The key is to... stop caring?

[Wandering Sentinel]

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.

While I hate to admit it, he's right. The game doesn't care if you're making sure your colonists are happy and healthy. If anything, it punishes you for it.

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.

If you have your colonists happy and comfortable, this is absolutely impossible. Once comfort in a dome is over a certain threshold relative to the amount required for population growth, you no longer have the ability to "specialize" that dome or any other in the entire colony for a simple reason.

I once did a test and made a mod giving me Service Robots and all tech to see what would happen if I brought about 30 Founders to Mars to live in a perfectly prepared dome. The result? First Martianborn within about two hours. Take note, that's 30-32 people in a Mega dome set up to have them as happy and productive as possible, something that you can probably do fairly easily late game. If you have a dome set up to tend to every colonist's needs and put them over about 90 Comfort, it will cause a massive explosion in births that quickly put the dome over capacity, causing people to leave for other domes and free up space for more births. I tried doing the specialization idea once and found out that people who went to the university dome couldn't move out once they graduated. The only way to make use of this is to deliberately quarantine every dome and cut off the water, oxygen, and power supply to kill off the entire dome so a few scientists/botanists/engineers/etc can make use of the degree you made a dome for them to study at.

And you do need to keep them somewhat happy. Happy colonists produce more.

See above. Happy colonists produce more, but they also reproduce much faster and prevent you from specializing unless you put a university in every dome, taking up space that could be used for a factory, a farm, or a research center. In the long run, the productivity gain isn't worth it unless you use Biorobots, but when you use them you give up the ability to have any say over the new colonist's specialization.

The fact is, this is a game that's shown extreme flaws in a system that should be interesting by making it seem like not caring should punish you when giving more than the basics punishes you in the long run... And that's before you look at the fact that many other parts work so counter to what you'd expect (cloning vats don't clone the colonists working in them, or even in the dome for that matter, like the wiki and common sense says, for instance) and a lot of it is misunderstood because there's little to no information ingame.

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

When a company chooses to publish a game, they're putting their name and reputation behind it. Any game Paradox publishes has some of the same expectations tied to it since it draws in Paradox's fanbase... Which means that a game that doesn't live up to those expectations can still hurt Paradox itself.

 

[Xavori]

All the stuff you said....

You're wrong. I have a 6k+ pop colony that I can still specialize domes as needed. In fact, I even have a baby boom specialized dome that does have lots of extra happiness, a medical spire, a bunch of nurseries and schools and universities. The result is that dome pushes out the specialists I need to the other domes because the kids go straight from getting the perks at schools to the training at university. I'm dead serious that if you don't specialize, you start a cascade of fail. So I start at the very beginning pushing to get colonists born at the best location, and even colonists who aren't born there head there as kids because practically every other dome I have is thumbs down on kids.

Here's an example of a specialzied dome in my mega colony. I was running low on polymers because I have so very many domes. So I built this beast and set it to thumbs up engineers, thumbs down scientists and geologists, and I left botanists, security, and untrained alone because I have some need for those types, but don't want to encourage it too much.

Here's what that looks like (I'd embed, but Paradox forums don't let steam screenshots embed as images, just links)
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd....511/D6F45437D027FFF8926DA6ED35624FEC6941ADC7/

Let that run a bit, and all my polymer factories (10 of them for this dome) ended up looking like this all by their little lonesomes:
https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd....693/7FEEA7B8055838A1BEE134AC9279B3938988EC2B/

That gave me plenty of polymers to build and maintain more domes and push past the 6k mark. (side note, that long dome to the right is one of my fix flaws speciality domes I talked about above).

The key point is that there is absolutely no way I'm going to micro that many colonists. What's more, I don't have to. The game does a pretty good job getting specialists into the jobs they are supposed to do provided there aren't bunches of other colonists also looking for jobs in the same dome. So as long as you focus your domes on the different specialties, you can push high efficiency production in any way you want.

 

[EntilZha]

Or alternatively, they failed at playtesting.

That's what happens when you're more concerned with sending copies to streamers instead of real alpha/beta testers.

I've seen this so many times in recent years.

 

[Zinegata]

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.

Lol, and this is why people should have been complaining about more lategame content and challenges, a real hard mode (say breakdowns occur twice as fast), interface tweaks to improve QOL (do we really need a second click to load a single-resource depot?), and improved in-game guidance on mechanics (e.g. you must upgrade structures manually and pay resources).

Instead we had all this pointless drama about botanists wanting to be factory workers, people pretending it "breaks immersion" and made their colonies inefficient and unwinnable, to the point that the devs are focusing on improving worker placement AI instead of stuff that would actually make the game more accessible and fun.

 

[Zinegata]

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.

I pretty much started with specialized Domes from the outset with my second playthrough.

The key is to realize that you do not need food production in your first Dome. Food is cheap to import and people don't eat a lot every day. You can wait until farms before really starting food production.

 

[Whitecold]

I can only agree. I never did the level of micromanagement some people seem to do. I just kicked a few people from the science labs to boost efficiency a bit.
I think one problem is that your starting colonists must be happy enough in the starting dome, where you don't have any services running, but that same level is also acceptable in a established colony.
And of course, each new dome starts over all again with its own services, no organic growth.

 

[Zinegata]

You're wrong. I have a 6k+ pop colony that I can still specialize domes as needed. In fact, I even have a baby boom specialized dome that does have lots of extra happiness, a medical spire, a bunch of nurseries and schools and universities. The result is that dome pushes out the specialists I need to the other domes because the kids go straight from getting the perks at schools to the training at university. I'm dead serious that if you don't specialize, you start a cascade of fail. So I start at the very beginning pushing to get colonists born at the best location, and even colonists who aren't born there head there as kids because practically every other dome I have is thumbs down on kids.

In short, the key is to care about your colony as a whole, rather than trying to be a career counselor or work placement officer for a hundred individual people.

A properly run colony enables its individuals to succeed without you needing to play career counselor; which is consistent with the game being a management game rather than Crusader Kings in space.

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

I have a 6k+ pop colony that I can still specialize domes as needed. In fact, I even have a baby boom specialized dome that does have lots of extra happiness, a medical spire, a bunch of nurseries and schools and universities.

I honestly can't do this. For me I always either have too many births or hardly any, which is the problem. Around the time I have the resources to set up a dome specifically for universities, I've set up my domes to make people as happy as possible (which, if you're clever about boosting morale, can net you about enough of a performance boost to negate the wrong specialization modifier) and the population explodes so much that I can't actually get people back into other domes once they go to the university dome. My experience with the game has been mostly binary: either they have a ton of kids or they have almost none. The only way for me to specialize domes is to build a university in each and set them to train people in that specific specialization, otherwise they can't move to domes that need their skills. The trick is you need to get average comfort almost right on the amount needed for children to be born for growth to be manageable when, as some people stated, it's far easier to just keep them alive and keep ferrying more people in when others choose to leave or (as I'm forced to do) just try to keep people happy and make a point of not letting anyone in or out of a dome except to send nonspecialized colonists to a new dome to start populating it.

 

[Lordban]

Lol, and this is why people should have been complaining about more lategame content and challenges, a real hard mode (say breakdowns occur twice as fast), interface tweaks to improve QOL (do we really need a second click to load a single-resource depot?), and improved in-game guidance on mechanics (e.g. you must upgrade structures manually and pay resources).

More lategame content and challenges, interface tweaks and improved in-game guidance on mechanics would all be good, but twice the breakdowns is a terrible idea for the harder sponsor/terrain combinations. It makes the Church of the New Ark sponsor almost guaranteed to be non-viable (you're stuck on $4Bn unless you get lucky with an early event but have to pay for a lot of extra parts you can't afford), and the PDS one doomed to fail if you don't have both water and rare metals close to your initial hub.

Also, in discussing colonies, do remember easier starts don't need to go through colonist micromanagement - efficient dome management suffices - but the harder combos are going to start smaller, and keeping a close eye on your colonists working their assigned jobs is indispensable if you don't want further exposition to gameover scenarios than you already have. And the harder starts also need to sacrifice something else valuable if they're not going to run food production from the get-go - the costs for food are trivial with a $6Bn start, but no longer so on a $4Bn one).

 

[Darkstar616]

Colonists and domes are easily the biggest part of the game.. Except they're more of an afterthought. They're boring to play with and are really only there as a sort of set dressing to stage mysteries. They really need work. I finished my first mystery and I really couldn't be bothered playing any more after that. There's no appeal to warrant a replay when the core mechanics are just so "meh". Such a shame.

 

[Holce]

Micro the colonist is bad in general. It may help at start but you have to remember that the manual assignement is only valid for 5 sols. You won't manage your colony like that past the 2-3 first batchs of colonists. I think it is made on purpose to force the player to manage more globaly past the very early game.

For early game, you need to choose carrefully you colonist to have the specialist you want. And if you don't have enough specialist take people with good perks and no specialisation. People tend to prefer working in job that suit them. But they will try to occupy all work place the better they can. For example I had 5 scientists and 6 ingineers for a research center and an electronics factory. 5 scientists for 6 specialized workplaces (83.3%) and 6 ingineers for 10 workplaces (60%). The game put one scientist in the factory. The reseacrh center had 66.6% occupation and the factory 70%. I put the research center on highter priority and the lost scientist go where I wanted him to go. I could have close some workplaces in the factory to allow only 8 people in the workshift. It would probably achieve the same result. Those methods are better that micro the colonists.

For the middel game when you do not have too much unemployement and homeless, filtering the domes work insainly good. Within my first three domes with two sanstoriums, I have removed 6 out of the 7 possible flaw nearly completely. I had 34 alcoholic on 230 people at start (an alcoholic, hippie guru). 10-20 sols later, I had not a single one. The probleme with automatic assignement is that free slots are needed. A colonist will not move to a dome if there is not house for him (Except maybe if he is already homeless). I think the same is true with work. An unemployed scientist may not take the place of an colonist without specialisation working in a laboratory (or it will take time). The scientist may go work in a factory in another dome. Using the filter on domes may prevent that and increase work efficiency.

For late game: I think it is not possible to avoid unemployement and homeless people. It is a good think. it is a stabilization factor. If people stop working because of age, the free slot will be reassigned automaticaly with the better specialized people available. You will not have to wait for a new child to grow up. The problem is it reduce the efficiency of auto-assignement. You have to wait for people to age or die.

Edit: The problem is natality control. If natality was not only dependend on confort, they will not stop having children until there are too many homeless. Having a way to reduce homeless without building more and more house endlessly is needed. Without homeless, the dome filtering would work late game. We would have less unemployed. We need a condom factory.

 

[Xavori]

I honestly can't do this. For me I always either have too many births or hardly any, which is the problem. Around the time I have the resources to set up a dome specifically for universities, I've set up my domes to make people as happy as possible (which, if you're clever about boosting morale, can net you about enough of a performance boost to negate the wrong specialization modifier) and the population explodes so much that I can't actually get people back into other domes once they go to the university dome. My experience with the game has been mostly binary: either they have a ton of kids or they have almost none. The only way for me to specialize domes is to build a university in each and set them to train people in that specific specialization, otherwise they can't move to domes that need their skills. The trick is you need to get average comfort almost right on the amount needed for children to be born for growth to be manageable when, as some people stated, it's far easier to just keep them alive and keep ferrying more people in when others choose to leave or (as I'm forced to do) just try to keep people happy and make a point of not letting anyone in or out of a dome except to send nonspecialized colonists to a new dome to start populating it.

Okay, I'll walk you through the key domes in my colony, and you'll see why it works and maybe see what you are missing.

1. The kiddie creche - Up kids and nonspecialized, down everything else.

This medium dome has a lot of nurseries, an open air gym, playgrounds, a couple schools, 2 infirmaries, grocer, some parks, dining, maybe an art shop, and 2 universities. It also has a sanitorium to remove the worst flaws and help deal with the lack of happy making. Because it encourages kids and unspecialized to come while trying to kick out everyone else, you can't put any specialist buildings in range of it. You also kinda want to stick this in the middle of your colony so that people have easy runs to nearby domes. For the most part, your Martianborns will all end up here. One of the key parts is those nursieries tho. Kids can live there; adults can't. That means they'll really be looking to live somewhere else once they hit adulthood as it's likely they'll be homeless otherwise.

2. The old folks home - up senior citziens, down kids, youth, and adults.

This is to empty your other domes so you have room in them for the up and comers. If you get lucky and get Soylent Green this is where you'd stick it. Otherwise, just make sure it has lots and lots of living space and at least one of each type of need. It might seem like a waste to dedicate a dome to not producing anything, but without it, you likely have a really hard time keeping the specialist paths going because the old folks are taking up both residential space and hiding the fact that the dome they are in is missing specialists that actually work so your universities don't replace them. I'd argue this is one of the most important domes you build.

3. Manufacturing dome - up engineers, down kids, seniors, scientists, and geologists.

This is where you actually make stuff. It has a security tower, grocer, art shop, diner, parks, infirmary, and a hydroponic farm that will eventually being growing algae to help with O2. That is the usual setup I have in all my domes for needs. After that it's apartments and manufacturing buildings inside and out with maybe a university in the megadome which has room for it and will help with homeless problem kiddie chreche's can develop if the universities there aren't training youth fast enough.

4. Resource dome - up geologists and botanists, down scientists, kids, seniors, and engineers

You can get away with sticking botanists and geologists together in a dome simply because mining is an outdoor activity while farming is indoor. They do a good job quickly seperating themselves out to the appropriate job. Early game you might consider a sanitorium to offset having people working outside the dome, and even late game, you still want infirmaries with the comfort boosting. The needs are the same as everywhere else except I never fill drinking or gaming because electronic stores eat too many hard to get electronics.

5. Sanitorium - up flaws and security, down kids and seniors (seeing the pattern here?)

This is where I send my alcoholics, gamblers, and chronic condition people to get fixed so that I can get away with not putting in space bars and casinos (well, until I had 4k colonists and quit caring as much) I also recommend sticking a university here because your Martianborn with flaws will be really tempted to live the creche early and come here. You'll also want to make a 3 shift security tower which you can get away with because the sanitorium spire will fix the insanity you're inflicting on the 3rd shift officers.

6. Idiot sponge - up idiots and renegades, down kids (seniors can stay here and keep the morons entertained)

The idiot flaw gets it's very own special place with a sanitorium spire and security officers. I don't want these colonists anywhere near the expensive to fix stuff.

Anyway, if you build this way, you'll keep a nice happy flow of colonists specialists moving to the domes you need them at. I'd like to stress again how important the old folks home is, and that you might need more than one. You really need to keep emptying specialized domes of non-workers as quickly as you can in order to maximize your colonies efficiency.

 

[jfjohnny5]

Anyway, if you build this way, you'll keep a nice happy flow of colonists specialists moving to the domes you need them at.

Ah, but the crux of the issue, and the biggest takeaway from this post, is that it doesn't matter if they're happy. Your dome specialization ideas are fine. They're a good strategy. Personally, I love your focus on efficiency - it's why I play games like this. The problem is that it doesn't matter in Surviving Mars. Properly specialized or not, happy, sad, homeless, whatever. The game will keep on chugging. You are neither punished nor incentivized to manage your colonists well. The colony will continue to run well enough without any input from you, the player.

This whole thing isn't even the entire issue. It's just a symptom of the deeper problem that people are bringing up in threads all over these forums: the gameplay is entirely front-loaded. After the early game challenge of getting setup in the first place, there's little to keep you drawn in. Just keep the colonists alive and you'll see all the game has to show you. I hate saying that because I dislike raising a criticism without offering an idea for a solution, but I really don't know what to make of this one...

 

[Uhlume]

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

The filters work really slowly though, I was running ~2K colonists in a substantial number of non-specialised domes, which worked fine.
Lots of homeless people, as the bunnies my colonists turned into due to high comfort levels were literally outbreeding my building of domes to house them.
I built a few domes to handle the giant pile of seniors I was growing and it took ages for them to move around to them, and even then they were frequently outnumbered by the other age groups in their dome because groups I was specifically filtering out of the domes were still occupying them en masse.

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

The problem is that it doesn't matter in Surviving Mars. Properly specialized or not, happy, sad, homeless, whatever. The game will keep on chugging. You are neither punished nor incentivized to manage your colonists well.

Part of the reason I don't play the Russian sponsor: if I ever did, I'd probably be too tempted to name all my domes after gulags or something. When you stop to think about it, that's basically what they are right now: Martian labor camps that people either voluntarily join or are born into and don't have much of a say in what kind of life they can expect since they can't just walk away if they decide they can't handle it. I mean, if you take away the fact they can board a rocket and leave if they're Earthsick, all the flaws make it seem more like your sponsor got most of their "applicants" by emptying the prisons in whatever country you're sponsored by. If anything, the massive, uncontrollable population boom means you really get punished for treating them well through the massive, constant strain on your resources that they create (build more housing, build more domes for housing, build more farms to feed people, build more water extractors/moisture vaporators to provide water for farms and people, build more MOXIEs to provide oxygen, build more power plants to deal with potential energy shortages, build more factories to provide resources for maintenance, build more mines to supply raw materials, realize the dome you built went into max capacity five Sols ago while you were messing around with the water problem, repeat)

 

[Exemplar Voss]

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?

Personally, I was expecting colonization of Mars - that the people would do the interesting bits, and interact with their environment in some fashion, even if the environment was just 'the domes'

Instead, in a land of high automation, drones and RC vehicles, people are necessary components for... mining and factory assembly lines. Which seems completely backwards. Sure unlike the other resources they also need food, but that's just a 2nd level resource requiring a basic resource, just like machine parts requiring metal, or electronics requiring rare metal.

Overall, the game is set up so that people are a disposal resource to be plugged in- the details of what they're doing don't matter so much as long as the resource outputs exceed maintenance consumption. You can fiddle with the filters, but it isn't particularly required.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Personally, I was expecting colonization of Mars - that the people would do the interesting bits, and interact with their environment in some fashion, even if the environment was just 'the domes'

Instead, in a land of high automation, drones and RC vehicles, people are necessary components for... mining and factory assembly lines Which seems completely backwards. Sure unlike the other resources they also need food, but that's just a 2nd level resource requiring a basic resource, just like machine parts requiring metal, or electronics requiring rare metal.

Overall, the game is set up so that people are a disposal resource to be plugged in- the details of what they're doing don't matter so much as long as the resource outputs exceed maintenance consumption. You can fiddle with the filters, but it isn't particularly required.

In a way, the games title is bleakly accurate. "Surviving Mars" because while survival is possible, a life certainly isn't. Its telling that the moast fun I have had has been an absurdly lucky run with almoasy no humans, I only imported colonists on sol 198 and then more because I felt I should than any actuall need.

 

[Xavori]

Ah, but the crux of the issue, and the biggest takeaway from this post, is that it doesn't matter if they're happy. Your dome specialization ideas are fine. They're a good strategy. Personally, I love your focus on efficiency - it's why I play games like this. The problem is that it doesn't matter in Surviving Mars. Properly specialized or not, happy, sad, homeless, whatever. The game will keep on chugging. You are neither punished nor incentivized to manage your colonists well. The colony will continue to run well enough without any input from you, the player.

This whole thing isn't even the entire issue. It's just a symptom of the deeper problem that people are bringing up in threads all over these forums: the gameplay is entirely front-loaded. After the early game challenge of getting setup in the first place, there's little to keep you drawn in. Just keep the colonists alive and you'll see all the game has to show you. I hate saying that because I dislike raising a criticism without offering an idea for a solution, but I really don't know what to make of this one...

It matters if they're "happy enough". This is true of the real world as well, fyi.

If you let things get bad, they'll quit working as well, they go renegade, or they even off themselves. Now if you want to say that it's too easy to keep them minimally happy, maybe.

As for late game challenges...that's every city builder game all the way back to the original SimCity. You always hit a point where you've "won" but because the game doesn't toss up a "Congratulations. A winnar iz you!" screen, the player doesn't necessarily see it that way. But you've beat the final boss, ripped out his spine, and chosen the green because everything else you did in this and the previous two games no longer mattered because...wait...wrong game.

Anyway, you're right that once you finish your evaluation, hit all the milestones, and finished the mystery that there isn't much challenge left beyond those you give yourself (ie. trying to figure out how to deal with water for a colony of 5k+). But that's always been true of city builders just like it's true for other games that have defined endings.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

It matters if they're "happy enough". This is true of the real world as well, fyi.

If you let things get bad, they'll quit working as well, they go renegade, or they even off themselves. Now if you want to say that it's too easy to keep them minimally happy, maybe.

As for late game challenges...that's every city builder game all the way back to the original SimCity. You always hit a point where you've "won" but because the game doesn't toss up a "Congratulations. A winnar iz you!" screen, the player doesn't necessarily see it that way. But you've beat the final boss, ripped out his spine, and chosen the green because everything else you did in this and the previous two games no longer mattered because...wait...wrong game.

Anyway, you're right that once you finish your evaluation, hit all the milestones, and finished the mystery that there isn't much challenge left beyond those you give yourself (ie. trying to figure out how to deal with water for a colony of 5k+). But that's always been true of city builders just like it's true for other games that have defined endings.

Moast other citybuilders are better at presenting lesser goals though. You optimise and rebuild and rezone and with enough bank you can rip down early errors and make a perfect modern city... Theres not enuogh for colonists to do to make that any fun though.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Ah, but the crux of the issue, and the biggest takeaway from this post, is that it doesn't matter if they're happy. Your dome specialization ideas are fine. They're a good strategy. Personally, I love your focus on efficiency - it's why I play games like this. The problem is that it doesn't matter in Surviving Mars. Properly specialized or not, happy, sad, homeless, whatever. The game will keep on chugging. You are neither punished nor incentivized to manage your colonists well. The colony will continue to run well enough without any input from you, the player.

This whole thing isn't even the entire issue. It's just a symptom of the deeper problem that people are bringing up in threads all over these forums: the gameplay is entirely front-loaded. After the early game challenge of getting setup in the first place, there's little to keep you drawn in. Just keep the colonists alive and you'll see all the game has to show you. I hate saying that because I dislike raising a criticism without offering an idea for a solution, but I really don't know what to make of this one...

I'm bringing this up a lot but its because I think it is key, to give us purpose and connection they need to give us a culture aspect to life on mars, something in the vein of Civalisations civics, with a limited duration and cost that scales by pop, so you have to work at things, and adapt to shifts or expend effort keeping a culture stable as sols turn and generations shuft. They also need to dramatically buff wonders, but give them huge man power demands, a moho mine should need a whole mega dome to it and its support staff, an artifical sun should be the same that telescope should keep a whole dome's worth of scientists busy. Then add the need for the cultural buildings on top of that and I think you would have a start. I'd also like to see anaomoly analaisis, at the very least for breakthroughs, done by people not robots so that having them out there means they get to go out get dusty and explore! could even requre differnt specialities for differnt anomolies.