Ixion - New Survival/Colony Builder Iiin Spaaaace!

[GloatingSwine]

Ixion is a game I've had my eye on for a while, and now it's out.

For those that haven't heard of it, it's a colony builder game set inside a giant moving space station. You need to manage resources and resource flows to make sure you have enough stuff to build and expand the station and keep patching up the hull, keeping the people inside your station alive and fed whilst launching probes to explore the star systems you find yourself in then sending mining and cargo ships out to collect resources and science ships out to investigate points of interest, which give you narrative dilemmas where you can choose different approaches for dealing with things you find which can give you different resources or get your science team killed.

It's all driven by an overarching narrative where you're leaving a polluted and ruined earth with a first generation FTL system, which is still new and so it causes massive stress on your ship whenever you use it, meaning you have to make sure you're ready with your hull nice and fixed before you jump to the next system to continue the story (you can also drive your station around inside systems, which again causes your hull to degrade quickly).

It's often being compared to Frostpunk because of the exploration and narrative dilemmas, but it's not got the same overbearing pressure because the ticking clocks are much slower and it's not desgned to push you into moral compromise (so far), it's more about how you're going to deal with the challenges of space and the consequences of the plot.

[The Glyphstone]

Have you done multiple playthroughs? Repayability is important to me, and I've heard from other people that Ixion has no random seeds and ends up more of a puzzle game with a single optimal choice path.

[GloatingSwine]

Have you done multiple playthroughs? Repayability is important to me, and I've heard from other people that Ixion has no random seeds and ends up more of a puzzle game with a single optimal choice path.

I haven't, I keep trying to do things more optimally, because it gets that optimisation itch going moreso than replay through randomness.

[ufo]

Have you done multiple playthroughs? Repayability is important to me, and I've heard from other people that Ixion has no random seeds and ends up more of a puzzle game with a single optimal choice path.

I have not gotten further than the second level (or third, depending how you count) because I find the game REALLY HARD, and felt that I had gotten into a series of catastrophes that seemed unsalvageable, prompting me to restart the campaign entirely. The impression I have so far is that it is, exactly, a puzzle-like setup as you describe; but the puzzle is sufficiently dense and dynamic that finding the 'solution' is replay value in itself.

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, it's not quite on the "losing is fun" level of Dwarf Fortress, but I've restarted a bunch of times to set myself up better to avoid cascade failure.

I get the feeling I'll hit the point where I feel like I have the first couple of chapters down and will throw down an end save on them.

[Name_Here]

I like it so far. Only real complaint is the storage yards you have available to you are so laughably small and specialized. Why do I need to make an entire storage yard for 5 electronics? Just stuff them in the Polymer storage bay we don't have a factory up and running yet so they'll keep.

The way it's brutal about shifting from handing you so many alloys to having none avaliable but what you can produce is very good.

[GloatingSwine]

Yeah, stockpiles are part of the space optimisation challenge. I think it's pretty much only Electronics that you're going to have in such small quantities that the stockpile for it is mostly empty.