Redshirt roll call

[Captain Jack]

All right, let's see what everyone's up to.

I'll start. I'm playing Zenith, still in my first game. In a moment of gleeful idiocy I decided that my city would be named Starships and my save file is Build This Town on Rock and Roll. I am not subtle in my references.

Roughest part for me so far has been figuring out the trash system. After a certain point I just gave up and deleted my Hazmat Centers and junkyards, which works fine until a lack of police starts riots that kill 600 citizens and crashes the economy and produces SO MUCH TRASH/POLLUTION.

Also haven't figured out Embassies just yet. Anyone do it themselves?

[ptarth]

Ditto.
Littering killed 75% of my city.
It started with just a little bit of excess litter.
Which then snow balled into huge amounts of crime.
Which then caused everyone to kill each other (because of the litter you see).
Then the survivors got mad about all the bodies rotting.
And they stopped producing food, because they wanted to run mining installations.
To recover I had to manually shut down all my external mines, which then enabled the people to make good career choices.

Then I lost my save because Commodo had sandboxed SBR.

Now I'm trying to start again, but I had to build 100 Exploration Camps before I could get to a level 2 city. I have no idea what I did last time to not force me to build them.

[Captain Jack]

Went back and rode that game into the ground. I had more diseases than people at the end, but somehow my population never quite dipped under 300. I'm guessing that's an anti-frustration feature to prevent someone from getting wiped out in two turns if they get unlucky.

I probably COULD save this game if I were willing to basically scrap it and start over. In all honesty though, I'd rather actually scrap it and start over. Not sure how much I learned from this... except maybe "A dump IS in fact a good idea, make it up to the planet with shrines". Still not sure what causes the crime explosion--is it better to build housing around police stations? Hmm.

[FractalReaper]

I've played a few games as different faction and I don't know if it's a bug or if I keep making the same mistakes but I almost always come to the same inglorious end. I'll be trudging along and everything will be pretty okay at first. Oh sure I'll have to ponder occasionally about why my city isn't producing meals or new citizens aren't being born despite the data saying I have all the appropriate building chains, but I find that as long as I keep putting down buildings everything works out in the end. The only issue is that my pollution keeps slowly rising no matter how many hazmats I build, so I just shrug and say "Whatever. It's not that big a deal. I'll handle it later." then go back to the rest of my city. Other than that, everything is fine, until somewhere between turn 80 and 200.

Somewhere in that range of turns my crime rating will suddenly shoot up from -800 or so to almost 4k in a single turn. It's as if every citizen decided to take the day off work so they could spend it committing felonies. Riots break out. Crowns are embezzled. There's probably some other bad stuff going on too. Before long the streets are littered with trash and corpses. A thriving city reduced to only a few hundred citizens in just a couple of turns, it goes without saying that my economy is ruined. I have no money and all the citizens have no food. At least there's plenty of housing and jobs.

And if that was all there was to it, I could fix this. Given enough time I could crawl out of that hole. But while the citizens were killing each-other and stealing my money, nobody was manning the hazmats stations. But the pollution creating buildings were still belching forth great stacks of chemical death. Pollution hasn't been increasing by a few points a turn while this is happening, it's been going up hundreds, even thousands. Smog obscures the sky and before long that dreaded event happens. Your population has been infected by a disease from pollution. With nobody working the disease centers there is very little hope for a vaccine. Even if scientists were working it wouldn't matter because if this event happens once it will happen again. The first game this happened my city must have had almost 30 different diseases and was unable to get a population over 100 by the time I called it. This leaves me trapped in a cycle of pollution, disease, crime, trash, and corpses. Each one feeding the others in a never ending downward spiral of failure. Once this happens there doesn't seem to be a way to salvage it. Either start over, or load an earlier save and then try and fail to figure out what went wrong as it happens again, or demolish and disable as much as you can and hope your neighbors don't take advantage of your weakness.

I imagine I'm doing something wrong, so I'll ask my fellow beta participants. How do you keep your entire population from randomly going insane and murdering everybody?

[ptarth]

Banks cause crime. Actually, banks should probably be rename something else that makes more sense. Or the Benevolent Dictator is financing everything through a series of Ponzi Schemes....
Litter causes too much crime. Once that happens, the riots start, and then you just have to ride it out and rebuild from the ashes. Your population will die by the time you can do anything to fix the problem. I'm not actually sure where litter causes crime.
Factories are also a trap I think. They create TONS of pollution (500), which means they need to be covered by 5! hazmats to cancel the pollution. They also do NOT provide any worthwhile money. I'm not sure why they are so early in the tech tree.

In regards to FractalReaper, my bet is on litter. Either you didn't build a dump or it became filled. The people really hate litter. It's like SimCity4000 except instead of moving out, they kill their neighbours. And then complain about the dirty corpses next door.

[Captain Jack]

So, basically Nightfall, but trash instead of stars?  I'd read it.

Hell, I'd write it.

[TheVampire100]

Hm, I'm starting a little late, I didn't recognize at first that I got already the key.
So far I'm still trying to find stuff out. It needs some time to get what all the stats mean. I mean, even the simplest buildings have dozens of stats. I was also confused how you build stuff. I thought you would do this in the city management (which is for some odd reason empty but maybe I have to advance first). Instead you have to click the buttons below. Since the GUI will be changed soon this is okay for me, it was just a little confusing at the start because I had to find out what to do.
The explorer camps seemed also strange to me, I didn't get what they do first. They seem to play a scouting/research role in the game.

What I don't like is the Left crtl plus left mouse button for the detail screen of buildings. I edited it to right click but since the button seems to be unoccupied at the moment I suggested that they design it that you simply have to right click on a building instead of pressing two buttons.

Are the hot ips also missing for everyone else? I guess they are not done yet?

Anyone else playing the music from the folder right now? ^^
I like it that they reused music from other Arcen Games (Last Federation, AI War, Bionic Dues). They fit the best for the races.

[Captain Jack]

Right click actually backs you out of any screen that isn't the main map. Also it gives you info blurbs on stuff buildings on the tech tree.

You mean hot tips, right? Redshirts don't get (m)any, our job is to stumble around as best we can and see what we blubber into.

The stats are pretty straightforward, I just wish we could get overlays for the various conditions they deal with. Placing police stations would be much less stressful if we could click a button (that isn't constructing police stations) to see where the hotbeds of criminal activity are. Waiting to see what the GUI overhaul does before I report that one.

[tbrass]

Banks cause crime. Actually, banks should probably be rename something else that makes more sense. Or the Benevolent Dictator is financing everything through a series of Ponzi Schemes....

Banking crimes seem relatively tame compared with the stock exchange. Those wolves of wall street trade in their credit default swaps for gattling guns. It's scary.

Haven't seen any other factions (haven't played past ~100 turns)

Re overlays and crime - I have a crime overlay that does some sort of color gradient. My exchange is bright red (when active).

[TheVampire100]

My Krolin game came to an end through, you guess it, trash/crime combination. From one moment to the other my crime exploded ( Ihad all the time no crime so this came to my surprise) and that caused a lot of buildings to shut down. This ended in huge pulution/trash which caused diseases. More people died, I couldn't get back to my feet because the max population couldn't keep up with all the stuff I needed at that moment (police stations, trash dumps, Hazmats...).
I could have tried to ave everything but it was more work to rebuild everything instead of starting from the scratch.

My second round came to an end before it even started. Wanted to try the Zenith and like always I had to playe exploration camps on the beginning. However, at a certain sport one camp got destroyed from the Boarines. i don't even know why they have military buildings such early in the start but from now on I couldn't do anything else except "build camp", "let camp destroy", "rebuild". Since the costs of the camp are the exact amount of crowns I get per turn I can only watch the same scene again and again. I can still research stuff but this means nothing because I cannot build anything except the replacement camp. I had to quit after that.

[Misery]

Mostly going fine on my end, though some of the stats dont really make sense.  I have 8 gazillion of both water and crops, yet I have.... -34 meals?  What?  At this point I'm not even entirely sure what that means;  I've seen the explanation that population requires meals, okay, that makes sense, but nothing I do causes the maximum population to actually go up.  So it's completely stuck at 300, and that probably means that new buildings will now do nothing, since all 300 of that population are already in jobs.  So yeah, I havent the foggiest clue how that works.  I havent seen a mention of what actually determines that max number.

As it is, I currently have 1500 food produced each turn, and 3000 water;  but only 300 meals are possible, it says.  So... yeah.  I dont know.  I have a feeling the game has now reached a "guaranteed loss" situation, so I may have to start over.

Exploration system in the early game is strange.

There's been a few wacky GUI issues, but those'll be gone soon, so that's good.  The current UI actually seems mostly fine to me, aside from some of the stats not really making sense.

EDIT:  Well SURPRISE I figured out the meal bit literally 2 minutes after this post.  Ugh.  I swear, this happens every single time....

The description of it though remains confusing, so that might be an issue.  Or I'm just being spacey, I can never be sure.

[mrhanman]

My Krolin game came to an end through, you guess it, trash/crime combination. From one moment to the other my crime exploded ( Ihad all the time no crime so this came to my surprise) and that caused a lot of buildings to shut down. This ended in huge pulution/trash which caused diseases. More people died, I couldn't get back to my feet because the max population couldn't keep up with all the stuff I needed at that moment (police stations, trash dumps, Hazmats...).
I could have tried to ave everything but it was more work to rebuild everything instead of starting from the scratch.

My second round came to an end before it even started. Wanted to try the Zenith and like always I had to playe exploration camps on the beginning. However, at a certain sport one camp got destroyed from the Boarines. i don't even know why they have military buildings such early in the start but from now on I couldn't do anything else except "build camp", "let camp destroy", "rebuild". Since the costs of the camp are the exact amount of crowns I get per turn I can only watch the same scene again and again. I can still research stuff but this means nothing because I cannot build anything except the replacement camp. I had to quit after that.

This is pretty much exactly what has happened to me, except the order was reversed. And I played Skylaxian.

[Misery]

Okay, current problem I'm running into is the military stuff.

I've got the Skylaxians constantly popping any building of mine that gets placed on the northeastern side of my city; doesnt matter what it is, they destroy it instantly.  I figure, okay, use anti-air towers.  Despite being DIRECTLY next to the buildings being attacked, the towers... do absolutely nothing at all. 

So I figure, okay... I'll attack them with my own helipads!  ....but there's no way to get one in attacking range, because I cannot anything to defend the construction of a helipad that's actually going to be able to do something.

As far as I can see it, this means that whoever drops a single military attacker building first has a monstrous advantage, and I honestly cant see any way around it now.  There's no way to put a military building in a spot where it can actually do something.   Which is a problem I'd wondered about, with the game's "no units" concept, as there's no manipulating any military stuffs once they're dropped.  I cant get something in a strategic spot because it actually has to be BUILT there, and is destroyed before it can have any sort of combat effect. 

I'm going to mess around with it some more... I'm suspecting I'm going to essentially have to draw a screwy line of air-defense towers to the spot I need a helipad in, which seems like an unintuitive solution to this.  The mechanic in theory works out well, but it does seem a tad strange in practice.  Not sure what to suggest.... that's just my current feedback from now.


Also, so far, the game is very engaging, though it took me some time to get the hang of what I was doing.


What I dont understand:  What's this planetary rage counter?  I havent seen like, disasters or anything happen.... I have a shrine I can build to appease that, but I havent seen a reason to do it.  I'm on about turn 120 right now.  Nothing bad has happened yet beyond the air attacks; havent had any citizens die to anything or anything else go wrong.


Also, crime.

Also I cant get the embassy to do anything.  I've got the entire Skylaxian city scouted and some of the Neinzul, Evuck, and Thoraxian, but it doesnt let me select one.



.....and now disease randomly goes bonkers.  NO idea what causes that, and the only building that can even conceivably do something about it is buried quite far into the tech tree; that bit might be a major balance problem.  At this point, it's probably unfixable.  I'd wondered if it was polution, but the hazmat buildings seem to barely make a dent in that.   Doubt it matters at this point.  Every time I get the birth rate higher than the death rate (by spamming birth centers) another disease appears;  currently there's 4 of them at once.

EDIT:  Also I'm now getting the social levelups like EVERY SINGLE TURN.  I'm doubting that's supposed to happen.

AND THEN UTTER CHAOS.  Whole mess is still running, but... it's just this berserk mass of red numbers and horrible icons of impending DOOOOOM.   So my first run pretty much comes to an end around... turn 173?  I think that's where it was.  The citizens ended up killing themselves with smog. 

I'll have another go later tonight and see if things go differently now that I know more about what I"m doing.  I think the most difficult part was learning just how building positioning affects things.

I never did get to shoot the Skylaxians.  Dunno what I ever did to them in the first place, aside from exist... the jerks.

[crazyroosterman]

I'm playing as the korlin on my first game and I'm 34 turns and so far I haven't had any issues that I've not been able to figure by routing through menus' although at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to make my barracks work I keep clicking on it in the menu and then hovering over the zeniths injection well that they've built near me and clicking on it but will happen.

[Hyfrydle]

Just arrived home from work and going to fire the game up, decided to play as the Skylaxians one of my fave races from The Last Federation. Started a game last night and got confused and spent all my money on landers. Hope this game doesn't go the same way.