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This is related to the feedback in this thread. During a campaign playthrough on Hyla's Crescent a lightning strike took out one of two zorium generators and my entire colony was dead within minutes. Sorry about the wall of text.

I was playing past the endgame objective just to try some things out in a larger colony, so at this point I had reasonably sized colony of ~1300 inhabitants and energy demand of ~2400/2700. Right before the lightning strike I had an average of 90% happiness and had maintained this for a few sols. However, once that one generator went down the entire colony went into a death spiral that I don't think a player could have foreseen or stopped once it had begun. 

The huge energy supply dip took out key buildings like my chemical plants, which completely stopped enhancer production, which caused addicted inhabitants to experience the withdrawal effects i.e. crime and every other inhabitant to become severely unhappy with the crime, which caused a colony wide efficiency drop, which caused every other energy supply building to drop and at this point there was no recovery. With every inhabitant unhappy and at 10% efficiency there was simply no way to get energy supply back up and buildings back on. So since every building was shut off, food and water supplies were exhausted (I had around 20k food stored at this point?) and the entire colony died. 

So I've been thinking about how I could have avoided this situation or prepared for it, but I don't think I could have.

I had an okay energy demand/supply margin, and since I was using almost exclusively geothermal and zorium generators I didn't have any energy concerns during the winter. Before this lightning strike I hadn't noticed any building other than tunnels get taken out by lightning, so the only threat to energy seemed to be in the winter. If I had known that the generators could be taken out, I could have surrounded energy buildings with more battery buildings. However, this would only be effective if you caught the strike in time and were able to turn the batteries on to provide energy. I think the lightning notification a) got lost in a sea of other notifications, b) was conditioned to be ignored because I assumed it was another tunnel going down, c) didn't trigger a game pause even though the event was serious. Maybe I should have noticed the energy numbers right away, but I don't think I could still have caught it in time given my game speed. If the lightning strike had paused the game like other serious events, *maybe* this could have been stopped. 

I also don't think I was being reckless with the enhancers at this point in the game. I had spent a few hours building a really solid supply chain for them (but obviously not energy supply :). I had dozens of greenhouses supplying raw materials for enhancers being produced in five or six chemical plants. I had a constant store of a few hundred of each enhancer at any given time, so they were being produced and consumed at a responsible rate. But once the chemical plants lost power there seemed like no way to stop the chain of events. I could have tried to build a larger store of enhancers for situations where the supply stopped, but once the enhancers were on it was very hard to regain control of their consumption rate. There was a lot of effort given to just keep that small surplus. Maybe I could have built a huge supply up before turning them on? That might of prevented the situation. But if the storage buildings loose power it doesn't really mater how much you have stored. If the game paused after the generator was taken out I could have turned on prohibition and possibly stopped the chain there. 

Ultimately I think this was a combination of mistakes on my part and what I think are some pain points in design. Hopefully the lightning antennas are something that would have prevented this issue? I would definitely use them around energy buildings in future games 🙂 Also the balance around enhancers seems off and the control around enhancers seems really lacking. Even before this event I felt like I had little control over enhancers effects on my game.

There should perhaps be something like a 'one button' emergency mode that switches off all unnecessary buildings, puts in rations and martial law, and reverts all energy to the building drones who can then try to rebuild the energy supply.

This behaviour makes me think of the famous 'Banished' famine spirals where people die of hunger, ignoring barns that are filled with food.

Heya Bluesqur!

Ultimately, death spirals are part of the game, but we do want to look at ways we can help players avoid the worst death spirals.

Lightning Towers will definitely help with this once we get them in.

We'll also see what we can do to make the worst cases less lethal and give players more tools to help salvage this sort of situation.

You are too depends on Zorium generator.

You can easily help your colony to overcome winter by using what i call Solar formation - Check in discussion forum - I post that formation there.

Each formation provide 8 x (13 + 2) | 8 x (26 + 2) in exchange for 14 + (30 x 8) nanites.

So if you have 25 formation side by side  you will gain 25 x (8 x (13 + 2)) = 3000 power  during winter or 25 x (8 x (26 + 2)) = 5600 power  during spring summer and fall. And with Low burning mode of your Zorium generator and Power restriction social policy, your colony is way more likely to survive.

Of course this formation doesnt provide much on if you just build a small amount of them but if you buy a big enough and assume you have a lot of nanite and know how to create them without Iron deposit / copper deposit, you can technically have power to sustain your colony without Zorium generator.

I just hope developers will add Lightning rod and Wind turbine to help Solar panel generate power during winter and allow Batteries structure to auto switch between Absorb / provide / Idle mode - It is automated structure anyway. This game sure can have some other form of power generator as well.

So I had a very similar situation also on Hyla's Crescent. It was pretty early game and so I was just starting to get the industry running. During the winter one lightning strike took out my geo-thermal generator and pretty much ended the colony as I did not have enough nanites to repair it, and the drones were offline. There is no way to choose which buildings use the power available so I wasn't able to get it back up and running so it just ended my game.

Also, though I see Bluesaka111's point as to what is most efficient, I think that it would be great to have multiple very viable strategies rather than one "best" strategy on how to play the game. This could be aided by different research trees etc.