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PC IXION

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PC IXION

Unread postby icycalm » 22 Feb 2022 23:19

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https://www.kasedogames.com/ixion

Bulwark Studios wrote:IXION combines city building, survival elements and exploration, into a thrilling space opera as you explore the stars.


https://store.steampowered.com/app/1113120/IXION/

Bulwark Studios wrote:Authorised by DOLOS AEC, you will guide the Tiqqun space station onwards in a perilous journey to find a new home for humanity. Station infrastructure, population management, exploration, survival, these responsibilities fall to you. Will you find hope out there in the dark? Good luck Administrator.


What intrigues me about this is that you send probes out to a solar system etc. You aren't just building up a tiny part of a planet, as in Industries of Titan and similar games, so it scratches my PA itch much more than anything else. Or maybe you could see it as taking aspects of Homeworld. Production values are also atypically high for the genre, which is always a good sign, though with somewhat less character than in IoT or Frostpunk. You can play a demo right now on Steam. They are calling it a "Prologue", so maybe it's a finished chapter instead of a random demo.

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Epic Gameplay Trailer!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGlFvRp ... XVyolQO3wj

TBA 2022.
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icycalm
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Joined: 28 Mar 2006 00:08
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Re: PC IXION

Unread postby icycalm » 08 Dec 2022 07:58

https://steamcommunity.com/id/von_schti ... ed/1113120

von_schtirlitz wrote:IXION is an excellent simulation of trying to manage a """self sufficient""" space station filled with electrical sockets, populated by suicidal children armed with forks, from trying to electrocute themselves.

You have been appointed the captain of an unfinished space washing machine with a prototype hyperdrive that is constantly falling apart. Literally, if you do not spend hundreds of tons of alloys weekly to upkeep your ship, you will explode and lose. Coincidentally, you must also use the same resources to build repair facilities and also grow and expand your ship. This basically involves managing a medium sized fleet of haulers and miners to even attempt to keep up with raw resource demand, which take up a lot of space and resources back at home.

After blowing up the earth with rotor wash, your crew decides that now is the time to start unionizing and forcing you to adopt very lax labor standards. They become extremely upset when having to work more than the contract they signed, and have also found a large stockpile of explosives and molotovs in the middle of your ship. At the slightest inconvenience, they will start blowing up random buildings in their sector and then complain about it. However, blowing up random buildings also really damages the washing machine, which requires alloys to fix. Alloys, which are made in the furnace that they just blew up 2 days ago. Also, they are now even more sad because the washing machine is falling apart from the explosion they caused and you cant fix it :( This is probably the best time for a labor strike in all of your other critical infrastructure, and probably cause some more explosions along the way. Oh, and best part about these very numerous explosions, is that you get to be part of them! Every 3-5 seconds, you need to find which sector something blew up in, and click the green button! Every single time! Otherwise you will hemorrhage ship health and die within days.

You can, however, invest a little time into tidying up the situation, and spend a little time scooping up extra resources to fix holes and make people happier. Wait, you get a permanent mood debuff from staying in the same system and trying to solve problems? Awesome, I guess I have to jump to the next system and get even more permanent debuffs to cripple my already dying ship. Amazing difficulty options I can tweak on the fly as I'm learning the game.

Jumping into the next system, the fleet of suicidal support ships so essential to my survival decide that their only possible routes are through the spicy thunderstorms that instantly kill them. You can research technologies to give them a *slightly* better chance at survival, but the limited amount of research you can acquire lie through those spicy thunderstorms. I gave up at this point because seeing my ship hull health meter go triple digits into the red from having ISIS cells onboard my ship and losing essential ships who decide that they need to electrocute themselves in the thunderstorm to fix those problems is not fun.

Beautiful game, very enthralling story, fun city builder gameplay, horrible balance


https://steamcommunity.com/id/thephoeni ... ed/1113120

Phoenix wrote:Slow waste of your time. Accidents need fixed pronto.

1. Even on optimal conditions, severe accidents can occur, and should... OCCASIONALLY. Not once every 2 cycles, and even then, shouldn't kill 3 people and injure 6.
2. The aforementioned accident, that is 100% RNG. Can trigger a downward spiral where your population is SLIGHTLY overworked, and therefore 100% more prone to have an accident. Bringing the ratio to close to one a cycle. Which will make them MORE overworked causing MORE accidents, causing more population overwork, causing more accidents, etc etc.
3. Your ability to get new population to remedy this, is far outpaced by the rate at which accidents take your population out of commission. Seriously, your population are effing morons.
4. When you realize, that accidents are a constant and frequent thing, no matter how carefully you play the game, and understand that you are set up for failure, it makes you not want to play it. (Remember, its RNG based and even in optimal conditions, accidents seem to happen VERY frequently)

When did I discover this? About half an hour after my ability to refund.

Save yourself the money, and wait for the developer to fix, if that's even something they desire to do.

If its "Working as intended", I can think of far better ways to simulate the end of humanity than forcing the player to invest hours into a game before they realize they are unable to fix the problem.


https://steamcommunity.com/id/Vorcha/re ... ed/1113120

Angry Trash wrote:I quit the game without saving after my 12th accident in 30 cycles. It's arbitrary, completely unpreventable, and a mechanic which forces a death spiral (which this game has several of, such as the ability to construct new space ships and some kind of quantum slip drive but not be permanently able to repair your ship causing increasing bleed rates each chapter).

Let me give you some quick math. Chapter 1 started, for me, with 199 people. Each accident loses you between 2-5 workers on average, sometimes they die but that doesn't truly matter because you'll wish the ones who didn't did anyways. Accidents can, and do, trigger when you have : No shortage of materials, an abundance of workers meaning optimal working conditions, a nearly perfect hull, no power difficulties. An accident triggers, on average, every 1.5 cycles. Accidents often are explosive, which means they will damage the surrounding buildings, if you build optimally this means two/three accidents per major malfunction, so 4/6-10/15 losses. So let's take the most conservative average, 12 * 5 = 60 that is 30% of my workforce gone. Consider then, that it takes 8-15 cycles for someone to heal from an accident, and each worker you're short of your optimal workload increases the risk and severity of accidents. Hospitals, naturally, need doctors and with 3 accidents filling up a single hospital, you increase your worker shortage by another 20%. Well golly gee, that means that I literally cannot avoid dying.

This needs to be fixed it is absolutely insane and makes the game so abhorrently tedious and arbitrary I regret having made it over the 2 hour threshold.


The issues sound fixable, and the game does look great, just like with Knights of Honor II [ > ], so give it some time and check back.

Release Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssYxoiWKJXg

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icycalm
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