Planetbase

[Hellhawk666]

For those who like city/civilization building games this might be of interest http://store.steampowered.com/app/403190/. It is reminiscent of "Banished" (if you've played that) but set on an alien planet. No big exploration or anything - it focuses on getting a new colony self-sufficient before something critical runs out, and then developing it into a large installation.

I bought it a few days ago and have about 20 hours in-game now. It has the addictive quality of a good building game with just enough complexity to make it interesting. Juggling the balance between power requirements, food, water and oxygen is the main concern but there is more to it than just that. It's a nice small time waster

I've noticed a couple of glitchy things so far, but they will hopefully get ironed out fairly soon. Mainly to do with AI performance (people going off walking in circles, focus on the wrong activity, etc). Apart from that the game is stable, balanced and well thought out.

If they can fix the AI niggles and add a few more features (or open it for modding) it could be a really great little game.

 

[MaxLexandre]

I got to play it before release as invited beta tester, things got a pretty stable release, but a complicated unforgiving AI, it's not that AI is bugged, it's just the gameplay to achieve certain things has to be done X way, or the whole base gets to a point of no return, this seems to got several people frustrated.

I got to play for like 100 hours at the end, after Space Base sad flop, it was pretty cool.

 

[Hellhawk666]

I got to play it before release as invited beta tester, things got a pretty stable release, but a complicated unforgiving AI, it's not that AI is bugged, it's just the gameplay to achieve certain things has to be done X way, or the whole base gets to a point of no return, this seems to got several people frustrated.

I got to play for like 100 hours at the end, after Space Base sad flop, it was pretty cool.

The gameplay certainly follows fairly strict procedures - eg power is all important and must be up and built before the first night or you're doomed ; building too fast is a disaster if it exhausts power ; water & air have to be ensured ; etc. However it's hard to imagine how things could be done differently.

There's the initial "survive" stage, then reaching sustainability before the food stores run out. After that it's mainly managing expansion carefully, but they could make things more interesting by introducing specialization after a certain point. There are a lot of interesting suggestions for expanded gamplay on their forum.

Personally I'd like to have more precise control over each colonist - where and when they are rostered, where they should eat, their allocated dorm bunk etc. It's a game that focuses on a relatively small number of assets, so micromanagement could actually add to it rather than being boring. It's also (I think) not possible to build a small sustainable installation - there is a minimum population level required to run everything. Adding very small outposts could be interesting, but that's probably exceeding the intended point of the game.