Having commented here and there on some other threads, I thought it might be a better idea to put my thoughts down in one place on the state of the game going into launch - note this is definitely not anything like a review (pls no ban, Paradox), but a list of stuff I'd like to see, and which bits should be in the base game in order to patch up some holes versus the ones I think would make fun additions which I personally would pay extra for.
(Warning: this might be rather long.)
1: Transport infrastructure options. At the moment there are... well, two and a half, if you count the drones, alongside the RC rover and the air shuttles. At present, the game basically takes care of nearly everything itself, or tries to, and that's fine in the early game - but once you start to go above more than a couple of domes, it definitely struggles at times to keep up. You as a player can direct individual drones to move stuff between stockpiles (and you can imagine how tedious that would get), or else use rovers to make one-off drops or set up recurring supply routes.
The downfall in all this comes from several factors; firstly, there are almost no stockpile options whatsoever - you can either have it opened or closed (and for universal ones, have individual materials closed), but a closed stockpile is automatically emptied. This means that you cannot as a player, for instance, designate a stockpile as a "primary" drop-off point that drones will always try and keep supplied, which you could then set a rover supply route from; of course this means you can't do the opposite either and have a designated "supply" stockpile at the other end, or have one that accepts input but not output, and so on. This alone makes the rover supply route option irritating to use because you have to constantly monitor it so you can switch it over to another stockpile once it empties one (irritatingly, they will also run out of power at some point because the game isn't smart enough to direct it to charge automatically when it's got a low battery, so again, you have to constantly monitor them).
Secondly then, there are the shuttles, which are much faster but carry very little - but they're also the only autonomic way of moving materials/colonists over bigger distances. There are almost zero options with shuttles; you just have to spam the depots and hope the game doesn't get constipated, which it still does - there's a screenshot in another thread where I had 60 shuttles in service and over 2k food stockpiled, yet still ended up with dozens of starving colonists across several domes. At the very least the player needs to be able to set transport priorities for different cargo types; coupled with proper stockpile options it would be an immediate improvement on what there is now. All of this makes it very hard to make sure you have a steady supply of materials going where you want, when you want, and the only option that there is becomes incredibly tedious to use very quickly.
Thirdly, and lastly, even if all of the above were fixed, it still makes no sense whatsoever that the cargo rover and the shuttles are literally your only options as a player, even as you're building artificial suns and mines that tunnel beneath the very crust of the planet itself. Apparently the technology of "making a tunnel between two close-by domes" is just too complicated, or sticking a passenger cabin on a rover. Give the player something more to work with, maglev, vacuum tubes, monorail, subway tunnels, whatever. If nothing else it would give you something to do once you've hit the mid game and you're sitting on the fastest speed just waiting for enough materials to build your next dome, or research your next tech. Some players also actively enjoy the process of trying to optimise their production and transport networks, so for them (and me) the current state of the game in that regard is frankly stifling.
Proposals: for starters, proper stockpile options need to be a thing (see games like Pharaoh, Banished, Dwarf Fortress). Add some mid- and late-game techs with new transport options (a little bit of Transport Tycoon, a little bit of Factorio). Players should have control over where things are going in their colony instead of being almost totally at the whim of the game itself, which can and does get things wrong. As an out-there thought, have teleportation as a breakthrough tech, giving a way to instantly transport people and materials between locations.
2: Building priorities need to change. This partly ties into what I wrote above; just as stockpiles have almost no player input on how they function, buildings themselves also to some extent suffer from this. There is presently one priority button which controls everything - power/water, workers, repair, and materials delivery. This is an incredibly blunt instrument which leaves very nearly zero room for the player to choose individual building priorities intelligently. Simply put, these should be separate options - if I, for instance, want to give a factory a high priority for workers and input materials, but a low priority for power in case of brownouts, then I should jolly well be able to do it. Again, as above, this is taking too much choice out of the hands of the player. (I've also seen elsewhere the suggestion to select employment to "specialists only" which I thought was an excellent one.)
3: Drone priorities. Basically, we need the janitors from Theme Hospital; in that game, they had the function of fixing your equipment, watering plants, and picking up litter - and you could give them a percentage-based priority for each task. In SM, I envisage this as being a certain number of drones per hub dedicated to each task, based on what you've picked as a player, so that no more will you have to wait for repairs to happen because all your drones are moving materials to a construction site, for instance. Ideally this would be set on a per-hub basis; it would even allow you to perhaps set up totally specialised hubs for a single task (moving materials about in a heavy industrial area, for instance, so that your shiny new maglev cargo train doesn't have to wait too long in loading before it whisks them away to the other side of the map).
4: Bring back the Almanac. Yeah, I get it, you don't want this to be seen as Tropico in space, but frankly the current system is pretty deficient in giving actually useful information, not to mention being annoying to use. You want to find out how many colonists have a certain trait? You want to see how many people are approaching retirement? You want to see some food production graphs, or track the birth rate? Well, tough luck. At best, with some information such as traits or gender, you can glean it on a per-dome basis by clicking the colonist filters to see who in the dome currently has them. In terms of global information, you get a bit on materials and your total population, and that's it (and even then, the consumption/production tooltips do not deal well with any kind of "spiky" production, primarily food, where crops take time to grow but consumption is constant).
5: Add some global policy options. Currently, there's nada. Zilch. You can't even order your colonists on to half rations if food gets low, for example, and it's certainly one of the contributing factors to how empty the game can feel at times. Some proper policies would go a long way to giving the player the feeling like they're genuinely shaping the colony - for an example, the colony I've put the most time into (around 40 hours out of about 50 total playtime) has over 2.5k pops, and they've having babies way faster than I can build new domes... so why can't I do something about it beyond segregating most of my domes into being single-sex only? So, sure, I can set the population filters on individual domes, or toggle them into a quarantined state, but beyond that? As it stands, past a certain point I started to realise I wasn't truly the administrator of this brave band of colonists on another world, but merely the town planner who decides where to build the next cement extractor or set of oxygen tanks.
6: Tourists. There are already tourists in the game, but precious little to do with them. This was a pretty important potential strand of income in the Tropico series, and so it could be here too - I don't even think it would take that much, just give some new buildings behind mid-game techs (it would even make sense to have the casino, again, already in the game, to be one of these) which your space tourists can visit to spend some money in before they toddle off back to Earth. Just the fact that tourists are already available makes me think this is an idea that Haemimont has already had and either did not have time to implement fully, or else decided to hold back for a DLC. Personally, I think this should be a part of the base game, just to add some variety for the player - presently you can only make money through sending back rare metals, researching techs (either a few specific ones, or every one if you have the right sponsor), or celebrity colonists. It gives a player something to work towards, and adds a possibility for dome specialisation that is not currently present.
7: A lot of the mid and late game feels kinda empty at the moment. There are disasters to keep you on your toes (and how I wish the game would auto-pause when they crop up, because I basically spend most of my time at the fastest speed setting past a certain point), but aside from that there is just a lot of sitting around waiting. Some of the stuff I've outlined above would certainly help out, but I feel like overall the game needs more events happening as you go along up until you hit a Mystery, if you have them enabled. I spent a fair old part of my 50 or so hours so far watching Netflix or YouTube on my second screen (I just discovered Critical Role, so there goes my next six months I guess), and only glancing back at the game every so often when an alert popped up or to check if that new dome had been build yet.
8: Lastly for this list, there are some specific UI improvements I'd like to see; let me see drone hub coverage when putting down any new building (including stockpiles), or selecting rocket landing sites. Let me shift-click to make multiple drone blueprints. Let me have some way of telling the game what I do and do not want to be auto-pinned to the bottom of the screen, and let me have some way of quickly dismissing them (alt+click or some other combo) other than clicking them to bring up the panel, and then unpinning them individually (which is super fun when it's constantly adding new colonists who have rare traits, I basically gave up and now the pinned bar is all but useless because it's so crowded). Let me prioritize alerts of some kinds over others, as other Paradox games do, or even disable some entirely. Let me click on the alert for the tech I just finished researching and see what it is instead of having to hunt it down on the tech screen (where you can't even see the name unless you mouse over them) to remember what it does.
So. If you made it through all that, well done, have a cookie. I did also promise to go over some ideas I'd personally love to see as DLCs, because there's a heck of a lot of scope to add stuff which doesn't detract from the base game (as locking transport stuff behind a paywall would, for instance). These are all just various ideas I've had as I've played it, some inspired by other games, TV shows, books and films, or else just things I thought would be cool to have.
(Warning: this might be rather long.)
1: Transport infrastructure options. At the moment there are... well, two and a half, if you count the drones, alongside the RC rover and the air shuttles. At present, the game basically takes care of nearly everything itself, or tries to, and that's fine in the early game - but once you start to go above more than a couple of domes, it definitely struggles at times to keep up. You as a player can direct individual drones to move stuff between stockpiles (and you can imagine how tedious that would get), or else use rovers to make one-off drops or set up recurring supply routes.
The downfall in all this comes from several factors; firstly, there are almost no stockpile options whatsoever - you can either have it opened or closed (and for universal ones, have individual materials closed), but a closed stockpile is automatically emptied. This means that you cannot as a player, for instance, designate a stockpile as a "primary" drop-off point that drones will always try and keep supplied, which you could then set a rover supply route from; of course this means you can't do the opposite either and have a designated "supply" stockpile at the other end, or have one that accepts input but not output, and so on. This alone makes the rover supply route option irritating to use because you have to constantly monitor it so you can switch it over to another stockpile once it empties one (irritatingly, they will also run out of power at some point because the game isn't smart enough to direct it to charge automatically when it's got a low battery, so again, you have to constantly monitor them).
Secondly then, there are the shuttles, which are much faster but carry very little - but they're also the only autonomic way of moving materials/colonists over bigger distances. There are almost zero options with shuttles; you just have to spam the depots and hope the game doesn't get constipated, which it still does - there's a screenshot in another thread where I had 60 shuttles in service and over 2k food stockpiled, yet still ended up with dozens of starving colonists across several domes. At the very least the player needs to be able to set transport priorities for different cargo types; coupled with proper stockpile options it would be an immediate improvement on what there is now. All of this makes it very hard to make sure you have a steady supply of materials going where you want, when you want, and the only option that there is becomes incredibly tedious to use very quickly.
Thirdly, and lastly, even if all of the above were fixed, it still makes no sense whatsoever that the cargo rover and the shuttles are literally your only options as a player, even as you're building artificial suns and mines that tunnel beneath the very crust of the planet itself. Apparently the technology of "making a tunnel between two close-by domes" is just too complicated, or sticking a passenger cabin on a rover. Give the player something more to work with, maglev, vacuum tubes, monorail, subway tunnels, whatever. If nothing else it would give you something to do once you've hit the mid game and you're sitting on the fastest speed just waiting for enough materials to build your next dome, or research your next tech. Some players also actively enjoy the process of trying to optimise their production and transport networks, so for them (and me) the current state of the game in that regard is frankly stifling.
Proposals: for starters, proper stockpile options need to be a thing (see games like Pharaoh, Banished, Dwarf Fortress). Add some mid- and late-game techs with new transport options (a little bit of Transport Tycoon, a little bit of Factorio). Players should have control over where things are going in their colony instead of being almost totally at the whim of the game itself, which can and does get things wrong. As an out-there thought, have teleportation as a breakthrough tech, giving a way to instantly transport people and materials between locations.
2: Building priorities need to change. This partly ties into what I wrote above; just as stockpiles have almost no player input on how they function, buildings themselves also to some extent suffer from this. There is presently one priority button which controls everything - power/water, workers, repair, and materials delivery. This is an incredibly blunt instrument which leaves very nearly zero room for the player to choose individual building priorities intelligently. Simply put, these should be separate options - if I, for instance, want to give a factory a high priority for workers and input materials, but a low priority for power in case of brownouts, then I should jolly well be able to do it. Again, as above, this is taking too much choice out of the hands of the player. (I've also seen elsewhere the suggestion to select employment to "specialists only" which I thought was an excellent one.)
3: Drone priorities. Basically, we need the janitors from Theme Hospital; in that game, they had the function of fixing your equipment, watering plants, and picking up litter - and you could give them a percentage-based priority for each task. In SM, I envisage this as being a certain number of drones per hub dedicated to each task, based on what you've picked as a player, so that no more will you have to wait for repairs to happen because all your drones are moving materials to a construction site, for instance. Ideally this would be set on a per-hub basis; it would even allow you to perhaps set up totally specialised hubs for a single task (moving materials about in a heavy industrial area, for instance, so that your shiny new maglev cargo train doesn't have to wait too long in loading before it whisks them away to the other side of the map).
4: Bring back the Almanac. Yeah, I get it, you don't want this to be seen as Tropico in space, but frankly the current system is pretty deficient in giving actually useful information, not to mention being annoying to use. You want to find out how many colonists have a certain trait? You want to see how many people are approaching retirement? You want to see some food production graphs, or track the birth rate? Well, tough luck. At best, with some information such as traits or gender, you can glean it on a per-dome basis by clicking the colonist filters to see who in the dome currently has them. In terms of global information, you get a bit on materials and your total population, and that's it (and even then, the consumption/production tooltips do not deal well with any kind of "spiky" production, primarily food, where crops take time to grow but consumption is constant).
5: Add some global policy options. Currently, there's nada. Zilch. You can't even order your colonists on to half rations if food gets low, for example, and it's certainly one of the contributing factors to how empty the game can feel at times. Some proper policies would go a long way to giving the player the feeling like they're genuinely shaping the colony - for an example, the colony I've put the most time into (around 40 hours out of about 50 total playtime) has over 2.5k pops, and they've having babies way faster than I can build new domes... so why can't I do something about it beyond segregating most of my domes into being single-sex only? So, sure, I can set the population filters on individual domes, or toggle them into a quarantined state, but beyond that? As it stands, past a certain point I started to realise I wasn't truly the administrator of this brave band of colonists on another world, but merely the town planner who decides where to build the next cement extractor or set of oxygen tanks.
6: Tourists. There are already tourists in the game, but precious little to do with them. This was a pretty important potential strand of income in the Tropico series, and so it could be here too - I don't even think it would take that much, just give some new buildings behind mid-game techs (it would even make sense to have the casino, again, already in the game, to be one of these) which your space tourists can visit to spend some money in before they toddle off back to Earth. Just the fact that tourists are already available makes me think this is an idea that Haemimont has already had and either did not have time to implement fully, or else decided to hold back for a DLC. Personally, I think this should be a part of the base game, just to add some variety for the player - presently you can only make money through sending back rare metals, researching techs (either a few specific ones, or every one if you have the right sponsor), or celebrity colonists. It gives a player something to work towards, and adds a possibility for dome specialisation that is not currently present.
7: A lot of the mid and late game feels kinda empty at the moment. There are disasters to keep you on your toes (and how I wish the game would auto-pause when they crop up, because I basically spend most of my time at the fastest speed setting past a certain point), but aside from that there is just a lot of sitting around waiting. Some of the stuff I've outlined above would certainly help out, but I feel like overall the game needs more events happening as you go along up until you hit a Mystery, if you have them enabled. I spent a fair old part of my 50 or so hours so far watching Netflix or YouTube on my second screen (I just discovered Critical Role, so there goes my next six months I guess), and only glancing back at the game every so often when an alert popped up or to check if that new dome had been build yet.
8: Lastly for this list, there are some specific UI improvements I'd like to see; let me see drone hub coverage when putting down any new building (including stockpiles), or selecting rocket landing sites. Let me shift-click to make multiple drone blueprints. Let me have some way of telling the game what I do and do not want to be auto-pinned to the bottom of the screen, and let me have some way of quickly dismissing them (alt+click or some other combo) other than clicking them to bring up the panel, and then unpinning them individually (which is super fun when it's constantly adding new colonists who have rare traits, I basically gave up and now the pinned bar is all but useless because it's so crowded). Let me prioritize alerts of some kinds over others, as other Paradox games do, or even disable some entirely. Let me click on the alert for the tech I just finished researching and see what it is instead of having to hunt it down on the tech screen (where you can't even see the name unless you mouse over them) to remember what it does.
So. If you made it through all that, well done, have a cookie. I did also promise to go over some ideas I'd personally love to see as DLCs, because there's a heck of a lot of scope to add stuff which doesn't detract from the base game (as locking transport stuff behind a paywall would, for instance). These are all just various ideas I've had as I've played it, some inspired by other games, TV shows, books and films, or else just things I thought would be cool to have.
- We Need To Go Deeper - build stuff underground! One of the real-life ideas for settling on Mars is using lava-tubes or caverns - and perhaps there could even be late-game techs for digging out your own suitable dwellings in the sides of cliffs, for example. Could also come with the option of a new disaster - Marsquakes...
- Catching the Moon - Currently the Space Elevator just goes straight up... but what if it was tethered at one end to one of Mars' moons? And what if you could then build a new colony right up there at the other end, making it a true starport for Mars?
- Independence Day - There are many fictional works in which a settled Mars has struggled for - and won - independence from Earth, making it a fairly natural fit for SM. With various events, decisions, and possible outcomes, do you choose to stay close to the mother planet, or attempt to strike out on your own?
- The Merchants of Mars - You've been playing a while, and let's say you're on your third colony already... which at the moment might as well be your first, as far as the game is concerned. What if that wasn't the case? What if you could trade with your persistent existing colonies, set up networks between them, and slowly cover the face of Mars with the works of man...?
- Industrial Revolution 2.0 - More raw materials. More factories. More supply chains. More exports. Vertically integrate it until it cries, and then make it come back begging for more.
- A Home Under The Stars - Terraforming the whole planet is something that is far outside the scope of the game's timeframe - however terraforming just a bit of it might be much more possible. Fill in craters, flatten hills, and at the end of it all, build a slice of Earth under a tent that puts even the mightiest dome to shame (and bonus points for coolness if one could somehow do free-form placement with a scaling cost to match).
- Crime & Punishment - Thieves. Murderers. Drugs dealers. Bootleggers. People who talk in cinemas. And a great big space jail to lock them up in... or rehabilitate them with, if you should so choose. And who knows, let law and order slip too far, and you could even have the birth of the Martian Mob on your hands.
- It Comes For Us All - Earth is no stranger to disease and death, so why should Mars be? Presently there are certain of the Mysteries which involve disease, but in the confined quarters of the domes even something comparatively mild could knock out vital portions of your workforce - so make sure to plan accordingly.
- Lastly, of course there's plenty of scope to add more Mysteries and more Wonders in DLC packs - the Leviathan Story Pack in Stellaris is a perfect example of how this can be done right.
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