Oxygen Not Included
klei.com
klei.com
My issue with ONI is that I have a great time building a base for a while, and then invariably I fuck up containment somehow, leaking germs/pollution/CO2 everywhere, at which point it's too much of an ordeal to clean, so I abandon the base.
I'm sure this can be overcome with careful, wiki-led gameplay, but I haven't gotten over that hump yet.
One key thing that another poster has mentioned is taking it slow. Also learn to use vacuum and similar mechanisms to your advantage. If you look at other people’s advanced builds, they almost always start with a vacuum to control the environment and build from there.
Here's a few tips:
1) Don't feel pressured to grow fast. I have beat the base game and come pretty close to beating the expansion (stopped only by laziness) with no more than 12 dups. You can get really far on just 3-5. Taking too many dups early is like taking VC money, now you've got an aggressive ramp and a time limit.
2) Don't pick up dup skills too fast. All you really need at the start is a digger and a researcher.
3) Don't do advanced research too fast. Pick & choose what you need. Advanced research uses a lot of water, which you might need for electrolysis (oxygen).
4) Gas stratification is your friend.
5) Most germs die off (slowly) in pure water & pure oxygen.
6) Atmospheric chlorine can interact with stuff in pipes.
7) Rock has a lot of thermal mass if you don't dig it out.
8) Go exploring around the map! Go to the edges and see what you find :)
If you see 4 blocks of Neutronium, there's a geyser on it. Set an emergency-priority task on it, and it will reveal what it is.
Found a Natural Gas geyser? Awesome! Your energy problems are mostly solved!
DF has many systems that generate cool history and artifact/art descriptions but have tiny impact on actual game. As long as you place few farm plots, you can produce enough food to buy out whole caravans. The game balance simply was never the focus. Same for performance of large forts.
What's hard is the steep difficulty curve when you are first picking up the game, especially if you play without outside resources. The game itself does a poor job at explaining what you are supposed to do and in which order, which means frequent restarts because you didn't anticipate something you didn't know about yet.
When you overcome that initial curve, the game is actually quite easy, though it can become a bit boring after a while because there is no random event to spice things up.
An interesting aspect of this game is that the most useful player created mechanisms seem to come from exploiting the edges of the physics simulation, the parts where the simulation simplifies real physics. I’m sure there’s some interesting philosophy of science to explore in that idea.