YMMV / Surviving the Aftermath

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • You will never, ever bother using solar power once you have wind turbines. Sure, wind turbines shut down during magnetic storms and need to be kept heated during winter storms, but this is a small drawback compared to the fact that solar panels don't work at night, which in a colony where people are working 24/7 is not exactly a minor issue. Wind turbines are also only slightly larger than solar panels,^note solar panels are 2x4 units, while wind turbines are 3x3 while producing much more power each. The two simply aren't balanced against each other.
  • Similarly, the only source of water you'll ever need is Water Wells; despite needing to be spaced apart from each other and placed on the right ground, it's easy to find enough space to build as many as you need (especially since they have a tiny 2x2 construction footprint, allowing you to plop them down anywhere they can get 100% efficiency) and it's arguably easier than trying to find enough space on the waterfront among the other water buildings. They don't require workers to operate like the Water Collector (despite providing almost as much water each), don't require power or advanced building materials like the Bore Well and Water Pump, and if they're not quite cutting it, you can easily and cheaply upgrade them to Drilled Wells once you have the right research. Given that you start the game with them unlocked, they pretty much complete negate the challenge of managing your water supply right out of the gate.
• Contested Sequel: None of the game's 3 expansion DLCs are particularly well-liked. 'Rebirth' is considered the least-bad, as at least the Blight mechanics and ability to terraform the ground adds some interesting new challenges and possibilities, but it also just adds a lot more irritating attacks on your colony from wandering monsters and the random uncurable infection that will drive your colonists insane and force you to put them down is frustrating. 'New Alliances' is considered to have interesting ideas but with very half-baked execution, particularly the "rival" coalition who have little to no characterisation, and the added tech tree adds a lot of stress to the existing early game challenges with nothing to compensate for it. And 'Shattered Hope' is just considered outright dreadful and makes the game unambiguously worse, with the new Hope and Anguish mechanics clashing horribly with the existing colony morale mechanics rather than supplementing them, and the other additions just being token and gimmicky. All three DLCs are also considered quite overpriced for what they offer. Rather irritatingly, they all have unique achievements tied to them that you have to purchase them for if you want 100% Completion.
• Disappointing Last Level: It's generally agreed that the game's biggest flaw is its terribly underwhelming end game, where to complete the Doomsday Bunker you just have to throw up a bunch of Engineering Outposts in a bunch of different locations and wait for special research points to slowly, slowly accumulate, occasionally having to do half-baked quests (many of which just require you to build more Engineering Outposts in specific biomes) to proceed. You'll probably have researched the entire tech tree and conquered the entire map just to kill time while you're waiting for all the research to pile up. Then after the last quest (which requires some pretty difficult combat against a previously-unknown enemy faction, including a totally unfair ambush where they suddenly spring a horde of invaders on your colony while your best combatant specialists are out in the field bringing down their outpost) you finish filling the research bars, complete the Doomsday Bunker and... well, that's it, you win. Have a cookie.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Pollution. It is everywhere on the map when you start and presents a major hazard, not only constantly making your colonists sick if they spend too much time near it and contaminating any buildings that are too close, but occasionally exploding and damaging anything or injuring anyone nearby. And getting rid of it is an ordeal- the only way to clear pollution piles are with Environmental Stations, which are quite a long way up the Safety tech tree, require advanced materials (like concrete and components) to build, an energy grid to run, and need an additional Waste Dump to store the output in, meaning you can't even start clearing them up until you're several hours into the game. And even then, they're agonisingly slow and inefficient, taking several days to clear even a single pile. So until you clear them, you just have to suffer a constant stream of sickness in your colonists.
  • The way buildings stockpile pre-construction & upgrading resources can be infuriating as it seems like there is no priority given to getting buildings up and running. Resources trickle into all waiting buildings and even using your one priority ability does little to speed things up. It's incumbent on the player to not prepare multiple buildings at the same time, even though doing this is how most people play these city builders, by preparing a specific area how they want it to be in a single go before moving on to start planning & preparing another area.
  • Buildings being upgraded lose their ability to work. The buildings do not wait for the stockpile to be built then building the upgrade. Instead the moment the upgrade is clicked the building goes into the construction mode to stockpile resources like it was just a new building.
  • Entertainment is nothing more than brute force building spam. Any large colony requires way too many of these buildings than is really feasible to build to bring the level up high enough, and the buildings that provide the biggest bonuses use the expensive electrical components and take an eternity to build.
    • Relatedly, while happiness is rarely too much of a problem in the base game, rival society attacks that were introduced in the 'New Alliances' DLC can include propaganda attacks, which will devastate your happiness, effectively dropping a perfectly happy colony to bare minimum happiness and instantly causing people to want to leave. If you can't rapidly boost happiness by a lot again (and you generally can't), you're effectively losing 3 colonists every time this randomly happens. Making matters worse, the only way to defend against it is with an Anti-Propaganda Station, which is hard to get (depressingly-high up the newly introduced Societies tech tree, difficult to reach in the early game when you really can't afford these hits), expensive to build and run (requiring components to build, 10 power to run, and three colonists to fully man) and doesn't even work very well- a fully-manned Anti-Propaganda Station will only raise your defence against propaganda attacks to the low end of "moderate", meaning you need two to really be safe from these attacks. Don't be surprised if you finally build your shiny new Anti-Propaganda Station and man it, only for a propaganda attack to immediately strike your colony as if the station wasn't there to the tune of -60 colony happiness!
  • Using vehicles on the regional map is widely considered pointless and not worth the time it takes to support them. They are only slightly faster to move but while in a vehicle your group interact with anything as a group so everyone has to keep getting in and out of them individually. They really should be a mid to late game improvement that can gather everything inside a sub-region while preventing the health damage or lessening it, but having to build an entire additional supply line for oil to run them is tedious.
    • Moreover, if your specialist got in a car while carrying loot, that loot is irrevocably transferred to the car. You wanted to get the loot back but needed the car elsewhere? Tough. Your car full of loot run out of fuel outside the colony? Double tough - refuelling is only possible in the colony, and only at the garage. And unless you've unlocked and built the garage, any car that enters the colony just... disappears. And after you've built the garage, you cannot take a car out untill it's fully fueled (the game calls it "repairs" but it requires nothing but fuel!), which takes several hours.
  • While several fighters can attack a single target, which shifts the odds in your favor and reduces damage taken, scavengers and scientists cannot team up to loot the same building, for some reason.
  • There's no easy way to toggle between buildings. You can't for example, click on a farm and then toggle through each to see what they're building, and no way to "find" a specific type of building in the sprawl of a large base, you just have to try and remember where important buildings are (you can open the list of all your buildings and choose to go to any given one, but that's barely less clunky). To make matters worse, many buildings look almost identical on the map.