Super Energy Apocalypse - FAQ

General Help

• Q: I'm confused, how do I play this game? I need help!

  A: There's this great big green button called "HELP" right at the top of the in-game menu.
  

• Q: Is there a strategy guide or wiki available?

  A: I have started a page at IndieFaqs about Super Energy Apocalypse. Please help contribute to it!

Specific Strategy

• Q: How do I beat level 8?

  A: In version 1.2, level 8 was notoriously difficult. Hopefully I have tweaked it so that level 8 is now beatable in version 1.3 and above. The previous version WAS possible, but just barely.
  
  I have personally beaten level 8 on version 1.2 with the following strategy:
  
  save your fossil fuels and build a natural gas plant immediately, and try to get a lab built on the first day. Upgrade your non-renewable resources (natural gas plant & gasoline fuel) as quickly as possible to make them last longer. Build only what you need to survive, keep your base small and tight so its easier to defend. If you build up a food surplus, disable your farm and just eat down your surplus and ignore the defecit warning, so as to conserve energy. Stack floodlights together for maximum effect, and be sure to get gun turrets in soon after so that if you run out of one resource (metal or energy) you will still have half of your defenses online.
  
  The geothermal spots are tempting, but wait to build there until you can effectively defend them. The larger your base, the harder it is to defend. If you hold out long enough, towards the very end Colonel Thorvald Roosevelt will come with much-needed supplies for your base, and this should keep you alive through the last day.

• Q: I have a lot of oil wells, but I'm barely producing anything! What gives?

  A: Oil wells run dry after a while. They never completely run out, their output just continues to steadily approach Zero over time. Once you've been running them for a long time, they'll be producing mere fractional amounts of resource and you might as well just disable them because the energy cost isn't worth the miniscule amount of output. This is what oil wells are like in real life.

• Q: I switched to electric cars to deal with Smog, but now I'm producing even more than before! What's wrong?

  A: Electric cars don't produce any smog in and of themselves, but that energy has to come from somewhere. If that energy is coming from fossil fuel power plants, then building more power plants to supply more energy for your electric cars is probably going to produce MORE smog than if the cars were just running off of gasoline. For electric cars to be an environmental benefit, you will need to be providing them with a cleaner source of energy, such as natural gas (which still pollutes, but not as much), or wind, solar, geothermal, or nuclear.
  

• Q: Giant zombies are killing me! What makes them grow so big?

  A: The zombies grow bigger whenever they either :

  • Eat enough garbage to level up
  • Smog levels increase to a certain point
  
  When a zombie eats enough garbage, all of its hitpoints are restored and it grows stronger. Also, for every 100 units of smog you have in the air, new zombies spawn already leveled up. So if you have 400 smog, all new zombies START at level 4.
  
  Also, eating Nuclear waste will cause a zombie to instantly upgrade to the maximum level.
  
  

• Q: On some maps, I keep running out of fossil fuels! What am I doing wrong?

  A: Fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource. That means that after a certain point, you've used them all up. To truly sustain your economy, you need to invest research in other kinds of power sources.

• Q: What does a star on a building mean?

  A: A "star" building will produce twice as much as a regular building, because of favorable terrain conditions. A farm built on fertile soil produces twice the food for the same energy input and garbage output as a regular farm. A geothermal plant built directly on a big hotspot produces twice as much as a regular plant, and a wind farm built on high altitude is twice as effective as one on low altitude, etc.

• Q: How do I recycle things?

  A: This feature is only available in version 1.5, which has not yet been released. Previous versions of the game left in references to recycling before the feature was implemented.

  In version 1.5, recycling is performed by constructing a recycling center. Garbage trucks will then automatically take part of their garbage here first to reclaim recyclable materials before proceeding to the landfill.

  Metal is the primary recyclable material, but by upgrading your recycling center, you can add new recycling programs and reclaim more material.

• Q: Where is "high altitude" land?

  Q:This is another feature that was prematurely mentioned without being implemented. This feature is available in version 1.4, which is currently available on the beta page. As of this writing, high altitude only exists on Sandbox Map #1, but I will be updating various levels to include this feature.

• Q: Why do some zombies not die immediately on sunrise?

  A: Sunrise does not directly kill zombies, it causes them to sustain a certain (fairly high) amount of damage per frame (the game runs at 30 frames per second). High-level zombies have many, many more hitpoints than low-level zombies. Thus, the sun kills low-level zombies nearly instantaneously, but high-level zombies take much longer. This is an intentional feature: the stronger zombies have gained resistance even to the sun.

• Q:Why do certain features (like certain power plants) seem totally unbalanced?

  A: This isn't a normal video game, where we just make up all our numbers so we can have a nice rock-paper-scissors effect. The balances are taken from real life, based on the best data I can find. Wind and Solar power, for instance, produce a LOT less energy than Fossil Fuels. America gets 50% of its energy from coal for a REASON - it's very, very high yield and pretty darn cheap. Of course, Coal is a very high-polluting power source, too. And so we model all this stuff in the game as accurately as we can

About the Game

• Q: Can I host Super Energy Apocalypse on my own website?

  A: Please do! Send me an email at : Lars (dot) Doucet (at) Gmail (dot) com and I'll send you a distribution package with instructions. Understand that I retain all copyright to the game and the right to revoke permission to host the game at any time

• Q: What are those ads at the beginning of your game?

  A: That's from MochiAds. And the reason it's there is because I need to pay rent :). Seriously, though, if you are a flash developer you need to look into MochiAds. You create an account, put in two lines of code into your game, and then start distributing your swf file around the internet. Then, from a centralized webhub on MochiAds, you can control the sorts of ads you want to sell in your game. If someone pirates your game and puts it on their site, then you still make money because it still displays the MochiAd. And if you want to put it up on a portal that pays you directly that doesn't allow ads, then you can go into MochiAds and disable ads JUST for that website. It's pretty great and a great revenue stream for me for Energy Apocalypse. It keeps me fed.
  NOTE: PLEASE DO NOT run bots to click on my game's ads a lot in order to "help me out." Also, don't click on them just to drive up my hits. That is click-fraud and I don't support it.

• Q: What's your relationship with Jayisgames?

  A: I'm not professionally affilated with Jayisgames.com, but I'm a good friend of the site's owner, Jay Bibby, and an occasional contributer to his website in the form of columsn and games. I won second place in their recent casual games competition for Super Energy Apocalypse.

• Q: What's your relationship with Kongregate?

  A: Again, I'm not an employee of Kongregate, but I do work with them. They're one of my favorite flash portals, and work really well with developers. I've earned even more money from them than I have through MochiAds!

• Q: Where do you get your numbers?

  A: Prior to version 1.5, the numbers (energy output, fuel consumption, etc) in the game come from my original research, which was okay but not great. I mostly combed the internet for the statistics I could find, filled in gaps with my own calculations and estimates, and hired my roommates (a petroleum engineer and a chemist) to go out and bring me back some data to crunch. This research method was in no way comprehensive and has a lot of uncertainty and possibly even outright mistakes in it. I'm in the process of collecting new information and data which I will use to overhaul all of the game's numbers and statistics, which will see its first implementation in version 1.5. This will probably affect game balance to a certain degree, but depending on how good my original data was, will only be a refinement of the current ratios

• Q: What do zombies have to do with teaching people about the environment?

  A: Directly? Nothing. I was inspired to make this game by watching how detailed people would get in discussing stragies about common RTS games like StarCraft. I thought, "Man! And that's just about managing space crystals to fund a military operation!" I figured I would invert the complexity - very simplistic military, very deep economic sector, and make the economics about sustainable energy use. The zombies are there to give you a challenge to face up against and an incentive to conserve your resources and protect the environment. This makes it a complete game and makes your environmental and economic decisions, the game's true "educational" content, matter.

• Q: Those things don't really look like zombies.

  A: That's not really a question, but I'll answer it. The game actually refers to them in full as "Mutant Alien Zombies." They are a totally generic threat and have about as much to do with "Dawn of the Dead" style zombies as I have to do with the American Accordion Appreciation Society. The name for the little spider-like guys is actually "Edderkop" in the game's code, the Norwegian word for "Spider." And yes I know they only have six legs.

• Q: Can I help you beta test?

  A: Yes! Click here

• Q: What do I get for beta testing?

  A: My undying gratitude and a mention in the credits!

Game Design

Common Political Questions I get

• Q: Do you believe Human Beings are causing Global Warming?

  A: It's fairly likely, but I'm not sure. At the end of the day though, I see this as an irrelevant question. POLLUTION is dangerous in general, regardless of whether Carbon Dioxide (a small sliver of ALL our total pollutants, even considernig how much of it we produce) is heating up the earth. Even if Global Warming never happens, we are still facing a large ecological and ECONOMIC crisis brought about by declining air quality and waste of precious resources. You don't have to believe in Global Warming to be concerned about the environment, and the plus side is, if you take care of dangerous pollutants we're emitting into the air, land, and water, the by-product of that is that IF Global Warming really IS happening because of human CO2 emissions, these measures will help curb its effects. It's a win-win situation. We ignore this issue at our own peril, Global Warming or no.

• Q: Are you some kind of tree-hugging hippie?

  A: Despite the long hair, no. (And no offense intended to proud self-proclaimed tree-hugging hippies). I'm actually a Ron Paul conservative. Conservation isn't an issue that either political party gets to claim as their own, and most politicians are really stupid when it comes to these issues anyway. I have always believed that it is better to re-use or fix what you already have rather than buy or manufacture something new, and it's best to live within your means rather than spend conspicuously or wastefully. Environmental conservation is a natural corrolary to these basic economic principles. "If you spend more than you produce, soon you will have nothing." Same thing goes for the environment, especially since many resources CANNOT be produced forever and will eventually run out, either this century or the next. I hope to put the conservation back in conservative.
  
  Classical economic conservatism has very little to do with George W. Bush's more famous Neo-Conservatism.

• Q: What do you think of Al Gore and his documentary?

  A: I don't think of him.

• Q: What do you think of (insert highly-charged political statement)?

  A: See above question.