Playthrough Terra Invicta – Accumulate Resources

It takes a long, long time, but in mid 2027 I finally begin to actually accumulate things like Volatiles and Water.

The Moon (Luna) did not have a lot of good sites but Mars is doing pretty well. I have some sites being built out and others waiting for boost to accumulate so mines and nukes can be built.

I lost my double agent, but otherwise my councilors keep doing better. I’ve built up a lot of Admin on many of them, giving access to orgs and therefore lots of abilities, research, and bonuses.

Europe and Russia (Plus the good old USA) are under my control. I’m merging nations in to either as it becomes possible – Greece, having left the EU courtesy of Servants, will be coming back soon. Baltic States (That’s Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) should join the EU while Belarus will merge soon with Russia. After that, I can probably get “The Stans” under my control to start the clock to their unification with Russia.

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is controlled by the Resistance. Servants are in India / Indonesia and other scattered spots.

Halfway through 2028, I have managed to research the Warsaw Pact technology, and now the Eurasion Union is a member of the European Union.

Here’s where it is getting confusing again. Many times, I would see a nation (Say, Greece) that was part of the European Union but it did not have “a claim” and therefore could not be merged into the nation. Then, something changed and all of a sudden the claim was there. June 2028 shows a confusing set of possibilities for the nations, but most of them don’t have a claim and therefore should be not unifiable.

Do I progress, and assume that the claim block will remove itself ? Or do I stop at this point and figure out how to claim ? Or just not worry about it ? There is an amazing array of independence movements I can research which might continue to move nations into chunks I can control.

I decide to leave this post at June 30 2028 and decide what to do next later.

Playthrough Terra Invicta – Early Game

By February 2023 Europe is halfway controlled by the Resistance.

I’m watching for the events to be unlocked that Federation members (IE, European Union members) can be unified into one country. France starts out as a 4 control point country, and the maximum that the European Union (or any country, actually) can have is 6. The more you merge, the more you reduce the number of control points and create additional space to control more area.

Important items for various diplomatic statuses

The big ones are A – Have a “claim” B – 180 days in power C – Join the Federation.

In September 2023 we’re finally ready – unification is possible.

After the France/Italian/German etc unification the control points in use dropped by 150, and the European Union goes to 5 control points.

By January 2024 we have successfully prospected the moon, but don’t possess enough boost to reach it.

Not very good sites for the Moon.

Best site is Mare Tranquillitatis but not by much – get some gold and fissiles from there, but no water or volatiles which you need much more of. So it will be a priority to do the Mission to Mars to start acquiring these things. After waiting awhile I end up with the boost required and build the outpost.

Next step is “Space Mining and Refining” which is locked behind several technologies. But first, I manage to turn a Servant councilor.

I set her “Fail” to 60%. Default is 50%.

This lets me know the Servants are in a similar position to me. They have less science, less resources, less control points, stronger councilors, and more money. Interesting.

By 2025 I have unlocked the Mining Complex, and need to continue developing enough boost to mine my two moon sites. And this is where I’ll leave this post; it will take several game years until resources actually start to accumulate.

Playthrough Terra Invicta – Set Up For Success

I continue to try and get farther with my first goal – “How am I supposed to play this game?”. So I start it as easy as I can manage.

Very little factional conflict – it was driving me nuts my first games – to get in the way of getting to the aliens. Your first decisions are more meta, make sure you get two “good” councilors or just do a restart.

Do read the pop up windows (like the left) and the Tutorial explanation things (right)

The key first attribute is Persuasion. It’s possible to get a 9, 8 is unusual, 7 is typical, lower values are possible. Each of the 7 attributes is useful and you should aim to have a high score for the first 5 in some councilor. You can simply add the 7 together (ignore loyalty) to get an idea how valuable they are.

But at the beginning, you want Persuasion. Administration is also good. You also want the right countries. I am settling on a strategy of grabbing Europe, Middle East, USA, and Russia. Depending on where the councilor is from, will open up better things. I have one American and one Caribbean, and Caribbean is a liability. I will always get an American because….. my IP address is American or something like that. Grace totals 9/19 and Walton 20/23 – she sucks, he’s good. The pool of recruits has a couple of 8 persuasion people but they are not from the areas I mentioned. So I think I’ll restart.

7 Persuasion. 11/20 and 25/30 – now we’re talking. But Bangladesh – I’m never hitting that country. Recruits are all subpar. Saving this one and restarting.

An EU country – perfect. Persuasion 8 – Great ! Look at Tia – 24/29, Government (important), 6 ADM. But Matthew underwhelms, 15/15. Some recruits are interesting. I’m going to save this one (over the one above) and restart again.

Russian this time – still good. I aim to eventually take it over. Both with Persuasion 7. 24/28 and 17/17 – she’s great, he’s OK. Recruits include an EU councillor 16/24 with high ADM. This is the one we’re going to playthrough.

Having done all of this, nothing is unfixable – EXP lets you increase these attributes and give them traits as well. You also want to pay attention to the missions each councilor is permitted to take.

Both of my people can control nation; Georgiy can do public campaigns. Between the two of them they have excellent complementary skills, including Georgiy being a criminal and Shameka being government.

(If you’d rather craft your councilor, you can customize their names, accents, portraits etc.)

This is a useful message being displayed on the right

The tutorial messages include pop up windows and these things. Do them, as soon as you can – they tend to move you in the right direction.

As I begin the game, I have 50 influence and I’m aiming to get 60 so I can recruit the desired councilor, so I let time pass until the mission phase hits.

The advice displayed (grab a Russia control point) can be useful so try to read them. Also think about any strategy you have specifically. Since mine is to take over the EU I’m ignoring Shameka.

I am going after France, but to get there, it will be easier taking over control points in her neighbors such as Alpine States (IE, Switzerland and Austria), Germany, and Benelux (IE Luxembourg, Holland and Belgium). Georgiy will be working public opinion for additional boosts to success. So I’m having her start with Hungary.

A couple random events fire before this gets attempted, I get a lot of extra influence, and recruit billionaire Paulin Muller (French). He has high ADM so I can buy more organizations. I pass on the other recruits for the moment – they refresh periodically, I think every 15th of the month.

Now I’m on my way. Time to campaign/control while I recruit.

Time to talk about Orgs and Administration. Probably the first stat I will attempt to get to the maximum value for each of my councilors is Admin. Each point of Admin lets you buy one point of stars in an organization. The Schinhofen Books gives me influence income and two points of persuasion so it’s a perfect buy for my diplomat.

By December 1st, I have executive control over France – but the Servants are fighting me for it. France started the game with a large pro-Servant majority in public opinion, so I guess they decided to go for it. Looks like I’ll have them kicked out soon. We also took the Balkans and recruited our 4th councilor, a spy.

The playthrough has passed the setting the stage phase.

A Blizzard Of Game Mechanics

I have started up a new game – Terra Invicta. It is a fascinating and fun expansion of the idea of the XCOM universe.

In XCOM, you have alien ships attempting to invade earth in a 1970s style milieu – mysterious aliens doing things you can’t understand. You blow up the ships; use ground forces to attack aliens; research and eventually go to an end battle. Great fun.

In Terra Invicta, the basic idea is there but it has been expanded massively.

• Shadow Government – You play as one of humanity’s factions, and begin shadow government operations on nations across the world
• Factions – Makes me think of Alpha Centauri. The Servants, who welcome the aliens. The Resistance, who fight them. Humanity First, who want to exterminate them. Et cetera.
• Research – because what game doesn’t. But it makes sense, you need to upgrade your capabilities to meet the alien threat.
• Space Combat – I am not yet very familiar with it.
• Fighting through the Solar System – the entire thing is represented. I’ve made a hobby of knowing the various bodies out there in the solar system, but there are many more things in the game than I had ever heard of; small moons and asteroids, basically.

The main game screen. I am zoomed into Earth.

There is a series of notifications on the left side. I find most of them valueless but occasionally one is important. You can clear them, but they reappear when you reload.

The documentation in the game is severely lacking – the typical modern gamer lament. But I’ve played a lot of games and am making progress actually understanding it. The game systems seem to be newbie friendly and never force you into a “counted out” spot – or maybe I have yet to experience it.

Resources and menus

Earth based resources include :

• Money
• Influence
• Ops – like “Operations”, war
• Boost – ability to overcome gravity and send things into space
• Mission Control (MC)
• Science
• Control Point Capacity

By far, I pay the most attention to control points. These represent how much of the nations you are able to control. The more nations you control, the more of various resources you get – but it also depends on quality and other factors.

Space based resources include :

• Water – A good one; everything about searching through space in the real world is about water.
• Volatiles – “Highly reactive substances”.
• Base Metal
• Noble Metal – I think of this as gold, especially given the icon.
• Fissiles – IE, nuke stuff. Uranium.

The obvious ways to get space-based resources are mining for them. Their storage seems to be abstracted, once you store them they are just “there”. Base metals are easy, you don’t worry about them at all. Water and Volatiles are fairly easy. The hard one is really the Gold. I’ve only needed tiny amounts of fissiles.

The commands menu :

• Earth – warps you to Earth, obviously.
• Solar System
• Council – shows you Councillors. You don’t act directly, you tell these people to take actions for you.

This is by far the easiest part of the game to deal with, so I stop here.

• Nations – gives you a summary list of all your nations that you have control points in. Very helpful.
• Habs – If its a space structure, or base on a planet/moon/asteroid, that is a hab. You can view them here.
• Fleets – These are your space ships.
• Reasearch – You do research here. There are two types, technologies (these unlock for all factions), and projects (unlock faction by faction).

Top row is “Shared” research – with all the other factions – and bottom row is only for your faction.

The final one is Intel. This is a really well done set of screens that should have its own post.

It’s broken down in obvious ways – Aliens, factions, and space bodies.

I’ve gotten very familiar with the Nation screen.

When I started, I just worried about Public Opinion and controlling nations. But it turns out the game systems will force you to treat nations differently.

The national attributes include

• GDP – by far the most important piece.
• Democracy -10 is full democracy and 0 is totalitarian.
• Unrest – 0 is peaceful and 10 is civil war.
• Control Points – Turkey has four. The left three are less important than the fourth, which is the Executive point, and allows you to control the nation.
• Miltech – 2 is Industrial Age. 3 is Atomic Age. 4 is Information Age. I’m sure there are others, but I doubt anyone is at miltech 1.
• Nukes – you are definitely going to use nukes in this game, and all nations have the opportunity to acquire them.
• Navies – These get paired with land forces to move them from one region to another.
• Investment Points – how much you can invest into various national priorities I will post later. Turkey has 12.
• Money – Turkey provides 49 per month. 25% to each owner of a control point.
• Research, Boost, MC
• Education – High education feeds a lot of items, but makes it harder to unify/diversify a country.
• Cohesion – 10 is super conformist. 5 is healthy diversity. 0 is tribal/fragmented.
• Per Capita GDP – Super important. You want this high.
• Inequality – the lower the better, aka 10 means rich people and peasants, and 0 means society is basically a middle class.
• National relations – you can have nations At War, Allies, or Rivals.

Your investment priorities

Is your head spinning yet ? Let’s make it more confusing.

Those 12 investment points Turkey has get divided up by control points (3 per), and these points get divided up by the faction that controls them. You don’t control each by amount or directly, you select a Priority Template to dictate how your points get allocated. Each line has various effects.

• Economy. As Economy increases, GDP goes up, Greenhouse gases go up, Inequality goes up. There are modifiers based on the country’s regions; and its Democracy score (higher is better), and Cohesion score (5 is best).
• Welfare. Decreases Greenhouse and Inequality.
• Knowledge. Increases Government, Education, and moves towards middle score for Cohesion.
• Unity. Unify the country. This increases Cohesion (literal increase, not moving to the middle), decreases government, and moves public opinion to the nations that control points.
• Military. Increases Miltech and decreases Unrest. The Democracy score modifies, low is full effect, and 10 reduces it. If Unrest is zero, Miltech increases faster.
• Spoils. This means something like crime and corruption. Spoils increases Money, increases Inequality, decreases Democracy, and increases Greenhouse.
• Funding. Increases Money. A lot lower increase than Spoils.
• Boost.
• Mission Control.
• Navy
• Nuclear Weapons

That is one complex feedback loop to navigate. The “Template” system could be done better – I gave up on every one of the default templates and just played with it. And I keep giving up on my games as I discover more and more and just want to restart.

I believe I’ll cover this with additional posts – the Intel screen (hidden gem), an early playthrough, Things I Wish I Knew Earlier, and other possibilities.

If any of this sounds interesting, this is a game you should buy. The elevator pitch is “Dwarf Fortress in Space” – you enjoy it even when you lose, and it’s not about winning. Sounds about right.

Steam Achievements – Fun With Statistics

I have always gotten a kick out of the achievements system in Steam. It’s fun to unlock them and it’s fun to have more than your friends. It’s also fun to highlight the ones you treasure the most.

So I’ve set up my profile to show most of these things –

The first block is the choosable achievement showcase where I put all the ones that I like, for whatever reason. The Rarest achievements is auto generated.

As you can see, I have a number of achievements that are tied to the defunct game Marvel Heroes Omega. There’s a couple reasons why they’re so rare. The biggest one, is probably that these were added at a late date in the game’s life, so anybody achieving these would have had to run the game closer to its end of life for them to update.

And for some time, I’ve been trying to figure out ways to push these achievements off the list. That’s the main reason the Civilization 5 achievements are on there – I deliberately set out to get them. It’s never going to happen, because I’m not that good at most games to get .6% or less achievements. I have two that are .2% and the rest are mostly .4%, with the last one showing being .6%.

There’s a third party tool called the Steam Achievement Manager which will manipulate achievements, but this doesn’t work with Marvel Heroes. Apparently server-run games like an MMO report back to Steam what the achievements are and thus can’t be manipulated. Whereas a single player game will let you unlock achievements and it gets reported to Steam somehow.

No can do.

At least the tool helped me figure out something. There’s a horrible game named Gettysburg, Armored Warfare – supposedly a re-imagining of Civil War battles with armored soldiers and tanks. Kind of a Warhammer type thing. The reason it’s achievements are so rare is because you must play an online game to get them to fire, and nobody is going to go online with you and play this one.

So that’s why I can’t get these achievements.

Reports from the community are that even deleting games from your library does not affect your Steam Achievements, so I can’t just delete the game and rarest would reset.

Neither am I the only one to try and figure out this question. I get a kick out of how the people who responded to this don’t see the point (largely).

So my rarest achievements are sort of fun. I have a whole bunch that nobody can ever get at this point, and they’re very unlikely to change since I don’t seem to earn ones that other people haven’t earned. Instead, back to trying to earn more and pass up that guy with more than me.

Fuel Analysis For Your Mech

Tags

Dyson Sphere

Dyson Sphere Program has a lot of possible fuel items, so I put together a table and analyzed the results.

I have not found any attempts to figure out the best Mech fuel yet so instead I set up my own. The only time I’m really concerned about mech fuel is when flying from planet to planet, or warping to other systems. It’s no fun to run out of power and be faced with reloading a save. So just what should I be burning ?

The two important factors to balance are the energy you can extract from the fuel (Total Power), and the Efficiency (How fast each item turns from inventory to power). Ease of collection is also a factor.

Fuel Efficiency Chart	Power	Efficiency	Stack	Total Power	Energy Efficiency
Carbon Nanotube	.084 MJ	-80%	100	8.4	.0168
Graphene	.096 MJ	-70%	100	9.6	.0288
Crude Oil	4 MJ	+20%	20	80	4.8
Fuel Oil	4.4 MJ	+30%	20	88	5.72
Diamond	.9 MJ	-50%	100	90	.45
Wood	1.50 MJ	-10%	100	150	1.35
Hydrogen	8 MJ	+100%	20	160	16
Deuterium	8 MJ	+100%	20	160	16
Organic Crystal	1.8 MJ	-20%	100	180	1.44
Fire Ice	4.80 MJ	+40%	50	240	6.72
Plants	.5 MJ	-30%	500	250	.35
Coal	2.70 MJ	0%	100	270	2.7
Energized Graphite	6.30 MJ	+60%	100	630	10.08
Hydrogen Rod	40 MJ	+200%	20	800	120
Deuterium Rod	600 MJ	+300%	20	12000	2400
Antimatter Rod	7.50 GJ	+500	20	150000	45000

As expected the critical recipe components are horrid for power (Graphene, Carbon Nanotube).

For super early game energy plants, wood, and coal are pretty good. Gather easily and burn in the mech. You might want to save your wood and plants to make organic crystals, however. Early game they are hard to come by. Later game, the crystals will probably do in a pinch for short journeys if you have a planet to mine them directly from.

The various normal fuels (Oil and gases) are pretty bad, mostly owing to tiny stack sizes, so don’t burn these. I am hoping for a stacking rebalance – it’s nuts that one stack of hydrogen is 20, but your liquid storage tank holds 10,000.

The clear early-mid game fuel winner is Energized Graphite. Set up some smelters next to a coal field and store it, now you have mech fuel to get you anywhere within 5 light years. You can get a teeny bit extra power out of your Hydrogen Fuel Rods, but you have to set up a small production line to make them, so why bother. The extra efficiency isn’t worth it. Want to travel 20 light years ? Get several warpers and stack some extra graphite in your inventory.

Late game, while you’re building a Sphere, the Deuterium Rods start to look attractive. They are a component of the rockets so you’re going to be building them as you launch pieces of your Dyson Sphere. They’re expensive – you need to use the Super Blue Electromagnets to create them, but just wait until you’re building a lot of this stuff and start using these.

The Antimatter Rods are similar, power needs get really high at the End Game, and you’ll be making a lot of antimatter to deal with the white cubes.

Speculating About Lord Of The Rings (And LOTRO)

Tags

Dyson Sphere, Lotro

Taking a break from Dyson Sphere Program (Literally, I play this every spare minute), I decided to look up some old school gaming information and came across something I had not heard about previously.

Lord of The Rings is getting an epicly long television series on Amazon at some point. I like the idea – the family has transitioned to adult television so I don’t watch many shows with the kids anymore; watching this with them would be awesome. The gaming angle is that Amazon Game Studios is going to develop some kind of an MMO for Lord of the Rings.

Now – there is an existing Lord of the Rings Online game, fantastic for its time (2007), but which I find interminable today. Is its license about to be cancelled or revoked ? Or is it simply going to compete directly with whatever shadowy project Amazon may release someday ?

Amazon Game Studios hasn’t exactly captured the PC / Mobile game market, their offering Crucible came out and then was immediately pulled from the market – not a move that inspires confidence for me. I do not want to invest money or mindshare in games that disappear like that. Bloomberg throws up a report about them that was apparently so bad, Amazon felt the need to respond to them.

One thing that interests me is how little we’ve heard from John Smedley lately, ex-CEO of SOE and apparently one of the big mucky-mucks at Amazon Game Studios. I’ve tried to keep track of him since this dude is in my generation and touching on the same nerd-points I always seem to. He is reputed to be working on a secretive project, so putting all this information together……

Would we end up with a John Smedley – led team developing Lord of the Rings Amazon at this point ? A new MMO take on LOTR would be something that would interest me greatly.

My best source for LOTRO hasn’t covered this one so I’ve no idea how accurate my speculation is or if there’s more to the story.

Dyson Sphere – Part 1 – Starting Out

Tags

Dyson Sphere

Currently, my Steam Playtime for Dyson Sphere Program is over 100 hours, but I have not yet completed the game. I think my current game will eventually result in a win, but in the meantime I wanted to start a playthrough and post it up.

Flying to your system

The game begins with the storyline and you flying into your starter world/system. I picked a 100% random seed which became Vega system, with infinite resources and 64 worlds. Every starter system consists of two planets and a gas giant (or variant gas giant). Isn’t it amazing how good the graphics are ?

First Planet. First steps. What to do now ?

The game consists of researching and acquiring resources, as well as setting up production lines to make resources. The first few recipes are shown, this is all I know how to make at start.

There’s only one early lesson I need to apply here : Save the wood and plant fibers. My first game I burned it all as fuel for the mech, then it was harder to start up making yellow cubes.

Iron and copper are nearby so I immediately grab some ore and make some iron and copper ingots. And then I start my first research :

The Tech Tree

The Tree is divided up into pure research (Technology) and upgrades for various systems. I’ll do the mecha core first since it only requires iron and copper ingots.

It’s a slightly odd window

The way you know your research is going is based on the little window. Manual research means using items from your inventory – the first number. The second is the number of items remaining to be hashed.

Now my mech can store a little more energy before being depleted.

I’m going to need coal so I zoomed out the window, theres a lot of stone nearby but the coal is a bit of a walk away. I gather a bunch to power the mech.

Stick Coal in the mech for the moment to keep it powered.

With that out of the way, the first thing I really want is logistics boxes – these store items for you. So now to technology items on the tree. The first step requires 10 magnetic coils and I have enough materials to research it, so I do. Now, Logistics is unlocked on the tech tree.

I need only some iron and copper to complete this so I gather some and Voila, I can make boxes. All I need is stone which I gather up.

I made a box

Now I can store more items. Your inventory is really limited so you need to take advantage of these boxes. And now I can clear some area for future building.

You get a variety of useful items from clearing the flora. Wood and Plants will make Organic Crystals someday. Titanium and Silicon Ore in small quantities will be useful to get started acquiring more of it. Stone is used for boxes and many other items, and Coal will make Energized Graphite, the best fuel available in the game.

Lots of queued actions. Right Click and Shift queues them.

I keep clearing while I manually build more items and wait for technology to finish, and in rapid order Smelting, and Basic Assembly, are completed. The most important next one is Electromagnetic Matrix which allows me to build blue cubes.

Need more coal.

All the gathering and making has depleted the mech’s energy, so I gather more coal. Your stored energy is in the yellow bar on the bottom of the screen; and the chamber are items that will/are being converted into energy. This is going to take a while, so I decide to build something. I place the mining machine along with a wind turbine. You need a power grid, to power all of your machines, and that starts here.

It takes a while, but taking the coal out of the mining machine and letting the mech harvest it, I eventually end up full of coal.

The Power Grid – Not Enough Power

When the mining machine is running, I don’t have enough power with the little wind turbine. I’ll need to build more of those things to get started. I leave it running and dumping coal into the storage box.

Next up is Mech Flight, which just requires coal and magnets.

Dyson Learning Experience

Tags

Dyson Sphere, Factorio

This Dyson Sphere Program is just amazing. I am 100% addicted.

On my fourth playthrough now, since several things are not obvious as you begin to go through the game. There’s no manual – you have to figure it all out from the displayed information in the game. It looks like the goal of the game is :

#1 – Research & Build a Factory on your planet.

#2 – Expand to other planets for different resources.

#3 – Expand to other stars.

#4 – Construct Dyson Sphere(s)

I’ve managed to get to step 2. There are a bunch of roadblocks that have made me start over, so I’m documenting these things here.

First – getting off your planet. You will research Flying Upgrade 2 and then be able to fly off-planet. You want to have some fuel in your inventory and in your mech, Graphite and Hydrogen are two obvious primitive ones or you can make fuel rods with a lot of power.

To get off planet, double tap the spacebar and your mech is atmospherically flying. Now hold the space bar and hold down the W key, you will transition to space mode. Don’t accelerate yet ! Figure out where your destination planet is – I have a hard time every time I do this – then point your mech at it with the W key.

Once you’re flying straight at your destination, press SHIFT. This accelerates you from 100 m/s up to 1000. I never go faster than 600 and usually 300, because if you miss the planet, turning around is very hard. Fly straight at the planet and crash into it by using ALT. Slow down by pressing S.

The research is done factorio-style where you have to construct colored cubes, which get burned in the process. Blue cubes are pretty easy – set up factories to make magnets and circuit boards, send those to a research lab for cube construction, then send them to storage or another research lab to conduct research.

Red cubes are a step up. You need Graphite, easily made from coal, but you also need hydrogen. Strangely enough, getting RID OF resources is the bottleneck you will have to solve. Hydrogen comes from oil refining, or X-Ray cracking, and you need tons of the stuff to make enough red cubes. The refined oil is much easier, you can send it to a liquid storage tank and store tons of it in these. You’ll want it later.

Next, come yellow cubes. These required diamonds, easily made (!?) from Graphite. They also require crystals which are created from two rare resources, 1 Organic Crystal, and 3 Titanium Bars.

The titanium has to be imported from another planet. The game is set up so every game will have little titanium on the starter planet, but at least one other planet with a bunch of it. Set up some factory resources and mine titanium, then smelt it into titanium bars and store it. Take a bunch with you back to your starter planet.

The starter planet titanium is hidden among all the trees and rocks scattered all over. Your mech can harvest all of this stuff, so you might as well, while you wait for some research to be completed. I get around 2-3 hundred titanium ore from this process and stuff for the miserable Organic Crystals

The REALLY hard part is creating the stupid Organic Crystals. These don’t sound hard – flying to another planet does – but they require a long complex supply chain. Get your Refined Oil, plus Graphite, to make plastic. Then take plastic, plus refined oil, and water, to create Organic Crystals.

Remember making those red cubes ? I keep ending up with a ton of excess hydrogen and a hard time keeping the refineries going to make refined oil. So you have to find some way to solve this, like make additional oil extractors over other oil seeps and feed that to a refinery farm doing nothing but extracting the fuel.

You can also make small quantities of Organic Crystals with the wood and plants on your planet. So I gather as much of that stuff as I can, store it, and once the recipe unlocks I make as much as I can.

That’s as far as I have gotten. I restarted the first time because it was all confusing. Second restart was due to choking on oil and hydrogen in a huge mess. Third restart due to Organic Crystal madness. But I’m starting to see a pattern here and am producing resources for the next cube. The easy one is a crystal made from silicon, and these are under construction already. The hard one will be on my research path sometime soon.

Also, set up a plant to make sulfuric acid. This requires – you guessed it – refined fuel, water, and stones. The recipe for graphene requires it, and this stuff is for solar sails and your interplanetary, or planetary, drone system.

And remember to take in all the sights. The visuals are just breathtaking.

What I would really like to understand is just HOW you construct the Dyson Sphere, but it appears the tools don’t work until you have finished the tech tree.

More Than Conquering The Galaxy ?

Tags

Dyson Sphere, Factorio, ROTP

ROTP is definitely an awesome game as it approaches release – go take a look. The end goal, of course, is to conquer the galaxy, meaning every system which has a maximum of one planet in it. Each planet is simplified as well, to permit the task to be completed.

I hadn’t really thought people might be able to design a better game, with a BIGGER GOAL than that, and incorporating more detail than simplified sliders, but it appears Youthcat games – a Chinese group of designers – have managed it with the Dyson Sphere Program. The universe is empty, so we’re not talking about conquest……….. although that might come in the future of this early access game. You apparently pick a system, and set to work creating a Dyson Sphere, a set of constructions around the star to harvest absolutely all of that stellar energy.

The game immediately brings to mind Factorio. Probably Satisfactory as well, although a “3D Factorio” was not enough to convince me to try it. The visuals are all really pretty, and I’m very clearly playing a Factorio clone. Mine iron. Mine copper. Start researching – which costs things you build with Iron and Copper. Manufacture stuff in a massive factory to reach the end goal.

You are a mech (In effect – the text is more subtle), and you build and sculpt your initial planet until you can begin to move from planet to planet; and presumably from star to star. The end goal is pretty far off for me, but I’m getting the hang of it and it is incredibly polished and bug free for an Early Access steam game.

Definitely something to consider buying, and this week, it’s on sale for a mere $18. $20 full price. It’s release week, and will be on sale for 41 hours as I write this.

I’ve owned the game for about four days, and ……… there have been four micro patches in that time. The developer appears serious about being committed to the game and finishing it all up. True, these are seriously micro patches (Like one new feature and 3-4 issues dealt with) but the attention is important.

If you REALLY want to find something to complain about, I’m sure you can – the translation isn’t perfect, maybe all the phrasing makes sense in Chinese – Or the minimal documentation – but it looks like a worthy successor to Factorio which can capture hundreds of hours from you.