Is this game overwhelming for new comers?

[Shampoo]

From what I had gathered here and there, this game seems to be highly technical that may be beyond my mental capacity...

I love games like Cities Skyline, and Banished, but those games are relatively straight forward that I could just jump into the sand box and learn from there...

I am wondering should I buy this game...

[Humanyoyo]

Im a relatively simple guy, and ive played city skylines, and ide say Oxygen not included is a little harder than city skylines, but im really enjoying it. The most difficult part is the plumbing and vents, but a few google searches or questions in a forum can usually fix ignorance, although right now the plumbing is super confusing to me. If you don't want to have to micromanage detals of life, this game isn't for you.

[Cradive]

it has a steep learning curve, especially after every update. But once you get past that it overall fun to build and solve the need of your colonies.

[Snipah Shot]

I think everyone should buy the game. The game is not easy, that is for sure. I've been playing it for some time already and I've noticed that some words can be quite a bit harder and it takes time to know when one is such.

For example, my current world has its clean water deposites above my base which made the start a bit harder, as opposed to below the base.
The new update also made the game a bit harder, at least at the first go at it. Took me some time to realize I can move dupes between jobs without them losing previous job experience. It made me stuck a bit early when I was looking for a good dupe to get to make a miner (As you can't go through certain minerals without it).

[nigel57m]

Starting out my colonys became "screwed" pretty early 15-20 cycles. Im doing ok at 150 cycles and was getting frustrated at the jobs not getting done. Needed to train More miners and more miners. Also I have a lot of food but if the work is to far away the dupes will in some cases starve before eating food thats in the fridge. frustrating. The games not that technical but you need to understand what the environmental conditions are and how they change over time. ie. Heat, Germs. If you water is located high up use gravity to bring it down where its more convenient or use a pump.

[Gorlos]

Originally posted by Shampoo:

From what I had gathered here and there, this game seems to be highly technical that may be beyond my mental capacity...

I love games like Cities Skyline, and Banished, but those games are relatively straight forward that I could just jump into the sand box and learn from there...

I am wondering should I buy this game...

It's really easy! If you are ok to see your colony die multiple times and willing to restart the game until you learn it.
gg <3

[JustOnePepsi]

It's all about planning and wise resource management.

You can pause the game and there are 3 different speed settings for running the simulation, so you have more than enough time to think about what you want to do next.

There are a lot of technical things, but the game isn't an accurate representation of reality by any means. Water acts like a thick syrup. Gases don't mix. Sand falls straight down in columns like in minecraft. Tiles can be built floating in the air...

Once you have a basic grasp of the main systems at play (gases, liquids, heat, and pressure), it just becomes a process of trying to find ways to make stuff work. There's a pro and con to nearly everything that you try to do. When starting off, it's prety simple. Make algae deoxidizers to generate oxygen. The only real con for this is that you need to power it, and you need a supply of algae. Later on, you'll build electrolyzers, which produce oxygen AND hydrogen in addition to using water. So instead of worrying about algae, you have to worry about water conservation and what you're going to do with the excess hydrogen. Power begins with dupes running on hamster wheels. An upgrade from that is coal generators, which not only require coal, but produce a lot of heat and carbon dioxide.

Basically, everything in this game requires you to think about how exactly you're going to mitigate the cons of using it, while maximizing the efficiency of its benefits.

There are also a crapload of guides floating around. Brothgar is a great youtube channel to watch. Also CrypticFox.

Oh, and one more thing... there's really no "lose" state in this game. If your dupes die, the printer will eventually be ready to spit out another one, and you can try to save your colony. Though the game isn't complete yet, and pretty much all colonies are doomed to fail if they run out of one resource or another (or if you don't manage heat properly, which can be a real pain at the moment).