Shopping balance is terrifyingly bad

[just.dont.do.it]

All shops, starting from grocer and ending with electronics store, consume exactly the same amount of resources for each visit.

Now compare this with production rate of such resources: 2-3 people can grow 50+ food every 4 sols even with barely any farming tech (and much more with giant crops), while 10 people will make about 20 electronics every 4 sols, while consuming rare metals, lots of power, and massively more maintenance (substracting maintenance, it will be less than 20 electronics).

In other words: art store can be plausible in certain cases but still requires a huge amount of workforce just to produce resources needed for it, but god save you if you ever build an electronics store in your colony at any time except the extremely late game.

[Los]

art and electronics store are baby factories.... build them and watch babies pop like bunnies

[just.dont.do.it]

Not really. You can build non-store facilities (casino, bar) for more space but exactly the same effect. And those don't eat resources apart from maintenance.

Stores don't do anything particularly grand.

PS: And you will almost never need a baby boom in your colony, given that there's no birth control. Apart from maybe racing for "80 martianborn" evaluation if you were extremely slow with it early game.

[Los]

one of those stores will keep the average confort on a basic dome well above 70 for me and most of my kids are coming from that one little dome even though i got bigger domes... i've never bothered with the bigger ones but i never built them in the early game either

[just.dont.do.it]

Well, I hope you're okay with having 5-10 people in a factory just producing resources for that shop.

[Los]

lol in the end game theres i got more people than i know what to do with them

[flow]

I feel like the electronics and art stores should eventually reach saturation and heavily slow down in resource demand. There's only so many TVs and paintings you can sell to at most a few hundred people.

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by wanyfer:

lol in the end game theres i got more people than i know what to do with them

So why would you need babies?

[Emmote]

Originally posted by flow:

I feel like the electronics and art stores should eventually reach saturation and heavily slow down in resource demand. There's only so many TVs and paintings you can sell to at most a few hundred people.

Tell that to the people who buy a new iPhone every year. lol.

[just.dont.do.it]

Originally posted by VA gamer:

If you are spending more in maintenance for your elex factory than you are producing in electronics

Good sir,

I'd like to inform you that you just won a gold medal for reading comprehension.

[DVN]

So parks and houses alone are enough to keep the comfort around 40-50?

[just.dont.do.it]

Your starting houses, while being inefficient with space, will allow most of colonists, even the needy ones, to get to 50-ish comfort with minimal support from other facilities (parks + grocers only).

Furthermore, a few techs and breakthough techs will allow you to have 50-ish comfort everywhere just by itself.

As it currently stands, comfort is never really a problem (only sanity is, and only if you play on a map with lots of disasters). Even worse, *high* comfort might be a problem, as it leads to uncontrollable population explosion.

[Trekner]

i once buildt those stores, but only ever once.. when i saw the "price" those stores enacted on my electronics and polymers, i trashed them and have never buildt one since.

[_Patrick Swayze]

Originally posted by DVN:

So parks and houses alone are enough to keep the comfort around 40-50?

Dont forget the strippers.

[DVN]

I noticed that the grocer and diner can eat through the food supply fast though. Without grocers and diners in every dome, I'm feeding a 120+ pop with only one farm.

Not having a grocer but a food storage depot nearby gives a -5 unprepared meal comfort debuff that is usually countered by a well rested +5 comfort buff. So I'd argue you don't even need the grocer.

[flow]

They only really seem usable in a very late late-game that you don't really have any incentive to reach at the moment.

Sure, you could fill the entire map with domes, mines and factories, but at that point you've got no progress left to make, and should have reached a point where you have a massive surplus of food production and infinite water and power anyway.