Surviving Mars: Space City Builder (Paradox/Haemimont) (Looks Not-Shit!)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Surviving Mars: Space City Builder (Paradox/Haemimont) (Looks Not-Shit!)

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

boner confessor posted:

tropico on mars

As someone with 800+ hours on my steam shame counter for Tropico games, this sounds like an excellent buy for me.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2018 16:56

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 02:31

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

unbutthurtable posted:

Tropico 4 is the best, tightest version of what 1 & 3 were going for. Tropico 5 adds a bunch of new features (many of which are cool and good) and changes a bunch of things, and also simplifies a lot of things (in a frustrating way sometimes).

what I'm saying is that Tropico is an island of contrasts

If this game ever reaches 'Tropico 4 + Modern Times' levels of polish and content, it'll be truly fantastic. I love the early to mid game right now, it really scratches that Tropico itch of bootstrapping your economy, expanding, and dealing with crises the game throws at you. The lack of later game content really shows though, if I can survive long enough to get the deep extraction techs researched, the rest of the game is just an extended victory lap / cranking out domes to keep up with my horny colonists. Modern Times campaigns stayed interesting even when you were sitting on multiple rum/cigar/coffee chains and raking in basically infinite cash. The foundations of that are present in Surviving Mars, but need a lot of building on.

In conclusion, everyone should play Tropico 4 + Modern Times.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2018 14:08

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

boner confessor posted:

nah, they tried to shoehorn war into tropico 5 and it was bad

What little there is shoehorned into Surviving Mars is pretty bad as well. The endgame of the armed rover mystery if you take the fight-it-out option is rather unfun and well, frankly kind of annoying. Reminded me of all the bad things about combat in tropico 5.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2018 23:00

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

Launch pads, interdome tunnels and more endgame content all make me happy.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2018 17:23

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

Mein Kampf Enthusiast posted:

Fuel can explode? I always place my fuel depots away from any landing sites to be safe, but I didn't know it was actually a thing.

Yeah, it'll detonate with a blast radius of about two hexes. I learned this the hard way when I stupidly put a fuel depot right in the middle of a forest of life support pipes and polymer factories to make it easier for the drones to keep said factories fed. One unlucky meteor strike later, I was rebuilding a significant portion of my infrastructure.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2018 13:55

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

Picked this up again after the latest patch. Definitely injected some new life into the game. Now it feels about 80% complete instead of the 60% complete it was at launch. The new domes are pretty nice, though the dome link system is kind of useless. Early on it's ok for being able to spread the need-meeting buildings out across a couple of domes, but each terminus eating an in-dome hex and the tubing being a blocker a pretty stiff price to pay. Once you go up to medium+ domes it's less of a problem, but by the time you're in the big domes you've got space to spare and don't really have as much need to interconnect.

Mods still make life better in this game though. Automated anomaly scanning and resource harvesting mods are must haves. No more missing out on free science and metal cause I didn't click thingies.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2018 15:14

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

Chakan posted:

New Dev Diary:
https://twitter.com/surviving_mars/status/1024616376391090176?s=21

Among other things they're changing power so that power consumers/producers don't have to be connected to the power line, just adjacent to something that's hooked up.

All the QoL improvements look really good, especially adjacent auto-cabling, being able to set minimums on storages and speeding up the early bootstrapping portion of the colony. I like making the cable and pipe leaks part of a disaster instead of just a random gently caress-you for building a big grid. Having to suddenly deal with a big mess of faults in one area of the grid will make valves and switches much more useful. Disasters sound like they're going to be much nastier with the bigger and randomized health and sanity penalties.

Not with regards to the patch, but I really wish they'd evolve the export system a little more. It would be nice to have things other than rare metals and research to trade for cash.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2018 14:38

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

This thread kinda died, but the Sagan update dropped last week. Looks like most of it is QoL stuff they borrowed from mods, though there is a new challenge mode.

Items of interest:

Challenge mode - Complete a timed objective in a pre-built scenario. 24 challenge scenarios available

Concrete extractors now work like they do in the wide area extractors mod and will just hoover up the deposit until it's depleted, no more micro-ing them around the deposit to suck out every last erg of concrete.

Rovers don't have deplete-able batteries anymore, and the Command AI research basically turns on the automated mode from the autonomous rovers mod.

Research randomization is now tied to map seed, so the tech matrix (research order and breakthroughs) will always be the same for a given map. This is supposed to be for high score competitions and challenge modes I guess.

Dust producing buildings will now show their area of effect.

Big pile of bugfixes and some balance changes.

I haven't played around with the challenge mode any, but the QoL fixes are nice. Really just means unchecking a couple of mods from my mod order, but it's nice to see that the game is still getting post launch support.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2018 13:51

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# ¿ May 16, 2024 02:31

Verloc: Feb 15, 2001; Note to self: Posting 'lulz' is not a good idea.

Gadzuko posted:

Just picked this up and I'm building babby's first Mars colony with the International Mars Mission which seems like the extreme easymode start. What's the typical base layout? One big dome surrounded by littles, or more of a hodgepodge? I'm unclear on how far colonists will walk inside domes to get to jobs and services. Is it just their own dome plus any that are directly connected to that dome, or can I set up a chain of connections to have people walking two or more domes away to get to a service? Also, is fusion power worth it without the upgrade to reduce the worker requirements? It kinda seems like it's not, but that might just be because I have an engineer shortage.

Workers will only commute 1 dome away to work or meet needs. Early on I always shoot for a trio or quartet of linked basic domes. I do run the modular apartments mod though so I can get away with eating more in-dome hexes for tunnels without loving my population density over. I usually shoot for a setup like below early on:

pre:

        School/Research/Needs
           /               \
Housing/farms  -------     Housing/farms
            \              /
            Industry & Misc

Plonk down the domes that'll be one of your housing/farm domes first, then the research/needs dome. Then either the second housing/farm dome or the industry dome depending on how fast I need to bootstrap on-site production of industry products.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2019 17:39

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Surviving Mars: Space City Builder (Paradox/Haemimont) (Looks Not-Shit!)