Have any of you guys played Planetbase and what did you think of it?
Planetbase is a brutal game where the opening moves really make a huge difference as to success or failure. The loss of a single crew member in those opening moves before you get the infrastructure to recruit more colonists can literally make the difference between success or failure. An unfortunate part of that game is how the opening moves are pretty repetitive too so far as players pretty much follow a formula or script and do things in a certain manner for success in the early game. It is only in the mid-game realm where some of the various scenarios (or "planets" with different environments) really comes into play excepting that the harder scenarios have even fewer initial colonists.
A gripe I have about Planetbase is how the colonist roles are far too regimented. I had one colony that had about 30 colonists and I thought it was doing well when a terrorist came into the base and killed all but one of the biologists. The terrorist and deaths dropped the colony "score" (basically a prestige thing sort of like found in CKII for rulers) so no new colonists would come to replace the dead biologists. That in turn made a literal death spiral so the colony ran out of food in spite of a huge farm area dripping with unharvested food.... as if an engineer couldn't figure out how to pull a few tomatoes off of vines or something. The last biologist literally starved to death while harvesting food and enroute to put it into a food processor.... where the food was taken immediately by another colonist before the biologist could eat.
I really hope that Surviving Mars has a mechanic quite a bit different than those highly regimented and unchanging professions.
The late game of Planetbase is kind of fun as you set up extended defenses to protect against those above mentioned terrorists and equip a literal army of soldiers (called "guards") who are also equipped with guns you have manufactured in your base. Resources are rolling in where the larger problem is simply avoiding overcrowding and allowing multiple paths so you don't run into people dying from Oxygen deprivation due to simply having several hundred people standing around in the same dome (it is odd that was even modeled). The construction of monuments is IMHO silly other than as a resource sink, but it is a part of the game and feels like building wonders in Civilization with far fewer benefits.
Modding support is severely lacking, something I also hope becomes a thing with Surviving Mars. Before the official forums went offline, there was a discussion about adding modding support by users.... sort of like happened in Minecraft. Those threads were summarily deleted and purged from the board as if they never happened and interpreted as though the developer was hostile to the idea of modding in general. Planetbase now supports some "modding" in the form of language translations and setting up some basic custom scenarios, but they don't allow you to customize buildings, add professions or add resources.
Modding support alone would make Surviving Mars a different experience. Given the attitude that Paradox has towards modding support, I do expect it to happen as well at least on some level far beyond my experience above.
At its heart though, Planetbase is about some version of humanity in the extreme distant future where you are colonizing exotic planets in remote places around the universe where your colony is but one of millions or billions. Surviving Mars is about humanity's first attempt to step out beyond the Earth and to do something permanent on an alien world where such a colonizing experience has literally never happened before in history. That is where I think the games can definitely diverge and hopefully be a very different experience.
