Had a little hiccup during my first run. The SEED facilities wouldn't build and the colony died.
If you can reproduce that problem of your SEED facilities not building please let me know how to do so. They should never not build so I'd like to figure out why that happened and squash that potential bug.
The second run worked better but I think I got behind the power curve on power and food production and, once again, dead colony. Feels like the difficulty level has been increased some. Seems more lifelike. Run out of food, power, air, etc. and everything goes to crap.
Yes, it's very much intended to be much more challenging. The gameplay at the moment can be considered the 'medium' or 'intermediate' difficulty level. Easy difficulty will make this more forgiving and 'hard' mode will be extremely challenging with population mortality much higher and resource production much lower. This is all subject to tweaking as the game progresses further.
In the original, didn't the starship de-orbit and crash at turn 200? Or am I thinking of something else? This one went down at around turn 45 or so. Didn't pay attention to the exact turn, but it seemed to happen much sooner.
I explained this a bit more thoroughly in
your other post but basically, it's currently set to 24 turns from touch down (so turn 25). This is quick, I know. It's representative of the most difficult mode which gives you very little time to land your colonists and cargo and get a rudimentary colony set up before you lose your last ties to Earth.
I like the news graphics. The scene of the spacecraft crash site and the colony being taken over by sand dunes is pretty cool.
Thanks! WhiteClaw put a lot of effort into the new structure graphics. Still a WIP but we're working on it!
The announcement window visuals are temporary -- I found them on Deviant Art and used them with the PLACEHOLDER text over them until we can get originals (or permission to use these). They fit the general vibe I was going for.
Morale was low, but rising when things when kaput. Running around 480-485. Since it was rising when they all died, I have to presume that it was because of starvation. Got some other questions, but I think they will be better suited for another thread.
This almost always happens because you ran out of Rare Minerals, a critical resource for keeping Power Facilities (specifically fusion) running. This has caught me off guard several times during testing. Keep a
very close eye on your Rare Minerals and don't expand too fast. The SEED Smelter is extremely inefficient so you'll need to replace that as soon as possible with a regular Smelter. In fact, build two before you build a Fusion Reactor (the reactor uses up a lot of rare minerals). You should also have at least two mines running and make sure you have PLENTY of Storage Tanks -- if you run out of room in your Storage Tanks you'll find yourself in a colony collapse very quickly.
Later versions will allow you to tweak what your smelters are focused on, what your mines are focused on and will allow you to dump some resources to make space if needed (e.g., if you have an overabundance of Common Metals, you can dump some of it to make room for other materials). That's more of an emergency procedure if you're not paying attention to your storage and run out of room. Storage Tanks are cheap so make sure you're always ahead of the game with those.
Future versions will provide alerts for when you're running critically low on resources, running out of storage, food is diminishing, you're reaching the limits of your power generation, etc.