From someone who has spent many hours on this game and understanding the work around a that you have to make to allow certain things to happen. I have fully developed an end game utopia but am capped with the terraforming stage for resource requirement and transport time. Some of my biggest drawbacks as I’ve acquired over 120 hrs in this game are
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Trains - you make no sense in your stops. Since they are inconsistent with pickup and drop off at the same location over multiple stations. Adding a: here is how trains work mechanically would be great and allowing customization for the input and output would be wonderful.
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Game scaling through tiers - if you don’t plan for it you will have to rebuilt your city many times over. Which is unfortunate for newer players and is a time killer but it’s a learn as you go through
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Districts - so, I love the system, allow sub districts to exist so that I can interconnect one major district to another and not worry about the micro connections and can do bulk math calculations from the major district.
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Good meals math - no matter what I do, I have to nearly double production of good meals because consumption and production aren’t accurate for some reason. After an hour of straight gameplay a city goes “we are about to starve, send food” when there’s no chance to really pump up production at all before suffering a crisis. So allowing an earlier notification for downgrades would be huge.
Now for some late game stuff
5) terraforming - wonderful, great, love it. Requires WAYYY too much population to fuel those buildings - especially the science requirements are insane. It makes it very difficult to manage or organize these small influence spheres when you have to literally double your population size to upkeep just two of each terraforming type (except magnetic field).
- building the magnetic field generator and adamantine mine - please show what they truly need and allow it to be constructed as a progress bar rather waiting hours for everything to be sent. Or atleast somehow notify the player that a stage has progressed and to import the next batch of items. Since a lot of time can be wasted with no progress being made.
Finally, some material input tweaks that will help greatly
7) supercoil conductors - your 10 microchips per 26 seconds is insane… the ability to reliably fuel that requirement is steep. I’d recommend cutting that to 5 microchips or substituting with a new production material like copper wire. But the cost is too steep for such a fast production time.
Overall - game is balanced well, I understand the system but upscaling is difficult to the untrained eye, especially in traffic management. Proving an explanation as to how various mechanical transport systems work and number calculations being precise would be the biggest help. Given that travel time isn’t accounted for which is HUGE late game