Feedback Roundup

[Rashadjin]

New UI is great, but…

Would be nice if clicking on a power pole gave energy radius indication like placing them does. Same when placing a structure. With the addition of power, you’ve created the need for UI overlays indicating coverage/condition of things, or thing for now.

Still can’t seem to manually rotate or designate which side of a building is going to be connecting to a road, where appropriate. It’s all based on having the roads placed beforehand, which is somewhat backwards to traditional city building. After sizing up and placing buildings or zones, roads are then filled in after. This is not always how it works, but is often how it works because building size and orientating being fit to the terrain are primary considerations which are then used to determine how the road networks need to be setup around those two limitations.

First step of tutorial says to place a road near iron and sulfur. Not sure if this is valid still as iron doesn’t matter until you begin the research phase of the tutorial many steps down the line, and I prefer to create a separate production cluster for research.

Would be nice to have consumption timer and amounts on the hab tooltips still. Great work on the tooltips in general, otherwise.

A personal peeve of mine is that wind and solar are not “early” forms of power. In reality, they take heavy industry to produce, being neither cheap nor simple to get going. Problem is desert world doesn’t make coal or gas particularly believable either, but combustion power generation is way simpler to get going and should be “early” means of power generation if there isn’t some hardcore industrial and technology base in the background.

My experience of InfraSpace remains a little stale because there’s not a lot of feedback or engagement from the game + duotone desert world. The more passive city builders tend to distract from this with eye candy which isn’t an early dev thing. One big thing I’d suggest for InfraSpace is having the player manage transportation by way of adding vehicle hubs and preferably the production of the vehicles themselves. Having a tech and production chain for vehicles to improve road throughput that way could help separate the game out from others. Right now, it’s sort of a gamified oddity that mines come with their own fleet of trucks.

[Rashadjin]

To expand on the experience being a little stale a bit more, I think there’s also the problem of a lack of limits on building and expansion. Once the cement or steel enters a storage facility, I can then place buildings and roads anywhere without any problems. I don’t need to have those resources transported to the build site. I don’t need to connect workers to their work site either.

There’s so much freedom to building, I don’t really have to plan out my expansion in the early game. Just plop stuff wherever convenient. That changes if you want to make a cool hab or production hub with a lot of density and efficiency, but until then, you can have your cement and steel production across the planet from your shuttleport/habs/amenities across the planet from your research center.

The recent addition of power makes it more efficient to keep things closer together, sort of. Wind turbines and power poles are so cheap there isn’t enough of a downside of splitting those out too.

I think the biggest limiting factor to scattering everything to the wind in mini production clusters is it’s really worker inefficient and that has real costs compared to everything else.