The last time I’ve played Autonauts, I can’t really remember. Nor can I remember why I stopped playing. That was until I stepped in my save and.. suddenly realized. It’s another one of those ‘buildy games’ that I stress more over how to make things look good than actually playing the damn game.
Don’t let the always smiling (or grinning) rosy cheek characters fool you. This game is
hell. But for those who have never played Autonauts, just go back to 2020 where I reviewed the game. A warning though, it’s slightly outdated by now. There’s now 8 Tiers instead of 6, and there’s four gamemodes now.
And that’s where the hell comes from. As I stated before (which is still viable), the training wheels come off when you get into Research. You can do anything you want to make your way to Tier 8, as long as you feed your heart shitters for their research currency.
Now, here comes my problem. It isn’t really the game wanting you to prep for a Tier in advance of your current tier (so you’ll be ready), it’s the planning part. There’s nothing out there that says “if you want your village to be optimized yet also look good, put this here and that there.. but prepare to also put what you built over here now as you’ll need room for this in a tier from now”.
This is what hurts, and this is my bane in every fucking buildy game. Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory.. you name it, I struggle with it. Every game out there does this to me, putting more and more, expecting me to just.. know where to put everything, yet ALSO come up with a plan to move it for other shit.
If you don’t have fast moving bots, you have to keep everything close together to maintain efficiency (similar to Satisfactory’s early game). But unlike that game, there
aren’t any true ‘cheat’ mods that could help me. Most of the mods on the Steam Workshop are balanced. You also cannot throw a speed boost on your crops to grow faster, or produce more.
But then there’s Settlement mode, which I’ve been told gives a more direct (yet also limited) approach to learning the progression tree of the game. So I thought, nice. This would teach me what I should build, and when I should build it.
However… it cannot be fully used to learn, as it shifts certain plans around to either be obtained sooner, or later than in the original gamemode. A good example is the upgrade to the Crude Bucket, called the Good Bucket. I was able to obtain this in Stage 4 of the original. But in Settlement, this bucket is locked until Stage 6. My assumption is the devs either like to see you suffer, or the bucket was never intended to be used as an upgrade that early.
…Why does Settlement mode feel less of a tutorial on the game’s progression, and more of
a ‘challenge mode’? Yet, the research cost of Wuv in this mode is majorly
decreased, allowing faster research early game. So if it was a true challenge mode, it would take everything from the original mode and crank the difficulty knob to 11 (such as requiring the mid to late game Metal Ore much earlier by changing the recipes).
Settlement mode doesn’t change any recipes, that I’m aware.
With that said, let’s look at the new gamemodes;
(was originally called Colonize)
1. Original (standard) gamemode that all the trailer videos go over, getting
your Colonists (Folk) from Tier 1 to Tier 8 to progress as fast or slow as you want.
2. Gives an option to toggle bot recharging.
Pros: Doesn’t change anything from the original, as it is the original.
Cons: Gives too many options that might cause some players to feel confused on what’s the most efficient way to progress.
1. Build your village in order to progress. Gives a more directed, limited approach for people unsure how to progress in the original gamemode.
2. The research cost of Wuv is much cheaper, allowing you to complete research
faster (earlier on).
3. Disables bot recharging, but adds a challenge mode (that you can thankfully
disable) which caps your max bots at 300. Turning it off disables the achievement in the world it was done.
Pros: Limits what you can do in order to teach you how certain things work.
Cons:
1. Doesn’t tell you where to put what for maxinum efficiency, still causing me to feel confused on how to progress.
2. Forces you to use Bulrush during Stage 4 (Clothing) instead of Cotton.
3. Removes the Bot Storage structure due to the 300 bot limit.
(Unlocks everything in the game at the start, but you still have to build them)
Pros: I dunno what this is used for.
Cons: Kind of pointless?
(Mainly used for testing purposes)
Pros: Good for testing village designs.
Cons: Doesn’t teach me how to play as everything’s unlocked.
Time for my final thoughts. So.. look, I know experimentation is key when it comes to games like this: trying to learn what works and what doesn’t. But that doesn’t really work for me, most of the time. My experimentation has more fails than wins, and most of the time I’ll be stuck in a fail streak which doesn’t bode well for my mentality. The whole ‘great idea, poor execution’ comes to mind.
And it doesn’t help when my brain finally is ‘happy’ with a design, only to later feel
it’s ‘boring’ and it ‘needs to be changed’ (which has a high chance of it looking even worse than it did or.. never really getting another idea how to improve on it but not letting it go for another task). It’s freakin’ annoying.
I think that manifested from my years of playing The Sims; the ultimate game to
say “ugh, this is ugly. I don’t care if I spent four hours on it, I want to tear it down and start over.. but I can’t think of a better idea! But I have to do something! But I can’t
think!!”.. and over, and over. It’s unending until I just stop playing the game from frustration.
Aka, why I had stopped playing this game a few years ago. The game isn’t bad, I’m just bad at buildy games as the biggest puzzle is design and planning of a base. 😖
It upsets me that so many have little to no issue with this and have completed the game way before I have. Because they don’t fear the unknown (they experiment to see what works with them and what doesn’t). They don’t fear when something looks ugly.. it doesn’t bug them.
I wish I had this superpower, over my mind. Disappoints me that I can’t be like this.