Curiosity Update has Dorito Domes!

[Thallori]

And graphs! I wonder if the command center is just the graphs. It would be pretty neat if it was something your sponsor did poorly until you built an in-dome governmental structure. Low resolution graphing for the beginning of your colony before you made administration part of how you move forward. Then again, I'm still a big fan of Dwarf Fortress's, "not knowing how much you have until your record keeper is better at their job."

Edit:
Oh, and because no one seems to have posted this yet:

Seems that there's a few new dome shapes. Not certain why I'm so excited for that of all features!

 

[Promethian]

0:43 - window with colonist list showing traits and stats. Many useful filters seen at top.

Immediately after is a short preview of the graphs. One looks like colonists and there is room for two different graph types. Will we finally be getting the death and birth rate info?

 

[Eric Danieros]

Great stuff, looking forward to all of it. Thanks for making the thread over here.

 

[Nero616]

What I hope is in there:
Graphs that show me how my production is increasing or decreasing by showing me how much is produced now, a few sols ago and how much is consumed now and a few sols ago.
Graphs that show me how many births I had colony-wide and when they were.
What is confirmed to be there:
Graphs. No Clue what graphs.
A tutorial.
New dome shapes.

 

[zenstrive]

I would be disappointed if those dome shapes are just those, dome shapes, nothing different from vanilla domes.
Would be happy if those domes are expandable, hence the strange shape.

 

[Nero616]

that would indeed be interesting.

 

[Promethian]

I would be disappointed if those dome shapes are just those, dome shapes, nothing different from vanilla domes.
Would be happy if those domes are expandable, hence the strange shape.

I agree but also not. Aesthetics is important. Surviving Mars kind of fits with the city painter genre. Once you are past the point of scarcity and have the mystery finished you are just expanding for the sake of making the map pretty. More beautification options are important.

That said. Yes, domes with specialized effects would be good. Like a star shaped dome that is specialized to be a central services location. It would have a single hex at each point where we can attach a passage and the dome serves as a sort of highway. The paths are all the moving paths like the passages have so they can pass through the dome fully without it counting the "only one dome over" rule. The dome would also have a "no residences" and "no, geology, engineering or botanist buildings" rule. So it can take services and workshops but nothing involving creating the necessary resources to keep the colony running.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

I am, underwhelmed to be honest. More dome shapes means nothing if its stilljust the same handfull of buildings to put in them. More graphs mean less, when theres only one solution to a given issue.

 

[Smiles_]

I am, underwhelmed to be honest. More dome shapes means nothing if its stilljust the same handfull of buildings to put in them. More graphs mean less, when theres only one solution to a given issue.

Yeah. The general lack of strategy in terms of diverse offerings for buildings made me shelve things for a while. I'll keep an eye on things, and I hope some of the content packs and DLCs will flesh things out a bit more.


Smiles

 

[Nero616]

What do you mean by solutions?
Your polymer production is too low to support all the maintenance cost, so you build more factories, turn buildings off that need polymers to maintain or purchase polymers from earth. What other solutions do you want?

Asking out of curiosity, not out of disagreement.
I find agreeing or disagreeing on an issue I don't understand to be rather foolish.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

What do you mean by solutions?
Your polymer production is too low to support all the maintenance cost, so you build more factories, turn buildings off that need polymers to maintain or purchase polymers from earth. What other solutions do you want?

Asking out of curiosity, not out of disagreement.
I find agreeing or disagreeing on an issue I don't understand to be rather foolish.

right now its all one need, one solution, you build X AND Y. So Need polymers? Build moxie, water sorce, Fuel refinery, and polymer factory. Once you figure out how to do all that its asolved problem and there are zero choices along the chain yes?

What would add more gameplay is the option say, to turn over some of your crop land to production of biopolymers, so now you have an OR, you can eat fuel for your carbon chains, or gve up space and manpower in the domes each path having burdens and trade offs.

Or the colonists needs, its the same buildings in every dome, theres no option say to have a VR church that meets solcalisation and gaming over a cassino, no option to allow a diner to upgrade with a still and make mars beer from foodstocks. The need buildings arent helped by being very speciffic in a way that defies attemts to create our own narataves and also creates morequestions like 'no one watches movies any more? or writes home?' and is also very reductave I mean I am personaly proof that some geologists are not the least intrested in going to bars.

 

[Nero616]

Now that actually sounds interesting.
The Question "Do I use this Farm for Polymers or Food" actually sounds like something I would really consider, until I figure a Food-Farm/Polymer-Farm/Polymer-Factory ratio that works for me.

What I would also like is Cattle and Chicken farms and such that actually produce a different type of food that still is compatible with all the buildings that sell food like the grocer or the diner, but makes vegans unhappy.

We discussed Food and Polymers.
Now a few things are missing.
Water.
Energy.
Metal.
Concrete.
Electronics
Machine parts
Research points.
Should there be more options to deal with renegades?

What do officers do, other than work in the security towers looking for renegades? Why does the Trait Vegan exist? It does absolutely nothing.
I suspect that both will be expanded upon in future DLC.

 

[Whitecold]

Food overall should require you to farm more variety as the game goes on. An early colony might be accepting of limited variety, an established colony will want a rich mixture, including meat instead of a pure quinoa diet.
Similarly the endgame buildings are pure obvious resource sinks. You don't get anything out but an achievement. I really hope for some end game buildings that are actually necessary to build large colonies, some additional challenges that are not massive unemployment rates.

 

[Nero616]

Massive unemployment rates are a huge burden on Societies IRL and realistically would be even more on a Mars Colony.
The Art Store and the electronics store, or however they're called now, are available from the start, but I stopped building them, at least until my factory output is so high I don't know what to do with the resources anymore. And that has so far only happened once.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Massive unemployment rates are a huge burden on Societies IRL and realistically would be even more on a Mars Colony.
The Art Store and the electronics store, or however they're called now, are available from the start, but I stopped building them, at least until my factory output is so high I don't know what to do with the resources anymore. And that has so far only happened once.

Only, unemployment, the notion that we have too many people is an awfully bleak way to look at things. The alternatave is that we simply need IRL and in game, new ways to take advantage of that pool of effort and tallent.

SM is, theresno humanity. No familes no politics, thats a problem with moast city builders but the effort made to make pops unique via traits and things only to have them opnionless interchangable automa is an issue atm.

 

[Nero616]

Those "New ways" are called Workshops, you just sink your spare workers into, that basically don't do much other than give your people something to do.
At least, that is what I understand from reading about it. I haven't built them yet.

In SM, you are closer with your people than in most other citybuilders. That is why we notice that they don't socialize, play with their kids and such things.
Despite the Colony being depicted as a future Utopia, I can't help but see an extremly authoritarian left wing... I don't even know what to call it...

 

[Thallori]

Anarcho-communist-enforced-serial-monogamy-hetero-god-run dictatorship?

 

[Nero616]

Yes. Minus the "god-run" part.
I don't think the Player is a god here. Instead, I think the player is the commander, as implied by the various Events during the Mysteries, or a series of commanders.
A human who is in charge of the Colony, wielding unlimited power over the colony, with the authority to order any Colonist to move to this building or get hired at that job at a whim. That Human does that until he retires, at which point the player keeps on playing as his successor and does not even notice the commander he plays has changed.

 

[Thallori]

I don't know. All hail the immortal mayor (our god) has always been my favourite saying when it comes to city builders.
"Destroy that home. Let that hatchery burn down. Kill the school budget. Nothing can stop me except bankruptcy, muahahahaha!"
Or something. The god commander role has always had a place in top-view games, from RTSes to Grand Strategy; perhaps the only game I've ever played where it made any sense was Achron, where you played an AI who was literally expected to give orders that don't make sense because they were the only ones who had a non-linear perspective on time. Immortal until you blew up, but then you could still save yourself in another time stream.