General Category > Stars Beyond Reach Beta Phase 1-2 Discussion
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.
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