This game sucks! Or I do... What am I doing wrong?

[wizcreations]

I'm ready to give up and leave my negative review, but I figure I may as well ask for help first.

My 2 biggest gripes in the game are:
1) There is literally no city planning allowed unless you have a huge stockpile of nanites, and even then it's severely limited planning.
2) All the information you want to know is present, but you have to look at several different menus in turn in order to find the one piece of information you want.

Let me elaborate.

1) I want to plan where I am going to put future buildings, but I can't because there is no way to see how big a building will be and there is no way to mark the map with what you want to put where. Mousing over a building in the menu does not tell you how big it is, but it should! And being able to place ghost buildings as a map for future construction would be tremendously helpful

2) I'll give an example on this one. In my Referendum, I am told "it's too crowded where I live." So I press R to open up my resource menu and switch to the population tab. I see that only 50% of my available housing is in use. Clearly there is plenty of space for people to live, so why is it crowded? Then I have to open the housing overlay and look for buildings that are full. I see a section of my city with 2 completely full housing structures. Why is that? (The correct next answer would be to see which structures these people who live in a specific residence work at, but that capability is missing from the game, so instead...) Now I have to open up the commute window and see how far these people are walking to get to work. Then if I want to know how many people are employed in that section of the city, I have to open every single building and count them. Why can't I just see an overlay of how many people are working where? Instead the overlay only shows me job fill priorities and % full. I wish I could just see how much housing I needed in a specific region to understand how many people are needed to fully employ my structures.


Other nitpicks:

I can't figure out what the police bots are doing. People complain about my totalitarian police force and high crime in the same referendum.

First tier scrubber bots are worthless. They can't clean fast enough to stop the spread from one point to the next. Tier 2 can barely keep up.

It's entirely pointless to build higher tier automated buildings unless you are severely limited on space. You get a far better return for nanites by building many of the lower tier.

I see no point in ever interacting with individual citizens or my "security camera" view. Why is this even included?

Building descriptions in general don't provide ample enough information about the building's purpose and use. (For example, the 2x2 storage building doesn't tell you it provides 5000 units of storage, or that it's a 2x2 building.)

Trade contracts constantly ask me to produce resources that provide no benefit to my colony, or ask me to trade my most valuable resources. I'm not going to bog down my mill and chem plant to produce something that gives me ration packs when I could instead produce something actually useful at those structures.

The buildings "ghost" when you try to place a new one, even if you disable this in the settings.

There is no way to see the map grid unless you try to build a specific building that makes it visible.


My summary of my experience thus far:

Aven Colony offers pretty graphics but lackluster play. It's a city builder that impedes your city construction every step of the way. You're not able to plan your layout. You're not told what a building will do until after you build it (and even then it's only a partial description). Information is hidden several layers deep into several different sub menus, making it a time-consuming mess to find out why you're suddenly short on one resource or another. There's a HUGE learning curve before you'd be able to instinctively know the information the game tries to hide from you.

The game is monotonous and shallow with mission objectives like increase your population, build 3 more buildings, build this specific worthless building. You're going to end up building the same colony every time you play with slightly different layout to account for the map. It seems the best strategy is to build a small-ish town that can support 200 people, then fast forward the game until your population is nearing 400. Then you'll have enough population to fully staff most of your buildings--food and power will no longer be an issue thanks to your growth in farmers and power plant workers, and you'll have plenty of nanites (money) to build anything you want since you didn't build anything while in 8x speed.

TLDR: The game is missing highly necessary quality-of-life features to make management enjoyable and it's missing the depth and variety of strategy to make it worthwhile to play again and again.

[Sticky Wicket]

Originally posted by wizcreations:

TLDR: The game is missing highly necessary quality-of-life features to make management enjoyable and it's missing the depth and variety of strategy to make it worthwhile to play again and again.

Indeed +1

Dont expect any necessary improvements however, as the developers have considered this game *finished* for a long time now. What a pity it could have been worth playing of some actual thought had been put into it.

As you succinctly point out pretty graphics has been favoured over in-depth content. I agree with pretty much everything you say.

[LadyAquanine735]

I can help. I was one of the Beta Testers and figured out how a lot of things worked.

Gripe 1: It is actually up to you to plan things out, but you need to know how each building works in relation to the others. Most buildings are gonna need tunnels next to them, save for unmanned buildings, like solar panels, or plasma turrets. Your colonists like to have tunnels (roads/walkways) to use.
Often when I plan a future building spot, I remember how big the tile footprint is. For example, those big apartment towers are 3x3 tiles, so you need to set up a "loop" or "square" of tunnels that creates an open 3x3 square to plunk the building down on later. Big buildings such as the Zorium Plant, the exploration vessel launchpads, and the biggest skyscrapers, are usually 4x4 tiles. The humongous buildings, such as the space elevator and the museums, are usually 5x5, the largest in the game. Most other buildings are 2x2 tiles, or cover a single tile, depending on what it is.

Gripe 2: I always have this problem, but it's not as big a gripe as not having clean air, water/food available. You lose water or food, you're sunk and the population wants to lynch you. One thing I read you can do to help crowded residential towers, (particularly if you already have plenty of space) is to set up a park next door, and replace some of the tunnel with those "park bubbles" as I like to call them. They're basically a section of tunnel (which are in the same menu as the park) with a bit of something pretty in them. On older, more established buildings, I like putting those on the corners.
I know a trick you can use to look at all buildings of the same type :). Let's say you want all greenhouses to be top priority for workers. Click on one, and then press Shift, and it'll highlight all the other greenhouses, and then you can choose what kind of worker priorities you want for all of them. Be mindful of things like inflow of colonists, how many jobs have actually been filled, and other stuff like that, ok? You can do similar stuff with other buildings. Worker priority will determine how quickly the roster for each workplace gets filled up.
Commute is really easy :D. Early on in the game, get started on building hovercar terminals. Try to make sure they are evenly spaced around your colony, so colonists don't have to have homes right next door to work all the time. They can just take a quick walk down the street, get into a hovercar, and fly over to work. It's a particularly great idea for when you have to build extensions to the colony fast, and don't have time for anything but tunnel, construction drones, and a hovercar terminal. (It's a trick I learned in that polar colony, when we landed too far away from fertile land).
There are some buildings you absolutely must have full rosters in, such as mines, nanite factories, and police drones. Farming is also a high priority, as is electricity. But again, be mindful of your current worker pool, your inflow of colonists, and how many jobs have actually been filled already. If you're in the 30-40% range, you need to stop making workplaces and let the colonists come in to fill what you already have.

Gripe 3: The police 'bots fly low over tunnels to see if anyone is attempting to steal. It deters crime, and it's usually best to build Police Drone hubs next to residential areas, the nanite factories, and the farms. Everywhere else is not usually an issue. You can keep an eye on crime by opening the overlay menu, and clicking on that guy with the Hamburglar face. Most of the time, crime occurs in residential areas in your colony, but it's usually due to either too many unemployed colonists, or low food levels. They usually hit the nanite factories next, and then the farms. It's best to get the police drones started soon after initial buildings are set up.
When you first put a scrubber bot hub down, it will show you a circle around it. That's basically the 'bots' range, which is set up so they don't go too far and run out of power before returning to their hub to recharge. It's important that you have these ranges from different drone hubs overlap, so the drones can help each other. I do this all the time with construction drones, and it works similarly with scrubber drones. I also do the range overlap thing with lightning rods and plasma turrets. It sets up a network that can make your drones and lightning rods more effective in your colony. If you want to know the range of current drone hubs, click on them to open their menu, and click on the button "show range." You can also see all their ranges when you plunk down a new scrubber drone hub, so it helps you figure out where the next one should go.

Gripe 4: I often don't use the vanilla trade contracts, because they ask for nanites, and I'm a miser over those, even when they're in ample supply (which doesn't happen often). However, if there are contracts providing food, I'm happy to grow crops or mine minerals that are totally useless to me, but benefits the other colonies. Like say, they're offering pasta in exchange for an alien crop. I'll happily set aside some greenhouses and farms (but not all of them) for that. Even better, when you get the chance to build remote colonies, you can make custom trade contracts with them that benefits you much more. The mining remote station in particular is handy for getting copper, which in turn can get you a good trade contract later. If you want to keep the custom contract, don't forget to tick the "Permanent" box, and make sure you have a trade vessel available to carry out the trade.

By the way, if you're having issues with getting enough nanites, mine more metal nodes and build more nanite factories. That, and make use of "Kelko Sludge" in some of your factories. It never hurts to have alien sludge to supplement your metals. Like I said above, having a remote mining colony provides ample opportunities for getting more metals through trade.

I'll happily answer more questions if you want.

[wizcreations]

Thanks for the lengthy reply! Good to know buildings max out at 5x5. I'd still like to be able to put a marker on the map to mark future builds, but knowing the size of buildings is half the battle. I'm still disappointed by the lack of planning my future layout. Placing tunnels in a grid pattern between every building seems rather silly. I try to build in blocks, then fill the inside so all buildings are accessible somehow.

For #2, the example I gave was just one of many issues with finding info. I have a tremendously difficult time finding the answer to any question I have regarding my current status. Regarding your answer though, do you build hovercar terminals pretty much everywhere they fit? I was only building them near major development areas, and at the outskirts where i don't have houses. I generally don't have an issue with commute.

Police fly around, but how exactly do they reduce crime? And why is my police force totalitarian and crime so high?

[LadyAquanine735]

You can hover your cursor over the buildings in the build menu, and they'll tell you what they do, and after you build them, you can click on them, and a menu opens up. If you're still having trouble, ask me what buildings you need help on. I know what each one does :).

Setting up the settlement at the start, in my case, is all about practicality. Like, I will build as little as needed to get to, say, a thermal vent to build a geothermal plant. I'll also try to cover all the bases for food, water, and safety. It takes time, but you eventually can add onto those. Much of the time, you end up building lengths of tunnel with buildings on either side.

You would have to figure out just how far out your little people can go before the commute becomes too much for them. I usually plunk down the first hovercar stations at the nearest work sites, and work my way out from there. The easiest jobs the colonists can walk to, are those right next door, or maybe a little down the street. You can also capitalize on that when building a new home, if you have the room (I love big maps). The hovercar stations are for really remote jobs, like the mineral nodes that are miles away from the settlement, or the farmlands that aren't nearby, etc. They all work together in a network you yourself build.

In the case of police drones, I think they are more deterrents towards anyone thinking of doing a crime. It's kinda like having a big dog in your front yard. Crims would less likely want to break into your home if they see the dog. Same goes for colonists considering committing a crime, and then they see the police drones.

Typically, if some colonist considers you totalitarian, keep in mind it's probably a fringe person who's interpreting what you're doing as extreme. You could only really be called a dictator if you declare martial law, which I usually don't have a need to do most of the time. I also don't do things like ration water, refuse job-switching, things like that. If you're not doing those things, the complaint shouldn't be taken seriously.

Oh by the way, I can teach you a few fun tricks in this game too When you want to put down more than one of the same kind of building (and have the nanites for it), you can press left-Shift, and as long as you're holding it down and have enough nanites, you can put down more than one of some building you want, like solar panels or batteries.

If you have paging buttons on your mouse, you can use them to rotate a new building before setting it down to build.

You can rename buildings (I do it all the time with the Exploration Vessels), and pick up pods from around the big planet map.

The X-button lets you see the planet map, so you can see any enemies heading your way.

You can use that big Transport Vessel to clear out the fog on the big planet map. That way, you can find Points Of Interest, as well as set up outposts later on.

When setting up fans for air quality, build bio-filters on either side of each fan you make, so you can nip the plague spores in the bud, should the plasma turrets not keep them away.

[Big Tex]

I find that much of my colony design, in fact most of it at first, is contingent on the available terrain and the location of the available mineral deposits, geothermal vents, and farmable land. I'm attempting the challenge map Icebound Isle right now on insane level. I'm having to start over for the third time now. And each time my colony begins with essentially the same design as I extend out for the nearby resources. I do have some latitude on placing the residential structures. So it's interesting to see with each restart how I can improve my design.