All time high: Our best colonies after finished milestones

[Tyrberg]

How do people get 1K+ colonists so soon after Sol 100? O_O

I think it´s fully possible to reach 1K+ before SOL 100.
Have the colonist start making babies as soon as possible do I guess is the start (having cloning vats ain´t a negative factor).
That will be my next game, even if I try to push it in my current as Space Y.
Getting 100 drones for evaluation is easy - but having up to 1k-1,5k that I will need for beating the top score will be a real challenge.
Running at right above 300% now. I do not think the 535% start necessary need to be "the best" when it comes to scoring.

 

[ainyru]

As i see score difference with my two games, doing things much faster dosnt give you really big bonus. This mean base difficulty bonus have high weight in result. Here my current game sample, u can compare with my previous game with same difficulty.

 

[Tyrberg]

As i see score difference with my two games, doing things much faster dosnt give you really big bonus. This mean base difficulty bonus have high weight in result. Here my current game sample, u can compare with my previous game with same difficulty.

I can only say that I do not like the system of scoring. You illustrate it very good.

It´s extremly little difference for your first human on Mars - Sol 20 (3799) vs Sol 13 (4173) or between produced food (sol 14, 6260p vs sol 24, 5725p).

If it doesn´t matter more than a few % of the base-score there is no meaning in the scores. The only thing that will matter in the end is the difficulty. I would like to see higher bonuses for "finishing early" and higher malus for "finish late". To be honest - "Found water on Mars" is a rather bad milestone to score. It´s just luck and you can do it with a commanderprofile from day 1.

The only thing it looks like we really can manipulate is the evaluation score - as some sponsors make it poossile to beat the score by a high multiplications. Because of that I think "Covenant of the new Ark" is the sponsor with highest possible scoring - high difficulty and with a high population you really can beat the evaluation. But that will be my next game. Now I´m as said try to do the same with SpaceY.

If goal for milestone "built a dome" is sol 10 I would like to see a rather high bonus for making it on half that time, and a rather bad scoring for making it in sol 20. With the later goals I feel the same.

I´m looking at "Research a break through"
I got it at sol 17, 195%, 2223 points - equals basescore 1140 points.
Kdubya got it at sol 15, 310%, 3596points - equals basescore 1160 points
You ainyru got it sol 57, 535%, 3959 points - equals basescore 740 points

I guess we have a goaltime for sol 20 or 25 on breakthrough - but that I and kdubya only got 50% points for this finishing it at least 30 sols faster, or in 1/3 if the time looks as to little difference. I will continue to count my scores here, but I do hope that it shows Heimemont that we need a bit more of a bonus for doing things fast, anad malus for doing it slow.

tl.dr. time make to little difference on score, just the difficulty.

 

[ainyru]

We will see. Difficulty looks important, but 535% can be not optimal. Something like selecting sponsor with 2 rockets with just little less difficulty bonus can win race, bcoz 2 rockets makes start much more faster. Same kind of factors can make some other sponsor/commander choices valid. Specially commanders, coz their difference in scores is not that big. And place as well, zone where im trying is very bad for researching anomalies, it separated on 6 unlinked areas, so you need 5 tunnels for reseaching every anomaly. It cause significant lag on research and "Research a break through" and "Scan all sectors" achievements.

But still, i think for best scores difficulty must be close to 500%.

And one more thing i want to point. Most scores comes from last 3 lines. So its better to disign strategy for max speed to reach these last achievements.

 

[Chiruadr]

Sponsor: Blue Sun Corporation
Commander: Politician
Mystery: Marsgate
Location: 24N149E
Difficulty: 330%
Mods: all example-mods except lower output of solarpanels in shadows.

The only mod I can think of that may come as cheaty is the waste dump which turns the dump from 70 to 5000 cause I got tired of having half the map with waste rock, space was never an issue. Also I used a less births mod that changed the threshold for births from 75 to 90. That actually made it kinda tricky to get population in the begging, since the only quick way was the Art or Electronic shop, and those are expensive to maintain as first. I also had to rely entirely on moisturizers because I had no water near me.

This was my first score attack run, Blue Sun + Politician gives you loads of money, more than 1.000 per 30 Rare metals, so money was never an issue. In the end I got bored after I reached the 500 pop mark, I just spammed buy applicants and rockets to get to 1000 faster. Funny thing, I didn't built any farms until I had about 200 pop, I just bought it and at some point I plopped a farm dome and be done with it.

Marsgate was really good to be honest. You get money if you repair the rovers and you get a really cheap anti asteroid. Might be something to keep in mind if you wanna try an asteroid heavy map

The Evaluation bonus was insane as I had way more than 100 metal exported by sol 100

Also the map has like 4 levels, only built a tunnel to one, used rockets with a rover+explorer combo to explore anomalies on the other levels. Seemed cheaper, once you get shuttles you can also ship fuel everywhere.

This was quite fun, it actually kinda made the game have a purpose since playing score attack, feeling like "I WIN". I'll try a 500+ difficulty to see how it goes next

 

[Tjapeh]

Hi,
Same as ainyru
Scores: 136.533
Difficulty: 535%

Paradox Interactive, Futurist, 44N 112W, Marsgate
No mods, version 228.184

The hardest part was the start, as I had to reload a couple of times since I didn't know that an extracter that wasn't powered by humans would freeze over at night. This would mean game over since you need a heater..
Edit: This is fixed by making a single worker do the night shift. Sleep is for the weak!

I could have scored a bit higher, but I slacked of a bit in the late-game grind.
No explorer rover start is best start

Domes build for the spoiled little brats being born on mars that do nothing but sleep, eat and have babies.

 

[Tjapeh]

It appears you can score bigtime on evaluation, which probably makes one sponsor (dop't know which one since I don't know what the evaluations are) the best to score high. Since the PI sponser has really crappy evaluation scores.
The difference can be seen comparing the 535% evaluation scores to chiduadr

The Evaluation bonus was insane as I had way more than 100 metal exported by sol 100

 

[ainyru]

Im finishing this map tomorrow, it will be alot faster than previous time. My population is on hard work all time, noone slack!
And btw, why u heat so huge area. I found thats only tiny area have to be heated - water storage. Everything else survives cold just nice, unless its meteor storm in same time (i has in in my game).

 

[Tjapeh]

Im finishing this map tomorrow, it will be alot faster than previous time. My population is on hard work all time, noone slack!
And btw, why u heat so huge area. I found thats only tiny area have to be heated - water storage. Everything else survives cold just nice, unless its meteor storm in same time (i has in in my game).

I'm interested in what score you have. This was my first try
About the heaters, energy is not reaaaaly a problem at this point in the game. I didn't use them for a huge part of the game. I just used a single worker in the night shift to not make the extractors freeze since I had the Safe Mode breakthrough (no insanity breakdown)

 

[ainyru]

This is my current situation. Sol 86. 275 population. Mega dome is ready to build
I predict finishing around 110 sol.

 

[Vaperius]

Here's my 290% Church of the New Ark run.

So while not as score impressive as some others, Church of the New Ark has a lot of handicaps and challenges. First off, you don't get any nifty techs to help off-set your weaknesses like Russia does, so you have to deal with the fact you have only one rocket, 4 billion in funding, no sponsor research, a doubled birth rate and halved food production from hydroponics farms, so because of those added difficulties I feel rather proud of what I managed to accomplish after about 350 sols of play.

Here is a view of the entire map. Initially I spread across from the bottom left corner up to the center where I stopped expansion at a deep water deposit that essentially feeds my colony indefinitely until I need to go even further left for core water deposit in the top left; or I would if not for this save being somewhat bugged out by now. The UI for dome outlines have completely bugged out as you can see in the score board image.

How was this possible? Space Elevator and lots of funding from repeatables after I built the science megadomes, before repeatables were nerfed although the domes churn out 20k science so it doesn't really matter either way.

Each dome has a dedicated purpose; science; manufacturing (one for each advanced resource, each with six factories even electronics thus the insane machine part count); idiot quarantine, flaw removal, farming, child management and senior management. In theory I could just expand indefinitely even with the glitches but I decided it be best to just move on as it was becoming difficult to build new domes without getting a new graphical glitch.

At full bore the electronics factories produce 50 electronics; the polymer factories produce 100 and the machine parts produce 126(thus the low metal count because I accidentally them on and they depleted my 2000+ metals in a few sols without me realizing it).

Here's what the colony looks like up close(before I built the last three oval domes at the top sadly.

The only other things of note about this colony are that I pretty much depleted everything as I went along, there are almost no concrete,metals or water near where I've expanded into and also I've given each wonder its own little outpost, because I felt it looked better.

 

[xMer]

Looks like maxing evaluation score would be key to victory. Anyone have made list of evaluations per sponsor?
Blue Sun - Exporting rare metals
USA - Scanning anomalies
China - People born on Mars

 

[ainyru]

Exporting rare metals is probably most potential. Its possible to make whole economy only producing rare metals and mine whole map with 2-3 mines on every resource. Every other resource we buy from Earth.

 

[Chiruadr]

Exporting rare metals is really big. It is offset a bit by the fact that blue suns has a low difficulty rating though

 

[Vaperius]

Its more than that. They get *30* million per piece whereas most sponsors only get 25 and many get less than that (CONA and SpaceY only get 20 for instance). Combining them with astrogeologist is one of the easiest games you can play.

 

[Chiruadr]

Its more than that. They get *30* million per piece whereas most sponsors only get 25 and many get less than that (CONA and SpaceY only get 20 for instance). Combining them with astrogeologist is one of the easiest games you can play.

I combined them with Politician for 37.5 million per piece

 

[ainyru]

Finished my second game

So love this game, probably gonna try again with other Sponsor and Commander. I have my understanding what is most important now.

 

[Tyrberg]

So many posts!
I´m sorry I ain´t updating right now - I dead tired and need to sleep early.
Updating tomorrow. As I´m semi-free I hope to ad my own SpaceY game to the high scores.

Looks like maxing evaluation score would be key to victory. Anyone have made list of evaluations per sponsor?
Blue Sun - Exporting rare metals
USA - Scanning anomalies
China - People born on Mars

SpaceY - Total population on Mars
Church of the new Ark - either as SpaceY or China if I remember correctly
Russia - total extracted resources.

Church of the new Ark and Russia seems to have a much higher possibility to score high than many other.

 

[Tyrberg]

Sponsor: SpaceY
Commander: Astrogeologist
Location: 22 S 109 E
Mystery: Spheres

SpaceY evaluates on total population - so the entire game I pushed for more population.
You may see that every dome has the medical spire with the upgrade for more births. Still I mismanaged a little and missed my goal of 1000 at year 100. I had 791 inhabitants.
The wonder I built was the Mohole. Was easiest to get machineparts (and I had most of that) so when I had possibility to focus on wonders it was an easy choice.
Around sol 80 I had to ship in to rockets full of food, the mystery made me loose focus and miss that food was running really low.
I got breakthroughs for free cables and for workerfree fusion. Workerfree fusion really made my game easier.


About the mystery

You do not want to know how many reloads I did trying to get all five rockets lift at the same time.
This was the best, and my favorite view over the base.

 

[ainyru]

Nice 106 Sol!
It's time to aim for Sol 100