Autonauts
I bought autonauts because of the amazingly catchy-yet-terrible trailer song but quickly got stuck into it and really enjoyed automating everything. While I think the game is very original and has a solid base for programming robots, I eventually got overwhelmed with having to manually record all the scripts for dozens of robots by hand and found progression extremely slow. There's a ton of content in the game, but the further you get, the slower it becomes. Trying to handle the scripts and designing a town is just too much, but it's really cool. The gameplay loop never really changes much and I found myself giving the same format of scripts to pretty much every bot.
Pros
- You can move buildings around after placing them, and depending on how you set things up, bots will automatically use the new location
- You can place signs to designate areas, then tie bot search areas to the signs so you can move them later
- There's an in-game list of all ingredients and where to find them
- When I first played this in 2020, you constantly had to recharge your bots - which got annoying really quickly. This is now optional
- Bots can be outfitted with upgrades, same as you can
- There's a large number of items and production chains to set up. They just mostly all work the same way
Cons
- There are no animations. Which is very stylistic but can also be a bit janky
- You can't queue your own actions. Want to pick up 4 sticks from the same spot? Click 4 times.
- You can make paths that give faster movement speed, which your bots completely ignore
- I could really do with a smaller UI; everything takes up too much space
- Editing existing robot code is really tedious; you can't just change one thing - you usually have to delete a block and do the whole thing again
- If you need to make adjustments to a bot after starting it, or move it, or interrupt it for any reason, it can throw a huge wrench in the works. For example, if the tool they need isn't in the right place, or their hands are already full of something from further down the program
- If a robot isn't moving and you can see it's stuck on a step of it's program, you have to stop it before you can examine where it's looking for something. Once you stop the program, you break the cycle as above
- It bothered me that the game was fully released (not Early Access) and was still missing half the content. 'Progression' is tied to levelling up colonists, and only 4/8 tiers were available for months.
- I expect that some people will spent the hundreds of hours required to make the kinds of towns that look like the trailers, but I'd kind of had enough after 30ish hours and I was still only on the second tier, and my town had absolutely no form of order, it was complicated enough just trying to get the production chains set up, let alone having to keep moving everything and the robot's code to accomodate it.