Beyond Earth mystery is not fun.

[krasnovian7]

*** Minor spoilers for the Beyond Earth Mystery ahead ***

So in my third playthrough I rolled Beyond Earth as my mystery and I'm not sure if it is properly balanced. I am playing 55% difficulty because I want to sandbox a bit and try new things.

For those who don't know, they Beyond Earth mystery consists of a guy named "Rene Goddenberry" who wants to solve Earth's problems by going into space. How this manifests in game is he sends rockets to your colony and asks you to load them up with materials. There is also 1 technology you can research for him, which I believe has a base cost of 5.000 science.

There are 4 different settlements you can choose to support developing, and I believe it takes 3 rockets for each to finish their development. The amounts required are around these (trying to go from memory):

• Rubicon Station - 120 Metal each; 360 Metal total
• Aldrin Base - 30 Machine Parts, 30 Electronics, 30 Polymer each: 90 of each advanced resource total
• Ganymede - 90 Polymer each; 270 Polymer total
• (I can't remember the name of the last base) - 80 Electronics each; 240 Electronics total

Each time you finish the 3 rockets you get a mild boost to research in a particular field.

The problem is that rockets started arriving for me on Sol 79, Rede died on Sol 115, and I failed the Mystery on Sol 137 because after his passing "his plan fell apart". There is no indication when the mystery begins that there will be a time constraint, and only vague hints that there might be a time limit when the Rede's Death event triggers. I have a Mohole Mine, 4 electronics factories working at full production, 3 Machine Parts factories, and 2 fully staffed Polymer factories and it wasn't enough to finish all the stations. I got 2 bonuses for finishing Rubicon Station and the Moon base but they were extremely underwhelming bonuses, and now the event is just over?

I think I'm done with this playthrough, it just feels like I wasted hundreds of resources for no reason.

 

[Chaon]

Maybe the mystery part is you simply don't know how long you have to complete his plan? /joke

 

[GAGA Extrem]

A lot of the mysteries are actually quite vague, and I think that is inteded. In the case of Beyond Earth it's not even that bad, but some can be devestating when you get them for the first time. I actually had a game that I lost because of a mystery, which was rather annoying. In this case, I'd say: Don't sweat it. Mysteries seem to be intended more as challenges than quests, so they seem to require a lot of input for little gain.

Looking at the screenshot I'd guess that you had a bad time with this specific mystery because it requires a strong economy, and thus is more suited for score-attack style play. For comparison, I have managed to get 1000 colonists + a few wonders by Sol 120 on a 250%-ish difficulty setup with Russia.

I got the quest once (in a different game) and from what I remember, I manged to get a good ending with only 2 of the 4 projects completed (or was that 2 completed by me, so 3 total?).