My thoughts after an over 100 cycle base...

[Ecu]

Heyo all!

I've played around 30 hours now and have managed to finally set up a base that has made it over 100 cycles without abuse.  As such, I wanted to kind of give my viewpoints on various aspects of the game.  First and foremost, I think the game is rather awesome.  I absolutely love the art style.  The potential for the game seems pretty unreal.

However, I've found a lot of the current mechanics to be rather frustrating to leverage.  One of the most notable issues I've found is the inability to reach any kind of equilibrium.  In a closed ecosystem, there should be no loss of resources, only conversion from one form to another.  However, piping alone seems to cause a loss of resources.  It doesn't seem like you acquire more liquid than you put in via the Lavatory, even though your Duplicant has expelled waste on top of water used.

Furthermore, many resources are just destroyed with no byproduct.  I feel like burning hydrogen should require hydrogen and oxygen and produce water and power (heat) as a byproduct.  While Mealwood plants are an alien lifeform and as such consume oxygen, they should in turn produce carbon dioxide.  All in all, the main thing I see as an issue is that I feel that a closed ecosystem should be able to be stable.

These major issues aside, there are some additional minor issues I've found.  One is that there isn't a visual difference between materials used to create things.  It would be rather appealing to have devices made from different materials have different strengths/weaknesses (decor for special tiles, for instance).  Another is that when loading the game, it does not recall the materials you were using to craft thing.  This can be quite frustrating as instead of using sandstone, you'll end up using obsidian (and generally not have enough to complete a length of tiles).

All in all, I am having a blast with the game, but there are things I really wish were done a bit better.