Welcome to our dev blog! Today lead game designer Oleksandr Pankov (Alex) provides us with an in-depth look at some of the base systems you'll encounter in Cygnus Enterprises.
Electricity and Efficiency
Despite appearing simple at first glance, the base and its features hide lots of interconnected systems that interact with each other and lead to different outcomes for the player. In this series of articles, we'll go through the interactions between various base systems to better help you understand how to manage your base efficiently and maximize output!
First, let's start with electricity and how it affects base operations.
On your base, electricity plays a crucial role in maintaining efficiency. At the start, you have only a recycler that can give a certain amount of electricity by recycling things like biomass and shards, but it's not exactly the most efficient way to spend your precious resources. So, later on in the game, you'll start building solar panels and wind turbines to generate electricity automatically, rather than relying solely on the recycler. However, as you progress through the game, you'll discover that the weather plays a significant role in the productivity of your electricity-generating structures.
The weather changes throughout the game, with different conditions such as sunny, rainy, and windy. As you might expect, each weather condition affects the productivity of solar panels and wind turbines differently. For example, sunny days will result in more electricity generation from solar panels, while windy days will see an increase in electricity production from wind turbines.
Once you've generated some electricity, it's essential to use it effectively. Each building on your base, excluding the HQ, requires a specific amount of electricity to function. Insufficient electricity will decrease the efficiency of all buildings according to the amount of electricity that is lacking. In other words, the less your electricity, the greater the decrease in efficiency. However, even in the worst-case scenario, you can always generate electricity by burning resources in the recycler, but it will come at a high cost.
To prevent wasting days when your base can't produce enough electricity to keep buildings at 100% efficiency, you can store extra electricity in advance. Currently, this is possible through the HQ's energy storage, but in future updates, there will be energy bank buildings available to extend the storage capacity. By saving some electricity on good days when electricity production exceeds consumption, you can maintain the efficiency of your base during bad weather.
In summary, electricity is a vital resource on your base, and the weather plays a significant role in the productivity of your electricity-generating structures. To effectively manage electricity, use it efficiently, store extra electricity in advance, and be mindful of the cost of burning resources in the recycler.
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Thanks,
Team Miaozi