Generating the tiles, the fog of war, and the AI for movement... It's something I haven't learned yet, so I'm always impressed when I see something like this done in a short amount of time.
The main problem that I have with the game is that water is very sparse, and it's only created from asteroid impacts, however, asteroid impacts have a chance of creating Asteroid Rocks so even then, it's not guaranteed that you're going to get water from it. I think there needs to be some sort of guarantee that even in the worst case scenario, you're going to have just enough water to complete the game. Another event such as one that is guaranteed to provide water, or a few ice chunks that are already generated when the game begins.
However, once you've gotten lucky with the first few asteroids, it's not long before the balance heavily shifts in the other direction. I can't really give advice on this, since I don't really play these kinds of games, but I had more facilities mining ore than there were chunks on the maps. My trucks were moving towards the ore in a little snake line every time one appeared, and I built my laser far ahead of time and it was just a waiting game for the timer to tick down with nothing to do.
Notes
- There is no way to exit out of creating a facility after selecting it from the build menu. Pressing the ESC key will leave the tiles that the building was going to be placed on highlighted, but not actually cancel the build. I would create a dedicated button like RMB or Q to easily cancel a build.
- Having to move the mouse to the screen borders to navigate the world is a bit sluggish and cumbersome. WSAD panning, or holding down the middle mouse button, would make this a lot more comfortable.
- Building a structure on top of the default explorer robot will cause it to get stuck in place and not further explore any of the map. Considering this robot is responsible for collecting alien crystals necessary to build the laser, this can brick your run. This doesn't seem to happen with the trucks created by facilities.
- Zooming in will always zoom towards the center of the screen, and it would be more comfortable if the game would zoom in towards where the cursor is pointed for easier navigation.
- Usually in these kinds of "RTS", or world building/simulation games, where an adjustable time scale is present, the keys 1, 2 and 3 will correspond with different time scales, and a key such as Tab will cycle between them. Something like this would be a welcome addition.
- The shield doesn't seem to work, and I had a difficult time figuring out what area of my colony was "protected". It is in a dome shape, but where the dome ends on the far side doesn't seem well defined. Either way, asteroids were destroying anything inside of it.