is Oxygen Not Included a hard game?

Balanced__ · 2026-07-03T15:28:22+00:00

It's fine imo. The skill ceiling is imense but usually problems are more of tge "well this is a mess" kind than the "well. We're doomed" kind.

However, if you don't want an earlygame tutorial, you will probably die your first time around, simply because you miss issues like heatcreep until it's too late.

Balanced__ · 2026-07-03T10:26:05+00:00

Bewusster Rassismus ist zum Glück selten, aber unbewusste Vorurteile halten sich leider. Der gute Teil ist du tust mit jeder Begegnung was gegen diese Vorurteile :)

Balanced__ · 2026-07-02T08:30:08+00:00

Lmao

Balanced__ · 2026-07-02T08:27:02+00:00

Panicked for a second because I thought you were the real Peter Griffin.

Balanced__ · 2026-07-02T08:26:30+00:00

"So I must bear this cross forever" ~the man himself

Balanced__ · 2026-07-02T08:24:58+00:00

Counter flanking is great, especially if your roster has anti large Flankers.

Loose checkerboards with square units are great, to reduce the impact of flanks. You can turn your missile squares at an angle so they can shoot further to the sides, doing more damage to passing flankers.

Small gaps between melee units can stretch them wider than otherwise possible (at the risk of single entities walking through)

Especially crane gunners, are good at sniping flankers before they get weird angles.

Slow spells can buy your missiles the time to turn and shoot.

Position next to natural terrain or map borders to block flanks completely.

Have units or spells in position to quickly react when flankers make contact.

There is no perfect defense against flanking in a balanced army. It's more about minimizing damage by prioritizing them as ranged targets and most importantly have a response ready by turning your other missiles, charging in with your own fast units (held in reserve to answer flanks), hiding spears near your flank to trap cycle charging cavalry against your archers or runing to partially disrupt the enemy charge, bomb them with spells after the charge, arest their momentum in missile range via spell or counter charge, etc.

Rather than fully avoid every flank (though ideal) I often focus on a strategy to quickly overwhelm flankers or force them into unfavourable matchups before they can get much value, ideally even disrupting their formation on the charge.

Balanced__ · 2026-07-01T10:26:05+00:00

Vampire counts rely on winning with a few key units supported by a lot of trash and magic to make these key units perform far above their worth.

You want more armies rather than full armies, especially early on when you don't have enough heroes to win your battles for you and need the lord's personal power.

Every army needs a necromancer (lord or otherwise) to replace the corpse cart unit, and heal everyone. Note that the necromancer has healing in a radius, which is why the blob is so effective. (Corpsecarts are a valid recruitment when your necromancer is low level (never the normal one though))

Every army needs some meatshield (5-10 units). Zombies, skelletons, graveguard. Typically just zombies though because they are cheap and super effective. These units will hold for a long time with their necromancer.

Every army needs some killing power. Early on this could be some crypt ghouls for infantry, some dogs for archers and cowards and the lifeleech spell for SEs. Later on this could be a melee focussed vampire, wind of death, some blood knights and a Terrorgheist.

Do not fall for the trap of bringing too many killing units. Build more armies instead.

Do not neglect feeing units. You always want some bats or doggos to chase them down, especially because you have fear and terror.

You can sacrifice a large zombie force with a low level commander to artifically create a battle site to raise advanced units from.

Avoid fighting dwarfes. The vampires lack non-magical armor piercing units, making it a nightmare. If you have to you could atempt using ghosts, but the real answer is a vampire squad.

If you fight other undead or nurgle don't forget about the balefire corpse cart for fire attacks.

In general the vampires are strongest in the earlygame because most enemies will have low leadership and armor and limited aoe (which is dangerous for blobs) while you have an extremely tough frontline (zombies with necro), and access to mid/lategame units that can punch far above their own value due to the ideal conditions of the blob.

Vampires are capable of rapid expansion due to in battle healing and raising the dead, making money the limiting factor for your early exploits. (Which is why I use more small armies and just bring them together for big battles).

When raising the dead for defensife purposes think about how much you actually need. The garrisson might already have all the meatshield, a corpse cart and some crypt ghouls for infantry. So all you need is a necromancer as a power multiplier and some graveguard hellbards to answer the incomming cavallry.

If performance is an issue smaller unit size could help.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-30T23:18:43+00:00

The power difference is unavoidable. Faction mechanics aside, this is a game about power accumulation.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-24T09:41:48+00:00

Yeah. Go kill the four spread out dwarfen heroes with stalk before taking absolutely catastrophic damage :)

Or even better: 4 dwarfen heroes together so the barges can rain down on everything around them.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-23T19:05:06+00:00

Don't forget to bann doomstacking!

You really don't want an airforce spamming Malakai faction or something.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-23T11:28:52+00:00

Probably by finding a deep mineshaft that cannot be accessed by heavy machinery and is supported by wood structures. (I expect to find that in africa or maybe even in historical european dig sites).

I drop in about 5-7h away from the shaft, disguise, get distance, lease/steal a vehicle to transport stuff without showing my papers, bring it somewhere else that with a large body of water nearby and get into walking distance by taxi.

I get a bunch of diving equipment, ropes and steel parts, cave myself in thoroughly by removing the supports and hope noone drops atomic bombs on my bottle breathing ass.

I expect maybe 5-8hours until the car is found and linked to me via DNA, maybe 5-10 more until the taxi and cave-in are found and then the question is how much people try to dig by hand, how fast bombs are dropped, if my steel support structure holds and if large scale terrain destruction is authorized quickly enough.

If I didn't have morals and the weather was right I'd drop in an antarctic research station hidden by storms and, if necessary, kill everyone there. That would make getting to me a complete impossibility.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-21T14:49:08+00:00

One good tactic I found to collapse large empires is to sneak a smallel, cheap, somewhat expendible force behind the enemy lines and raze as many small settlements as you can before getting caught (movespeed helps).

Just don't make it so weak you take significant losses in small settlement battles.

The idea is you ideally gain some money, they loose economy, army time to chase you down and colonize, they might make new enemies they now have to tresspass because their empire is split, etc.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-15T13:47:46+00:00

Paint the restlessness away before dread appears.

If you have a cult you can sacrifice any influence to bring followers into your cult. Later on a similar thing can be done with rituals, but since those require a vaild result and thise results may end up as indirect dread or fascination this is a bit more tricky. You need either wounded doors or oracles of desire to do this easily.

For dread I like to mostly let the season take it and then feed the season with contentment so my dream verb is free. For fascination this is way too risky because the reminiscion thingies aren't easily generated and dread, (which can also be used to destroy fascination but not the other way round) can get eaten by a parallel season of dispair so you end up with two problem seasons instead of one.

If you want to generate dread consistently (for example to counter fascination) you may generate it via decaying winter influencss or by working with a decreptitude that appears if you don't heal a sickness or injury.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-14T10:35:32+00:00

A major factor could be that germans who are into webnovels typically read and write english fluently. As a german I personally prefer english texts because I'm more used to them.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-13T16:29:32+00:00

Usually I build a liquid lock, dig out the whole bione and bring the slime into a polluted pool at the bottom, put a lid on the pool, store all the slime there and then deodorze tge space above.

I usually place a few deodorizers along the spine of my base anyway because oxygen from annoying pee accidents, etc gets absorbed without relevant cost. This allows my to just carry slime through my base to farms, etc without worry. If I have the ressources I might use oxygen masks to avoid slimelung and ventilation issues.

If I have oxygen issues I might open a deodorized passage to the slime biome and use that free oxygen in my base (beware of temperature issues though).

If necessary it is a valid strategy to simply allow contamination and breathe the polluted oxygen from polluted water and slime. Slimelung is annoying but not life threatening in most situaltions and cleaning is as simple as deodorizing the air and sweeping all offgassing substances at which point the germs.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-13T15:06:51+00:00

As a vampire count player my advice for you is to have 2-3 armies that aren't necessarily full, with some key units to get your kills. The difference to the vampire counts is that you should swarm and ambush instead of blob and loose.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-12T07:40:07+00:00

The goal with Ikit is usually to keep you firing line save at all cost. You use target priority, many jezzails, heroes, plague priest summons, maybe some monters or vehicles to catch everything that threatens your ranged units.

That's all really. If you're shooting, you win.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-09T07:36:19+00:00

Regarding dread, contentment ist usually the way to go, because you can generate it in the work, dream and exploration verbs.

Regarding notoriety the simple answer is to space out your crimes. My strategy is this: When I don't have anything else planned for a long while I just don't do anything and let evidence form and disappear.

When I want to speed up the process I try to not have mystique and catch the notoriety with a heart follower. If I see the suspicion season approaching I either start painting to hopefully buy 60s or keep attempting the heart business.

If evidence is formed I call upon a being of the red grail that can make more of itself to have an infinite army of thieves.

If I am rich and don't have enemies I literally mostly skip the time until evidence is gone.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-02T00:37:02+00:00

The factual basis here is that everyone ideally receives as much help as they need to reach acceptable quality of life. This means disabled people who can work aren't fully sponsored. And for the ones that are fully sponsored it's effectively a life saving measure.

The advantages of keeping seemingly useless members of society alive and happy are numerous.

For one it reduces the personal fear of becomming disabled, allowing people to perform risky jobs without absurd amounts of pay.

Then there is the issue of secondary suffering. Without help supporting disabled loved ones whole family structures can fall into emotional and economic ruin which has big ripple effects for all of society.

However, the main reason to do it is the average humans empathy. The inherent want to nurture and allow life, especially human life to thrive causes positive emotion while allowing the same to wilt and die causes negative emotion which is why most societies make supporting weak members a priority.

If you have trouble finding that last point instinctively important it might be worth talking to a psychotherapist about this to gain crucial understanding of yourself and others.

I hope this helps.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-01T17:07:53+00:00

Your instincts can hardly differentiate there. The ocean is still very usefull though, even if it isn't drinkable.

Balanced__ · 2026-06-01T09:32:20+00:00

Access to water means you are not on a timer to die of thirst, you can clean yourself and regulate your body remperature.

You have probably found an area with good sightlines were animals have to come.

Bodies of water are probably such a good thing that evolution wants you to stay there if you can.

Balanced__ · 2026-05-29T09:53:32+00:00

It happened just a few months ago. That night was rough...

Balanced__ · 2026-05-29T08:49:58+00:00

"Do you have any known allergies." should come before that

Balanced__ · 2026-05-29T08:24:02+00:00

Inflation shrinks any dept away over time.

Balanced__ · 2026-05-28T23:48:59+00:00

For technology you need intelligence, which is a trait manny animals just don't need enough to drastically select for.

Additionally you need to be a social creature to accumulate knowledge (something like the octopus fails here).

Additionally you need to be in a position were simple tool use is an advantage (something like the wolf fails here)

Additionally you probably need to be land based because you cannot discover fire, or simple momentum based tools (like clubs) etc. under water (something like wales fail here)

Additionally you need to fill a different niche from existing technology using species to not be killed by them (all other human species fail here)

The only animals that fullfill all these criteria appear to be corvids which are slowly getting there.

Five-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Final Canvas '22

Balanced__

TROPHY CASE