Starting Out
The beginning is honestly the easiest part. The goal here at this stage is to save you time from waiting.
Prioritize creating depots, trucks, and extractors, over expanding the population. The only goal for pops is gaining new tech, which isn't valuable if you can't use it because you don't have any depots. Have between 2-3 assembly plants for each of these.
After this try unlocking trucks by increasing the population of 1 city. Only increase the population of the 2nd city for the different technology goals.
At this point you can have a spaghetti facility because once you get trains it won't matter.
Mid-game Hump
Here is the most tedious part in my opinion... that is building out a centralized structured design to make the rest of the game much easier.
You should make a train and rail network similar to the design above that allows for rapid and quick expansion as you need to bring additional production online.
For tier 1 depots they can only move 1 hex so keep the factories only 1 horizontal line deep. For tier 2, 2 deep, for tier 3, 3 deep.
One exception to this is for high volume deposit areas, I keep the pickup area only 2 factories deep and I have 3 layers of tier 3 depots to allow for better unloading off the trains and loading into factories.
You'll notice for factories that require 2 resources you will have a hard time getting both to directly touch it with tier 1 depots so try to get the next tier asap.
For mines, have them route into the main facility via train. I have something like this setup where I fill the deposits with extractors and then surround it with depots. The higher tiers the better the range. I used to build on top of the deposits to get better range, however while you can extract more from 1 site at the time, later you'll have to come back, destroy the depot and then place an extractor on top of it and I prefer not doing that.
At this point you will also want to work on green house gases. SF6 will be the first gas you will want to produce, and ensure you expand out production to heat the planet faster.
You will also want to work on setting up tree production as you move into the later stage of the game to allow its expansion across the planet. The green house gas production will allow for these plants to continue to grow as the temperature and water help improve those factors.
End Game
Water and especially carbon were the hardest things to get initially at this stage for me mainly because I didn't realize the scale. The circled area was my carbon production to increase my polymers.
At this stage you can also start to expand all three cities as fast as possible to reach the 1 million mark.
Water is difficult until things start to melt. At that point use pumps to collect it, but be aware, in food production it will be very difficult to unload and insert into farms with the scale that is required.
You will also want to expand into NF3 gas at this stage to help warm the planet faster. Each gas type gets less and less value the more of it you have so you will want to balance between the two.
Generally scale becomes the problem with most resources which really requires tier 3 depots and expanding the drop off points. Additionally this will also hurt your frame rate... a lot.
Lastly you'll find that after reaching the 100,000 population mark composite becomes the hardest thing to make as it takes large amount of resources just for 1 bar, and your production will be large enough in the other categories when it dips down. It is also important to note, that as your population grows extensively you will need multiple supply depots and recycling centers for individual resources as they won't be unloaded fast enough even with tier 3 depots.
Things I Wish I Did Differently
The biggest change I would have made is building near the ocean.
Keep an eye out where the water arrows pool, and note that rivers and water flood production buildings. Depots that have already been placed, and trains seem to still work.
Thoughts For The Developer
There are a few issues that arise with the end game content. Here is the first:
I also found scale a rather painful and tedious problem as the game progressed. Later stages of the game need a better transportation medium other than rail, as it was no longer is sufficient. I had a bit of rail-ception going on for the last half of the game with multiple trains inside of each other.
Maybe an underground transport network, or rockets that exit into orbit (maybe mining on moons?)?
We also need better or upgraded factories so I don't have to place a massive line. If not, blueprints and a means to cut down on the number of drones as they have a huge impact on performance in the later stages.
Overall, I would have loved to expand the cities to eventually connect into each other, but the resource requirements and the toll it took on my PC prevented that from happening. I look forward to what comes next with the title and thanks for your work on this!
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2961368946
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