Does this game avoid the pitfalls of Per Aspera?

[Shrinkshooter]

Sorry if this sounds like a loaded question, I literally have no idea of how the game plays. Just looking for some input from people who have played a bit. The reviews seem pretty optimistic so that's a good sign.

Per Aspera looked thematically a lot like what I see in this game, but had a couple really dumb design decisions that practically ruined it. Interested in hearing others' reception of how this plays and what keeps it so engaging to them.

[akarnokd]

I haven't played Per Aspera because of the negatives on the reviews. I.e., finding new deposits all the time, drone pathfinding issues, tone shift to tower defense & combat, death spirals.

Plan B doesn't have these problems. No combat, no death spirals, you specify the transport routes. One consideration is that resources deplete by default so you'll have to move extraction along the fields and to other fields.

[MadElks]

I like the fact there are no hazards, it's pretty chill from that perspective. The puzzle is in where the resources are, what the game needs and how you meet those needs.

[Hausser]

It would help a bit if you told us what you didnt like about Per Aspera.

[The_Mess]

Wait, Per Aspera shifts to tower defence? Ugh, then again, they do have hyper-tubes, which is a bit of warning sign the dev's aren't good at the whole thinking thing.

Anyhow - Plan B's a chill version of factorio mixed with a terraformer, it's pretty straight forward and mostly easy to grasp and your only challenges are logistics and the impact of terraforming on your builds. Since we can't currently see where rivers, lakes and oceans will form... Though from now on I'll be avoiding the big basins since from orbital view you can see where the low points may possibly be.

[Avantgarde]

You can also look at the terrain height in the bottom left corner. The lowest points are around 100m and sea level will be a little bit over 200m at the end.

So if you are building anything in that range it will eventually be underwater.

[lnomsim]

Originally posted by Shrinkshooter:

Sorry if this sounds like a loaded question, I literally have no idea of how the game plays. Just looking for some input from people who have played a bit. The reviews seem pretty optimistic so that's a good sign.

Per Aspera looked thematically a lot like what I see in this game, but had a couple really dumb design decisions that practically ruined it. Interested in hearing others' reception of how this plays and what keeps it so engaging to them.

Moist of the "dumb designs" in Per Aspera have been addressed since a long time (no water sparsity, able to build on water, able to make food without chemicals, etc...)

On the other hand, it seems that right now, water is as much as an issue in Plan B as it was in Per Aspera at its beginning.

[Regumika]

A lot of people get "bad design" and "broken feature" mixed up. Most of the "complaints" of Plan B I think are mostly bugs and unfinished mechanics rather than bad design. For example, water (height table) generation and city generation parameters would probably be adjusted later so cities would always be at least X tiles away from water sources. Dams not working is most likely a bug. I mean, who designs dams to not work at all?

Considering this is early access, I'm going to skip things that are based on balance (recipes too cheap or too expensive, production time, etc.) or features being fleshed out (like train removal order, empty first vs last added).

I think so far the only "bad" design I see is the fact that supply depots have to touch an existing city block. This leads to destruction and repositioning later, or preplan depots but having to wait for the city to grow into the depots.

[Buntkreuz]

Originally posted by akarnokd:

I haven't played Per Aspera because of the negatives on the reviews. I.e., finding new deposits all the time, drone pathfinding issues, tone shift to tower defense & combat, death spirals.

Plan B doesn't have these problems. No combat, no death spirals, you specify the transport routes. One consideration is that resources deplete by default so you'll have to move extraction along the fields and to other fields.

Since resources are finite and cities just consume them int oa void of no return, there certainly IS a deathspiral.
If you dont advance efficiently and fast enough, you enter a deathspiral where you wont have enough resources left over to grow cities to a state where they become sufficient.

Per Aspera is fine and actually Plan B has a hard time to get on its level.
Sure, Per Aspera has a few problems like the drone pathfinding and the shift to combat in the story (which i actually liked a lot as i despise production games that have no actual goal or systems to make use of what i produce. Automation games about hoarding resources are boring af).
But the production, the researching, the terraforming etc are all vastly ahead of Plan B.
Thats fine, Plan B is just starting out.
But if you purpose was to find a better game, you better get back to Per Aspera.

[Lucid]

Yeah I took advantage of the exploit in Per Aspera of dropping new landers in unexplored territory, which guaranteed new deposits so they wouldn't be stranded. That was largely how I avoided the death spiral. But the logistics in that game were a real headache, and not in a good way. Plan B gives you a lot more control in how to get materials across the map. The challenges are much more fun to solve, but there are fewer of them at the moment as it has just hit early access.

I believe you will eventually run out of sulfur at the moment in Plan B, but you have loads of time to advance to the end game before that happens. I barely mined out the large deposits near my cities and there were tons of alternate deposits I could have expanded to to continue supply.