After playing on the harder difficulties, especially with the five sol long dust storms, I find myself really wishing for a new feature: letting a building finish its last maintenance cycle. Since it's going to break anyways, I'm always wanting to eek out that last little bit of concrete or rare metal before it needs some more of those tasty tasty (and expensive!) machine parts. This leads to me micromanaging my extractors and turning them off only when they reach 100% deterioration, then needing to go through them all again after the dust storm to turn them back on.
One way to fix this, UI wise, would be to add three buttons somewhere. I made up lame mock up:
Wow that's lame.. I was kinda going for an Anno 2070 happiness = higher tax revenue look with colour blindness blue in mind but 2 minutes in mspaint can only take you so far.
Anyway, this actually leads into another potential suggestion: having buildings go through a phase where they're just inefficient instead of completely broken for a time. From a UI perspective, I'd probably only want these for in-dome buildings or manned structures, but I'll make another silly mockup:
Where letting a building deteriorate past a certain point just means less production per day, or less comfort in the case of homes and services, or more power usage for subsurface heaters if you can figure out a way to make it prettier (maybe a toggle button next to request maintenance). With those tiny towers you could change the way maintenance affects it by never having it fully break without a meteor strike. That way players stop doing the thing where they just shut off their heaters for prolonged periods of time between cold waves, only turning them on at the last second and dealing with the giant floating Xs making them feel like they've done something wrong when someone is just playing efficiently.
Other buildings where they just become less and less efficient without ever truly breaking could be solar panels (though this risks players just building hundreds and leaving maintenance off), wind turbines (I feel weirdly okay with them always being able to barely creek out 0.5 power with crazy rusted gears in the martian soil), and drone hubs (there's something that just amuses me about a drone hub slowly becoming unable to use all their drones. One by one, the little guys getting lost.)
And another thing! With the solar panel tech for self cleaning, this would be an excellent opportunity to add subsistence only use. Giving the panels an extra option to go into shutdown when they hit 100% deterioration until they're back up to 0%.
One way to fix this, UI wise, would be to add three buttons somewhere. I made up lame mock up:
Wow that's lame.. I was kinda going for an Anno 2070 happiness = higher tax revenue look with colour blindness blue in mind but 2 minutes in mspaint can only take you so far.
Anyway, this actually leads into another potential suggestion: having buildings go through a phase where they're just inefficient instead of completely broken for a time. From a UI perspective, I'd probably only want these for in-dome buildings or manned structures, but I'll make another silly mockup:
Where letting a building deteriorate past a certain point just means less production per day, or less comfort in the case of homes and services, or more power usage for subsurface heaters if you can figure out a way to make it prettier (maybe a toggle button next to request maintenance). With those tiny towers you could change the way maintenance affects it by never having it fully break without a meteor strike. That way players stop doing the thing where they just shut off their heaters for prolonged periods of time between cold waves, only turning them on at the last second and dealing with the giant floating Xs making them feel like they've done something wrong when someone is just playing efficiently.
Other buildings where they just become less and less efficient without ever truly breaking could be solar panels (though this risks players just building hundreds and leaving maintenance off), wind turbines (I feel weirdly okay with them always being able to barely creek out 0.5 power with crazy rusted gears in the martian soil), and drone hubs (there's something that just amuses me about a drone hub slowly becoming unable to use all their drones. One by one, the little guys getting lost.)
And another thing! With the solar panel tech for self cleaning, this would be an excellent opportunity to add subsistence only use. Giving the panels an extra option to go into shutdown when they hit 100% deterioration until they're back up to 0%.
