so i played a while now and am now starting the last available map. so far its been a nice experience(except those pesky citizens whining over having to walk a bit XD, but ill get to that later). heres some feedback:
general feedback:
- i love the missions that always tell me what to do next to advance. gives me something to do, but id like a window that shows me these, and maybe even a treeview of them?
- farms dont make much sense for me. Arent greenhouses producing at the same rate? the only difference i see are costs. if there are more significant differences, it would be nice if the description could tell us
- buildings that are far away dont get workers, and building an apartment next to it does sometimes take ages to get enough people to fill the surrounding structures. it would be cool if you could build a transit system instead of tunnels there, so people can reach these places, and i dont have to build an apartment for a single person. disadvanted of these would be that they are more expensive and connected buildings cant be traveled to, meaning that workers cant access it from transit, so only automated structures make sense using these tunnels
-let players delete starting structures. sometimes they can be in the way if you want to build your colony in a specific pattern. add a prompt to ask the player if he really wants to recycle it, if you think they are so important.
-make batteries automatic (like the energy storages from supreme commander). for me they are basically useless if they dont jump in when im out of power. im not gonna go around and enable every battery to supply energy. that would be quite tedious.
-button to force more workers into a building. sometimes i want a building to be more efficient, so i want to set the priority of a building higher. this could be a slider, so you can set the priority to get the right amount of workers into the building, but not force a specific number, if there happens to be another building that gets more priority. in general id like to have more control over where people work
-add some form of storage management. somtimes i want to stop stuff producing, cause its cloggin up my storage, but i also cant switch it off. so being able to say "only produce if whatever you produce is < 100" would be nice
- add priorities for recycling buildings too. sometimes i want to recycle something before or after i build something, currently i think it first builds, then recycles. i had situations where i wouldve wanted them to recycle first. also i think it would be better to set the priority with a slider, or by a number. this would also need a more sophisticated way to calculate priority of build sites for the drones, and with the slider you can adjust the weight
vanaar:
very noice. its balanced energywise (you cant go without building solar panels), and no great distances to resources. i built the history center before i got the mission for it, so it had to be running for more than one sol. not that it was hard (i played on easy), but it confused me a bit that i had to wait for the mission to come up
sandy gulch:
also noice. i didnt quite get what the worms do. nothing that was next to it broke. in this mission i first encountered the lighting strikes. why do they instakill tunnels? why not just damage them a lot? its annoying cause it cant be repaired automatically. maybe you could add "destroyed" buildings instead, that can still be repaired, but need the full resources and time to be up and running again.
Azar Falls:
this mission was... bad/boring/senseless. all i had to do was to build a way to the artifacts and analyze them (with the few missions before that). why is the map so extremely huge if all i need to do is build a tunnel over there? i went through the effort to reach the next green field to place some greenhouses (btw, why do greenhouses require soil? cant we just transport it to them? add a dirt mine or something, that supplies the greenhouses with fresh high quality dirt), but that wasnt even necessary, as i got enough food by trading in the gold thats next to the colony. this mission needs some work, it was way too short
Hyla's Crescent:
this took a bit longer, but mostly because i wanted to get to these 2 thermal vents, and it took ages to get people to get in the habitat that i placed there. same for the other direction towards the artifact. noone wanted to go there. had to enable the high density option and fast forward a bit till i at least got a worker to the drone port next to it. also there are tiles/cells for placing buildings in the middle of the sea and behind the waterfall. im sure those dont belong there :P
Tenari Glacier:
this mission was okay again. but also a lot of space, and no need to actually use it all up. also i had to wait again for the last mission to get ready to tell me i had to research the artifact, and not just collect it. first time i encountered toxic gas emissions, but it took long enough for me to replace the fans with filters. also i noticed a little BUG here: when a building that is currently being built, is infected by a spore, and then scrubbed while still being built, the bar/meter over the building stays till the building is finished, and does not go away when scrubbing is finished. i hope the next missions also let me use the unity artifact ;) brainwashing citizens is nice.
phew what a wall of text. you have fun reading that, and ill report back when i played the next map (added last map stuff)