Kind of sad to see the game being downvoated on Steam because of difficulty. I really like the difficulty curve.
My first game was Europe in a place with reasonable resources and no disasters. It took some learning, restarting, trying new things, but the game rewarded me with a self-sufficient colony full of happy people breeding like rabbits.
I guess people get into the game thinking there will be some hurdles on the beggining and then you'll snowball into this magical self-sufficient place and it's not exactly like that. You only really reach this point with the wonders that are literally the last things you research, until then you are always on borrowed time, trying to survive just a bit longer by either expanding your production through new colonies, or trying to grab resources somewhere, or buying them from earth. You'll probably be trying to do all three and not quite having the resources, then the mystery comes and test you either a little or a lot depending on what it is and after you survive you get your first wonder as a reward then finally, FINALLY, you start to finding permanent solutions to your problem. And then the victory lap lasts as long as you want and only then you have your chill colony builder that I think people expect the game to be right from the beggining.
Now this game I am again Europe in a place with that has a lot of resources, but a lot of dust storms and meteor showers. Dust storm made me rethink everything in a way I didn't think I should. You read the description to dust storms and say it increases production of wind turbines while decreasing of solar panels, so your first thought is "well, then I'll make a bunch of wind turbines and less solar panels", right?
Nope, that's exactly how you die. Yes, your solar panels are better closed during wind storms and your wind turbines produce more energy, but they also, along with everthing else, accumulate more dust. Wind turbines maintenance cost machine parts, solar panels cost metal. You make a bunch of wind turbines, you'll never have enough machine parts on the early and mid-game to sustain the colony. It will eat all your resources to try. So you need A LOT of solar panels, with a reasonable ammount of power accumulators and just a few wind turbines. When the dust storm comes, you just hope you have enough in store until it dies out.
It took a lot of tries to figure this out, but now it feels so good to have basically conquered the map.
And I'm already thinking how I will slightly increase the difficulty next and how that will make me re-evaluate everything again. The game really is how easy or how hard you want it to be.
