More Mysteries

[phoamslinger]

Like many others I'm guessing, I'm looking for ways to add another layer of difficulty to the game, beyond just the setup and location.

I hate to say it, but I'm getting a bit bored with SM. I've done all the challenges, played every country/company, done all the mysteries, tried each commander, solved all the achievements, etc. Over 2200 hours of playing (it's still one of my go-to games when I get tired of other games).

But what I'm finding happens is as soon as the Mystery of the game is solved / resolved, the game loses most of its interest to me. I won. Again. I don't have the patience to go the full green planet route. The game just gets boring towards the end when there's no real challenge left and you're just trying to hit that last 100% in Vegetation.

Lately I've made Wonders off limits to myself. You can research them, but you can't build them. I've noticed it makes the game much more interesting for a longer stretch. Playing with "trying to make it harder", I found an interesting bug and sent off a bug report to Paradox Interactive.

But on to my request...

Could one of the mod makers build me a mod please? What would be nice would be a setting in the options for the start up screen that opened up multiple mysteries in the same game: either sequentially so that they potentially could run 200-300 sols, or perhaps more interesting, have them occur at the same time, or overlapping. I think a mod like this would add a significant level of challenge, but I'm not really a programmer type, so I don't know how much work would be involved in coming up with the mod. Or if it would even be do-able.

Thanks

[some moron]

What I'm not hearing is you playing with the difficulty settings I mentioned.

[phoamslinger]

?

You lost me with the non sequitur response.

[some moron]

oh it's not non-sequiter, you just don't understand
you are acting as though you are the first person to encounter this
in my guide i've discussed how to make the game more of a challenge. if you can play a game with the settings i describe (i'm tired of typing them over and over) and still succeed, then i'd say you've played it out. At that point it becomes only a race. With no "revert to saved"s.

sounds as though you are playing on easy settings, and i agree with about every other game, that's not interesting to me either

[priamossz]

if you want a challenge I can suggest what I am doing right now: NO Manufacturing of any advanced resources allowed, cannot sell rare metals either. The objective is to try to make yourself self sustainable with tourism money. I am doing random mystery (So I cannot prep for it) and have all disasters maxed out, no food imports and amateour colonists.

[some moron]

That's harsh. Throw in Long Ride cause that really made me have to plan ahead. And Inflation seems more realistic to me. Maybe even a Low Resources just so you have to keep updating.

[priamossz]

The issue is that tourist money is literally garbage in comparison of what you would need in terms of upkeep for even a relatively small colony ( I am talking about like 1 small and 1 medium dome) so I think that you would die in the short term before you could get to buildings that can save you (sterling gen and the scruber) The tourist already wasting 5 whole days in the colony with long ride they would need like 15 day to get to the colony, stay, and then be back at earth for the next batch. all that for like 100-200m if you invested into the safari. I am thinking of trying out next time, but first I want to see if my current rules are survivable (currently I am in sol 80 ish and have stockpiles, but more because of that planet mission that gives you 2b in the first time and decreases each time).

[some moron]

I applaud your self-imposed rules but I don't care for tourists. I find them very rude. So I allow myself to sell rare but I don't allow sterling nor triboelectric nor mohole since none of those are reality based.
I know sterling is a thing but they are really just batteries and the energy would have to come from somewhere so no, they are not "free energy".

[Hedning]

Originally posted by some moron:

oh it's not non-sequiter, you just don't understand
you are acting as though you are the first person to encounter this
in my guide i've discussed how to make the game more of a challenge. if you can play a game with the settings i describe (i'm tired of typing them over and over) and still succeed, then i'd say you've played it out. At that point it becomes only a race. With no "revert to saved"s.

sounds as though you are playing on easy settings, and i agree with about every other game, that's not interesting to me either

He says he has played over 2000 hours, what makes you think he never tried the difficulty increasing rules? Literally my 3rd regular game was on 1075% (every setting available on hardest). It's a slow start with just 12 colonists, but never really hard. Picking the hardest settings seems like a no-brainer that anyone would try.

[phoamslinger]

yeah, I've done the harder settings, that's not the point.

After I posted this, I saw the Suggestions forum and saw what people were putting in there (including a request very like mine), asking for improvements to the game. But I also noticed that most of the posts there never had even one post in reply, which makes me wonder if anybody reads them. This post has already had more replies than most of the ones in that section of the forums.

I'll try the Tourism angle (although having beaten the tourism-money challenge I suspect it won't be a difficult as it initially sounds).
Long ride I found to be annoying more than anything.
I usually play with Total Chaos.
Again, making all the Wonders off limits to build extends the interest level of the game.

Apparently the "bug" I discovered isn't something they're necessarily going to "fix", so you all can try playing with it if you'd like;

When you play your next game, don't select techs to actively research. Just let the game research the default (cheapest to the left of the screen) and take them as they come. The bug you'll find is that when you do it that way, you'll gradually lose the information / extra choices from your New Technology anomalies.

Mostly I'm looking for other ways to make the game interesting longer, and a way to hard code those into the game (mods and the like). A lot of the mods out there seem to be there more to streamline the game and make it easier, than to up the difficulty.

[phoamslinger]

Some Moron:

I found your guide (or do you have more than one?), although I had to spend some time looking for it: you are not nearly as famous as you seem to think you are. If you're going to reference yourself, when replying to someone's post, you might think about adding a link to your guide.

I need to take some time to read through it all, but it looks like you have some interesting blind spots as to best techniques on stuff. Again, I'll need to read the whole thing. On initial scan, I didn't see a mention of setting higher difficulties.

[priamossz]

by the way if you want to make the tourist challenge harder, try landing in a frozen area. I initially did it and just barelly could not make it work at super early game as meteor shower and dust storm murdered my pathethic energy production and it froze all my water production. I had that heating building (can't remember whats it called) but could not turn it on because of lack of water, even when my ordered supplies arrived :D

[Hedning]

Originally posted by priamossz:

it froze all my water production

If that happens you can turn off your dome, farm and other consumers and let whatever unfrozen vaporator you have supply your subsurface heater just long enough so you can repair your water and get it all started again.