| It definitely is more emergent than most games once you get past the early stage. A few examples to make that clear: - to get petroleum, you have to refine crude oil. There is a building that does that, but you only get 50% of the mass out. On the other hand, if you boil it yourself (raise its temperature to 402°C), you get 100% of the mass. Cue furious designing of an efficient boiler. Then you gotta figure how to efficiently burn it to get water out to produce more crude oil. - if you think that's cute, you can instead continue the boiling to 510°C and get Sour Gas. Then you freeze it to -162°C (not an easy task) and get Methane. Heat it up again and you get Natural Gas that you can burn for power. That comes out to 6X the power of the previous petroleum boiling. - you have some salt water provided by a geyser (an infinite source at a fixed output). You can use a building to get water out. But that means Dupes have to operate it. What if instead you boil that salt water to get steam, then cool that steam back to get water in a fully automated setup? Turns out it can be more power-efficient too! Oxygen Not Included is filled with unexpected behaviors, way more than meet the eye (there is a dedicated wiki page, which is lengthy but still far from complete) that enables to make all sort of crazy contraptions. I prefer to consider Oxygen Not Included as 2 separate games : the survival game you get at the beginning, and the engineering game you get once you overcome the survival issues. Unfortunately, many people drop off before reaching the engineering stage, or don't expect it and drop off because they only wanted the survival part. |