Maintenance breakdown

[djadmoros]

About year 50, I experience a complete breakdown of maintenance drones from which the game won't recover. Annoying and ruining the experience. I had temporarily a shortage of electronic parts, then ramped up the production, but to no avail. This is wrecking my whole time investment, hence a k.o. criterion.

[cswiger]

You can disassemble aerological scanners.

You can load an older autosave and try to recover your current game.

You can accept the loss and start a new game of Per Aspera.
(Likely you will play better the next time 'round. Or you can do something else. :-)

[djadmoros]

Well, I only will accept the loss when I find out what went wrong, but it seems to be the game's logic, not my tactics.

[cswiger]

You can blame Per Aspera's logic if you like, instead of accepting responsibility for keeping critical facilities properly supplied.

That won't help you figure out what went wrong, however.

[djadmoros]

There are two ways to see this. As you kindly posted a logistics introduction elsewhere, I found a statement there which addresses my problem:

»You can and should expect to build at least one drone hub for every 3 other buildings to ensure the smooth flow of resources in the game. Each drone hub can host one, and only one, drone.«

Now you can say: »There it is, you had it coming, just stick to the mechanism, dude!«

But when a system can come to a complete breakdown due to only one single underestimated factor, then my stance is: no real system would be accepted depending on one single factor without redundancy, so why should a game be?

My request of the developers is only that this mess should be recoverable. I'm sure the logistics infrastructure can be handled more implicit, without cluttering my planetary surface to that degree with drone hubs.

[victor.kornov]

FYI, you can prioritize maintenance buildings so they would be serviced by the worker drones first. This way they'd get heir supplies and help you keep afloat but at the expense of the flow of goods for other non-prioritized buildings.

[Fartikus]

I'd just start over and keep a better eye on your storage inventory

[djadmoros]

Maybe I'll give it a try in sandbox mode. As it is, the game is just a big logistics puzzle stampeded every other day by meteorites.

[cswiger]

Yes, this game is an infrastructure/logistics puzzle. Solving it results in a green Mars.

Meteors become less dangerous and then stop entirely as you proceed through the first phase of terraforming and build up sufficient atmosphere. Should take roughly 10 years.

[mreed2]

Originally posted by djadmoros:

There are two ways to see this. As you kindly posted a logistics introduction elsewhere, I found a statement there which addresses my problem:

»You can and should expect to build at least one drone hub for every 3 other buildings to ensure the smooth flow of resources in the game. Each drone hub can host one, and only one, drone.«

Now you can say: »There it is, you had it coming, just stick to the mechanism, dude!«

But when a system can come to a complete breakdown due to only one single underestimated factor, then my stance is: no real system would be accepted depending on one single factor without redundancy, so why should a game be?

My request of the developers is only that this mess should be recoverable. I'm sure the logistics infrastructure can be handled more implicit, without cluttering my planetary surface to that degree with drone hubs.

Actually, the particular problem you've run into isn't fixable by building more drone hubs. Its the only that isn't, actually. :)

The issue is that the sabotage story event that occured a bit before the current crisis damages all of your buildings -- not just the ones shown in the cutscene. And it damages them alot -- as in, 25% for easy, 50% for Normal, and 75% for hard (I'm guessing on the actual numbers). In effect, this crisis is the same as if a meteor hit all of your buildings at the same time.

One maintenance drone can repair one building about 10%, so you need "# of buildings" * 5 (for normal difficulty) maintenance drones to resolve the crisis. And, of course, normal tick damage continues during this time, so you actually need more than that. Under normal circumstances you need 1 maintenance drone / building / Sol (at a guess), so this represents a 1000x increase in demand.

A uber-logistics network is of minimal value here -- honestly, it might even be a disadvantage, because you still have to replacing worker drones, and worker drone production consumes plastics and electronics, which you need to construct maintenance drones. The fix is:

1. Turn all of your buildings off, then turn back on maintenance hubs, chemical mines, plastics factories, and electronics factories. In particular, turn off all incomplete construction, and all spaceports (except for the "Ferry new colonists from Earth" mission).
   
2. If necessary, deconstruct scanners -- they contain 6 electronics each, and electronics tends to be the pacing item in new maintenance drone construction.
   
3. Consider building new electronics factories -- but only if the existing factories are working at 100%.
   
4. Don't forget plastics (the other component required for maintenance drone production) -- you'll likely have tons of plastics stockpiled, but you can run out, and you likely only have one or two plastics factories (as you don't need very much outside of this crisis).
   
5. Wait until your maintenance drone population starts going up (this is shown on the main HUD, in the lower left).
   
6. Cautiously restart worker drone production -- you'll need loads of worker drones, and this will cause your maintenance drone production to stall, so you need to strike a balance between keeping enough worker drones to keep logistics functioning yet still produce a net gain of maintenance drones.
   
7. Once you are back to 100% worker drone population and 50% maintenance drones, you can restart other production.

If you restart (or revert to an earlier save), stockpiling electronics can help significantly -- still, it is possible to navigate this crisis blind -- just start deconstructing buildings that cost lots of electronics (scanners, spaceports, and hyperloops, for example) until you get things under control.

The root cause of this issue is that the game provides insufficient feedback to the player as to the nature and magnitude of the crisis. Generally, you don't realize that there is a problem until the red wrenches (indicating a building with only 10% durability remaining) start appearing, and its really hard to recover at that point.

This is magnified by the fact that the game has conditioned players to assume that issues are caused by logistics issues (not enough drone hubs), but in this case the issue is, most commonly, inadequate supply of materials (electronics). Thus, players tend to build more worker hubs to fix the issue which requires the production of more worker drones, which requires electronics, and since the worker drone factories tend to be prioritized...

To the developers credit, they've partially addressed this by adding the blue wrench icon (building under repair) so that you'll see a sea of blue wrenches appear immediately after the crisis. But a building that is "in queue" for repair doesn't get an icon, so once the blue icons disappear (because you've run out of maintenance drones)... Everything looks OK, but it really isn't.

[mikeydsc]

Click on the parts icon to open up its panel. In the upper left top corner open that up arrow. Balance your parts made to certain drone types. I had to set this to maint drones only so all other drone lines comes to a halt. Just remember to reset it after you recover.

I had this exact issue my first play through and it is recoverable, but its painful as well to grow back. It used up big portion of my stock so growth was halted. I set the priority to the maint hubs that their area was hit so they get repair materials first.

[Bowi]

Originally posted by djadmoros:

About year 50, I experience a complete breakdown of maintenance drones from which the game won't recover. Annoying and ruining the experience. I had temporarily a shortage of electronic parts, then ramped up the production, but to no avail. This is wrecking my whole time investment, hence a k.o. criterion.

What difficulty setting are you on?

[djadmoros]

Originally posted by Bowi:

What difficulty setting are you on?

I'm playing "realistic". Now that I've tried the sandbox (which means in many other games an open research tree, but not here), I realize that the story mode is some kind of unnecessary sugarcoating. Faring better now, avoiding "imperial overstretch" and meticulously monitoring my Relaises, but ... hmm ... for me, a puzzle is not what I've been expecting from a Mars colonization game. Perhaps the devs could wrap some Expanse-like story around the mechanism, »Rise of the MCR« or so ...

[djadmoros]

Originally posted by mreed2:

The root cause of this issue is that the game provides insufficient feedback to the player as to the nature and magnitude of the crisis. Generally, you don't realize that there is a problem until the red wrenches (indicating a building with only 10% durability remaining) start appearing, and its really hard to recover at that point.

Thanks for the comprehensive post, so it seems I'm not a complete idiot with my impression of the game.

[Daimo]

Here's my game that took me 30 years to recover lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-c1LUSM5Oc&t=212s

[Bowi]

Hopefully the Story mode will make "game over" nearly impossible. :P