I'm a new to this game (picked it up when it was free last week) and, after a bumpy start I'm now sort of it into it. My original problem is that I picked the easiest everything for my first game so it was so trivial as to be boring, and I didn't understand the mechanics so it all felt arbitrary. It all clicked into place when I realised that the same specialisations always led to the same interests, so if I build specialised domes I only needed a subset of all services covered. This of course becomes more complicated with perks and flaws modifying these interests. As different buildings cover different groups of interests (at different costs in workers, footprint, maintenance and consumption), finding out what services should be built is an interesting optimisation puzzle!
While the wiki is super helpful in providing all the relevant info (the game annoyingly only does so *after* you've built one), it wasn't in the format I found most helpful. So I made this spreadsheet (also available as a pdf)! The top half says what interests you need covered, and the bottom half what buildings you need to cover those interests, all lined up nicely per column. In addition, other information about buildings is available to the side for easy comparison.
What I've learnt from this is that Grocer is probably the most important building as its small, cheap, and with few workers, while satisfying both a compulsory interest and a very common one. The amphitheatre combines super well with it so that together they satisfy all the common needs at a tiny cost in every regard. The Hanging Gardens is even better than it looks, and I'm making the most of it in my India Ecologist current playthrough, all of my domes are constantly at 95+ average comfort since Sol 3 after the founders arrived. The Gamer perk is actually a huge pain in anyone but scientist, as it creates a hard-to-fulfil interest. Similarly, glutton is not a problem at all for engineers or those working in a dome with a diner (food is easy to get hold of), but is annoying for anyone else. Of course you don't need to satisfy everyone's need all the time, but I do try to avoid colonists with 2 interests that I won't even attempt to satisfy in their dome.
One thing I'm not sure of, is how many of each building do I need? Is there a rule of thumb? Assuming shifts are well balanced, my beginner heuristic is that if I have a total of X visitor slots for a given interest in a dome, that dome can support ~ 3X colonists with that interest. The fact that buildings serve different interests but not each colonist will roll every interest every sol seems to roughly cancel out on average.
I don't have any DLC so I haven't added those buildings, but that should be easy enough to do. Have I made any mistakes? Are there values for the two "?" I've left? Do you guys find this as helpful as I do? This subforum seems very quiet compared to the ones for other games, is most of the discussion on steam/reddit instead?
While the wiki is super helpful in providing all the relevant info (the game annoyingly only does so *after* you've built one), it wasn't in the format I found most helpful. So I made this spreadsheet (also available as a pdf)! The top half says what interests you need covered, and the bottom half what buildings you need to cover those interests, all lined up nicely per column. In addition, other information about buildings is available to the side for easy comparison.
What I've learnt from this is that Grocer is probably the most important building as its small, cheap, and with few workers, while satisfying both a compulsory interest and a very common one. The amphitheatre combines super well with it so that together they satisfy all the common needs at a tiny cost in every regard. The Hanging Gardens is even better than it looks, and I'm making the most of it in my India Ecologist current playthrough, all of my domes are constantly at 95+ average comfort since Sol 3 after the founders arrived. The Gamer perk is actually a huge pain in anyone but scientist, as it creates a hard-to-fulfil interest. Similarly, glutton is not a problem at all for engineers or those working in a dome with a diner (food is easy to get hold of), but is annoying for anyone else. Of course you don't need to satisfy everyone's need all the time, but I do try to avoid colonists with 2 interests that I won't even attempt to satisfy in their dome.
One thing I'm not sure of, is how many of each building do I need? Is there a rule of thumb? Assuming shifts are well balanced, my beginner heuristic is that if I have a total of X visitor slots for a given interest in a dome, that dome can support ~ 3X colonists with that interest. The fact that buildings serve different interests but not each colonist will roll every interest every sol seems to roughly cancel out on average.
I don't have any DLC so I haven't added those buildings, but that should be easy enough to do. Have I made any mistakes? Are there values for the two "?" I've left? Do you guys find this as helpful as I do? This subforum seems very quiet compared to the ones for other games, is most of the discussion on steam/reddit instead?
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