The game does not play in a too far distant future, so there will be no super-technologies producing main needed goods out of nowhere. Instead maintaining life support will be a key element in asteroid colonizations.
Asteroids will not be the home for thousends of people and there will also not be a wide range of comfort and entertainment. In fact an asteroid colony will be more a mining colony, being the home for working people, maintainance staff and mercenaries. An asteroid colony will alwas have a limited amount of living capabilities.
Therefore, you have to find a balance and conquer the difficulties in providing what is needed to maintain you population. There will be some key elements for this purpose, which is food, water and air. The game aims to have a culture which have learned to use hydrogen and oxygen as their key components to fulfill their needs.
Hydrogen could be used in conjunction with air to produce water, which is used for consumation, space farming and such things where hydrogen could be used as fuel for the space fighters and - if you have enough of it - also for energy producing.
Hydrogen can be gathered from space directly - honestly not very much of it but also can be mined from an asteroid itself, depending on how high the concentration of oxygen is. With the use of energy a colony will be able to maintain different buildings who transform/recycle hydrogen to produce the needed goods.
All this will result in a life support which should be easy to understand and to handle for the player. So there will be some buildings who do exactly serve this purpose. All of them needing energy.
Hydrogen Collector
This will collect particles from outer space and is able to filtrate and/or crack them for their atomic components. Heavily useful if the asteroid itself cannot deliver enough hydrogen by mining. This module will produce hydrogen, which can be transformed to water by the life support module
Space Farm
Fed with water and minerals mined from the asteroid, this module will be able to grow highly genetical modified plants which will deliver a good food source for your colony.
Air Reproducer
Oxygen is a highly recycled good. While it will be gathered by mining the colony has to be very careful with oxygen capacity. That's also why every space fighter is actually a drone and is not hosting a real crew. Oxygen would be just to valueable to lose it when the ship gets destroyed. As a benefit, space ships can be built much smaller.
Colony Ships are different. They will carry human life and a life support system with them. But this means, that transporters just have no room for big engines, so they are slow, have no shields and no weapons at all. You will need to gather enough extra oxygen first before you can approach to settle another asteroid.
Hopefully you got another insight in the Age of Asteroids and you like it. Feel free to make suggestions, tell me your opinion or ask any questions.
