My Vids (basic resources)
Part 2 (oil tech)
Part 3 (the train)
Now to answer some questions:
Sin wrote: › the scope of that game just seems amazing. |
Yes it is. You start out with nothing. There is usually coal, ore, water and copper resources close to where you start. You craft a pickax and start manually mining materials that you use to build more (ala Minecraft, I guess). But what makes it great is the whole point is to automate as much of this as you can. If you are manually doing things, you're not doing it right. The more techs you unlock, the better your equipment gets and you can build assembers that take raw materials (or sometimes refined materials) in and produce something new that you can then use elsewhere. It is the ultimate production-chaining game, I love those kind of games and this really just has me hooked.
As you expand out, you notice the aliens. They usually ignore you until you start building a lot of pollution. Pollution makes them aggressive and causes them to spawn and attack in waves. So you can build turrets and early on, regular bullets. Eventually you get piercing ammo that does more, and at this point I now have lasers defending my bases. But the aliens evolve and get harder and at this point it is a struggle to say ahead of them. You can go on missions and try and wipe out their hives which provides a bit or relief for a while, until they come back or you expand further. At this point, my map shows me red "blotches" on all sides of my base, representing the enemy. They grow, they attack and they destroy. It gets kind of annoying, actually. So you have to stay ahead of them if you can.
As to scale - yes, I have yet to find any end to this map. It just keeps growing. You can put down radars that scan the area and expose more areas, but a lot of it is in the fog of war.
So you start with nothing, progress to basic resource harvesting (ore, copper, coal) and then move on to more advanced things (oil, plastics, steel) and then high tech stuff (circuit boards, engines)....and God knows what else because I'm only probably 2/3 through the game :) So there is a lot of advanced tech I haven't got to yet.
Sin wrote: › Is it a linear tech tree? or can you really specialize into certain industries? Im wondering because I know the whole point of the game is to make stuff, but is their an "end game" part of the tech tree or is it really just go what whatever path you want to? |
Sort of - the tech isn't really a tree, but there are prerequisites. You could conceivably play the whole game and just focus on the required stuff to achieve the "end game". The end game, by the way is to build a rocket to get the hell outta here. I guess not too different than The Martian.
Tech is done by manufacturing 4 different beakers - red, then green, then blue then purple. I have just finished establishing blue science. You would be amazed how much production it takes to build a sustainable blue science system! It is shocking. In fact, I'll make another video just for that.
So you could just build and not worry about "winning" the game. But you have to do the tech if you want more stuff, but you can totally choose what and when you research.
Sin wrote: › Like you said you had to fight the alien race for a particular part of the map that was rich in resources, is that a whole separate part of the game? |
Not really. Your player carries weapons - machine guns, pistol, flame thrower, shotguns - there is a bunch of stuff you can have. You have armor, you can build tanks (I haven't researched them yet) and also have bots that help protect you. You just walk up and they start swarming you and you try and kill them off, then blow up their hives so they won't respawn. I've learned that you can plop down gun turrets to help give you a bit of tactical advantage, but it can get hard to do quickly. You can also configure the game to make the aliens peaceful, if you want.
They also leave behind artifacts that you can collect and are required to build purple science, the last bit of the tech.
