Amount of resourses

[hivooha]

I'm enjoying the game so far, but there should be an option to make resourses to last longer, i've seen dev say that he wants the game to not be about micromanaging everything, but since cities cannot produces enough metal waste to sustain themselves (it makes sense), you have to continue extracting resourses from the planet. And every 20 or so minutes i have to go to another patch of iron/sulfur and delete every empty extractor one by one and add more storage instead so resourses from new extractors can actually get to factories. Here's my suggestions:
1. Allow players to choose the amount of resourses each vein has (normal/plentiful/infinite)
2. Make a tool for mass planting and mass deleting of extractors, factories etc.
3. Make so that cities are able to go self suficient

[Flaske]

yes, agree. what makes it worse is the city will consume resources when it's not growing too. meaning that if the city isn't 100% supplied, or waste management isn't at 100%, you are still eating up resources.

So it becomes very frustrating trying to keep everything constantly at 100%, or else you'll be wasting resources.

My suggestion to the dev would be: Consider making it so that consumable resources (like iron, sulfur etc) should be used ONLY when the city builds new buildings, ie expands.

Renewable resources should be consumed all the time.

It's fine to lose resources if the city is flooded, or shrinking somehow. But losing them when just idle makes things pretty stressful, for me at least.

[Gaddy Games]

a mineral patch of 450 lats 2.5 hours at normal speed. Fast speed is the issue usually

But an option for world generation mineral quantity is planend

Cities *are* self sufficient in end game (in mid game you still need some sulfur) with the recycling, with the recycling, but you need minreals to make them grow.
And all this recycling make the depletion of normal resource needed, to give a real purpose to recycling

[Ketamarine]

Originally posted by Gaddy Games:

a mineral patch of 450 lats 2.5 hours at normal speed. Fast speed is the issue usually

But an option for world generation mineral quantity is planend

Cities *are* self sufficient in end game (in mid game you still need some sulfur) with the recycling, with the recycling, but you need minreals to make them grow.
And all this recycling make the depletion of normal resource needed, to give a real purpose to recycling

Your first comment completely misses the point.

The veins deplete far too fast for the tastes of most players. And everyone is going to play the game on 2x-3x speed.

I played for maybe 90 minutes today and had to rip up multiple mines and rebuild them... and it's just not FUN or engaging gameplay.

I have thousands of hours in games like factorio and openTTD and they both handle this issue WAY better than your game. If you are trying to make a game about logistics like ttd, then just make the patches smaller and infinite. If you are trying for a full automation game, then you need to have blueprints to let us quickly place down new mines.

The current system breaks the cardinal rule of gaming: Don't bore your audience. And hand building and tearing down 50 mines is BORING AF, Too many other, better and complete games out there to waste my time doing that...

[Buntkreuz]

The classical solution to this is a deep vein/deep drill/ deep mine tech you can use that generates infinite resources.

I think the problem is, that cities just eat up resources without providing something you can use.
The game is a solid basis, but it lacks some things that could solve this.
One example would be some techs you can unlock that could deal with resource generation, with resource consumption, with city growth etc.
Other automation games like Factorio have mod or tech sockets for their machines (see Satisfactory for example) to change the behaviour.
I think this could work here as well, but on a global scale (you dont socket tech modules into single machines but you select them to function globally).
So for example when i have unlocked the tech module "deep drilling", my extractors generate one extra resource for every resource extracted.
So i extract one sulfur, i get one additional for free.


Researching such modules could work dynamically (you select which ones you want to research) to get a bit off the current linearity in progression.


So in theory my suggestion is:
1.) Cities eat resources, they could provide tech points in return, that you can use to create new tech modules.
You have a menu where you can socket one or two such modules for each building category (extraction, production, transportation, ecosystem/terraforming).
The socketed modules work globally for the respective category.

2.) You can spend research points also as some sort of currency to purchase resources at a space port.

3.) You can establish transportation routes between planets.

[Bomoo]

Originally posted by Ketamarine:

Your first comment completely misses the point.

The veins deplete far too fast for the tastes of most players. And everyone is going to play the game on 2x-3x speed.

Speedrunning how to get your opinion disregarded: pretend like you're speaking for the entire audience.

[Bomoo]

Originally posted by Zero Fox Given:

The classical solution to this is a deep vein/deep drill/ deep mine tech you can use that generates infinite resources.

If I'm not mistaken dev did say he'd be looking into that down the road. You're right, it's probably the most obvious solution to the issue of finite resources.

[Ismène]

The main issue I'm seeing with finite resources is that a particularly slow or bad player can, eventually, put themselves into an unwinnable state, where their cities aren't yet self sufficient but all relevant resources have been exhausted.

It also just seems at odds with the game otherwise focusing on logistics.

[Ketamarine]

Originally posted by Ismene:

The main issue I'm seeing with finite resources is that a particularly slow or bad player can, eventually, put themselves into an unwinnable state, where their cities aren't yet self sufficient but all relevant resources have been exhausted.

It also just seems at odds with the game otherwise focusing on logistics.

agree 100%

Even a decent player, if you are focusing on a different city, then come back and your original city is failing because it switched over to a new resource required. Which in of itself is a TERRIBLE mechanic. Like just copy Anno with the different tiers of requirements and balance resource deposits and crafting costs appropriately.

I feel like this dev team hasn't played the games they are competing with. Meaning they have no idea what best practices are in other games. Especially factorio, Anno 1800 and OpenTTD. This game could use a LOT of features in those games.

Specifically:
All of the route manager UI from openTTD or even factorio.
Entire blueprint system from factorio.
City leveling system from Anno.

Since all of these systems exist, it's silly to just pick some half-assed version of one of them (TTD I guess for the cities??, except TTD never stops accepting anything) and just run with it...

[MrFailSauce]

Originally posted by Gaddy Games:

a mineral patch of 450 lats 2.5 hours at normal speed. Fast speed is the issue usually

But an option for world generation mineral quantity is planend

Cities *are* self sufficient in end game (in mid game you still need some sulfur) with the recycling, with the recycling, but you need minreals to make them grow.
And all this recycling make the depletion of normal resource needed, to give a real purpose to recycling

You could always just use fewer patches with higher stack count. That way the total count of resources would stay constant and recycling would be equally valuable, but the micromanagement would be less

[The_Mess]

A new tier of resources will probably solve it for most of us.

Anyhow, as long as you're only focused on 1 or 2 cities, once you've got trains it seems there's plenty of resources. Though the fact that metal waste can disappear if you're not meeting 2/3 needs is a bit annoying. Should be produced as standard once the city is above each tier size.

[Le'Stranger Wuv'Bottom]

Quick depletion of resource nodes is what is keeping me from playing this for dozens of hours.

[Retroficient]

I would personally love options to set richness of veins. In fact, a whole option system like Factorio would be amazing.

But yeah, Mineral Richness options would hands down be a most welcome addition to the game.

[spuriousmonkey]

I am doing the second play through (not counting the demo) and now I adjust my factories for the fact that basic resources will deplete. A concrete factory is not going in the same location as the sulfur source. A reinforced concrete factory is not going to be in the same location as as a concrete factory. They will be independent entities.

By the time resources start to deplete in any significant manner I have trains researched and just switch the train origin to another sulfur patch for the concrete factory. There will be trains from the concrete and steel factory to the reinforced steel factory. etc.

Factorio has the same mechanics really, here also your ore patches will deplete, except that the patches get richer the further you go from your starting point in factorio.

Once the city doesn't need reinforced concrete any longer I redirect the trains to another city. Once reinforced concrete isn't needed at all any longer I just change the function of the unloading train station to something the city does need.

Different problems require different solutions.

And to reach 1 million population you only need a fraction of the ore patches that exist. Is there really a point into making richer deposits if you only need a fraction of the existing ones. Train tracks are super easy and quick to lay down. (unlike in Factorio). Distance is not really a huge issue. You just put more trains on the track to compensate for distance.

The deposits might need to be adjusted if the game ever starts having more than 3 cities. But in that case there might be solutions coming from the tech tree.

So I don't really get the 'depletion' issue. Depleting is a logistical problem you need to deal with in the early game and it becomes less of an issue to the longer you play. To me it is actually part of the appeal. How to solve the the logistical problem of depletion.

I play mostly on 2x speed.

[opie]

I don't have a problem with the time it takes to maintain mines. Once you have a few hundred extractors, you can just paint an entire fresh patch with extractors and dot the outside with depot 2s. As you eat away at the mineral patch, replace some of the extractors on the depleted, peripheral patches with depots so that the minerals keep flying outwards. If it's a really big patch I will put some truck depots at the back of the mine to shuttle the minerals to the rail loading depots. When the mine is totally depleted you can just mass delete everything.

What would be nice is if an extractor changed color once the patch underneath it was depleted so you could quickly see where you need to put a depot.

[Exlium]

My advice is to pause if you have extractors that aren't placed, build up first as much as you can and then resume. If you just let it blow by years without doing anything meaningful of course it's going to have some sort of repercussion. If you utilize the pause feature occasionally, you can still enjoy 3x speed so you aren't waiting around for more factories/tracks/extractors or whatever you are trying to do. Maybe my opinion will change after I finish the game but so far I haven't run into any issues.