Newbie playing without any DLC so apologies if what I'm saying is false/outdated.
I'm finding landscaping super buggy, overpowered, and making a lot of the game sort of 'meh'. The bugginess is two fold, firstly I often have to flatten an area repeatedly to be able to build on it. Secondly the waste rock required/produced is wrong, either I dont need/produce any, or only a tiny fraction of what is displayed. This contributes to landscaping being too easy. A handful of drones can (with virtually no resources, and no techs unlocked) get rid of huge canyons, entire mountains, and join together different plateaus in just a few hours. That means that the topography of Mars plays almost no impact on my colony growth, which removes what would otherwise be an interesting constraint and is sort of immersion breaking. Why build an expensive tunnel when I can flatten easily (only reason IMO is reducing the length of pipes/cables that could get damaged).
I think this would be fairly easy to solve. Make landscaping actually require/produce the stated amount of excess rock, or even 5x that. Double the amount of excess rock again at the start of the game until some mid-tier robotics tech is discovered. Also massively increase the time it takes. Add a new rover (Bulldozer) that does the landscaping rather than drones. Landscaping should create a large amount of dust in a wide radius around the zone being landscaped (linked to how much total elevation change is being done). That way, landscaping can still be done when you need it, but it requires a reasonable investment first and comes at a cost.
As a QoL change, it would be nice when trying to place a building/dome that, if the "uneven terrain" block comes up, we could right click to flatten exactly that footprint.
I'm finding landscaping super buggy, overpowered, and making a lot of the game sort of 'meh'. The bugginess is two fold, firstly I often have to flatten an area repeatedly to be able to build on it. Secondly the waste rock required/produced is wrong, either I dont need/produce any, or only a tiny fraction of what is displayed. This contributes to landscaping being too easy. A handful of drones can (with virtually no resources, and no techs unlocked) get rid of huge canyons, entire mountains, and join together different plateaus in just a few hours. That means that the topography of Mars plays almost no impact on my colony growth, which removes what would otherwise be an interesting constraint and is sort of immersion breaking. Why build an expensive tunnel when I can flatten easily (only reason IMO is reducing the length of pipes/cables that could get damaged).
I think this would be fairly easy to solve. Make landscaping actually require/produce the stated amount of excess rock, or even 5x that. Double the amount of excess rock again at the start of the game until some mid-tier robotics tech is discovered. Also massively increase the time it takes. Add a new rover (Bulldozer) that does the landscaping rather than drones. Landscaping should create a large amount of dust in a wide radius around the zone being landscaped (linked to how much total elevation change is being done). That way, landscaping can still be done when you need it, but it requires a reasonable investment first and comes at a cost.
As a QoL change, it would be nice when trying to place a building/dome that, if the "uneven terrain" block comes up, we could right click to flatten exactly that footprint.
- 1
