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How do you play SS2?

How do you play SS2?

  • Fully Automated (set it and forget it, play mostly for questing and story, building gets in the way)

    Votes: 10 23.8%
  • Normal mode (plan and build things by the plot, no city plans, "director level" attention)

    Votes: 23 54.8%
  • Simulation (installed SS mainly to build, love building and managing everything yourself)

    Votes: 9 21.4%

  • Total voters
    42

fathamburger

Active Member
Messages
251
Looking to get a single snapshot on this vs antecdotes across a thousand different threads, reddit posts etc

Please comment if I should add new responses, make different combinations etc
 
Personally I'm somewhere in between the options you've listed; manually build one-two settlements (typically Sanctuary and Vault 88), City Plan the rest. I find that the best way of rationalizing the conflicting feelings of being told "the settlers built that, not you" but still also being spoken to like I'm in charge and still having to do significant work myself. Nobody else seems to be bothered by that though so it's a Just Me thing
 
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Personally I'm somewhere in between the options you've listed; manually build one-two settlements (typically Sanctuary and Vault 88), City Plan the rest. I find that the best way of rationalizing the conflicting feelings of being told "the settlers built that, not you" but still also being spoken to like I'm in charge and still having to do significant work myself. Nobody else seems to be bothered by that though so it's a Just Me thing

Actually that's how i've been doing it too. Vault 88 I wanna keep manual and one I've probably spent way too much time doing even with SS but I have a few others where I thought city plans didnt exist like Finch Farm, Far Hahbah settlements etc too but I just forgot/didn't know that I needed to build a desk vs just doing everything from workshop. In the end if I have to, I'll automate the rest except Vault 88 and even then I'm currently considering scrapping it all and using that vault tec plan instead.

Which did you end up voting for then? I'd add more options but apparently I can't edit them anymore.. :(
 
Which did you end up voting for then? I'd add more options but apparently I can't edit them anymore..
I actually didn't vote, because none of those options felt "right". I did spend several months worth of playthroughs doing 100% manual building without City Plans (there was a bug that stopped them from working for some people, I was one of them) but now I've grown to like just throwing them down and leaving them alone.
 
While I'm definitely more invested in the story, I love immersion and building an environmental story. I look at a settlement, see what they have and what is around it, and what my other settlements will need. E.g. I like to have Tenpines focused on industry and imagine them eventually using the nearby rails to transport goods to Starlight Drive-in, my commercial town.
But since I don't have the time to build everything myself, and It's more immersive to have the settlers build, I often use city plans that fit the narrative or can be altered to fit.
So I'm somewhere between normal and automated, where I choose what to build and try to make balanced settlements, but skip most costs and needs.
 
Yeah not sure how to interpret these three choices - it seems that you are saying that if you use city plans you have to be "fully automated" the way you have set it up. I use city plans a lot of the time, but I have construction and maintenance costs on, disease system on, HQ disaster system on, HQ timers on, I have low involvement with my city plans so they have to be fed scrap, and I play using scrap categories. I also tend to manually edit city plans a lot over time (swapping out basic level farms, martials, and municipals, with advanced or high tech) managing the SPECIAL of the settlers and their training and sometimes changing out the recreational plots or adding them if the city plan has space in it - but according to these choices it would sound like i have to pick automated because you have said "normal mode" means "no city plans" and that doesn't feel right to me.
 
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You should also maybe include an option for the few that play in hardcore mode - full maintenance costs, even for non-plot objects, component level scrap, survival mode, etc. etc. I'm curious how many of those there are as I play survival but essentially use the middle, normal parameters from the City Manager 2078 holotape because I couldn't deal with survival mode plus hardcore SS2 mode.
 
Fully automated on easy mode, though I build all the settlements myself as I like designing them . so yeah I select the buildings ( specific building plans) and the floor layout and so on. When I see a popup for a change I go check it out :D
 
I pick a few settlements to manually build each playthrough based on what sounds fun at the time. The others I either don't build up at all (performance/bug issues) or use city plans (default SS plans or custom user-made plans). I would say I build 20-25% of my total empire. I typically use the medium settings for involvement.
 
Sorry guys I was expecting to add more options as I got more feedback from you guys since I only knew of the 3 initial options to play SS2 on but the editing feature is permalocked after poll creation it seems :(
 
From my own observations, it seems like quite a lot of people end up finding their own "custom" level of 'difficulty'; SS2 has so many options you can tweak that it's possible to cover quite a lot of preferred playstyles. Overall, the "manually manage a handful of settlements, let the rest City Plan themselves" seems pretty popular too.
 
From my own observations, it seems like quite a lot of people end up finding their own "custom" level of 'difficulty'; SS2 has so many options you can tweak that it's possible to cover quite a lot of preferred playstyles. Overall, the "manually manage a handful of settlements, let the rest City Plan themselves" seems pretty popular too.
I'd say that's about right - it is one of the nice features of the mod that even with the three main options on the holotape you can vary things a lot between them. I do usually have what I'll call my 5-6 "core" settlements that I will often heavily micromanage because they're crucial to the caravan network and provide the bulk of the resources. These are places like the Castle, Abernathy, Starlight, Tenpines, and usually a couple of wild cards. There I want to make sure the settlers get lots of training and that the plots are at least advanced level with some high tech.

The rest I will probably just use a basic 1-level city plan (either the basic ones in the mod or the Waning Gibbous pack) that I might make some tweaks to because they are more or less support to extend caravan range or comm station range for salvaging and maybe contribute a few resources to the network.
 
I've played a couple times on components and operational costs, got too grindy for my tastes (wouldn't even attempt HQ with it, sounds like a nightmare), went back to the middle one. I still occasionally (well mostly) get very involved in every settlement, even city plan ones. Some I make from scratch all by myself with an occasional help from my buddy tgm (I'm well past the stage of setting shops to buy from them or going to diamond city whenever I'm low on steel). Mostly a mix of SS2, vanilla and other mod added items like CVC fences and beds (let them couchsurf or sleep on a steel sheet, the latter is good for the kidneys I heard)
so yeah probably in the middle but I'll vote for the 3rd one
 
Yeah, I tried Maintenance Costs and all that a few times, it's just such a pain to get the balance right, even on Categories level.
All 31 Components does have one hidden "advantage" though: Construction in HQ can also now deduct directly from Workbench storage back in settlements when on that level, making my habit of having an Industrial: Junk Gathering plot in every settlement end up paying off.
I've actually weighed up doing a run of relying only on Junk Gathering for Industrial, with plot construction costs still switched on, but that seems like quite an investment.

For my next playthrough, I'm going to test a combo of settings I'd not yet tried: Only 'single resource' for Complexity, but with City Plans set to "use global settings" - it's the "Use global" for City Plans I've never tried. I imagine progress will be substantially slower early on, but will spiral upwards quickly once it gets going.
 
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I chose the third option, but am probably somewhere between the second and third. I play on component level, and rarely use city plans. I spend significantly more time designing and building settlements than questing in most playthroughs.
 
Today is probably the first day Ive really played focused on improving my settlements and not ploughing thru any new quest mods etc. At this point I'm something like 75% automated and 25% build/improve by hand. Turned a quarter of Sanctuary into a farm supply hub and Sunshine Co-op's gone from yet another base I didnt want to be bothered with which was even captured "accidentally" to being probably one of the nicer and better plans/city plans I've built on top of. All that land came in handy for farm spamming in the end.

I dont think anyone's really 100% locked into one of the options and I was intending to expand out the polling as I went but it was cool both getting the data and reading the stories of how everyone approaches SS2, it was worth asking :)
 
I build most on my own, but then use city plans for some of the "iconic" areas like Vault 88 (because I can't design a vault for a damn)
 
Sorry guys I was expecting to add more options as I got more feedback from you guys since I only knew of the 3 initial options to play SS2 on but the editing feature is permalocked after poll creation it seems :(
No worries just do a more refined poll later :D
 
Pretty much never use City Plans. I like to do nice urban grid layouts, with sturdier building plots (we're supposed to be rebuilding society, might as well make it nice and walkable) while most city plans seem to favour the rickety ramshackle approach with buildings and suspended bridges that look like they might fall down at any moment.
 
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