Posted on: April 18, 2021

seaofgiants

Games: 11 Reviews: 7

Impossible to Survive despite 1st Level

I recommend Dawn of Man over Planetbase. The graphics and premise are attractive in Planetbase but even on the novice level your colony is ridiculously vulnerable to death. Death will be most likely be from starvation despite having plenty of bio-domes and biologists to care for them. It just doesn't make sense! It takes too long to mine and produce precious resources (and then expand your colony) while cascades of disasters make it impossible to keep up basic survival. To make matters worse, once things start going south it is impossible to recover. You are then counting down the clock until everyone is dead with absolutely no means to stop it. After hours of cultivating what you THINK is a strong and thriving colony only to have it ripped away for no good reason within a few turns makes this game extremely frustrating. Dawn of Man is much more forgiving in its game play, making it fun, relaxing and rewarding.

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Posted on: June 29, 2019

datawraith236

Verified owner

Games: 902 Reviews: 22

Good game - not for the faint of heart.

Let's make something clear: the difficulty is absolutely PUNISHING. It's about as difficult as it would be to colonize a planet. Hard to find terrain that's fit for construction. Hard to keep the resources flowing. Hard to get enough workforce to operate the equipment. And when it fiinally seems that your base is OK, machinery start to break down -> need spare parts -> need more resources -> need more workers. Then you realise that your people eat up all the food and suck up all the oxygen, so you need to build more machinery and when you think you've stabilised your economy, your slaves- i mean valuable pioneer colonist get DEPRESSED, forcing you to spend precious material on entertainment facilities. You may not get as many types of buildings as in an other strat. game, but Planetbase is about resourcess: you have a s-load of variou reources that you need to produce, refine, store, and use. You need to carefully manage both exterior and interior space to be able to build everything you need on the planet and inside your building (yes, buildings are worthless when empty: you need to build equipment inside the buildings). This game really does feel like a struggle against the extreme conditions of an alien planet.

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Posted on: June 30, 2016

eryngo

Verified owner

Games: 1498 Reviews: 47

Good space colony game

This game is about surviving on a planet and building a self-sufficient colony. There are different types of colonist; you have engineers, workers, medics and biologists. The engineers build and construct buildings or do specialist tasks like repairing robots. The biologists work in the biosphere growing foods, medics brew medications and heal your injured workers. etc. Every base starts with creating power, water and air, and build a place for your colonists to rest and to eat. Once you've done with the basics you start fighting against poweroutages and trying to be self-sufficient as good as possible. Resource management is important, because everything is limited and it can be very frustrating once items are "out of stock". There are downsite in this game... The AI seems a bit buggy when it comes to priorities. Every colonist have basic needs; it needs water, air, food, sleep and happyness. From my experience with the game is that the colonist keeps on working on there jobs even though they are in desperet need of water or food. Another problem I encountered is shortage of food. Workers ignore to bring the finished product to the canteen. (because they have other priorities?) The canteen food-machines are very slow in creating meals and the result is starving colonists. At a certain point the game is unplayable because to many of your biologists died and the food-production stoped... Another problem is that at some point in the game the colonist and trading ships stop visiting your base. (I guess because of the low morals) But this is unavoidable. Once you've reached this point its basicly game over. And my last big issue with this game is the music; its horribly annoying... Only one long audio track? Overall this is a good game, if above issues will be solves with updates/patches I can recommend this to everyone who love this type if sim-gaming.

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Posted on: November 29, 2019

Sarxis

Verified owner

Games: 266 Reviews: 52

Impressed

I was a bit skeptical of Planetbase (and Dawn of Man for the same reasons) because of the mediocre review rating and some of the comments. But now that I'm playing it, I really don't see what the problem is. The game is quite fun - the interface is super clean and easy to use. At first I thought the game might be too simplistic, but it's actually challenging to balance production, storage, energy, and everything else you need to do. Plenty of content! Graphics are quite well done and pleasant. Glad I finally got Planetbase.

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Posted on: December 29, 2020

olamansteamhater

Verified owner

Games: 111 Reviews: 7

Warning: Stupid AI

I have always been excited for city builder especially when it's in space. This game, however, is nightmarish in all the wrong ways. The game isn't challenging because of good game designs, but because of bad game designs. So as you can see from the screenshots above, your buildings are pods that you have to connect to each other. All buildings have to connect to each other which is well & good, but it's not obvious on where you can place the buildings because sometimes the game just won't let you so you'll have to think very carefully on where to place your buildings. To make it even worse. Nobody can move crates out off the way. So when you recycle your buildings, you get your resources back. Say, you just got a tech upgrade on your windmill & you want to replace it with an upgraded one on the exact same place. Well you can't do that because the AI are too dumb to move the crates out off the way & there's no way to order your colonists to move them either, but you can destroy the crates, thus destroying the resources you need to build your upgraded windmill just to clear the area. Now, try imagine that you're placing something crucial like an oxygen generator or a bio dome your module connection was off & you wanted to realign your modules. You can't, because the crates are in the way, and now your colony will collapse due to starvation/suffocation. Can't assign jobs to colonists. Colonists are specialists at certain tasks, but you can't tell them what to do. For example, biologists grows food for your colony, but if they don't want to, everybody dies. So make sure to set your crucial modules to top priority because your colonists won't do their job. Some jobs you can't toggle as priority so you might tear off your hair from that. Can't rotate indoor furniture. When you place down something, they'll have an ugly angle & you can't fix it. Can't disable workstation. You have to shut down that entire dome. Hard skip, go play Surviving Mars.

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