You've massively overrated the arcology. The go-to spire when you don't need a specialized one (like sanatorium or whatnot) is the hanging gardens. To quote a certain talking head from a certain other game about mars - “having buildings is useless without people to staff them”. You need people no less than you need living space. Hanging gardens is how you get more people.

Graveyard shift is when you make people work heavy workload on a night shift outside of the dome. Night shifts and heavy workloads alone are quite manageable and in fact beneficial to the colony as a whole. Learn to use them or read a dedicated guide if you can't figure them out on your own.

For as long as I've know this game rovers didn't use power. Broken ones can be repaired by drones.

Small grids do have merits but the also have downsides. Like the fact that you have far less control over your grid. You can deal with leaks by looping the grid and putting valves/switches.
Use mini-grids for things that are medium priority. The rest you want on a large grid so you can keep high priority buildings running by turning off low priority ones.

Loner is one of the better flaws actually. But explaining that would take too long. It's the idiots that you really want to avoid.

You shouldn't “run out of money” in the first place. That's what we ship gold to earth for.
Spend money to make money. Those electronics factories are a big investment. You don't do them “on your last slice of budget” you do them when your budget starts to expand.

Some of those are newbie tips only a newbie would buy into.
And misleading by guides annoy me.

DO rush to get colonists. In worst case scenario you can keep them for up to five days in orbit. That's more than enough time to finish building what you need for them.
Furthermore waiting for research is wasteful. Even in the best case scenario food tech and apartment tech are going to cost you 1000 each. In the early game that means you either need to outsource or wait several days. Both the cost of outsourcing and the cost of precious metals you would have mined in those days easily outweigh the cost of a temporary hydroponics farm and living complex.

Do stockpile, except for power. In case of major shortages a few accumulators aren't going to save you anyway, and many extra are too costly. In case of minor ones, there's always a concrete extractor or two you take out of the loop while you fix/rebuild without suffering any major setbacks.

Sanity is a resource to be managed. If the building is outdoors turn the night shift off. If it's in dome night shifts are perfectly acceptable unless there is a disaster going on. 1) Outdoor's 2) Nightshift 3) Disaster. These 3 cause sanity hits and you can afford 1 out of 3 in the long run. more than that cause breaks. There are techs that remove 1 and 3 from the equation. Working nights is desired otherwise they will lose comfort and whine that the grocery store wasn't open at 2:00 AM on Mars and the medical building needs to work 24/7 to get the pop growth increase.

*smiles* You're very welcomed Pontifex.

Cool thanks @Dralth

Great guide.. gave a thumb's up, an award, and favorited it for future reference.

Good. Now that I understand some of the basics I'll give the game a try again if I can pull myself away from SW:TOR, Sid Meier's RR, and XCOM.

Nice guide, but I have a couple of observations on the "Avoid introvert old people" section.

First, while colonists with the loner trait can be an annoyance; dealing with them isn't that difficult. Early on, I normally set aside a small dome with housing of 30 or less (preferably one apartment building) just for loners, using the dome filters to encourage the loner flaw for that one while not allowing it in others. As the colony grows I might add a couple more such domes as needed, or just let them settle in otherwise limited population domes for remote mining far-flung deposits or farming and ranching.

Second, there's a breakthrough technology called "Forever Young". It enables seniors to work until the day they die. Of course, it's not something one can count on having every play-through. However, if it is discovered via a breakthrough anomaly (i.e. the one that looks like a magnifying glass) on a given map it will be there each game played on that map.