- again: sanitation. osha. waste management is tracking viruses IRL, are they not essential? this could be another tree for the hospital
- what would blow this game open is water management
- alien housing can't stop there. this is sci-fi, after a certain point they should trigger something. like some conjunction with alien research and number of houses, maybe transform the supercomputer. that'd be sick.
- tinkerers also seemed like a dead end with lots of potential
- the charts and graphing is great! it's edging to 'good teaching tool', seriously. it would completely eat up processing, but could there be a room usage / population count? maybe daily, it doesn't have to be realtime
- random stuff like if you have a pub next to open air, you can pay them to randomly drop things from high places. just to do it. it's low gravity, probably no one will die!
- this'll probably be a pain, a huge pain, but is there any way to get super young children to be housed with older people? i don't mind them traipsing into pubs or whatever, let them dance. or short of that, add an extra cost to housing for the robo-nanny, until they're a certain age. that would also be a better visualization of how many generations are cycling through.
- mushrooms
- got flowers? why not add bees? warm yellow would also go great in the palette. it could be a whole build-tree. get a solid beeswax room full of honey
- if the flying saucers stop running, have an added feature to fly tours. or pay per tour, even better resource sink. i'd burn food just to make the flying thing fly, haha
- spas could be cheaper precursors to the hospital, too. hygiene is so important. also where do they get their hair cut?
there's probably more, bbl