I'll be honest here - given there are a lot of folks playing the game for the first time I thought I may as well plug my old guide again:
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/the-complete-surviving-mars-guide.1178125/
Which is a very long and comprehensive guide on Surviving Mars, and is meant to help newbies figure out how to get their colonies up and running properly.
That said, the game also got a new update so I thought I may as well give my initial notes about it.
1) Yes, the damn update broke the game for a lot of people. I was one of them (my game crashed to desktop at start). The hotfix seems to have fixed it to some extent, but note that there will still be a lot of bug-fixes to come. You are not alone. Just wait patiently and hope they fix it.
2) Tourism, despite the update, remains a non-viable means of funding the colony in the early game. So as noted in my guide, if you're playing for the first time, stick to rare metal mining. Trying to make a tourism colony from the start will just end in tears.
However, it is a much-improved source of funding for the mid-game.
3) To elaborate: You can get more than $10 per tourist now, so long as you get a high satisfaction rating (4 or higher). I estimate that the top payout seems to be in the $20 range, which can be boosted to $30 with the Terra Tourism tech. I'll validate these figures with more testing, but if folks have verified the numbers then feel free to post'm.
So in an ideal setup, you can be earning $6 per day per tourist. That's a lot better than the $2 per day per tourist we used to earn.
Unfortunately, you simply don't get enough tourists at the start to make this a viable income source. You get maybe around 5 tourists at start, and even if you somehow manage to get them to 5 star satisfaction that's just $100 every 5 days.
Quite simply, the volume of tourists is insufficient to generate sufficient income. You will earn way more money by sticking Geologists down a mine and sell their output. Hell, you'll make more money by sticking even non-specialized workers in a mine; as the penalties for non-specialized workers are in fact not a big deal compared to having a labor shortage.
Worse, you're not guaranteed two new tourists for every one you send home anymore; and new tourists seem to be tied to the satisfaction of the ones who went home. Even with 4 star average ratings I was only averaging around 1.5 new replacement tourists; so it's not like before where you should always send tourists - even if they're miserable and provide little income - just so you can increase the tourist applicant pool and be able to send far more tourists to your colony later (for some sponsors, like Japan, this constant stream of miserable tourists was even mandatory in the early game to help increase birth rate).
4) Tourism instead seems to be a strictly mid-game option for the following reasons:
a) Terra Tourism is essential to making it work. Not only do you get 50% more income, you also get 100 tourist applicants. That gives you an actual decent pool of tourists to make money from.
b) All tourists are gamblers, and want luxury. So having a relatively prosperous colony that can support hotels and casinos is necessary to keep their satisfaction decent. For reference, you can't build hotels at the start - you need to the Smart home tech. Likewise the Low G entertainment building requires the medium dome tech.
c) Safaris Rover are available from the start of the game... if you don't load from an existing save that pre-dates the update (Yet another bug). Trouble is, I haven't actually seen a tourist use one (Yet another bug).
Fortunately, having a really nice hotel in a high-comfort dome and lots of satisfaction raising buildings can still get your satisfaction score up to 4 stars or higher.
d) So if you have a nice Dome, Terra Tourism, and all the comfort and satisfaction-raising techs, you can easily find yourself earning $2000-$3000 every five days as long as you send everyone to Mars using a fleet of rockets. And this pool will gradually grow to give you even more money.
Again, before you reach this point however, you simply won't have enough tourists to be able to fund your colony. It's the sheer lack of tourist quantity that makes this a non-viable "business model", and I really wish that Paradox added more tourist applicants in some sponsors like SpaceY just to give it more early game utility (which is a really easy fix that I have no idea why they didn't implement).
From a pure gameplay perspective, at least based on the way I play the game, the new buildings are simply not necessary. I'm a firm believer in simply using the same "service" slice in every dome - meaning an Infirmary, a Diner, and a Shop (usually just a grocer) and focus on making sure that I instead have enough service slices for the population. As I noted in my guide - variety in services isn't actually as big of a deal compared to having enough capacity. Colonists don't care if they can choose between a casino and three different kinds of store for entertainment if all of them are always full due to over-capacity!
Likewise, the TV station is still in many ways strictly inferior to most other cash-generation methods; including the new tourism payouts. Indeed, given it uses electronics, I'm inclined to just go Blue Sun and run call centers from Mars.
I will be doing a more major update to the guide though if we get an actual expansion as Paradox is promising. This had always been a deeply underrated game that didn't get enough love.
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/the-complete-surviving-mars-guide.1178125/
Which is a very long and comprehensive guide on Surviving Mars, and is meant to help newbies figure out how to get their colonies up and running properly.
That said, the game also got a new update so I thought I may as well give my initial notes about it.
1) Yes, the damn update broke the game for a lot of people. I was one of them (my game crashed to desktop at start). The hotfix seems to have fixed it to some extent, but note that there will still be a lot of bug-fixes to come. You are not alone. Just wait patiently and hope they fix it.
2) Tourism, despite the update, remains a non-viable means of funding the colony in the early game. So as noted in my guide, if you're playing for the first time, stick to rare metal mining. Trying to make a tourism colony from the start will just end in tears.
However, it is a much-improved source of funding for the mid-game.
3) To elaborate: You can get more than $10 per tourist now, so long as you get a high satisfaction rating (4 or higher). I estimate that the top payout seems to be in the $20 range, which can be boosted to $30 with the Terra Tourism tech. I'll validate these figures with more testing, but if folks have verified the numbers then feel free to post'm.
So in an ideal setup, you can be earning $6 per day per tourist. That's a lot better than the $2 per day per tourist we used to earn.
Unfortunately, you simply don't get enough tourists at the start to make this a viable income source. You get maybe around 5 tourists at start, and even if you somehow manage to get them to 5 star satisfaction that's just $100 every 5 days.
Quite simply, the volume of tourists is insufficient to generate sufficient income. You will earn way more money by sticking Geologists down a mine and sell their output. Hell, you'll make more money by sticking even non-specialized workers in a mine; as the penalties for non-specialized workers are in fact not a big deal compared to having a labor shortage.
Worse, you're not guaranteed two new tourists for every one you send home anymore; and new tourists seem to be tied to the satisfaction of the ones who went home. Even with 4 star average ratings I was only averaging around 1.5 new replacement tourists; so it's not like before where you should always send tourists - even if they're miserable and provide little income - just so you can increase the tourist applicant pool and be able to send far more tourists to your colony later (for some sponsors, like Japan, this constant stream of miserable tourists was even mandatory in the early game to help increase birth rate).
4) Tourism instead seems to be a strictly mid-game option for the following reasons:
a) Terra Tourism is essential to making it work. Not only do you get 50% more income, you also get 100 tourist applicants. That gives you an actual decent pool of tourists to make money from.
b) All tourists are gamblers, and want luxury. So having a relatively prosperous colony that can support hotels and casinos is necessary to keep their satisfaction decent. For reference, you can't build hotels at the start - you need to the Smart home tech. Likewise the Low G entertainment building requires the medium dome tech.
c) Safaris Rover are available from the start of the game... if you don't load from an existing save that pre-dates the update (Yet another bug). Trouble is, I haven't actually seen a tourist use one (Yet another bug).
Fortunately, having a really nice hotel in a high-comfort dome and lots of satisfaction raising buildings can still get your satisfaction score up to 4 stars or higher.
d) So if you have a nice Dome, Terra Tourism, and all the comfort and satisfaction-raising techs, you can easily find yourself earning $2000-$3000 every five days as long as you send everyone to Mars using a fleet of rockets. And this pool will gradually grow to give you even more money.
Again, before you reach this point however, you simply won't have enough tourists to be able to fund your colony. It's the sheer lack of tourist quantity that makes this a non-viable "business model", and I really wish that Paradox added more tourist applicants in some sponsors like SpaceY just to give it more early game utility (which is a really easy fix that I have no idea why they didn't implement).
Oh, and I am not really commenting on the buildings pack. If you like Silva's mods then support him I guess? I personally never used any of it; indeed I personally still avoid using connectors between domes.From a pure gameplay perspective, at least based on the way I play the game, the new buildings are simply not necessary. I'm a firm believer in simply using the same "service" slice in every dome - meaning an Infirmary, a Diner, and a Shop (usually just a grocer) and focus on making sure that I instead have enough service slices for the population. As I noted in my guide - variety in services isn't actually as big of a deal compared to having enough capacity. Colonists don't care if they can choose between a casino and three different kinds of store for entertainment if all of them are always full due to over-capacity!
Likewise, the TV station is still in many ways strictly inferior to most other cash-generation methods; including the new tourism payouts. Indeed, given it uses electronics, I'm inclined to just go Blue Sun and run call centers from Mars.
I will be doing a more major update to the guide though if we get an actual expansion as Paradox is promising. This had always been a deeply underrated game that didn't get enough love.
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