Endless Expansion
Platform: Javascript
Volch's new resource management incremental simulation Endless Expansion lets you start out mining stone and hewing trees, gradually working your way to facilities enabling you to produce technologically-advanced goods and materials like plastics, solar panels and power transmitters. Unlike Factorio and certain other games we could mention there are no hostile aliens, creature mobs or indigenous peoples to come between you and perfect idyllic planetwide resource-processing efficiency. Slap a few basic resource-gathering facilities where appropriate, connect them up to a storage unit or something that uses whatever it produces, attach power where appropriate, and you're ready to gather enough resources to build the next, more advanced, construction types. There are even Outposts that let you expand your available territory but you'll soon find that it's not how far you can spread out your empire that's important, it's how and where you prioritize your available resources that matters the most!
Just click on a facility type from the Constructions menu and left-click on the appropriate type of terrain to get building! Left-clicking on it again will spend a requisite amount of additional resources to upgrade the facility and double its production — and consumption! Right-clicking will downgrade it again and even give you back exactly what you spent to upgrade it. Do yourself a favor and enable 'Show level of buildings on map' from the Options menu! Most production buildings will need to be connected to another that uses its goods, or to a Storage, either directly or via roads. Storages are universal in this one; send raw materials to a nearby Storage unit and they're available from a different Storage multiple screens away. The same is true for Power Accumulators for energy and Reservoirs for liquids too. Since doubling a facility's production when you upgrade it also doubles the raw materials required, finessing the right balance of basic resources to refined ones takes a bit of skill as well as practice, and establishing a balanced manufacturing economy where everything works right and there are no shortfalls is a lot of the fun here. And if all that sounds about as fun as Intermediate Accounting, just give it a try for yourself! When you have surplus resurces stockpiled, the game is willing to spend them if you're running a bit short unless they're electrical power, which just as in life doesn't seem to store too efficiently in great bulk. The moment you get a power supply deficit factories that depend on it start to lose efficiency or shut down, so you'll want to ensure you don't need more than you have. While this incremental does tend to be a little on the grind-y side, that essentially depends on how you're allocating your resources. If you're anything like us you'll leave this one open in a browser tab and find yourself coming back to tinker with it throughout your next few days. With its simplified retro graphics, it's easy to get the impression that one of your favorite medieval 8-bit role-playing games underwent an industrial revolution when you weren't looking! Endless Expansion is still in active expansion, receiving new updates as we were writing this for you, and Volch is certainly responsive to player suggestions. We can't wait to see what emerges from it!
Huh. It's only been one month, yet someone already made a knockoff of http://www.notdoppler.com/reactoridle.php. Go Figure.....
If I build an outpost and then sell it again before it has stockpiled its need for steel the new land is still visible but I can use the steel for other purposes. Is this a feature or a bug?
The outpost shouldn't reveal new land until you activate it, at which point it should consume its steel stockpile and start storing up to do it again (at a much higher steel cost). If you're selling the outpost shortly after using it and getting a small amount of steel back, that's working as intended; if the new land is appearing immediately, or you get a huge stack of steel back, that's a bug.
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