What is best startup strategy for Mars Colony?

[PawelK198604]

I intially started as SpaceY and as Rocket scientist and even bulid two domes but strugled to get meta and water?

Now i started as Amercan(NASA?) and astrogeologist had metal and water but problem with cement and only 3 rockets :-(

[ancienthighway]

Pay attention to what tile you select to land at when starting a game.

You don't have to land your first rocket immediately. If you don't like the suggested starting spot, just run some scans from space and see if you can find something better. Use probes if you have the startup money for them (I always skip them).

Always bring an RC Transport with the first rocket. As you scan more tiles, surface metal will be revealed and the Transport can go get it for you.

Speaking of that first rocket, bring a prefab drone hub, moisture vaporator, and fuel refinery, an RC Transport, as close to 30 each machine parts, polymers, and electronics as you can get. Then fill up any empty space with drones.

Don't build a dome until you have an in ground water source.

In ground metals and water do you no good until you have a dome. Water isn't needed early unless you want to simply extract it into storage tanks. The vaporator will supply water for fuel production.

Land that first rocket near concrete deposits. The more the better. Set up one extractor, the vaporator, refinery, sensor tower, and drone hub. One solar panel per building, plus one to recharge the transport. Turn off the night cycle on everything. Build 1 solar panel once you have some concrete, it will power the sensor tower and drone hub at night. When the extractor has no deposits, destroy it and build another. Again and again until you find water or run out of deposits worth extracting.

[Kazeck]

If you don't find ground water then it's totally fine to use a water vaporator, 2 of them can supply a basic dome and it's agriculture, possibly 3 or 2 upgraded, indefinitely with the addition of a watertank. If you have a mid to high cold wave rating in the region then use 1 additional moisture vaporator and build a subsurface heater that covers them and the dome to reduce power consumption, deactivate it when not needed, but when needed it will actually provide a net power savings in 99% of cases, remember to adjust it's effective radius by clicking on it then the bar in the info panel.

I'd bring 3-4 probes, and scan either the area around the first tile, or a flat open space and look for 1-2 concrete sources and a metal source. Preferably you want a rare metals and a standard metal close enough by for one dome to work. Concrete can come from further away though no more than 1-2 tiles.

Which brings me to my next point, I'd play Inventor if you're having this much trouble for one key reason, autonomous drone hubs. Auto-Hubs means no more electronics drain from repairs, but more importantly no need to power the hubs, you can bring 3-4 hubs in your first rocket and deploy a broad area of logistical coverage able to gather local metal and possibly polymer, without further cost. Use a universal storage in the coverage range of 2 hubs at once between them in a chain to get them to readily transport goods around, if needed anyway use specific storages if you just want metal or concrete, and bring down an explorer instead of a cargo rover.

You can now search anomolies, get a good science boost, plan out your first dome and harvest a plethora of local resources. Remember to transfer drones from the outer hubs to your central one via the huds +1 or -1 icon for drones when you select the hubs. I recommend only bringing 2-4 drones on the first rocket as each hub will give you 4-6 more.

To make up for not bringing along a stirling or alot of machine parts just build solar panels and 1-2 batteries for the dome and related industry, adding 1 more battery if you have power hungry excavators.

Also remember if you don't have the fuel economy to make use of your extra rockets you can dismantle them for 10 electronics and 20 metal, it's a very poor return ratio of money to materials, but if you're a rocket scientist with 4-5 of the things you might be able to scavenge one during a critical time period to get necessary materials, but with autonomous drone hubs that will rarely happen as you'll have more electronics due to maintenance savings, as well as less early power needs since 3-4 drone hubs is 20 energy less needed day and night as well as less lengthy cabling.

Best of luck to you Pawelk.

[PawelK198604]

Originally posted by ancienthighway:

Pay attention to what tile you select to land at when starting a game.

You don't have to land your first rocket immediately. If you don't like the suggested starting spot, just run some scans from space and see if you can find something better. Use probes if you have the startup money for them (I always skip them).

Always bring an RC Transport with the first rocket. As you scan more tiles, surface metal will be revealed and the Transport can go get it for you.

Speaking of that first rocket, bring a prefab drone hub, moisture vaporator, and fuel refinery, an RC Transport, as close to 30 each machine parts, polymers, and electronics as you can get. Then fill up any empty space with drones.

Don't build a dome until you have an in ground water source.

In ground metals and water do you no good until you have a dome. Water isn't needed early unless you want to simply extract it into storage tanks. The vaporator will supply water for fuel production.

Land that first rocket near concrete deposits. The more the better. Set up one extractor, the vaporator, refinery, sensor tower, and drone hub. One solar panel per building, plus one to recharge the transport. Turn off the night cycle on everything. Build 1 solar panel once you have some concrete, it will power the sensor tower and drone hub at night. When the extractor has no deposits, destroy it and build another. Again and again until you find water or run out of deposits worth extracting.

Originally posted by Sethfcm:

If you don't find ground water then it's totally fine to use a water vaporator, 2 of them can supply a basic dome and it's agriculture, possibly 3 or 2 upgraded, indefinitely with the addition of a watertank. If you have a mid to high cold wave rating in the region then use 1 additional moisture vaporator and build a subsurface heater that covers them and the dome to reduce power consumption, deactivate it when not needed, but when needed it will actually provide a net power savings in 99% of cases, remember to adjust it's effective radius by clicking on it then the bar in the info panel.

I'd bring 3-4 probes, and scan either the area around the first tile, or a flat open space and look for 1-2 concrete sources and a metal source. Preferably you want a rare metals and a standard metal close enough by for one dome to work. Concrete can come from further away though no more than 1-2 tiles.

Which brings me to my next point, I'd play Inventor if you're having this much trouble for one key reason, autonomous drone hubs. Auto-Hubs means no more electronics drain from repairs, but more importantly no need to power the hubs, you can bring 3-4 hubs in your first rocket and deploy a broad area of logistical coverage able to gather local metal and possibly polymer, without further cost. Use a universal storage in the coverage range of 2 hubs at once between them in a chain to get them to readily transport goods around, if needed anyway use specific storages if you just want metal or concrete, and bring down an explorer instead of a cargo rover.

You can now search anomolies, get a good science boost, plan out your first dome and harvest a plethora of local resources. Remember to transfer drones from the outer hubs to your central one via the huds +1 or -1 icon for drones when you select the hubs. I recommend only bringing 2-4 drones on the first rocket as each hub will give you 4-6 more.

To make up for not bringing along a stirling or alot of machine parts just build solar panels and 1-2 batteries for the dome and related industry, adding 1 more battery if you have power hungry excavators.

Also remember if you don't have the fuel economy to make use of your extra rockets you can dismantle them for 10 electronics and 20 metal, it's a very poor return ratio of money to materials, but if you're a rocket scientist with 4-5 of the things you might be able to scavenge one during a critical time period to get necessary materials, but with autonomous drone hubs that will rarely happen as you'll have more electronics due to maintenance savings, as well as less early power needs since 3-4 drone hubs is 20 energy less needed day and night as well as less lengthy cabling.

Best of luck to you Pawelk.

That is the last recent state of play

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Biea8Eiordg

[Kazeck]

Looks nice, you have a pretty long line of pipes and power though which is pretty suboptimal early on especially since a single leak can really mess things up.

Some advice, make sure to put manual cut offs in the pipe network every so often since they cost no extra maintence and can be used to temporarily section off leaking areas. Instead of running very long power cables to a single concrete extractor try placing one large solar panel and a single power cable dot, (a node) It won't have power leaks and the solar panel can keep it running 2/3rds of the time, simply have it set to not run at night and viola concrete still comes pretty consistantly but you don't have the elevated risk of cable shortages, and save some metal it looks like given those cable lengths. Build a storage tank for oxygen and water directly next to the dome and pipe them in, this way if leaks occur up along the line you can shut the valve off and the dome will still survive, as I mentioned be sure to have a subsurface heater to keep the water tank functional.

Anyways it looks alright, so best of luck to you.

[PawelK198604]

Originally posted by Sethfcm:

Looks nice, you have a pretty long line of pipes and power though which is pretty suboptimal early on especially since a single leak can really mess things up.

Some advice, make sure to put manual cut offs in the pipe network every so often since they cost no extra maintence and can be used to temporarily section off leaking areas. Instead of running very long power cables to a single concrete extractor try placing one large solar panel and a single power cable dot, (a node) It won't have power leaks and the solar panel can keep it running 2/3rds of the time, simply have it set to not run at night and viola concrete still comes pretty consistantly but you don't have the elevated risk of cable shortages, and save some metal it looks like given those cable lengths. Build a storage tank for oxygen and water directly next to the dome and pipe them in, this way if leaks occur up along the line you can shut the valve off and the dome will still survive, as I mentioned be sure to have a subsurface heater to keep the water tank functional.

Anyways it looks alright, so best of luck to you.

Yes indeed i had problems wi6th that nasty leaks :-(
And now i proppably lost anyway because i not read the fine print it seems that i needed to scan for 30 anomalies in 30 mars days/sols :-(
I focused on creating more comfy places for my new martians And now it seems i would lost

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTcnSQPyjrY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUpybzTFMMM

Maybe i startover or load earlier save and try to look for those nasty anomalies but how find them ?

[hugofarnzworth]

TL;DR
I presume you have watched some of the youtube let plays. Here is one that is pretty good about tips and tricks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfhFIJb8UmU

I got bored, so I explored alternatives to the builds I saw on youtube.

One of the things I tried was the "no turbines for domes" strategy. You don't get as crunched for machine parts towards the mid game, instead it's metal you go through, but that's available on the surface.

One of the other things I tried was "no ground water" for the domes, i.e., vaperators only. This one is tough. Ground water is finite, but easily and cheaply obtained. Generally, ground water systems are not dependable unless a tunnel is used. You can forget about SpaceY where you need a pop of 200 at 100 sols unless you find and use ground water, with vaperators at this point being too expensive (one could get tech lucky, chaos?). In one of my earlier games, I had this massive full map water system with about 10 tunnels, sourced with 1.5 million units of water. When my pop got to 8k, half the water was gone. Ground water is not sustainable for a colony in the very long run.

Another thing I have tried is to reduce the piping and cabling to a bare minimum with dome service fans. No pipes are longer than 7 hexes. Dome pairs are connected with 14 hex pipes, the only exception. This has worked very well, with maintenance greatly reduced. It requires
a dome centric rather than resource centric approach to planning, but it's not a problem. I have only tried this strategy on fairly benign maps with lots of meteors and cold. It works great in the cold. https://steamcommunity.com/app/464920/discussions/0/1696048426805595080/

[ancienthighway]

Originally posted by PawelK198604:

And now i proppably lost anyway because i not read the fine print it seems that i needed to scan for 30 anomalies in 30 mars days/sols :-(
I focused on creating more comfy places for my new martians And now it seems i would lost

There is no win or lose. Even is you don't complete the evaluation task the game goes on. You just get a lower score and thoughts on how to do it better next time.

[PawelK198604]

Originally posted by Sethfcm:

Looks nice, you have a pretty long line of pipes and power though which is pretty suboptimal early on especially since a single leak can really mess things up.

Some advice, make sure to put manual cut offs in the pipe network every so often since they cost no extra maintence and can be used to temporarily section off leaking areas. Instead of running very long power cables to a single concrete extractor try placing one large solar panel and a single power cable dot, (a node) It won't have power leaks and the solar panel can keep it running 2/3rds of the time, simply have it set to not run at night and viola concrete still comes pretty consistantly but you don't have the elevated risk of cable shortages, and save some metal it looks like given those cable lengths. Build a storage tank for oxygen and water directly next to the dome and pipe them in, this way if leaks occur up along the line you can shut the valve off and the dome will still survive, as I mentioned be sure to have a subsurface heater to keep the water tank functional.

Anyways it looks alright, so best of luck to you.

And what do you think about my new colony?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWOCWZeg850