Kinda torn between recommending and not recommending the game. The game itself in my opinion is really good and the idea awesome. What makes me question if I should recommend the game is the people playing it (as it is with most games). The game itself is very playable, despite being in early access.

The idea of the game is to stop and asteroid from hitting the earth. Meaning you need to progress technology wise fast enough to do so and not destroy the planets ecosystem while doing so. However I have never seen the planets ecosystem been destroyed or even severely damaged as most servers have pretty large maps compared to players playing the game (as most players leave the game pretty early on leaving a handful of players on a huge planet that no matter what they do they can't make that big of an impact as to destroy its ecosystem).

If you play on online servers with others, the pattern is pretty much always the same. A ton of people join the server on first two days. On third day about half of them are still playing, on day four about half of those are still active and it keeps going on like that until there a at best a few groups of friends and few solo players left. The problem is that if you don't play with friends whom you can make inside trades and really cooperate in building your community, you will become irrelevant in the progress of the game (which contributes to people leaving). So the players mainly go into three groups of players. There are those that join the servers as a group, and know exactly what to do, and they can pretty much finish the game by themselves. The rest are there just to tag along a few steps behind the entire game. Then there are those that join the game and start demanding everything right away and usually for free or for fraction of the price that the people offering the items are asking for, if they don't get what they want they start flaming until they leave the game. They also tend to start telling people what to do. And then there are those that join the server, try their best to play nice and fair, but ultimately fall short for not being part of that group that makes all the advances far before anyone else and ultimately most of these will also abandon the server after noticing that they play no part in the progress of the game. I have started on like 20 servers, the only game I finished was one with just friends joining in on. And that way the game can be fun and enjoyable. All the other games I either quit as I fell so much behind that there was really nothing to do, or that others left and there were only handful of people left on the server and there for made no sense to continue.

Many say that its a cooperative game, and in away i suppose that is so, but I do believe that it's also a competitive game that is just not played correctly. I do think that it should be a competitive game amongst several towns/countries, just as in real life. But sadly most games just end up with one huge blob of people and then few smaller groups that are left without a chance against that one large mass (which will in a few days be only that handful of people that will keep on going). If you play with random people there are very few that actually contribute to your town, but instead go for that personal gain and just picks up the raisins from being a part of a town without actually making any contributions towards it.

I think the game really needs npcs or ai of any kind. At least for me who is sick and tired of the community that surrounds the game, and servers dead by the day 10. I would much rather bang my head against the wall with crappy AI rather than online players. The single player is kind of a bore alone, but with npcs i think it would be pretty great and more alive, especially if they knew how to create their own towns/countries, etc. Though I don't think this will be possible anytime soon, or ever.

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Food guy will not cook anyone food