Aquaticodoesn’t use roads like other city-building games. It doesn’t need to, since your drones and divers can swim anywhere they need to be. This makes it easier than some other games when it comes to planning your settlement, but there are still plenty of ways to make sure that the undersea colony is as well-laid-out as it can be.
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By keeping track of building synergies and planning ahead, you can ensure your success decades into the game while still letting your city grow organically. Try some of these plans to fit more buildings onto the map and get goods to their destinations on time.
7Farm Depot
One of the main bottlenecks you’ll encounter in food production is waiting for each harvest. This can take even longer if your workers have a long way to travel to reach a drop-off point. When you’re buildingFields, Greenhouses, Cages, and Orchards, try to construct them side-by-side with a depot directly between the entrances. This ensures that there is the least possible travel time, getting food into circulation the fastest.
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This also works with other clusters of production buildings as well - try it with natural combos likeFurniture and Decoration Factories, orSquid Hunters and Illumination Factories.
6Large-Scale Sea-Farming
When you’re scouting the map, take note of anylarge swathes of Fertile terrain, indicated with green tiles in the grid overlay. This will eventually become your main source of food, so leave it open for construction.
When the time comes, build your mariculture facilitiesentirely within the green area, facing one another with Depots in between like in the previous entry. Be sure to leave enough room in the central corridor for Pipeline and Navigation Signs!
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Building your fields this waymaximizes their access to drop-off locations, and the Navigation Signs ensure your workers move as quickly as possible when traveling and harvesting. If the Fertile ground happens to be near an Abyss, you can use Cages as part of the operation as well!
5Oil Fields
Tiles that appear orange in the grid overlay are rich in fossil fuels, making them ideal for Oil Platforms. Oil Platforms arethe only buildings that benefit from orange terrain, so it’s important to prioritize them if you’re playing on a map that doesn’t have much.
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The nature of the game is such that it’s effectively impossible to only build Oil Platforms in these areas. You can, however, save space by constructing Fuel Refineries and other buildingsjust off of the oil-rich tiles, since they only need Pipeline access.
Oil Platforms are actually some of themost efficient buildings in the gamedue to their low cost and upkeep. When your Platforms and their attached Refineries are fully upgraded, you can get huge quantities of fuel from comparatively few drilling operations.
4Nuclear Power Center
Uranium is hard to come by, and it has one purpose - to be converted intohuge quantities of energycourtesy of your Nuclear Power Plants! Most maps have only a few small patches of Radioactive Terrain (dark purple on the grid overlay), severely limiting your options for Uranium Mines. Chances are, you’ll have to extend a pipeline out to a remote area to get your hands on the glowing green stuff.
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Once you’ve scouted a source for your Uranium Mine, build a Depot next door along with a Nuclear Plant to immediately put the resources to use. A fully-upgraded Uranium Mine can supporttwo fully-upgraded Nuclear Power Plants, so if you’re able to fit a second one nearby so much the better!
Since this operation is likely to be farther from the main city, it’s smart to have a Guardhouse - or better yet, aDefense Platform- specifically dedicated to protecting it. Knocking out half the city’s power is one of the worst possible outcomes from a pirate raid!
3Submerged Suburbia
Medium Domes are perfect for concentrated population centers thanks to the shape and size of their compartments. Each has space for several rows of five houses, giving youroom for twenty familiesin each compartment that you dedicate to this purpose!
Start by constructing houses along one edge, either to the left or right of the compartment’s entrance. This is important, since the entrance will block construction if you attempt to build in front of it.
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Next, build a second row of houses facing the first, so that their entrances aretouching but not overlappingthose of the original houses. Repeat this process on the other side of the compartment - this will leave a four-tile gap running directly across the dome from the entrance.
The empty spaces between the houses can now befilled with Beautificationstructures.We recommend Medium Fountains and Statues on the center lane, with a Medium Planter between each set of house entrances.
2Dome Base
Domes have a relatively small footprint on the sea floor, leaving plenty of space for construction underneath them. Put this to your advantage byplacing a Warehouse close byfor easy access to goods both entering and leaving the Dome.
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The best buildings to put near a Dome’s entrance areones that use human workers instead of drones. This means your citizens will have less distance to travel between work and home, leading to more efficient production! It also reduces the time they spend out on the sea floor, where they arevulnerable to shark attacks- placing a Guardhouse near each Dome’s elevator shaft is a good idea, just in case.
1Outer-Edge Piping
Whenever you’re building along the edge of impassable terrain like a mountain (which will be often), the best thing you can do isrun Pipeline all along that edge. This guarantees that anything you construct in that area will have Pipeline access while taking up the least amount of space.
This technique is especially useful if the wall has inlets, where it allows you tofit small but useful structures like Tidal Turbines. It may not be the prettiest sight under the sea, but it works exceptionally well!
