The Limitations of Aven Colony

[Blackadar]

Aven Colony can be enjoyable. It is bright, colorful and offers some interesting challenges at times. But all of the best building games offer at least one of two things in the end and the very best offer both. However, Aven falls flat on both points.

(1) The enjoyment of looking back at your creation

Aven can be pretty enough to look at and it is nice seeing a space elevator but colonies appear to be a hodgepodge of futuristic but incoherent structures. When looking at my colony I do not get a sense of wonder or awe at the creation of it. The buildings are merely there to exist for function, not form. There is no reason to create a beautiful plaza, a quad of buildings, a downtown shopping district, even a mining/manufacturing area or anything of the sort. I get no feeling of a cohesive development or of the colony becoming a larger whole. Planetbase suffers from the same problem - a collection of disjointed modules that give no sense of a larger, cohesive community.

- and (more importantly in my view) -

(2) A design that requires the player to constantly tweak what they have already done

This is what I believe Aven’s fatal flaw to be. Occasionally a player may be forced to go back and put in an intake fan or upgrade a building but the game never asks a player to go back and reconsider their prior choices. All great building games do this. In SimCity or Skylines, a player is constantly prodded to tinker with their creation for new roads, safety structures and other reasons to make it better. In Anno players have to deal with the supply chains and get to see their inner cities grow and prosper; and there is a reason to rework those core areas to allow more buildings to grow and development. The Impressions games always asked the player to go back and redo city areas for monuments and to improve the routes of the walkers. Even Tropico requires redevelopment as your core city grows. Every single great city building game asks the player to do this.

Not so in Aven. Once an area is stable, there is no further development and additional growth elsewhere has no impact on the rest of the colony. Thus Aven is less of a builder and more of a puzzle game. The challenge is the order in which you put down your structures versus the external environment. While that does not make the game bad, it's design limits the enjoyment to be had.

[Sticky Wicket]

There is truth is this.

[CursedPanther]

Think I can input some more on point no. 1 to explain how and why this is happening.

The farming system of AC depends entirely on a fertility rating system base on the type of product instead of the soil in the region. Apart from those exotic regions where farmable lands are extremely limited and you're forced to put all farming structures at those locations, you can basically put them anywhere that just gives you the highest output. And becuz farms are most likely the structures you put down right after having an iron mine and nanite processor built, they quickly become the core section of your colony with all kinds of different structures surrounding them. For the green regions technically you can relocate them to the outer areas eventually so it kinda gives you something to do in point no. 2, but for the desert-like/arctic regions I guess you're outta luck.

Industrial agriculture could be an ancient concept to these humans of the future due to the environmental destructions entailing, but I just don't see how the soil inside the fully closed off greenhouses isn't heavily repurposed to specifically grow a certain type of plant so that you should be allowed to place the structures anywhere you like. The cost of greenhouses can be raised to balance the fact that they are no longer affected by the fertility rating system of the original soil, which also helps with the situation that no player really bothers with farms from the very beginning. It makes the greenhouse a real step-up structure.

[Sticky Wicket]

The farming system deffo needs to be changed a bit. Its obvious the whole reliance on soil for certain crops thing is a game device as part of the colony challenge, except that it is far too much an artificed one; and one that makes no sense really.

I also think the OP is right about AC as a whole needing much more internal logic and sense of purpose and immersion; it would be nice to see the option to develop+stylise areas so that they had very different identity and character; and have them be able to actually develop and grow in specialist ways. For example maybe a bar has a hawaiian theme..or a dance club becomes the hub of a thriving latin quarter with artists and cafes etc It would also be great to see specialised univerisity-type facilities that focus on certain types of technology and research randomly happening. The introduction of some light rp-style skills for emerging prominent figures; adding such things would make each time you play a map much more unpredictable and varied and make the challenges and aspects slightly different every time. Quite often I sit down to play a map of AC and all-to often end up finding it bland, disapointingly predictable and pointless. It feels like it really ought to be a lot more exciting to play than it actually is.

[MooBurger]

The problem with the first point is that any mechanic that forces you to do this (or point #2 for that matter) turns quickly into a cookie cutter Anno city (where you *have* to do 1 of several certain layouts otherwise you will never be able to achieve 100% building efficiency). Even Anno cities make tweaking hard, because space is super limited and you cannot tweak while maintaining your production chains.

[Eboreus]

There is also some misleading information. Just happened to stumble into a nanite deadlock: Information is that my balance is positive (green numbers next to the total amount of nanites available), but in fact it is negative. I need more nanites than I can produce - which stops me from builing a new nanite factory (never have enough nanites to do so). Well, of course I can tinker a bit like getting the nanite factory full personnel etc. to get a better balance or tear down a building to get it's nanites back, but still. I actually didn't notice the danger of my nanites depot going down, because I just looked at the green numbers and thought that everything is okay. As it is now the increased nanite production depletes my ore depots which is a bad thing because there is no new ore ore landing capsule close. So I should have planned to get to another one much earlier - but I didn't because I seemed to be fine. So, this is "Misleading 201" ...