That's what gets me ultimately. I get a good colony going, but end up trying to do something just a little bit ambitious, but there's something that starts breaking and requires so much effort to fix, after a while I just give up.
Adding one new station machine can result in you having to redesign the whole plan of your power distribution network.
Want to make those cool atmo suits? The noob trap is refining metal with the crusher and running out of easily accessible copper and iron.
The more long-term sustainable way is using the electric refinery.
It wasn't the only piece of infrastructure that led to it, but in my last base I had to redesign the whole power grid to have segregated electric networks of high-voltage wire leading to various power regulators that acted as substations delivering power to separate lower-voltage networks.
It was a cute puzzle but I didn't feel like I accomplished something from all that work, damn. I guess it's an analogue as to how it works in the real world, but I don't know enough about how it works in the real world as to tell how simplified and fake the game version is, what did I learn really?
And now you have to deal with all the heat dissipation from all this, time to learn the mock version of another infrastructure-related profession.
That said I got many, many hours of fun mastering the simulation up to that point, so it’s still a strong recommend for me.
No, I said that ONI crosses a threshold for me where I feel like I'm investing too much time into learning a simulation of a real-world trade to be worth it, it feels a bit hollow after a while that I'm devoting so much time to it and not learning the real thing.
I guess that Guitar Hero and Farm Simulator wouldn't be games for me either, I feel some guilt of not learning the actual thing after a while.
Edit: But to the credit of ONI, that's after ten hours of fun, and I go back to it once a year or so. My bases won't extend to the hundreds of hours and explore all the game mechanics, but I've still gotten a lot of enjoyment from the game.
Life also doesn't come with an instruction manual nor any handy mouse-overs, but in life I can use my existing years of experience and non-2D view of the world to deduce what's wrong. In a game, I only have access to the information the game chooses to share with me
I tried to get a refund, but Steam was all "nope"
The community is overall very welcoming, and it's an old game by now, with most things figured out.
Some people talk about hating Shenzen I/O and TIS-100 for being "too close to my day job," but for me having to troll through wikis, forums, and (heavenforbid) chat channels in order to debug a computer problem caused by someone not caring about my experience is too close to my day job. I got an adrenaline jolt just reading your sentence because my experience with those things is so incredibly enraging
I just chalk it up to "yet another game that's not for me," similar to my prior contact with Dwarf Fortress. I had actually considered buying the graphical version if it was a "reasonable price" but I'm not paying $25 for masochism
A few examples to make that clear:
- to get petroleum, you have to refine crude oil. There is a building that does that, but you only get 50% of the mass out. On the other hand, if you boil it yourself (raise its temperature to 402°C), you get 100% of the mass. Cue furious designing of an efficient boiler. Then you gotta figure how to efficiently burn it to get water out to produce more crude oil.
- if you think that's cute, you can instead continue the boiling to 510°C and get Sour Gas. Then you freeze it to -162°C (not an easy task) and get Methane. Heat it up again and you get Natural Gas that you can burn for power. That comes out to 6X the power of the previous petroleum boiling.
- you have some salt water provided by a geyser (an infinite source at a fixed output). You can use a building to get water out. But that means Dupes have to operate it. What if instead you boil that salt water to get steam, then cool that steam back to get water in a fully automated setup? Turns out it can be more power-efficient too!
Oxygen Not Included is filled with unexpected behaviors, way more than meet the eye (there is a dedicated wiki page, which is lengthy but still far from complete) that enables to make all sort of crazy contraptions.
I prefer to consider Oxygen Not Included as 2 separate games : the survival game you get at the beginning, and the engineering game you get once you overcome the survival issues. Unfortunately, many people drop off before reaching the engineering stage, or don't expect it and drop off because they only wanted the survival part.
The Spaced Out DLC also has smaller asteroids, it changed the game so it now requires more "inter-planetary" automation. I highly recommend trying the game with the DLC, but I'm not sure if Steam allows refunds for DLCs.