Avali Nexus Forum Thread 3: A crowd.

So I secretly love retro management games, I like challenges in healthy doses too, and so planetbase felt like a perfect fit for me, there's a very precarious balance to be struck between thriving and starving, mostly because thriving probably means you're neglecting a silent killer somewhere, and everything was kept on a wholly manageable scale, this is why Sol 0 interested me. A slight red flag came up when graphical options could only be changed in the launcher, but nonetheless I started it up eager to build my colony, the first thing I noticed was that this "fantastic" graphics setting was a joke, but that doesn't matter as long as the gameplay is good right?
Sol 0 distinguishes itself from planetbase by being more rooted in a near future endeavor by NASA where you will eventually break free from the inherent limitations of such an endeavor with a few vaguely plausible sci-fi pieces of equipment and technology, rather than another venture in a future of wide-spread commercial space travel, so one could be excused for thinking that Sol 0 will be very harsh on the player, however NASA proved surprisingly accepting of my failures, they would reliably and repeatedly send me teams of astronauts even after I let the last one starve to death in it's entirety, which felt a bit odd. Oh yeah did I mention that instead of making you scramble madly for self-sufficiency out of the gate Sol 0 will have NASA constantly send you colonists and supplies? Every year or so a rocket loaded with your chosen mix of supplies, equipment, and materials will launch to help your growing colony, now this is a necessity more than a crutch, as Sol 0 builds quite heavily on this idea of you having these periodic supply runs and early on it challenges you to stretch your supplies and make them last, you'll likely be some time in before you can even make your own construction materials, and even then you'll need a rocket to deliver some mining equipment.
Unlike Planetbase Sol 0 also glosses over almost all of the finer details of your astronauts' lives, making it feel less like the sims on Mars and more like a really tiny simcity, or a more modern rendition of that old deep sea tycoon game, remember that one? where you built an underwater city that was filled with little 3D characters who ran around in circles and never actually did anything? yeah Sol 0 is vaguely like that, sure your astronauts have to actually move around to build and repair things and you should be aware of the logistics of these movements but they never eat or sleep or drink the supplies are just automatically used up, and the colonists don't actively contribute in any way, they're simply a number needed to progress that consumes less food than the astronauts.
On the subject of your NASA supply runs there is an interesting dynamic to the base building in landing and returning the rockets, once a rocket is launched you have to land it somewhere, and from there you need to harvest water and methane to fabricate more fuel for it, so it can leave and stop taking up so much room that you could be using for the next rocket to come by, of course there doesn't seem to be any tangible reward for removing these rockets except reducing clutter in the landscape around your colony, but there also isn't much else to do with the methane.
Sol 0's most interesting concept is the initial launch that paves the way for your colony, where you are encouraged to forgo any actual personnel and instead bring a rover to survey the landscape for resources to build your colony around, while also establishing a small stockpile of resources your colony will need. As your colony grows you will occasionally encounter disasters such as tornadoes and meteor showers, but they're disappointingly local and basically just destroy everything in their small area of effect.
Sol 0 does a lot of very interesting things but it doesn't do any of them all that well, it's not so much that it feels broken or bad as much as it is simply outshined by Planetbase, had Sol 0 come first it may have had a chance, but following in the wake of Planetbase Sol 0 is trying to get into a niche that's already filled, and it just isn't working for it.