In part 1, we managed to build your first organism, now let dial that to 11 and engineer the whole planet ecosystem.

Getting habitability

Since the requirement for habitability is just for terrestrial plant support, we can start by focusing on that instead of building both aquatic and terrestrial biosphere. Let’s assume you have enough species slot from you environmental building, the amount of species you need depends on how much support they will give. You can probably go around six microbial species for this for the moon/mars if you follow this guide. Keep in mind that it depends from planet to planet (or moons) since the moon need between 3- 10 and Mars 6-20 and since it’s support that needed not number of species, you might just have 2 species of on the moon and be fine (if they give 3-4.5 support each). Note since the skyfarm get rid of the biosphere requirement, you may use easy route if your goal is just habitability.

Get those microbes everywhere

Our colonist will need plant and those plant will need microbial support. Good thing that in our previous entry we built a microorganism from scratch. Now we can do the same thing until we have enough support for our plant and some extra if you want those microbe that give credit. There are two main way to increase support. The first is by selecting a phylum that give support so either actinobacteria or fungus. Both give a base bonus of +50% to support. However species of the fungus phylum are less tolerant to arid environment (-15% tolerance low water). The second way if my selecting a gene attribute that boost support, for microorganism this mean either the Large gene (+50% support) and the Nitrogen Fixing. You can combine both ways them together and even stack attribute gene to give super organism that can give up to 10 of support. Since you cannot have organism with the exact same sequence you can mix large gene and nitrogen fixing to get more variety and still have a lot of support. Here, some example of the gene sequence you can build with high support that we repeat for each phylum.

Legend : L = large gene attribute NF = nitrogen fixing XX = low atmosphere tolerance, YY = low water tolerance (for fungus), AN = any

Actinobacteria = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN (and if your feeling it L-NF-NF, NF-NF-XX)
Fungus = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-NF, LNFXX, L-NF-YY, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN (and if you’re feeling it L-NF-NF, NF-NF-XX)
Lichen = Same as actinobacteria, you might be able to pull off a L-NF-NF or NF-NF-XX because of the +10% tolerance bonus lichens has.
Protozoa = Same as actinobacteria

I don’t really like the using NF twice in a gene, but if you’re comfortable with it just go for it.
Honestly my first batch look like this:
Protozoa/actinobacteria/Lichen = L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN
Fungus: L-L-L, L-L-NF, L-NF-XX, L-NF-YY, L-L-AN, NF-L-AN
Total support: around 50+

You can even get 64 of support with one microorganism

With this you will be getting multiple high support microorganism quickly, invest money in them to give them better odds of surviving.

Now you can unpause the game if you want to see if they survive and let them grow a bit.
Once your microbes are thriving let get some plant to get our habitability requirement.

If you have Lagrange Academy or a few culture points you’re willing to spare, you can go in the culture screen and add a few points to increase biomass.
This will increase the birthrate of all you species.

Going Green

Now that we have a microbial ecosystem, let have some plant take advantage of it.
We’ll focus on terrestrial plant since they are the ones we need for habitability, but the principle work the same way for aquatic plant.

Tree require more support, but give more support. However, the extra o2 can be a pain to manage.
Shrub have a +50% birthrate and require less support (-25% required) Moss +15% low temps resistance -15% low water tolerance are not super useful if you have the Soletta satellite since your temperature is usually just right.
Grass +2 pop grow&+1000c/min can be cost effective if you reinvest that 1000c/m in their health or just let them make money for you.
Usually I got with a mixture of tree and scrub maybe a few grass to start, if you’re feeling frisky about the extra o2 pumping in your atmosphere, you could always go for a mixture of scrub and grass initially.

Adding genes to your plant

Stacking large gene is not has good has with Microbes because now they will increase the support required too.

If you really want gene that give support, look at the fruit bearing gene first. Similar to large gene but it give an extra +2 to population.
You can mix them together to have four species that have +150% support.

Other interesting gene

Cash crop: +2000c/m -30 low water tolerance, this gene is a nice addition for plants, except maybe for moss since they already have -15% low water tolerance.

If you stack 3 fruit bearing genes together (or a mix of fruit bearing and large gene) you’ll get about +150 support (+200% for tree) but +150% support required. Which is about 14 support required per species (20 for tree) and 3.4 (4 for tree) support given.
Not sure my math is right, but that what I’ve observed creating my plants. You can add some cash to increase their health and remove it once they get over 100%.

Since you can mix the Large (L) gene with the fruit bearing gene (FB) you can get 4 combination with +150%.
L-L-L, L-L-FB, L-FB-FB, FB-FB-FB

WIth 4 plant type you get up to 16 species with high support, but beware of the support they need from your microbes however.

Side note: In order to give the maximum of support a species need to be health at 100% or more.

Create a few gene to get to your 10 or 20 of support for habitability and you are now habitable.
That mean you need about 3 species on the moon, 5-6 on mars to be habitable if you create high support plant like I’ve explain here.

Road to Paradise

Paradise is actually simple to acheive. You just need to be within 5% of all the goals and have enough support from your plant to be way right.
 

If at the beginning of the game you chose the biosphere option instead of biomass this guide is for you. If not, go start a new game with it and we’ll be waiting for you.

If it’s your first time with the biosphere or you got burn buy it, this guide will help you get your head around the basic.

Note if you just want your planet to be habitable might not need to border with biosphere if the skyfarm is built. 

Step 1:
First even if you have the biosphere you need to make your planet at least habitable for plants and microorganism. So get your temperature & atmosphere right, sprinkle some o2 and water and you’re good to go. Be sure your four metric are stable before starting playing around your biosphere. You could always try to create an organism that has better resistance to your planet problems, by giving it gene with higher tolerance to these problems or making them extremophile. However it’s easier to wait and create them in a stable environment.

Step 2:
Note: this step can actually start while you’re still in step 1.

While your adjusting your planet, research some biomass aquatic & terrestrial building (Like Reef institute & Zoological Society) and build some. If you only want to get to victory you can only build terrestrial building since it’s the one counted in the victory screen.

Step 3:

Once the planet metric are stables and you have enough biosphere infrastructure to support at least nine species you can start playing around biosphere menu.

How support work

What is support? In nature, each organism lives with support of other, carnivore need herbivore for food, the herbivore need plant to eat, plant need microorganism to enrich the soil with nutrient. This cycle of life is represented through support in the game. In the circle in blue on the left, its represent the amount of support your microorganism give. The green circle in the middle is the amount of support your plant give and the red circle on the right is the amount of support your animal give.
When you create an organism, this organism will receive (“consume” if you will) support from the previous group and offer support depending on the type of organism and the gene selected. Microorganism don’t require support so you can ignore the +50% support required modifier when creating them. Be sure to have enough support offered in one group before making organism from the next group. The base number of support each organisms give is 1 before modifier (seem to be 2 for microbe)
Note that to achieve victory you only need a bit less that 20 of terrestrial plant support (on mars, 10 for the moon), so if you’re in a hurry you can only focus on getting these 20 of plant support.

Creating your first organism

Once you selected what group your organism is going to be, you can now select the phylum gene of your organism. Let’s pick Lichen for this example since it’s our first organism and lichen offer better base environment that the others with its +10% bonus to all tolerances.

Now that we chosen our phylum we can now pick three gene that will determine the base attribute of our organism. This is probably the best part of the biosphere, creating your organism. Do you want it to survive at all cost or allow it to generate a lot of support for higher up the food chain. Or maybe you want it to proliferate like crazy and give out O2 at the same time. Or actually make your planet some extra credit. You can all do that, for now let’s build a simple organism that we want to survive on Mars with our current temperature, pressure, o2 level and water level.

Since they can ignore support required, the Large Gene is very interesting since its give an extra 50% supports and no drawback. You can even pick it three times if you want since attribute gene can stack, but let’s pick it once for this example. Another interesting gene unique for microorganism is the Nitrogen fixing gene. Its give 50% supports, but reduce resistance to low pressure by 30%. We could counterbalance that drawback by giving it the resistance to low pressure gene (+30% tolerance low pressure -30% tolerance high pressure). Since our pressure is high and stable and lichen already get a +10% to all tolerances, we will add another gene instead like one that increase the birthrate so our lichen can proliferate. The High metabolism gene is probably our best bet since it provides a boost of 100% birthrate and its drawback is that it need 50% support, but since our lichen doesn’t need support we can ignore it. Other viable options are either the Nocturnal gene (+100% birthrate -30% low temperature tolerance) or the Invasive gene (+100% birth rate -2000 credit/m). Infectious is another option, but it reduces your population grow and Airborne would be nice, but it has a -30 % tolerance to low pressure and since we already got -30% from Nitrogen fixing we don’t want them to stack together.
Now name your organism and you’re good to go. Now that you know have built your first organism you can start playing around and build a whole ecosystem.

Other tips that can help your biosphere creation and that your species survives.

• Invest money on each species to increase their health and help them survives.
• You can play around the biosphere menu and create your species while the game is paused.
• The culture modifier that usually help the biomass will help all your species birthrate instead.

Stay tuned for part 2: building a whole ecosystem and optimizing your biosphere to make your planet habitable.

TerraGenesis is not the new console from SEGA, it’s a space sim where you terraform planets in order to build human colonies. The game uses actual NASA data (in case of the planets of the solar system only) in order to make the game more immersive and real.

The game is free to play, you can either buy individual planet or buy all the planet of each system in bulk. If you don’t want to pay a dime you can unlock other planet when you successfully colonize one. You start with the choice of colonizing either the moon or Mars. Successfully colonizing them will unlock the other inner planet Mercury (the Moon) and Venus (Mars)

Once you chose your planet to colonize your need to setup a small colony and start mining to get some cash, which will help you pay for research, add module to your colony and build satellite.

The module part is where you build module to slowly terraform your planet. You’re on Mars and need to start having an atmosphere, you need to build a thermal dust plant to increase pressure, you’re on Venus and want it to go down build a bunch of hydrogen processor to drop that pressure to earth level.

Once you start modifying your planet don’t forget to check it once in an awhile or you end up like me and going waterworld on Venus (Kevin Costner would not be happy)

This is where I was a bit annoyed, I went to sleep while I was terraforming Mars and ended up putting to much o2 in it because I left it a +100 for the night. Same thing happen on Venus, but with the temperature. I’ve built the Soletta, a satellite that helps you adjust the temperature on your planet surface, but when it was built I had so much water build up in the atmosphere that it’s flooded the planet. Also, known has “the great flood” in the Venusian Holy Text.

So after that, I went all Tamagochi on my Venus, checking every time making sure everything was rising carefully, turning them down or up as needed. It’s like a feeding a little monster instead it’s a planet and it needs to be feed differently depending how it’s going.

I have some nitpicking on that flood thing, it’s weird that your colony can support the initial Venus atmosphere, but add a little water on the ground and everything falls apart. We (NASA) have (like today) base underwater so building cities underwater is probably feasible with current technology, but with our current tech we cannot build anything on Venus surface. So why the hell the whole colony get destroyed when the 1m of water above sea level when the damn dome can support about 90x earth pressure and a temperature that f**king melt lead.

Other than that TerraGenesis is a great game, I’ve managed to terraform the moon, Mars and Venus (twice), but the Tamagochi nature of the game got me and annoyed a bit my wife too. Constantly checking if your little planet is doing fine get tiring at the end. Another thing I didn’t like it’s how mining work. However, you can make it less annoying by building satellite that detects the concentration of each mineral on the ground. On the Android version there seem to have some bugs. Some of them seem to have been fixed since I last played, the game is still slow when you start having many late stage world to handle.

Give it a try and let me know if you like it.

We are doing a series of posts on FTL and  we hope you like them. If you want us to do more of this let us know in the comment or by mail at jack at onlinesgamestips.com

The Federation Cruisers are the only ships with the Artillery Beam.

The Artillery Beam’s path follows a specific algorithm. It finds the centers of two rooms and forms a path between them, with no limit on the length between them. It bypasses all shields and does one damage to each room hit.

Layout A

Unlock

Defeat the Flagship Construction in the Rebel Stronghold sector to unlock this ship.

Alternatively defeat The Rebel Flagship with the Engi Cruiser

• Default name: The Osprey
• Starting Crew: 1 Human, 1 Mantis, 1Rockman, 1 Engi
• Starting Weapons:
  • Burst Laser II
• Starting Resources:
  • 16 Fuel
  • 5 Missiles
  • 2 Drone parts
• Unique Ability: Artillery Beam
• Slots: 4 Weapon, 2 Drone (requires system)

The main advantage that the federation ship has its  the Artillery Beam. This system is a weapon of is own that ignores shields and does a lot of damage. One build for this ship is to focus on beefing up the defenses (shields/engines) and let the beam it do the work. This needs patience, but is worth the wait. If possible, destroy the enemy’s missiles promptly (or get defense drones), as they bypass shields and pose a threat to the hull, cloaking can be an option too if you are playing the advance edition.  Hacking could be a good system too, hit the weapon system and wait for your artillery beam to take out the ship.

This layout start with a decent weapon, the Burst Laser II, so you don’t necessarily have to go the upgrade only the Artillery Beam route. You can work it with a teleporter since the starting crew (mantis + rockman) is good for boarding. Just be careful not letting the Artillery Beam kill your crew or destroy the ship whiles they are on it.

Bomb can goes well with the Artillery Beam, your Burst Laser II can take care of Zoltan shield, the bomb neutralizes system that might cause problem likes weapon if they have missile, piloting if they are trying to escape right away or hacking it they hack your shield, pilot, engine or artillery beam.

Layout B

Unlock

Earning two of the three Federation Cruiser achievements will unlock layout B.

• Default name: Nisos
• Starting Crew: 1 Human, 1 Slug, 1Zoltan
• Starting Weapons:
  • Dual Lasers
  • Leto Missiles
• Starting Resources:
  • 16 Fuel
  • 9 Missiles
  • 0 Drone parts
• Unique Ability: Artillery Beam
• Slots: 4 Weapon, 2 Drone (requires system)

Layout B is very similar to layout A, they have the same module, 50 scrap more upgrade on the layout B and a smaller crew. The Dual lasers are less power full than the Burst Laser II but are very power efficient. The leto missile is useful but 1 damage is pretty low for a missile weapon, you might use them in the first few sector but you should try to either rely on the artillery beam instead like we explained for the layout A

Crew members of the layout B aren’t very useful for boarding so you might want to wither skip the teleport upgrade or hire better boarder along the way.

Layout C

Unlock

Reaching Sector 8 with The Federation Cruiser B and Advanced Edition content enabled will unlock Layout C.

• Default name: The Fregatidae
• Starting Crew: 1 Human , 2 Zoltan , 1Mantis
• Starting Weapons: None!
• Starting Resources:
  • 16 Fuel
  • 5 Missiles
  • 0 Drone parts
• Unique Ability: Flak Artillery
• Slots: 4 Weapon, 2 Drone (requires system)
• Starting Augmentation:
  • Emergency Respirators

Layout C is quite different from the 2 other layout,  It has an Artillery Flak Gun instead of an Artillery Beam, which unfortunately don’t go through shield like Artillery Beam and can be dodge, but is very useful to shred a Zoltan super shield then teleport your crew on the enemies ship.

This ship is a boarding ship and the synergy of the Zoltan with the clone bay can have amazing effect. Warp zoltan on the other ship make them explode, your clone bay will bring your Zoltan back to life, send the mantis with a resurrected Zoltan to finish the job. You might want to upgrade the  Cloning Bay and the teleporter to Level 3, to maximize the effect of this tactic.

What can be annoying with this ship is other rebel ship that are charging their FTL drive right when the fight start. Since the only thing you got to attack is your boarding team and the artillery flask gun that take forever to charge, there always a good risk that they might run away with your crew on it and increase the rebel fleet progressing by on jump.

Note , that the Artillery Flak Gun lacks the shield-piercing capacities of the Artillery beam, meaning that it’s essentially a slower-cooldown or more power-hungry version of the Flak Gun II. This make this layout not viable to rely purely on Artillery, unlike Layouts A and B.

I’m a big fan of FTL and basically have the game since release.  I’ve got all the ship except the Cristal one and over 100 hr played on it. So I was quite happy when then announced the release of FTL on the IPad awhile ago. With the recent release on the IPad they updated the game with new content (ship, alien, mod, ship layout).

The game started has a Kickstarter campaign on February 27th, 2012 andthe campaign was a massive success.

Ok! We get it, you like this game but What the game about ?

FTL is roguelike space games, where you control a spaceship that needs to save the Federation from the Rebellion. Has you flee from the rebel force to the federation headquarter to be deliver critical information about the rebel force, you encounter alien race, hostile ship, event, store. You can unlock ship by going through certain event or be beating the rebel Flag ship with certain type of ship. What most notable and very common in the roguelike game is that each time you lose your ship, either no more crew or the whole ship is destroyed, you need to restart the game.

With made me look forward for more game in the space genre here 3 games that caught my attention recently. Please note that because of my love for FTL I’ll probably start a weekly or bi-weekly post on how to unlock ship and various achievement. If you can’t wait you can always check there wiki, its awesome source of FTL information.

P.S: I hope they will make it available on android too.

Cosmonautica

Cosmonautica look quite promising, it’s can be describe has The Sim in space meet FTL of some sort. . The player’s ship is the size of a large townhouse and various rooms can be bolted onto its empty compartments. Living quarters, vending machines, cargo bays, weapons, engines and, wait for it, toilets… At present, there’s not much to do beyond trading basic commodities, but ground missions and enhanced combat are due before release. Take a look.

Related

A life of space trading (indiesgames)

The cosmo-nautica Blog

Planet express simulator (Rock paper Shotgun)

Cosmo-Nautica (indiedb)

Shallow Space

From the look of it Shallow space is a Space 3D RTS game inspired from homeworld. Players will need to mine for resources, advance capital ships and engage in battle to improve your officers skills. You can even design your own weapon configurations and ship modules, and believe me there are plenty of ships to play with!

Related: Dominate the Shallow Space (Indieretronews)

SPAZ 2

I loved the first game even though I haven’t finished it yet. It doesn’t have the same vibe FTL does but I really liked how you upgrade your spaceships and how you can customize them. The game has a bit of grinding to it that can sometime be cumbersome.

SPAZ 1

SPAZ 2 come back with all these mechanic, new ones and with enhanced 3d graphics.

Official Site : http://minmax-games.com/SpacePiratesAndZombies/

Last post on Star War & Star Trek inspired me to write another post on some space games that were sitting in my to review list. They may be not has “Grandiose” has KOTOR or inventive has Star Trek: Trexels but they definitely deserve a look.

Mighty Tactical Shooter: Plan your move

Gradius and tactical space battle meet together in the nicely done indies games Mighty Tactical Shooter. From the game info quote : “Make your way through multiple levels across four distinct themed chapters. Face challenges that wouldn’t be possible in any other type of shooter. Adopt new skills and tactics as the ship repairs, enemies diversify and the plot unfolds. A 2D side scrolling arcade shoot ‘em up, but turn based.” Like they say at the end : It’s about tactics, not reflex. Your move.

It may not have speed of Gradius but fi you want a different take on tactics and story instead of a standard “shoot’em up” will want to definitely give it a try.

Related news : Mighty Tactical Shooter (indie retro news)

Mighty Tactical Shooter: Gradius and turn-based tactics hybrid (indiegames)

Halfway: A Sci-fi Jagged Alliance

An alien force has invaded your spaceship and your crew need to throught the hallway of it to get rid of these nasty alien. That turn-based tactical strategy draw a lot of turn base fight from a old game I’ve played called Jagged Alliance on PC. Each character has its own tactical abilities, so they will all have to attack, defend, move, use items, and reload to stay alive during battles.

Halfway will be heading to tablets later this year after its initial desktop release.

Related news : Halfway (pocketgamer)