What are your favorite...

[DominusNovus]

Spires, Breakthrough Techs, Mysteries, Sponsors, Commanders...

You know, the stuff that is in some way mutually exclusive. Feel free to mention your last favorites, too.

My favorite Spire is Arcology, as a general purpose spire; every dome can use one. Network node sounds very nice, but its more specialized.

My favorite breakthroughs are all the techs that automate any building that normally requires workers, and the techs that make your pipelines/wires invulnerable.

I have only encountered one mystery so far, so I can’t speak to those.

For a commander, I’m fond of Oligarch simply to get arcologies from the start.

 

[Turin the Mad]

Spire: Medical Center (most domes asides from purpose-built) at the moment, pending further game play.
Breakthroughs: similar to you, along with Positronic Brain (go-go Gadget Colonist!), Service Bots and the Core resources. I'd love to be able to cherry pick the 'breakthrough loadout'.

Mysteries: n/a at present.
Sponsor: each has their thing.
Commander: Inventor hands-down for me. Not having to maintain and power the drone hubs lets me scattershot those puppies all over the map. If you get the Wireless Power breakthrough, they keep their drones fully charged with no time lost for all practical purposes. Expansion 1 drone hub at a time .. even easier if you ALSO get Printed Electronics (metal instead of Electronics to build drones).

 

[Tiakatt]

The breakthrough techs, some of them are just really interesting and fun. I think they're a great idea, and even like for the most part that they are random from a large pool so that each game is different.

But as it is right now, instead of being excited about them, I just find myself frustrated by anything that isn't either the pipe or cable upgrade, until/unless I get those. The fact that those two techs are not guaranteed is intensely frustrating. The lack of them hurts in a way a lack of any of the other 53 doesn't, and that just feels bad. The others feel great on a random basis, and those don't. So they end up being simultaneously my favorite and least favorite.

If they'd rebalance the breaks/leaks so that they're a little less frequent and repair a bit faster, that'd help a ton in bringing these two upgrades in line with the other breakthroughs, making them feel like very nice bonuses rather than something you can potentially be screwed out of. After a while I just get so tired of hearing the notifications over and over and over. Even taking steps to mitigate segment length, it can still get pretty excessive.

I can only speak to 2 of the mysteries. Inner Light is interesting and with neat mechanics. I did not enjoy Power of Three, though the payoff I got in the end was really awesome. Still, it was obnoxious enough that I'd rather not do it again.

I've tried Rocket Scientist, and Politician (with Europe). I like the early shuttle hub access on Rocket Scientist. Politician I took for its passive rather than its tech. I'm thinking I should try Inventor at some point as its starting tech is pretty awesome and as Turin points out it, like Rocket Scientist, also helps with early expansion.

I mostly use the Arcology though I've used a few of the medical spire and the Hanging Gardens as well.

 

[Mike6979]

I did hydro engineer with Europe, that is cool you tried politician. Does that bring in enough extra money that you can just buy from Earth for a good part of the game?

 

[KDubya]

I've gone with Russia and Ecologist for my first game on a resource and danger heavy map at 33N 118E.

The Fueled Extractors from Russia are great in that I can hit a switch and get a boost if and when I want it.

The Ecologist has been great as the Hanging Garden adds a massive +30 comfort to your housing which gets apartments up to 65 comfort. Just need an extra 2 water and all your apartments will be as comfortable as an Arcology.

I got Extractor AI as my second breakthrough and had robotic rare metal extractors on line before I landed my first colonist. Got the Gagarin's Legacy achievement for shipping back 1000 rare metals before sol 100 somewhere around sol 52.

 

[Tiakatt]

I did hydro engineer with Europe, that is cool you tried politician. Does that bring in enough extra money that you can just buy from Earth for a good part of the game?

It's not bad. And if you need to rush a tech or a few techs, it's a very minor loss to do so, rather than truly costing you 200-2000m which is itself quite a nice benefit, it can speed teching out up tremendously.

 

[Exemplar Voss]

Spire- definitely arcology. The extra space and not using normal plots for housing is a huge bonus. Plus, I rather dislike the spires that require staffing. They pull too many people away from the basic jobs, factories and mining.

Breakthroughs - too lol!random for my taste. Anything that reduces staff requirements is good for running things efficiently. I actually dislike the godmode for cables and pipes- shutting down fundamental challenges to gameplay seems odd and disruptive.

Mysteries- only dealt with the beginnings of a few - the cubes, the giant orb and wildfire.

Didn't get very far with anything but the orb, and didn't finish that since the AI decided to start murdering my colonists. It would fly them out to a dome and they would try to walk back to their origin point and die somewhere out in the desert.

Based on those three, I don't like the mysteries much. Too silly and fantastical, and a poor fit with the game. They're also implemented in a way that's its difficult to tell what's going on and the next step is supposed to be. The 'log of events' is...unhelpful.

Wildfire told me random people were infected, but there wasn't any way to tell who, what it did or how to fix it. Earth was contaminated by my exports, but they were still buying and selling, so... so what? The orb just wandered around, hovered for a bit and wandered somewhere else, but gave me little reason to care and was just an annoyance while I was trying to work around supply and pathfinding issues.

 

[DominusNovus]

Astrogeologist and Blue Sun look like they’d be a good combo. You can scan for deep deposits and mine them early. If you manage to roll excavator AI, you can have most of your basic infrastructure up and running sans colonists pretty early.

 

[Balkri]

Breakthroughs... I will not say they are my favorites but the combination is insane. The first transform all your excess power into research points, the other one make your fusion/fission reactors to work with out the need of workers (and the upgrade just cost 10 or 20 polymers).
I got both of them really early in my last game (one cost 1500 research and the other one 3000 or 4000)...

I built reactors everywhere and was drowning in research points

 

[DominusNovus]

Breakthroughs... I will not say they are my favorites but the combination is insane. The first transform all your excess power into research points, the other one make your fusion/fission reactors to work with out the need of workers (and the upgrade just cost 10 or 20 polymers).
I got both of them really early in my last game (one cost 1500 research and the other one 3000 or 4000)...

I built reactors everywhere and was drowning in research points

Nice combo. Running that with Martian copyrights really lets you do almost anything.

Speaking of Patens/Copyrights, do those trigger the Europe Sponsor funding bonus for research? You know, in case I want to abuse an already very abusable (under the right circumstances) tech.