The key is to... stop caring?

[Xeorm]

I get the impression that the game throws out a lot at the player without exploring much of the strategy aspects as a tutorial, but having the flavor text push you towards bad strategy at times. Combine with a score oriented difficulty system that heavily rewards time and you get a game that can seem harder than it is.

Colonists don't need much to survive. Health, sanity, and comfort. None of either and you have issues, but the minimum for each isn't much. The benefits for having high are small. Comfort especially is given as the big thing to worry about, but the main benefit of high comfort is children, but you're right that that's a small benefit. Unless you're going quickly at least. Getting more colonists in the founder stage can be a big deal for speed runs.

Applicants for the first few rockets are more than enough, but they won't allow for higher population colonies. High growth won't make things easier, but it will allow for a higher score. High happiness is legitimately hard to obtain, but enough is easy. Which I think is the idea. I know in Tropico I'd never have that high of a happiness. Everyone fulfilled is wasteful, but you can get pretty decent. Plenty of homeless then, too. Does seem like you might have been not focused enough on a proper strategy, and instead going after ideals of how you think it should be, rather than playing the system. That's not the system's fault.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

I get the impression that the game throws out a lot at the player without exploring much of the strategy aspects as a tutorial, but having the flavor text push you towards bad strategy at times. Combine with a score oriented difficulty system that heavily rewards time and you get a game that can seem harder than it is.

Colonists don't need much to survive. Health, sanity, and comfort. None of either and you have issues, but the minimum for each isn't much. The benefits for having high are small. Comfort especially is given as the big thing to worry about, but the main benefit of high comfort is children, but you're right that that's a small benefit. Unless you're going quickly at least. Getting more colonists in the founder stage can be a big deal for speed runs.

Applicants for the first few rockets are more than enough, but they won't allow for higher population colonies. High growth won't make things easier, but it will allow for a higher score. High happiness is legitimately hard to obtain, but enough is easy. Which I think is the idea. I know in Tropico I'd never have that high of a happiness. Everyone fulfilled is wasteful, but you can get pretty decent. Plenty of homeless then, too. Does seem like you might have been not focused enough on a proper strategy, and instead going after ideals of how you think it should be, rather than playing the system. That's not the system's fault.

This is a game about colonising mars in which actually having colonists on mars and treating them well is neither beneficial nor rewarded. I am not flawed for wanting better more engging systems, the systems are flawed for failing to reward or engage. Your very attaude is the same thing as the problem in which a human, or a simulation presented as one is expected to adapt to serve the needs of a construct rather than the reverse.

 

[Xeorm]

This is a game about colonising mars in which actually having colonists on mars and treating them well is neither beneficial nor rewarded. I am not flawed for wanting better more engging systems, the systems are flawed for failing to reward or engage. Your very attaude is the same thing as the problem in which a human, or a simulation presented as one is expected to adapt to serve the needs of a construct rather than the reverse.

Why do you need a reward to treat your colonists well? The game does give out benefits for well cared for colonists - children, less chances for flaws, no breakdowns, colonists don't leave, and minor performance boosts. Some others too I'm forgetting. But it's also standard for any life that some problems aren't worth treating because they're more expensive than they're worth or the problem is too complicated to deal with adequately or whatever. The game is trying to model real life, and not one where happiness is a goal that rewards more than happiness itself. That would be standard for any real colony.

 

[Skirlasvoud]

Why do you need a reward to treat your colonists well? The game does give out benefits for well cared for colonists - children, less chances for flaws, no breakdowns, colonists don't leave, and minor performance boosts. Some others too I'm forgetting. But it's also standard for any life that some problems aren't worth treating because they're more expensive than they're worth or the problem is too complicated to deal with adequately or whatever. The game is trying to model real life, and not one where happiness is a goal that rewards more than happiness itself. That would be standard for any real colony.

Like the OP stated, it's the instinct of any fan of city-builder to optimize everything.

It's the difference between Simcity 3000 and Simcity 2016.
People had fun creating the richest, most prosperous city possible in Simcity 3000 because they felt there was a complex web of systems they could tweak and raise into perfection.
People bailed on Simcity 2016 after they figured out the system had no such coherency and they could just plop down parks for their homeless bums, sink land value and everything would still be fine.

Real fans of City Builders... have given up caring too much for Surviving Mars.

Sounds like you never really cared, which might have been a good mindset!

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Why do you need a reward to treat your colonists well? The game does give out benefits for well cared for colonists - children, less chances for flaws, no breakdowns, colonists don't leave, and minor performance boosts. Some others too I'm forgetting. But it's also standard for any life that some problems aren't worth treating because they're more expensive than they're worth or the problem is too complicated to deal with adequately or whatever. The game is trying to model real life, and not one where happiness is a goal that rewards more than happiness itself. That would be standard for any real colony.

Which brings me smartly back to my first post in this thread, about the bleakness and nihilism in its implicit view of mankind and the human condition. As a model for real life it ommits anything of the adventure or trailblazing that it expoits in us to make a sale. The voice overs speak of that drive to push back the borders of knowledge the call to the adventure in taming a frontear that man has spent moast of its existancemythologising, but the lives of those colonists are of animal impulse and mechanical drudgery.

As for the idea of children being a reward? At this stage more population is really more of a punishment. Theres no in play differance between a colony of 1000 and one of 10,000 that is a failure of desighn. Theres nothing for colonists to do but pump out children, hoover up consumer products and work, that is a failure of imagenation.

These result in the game getting boring right when it should be getting intresting. As soon as humans arrive all you have left to do is square the input/output circle and wait for a mystery.

 

[Xeorm]

Like the OP stated, it's the instinct of any fan of city-builder to optimize everything.

It's the difference between Simcity 3000 and Simcity 2016.
People had fun creating the richest, most prosperous city possible in Simcity 3000 because they felt there was a complex web of systems they could tweak and raise into perfection.
People bailed on Simcity 2016 after they figured out the system had no such coherency and they could just plop down parks for their homeless bums, sink land value and everything would still be fine.

Real fans of City Builders... have given up caring too much for Surviving Mars.

Sounds like you never really cared, which might have been a good mindset!

See, those are two different issues. Problem with Simcity 2016 was it didn't have coherent systems that made sense which meant it didn't feel like a real city simulation, and more playing with specific spreadsheets. That's a bad system for sure, and leads to the game getting ditched.

What I'm arguing is that you can still have a good system, but viewed through the lens of realism (or cynicism if you're more inclined towards that). Keeping happiness at full is great...but not required, nor always the optimal goal, same as it is in reality. And through such a lens, it'd be foolish to reward such play with material rewards. Also doesn't mean that someone seeing happiness as a goal should feel that it's impossible. Haven't seen it be impossible to manage a system that allows for colonist happiness if you view it as a goal in and of itself.

Wouldn't be posting on here if I didn't care. But I've also done a lot of research on what colonizing would entail, so was already expecting that life on Mars would be pretty crappy for a long time. And so far the game does pretty well at doing that. Life right from the start does suck unless you put in lots of resources to make life better. Resources that aren't really refunded by the bonuses to having happy workers, which is also to be expected.

 

[Skirlasvoud]

What I'm arguing is that you can still have a good system, but viewed through the lens of realism (or cynicism if you're more inclined towards that). Keeping happiness at full is great...but not required, nor always the optimal goal, same as it is in reality. And through such a lens, it'd be foolish to reward such play with material rewards. Also doesn't mean that someone seeing happiness as a goal should feel that it's impossible. Haven't seen it be impossible to manage a system that allows for colonist happiness if you view it as a goal in and of itself.

Fair enough. I can't argue perspectives, respect your take on it, and I might indeed have come into this game with the wrong expectations.

Every city-builder that I've enjoyed had some sort of endgame that would stress your creation and system as a whole to succeed, or collapse if it found you lacking. The best of them had several outcomes coinciding each other. The Skyscrapers in Simcity 3000 wouldn't come without whole set of requirements being met. I hope I won't survive Frostpunk if I don't remain on my toes.

I find this drive lacking in Surviving Mars. Viewing it and taking satisfaction from it through the lens of realism just isn't for me I guess. It might be the kind of genre I need to recognize and avoid more in future.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Thinking on it theres another problem with "Mars, and the zen of not caring" the rewards and punishments a game hands out are a key component in how it comunicates with the player saying "This is worth doing" and "This is not" the milestones say "Having lots of people is agood thing" so do sponsor bonuses like the Church of the New Ark and its birthrate bonus.

But the experiancein play is saying "Having more than the minimum to meet your upkeep needs, or the minimum happyness to avoid breakdowns is a complete pain in the neck" the game's fluff tells us "Being on mars is cool" but the games systems say "This is an awfull place, and you want to be as removed from the reality of it as possible" via the sanity mechanics. The various techs and breakthroughs that automate or make people longer lived, or improve Marsborn say "people are a precious resorce" but the ways the graphs of resoce cost to sustain vs birthrate against death rate say the itteral opposite. The games detailed traits for individuals, and muchof the PR about the detail of their simulation says "each colonist is a destinct and valuable asset" but, again, the constant human tide says "Kill one and 50 more will replace them". Poor implamatation and shortsightedness undercut half of what the game is trying to do because it cannot settle on a coherent message in its systems and the behaviors they reward.

The elaborate support network you have to build is saying "Humans are important" but the limited scope of what they do says "Humans exist only to serve the machines".

 

[Jeffry]

What I'm arguing is that you can still have a good system, but viewed through the lens of realism (or cynicism if you're more inclined towards that). Keeping happiness at full is great...but not required, nor always the optimal goal, same as it is in reality. And through such a lens, it'd be foolish to reward such play with material rewards. Also doesn't mean that someone seeing happiness as a goal should feel that it's impossible. Haven't seen it be impossible to manage a system that allows for colonist happiness if you view it as a goal in and of itself.

Wouldn't be posting on here if I didn't care. But I've also done a lot of research on what colonizing would entail, so was already expecting that life on Mars would be pretty crappy for a long time. And so far the game does pretty well at doing that. Life right from the start does suck unless you put in lots of resources to make life better. Resources that aren't really refunded by the bonuses to having happy workers, which is also to be expected.

The problem is that it doesn't matter much if they're happy or not and that is not the case IRL and will certainly not be the case in a real colony some day. There are no downsides to people leaving your colony other than you have to ferry more in. And for them to leave you have to really piss them off. You bet there will be opposition, there will dissent for smaller things than for total discomfort, there will be strikes, there will be robberies and assaults and even mutinies if things go really south in a real colony someday. Just as those things happen on Earth. Yeah, there are renegades in the game, but they are not an issue.

The point is the people should matter more in a colony management game of this scale.

 

[Xeorm]

Fair enough. I can't argue perspectives, respect your take on it, and I might indeed have come into this game with the wrong expectations.

Every city-builder that I've enjoyed had some sort of endgame that would stress your creation and system as a whole to succeed, or collapse if it found you lacking. The best of them had several outcomes coinciding each other. The Skyscrapers in Simcity 3000 wouldn't come without whole set of requirements being met. I hope I won't survive Frostpunk if I don't remain on my toes.

I find this drive lacking in Surviving Mars. Viewing it and taking satisfaction from it through the lens of realism just isn't for me I guess. It might be the kind of genre I need to recognize and avoid more in future.

I do think the system could do better to make the big end goals more ...of an end goal. At the same time, it's harder to do a failing playthrough. Failing at colonies leads to lots of deaths, which is a far more fantastic death than traditional city builders. But could also be a difference between the Tropico series and more traditional builders. Tropico was very much that you wanted to survive, and then the rest of it was about making more money so you could advance your goals. It wasn't the most complex of things.

 

[semaphore]

Do colonists still breed if there's no room? I found that after giving up on ensuring all my colonists have a home, the homeless population stabilised and stopped increasing. I wonder if it's because of a lack of nursery space.

 

[Chiruadr]

Do colonists still breed if there's no room? I found that after giving up on ensuring all my colonists have a home, the homeless population stabilised and stopped increasing. I wonder if it's because of a lack of nursery space.

No, every dome has a cap on homeless. I think it's about 20% , I had a dome with more than 200 people and about 40 homeless, no more kids being born

I just look at them like my livestock now homeless people , future engineers.

I discovered a funny tactic, I can quarantine my baby making dome so they don't leave, all others dome I make low comfort so not many babies are born outside this one dome. The game still trains what you need, but they can't leave. So when I make a new dome, I just open the doors to baby dome and fill my new dome with all the homeless engineers or whatever. Instant specialists everywhere

 

[Zinegata]

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.

Church of the New Ark is only "stuck" at $4 billion if you do not have a source of income - which in the early game means a rare mine Dome producing $600M per shipment.

Indeed, that you think PDS is "doomed to fail" if you don't have both water and rare metals near the initial hub is a really damning indictment of how narrowly you play the game based on incorrect preconceptions.

You don't have to build a colony where you land - you only need to setup a refueling station which means spending on a Moisture Farm and a Fuel Refinery. My Russian run had that that initial fuel depot basically run forever (as I added a concrete-maker and drone hub later) - never connecting with the main Dome - and I just picked up resources from it using transports whenever the main area was short.

You can then spend the next couple of days building Sensor Towers (which are maintenance-free with the Futurist if you want a higher score) to augment your scanning, so that you can find an actual rare metal spot to build your Dome on. In my first game I literally spent 15 sols looking for an "ideal" spot with both water and rare metals, only to realize how unnecessary the water was when the relatively low dollar cost of the Moisture Farm became apparent.

The game is not some super-hard Dark Souls of city builders. It does however have a lot of detractors who prefer to pretend it's very hard than to admit that they are making the game unnecessarily hard for themselves due their failure to use their imagination to solve problems.

 

[Zinegata]

Like the OP stated, it's the instinct of any fan of city-builder to optimize everything.

And it can also be argued that city-builders become boring cookie-cutters copying the latest YT "best city" videos with that mindset.

Moreover, much of the "efficiency" in city builders is illusory. City builders tend to be open-ended and have unlimited resources, so the idea that you have to be "efficient" with them is frankly in many cases just pretense.

It's often more a matter of simply not screwing up a particular system - which in many case is the same with Surviving Mars. The difference between this game and the older ones is that present gamers seem to prefer review-bombing and pestering the devs than actually learning the systems.

The game is not presenting a bleak or dystopian future. It's only being presented as such because people are realizing they aren't as great city-builders and efficiency tweakers as they imagined themselves to be; and blaming the game is always the easier path.

Personally, while I'm finding the game to be too easy and lacking in late game content, Surviving Mars is a game that I actually enjoy because it doesn't have the pretense of hyper-efficient utopias. It's instead about the story of how a colony started and grew - with its trials, tribulations, belated discoveries, and hilarious oversights.

 

[Lordban]

Indeed, that you think PDS is "doomed to fail" if you don't have both water and rare metals near the initial hub is a really damning indictment of how narrowly you play the game based on incorrect preconceptions.

Well, I'm learning to play a new game like we all are here and only yesterday did realize a sensor tower spam solved a certain number of early woes As it turns out, that and a stutter-start largely simplified setting up on the hardest terrain I know of (44N 112W), did a start on a minimalistic payload of 2 drones 1 vaporator 1 fuel refinery 1 explorer 5 machine parts 5 electronics to be able to land and exploit different ground that would be more promising - a boon, too, as the opener was on an iced plateau. It's indeed not all that complicated to set down a colony on $3Bn.

Unfortunately, this also means that opening on literally any terrain with literally any sponsor has a simple recipe, and I do concur, at that point, it makes even the hardest setups rather trivial and the quest for efficiency rather moot...

 

[Zinegata]

Unfortunately, this also means that opening on literally any terrain with literally any sponsor has a simple recipe, and I do concur, at that point, it makes even the hardest setups rather trivial and the quest for efficiency rather moot...

Hence why my point earlier is that people should push for more options and harder modes. The base system is very solid, but once the initial puzzle is "solved" it becomes more a matter of repeating more of the same. By contrast ramping up the difficulty by more breakdowns will force people to tweak their strats and find ways to be even more efficient; while adding other ways of doing things will cause new solutions to be created.

In short, the game should improve what it's actually good at; not to try and solve an invented problem because some folks were not trying other approaches and prefer to complain about it. The latter is a player problem, not a game problem.

 

[EsoEs]

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.

This was one of my first points I made regarding this game, its not clear yet whether its a city builder or a survival game. As a city builder, its not very interesting due to limited differences between Domes (build apartments, the same service buildings, and a few production facilities, rinse and repeat).

As a survival game, the limited impact that population efficiencies have on your overall success make it also quite shallow, as once you are net positive on all resources, it really doesn't matter wtf your people are doing, where they are working, or how much they like living on Mars.

I would prefer devs to move towards option 2 where population issues can still cause you to "lose" later on in the game, but we'll have to see which way the game goes.

 

[Tehrus]

If I could make them hot bunk that would be the play, the first housing Building looks like it can house 60 people

 

[Bronzewing]

the filtering seems to stop working once domes start getting overpopulated. Wrong spec won't leave unless there's free space elsewhere for them to move into, prefered professions wont move in if the wrong spec guys are hogging the housing.

 

[PaulMClem]

Every time I come back to this thread it makes me kinda depressed. If you can truly glide through this game without caring about your colonists, treating them like drones/cattle/livestock then the game has failed MASSIVELY to achieve what it should be. I want this game to be about base building and colony management. If as a player you treat people like cattle then you should lose the game - people should revolt, down tools, want to go home etc. If this is not happening then I seriously hope the Devs make it happen.