Do you start over?

[Terminus]

Really upset because I messed up Chapter 2 and now I am faced with reloading after the Chapter 1 or starting over. I'm just wondering how many purists are out there and start completely over or just reload a chapter after a failed attempt?

[voidCaster]

I start over when I hit something I can't deal with and can tell I won't be able to fix, if and when I know that I can make more progress faster by reconfiguring the initial road layouts to accommodate certain buildings in certain places. I have it down to a pretty good science.

I'm fairly annoyed with the devs for not giving me the ability to look at what size a thing will be before I research it, but https://techraptor.net/gaming/guides/ixion-building-guide works fine! Sadly I didn't find it until after the first dozen restarts.

At the end of each chapter (just before the next Vohle Jump) I double-check everything. Resource nodes exploited? Resources collected? Production and distribution working well? All daughter-ships returned to hangar bays? If all is well, I take a hard save and make the next Vohle jump.

I haven't been able to figure out how to turn off Auto-Saves, so during the actual sector-exploitation phase I only take hard saves if I want to experiment with <something> whether it's a POI activity or a building configuration.

If the Hull hits 0 or some other catastrophe that I didn't see coming I try my last hard-save, and if that doesn't work and there are newer AutoSaves then I try those. If it happens again and I still can't figure out the reason, I reload the hard-save from just before the previous jump. When that doesn't work, go back to the top of this post :-)

[MoreEvilSquid]

I make a hard save just before and just after every jump - although In believe you can just "restart chapter"...

Anyway, I wouldn't worry about sub-optimal placements and the like - you've normally got a lot of time on your hands to collect resources and the like, which gives plenty of time to tear buildings down and rebuild them.

AFAIK you always get your resources back by destroying a building, so when a new building is researched that is just one row two big to fit, don't be afraid to demolish most of a sector and rebuild it to fit it in.

The only caveat is to make sure you do this gradually and in stages, and make sure you have enough storage depots in the sector to deal with the materials.

Remember you can always transfer people around if you find yourself low on accommodation or food in a sector. Actually as long as the people aren't starving, you can transfer them - so it's actually possible to continuously transfer people around the station for a while if your food production is crap, until they get to the starving point (and at that point you'll still likely have non-starving people in the sector, so you can transfer those people so the starving people get some food).

[Terminus]

Thanks! I had a couple of events happen which lowered my stability and trust and I am not able to build the monuments in time to prevent losing. I will probably just reload the chapter rather than start over since I already spent several hours on Chapter 1.

[Amanoob105]

Yes, but also not quite.

I'm also one that makes heavy use of manual saves, so I also saved before each jump in case I messed up. Which I did. At least twice.

However on my first run there came a point in the third system where reloading the prejump save wasn't going to cut it and I just had to accept that a lot of other far smaller mistakes had been building up for a while now, mostly in layout planning.
So it was just easier to start over from scratch, lessons learned and ready to do better next time.

*Edit*
Oh, before I forget, there's a pair of things that can help make the game go smoother.
This one is a godsend to trying to plan out your sectors.
https://ixion.info/

And this one contains a whole load of information on how Sector Specialisations work that just isn't largely available in game.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2904770584

[Terminus]

Thanks! This is all really helpful advice.

[Vitlöksbjörn]

I literally just beat the game on "intended" difficulty and I never started over, and I loaded the game once (autosave) because my ships flew into a cloud of death cuz I moved the station.

I believe the game keeps ramping up the challenge, but it also keeps giving you more and more powerful weapons to fight back. Still, there were moments where everything was really bleak and I survived by the skin of my teeth - especially the very final section, oh boy.

But that's why it was so engaging and fun for me! Felt like a real story, where mistakes have consequences, so I'd better plan far ahead.

[voidCaster]

Originally posted by Vitlök:

But that's why it was so engaging and fun for me! Felt like a real story, where mistakes have consequences, so I'd better plan far ahead.

This is what I was expecting as the bare minimum when I bought Ixion, because of its "genre" tags.

I have complained before about the inability to plan leading the OCD demographic to restart frequently.