The key is to... stop caring?

[jfjohnny5]

I'm not sure how I feel about this... I've kind of discovered (with the help of quite a few people noting observations on this forum) that they key to success in Surviving Mars is to not care about your colonists - at all. Make sure they have food, oxygen, and heat. That's all that's really required. Your candidate pool from Earth only shrinks if colonists die. If they're miserable, no one cares. It's disappointing to realize that you really don't need much of a strategy, as there is very little "punishment" for mistreating your colonists, and not much incentive to treat them well. Allow me to elaborate:

If you're like me, you see that "Homeless" number as something which must be quashed. Everyone shall have a home in my colony! However, as long as people have homes... they make babies. The comfort requirements are so low, that it really just comes down to homelessness. If there are no homeless, colonists will breed until there are. Only then will your population stop growing. (This is, of course, assuming you're providing food, oxygen, heat, etc - all the things they need to not, umm, die.) So, the key to managing your population is to not care about the people living on the streets. "Let them eat cake," so to speak.

As population growth is incredibly easy to attain (they're like Tribbles, seriously), you always have a workforce. That workforce might not be skilled, but they'll still get the job done. You can take away all their creature comforts (just give them a grocer, no recreation, no shopping, etc) and they'll be unhappy, but they'll still work. If you get some renegades, a single security tower can handle it. If you start getting high numbers of Earthsick colonists, it doesn't take much to pacify them. (Hooray! A Park!) You can grow your colony and expand your technology; albeit somewhat slowly.

However, there's no incentive to grow quickly, or to keep your colonists happy. You can continue to get funding, and applicants will continue to apply for the colony. You can get enough manufacturing done to cover maintenance needs. Try as I might, short of depriving them of food, oxygen, or heat, I couldn't get a colony to "collapse." It's kind of funny to me - at first (when I couldn't address the homelessness problem) I was thinking the game was too hard. Now I'm beginning to think it's honestly too easy. They've made something so "approachable" as to not have a lot of real challenge.

Please, please, please if someone can prove me wrong, do so. I don't like feeling so disenfranchised with this game. I really want to like it. I want it to suck me in.

I think a lot of us Paradox fans are used to something with some teeth; something which puts problems in front of us that we have to solve in order to move forward. Ironically, a game which should be full of problems to solve (how to survive on a barren planet), doesn't really have many problems which need solving. Things just kind of... work. It feels shallow. That might not inherently be bad, but its not what I (and I think many of us) was expecting.

 

[EndlessTest]

I havent read all the above but from the title and a few phrases in, i do agree with that statement.

The best way to play this game is not to care about your colonists and what they do. Let the game do its thing (even tho most of the time its doing it backwards) and just ensure you get enough food, water, oxygen.

The moment i stopped caring i started to have more fun with the game.

Those that cannot do that, well, sucks for you i guess.

 

[PaulMClem]

If not caring is the key to success then the game would need to address that. Colonists would have to become more prone to leaving, downing tools, getting pissed, going mad etc. Shouldn't be that hard to do. I hope what you say isn't actually true, but if it is then it would be disappointing as I enjoy managing people as much as the colony itself.

 

[Benzhexol]

Just a quick question, which difficulty you play?

International Mars Mission is something like a tutorial mode, and you won't enjoy the game with it.

Different sponsors refer to different difficulty level. I just had a playthrough to unlock USA achievement (complete all research in Engineering), and I find it challenging.

 

[Calvax]

From the discussions all over this forum and some testing I've come to the same conclusion. The difficulty in the game comes from resource management, managing the colonists' skills, workplace assignments, sanity, morale, comfort and homelessness seems difficult but if you take your hands off the wheel absolutely nothing beyond the resource management matters. The only incentive to even pay attention to your colonists (beyond having enough to produce materials for maintenance) is immersion and the mechanics and tools available are so bad that it becomes supremely frustrating rather than rewarding.

 

[Ogi-Nollox]

Most of the complains about this game on steam and OP post makes me think that this game is being marketed to the wrong people... And thats purely a publisher's fault. This game is basically Tropico in space, if you had know their previous games you would have know how to play and enjoy this game from day one.

I think a lot of us Paradox fans

This game is not a paradox game, seems that there has been some major misconception among some people.

 

[Artaios Greybark]

I will have to disagree with OP. When my colonists are homeless or maybe don't even have certain amenities, they get homesick and leave with the next rocket. I pay careful attention to how they are feeling since I have had it happen before that with 12 new colonist arriving, half that of the old leave.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

It really does feel like the devs have a decicedly bleak view of humanity. In no time at all we go from having not enough people, to having too many, and nothing for any of them to do. They make no art and no culture, just eat and breed and turn paradise into hell.

 

[Herbert West]

It really does feel like the devs have a decicedly bleak view of humanity. In no time at all we go from having not enough people, to having too many, and nothing for any of them to do. They make no art and no culture, just eat and breed and turn paradise into hell.

Or alternatively, they failed at playtesting.

 

[Thorin]

Just a quick question, which difficulty you play?

Irrelevant, currently doing a 515% run (skipped 535% to get a different map than everyone else on hardest try), 8 people left when the supply rocket landed and only 7 left, don't care, can import 100+ more from earth, the next batch will also leave probably, since I still don't have the option to give them proper care, they got a working grocer just now and shift shuffled them for 25 hour workdays, but who cares, no one died, so no damage to anything, and even if they die, still got plenty in thy pool, you only need one working dome to continue.

 

[Marcus]

Apart from the resources needed to keep your colonists alive and the colony going (that includes resources to feed colonists who refine resources and produce research) what kind of colonists management were you expecting?

 

[Herbert West]

Apart from the resources needed to keep your colonists alive and the colony going (that includes resources to feed colonists who refine resources and produce research) what kind of colonists management were you expecting?

Again, this is a clash of systems and presentation. Specialisation, and non-specialisation work penalties imply that it is optimal to have specialists work specialist buildings, and that the edge case, where everyone is assigned wrong, you are so sub-optimal that you are failing.

But, the systems to control this, and the system behaviour itself is inherited from Tropico, meaning that the control is weak to non-exsistent (not to mention nonsensical in the setting), and penalties are too lax to cause gameplay.

 

[jfjohnny5]

If not caring is the key to success then the game would need to address that. Colonists would have to become more prone to leaving, downing tools, getting pissed, going mad etc. Shouldn't be that hard to do. I hope what you say isn't actually true, but if it is then it would be disappointing as I enjoy managing people as much as the colony itself.

I certainly hope they address this. Shallow gameplay is fine if you're just looking for a quick fix. I'd wager that's not what Paradox expected from their devs on this one though.

Just a quick question, which difficulty you play?.

I've played a few different runs already. Farthest was Sol 160 or so with SpaceY, and with the map it was a 200% difficulty bonus. Had about 400 colonists. I played just a little ways into a 535% game just to check my theories. They seemed to pan out. Difficulty doesn't affect the colonists directly.

This game is not a paradox game, seems that there has been some major misconception among some people.

Oh, I understand the difference between the developer and the publisher. It isn't lost on me that Paradox is the publisher, only. That does still mean that if they are willing to put their name on it, that certain qualities could (and I'd argue should) be reasonably expected.

 

[BoogieMan]

I came to the same conclusion. Even though it's not how I want to play. Their idiocy about assigning themselves bad jobs when it utterly and completely is unneeded made me stop caring. Fine. Do whatever you want. My game pace and sped up and I am less irritated by seeing my scientists working in the polymer factory while I have an engineer in the science lab if I don't check very often.

I don't know any of their names or keep track of them or check in on them any more. The game gives me no reason to care. They're just going to be idiots no matter what I do. Paradoxically (har har) managing the populations and job assignments from dome to dome requires a lot micromanagement since the in game systems don't really help much while simultaneously disregarding a lot of that micromanagement as they run around and doing their own thing which is usually the WRONG thing.

If this infuriating job assignment system gets addressed, and productivity is more finely tuned based upon their quality of life, maybe there will be more a reason to do so. But until then, just give them basic needs and move on.

 

[Xavori]

The OP and everyone that agrees with him are wrong. OP is also doing the same thing wrong that practically everyone complaining about colonists gets wrong. Don't micro them. Instead, specialize and micro the DOMES.

If you're upset that your electronics factory is staffed by scientists, my first question is why are there scientists in a dome with engineers? Don't do that. You're massively hurting your production, and making things hard on your universities trying to decide what specialties to train. In fact, by not specializing your domes, you're creating a chain reaction of inefficiencies.

Instead, make heavy use of the colonist filters on domes...FOR EVERYTHING.

Have a bunch of alcoholics and other assorted problems? Build a dome with a sanatorium spire and fix them. Just build the dome, the spire, a couple clinics (because there is a good chance you're going to have health issues in this dome), security, then a few various enjoyment bits and a bunch of housing. Then in your filter, go thumbs up on all the flaws your sanatorium is build to fix. If you have the long dome, build two of 'em and fix even more flaws. Add in the tech to convert flaws to perks, and you're golden.

Same thing with production. You should have a dome that is thumbs up botanists with farms, thumbs down engineers and scientists (leave medic, security, and unspecialized neutral, you need some not a lot). Build a science dome that is thumbs up science thumbs down engineers and botanists. A university dome that is thumbs up unspecialize, thumbs down specialized. And so on.

And you do need to keep them somewhat happy. Happy colonists produce more. My current colony is approaching 6000 (because I want to see if I can get to 100k), and with the exception of concrete, I'm producing way more of everything then I need. As for concrete, well, having a speciality science dome means I'm producing lots of Martian copyrights for 2 billion a pop which buys a lot of stuff from Earth....

 

[Mann42]

The OP and everyone that agrees with him are wrong. OP is also doing the same thing wrong that practically everyone complaining about colonists gets wrong. Don't micro them. Instead, specialize and micro the DOMES.

Except that it doesn't matter. At all. It doesn't matter if your people are assigned to the right specialty, if they're homeless, if they're upset. As long as they're not outright dying, it makes no functional difference to the difficulty or experience of the game.

And in fact, dome management is still buggy and inconsistent enough that, when coupled with the fact that any output benefits are unnecessary and almost meaningless, you simply accept that trying to manage it at all is a fools errand - the time to benefit analysis comes out in favor of just not caring.

Just load up the meat robots onto the rocket so they can make my needed resource numbers go up (since resource management and budgeting is the only real challenge). As long as they're eating and not going on 2 hour walks across mars because they couldn't wait for a shuttle, there is absolutely no reason to care about them, because the game plays exactly the same. The "challenge" of managing your people is entirely cosmetic. You can play with it if you want to, but it's really just for your own self edification.

 

[Thorin]

As for concrete, well, having a speciality science dome means I'm producing lots of Martian copyrights for 2 billion a pop which buys a lot of stuff from Earth....

And the fact that at any time in the game someone can think it is a good idea to import concrete (heavy, bulky, cheap stuff) to Mars is the best symptom of some fundamental problem. And we do it in the endgame, since with space elevator it is fast and cheap, and money is useless after some point.

 

[Lordban]

The OP and everyone that agrees with him are wrong. OP is also doing the same thing wrong that practically everyone complaining about colonists gets wrong. Don't micro them. Instead, specialize and micro the DOMES.

With the harder sponsors, this is not going to be a possibility until after a good while - you can only afford a finite amount of development before the one or two domes you've scrapped resources for absolutely have to turn up a net profit after maintenance costs. When your resources are very limited, you do want to specialize the colonists, because full specialization of domes just isn't an option. And colonist micro may very well be the difference between seeing your economy finally take off and watching it choke as the limited deposits it can exploit run out.

 

[Imgran]

If not caring is the key to success then the game would need to address that. Colonists would have to become more prone to leaving, downing tools, getting pissed, going mad etc. Shouldn't be that hard to do. I hope what you say isn't actually true, but if it is then it would be disappointing as I enjoy managing people as much as the colony itself.

Before we go there, the systems need to work a great deal more consistently. I don't mind a major resource management challenge as long as the rules are fair and the AI obeys them. There's several problems with that in Surviving Mars at the moment, so I'd hold off ramping up the challenge level until the basics work.

 

[BoogieMan]

The OP and everyone that agrees with him are wrong. OP is also doing the same thing wrong that practically everyone complaining about colonists gets wrong. Don't micro them. Instead, specialize and micro the DOMES.

If you're upset that your electronics factory is staffed by scientists, my first question is why are there scientists in a dome with engineers? Don't do that. You're massively hurting your production, and making things hard on your universities trying to decide what specialties to train. In fact, by not specializing your domes, you're creating a chain reaction of inefficiencies.

Instead, make heavy use of the colonist filters on domes...FOR EVERYTHING.

Have a bunch of alcoholics and other assorted problems? Build a dome with a sanatorium spire and fix them. Just build the dome, the spire, a couple clinics (because there is a good chance you're going to have health issues in this dome), security, then a few various enjoyment bits and a bunch of housing. Then in your filter, go thumbs up on all the flaws your sanatorium is build to fix. If you have the long dome, build two of 'em and fix even more flaws. Add in the tech to convert flaws to perks, and you're golden.

Same thing with production. You should have a dome that is thumbs up botanists with farms, thumbs down engineers and scientists (leave medic, security, and unspecialized neutral, you need some not a lot). Build a science dome that is thumbs up science thumbs down engineers and botanists. A university dome that is thumbs up unspecialize, thumbs down specialized. And so on.

And you do need to keep them somewhat happy. Happy colonists produce more. My current colony is approaching 6000 (because I want to see if I can get to 100k), and with the exception of concrete, I'm producing way more of everything then I need. As for concrete, well, having a speciality science dome means I'm producing lots of Martian copyrights for 2 billion a pop which buys a lot of stuff from Earth....

Except most, if not all of that, doesn't apply until you're quite a bit farther along the game. Early on you can't afford to have a bunch of specialized domes, even if you had that much tech researched, got the right tech early enough, and the disasters were tame.

The OP isn't wrong, and neither are you, but your position doesn't apply for the first half of the game, while the OP's concern is present the whole game. It can be mitigated later to some degree, but several aspects of the game are far from where they need to be.