So this came out. Anyone giving it a shot?
Got it yesterday and played around 7-8 hours. Started a couple of runs, but didn't get too far down the storyline (imo).
Pretty neat overall. Digging the style and presentation. For a city builder type the cinematics and music are awesome.
The game is 'difficult', not in the sense that it is especially hard, but by requiring you to pay attention to what you're being told and plan ahead. I don't get the feeling the game wants to hold your hand. Also fucking up seems to bring on a cycle of death more or less.
For example in one of my runs I expanded too quickly into another sector of the station, which costs quite a lot of population. My initial sector now didn't have enough workers to do all the jobs and they had to do overtime. This caused accidents, which caused less workers, which caused more overwork, which caused more fuckups and so on.
This is especially bad since workers are quite hard to get. After the 'tutorial' part you can basically only get them only by thawing out cryogenic pods. These take time to gather and time to unfreeze.
Gathering resources is quite slow in general, especially if your station if far away. You can move your station, but that can bring on other fuckups.
I once tried to move the station inside the solar system and didn't realize I had too little stored power to do that. This meant my hull repair building (you basically have to constantly spend a small amount of a basic resource to keep your hull hp up) stopped working and the hull got fucked which caused a lot of morale problems. Since the repair work is pretty slow compared to how fast you take damage, it was again a 'small' mistake with big consequences. The game gave me the data about how long the move would take and how long the battery power would last. I was just pants on head retarded and didn't put two and two together.
Now I don't think being punished when you do something stupid is a bad mechanic, but after my population fuckup, I started another run and made sure I had a surplus of workers. I never had to deal with an accident again. It's like that part of the game was 100% solved by just keeping some dudes doing nothing, which felt a little weird.
The only things I don't like so far is the pretty weird way in which sectors share resources. You basically have to set mins and maxes of what resource you want in which sector and you can also restrict which sector shares what with other sectors. Honestly I would have preferred a 'Give 50 alloy from sector 1 to sector 3' button or something, but I have only started playing around with this part. Another annoying part of this is that you need storage for a resource locally in a sector before you can use it.
Space wise it feels a little claustrophobic, since if you don't plan very well you will probably end up small gaps between your buildings that can't be used for anything. Haven't gotten yet to researching upgraded buildings (bigger storages, homes, etc) and I can foresee some swearing in my future if all upgrades have different sizes compared to the base buildings. By the time I was ready to start unlocking these upgrades, my initial sector was 90% filled and there is no chance in hell I can do drop in replacements if their footprint has changed.
Overall pretty fun so far. Would forget to produce enough food/10 again.
zeitgeist if you ask me. I guess between SpaceX and other New Space companies working on commercializing space, Artemis, KSP and the Expanse there is quite a bit of buzz, exposure and gateways into this stuff. I would even say that out of all of these Artemis is the least impactful, at least until they land people again on the Moon later this decade. The CEO from the trailer is obviously inspired by Musk and his "making humanity multiplanetary" slogan.
