These Tips & Tricks Will Make IXION Easier! | IXION | Tutorial/Guide 

The best thing about this game, is that even in the deepest and furthest ends of space, finding a random dog and making him your crew member to get +1 permanent happiness made me extremely happy

2 Things I think that would make the game move from good to excellent; one I would use, one that would quiet the grumpy people: 1) a Story mode, that removes many penalties (I would not use but might get rid of many complaints) 2) an offline zone designer so you can try different spacing without having to wait the extended time tearing down and rebuilding to move things one tile, this option limited to buildings that you have opened in your various playthroughs.

I also think some of the problems that make this "hard" is that people try to rush to fast and ignore trying to balance everything.

My one gripe concerning the game is the choices that have to be made. On my first playthrough, I tried not using the save and reload to check out all choices and just lived with whatever choice I made. Many choices have consequences that make the game super hard and there is no logical way to figure out the correct choice beforehand. Once I restarted and found a webpage that tells me the outcomes in advance, the game becomes relatively easy. For instance, wrong choices in chapter one can make it so there isn't enough science points to get both the Cryo tech and steel mills before chapter two, and not having both those techs means it is very close to impossible to deal with the increased hull damage. My solution would be having each encounter resulting in the same amount of science points, no matter the choice and only changing the hard rewards. Otherwise, I'm loving the gameplay and the story. I'd totally buy the game again, as is.

Ixion has really sucked me in. I don't normally get into these types of games, but have loved the story and the game play. Yes there is some tuning that needs to happen and i'm sure it will, but it's solid fun.

I particularly like this game because of the challenging game play. You're in space, the most inhospitable environment besides the deep, deep ocean. Most gamers are used to having their hand held in a casual game. This is an old school game with deep atmosphere and great music. Don't make it too easy just because some people don't understand the complex nature of the simulations. I really like this in games and will play again and again to try to optimaze and see what other choices in events will yield.

100% agree with you, Nilaus. Ixion is one of the best games in years, and the difficulty is a large part of why. Thank you for making this video!

Honestly, the most egregious balancing imo is the stability penalty from storing too many cryopods, since this scales with the amount of cryopods you have. I can get behind the other stability penalties with the DES penalties and other penalties from policies, but why is everyone getting super angry with a -6 penalty (!!!!!!) just because i have 1000 cryopods on storage, which are in the process of being opened? So people are more angry that I'm rescuing people than they are from getting Earth blown up? Reason I'm the most on the fence about the cryopod penalty is because the game throws you a F**K TON of cryopods on one of the chapters, the game almost wants you to fail because of storing too many cryopods on storage at that chapter during your first playthrough.

Well said, you're making it look pretty easy and not so stressful.

This video is really appreciated. I have a friend who held off on buying it because of all the reviews.

In my opinion the true way of salvation is a bit counter intuitive, you actually NEED all that useless non-workers to generate enough waste to achieve self-sufficiency. Rush those recycle tech and defrost as much pods ASAP after that. Then you will have free water (which means free food) , free alloys, free polymers, free everything. I will admit its a risky way of doing things and you'll need quite a few techs to pull this off, I suggest making your third district a dedicated population district full of houses where you concentrate all the non-workers and do the defrosting. Police station + propaganda + limit food + waste recycle to make things easier.

As someone who played 2k h in Factorio/Dyson/Satisfactory i have to say that i love the relaxed "just build and you will progress somehow" approach in those games (Factorio in peaceful because i don't care about fighting) Don't shy away from complexity (finished basically every mod in F. except Pyanodon - 250h in so far), but don't like the strict need for perfection. Maybe Ixion (in its current state) is not for me.

You honestly sound so offended that people dare leave negative reviews. I know you're simping for the devs because they sponsored you. But your video comes off with a massive arrogant "Git gud" tone and just makes you sound upset that people are complaining. You're attacking the people that leave the reviews as stupid, because you're biased. People's complaints are valid. The Demo doesn't let in for even a hint of anything you might experience. There is zero degrading hull in it or any of the other issues. Get the full game, hull degrades constantly, but why? It's a state of the art ship, why is it taking continual damage, and why does that continual damage get WORSE instead of better as the game progresses. It doesn't make sense. The maluses you get don't make sense either. Negatives for staying in a system too long, but jump too early and you get negatives for that too. Why do people get pissed off if you have too many cryopods on board? They're on board and safe. But no, they'd rather you thaw them all out and have them starve. More so, they don't care if you leave hundreds of people behind. If this ship was the last of humanity it deserves to go extinct. Workers pitching a tantrum for being told to work a little harder when YOU'RE THE LAST OF THE SPECIES. Is just stupid design. Oh and lets not forget that it's down as a city builder on steam. When it's far from it. It's a puzzle game with one solution that has zero replayability except for a different ending. The journey there will be the exact same. This is perhaps your worst take I've seen. Ever.

accident prone crew, snowballing into sectors not working... that's my biggest issue. but i am sure that is my problem

Also by the way about the EVA Airlocks, make sure you finish all Solar Panel sets by at the most chapter 3, maybe 4? Because the hull damage you get from pausing hull repair combined with irrepairable hull on the late chapters can pretty easily kill your station in the time it takes to fit the new Solar Panels especially if you don't keep your hull topped off.

IXION has a communication problem. The player is told, without warning, that they made the mistake of staying too long and have a permanent penalty as a result. That's not what's happening, it's a soft penalty to encourage the player to jump, after which it disappears, but what the game actually Said is "Stability Penalty: -1 (Permanent)" I imagine fixing *that one thing*, changing the text to "-1 (Until jump)" for example, would have a dramatic affect on the reviews.

honestly I ended up ahead of the curve - ensuring surpluss food but also ensuring that all resources are circulating which is needed. Sec1 - Housing, training and Cryo, Sec 2 - Industrial - Steel, Carbon and Chip manufacturing etc. Sect 3 - bread bowl and water. Hopefully if I can get sect 4 open, I can move all space requirements to this location for main logistics

Something worth mentioning (especially after you have 3+ cargo ships with some upgrades for extra cargo). Do not assign all 3 of them on the same dock. You can easily flood the dock with goods and you will have issues (no room to load goods for a colony or not emptying the dock too fast). Spread your cargo freighters in different docks and have warehouses relating to imported goods nearby for easy access and faster unloading times. Another tip: cargo in docks does not count towards warehouse capacity and does not go away after a jump. That means that you can stock a small warehouse with 100 iron and have a dock with another 300 iron before jumping into a new sector (basic capacity with no upgrades). This will give you a nice boost at the start of the new sector while locating new sources for mining. Just dont flood all your docks this way. Final tip: you cannot stick to a layout per sector throughout the game. Keep in mind that you will need to demolish and re-build part of a sector many times as you progress and as you unlock new stuff. This is NOT a build-and-forget game

Good summary. An important tech I feel is worth mentioning is the mess hall upgrades, as fully upgraded 1 food can be used to serve twice as many people, which I found crucial when hitting larger populations towards the end game, and failed at first, because I didn't even know the tech existed!

IXION is actually balanced rather weirdly. Not saying bad, but weirdly for sure. Difficulty peak is at about chapter 3, but once you got some certain researches, like waste treatment center, the station becomes basically self-sufficient. I rarely had to mine anything below chapter 3 because I had everything I need already. 3.5k pops all nice and happy, fed and not overworked. In the late half the game becomes, well, not easy, you still have to monitor and intervene, but there are many things that are present, but you don't need them. Like there are whole two other systems with their POIs, but it doesn't really matter because events are very much the same with only several exceptions. Same with tech - never used nuclear power, or mushroom walls, or algae farms. Having a prologue this breathtaking and lategame/ending this unbalanced is rather disappointing.

For me the question always is: Why not make the experience customizable? Have a recommended difficulty for players to experience the game as intended, and then an options menu to let people decide if they'd like to tailor their experience. I completely get that this game has an intended difficulty, and there's nothing wrong with that. I just don't understand why you'd want to force players through it rather than giving them the option

I read the reviews after I wrote my glowing review and I am shocked by the response. I think a lot of players saw a space game and set their expectations for something that wasn’t the game. Happens a lot with games themed in space. This plays a lot more like a harder Anno, Frostpunk, or Banished themed in space.

Thanks for this, grabbed this after your first episode and really enjoying it!

"youre playing the incorrectly" NO this is bullshit. Thats like saying there is only one language you can speak. The game has problems and is missing things as well such as o2, water, and human waste. I thought this game was realistic? Another thing in every other city builder is the ability to have 3/5 workers in a building. Dont even get me started on strikes thats bullshit and completely unrealistic. The people that go to the moon IRL are the best of the best. why wouldnt that be the case here?

Ixion is a fantastic game and I've been waiting for the release since the first demo, however the reviews are because the demos never showed how randomly difficult the game would get right after the tutorial was done and no where did it say the game was meant to be really hard, only a quick discord announcement after bad reviews started coming in cause the devs werent clear. No difficult sliders etc. It's a rough launch and then devs have tried to cover it up slightly. Great game, but the release was a little weird.

People wanted Frostpunk in space, they got grind simulator the game. As a video game developer "hard" is not a game mode it's a feature. Dark souls is "hard" but the combat when fully explored is rewarding. IXION is not rewarding it's just a grind.

I listened to the whole video before starting to respond, but while I greatly appreciate the effort to help others to succeed at the game like you are because you are clearly having fun with it (and i've enjoyed watching you enjoy it), there was a kind of response underlying your message I would want to push against. Some of us like logistic games but aren't as good at them or have other factors on what makes something 'fun' for us. The challenge is a good thing, it can push us forward instead of getting complacent. Some mechanics are absolutely a part of good game design that have the intended effects that you were outlining, so that's not in dispute. The problem is that some of these do not feel fun to others. I have not gotten the game yet and do not yet intend to unless more options are available to customize for our fun. The game can stay the way it is as a 'normal' or perhaps 'intended' difficulty, but if this game has or gets options that can customize the difficulty, more people who want to get into the game but dislike x y or z will be able to share in the love for the game. I for instance, still play Factorio with biters on peaceful, and sometimes with cliffs off too. I play it in downtime while I work, or just enjoy watching it run. I fail when I play with biters, even when i add in air filtration mod options. Is it a failing on my part as a player? No. Why am i still able to play and enjoy it? Because the game devs included the options to customize your experience the way you want. Underlying your video was essentially a message of "get good." I understand this is arguably the correct answer, but it can also be exclusionary, putting blame on the players who want to get involved and invested, which can turn people away. It turned me away. I know you want this game to succeed, and if it wants a lot of players/sales, sometimes that means making the game more accessible. If it's only focused on satiating players who want peak optimization and so on, then it has already succeeded and the reviews don't matter.

36 hours in and finished the game. Gonna make new run soon with the experience and shoot for different ending. I think zoomers are hitting max speed, clicking things and wondering why their screens are full of warnings.

To my surprise I found game too easy. I did take some effort to made my ship self sufficient at food and alloy by population 1500 or so. From there it was a breaze... I have even missed Space Industry district specialisation mega bonus for EVA efficiency till very end of game.

I love it that when nilaus goes “git gud”, he then proceeds to help you to “git gud”. Watch and learn Gamers™️

How you progress in the first few systems (old/new sol) is important. If you go too quickly you will not have time to collect everything, if you go too slowly you can become hard locked or incapable of completing the start of the next chapter. I find it's better to wait until the game pushes you forward rather than go willingly :)

Honestly as someone who is playing this game i understand its supposed to be hard but that is no excuse for the toxic as F people in the review comments who are screaming at the people who find the game way to hard

This game is Fire. Half way through. Love it. Does not deserve the bad press. Only balancing issue I see is players bot balancing the Tiqqun.

After DSP this is the second game series why i come for your chanel. Thank you for your gameplays. :)

This game is quite fun, and was clearly designed to be a challenging experience. That said, some of the "challenges" imposed often feel contrived, or even nonsensical. My biggest gripe would be the fact that accidents seems to happen on a regularly scheduled basis in all sectors at the exact same time. This coupled with the fact that every... single... worker in the building gets injured is just mind boggling. I shall also add in the fact that injured parties are removed from the work force, so now your sector is on extra hours, because obviously a building that had a large enough accident to injure all parties should be fixed BEFORE everyone heals. This is easily dealt with by building infirmaries, and micromanaging your buildings, but it just feels hugely immersion breaking to me. Next thing is how idiotic your people are... oh no the leader didn't do several of my asinine requests (such as opening a new sector when you clearly don't have the resources/people, or provide a new service that you don't even have the tech for) better blow up multiple buildings in the ONLY THING KEEPING THE HUMAN RACE ALIVE!? First off, where are they even getting their hands on explosives? Next, if things are getting out of hand enough to support terrorism on a SPACE STATION why weren't there events leading up to indiscriminate bombings? This event literally just blind sides you out of nowhere. This happened to me at 100% trust rating and +2 happiness in every sector... Sure "people" are profoundly more stupid in large groups with group think going on, but this is just too huge a leap for me to get behind. If they had a protest group raise demands first, a discontent meter, security forces to prevent this, or any number of things before random bombings to actually provide some kind of lead up I would be much more on board with this. My last, major, complaint would be how science exploration works. In an attempt to make your decisions matter they have made it so that the player can only perform so many actions at a research site based on the choices you make. Most of the time these choices make a lot of sense are are pretty well thought out. Then there are the times where it makes no sense what so ever. For example imagine you had a range of choices with the options to explore a hanger bay of a station, and place charges to destroy the station for parts. Obviously if you destroy the station you can't explore the hanger, but if you explore the hanger for some reason you can no longer destroy the station? Situations like this happened more times than I could easily ignore. The problem with making "challenging" games is finding the right balance between being difficult and just being a chore. I feel, for the most part, that Ixion finds this balance pretty well, but I also think there is much room for improvement in making the difficulty feel less immersion breaking.

A note regarding the EVA efficiency for hull repairing I have no clue if I'm right or wrong, but during my last game I had the hunch that the efficiency decreases both the amount repaired and the alloy consumed by the same percentage It's described as "the higher the hull integrity the longer it will take for the EVA airlocks to identify new breaches to repair, lowering their efficiency"; I took it as "we don't know where to repair, so we aren't" I verified this by looking at the alloy consumption; while your airlock is consuming 2.5 at 63% efficiency (12:14), mine was consuming 4 at 100% (should be 3.96, but rounding etc), so either I did something to mess up the number or it actually works like this (I think I had 2 airlocks active at the moment), which would mean there's no need to juggle it on and off unless you absolutely need alloys and now. As an aside, the first time your hull breaks down you have (I think) 40 cycles of invulnerability. If necessary, abuse them. Even though you already said it, the DLS center is insanely good; just building it is +1 stability, enabling propaganda is A FURTHER +1. For a handful of alloy and a processor, go for it as soon as possible. Again, as you said, improved abitation gives extra stability: while cell housing is compact and cheap, investing extra alloy, electronics, and space for domotic housing can give you both a denser (or about the same) population/cell AND a damn +3 to happiness. Then a couple more things I didn't see you mention: Even though it's kind of a late-ish game tech, recycling is busted. DLS center + waste treatment center can generate the 3 basic resources from thin air (including materials to repair your hull). Later, by enabling Nihei protocol (housing generates waste), you can slap all your (previously deadweight) civilians in a sector and have them create enormous amounts of free resources. Sector specialisations are bomb; look up "ixion specialisation" on google for a quick rundown, but if possible try to apply as many of them as you possibly can. I usually have sector 1 for industry, 2 for food, 3 for population/recycling. Logistics matters, both inside and outside: Inside, place your storage accordingly, and try to minimize the trips. Your storages have by default 5 cars. Each one can move one resource (or I think 5 if you're moving them between storages in the different sectors), but even at 5x speed they take time. You don't want to waste it, so think forward. The ships are so. damn. slow. Don't be afraid to move the Tiqqun, the hull durability you sacrifice is nothing compared to the amount of extra resources you'll manage to mine. Beware that at a certain point mining iron from a far away asteroid won't be worth the alloy spent to repair the hull while waiting for the cargo ships to take the trip. You can manually ignore asteroids if the need were to arise. Also get better engines through research. Don't be afraid to reorganize. Do it bit by bit, but if you realise your floor plan is crap, rip it up and do it from scratch. I usually have a strip just wide enough to hold a storage in the center, connecting the previous and next sector (the canteen can fit sideways at one end or the other) and everything else on one side or the other. On each side you can fit 4 3x3 buildings (battery/basic housing), 3 insect farms, a large factory (alloy), or a space structure + enough space for a set of batteries. Worked well so far. Also, don't be afraid to restart. I had to do so 3-4 times before getting to chapter 3. Anyway, love the vid, love the serie, love the channel, and most importantly, love the game! Keep up the good work

Ya know, I hear everyone comparing this to Frostpunk, sure, there is that parallel, but, personally, I'm reminded of a more stark and serious version of classic Startopia than I am Frostpunk. A lot of the same sort of challenges are in both games, the main differences are there's not an RTS element with Ixion and the space station moves, but, inventory management/space management/time management are very similar, even the mechanics surrounding opening the other bays reminds me of it. The biggest difference is that OG Startopia's main mode was broken into missions and not a sandboxy continuous journey. It's tough as nails, but, not as bad as some games in the genre I've played... Hell, Startopia itself had more difficulty in it... granted that's also because of the jank factor that makes that game endearing, still, the comparison in my mind stands.

IXION is a Masterpiece!

I was really hyped for this game when you first tried it out. I loved the idea and the basic mechanics of the game. After I bought IXION on release day and launched it to find no difficulty setting. I didn't think much of it until losing on three separate saves by chapter three. I do definitely agree that most parts of the games should stay as they are but also include a more relaxed mode. I've been watching your content for awhile now but I still don't live with efficiency. If there was a more lax mode the players that want to play the game would be able to play and enjoy what they're doing.

Thanks for this video! Lots of useful information!

I am still on the fence with this title. The concept is very strong, and I love this style of game. My problem is I dont want to feel rushed playing each chapter. If I have enough stuff coming in to maintain everything. I dont want to feel like I have to move on to the next chapter too quickly. I want to be able to mine out everything in the sector/chapter if I so choose before I move on. I have no problem with having some priority actions. ie: doing something in X amount of cycles. I also have no issue with needing to keep the work force at optimal either. I think this game would benefit with a difficulty slider as others have mentioned. I am watching this game with high interest. Top notch video as always Nilaus.

Emma Klain : "As is often the case with tools produced by my department, I think you’ll find that once you start using the DLS, you'll never be able to do without it." XD

This is my game of 2022 easy already have 39 hours in it and have booked the coming weekend for a fresh start with some of your tips will post a glowing review and have hit up my friends list to let people know how good it is.

The other things that hurt developers are when they release a game that has bugs or issues with accidents, then try to patch it which results in the game no longer being playable to many people, resulting in them to roll back a patch just to fix it again later. Things like that just hurt them as well and usually show that the developers may have been more interested in getting it out than doing testing and making sure it is good before releasing. I personally bought this the day it came out, just to not be able to play it due to the bad patch so i got a refund. I now will wait a while before buying it again so i can see if this game and devs are worth it and how they handle this game.

I watched your stream yesterday, you should look at the water treatment center, it should help you with your waster/ice issue. maybe even replace the ice completely if you can produce enough waste.

Well said. Self reinforcing feedback loops means you can end up in a terrible place, but picking up on the cues to mitigate the downward spiral wasn’t to hard. I’ve survived so far 😊. The only unbalanced thing I found so far is the balance between your voice and the game sound in this video. I found it hard to hear you at times.

Such a flood of good games right now. I'm close to beating an island in captain of industry, I have against the storm installed waiting for me, and Ixion and dwarf fortress just dropped. It's more than I have time to play

My only real gripe with IXION is that it portrays space-faring people as hipstey pussies. "Ooh, I've seen this one planet behind my window for way too long, lets go on a strike!" "Ooh, we don't have enough food for the last two days, lets go burn a farm down!" "Ooh i heard there's a storage full of frozen people and i'm kinda bored lately, thaw them out or it's riot!" Also the creators are waay into eco-vegan agenda, down to often illogical results in exploration options. Otherwise the premise and the story twist are pretty gripping. And music is just godly, it had no business being this high quality but it is. Top notch!

I enjoy the game very much but there are some legitimate quality of life issues that frustrate players without serving any purpose or adding any complexity to the game. For example some expeditions lock the science ship in. If you dont have the resources to proceed or if you simply wish not to proceed with the expedition you have to unassign the science ship from the dock, abandon it and build a new one. (At least until you can come back to it). You had a 5 second power outage during the meal cycle? Your workers will starve for the next few cycles even tough they have food in front of them. Hopefully the devs can sort through the “its too hard” type of reactions and find the actual constructive criticism. I think after the next couple patches this will be one of the best hardcore colony managers out there.

IXION is easy game. You can basicly afk 100 hours on start mission to research all what you need (joking) But really. Human waste in this game is broken. How I even get METAL from it? But yes, with right amount of people you can basicly afk on 3rd or 4th location. All you need is to upgrade Science lab passive points generation and boom, the game is broken and you have like all upgrades. Layout is a problem? Why? Just fix it, bozo. Highly recommend to specialise on one space sector. I didn't like the game. Trash system is so trash and should be removed. You should be in a constant threat of dying from not having the metal, not making metal literally from thin air. P.S. "Do not to use it if you do not like it!" Seriously? I am not an idiot to not use the broken mechanic to my advantage, u know? :3

The game needs a difficulty slider, it would solve the negative reviews. But for those who play on the default hardmode, yes, there are balancing issues. 1) Sectors with ppl happy and optimal working conditions CAN'T send 30 ppl to infirmary, after all its on the best possible working condition! 5 workers TOPS would be resonable, still wrong but ppl are dumb. 2) Waypoint for transporters or tweaking AI to adjust their route to avoid hard climate regions. Can't be flying the mothership around to fix other ships stupidity all the time 3) Auto-pause when doing stuff on full screen. We always forget to pause before adjusting some research or some policy or transferring materials between sectors There are more issues, but those 3 are the core issues that create all the others.

Glad to see i'm not the only one who believed that the vast majority of negative reviews came from people not really understanding how the game worked.

Most of the negative reviews on Steam seemed to boil down to "I keep trying to follow the Oregon Trail but I keep dying of dysentery, devs patch now 0/10 pending updates". It actually made me MORE interested in the game. I think most of the problem is the very binary like/dislike nature of Steam reviews. There are some pretty good reviews in the stack that point out necessary patches or potentially missing QoL features though. Just, doesn't seem worthy of a Do Not Recommend in most cases.

My biggest complaint: near the start I used up my science and couldn't research the black box. Had to edit my save to make progress.

Few comments from my hours upon hours of playing. First and foremost, your video comes off very heavy handed. Like you're ignoring the cascading level of issues because you want this game to survive. That said, - Always being in optimal condition reduces the chances of having issues, but doesn't stop them. I'm late Ch. 3, and have chains of buildings having accidents and killing people with 100+ more workers than needed. Add to that, many on the discord have even shown that you can end up going into extra hours with enough workers if it gets to less than 5% difference between the amount you have and need. Hell, I had a sector with 720 food in it, mess hall fully upgraded, and of the 322 residents, 240 of them starved to death asking me to make sure I had at least 40 in the sector within 2 cycles. - You address ways to combat negative traits, ignoring the complaint (made by many) in how there are too many, and how some of them don't make sense. Like having too many cryo-pods in storage or being in a system too long. Add to that, you ignore how the buildings you have to use to combat these take up a good chunk of the limited space we have per sector. Those 7x7 parks/monuments aren't small when the largest housing in the game holds over a hundred pop (fully upgraded) in a 6x3 area. Honestly, any part of this system is a headache. Not enough space for everyone? Minus points. Too many people not awakened? Minus points. Need to build more? Can't as your hull is constantly draining resources and you can't open more shops or you'll be over worked. It's unnessecary difficulty that also doesn't fully make sense in the setting.

Thank you for this video. I love the game. I found it hard at first but if you get the hang of it then it gets better.

I am afraid that "reviews" will be the end of challenging builders like Frostpunk and Ixion. People expect a chill experience like in a lot of builders and can't deal with the challenge. Ixion (and Frostpunk) is actually pretty easy IF you actually plan ahead (which is the point of the game). Not to mention the huge amount of cheese (You can (up to) halve the amount of alloys you expend for hull repairs if you only repair at higher repair efficiencies AND once you get into waste management you can actually become self-sufficient). Just like souls like games are not for everyone, challenging builders are not for everyone.

Very helpful, thank you for this!!

I agree with most of this, but I just know the time constraint will kill my enjoyment completely. It's not just the stability hit for taking too long, but limited resources combined with a constant expenditure due to hull repair. I can build efficient industry, but I really, really hate to be hurried with pretty much anything. Basically, to be hurried means I find a game stressful rather than enjoyable. I bought the game somewhat prematurely, but now I find a difficulty setting that makes it possible to take your time would push Ixion from "maybe when I'm in the mood to deal with this" (which might be never) into the category "I absolutely must play".

Honestly people just jump sectors too soon. There is 8000+ iron in sector 1. Even if you spend 2000 on buildings that still leave you with 6000 for repairs. With 1EVA and 2 sectors you use 4 per cycle so you can safely stay for 1500 cycles in first sector and research whatever you want just running at speed 3.

i have played Stellaris, Factorio, Oxygen not included,... and likes. So in my opinion, the problem with IXION is it's too boring considering the setting it advertised. Even Democracy series gave me better entertainment per interaction/click than this game does

Great videos Nilaus, but gamers shouldn't be required to watch videos to play a game and enjoy it. If that's the case then the developers have failed at making their game understandable up front (which I think is the main issue for them). We do appreciate you showing the somewhat narrow path we must follow in this game to get anywhere. Keep up the good work.

Does this game not have any difficulty settings? If not then I agree that it should have them. Sure it might be beatable as it is, but some people don't want to watch how-to videos just to be able to beat a game...

Very good tutorial, thank you !

Games without difficulty settings should not be surprised when people complain about difficulty. That's why such settings were created in the first place. Don't defend a game that chooses to bypass this extremely common adjustment.

The game isn't hard, it's tedious and not fun for a lot of people who bought it based on what they said it was and not what it actually is. People wanted a fun space station city builder, not a infinite hull damage repair simulator.

I didn't think it was particularly "hard" challenging yes. But that is what makes it fun

one more thing for DLS policies -intense hour give -1 to stability, but make you need 25% less workers. which make being on optiomal everywhere so easy

personnaly i think the problem of the mixte review it the bad descriptions, specially in the research tab . plenty of stuff help you stability but is not cleary started , as for exemple better housing = better stability

I'm having the opposite problem others seem to be having, as I loved how hard the game was at first, it took a few dozen retries, but I managed to find an excellent layout that works for me (still improvements to be made but the bones are good) for the first 2 systems. However, after I found a layout and progress timeline that works so well for me, I am now swimming in resources, to the point I cannot spend them fast enough and scramble to have enough storage to ferry them off the space docks so the transports can redock and unload. I love the challenege this game threw at me initially, I just hope I haven't bypassed that perceived difficulty so early that the rest of the game becomes a boring slog. Given how similiar this game is to Frostpunk in difficulty and logistics, I doubt that will be the case. This is the main line from my Steam review of Frostpunk and I feel it really applies to Ixion as well: "This game hates me, and I love it."

Great video thanks!!

This is a great video. It helped me so much.

The thing is you have all the time in the world to optimize everything atleast in the first 2 chapters i don't know what's beyond but i all you do is get the -1 stability debuff from staying too long.

You can avoid accidents forever by never putting ixion in anything over extra hours in the first mission before you do you first jump

The game is great, but it's not flawless. Most of the negative reviews in Steam are unnecessary, but not always baseless: - there should be an endless game mode (without having to change the settings to make the game dumb easy or edit the Player.sav file); - accidents should be preventable or predictable or somehow decreased by the tech tree; - the story could be better, especially in chapter 3 and 4; - small QoL improvements missing here and there. I had more fun playing Ixion than Frostpunk. However, I can still play Frostpunk after a couple hundred hours but I can't play Ixion anymore after "only" 40 hours because it's not as polished.

Thank for tips and tricks! Very, very useful information💥

Its not a bad game, has some good bones. That said, its got some issues that I hope to see the modding community, or even future dlc address.

Great video and I agree, it's an amazing game and I have been loving it so far. I do think that the concerns people are raising are valid, the game is clearly not doing enough to teach people how to play it, the game's difficulty is fine as it is but I think a lot of players are making mistakes that have very severe consequences or might even soft-lock them. The thing you say at the start of keeping ahead of things is very hard to do, especially considering how many new things the game throws at you each chapter, it never stops and can get overwhelming really fast. I think the biggest issue is the game not teaching you well enough, if players knew how to play better from the start then you wouldn't need to make this video. A punishing game is fine, but if it "feels" unfair then a lot of people won't like it, even though you can stay ahead of these issues. The game lends itself well to multiple playthroughs so I don't understand why they don't just have a "beginner/story" "normal" and "hard" difficulty setting so people can enjoy the game in different ways. It feels like they made a decision to have a hard game because that's how they like to play games instead of thinking about what their customers might want.

I dont think adding difficulty options would ruin the game. Forcing it to be too easy for people like you would be bad too, no better then it being too hard for people like me who dont play these games. But id love difficulty options - I love the tone and sound and feel of the game but I just want to play at my own pace and not stress much

You come off as almost offended that people left bad reviews for the game.

Ixion looks like Frostpunk in space. People having issues probably did not play Frostpunk

IXION has been promised to be frostpunk in space, And oh boy, it delivers! I still remember my first few frostpunk runs when game just relased and balance was, how to put it? PAIN! My brain was running hotter than generator trying to figure out how the fuck I'm suposed to survive the shitstom game was throwing at me and I loved it. Same thing with Ixion it is a bit unbalanced for sure, a lot of important messages are missing and microing your science ships is annoing at best when you get minimal information about what they doing right now, at least let me queue exploration after science transmiting is finished! But, aside from all this game feels rather easy as soon as you learn what does what, currently at my thrid run and I'm getting bored watching my deathfleet striping solar systems from resources. Oh well, I gues knowledge of whats going to happen makes any game easy. In frostpunk you are constantly desparate for workers, here you have abundance of them. In frostpunk you struggle for food to feed your understaffed city without taking away too many peaople to make food or you die from starwation or cold, here just slap few roman..ekhm, insect farms and you are fine, just like that, no need to worry about workers you have infinite number of them for some reason! Hull integrity? lol, just slap bunch airlockswith lots of alloy storage and sector for shiping and refining raw resources and you can YOLO it inside space storms, nothing compared to heating and coal suppy pain frostpunk had. And don't even start me on happines and trust, those are way to easy to obtaing and keep at max lvl.

Ixion is appealing to me as a "Frostpunk in space". The only thing holding me back from buying it is the price. I'll give it a shot if/when it goes on sale for 20 euro or less.

I love the challenge of managing so many things at once. My only gripe is with some of the events. The game has some harsh penalties for some of the event outcomes where it did not portray any risk in the choice.

LOVED the game , Biggest problem people are having IMHO is the learning curve, and that you are not hand held an pointed at the technologies you need that help you get stable. Important Technologies are held behind prerequisites meaning you have to scan the tech tree and plan ahead. You can use. Recycling to become completely stable and positive on production and food without any mining and this is greatly aided by the Area specialty bonuses, which is the other mechanic that is not immediately obvious. .@ Nilaus Never build more that 2 Iron Smelters, second one was turned off most of the time (only used it to stockpile for future building). Replaced it with a 3rd recycling at the end of CH 3

Also a stockpile and few workers getting injured for a cycle is not a big deal if you have enough stockpiles and a medical facility

This game has been great but I was so invested when I died the third time. The colony just spiraled out of control when I decided to completely rework sector 3.

Yep, reading a review that says, this game needs X feature... When the game already has it, just says the reviewer didn't play the game enough.

Long time viewer, first time comment. Wanted to say love all your vidz and your channel has become quiet addictive to watch, I check multiple times a day just to look for new vidz or re-watch past ones. I purchase many games off Steam purely off watching your gameplay. Wanted to applaud your comment in the beginning about poor reviews on Steam for games people do not understand properly, I see it far too often and does make it harder to know if a game is genuinely good but damaged by poor reviews or bad. Keep up the amazing work and look forward to watching you for a very long time to come.

There is a giant Bug-List for example in Discord - more than 300 unquestionable bugs listed and discussed there. Most reviews are not about the hardness of the game, its just unplayable out of bugs in the later stages. When you miss for example a Trigger because you Save/Load at the wrong time - you can not recover from this and need to restart the whole game from the beginning. Even after 10th of hours of gameplay. Thats extremely frustrating! The first Day even critical buildings where broken and it took 3 Hot-Fixes in the first 24h to make it at least a litte bit playable. I was also absolutely curious about the game but this very huge amount of bugs justifie the bad reviews. Few examples: There are buttons - without any Text, and you cant find out what they do (Trainstation) There are buttons, not even the Admins and Devs know what they do (Water Recycling has 2 different "off" types...??) Translation in Germain is wrong for lots ob Buildings. Just stating wrong numbers - example is the Mushroom wall. If you loose to many Colonists in Stage 2 - you get Stuck in Stage 5 after another 40-50h of gameplay. So you need to skip back 50h of gameplay... Deconstructing buildings - and Save/Load when the last Item is in Transfer - make a broken building site. You cant deconstruct, nor construct. Just blocking space forever... Savegames have CRC errors and cant be loaded again.. Research stuck at 100% - and never finishes. Blocking research forever. ... Just read through the bugs lists with Screenshots. EDIT: Official Bugtracker lists currently (13.12.2022) 412 bugs....

It's not really a hard game. Done in first try with a lot of debuffs from events of which i didn't knew before hand and with not as broken economy. In fact i didn't even knew till the moment i went into a forum that there was 2 more specialties, and that there is more than tier 1, because i wasn't able to get a single tier 2 by the end of a game. Ooops. From the start of chapter 1 realized very early that this game gonna tank me with stability A LOT. After the first -1 stability for "spoiler" , -1 stability for "spoiler" and the -3/-2/-1 "spoiler" (that has been nerfed by now btw) and -1 for "spoiler" in chapter 2 right from the gate because of "spoiler" which i had no idea how it worked back then, I've come in into chapter 3 really well prepared, overprepared in fact because i expected some real shit after what i've seen previously. And that's how it's been all the way up to chapter 5 starting with second one. I was overprepared, expecting some real shit.. non of which unfortunately worth it. All of my preparations were really nothing but an overkill. Later i will figure out that is was ten times more easier than i initially believed it to be, so it was in fact even more easy. Even more so, given the fact i used some useless and pretty inefficient buildings overall and still finished it. Good game for a first run. Unfortunately after that.. i just play Against the storm now.

“Not understanding how the game is supposed to be played” my arse. Making a game hard is a design choice, if I don’t agree with that choice, I’ll feel free to leave a review to that effect. Ixion suffers really badly from ‘unexpected consequences’ syndrome, which as an older gamer (I started on the C64) I’ve had a lot of in my time, modern games are peanuts compared to the unexplained rambles of my youth… but that doesn’t mean I find it acceptable design. Ixion would be a vastly superior game if it did not hide consequences for your decisions behind long periods of time, leading to the need for videos like this. It’s why it’s just not as good as say, Frostpunk.

What i did is as soon as i opened sector 2 and balanced food and housing, i created 2 "space ports" (sorry, i'm spanish. It's called "dársenas" in Spain) and created 4 cargo ships and 2 miners. Plus the ones from the sector 1. OH BOI i'm salvaging the whole galaxy xD

developers are heart because they did not provide proper tutorial, in the part you are describing.

The game is great. It's main issue is that it does absolutely terrible job at teaching the players it's mechanics. I stand by the statement that every game where you need to look up external sources in order to figure s**t out is badly set up. I have 12 hours invested and just by watching this video I now learned that there are these additional upgrades for tech I research. I did notice it even before. Is it therefore right to say that the game sucks. No, but some tutorial for dummy where you would learn how to transfer supplies from sector to sector would be nice!

Some great tips and ways to improve your gameplay in this video. However, for the next one PLEASE turn the volume down and/or pause the game. Your voice is not particularly loud as it is and some of what you said was drowned out by game noise or speech.

Game's a bit of a learning curve, but if you dont get your allow smelter on asap, your pretty much screwed.

"The problem is the player not the game" they released a next fest demo that had almost no difficulty curve, and tons of people thought they were getting Cities Skylines in space or something like Surviving Mars, There are still a ton of bugs they are not being communicative in Steam forums, There's little to no QoL, even when you have 95% of the tech tree and building upgrades it's still super awkward to try to upgrade and rearrange your sectors. please stop defending an incomplete product There is a ton of potential here, they shouldn't have done a 1.0 release, they should have done early access. I like the game but it needs difficulty options that don't' involve save game editing for people that just want to experience a sci-fi story. I want the game to be good but right now the developers shouldn't be defended. As is you're literally telling everyone that it's fine as long as you play PERFECT at all times, that could simply be toggled in a difficulty setting not everyone wants that, ultimately we get more games like this and more DLC the more people buy the game, don't attack the playerbase for not understanding a game that doesn't even explain key concepts. patch / balance the game overhaul the systems, add QoL, then the reviews will turn around.

Do yourself a favor guys and BUY the game and play on EASY and just enjoy the story and gameplay. For every SciFi fan it's gonna be an amazing gem of a game and an experience to remember for years. Promise! Also the music is otherworldy! One of my favourite games of all time.

One of the hardest things in this game is transitioning from bug farms to real farms, which requires setting up infrastructure for ice gathering and melting and researching several required techs, not to mention a strategically placed docking bay. Once you're past that though, you can roll up your bug farms and spend the space and alloys on other things in a massive relief.