What is early-/mid-/late-game?

[GoHereDoThis]

I keep reading people referring to early-/mid-/late-game and how certain things are expected at certain points.  However, how do you really define early-game?  Mid-game?  Late-game?  Is it duplicant count?  Is it cycle count?  Or is it when your base is able to do XXYYZZ?

[Neotuck]

Just now, GoHereDoThis said:

Or is it when your base is able to do XXYYZZ?

this one

best to make a goal list and do them in order of what is important and what can be done

[GoHereDoThis]

Thanks, but can you clarify what you'd consider to be achievements of the early-game?  Mid-game?  How would you know if you're in the late-game stages?

[Coolthulhu]

Those are all somewhat subjective terms.

Being able to launch rockets can be safely placed in the lategame/endgame.

I'd say that early game ends either when you start using atmo suits for most work. This is game-changing because you no longer care about scalding temperatures and deep liquids, can cap everything and use liquid locks. Alternatively, mid-game can be characterized by using one electric line with transformers instead of separate lines for everything.

[Lilalaunekuh]

My subjective categories:

-Early game: Game start till I have a stable oxygen production and a stable power grid supporting it (can be just a wheel and a battery)

                      I try to leave all wild plants untouched so food isn´t really an issue in first cycles

-Mid game: Till my bristle berry farm is running (this means I have a scalable and duplicant-free INFINITE food production)

-Late game: After my base is 100% sustainable without further interactions

(No overheating, no freezing/boiling water locks ...)

 

PS: I like to leave my base running while doing something else, so it´s not rare that my base is running a couple hours unsupervised^^

 

 

[Sasza22]

Some people only consider it lategame when the map is mined out and you start running low on unrefiend metals, slime and dirt.

22 minutes ago, Coolthulhu said:

I'd say that early game ends either when you start using atmo suits for most work. This is game-changing because you no longer care about scalding temperatures and deep liquids, can cap everything and use liquid locks.

That`s depenednt on the playstyle. I don`t use atmo suits everywhere i can. Instead just set them up near space and at the edge of the oil biome. Everywhere else i let my dupes walk without them (althrough i`m not playing on lowest immunity).

IMO early game lasts until you set up electrolyzer oxygen production and natural gas energy production. Late game would start when you tame the space biome and make sure meteors stop damaging the surface layer.

[impyre]

I personally like Lilalaunekuh's answer best.

Early-game = "Will I make it? Is my map good or bad?"

Challenges:

• Oxygen
• Sanitation
• Food
• Basic research
• short-term sustainability
• meal lice, muckroot, and meat

The name of the early game is survival.

Mid-game = "I have a lot of unsustainable things going on... which do I tackle first... which is most likely to kill my base... oh yeah, how's my heat looking... crap, I gotta find some wheezeworts... stupid slime biome is in the way"

Challenges:

• Expansion
• reorganization
• morale improvement for more useful jobs
• reliable power/heat management on a small-to-medium scale (since this is the foundation for everything late-game).
• Better research, automation/power management, basic health.
• medium sustainability
• probably barbecue (since pincha pepper is easy enough to find and you should've been ranching for awhile), frost buns, and stuffed berries

The mid-game is about setting yourself up for success later. Build the foundation for greatness. Plan for later needs while solving current issues.

Late-game = "I gotta start thinking about the long haul, and how I'm going to get to the end-game stuff. How's my sand, do I need to go get some more or make some? Maybe I should switch to a boiler or chlorine system instead of a filter. I wonder what's more optimum, can I get power out of a boiler, or maybe use it's heat for something else too?"

• Further expansion
• industrial-grade supply system
• rock-solid stability
• advanced tech: advanced healthcare, rocket tech, advanced automation, etc
• long-term sustainability
• pepper bread (from farmed pincha and sleet wheat)

Although you can honestly use any metric you like to track game progress.

[Xuhybrid]

Early game is food, oxygen and research.

Mid game is heat management and material processing like plastic/metal.

End game is rockets where you don't have to worry about survival.

[GoHereDoThis]

Excellent input, thanks chaps!

 

[ruhrohraggy]

It will be different depending on who you ask it seems :D.

Late game for a new player might be cycle 50-100, which is early game for people playing 1000+ cycles.

My early game is focused on getting to :

Automated coal power => Mushroom farm => Plumbed bathrooms => Great Hall and Break Room => Drecko / hatch ranch and 4-6 dupes. (I'm very picky with my dupes)

Mid-game is : Getting to AETN and setting up stable O2 => Finding reliable water source => Clearing a p.water heavy swamp biome for a pool I can use with my metal refinery (and later pincha peppers) => Comfy Bedrooms => Atmo Suits and Exo-Docks => Fossil foraging => Steel => 7-8 Dupes => Wall off space.

Late game is whatever I feel like doing after that.

[impyre]

@ruhrohraggy Your late game is "I win fools! Bwahaha". I like it.

[LeifErikson]

4 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

Thanks, but can you clarify what you'd consider to be achievements of the early-game?  Mid-game?  How would you know if you're in the late-game stages?

I consider mid game the second that I no longer use algae for oxygen (read: have a SPOM setup), have a bathroom setup with an infinite water loop (feed to a sieve and use the excess for electrolyzers).

Late game I would consider when I have all tech researched, save rocketry stuff that requires missions, and my base is completely self sufficient.

[bountygiver]

for me,

 

early game is you are relying on stuffs you dig out, production is low and very unsustainable

mid game is when you can produce a lot of stuffs efficiently, with the help of geysers, your limited resources will not run out for another hundreds of cycles

late game is when your colony is fully self-sustainable, where the only resources you actually consume comes from geysers/space, everything else is converted through machines/animals

[GoHereDoThis]

I'm surprised at where some people put atmo suit priority.  Don't you need that when exploring/clearing slime biomes?  In a previous build, I cleared out 2/3rds of a biome with atmo suits then made a mistake of making an alternate entrance.  When asking my dupes to clear out the remaining 1/3rd, and putting deodorizers in place, a couple of my dupes got slimelung.

[impyre]

It's not uncommon to find slime biome pockets that are not full of slimelung. As long as you pay attention to what you're doing, don't dig any more slimelung tiles than absolutely necessary, and avoid the pockets of germs where possible... you can safely explore quite a bit. It is a bit random, so some maps are more challenging than others. Just protect your base with a water-lock, and make sure to quickly quarantine any dupes whose immune systems get too low. Another option is placing a mesh door near the water-lock and restricting the dupe in question from being able to enter the slime biome until they've fully recovered. This allows them to still do other tasks. Just make sure they aren't spreading slimelung around your base, sinks near the entrance work well... though it's not strictly necessary if you simply don't allow them to touch anything contaminated. Also don't put storage in your base for slime, be careful not to dig infested algae (although algae typically doesn't carry slimelung, it can on occasion). Gold amalgam is usually okay to dig too, though it's worth double-checking if it's next to a large chunk of slime. Also, slime biomes found near cold biomes without an abyssalite layer between them are usually safe too. It's not as common, but abyssalite is usually safe to dig, so you can accelerate the process yourself by simply digging it out and letting the cold do it's thing killing the slimelung.

[ruhrohraggy]

23 minutes ago, GoHereDoThis said:

I'm surprised at where some people put atmo suit priority.  Don't you need that when exploring/clearing slime biomes?  In a previous build, I cleared out 2/3rds of a biome with atmo suits then made a mistake of making an alternate entrance.  When asking my dupes to clear out the remaining 1/3rd, and putting deodorizers in place, a couple of my dupes got slimelung.

Make sure to have 3-4 med-beds setup before clearing slime biomes.

I like having a couple vitamin chews handy for the miners doing the clearing, since they're exposed to the p.oxygen for the longest.

Try to dig from the top down, and try to get some p.water underneath where your digging, so the slime falls into it, and doesn't off-gas.

Prioritize storing slime into storage containers submerged in a little water if they do happen to off-gas. Mushrooms are an amazing food source, so at that point in the game, you really want every last kg of slime your dupes can get their little hands on.

Doesn't matter if it has slimelung. The mushrooms usually come out with trace amounts, and the dupes are eating it, not breathing it.

And, they will come down with slime lung, it happens. A lot faster than waiting on Atmo suits though. Just gotta make sure to get de-odorizers up the right way. Since p.oxygen doesn't really move up and down through oxygen, you have to have 'em every 4 tiles of height, or so. (When clearing big rooms)

I usually only use Atmo suits for super hot environments, places where dupes operate machinery without oxygen (oil refinery) and space.

[Mariilyn]

That's how I would characterize each phase. It's mostly in line with Impyre's earlier answer :

And here are the additional criterions that are personal : 

[impyre]

@Mariilyn

Steam/solar for late-game? Without bugs/glitches? I use steam for heat removal, but it doesn't give me enough power to be a primary power source. I'd personally rather use the heat sources I have for cooking petrol/nat gas honestly, I feel like that's way more scalable, and you get great returns. I've never been able to use solar panels effectively, I just use them to power bunker doors/scanners/telescopes... but then, i've never gone large-scale with them I guess.

Could you post or point me to some examples of using steam as a primary power source without using bugs/glitches? I know a lot of people think that's silly, but it's a personal preference. I saw a pretty recent thread on solar output, I suppose it's worth trying.

[dallion]

Early Game - Hey Guys, What should I do to prevent my colony dead.

Mid-Game - Everything is sustainable. if some accident happened, my colony will be ok

Late-Game - Boy! Let`s hack the world as long as you like, and from side to side

[Iriswaters]

6 hours ago, Sasza22 said:

 

IMO early game lasts until you set up electrolyzer oxygen production and natural gas energy production. Late game would start when you tame the space biome and make sure meteors stop damaging the surface layer.

Definitely some subjective there.  I know I am not the only one that rushes bunker tiles, aiming for boarding up space as one of the first mid game goals.  With a mind to just blocking it off and forgetting about it for a few hundred cycles.

And yeah, unless you are playing on harder difficulty immune systems, atmo suits for swamp biomes are not required.  Can be useful, but not an absolute.   If you are playing on harder, then yes, atmo suits and ore scrubbers start looking like attractive options.  They really aren't all that hard to get to, either.  Just requires a bit more time turtling in the starting biome, or expanding into caustic, living off the quite generous starting area dirt/water and if needed supplementing algae from the caustic.  

[Mariilyn]

57 minutes ago, impyre said:

Steam/solar for late-game? Without bugs/glitches?

No you're right about that, that last line could be better formulated. The steam turbine currently cannot be used as a primary source of energy without bugs. It's more that those buildings generate power on an intermittent basis and therefore I think they work best as complementary sources of energy within a robust electrical grid managed with automation.

[Iriswaters]

Ya, I think of end-game power being sour gas condensation and 30-60 nat gas generators.   Lol

[Lancar]

7 hours ago, GoHereDoThis said:

I'm surprised at where some people put atmo suit priority.  Don't you need that when exploring/clearing slime biomes?  In a previous build, I cleared out 2/3rds of a biome with atmo suits then made a mistake of making an alternate entrance.  When asking my dupes to clear out the remaining 1/3rd, and putting deodorizers in place, a couple of my dupes got slimelung.

I've moved my priority for the atmo suits much further down the line, basically to when i break into the oil biome.
In the past, I used to fear slime biomes. I waited the longest time and caaarefully extracted the reeds i needed to make my first suit before even considering leaving the starter biome.
These days, I leave the starter biome as soon as i got my polluted water tank done, got deodorizers researched and started insulating my base. At the bottom of the pool i place a cargo compactor accepting only slime with priority 7. That's all you need to start with.

There are only three sources of Slimelung infection in the game: Morbs, mined slime and pre-existing infected PO2 generated at game start.
As long as that previosuly mentioned compactor is submerged in liquid the slime within it will never off-gas, which means it'll never make slimelung PO2, and the prio 7 means that as soon as a slime tile is mined it'll immediately get transported there and effectively neutralized. This means that even pockets of existing PO2 won't catch the disease either.
This leaves morbs and existing pockets of PO2.
Morbs can be killed, so do that. If you ever need morbs for anything, make em with latrines. Easier and more controllable than catching existing morbs anyway.
Existing pockets can be vented into pure oxygen via a deodorizer tunnel until its safe.

Wth those 3 things taken care of, which is easily doable early, you'll never have dupes catch slimelung. Unless you're playing at the very hardest setting with worst immune systems, any minor slimelung leaks will easily be handled. You might see dupes immunity drop to the mid-90%, but that's it.
This relegates atmo suits to handling extreme temperatures only and frees up the rest of the entire map for dupes to roam without them.

So, to me the early/mid/late setup is like this:

Early: Starter biome
Mid: Expanding the base outside the starter biome, lasting until oil infrastructure is done
Late: Moving towards and working the space biome along with other fluff projects.
 

[Lurve]

Early game: survival, base stabilization. For me this means atmo suits all around, not because of slimelung but because I prefer not to care about gases unless I want to use them. I don't do liquid locks or mop either, so it's a right sewer outside.

Mid game: Explore, find geysers, make steel and plastic, mine out fossils, refine petroleum. Generally make use of the resources on the map in the fastest way possible. I know that trying to "bootstrap" to a late-game project in the mid-game will just end up a painful mess of broken pipes, so each time I have to peel myself away from it.

Late game: all that renewable boiler nonsense, decorative projects, rockets. Now that I have the resources to do something correctly, I have the luxury of taking my time and getting bored and making a new map.

[Papartichaud]

20 hours ago, Lilalaunekuh said:

PS: I like to leave my base running while doing something else, so it´s not rare that my base is running a couple hours unsupervised^^

The ultimate test to late game : " Okay dupes, i'm gonna eat, don't die "