While the community is speculating that development is closed for Surviving Mars, I wanted to make a pitch for a feature for the game which would be very cool, extremely thematically appropriate, and also relatively easy for haemimont games since they have already done much of the core development work. Comments appreciated.
Hydrodynamics: Connecting global sea levels to in-map hydrology!
Core engine capabilities/requirements:
1. Surviving Mars possess a database of global average elevations for each colonizable grid cell on Mars.
2. Surviving Mars is able to render three dimensional elevations in the colonial area (and can therefore map game elevations to elevations above or below the average elevation for the cell).
3. Surviving Mars is able to render water and the water model is sophisticated enough to recognize both relative elevation (to determine where water should be) and whether or not there are barriers to water flowing from one area of low elevation to another (watch the lakes fill up sometime- low lying areas don't fill until the relevant saddles between low points are overcome). The lakes also appear to use the actual terrain engine of the game (when panning the camera over a lake, the camera behaves as if it is moving over a low lying area instead of an art object).
4. The game is able to determine when water should be frozen or liquid. The game does not appear to have a flow model (water elevations rise and fall at steady state) but I'd be delighted to be wrong.
5. Underwater objects appear to continue to be rendered.
Primary game mechanics:
Initialization:
All maps will have in game elevations mapped to their average datum elevation and each tick "up" or "down" in the in game map elevation system will correspond to 10 meters for the purposes of calculating whether water should enter the map. (The lowest lying areas appear to be 100+ ticks below the higher plateaus, and the goal is to ensure maps with elevation have significant differences in what gets flooded when). [Because Mars has below sea level elevations ranging between 0 and -~6500 meters, this means every 1% water add is about 65 meters and most maps will experience differential flooding levels for up to 16% of the water-terraforming process range.] The map will additionally include a deterministic "primary direction of flooding" based on where the colony is on the planetary grid (and this will be visible to the player on colony start). There will be six possible directions corresponding to the orientation of the in-game hex grids. The side of the game area which is the appropriate direction will be marked and the map-edge-hexes which are lowest will be clearly indicated (this allows for the possibility that the relevant side has a cliff wall with a small gap at a lower sea level, for example).
Progression:
As global water levels rise during the terraforming process, the game calculates whether the grid cell of the colony has reached the current global sea level. Thee scenarios can occur:
1. The colony is higher than sea level at all points in terraforming. No changes to base game.
2. The average colony datum is lower than the current sea level but the current temperature does not yet sustain liquid water on the surface. ["Ice Age"]
3. The average colony datum is lower than the current sea level, but the current temperature permits liquid water. ["Incoming Tides"]
Note: colonies starting below sea level will receive a boost to their difficulty rating. The colonial commander will also be warned when sea levels are within 10% (on the 0-100% terraforming scale) of the level which will trigger flooding of the lowest lying areas of their colonial map.
If temperatures are too low ("Ice Age'), the player will receive a notification that the accumulating ice on mars is pushing into the colonial zone (essentially, glacial action). The relevant hex direction off map will start to turn white and have ice art on it. All edge hexes in the correct direction will calculate whether they are lower or higher than the current sea level. Every Sol, hexes which are adjacent to currently iced tiles (which includes the game map edge) will ice over/fill with ice by an additional tick, continuing until the appropriate level is reached.
If temperatures are high enough ("Incoming Tides") the player will receive a notification that the expanding oceans have reached the colony. The portion of the map edge which is adjacent to the lowest hexes (as determined at game start) will receive art showing fingers/inlets of water reaching towards the relevant hexes. If the player has not done anything to modify the hex height, all low lying areas which connect to the water inlet areas (at a level below the current sea level) will immediately flood. (this flooding can have a cool animation but should proceed rapidly within a single Sol, and can even take place as a "game is paused, watch the water flow" animation (or cut scene) if it isn't easy to procedurally generate the flow in the game engine).
Game Effects:
Flooding and ice do not inherently damage or destroy player infrastructure. Ice behaves like a permanent un-meltable cold snap at an ice depth of one tick, and fully disables external operations at a depth of three ticks or more [TBD - but this would be half of the depth of 1% water tick on the terraforming scale]. This means mines/oxygen generators/landing pads/supply depots do not work at all and are inaccessible, but drones and moving entities (including colonists) will drive around on the surface of the ice without issue. Domes are unaffected and the ice should just pile up around them. Tunnel connections between domes work as normal but it is impossible to otherwise enter or leave the sides of a dome which are iced to three ticks or higher. Because the ice moves slowly, there will be plenty of time for the player to relocate infrastructure or enact countermeasures against the encroaching ice (more this momentarily). While movement is possible on ice and rockets can land, no new buildings can be constructed on ice at any time (if ice is melted and a rocket is on the ice at the time, the rocket is destroyed).
Flooding similarly does not damage equipment, and unlike ice, generally does not disable external building operations. Drones and surface movement in water are fully blocked, however, unless the player has researched appropriate technologies (Upgraded drones/etc. will have propellers added for underwater ops and will otherwise move as normal with new animations - Japanese wasp drones already basically do this and the Japanese shouldn't need this tech because their drones are already upgraded). Rockets also cannot land on water and a technology must be researched to upgrade landing pads for floating operations. This technology simply moves the landing pad to the water surface height and creates some art anchors holding it to the ground level below (there's artistic tunnels or something like it which make it clear how drones move from the pad to the undersea surface). Similarly, after the technology is researched, shuttle hubs have an extension which always sticks above the water level and flying shuttles are unaffected by water (they dive into it to deliver supplies). Water will be rendered very transparently and the player is welcome to proceed to build an atlantean colony environment (zooming in and/out and/or a toggle can be used to make the water surface level more visible as needed). All farm/vegetation based technologies and buildings will have equivalent sea-based alternatives (grass = sea grasses, bushes = coral (or something), trees = undersea megakelp), which are unlocked at the same time as the relevant terrestrial plant (but obviously no longer have a water requirement).
Countermeasures:
The player can enact countermeasures against encroaching water and/or ice by modifying the terrain to block water and ice flow. As stated above, every 1% water terraforming status corresponds to about 65 meters of water depth, so 6 ticks of elevation gain will be required to create berms and other blockers against a given sea level encroachment. This can be accomplished by using the existing elevation modification powers, or by researching technologies which unlock various types of sea barriers. Sea walls/barriers use concrete or waste rock and allow steeper elevation gradients than are possible with the standard elevation modification. (TBD exact, but notionally a sea wall could allow 12 ticks of concrete height for every hex of wall thickness, and a barrier can allow 6 ticks of waste rock height for every hex of barrier thickness. I think the ratio for dirt based elevation modification is about 2 or 4 ticks of height gain for each hex). The top level of a barrier is always a drivable surface and can act as a road for vehicles/people, and can be built on if sufficiently thick. With enough investment, it should be possible to build walls as high as the highest allowable terrain height on a map (allowing for epic mega-dams holding back the sea) but if the water terraforming level exceeds the maximum height of the map, everything is flooded.
If a wall is built in a flooded area such that part of the flooded area is cut off from the offmap sea access point(s), the cut off area will drain over the course of 1 sol, allowing for below sea level (but dry) operations. Ice, once present in a hex, cannot be built on in any way and there is no way of draining or eliminating it except by melting it. A player can prevent the encroachment of ice by building barriers before the ice reaches them.
Optional features:
1. There are no situations in which it is possible for rain to occur before the temperature reaches the "liquid water" phase. It would be a nice artistic effect, however, if snow were possible when temperatures are between 25-50%, rain is active (atmosphere above 25%) and a cold snap is occuring. The game effects would be identical (acid rain/clear rain) but you would see white or greenish/yellowish snow as appropriate to the rain type.
2. The water threshold for trees should be lowered (50% maybe) and the option to disable water level changes from lakes should be activated (you can keep the lakes on for aesthetics but they don't do anything). Additionally, below certain temperature and atmosphere thresholds, it should be possible for water levels to retreat like atmosphere and temperature can (soil absorption and/or ice cap formation). This will give players more flexibility to create a mars with a sea level below datum and choose a water level they like for their colony. Super low lying places are going to have to be underwater but everything else should be up for grabs.
3. Additional technologies could be required to be researched to enable buildings to operate underwater.
4. If certain sea-level raising options are chosen (such as comets), a barrier is overtopped, a barrier is broken, the water raise can be made to be damaging to buildings and infrastructure. This could be an additional disaster/threat as well ("sea surge detected!") - essentially tidal waves/temporary additions to current sea level which damage infrastructure (which can be fixed but which can also be extremely dangerous).
Hydrodynamics: Connecting global sea levels to in-map hydrology!
Core engine capabilities/requirements:
1. Surviving Mars possess a database of global average elevations for each colonizable grid cell on Mars.
2. Surviving Mars is able to render three dimensional elevations in the colonial area (and can therefore map game elevations to elevations above or below the average elevation for the cell).
3. Surviving Mars is able to render water and the water model is sophisticated enough to recognize both relative elevation (to determine where water should be) and whether or not there are barriers to water flowing from one area of low elevation to another (watch the lakes fill up sometime- low lying areas don't fill until the relevant saddles between low points are overcome). The lakes also appear to use the actual terrain engine of the game (when panning the camera over a lake, the camera behaves as if it is moving over a low lying area instead of an art object).
4. The game is able to determine when water should be frozen or liquid. The game does not appear to have a flow model (water elevations rise and fall at steady state) but I'd be delighted to be wrong.
5. Underwater objects appear to continue to be rendered.
Primary game mechanics:
Initialization:
All maps will have in game elevations mapped to their average datum elevation and each tick "up" or "down" in the in game map elevation system will correspond to 10 meters for the purposes of calculating whether water should enter the map. (The lowest lying areas appear to be 100+ ticks below the higher plateaus, and the goal is to ensure maps with elevation have significant differences in what gets flooded when). [Because Mars has below sea level elevations ranging between 0 and -~6500 meters, this means every 1% water add is about 65 meters and most maps will experience differential flooding levels for up to 16% of the water-terraforming process range.] The map will additionally include a deterministic "primary direction of flooding" based on where the colony is on the planetary grid (and this will be visible to the player on colony start). There will be six possible directions corresponding to the orientation of the in-game hex grids. The side of the game area which is the appropriate direction will be marked and the map-edge-hexes which are lowest will be clearly indicated (this allows for the possibility that the relevant side has a cliff wall with a small gap at a lower sea level, for example).
Progression:
As global water levels rise during the terraforming process, the game calculates whether the grid cell of the colony has reached the current global sea level. Thee scenarios can occur:
1. The colony is higher than sea level at all points in terraforming. No changes to base game.
2. The average colony datum is lower than the current sea level but the current temperature does not yet sustain liquid water on the surface. ["Ice Age"]
3. The average colony datum is lower than the current sea level, but the current temperature permits liquid water. ["Incoming Tides"]
Note: colonies starting below sea level will receive a boost to their difficulty rating. The colonial commander will also be warned when sea levels are within 10% (on the 0-100% terraforming scale) of the level which will trigger flooding of the lowest lying areas of their colonial map.
If temperatures are too low ("Ice Age'), the player will receive a notification that the accumulating ice on mars is pushing into the colonial zone (essentially, glacial action). The relevant hex direction off map will start to turn white and have ice art on it. All edge hexes in the correct direction will calculate whether they are lower or higher than the current sea level. Every Sol, hexes which are adjacent to currently iced tiles (which includes the game map edge) will ice over/fill with ice by an additional tick, continuing until the appropriate level is reached.
If temperatures are high enough ("Incoming Tides") the player will receive a notification that the expanding oceans have reached the colony. The portion of the map edge which is adjacent to the lowest hexes (as determined at game start) will receive art showing fingers/inlets of water reaching towards the relevant hexes. If the player has not done anything to modify the hex height, all low lying areas which connect to the water inlet areas (at a level below the current sea level) will immediately flood. (this flooding can have a cool animation but should proceed rapidly within a single Sol, and can even take place as a "game is paused, watch the water flow" animation (or cut scene) if it isn't easy to procedurally generate the flow in the game engine).
Game Effects:
Flooding and ice do not inherently damage or destroy player infrastructure. Ice behaves like a permanent un-meltable cold snap at an ice depth of one tick, and fully disables external operations at a depth of three ticks or more [TBD - but this would be half of the depth of 1% water tick on the terraforming scale]. This means mines/oxygen generators/landing pads/supply depots do not work at all and are inaccessible, but drones and moving entities (including colonists) will drive around on the surface of the ice without issue. Domes are unaffected and the ice should just pile up around them. Tunnel connections between domes work as normal but it is impossible to otherwise enter or leave the sides of a dome which are iced to three ticks or higher. Because the ice moves slowly, there will be plenty of time for the player to relocate infrastructure or enact countermeasures against the encroaching ice (more this momentarily). While movement is possible on ice and rockets can land, no new buildings can be constructed on ice at any time (if ice is melted and a rocket is on the ice at the time, the rocket is destroyed).
Flooding similarly does not damage equipment, and unlike ice, generally does not disable external building operations. Drones and surface movement in water are fully blocked, however, unless the player has researched appropriate technologies (Upgraded drones/etc. will have propellers added for underwater ops and will otherwise move as normal with new animations - Japanese wasp drones already basically do this and the Japanese shouldn't need this tech because their drones are already upgraded). Rockets also cannot land on water and a technology must be researched to upgrade landing pads for floating operations. This technology simply moves the landing pad to the water surface height and creates some art anchors holding it to the ground level below (there's artistic tunnels or something like it which make it clear how drones move from the pad to the undersea surface). Similarly, after the technology is researched, shuttle hubs have an extension which always sticks above the water level and flying shuttles are unaffected by water (they dive into it to deliver supplies). Water will be rendered very transparently and the player is welcome to proceed to build an atlantean colony environment (zooming in and/out and/or a toggle can be used to make the water surface level more visible as needed). All farm/vegetation based technologies and buildings will have equivalent sea-based alternatives (grass = sea grasses, bushes = coral (or something), trees = undersea megakelp), which are unlocked at the same time as the relevant terrestrial plant (but obviously no longer have a water requirement).
Countermeasures:
The player can enact countermeasures against encroaching water and/or ice by modifying the terrain to block water and ice flow. As stated above, every 1% water terraforming status corresponds to about 65 meters of water depth, so 6 ticks of elevation gain will be required to create berms and other blockers against a given sea level encroachment. This can be accomplished by using the existing elevation modification powers, or by researching technologies which unlock various types of sea barriers. Sea walls/barriers use concrete or waste rock and allow steeper elevation gradients than are possible with the standard elevation modification. (TBD exact, but notionally a sea wall could allow 12 ticks of concrete height for every hex of wall thickness, and a barrier can allow 6 ticks of waste rock height for every hex of barrier thickness. I think the ratio for dirt based elevation modification is about 2 or 4 ticks of height gain for each hex). The top level of a barrier is always a drivable surface and can act as a road for vehicles/people, and can be built on if sufficiently thick. With enough investment, it should be possible to build walls as high as the highest allowable terrain height on a map (allowing for epic mega-dams holding back the sea) but if the water terraforming level exceeds the maximum height of the map, everything is flooded.
If a wall is built in a flooded area such that part of the flooded area is cut off from the offmap sea access point(s), the cut off area will drain over the course of 1 sol, allowing for below sea level (but dry) operations. Ice, once present in a hex, cannot be built on in any way and there is no way of draining or eliminating it except by melting it. A player can prevent the encroachment of ice by building barriers before the ice reaches them.
Optional features:
1. There are no situations in which it is possible for rain to occur before the temperature reaches the "liquid water" phase. It would be a nice artistic effect, however, if snow were possible when temperatures are between 25-50%, rain is active (atmosphere above 25%) and a cold snap is occuring. The game effects would be identical (acid rain/clear rain) but you would see white or greenish/yellowish snow as appropriate to the rain type.
2. The water threshold for trees should be lowered (50% maybe) and the option to disable water level changes from lakes should be activated (you can keep the lakes on for aesthetics but they don't do anything). Additionally, below certain temperature and atmosphere thresholds, it should be possible for water levels to retreat like atmosphere and temperature can (soil absorption and/or ice cap formation). This will give players more flexibility to create a mars with a sea level below datum and choose a water level they like for their colony. Super low lying places are going to have to be underwater but everything else should be up for grabs.
3. Additional technologies could be required to be researched to enable buildings to operate underwater.
4. If certain sea-level raising options are chosen (such as comets), a barrier is overtopped, a barrier is broken, the water raise can be made to be damaging to buildings and infrastructure. This could be an additional disaster/threat as well ("sea surge detected!") - essentially tidal waves/temporary additions to current sea level which damage infrastructure (which can be fixed but which can also be extremely dangerous).