I wanted to discuss this because I am still baffled by it. I see a pretty clear trend in the B & B content balancing. It's not a lazy copy/paste. There are a lot of conscious design decisions to make B&B content more costly than vanilla SM.
Asteroid mining is a lot harder to pull off than regular mining. The water extractor and mines are costlier than their vanilla versions and colonists die a lot faster walking on asteroids than on mars. You need costly techs even for little things, like bringing rovers to asteroids. Both the micro-g-habitat and the underground domes have a much, much higher upkeep than comparable mars domes. (10! water and oxygen for an underground medium dome with no vaporators). You can easily lose a lot on asteroids and constantly have to clear rocks in the underground. Everything is harder.
With so many conscious decisions to make the game harder for the player, you would assume there is some amazing payoff at the end....but there just isn't. Everything seems to lead to the underground wonders, but then at least 3 of 4 underground wonders are pointless if you do not plan to have many domes underground, which you have no reason to want (don't know the full effect of the bottomless pit yet, but I doubt it's worth the investment).
I truly don't get this. If game designers had just neglected balance, I would have expected them to just make the new content horrendously OP, but that's not the case. Clearly, someone gave some thought to game balance. I would say that e.g. the amphitheater is balanced better than some content packs. There is also a theoretically nice progression in B&B: Mine asteroids to explore the underground, explore the underground to get to the underground domes and wonders...but then...nothing. How did nobody notice that all that additional in-game cost has zero payoff?
So excuse the slightly ranty nature of this post, but I am still a bit stunned by this. Giving your added difficulty some reward in the end seems like such an easy and obvious thing to do, and I believe that the DLC could have been much more enjoyable and much better received with even some simple tweaks in that direction...But as it is, there is zero reason to pursue much of the B&B content after trying it once. I believe adding additional challenge to SM was a great direction to go with a new expansion, but how did no one notice that an additional option that is essentially "same as vanilla, but worse in every way" just begs to be ignored? Like I said, I am truly puzzled what happened there.
Asteroid mining is a lot harder to pull off than regular mining. The water extractor and mines are costlier than their vanilla versions and colonists die a lot faster walking on asteroids than on mars. You need costly techs even for little things, like bringing rovers to asteroids. Both the micro-g-habitat and the underground domes have a much, much higher upkeep than comparable mars domes. (10! water and oxygen for an underground medium dome with no vaporators). You can easily lose a lot on asteroids and constantly have to clear rocks in the underground. Everything is harder.
With so many conscious decisions to make the game harder for the player, you would assume there is some amazing payoff at the end....but there just isn't. Everything seems to lead to the underground wonders, but then at least 3 of 4 underground wonders are pointless if you do not plan to have many domes underground, which you have no reason to want (don't know the full effect of the bottomless pit yet, but I doubt it's worth the investment).
I truly don't get this. If game designers had just neglected balance, I would have expected them to just make the new content horrendously OP, but that's not the case. Clearly, someone gave some thought to game balance. I would say that e.g. the amphitheater is balanced better than some content packs. There is also a theoretically nice progression in B&B: Mine asteroids to explore the underground, explore the underground to get to the underground domes and wonders...but then...nothing. How did nobody notice that all that additional in-game cost has zero payoff?
So excuse the slightly ranty nature of this post, but I am still a bit stunned by this. Giving your added difficulty some reward in the end seems like such an easy and obvious thing to do, and I believe that the DLC could have been much more enjoyable and much better received with even some simple tweaks in that direction...But as it is, there is zero reason to pursue much of the B&B content after trying it once. I believe adding additional challenge to SM was a great direction to go with a new expansion, but how did no one notice that an additional option that is essentially "same as vanilla, but worse in every way" just begs to be ignored? Like I said, I am truly puzzled what happened there.
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