Maintenance and Comfort

[Althis]

I started playing Project Aura again after about maybe two years. Serious congrats on the expanded content, patches and etc. I love this game tons.

I was going along fine in my first run through, and then suddenly everything went to hell. First: even playing low, I got hit by 3 rain storms in a row and everyone was sick. I started to expand rapidly in hopes of following the trees to get medicine or something up. That's when I realized that I was rapidly running out of power, comfort and maintenance.

After this failure, I restarted and am currently playing it cool. I am now about 3 hours in, and I have finished a comfort workshop and a maintenance workshop. The productions are extremely vague, but I believe they will temporarily help me be able to handle expansion. I can't find ANY documentation saying anything, so it is a risk.

On the other hand, I can't expand anymore without having to destroy my existing infrastructure to have maintenance/comfort points (lest I deal with everything going to hell). In desperate hopes of getting more maintenance, I got maintenance drones, but despite the building having a drone on it, I apparently have no drones.

What do I do right? What did I do wrong? I have been sitting on my hands for almost 30 minutes with the game on fastest, waiting for an invention doc to come up from my research labs so I can get something. Until then, what's the point? I love the systems in place, but I feel like there is an unnecessary grind factor in the production lines, especially where chance is involved.

Also: I believe the Official Wiki is out of date. It says that portals and maintenance buildings are a part of the regular building blueprints.

Double also: upgrading your colony size to level 2 appears to give more maintenance production, but I can not attest to this because getting to that is going to be a huge risk. The chance of getting invention docs is NOT going in my favor, and I can not play it safe any longer.

EDIT: Update
I got the workshops to produce -- using one guy switching back and forth -- a maintenance and comfort toolkit. I left click to use and the game says "....Toolkit doesn't have any charge". You have to charge it like a battery before using, which means I have to spend more time sitting on my hands.

[Nexcentric Games]

Hi Althis, you are right, we need to update help/wiki. It is something in the todo list and will be addressed ASAP.

Meanwhile I hope you find this useful:

Maintenance and Comfort are explained here:
http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Colony_Maintenance%26Comfort
Kits are charged when you have a surplus, so instead of losing it, if you have a kit it will be stored there.

For the drone, to produce its bonus, you need to put it to patroll:
(Go to govern panel/drones and click on the maintenance drone).
http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Colony_Drones

Drones basically have 3 posible states:
1. Inactive
2. Patrolling
3. On Mission (when you assign a given task, like to examine an outside climate threat)

*Note the amount of drones of a type is limited to your drone tech and the total flight paths in use is limited by your colony level.

I got hit by 3 rain storms in a row and everyone was sick.

We are releasing a new patch in the coming days with a bit of extra balance applied.

Thank you for your feedback ;)

[Althis]

Thanks for the reply. I will have to follow out the link and see what it says.

On the other hand, I really feel like my hands are tied most of this game. I am at the whim of random chance for invention doc spawn, and the rate of that has been low. As my friend asked "why not just leave the game running overnight so you can actually do something?" I'm working at a steady pace, but even on the fastest setting, I spend a lot of time between cycles just waiting.

[Nexcentric Games]

Originally posted by Althis:

I'm working at a steady pace, but even on the fastest setting, I spend a lot of time between cycles just waiting.

Recently we reduced -a lot- the research/innovation points generation and, on the other hand, an Innovation bonus was added (it applies a multiplier depending on the amount of time that happened after your colony leveled up).
For the next patch, we have plans to make this bonus relevant also to your chance to produce Invention Docs while researching. *Any suggestion is welcome.

[Althis]

I started trying to get corporation support, but I learned quickly that having more than one corporate headquarters causes weird interactions-- so, trying to get mutiple core colored core docs makes other corporations hate you more? Why?

I feel like I am being punished at every turn when trying to expand. You are forced to use all of the tech trees to some degree (unless I am doing something wrong?) but it is really hard to actually maintain it. Maintenaince forces you to choose certain buildings, power forced you to choose certain places and comfort hard caps your population limit. I thought the balancing act was figuring out how to Tetris all of my buildings on the platforms!

Once I build the other corporation headquarters thing, the game started to glitch out: a lot of message boxes went away.

[Nexcentric Games]

Diplomacy help is updated:
http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Colony_Diplomacy

the game started to glitch out

It is a known issue we are working on, an engine memory leak. The current solution is to restart the game.

Again thanks for feedback ;)

[Althis]

Thank you for listening, seriously. As a fan, it makes a huge difference.

[tabla_redonda]

Originally posted by Althis:

I started trying to get corporation support, but I learned quickly that having more than one corporate headquarters causes weird interactions

Be careful to not start too early with rival corps in your colony. later you may build monuments (requiring electrum) that will help you on this.

This pic ilustrates corps relation:
http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Colony_Diplomacy#Relationships_Among_Corps

So try to start with 2 not-rival ones.

[Althis]

Is there a point to the market anymore? I have found that there is nothing worth buying and I don't even bother with it. Why have the capacity to sell/buy when there is nothing noteworthy to sell/buy?

As for comments:
1) make comfort and maintenance more accessible. From what I can tell, to get more comfort, you need:
- a zeppelin
- ship factory, and I don't even know how many materials
- ships to get comfort materials
- an assembly tunnel, which is a huge feat
This takes forever. In the meantime, I can't do anything because I can't get more comfort.
Maintenance is gotten through the drone, but you have to build a ship factory.

2) to raise morale, you build better residental, or more food options. One is the industrial kitchen was too expensive for me to build at the moment I looked and logically thought that all I had was water and seaweed. There are cooking options here.
The alternative was bio dome (through the Eco Corp). I got it up, but found out that I needed to get green invention docs to get seeds, or burn my influence to get pineapple, which I couldn't recover seeds from because I needed green core invention docs. Blocked again.

3) metal sorting: if you don't have the invention docs to get straight metal pull from the water, you have to wait for sorting, for a low low chance to get metal. However, the advanced factories take huge quantities of these rare metals... I can't afford a ship factory to make better ships.

4) Influence: you can't earn it, you have to make it. But building corps makes other mad at you, and if you can't outproduce influence, you will inevitably get negative reprocussions. The style parks are right out because they are negligable influence production and are excessively costly.

5) like comfort and maintenance, getting energy amplifiers can be hard because the tree is inaccessible and convoluted. You run out of energy production way before you can even get amplifiers/batteries of any quality. The tidal towers are vaguely useless because their production to return value is low.

I don't know what all of that is intentional, and what all is just "waiting for feedback". Either way, I am going to play this game and enjoy it. The art is beautiful and the management is wonderful. There is so much colony to expand into and so much to make, but I feel like I am waiting behind a chance drop grind wall to go anywhere.

[Althis]

Originally posted by tabla_redonda:

Originally posted by Althis:

I started trying to get corporation support, but I learned quickly that having more than one corporate headquarters causes weird interactions

Be careful to not start too early with rival corps in your colony. later you may build monuments (requiring electrum) that will help you on this.

I can't produce electrum yet. I needed to get the Eco for food and morale, but also Neo Industrials so I could get better energy output.

[tabla_redonda]

Originally posted by Althis:

Is there a point to the market anymore? I have found that there is nothing worth buying and I don't even bother with it. Why have the capacity to sell/buy when there is nothing noteworthy to sell/buy?

http://en-wiki.projectaura.com/Market#Available_Items
Depending on your affinity selection you may find extra interesting ones. Note also, once you raise a friendly relation with a Corp it will sell you security boxes.

This takes forever. In the meantime, I can't do anything because I can't get more comfort.
Maintenance is gotten through the drone, but you have to build a ship factory.

The initial packings combined with market + your strategy can be a great boost. It is not a good idea going for plenty of buildings and colonists on start, you need to grow carefully. A colony with 20 colonists with an average 100 morale produces the same wasting 1/2 than another with 40 colonists with an average of 50.

*BTW, you can purchase Alpha ships in the (VR) market.

2 and 5

I would go for food variety on start. Cosmos will sell you a finished product (orange juice). If you went with conservatives you can pick seaworms also for food. If you are going to farm early, you may ignore the industrial corp and focus on low energy consumption. *If you develop tidal tower tech can be very good on early for energy generation.
*Entertainment/Vestiges (you can see it in the knowledge tech panel) is also a must for the morale.

Placing properly your buildings and managing energy is also important, you know you can setup the amount of energy going to your platforms for production boost?

4

Quests may bring an extra way to gain influence/rep.

BTW, Supercomputer infra (from the Cosmos) will help you on invention docs production as well.

[Craig Smith (or family member)]

I have to say. I also am finding the new system too hard with not enough small scale improvements you can make to buildings,I Think we need as i suggested items to add to residence buildings for early morale and comfort. just like adding a ship to a hangar, you could add a furniture pack or a basic / medium / advanced comfort pack made by an artisan in the assembler to a residence to help with this and maybe a maintenance pack to lower building costs just a little tiny bit to help get from tech 2 to 3 without the inevitable feeling the walls are about to come crashing down around you befor you get to where your going.

[Althis]

I like this idea. I haven't a chance to play again and try out the recommendations posted above.

[Craig Smith (or family member)]

I'm sure PQG (pixel quality games) is working on this issue, comfort has always been a difficult as you need a alpha ship finding comfort items and a zepplin to convert the comfort items into comfort points, maintenance points have only recently become a problem after PQG turned the auxiluary workshops to requiring a core research doc rarther than a regular one. made the game much harder as just as your getting your zepplin sorted you realise the colonists are getting sick and need medicines and hospitals and theres no short cuts there either. like i say you really feel like the walls are falling around you.

[Althis]

My problem is that it happened to me in the span of five minutes. I went from alright to losing within the time it took to upgrade my colony once. It was a slap in the face because I thought I had things under control.

[tabla_redonda]

Originally posted by Craig Smith:

comfort has always been a difficult as you need a alpha ship finding comfort items and a zepplin to convert the comfort items into comfort points, maintenance points have only recently become a problem after PQG turned the auxiluary workshops to requiring a core research doc

It is curious that previously zeppelin was requiring the core tech and not the aux workshops. If you go industrial you learn this tech from start, so it sounds like a move to give this advantage to players choosing industrial affinity.
Something to check here could be to start early with a workshop (for the toolkits to store your surplus on what you foresee will lack). I guess with packings + market could be doable so you don't waste all that maint/comfort on start.

Leveling up can be the solution to your problems. It will grant you an extra 25 maintenance and comfort daily, and what you lose is a global 1 morale.
So, getting a way to find an extra food source (to counter that -1 morale): market or worms if you are conservative, seeding if you are eco...

Originally posted by Althis:

My problem is that it happened to me in the span of five minutes. I went from alright to losing within the time it took to upgrade my colony once. It was a slap in the face because I thought I had things under control.

Doing the campaign is a great guide for the startup, but there are other ways ofc. It is a matter to keep an eye on your population stats.