A bit of Anno: 117, but mostly Surviving Mars: Relaunched.
Surviving Mars still feels buggy and unfinished, but at least there’s a promise of getting the published game mechanics functioning as intended in the future. One patch after another the devs keep fixing and breaking and fixing the game’s various mechanics. At the moment it would be cool if they could get trains to work as intended, but so far the trains are more like unreliable passages between domes. True to form, the base game’s original limitations are still causing issues. Originally, the game was not designed to work with connected domes, and this limitation has never been fully resolved. It’s possible to have a lot of fun with the game, if one is willing to work around the limitations and unwritten rules inherent to the game. So, for example, I build domes into triangles, so that every dome is always only one passage away from another. I also micro manage workers, mess around with shifts, and block off undesired work slots in otherwise functioning buildings. All to make sure workers, more or less, stay put and keep doing what they are supposed to be doing. Similarly, I don’t even attempt to make any kind of utopian domes, where everyone is satisfied and sane, but instead use officers to keep radicals from becoming a major issue. Still, as far as Mars colony sims go, there’s nothing quite like Surviving Mars, so even though this is a flawed game, it is a good game.
Anno 117, on the other hand, seems to work as intended as far as I can tell. It is more of a bare bones game at the moment, but then again doesn’t have a gallery of hit-or-miss DLC like Anno 1800. The core game play loop feels satisfying. You build houses, build infrastructure to fulfill the desires of different layers of citizens, build increasingly complex supply chains (while keeping an eye on optimizing throughput), take advantage of production building radius effects (with some nice combos between different kinds of buildings), optimize islands for different kinds of productions like you would cities or towns in any number of other strategy games, research (mostly incremental stuff that adds up nicely), and build boats & soldiers for some light RTS flavored fun. The RTS side of the game is robust enough to be entertaining, while not being the main focus (probably will be fleshed out in future DLCs). Currently it’s not hard to keep citizens happy and productive, and it is very easy to play tetris with both homes and production buildings to optimize resource output. With not a ton of content in current game, I’ll probably get a couple of hundred hours out of Anno 117 before waiting for future DLCs.
This is interesting, I’ve never heard of cachyOS. I’ve been running bazzite for a while now, I’ll have to check it out.
In related news, I’ll be trying to set up 8-player double dash on my HTPC with bazzite installed for a party coming up. Hopefully I can convince two instances of dolphin emu to LAN to each other
bin.pol.social
Najstarsze