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 http://store.steampowered.com/app/464920/Surviving_Mars/  UPDATE: THIS GAME IS FUKKIN GREAT AND STEAM REVIEWERS ARE loving MORONS, TRUE FACT.So I've been following the prerelease coverage for this for a while and it came out a couple of hours ago. Launch Trailer Review Far as I can tell, it's a colony manager/city builder about colonizing mars. The difference is it actually looks really interesting. Like, I want to try this out, but obviously there are an assload of lovely colony sims out there and it's making me hold off hence I come to you, dear goons. Do you have this game? Is it good? It looks really neat, with a nice amount of managing colonists/food/supplies and a randomized tech tree, plus endgame "mysteries" to play with which I'm mentally connecting to Crises in Stellaris. I also really like the retro-futuristic twist to the visuals with people living in giant glass domes. Haemimont have also been around for like, forever, and I'm sure I've played some of their other stuff. Plus it's supposedly got a lot of mod support with Lua and I would guess something like the Cities Skylines asset editor? Can't find any info on this in detail. If you have this game please tell me/us what it's like!   
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Mar 20, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 19:22
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Alkydere posted:AAAAH! WHY IS THERE NO THREAD FOR THIS GAME! AM I GOING HAVE TO SLAP TOGETHER SOME LAZY rear end-oh here's a thread! Fear not, I have slapped together some lazy rear end poo poo so you don't have to. I admit I'm mostly interested in whether it's going to take off like Cities Skylines and whether or not it's got the mod tools to really expand on the core mechanics. Cos the core stuff looks really drat solid and the only thing I think that's making me hesitate is that I think this game could be amazing if it just had lots and lots of content to play with, hence the hope for mods.
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Mar 15, 2018 20:13
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Pylons posted:Didn't notice this thread got made. I'll echo my impression about the game that I posted in the paradox thread. One thing I thought I noticed in the preview videos but nobody seemed to try, is that if they put the dome preview with the doors touching another dome they seemed to highlight? I figured that was how you connected domes together. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Mar 16, 2018 |
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Mar 16, 2018 00:09
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Pylons posted:You know, I didn't really try that. I figured if "connecting" domes was possible they'd have little tunnels for it. Maybe I'll give that a shot. It's been bugging the hell out of me honestly watching the preview streams because they seem to miss a lot of important stuff, such as "being out of oxygen" and "having leaks everywhere" so I haven't been able to keep up with them  I would have assumed they'd have a kind of passenger pipe too if it was possible but maybe not.] E: Reading the steam forums suggests apparently you can't connect them, weird decision if so. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Mar 16, 2018 |
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Mar 16, 2018 00:13
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Demiurge4 posted:It's weird too because connected domes were shown in early screenshots. That I believe is actually just a type of dome you can build, it's elongated and holds two spires.
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Mar 16, 2018 10:05
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It's real weird that you can't connect them even by building adjacent cos that would make for interesting logicatical challenges and with the variety of dome shapes you could make some interesting complexes. Even if it meant degrading service quality for having to cross domes.
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Mar 16, 2018 10:38
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Zephro posted:So is this a chillaxed city-sim-in-space like SimCity or Cities:Skylines, or is a spin-a-bunch-of-plates-till-they-inevitably-come-crashing-down failure-fest like Dwarf Fortress or Rimworld? From what I gather it depends on how high you set the difficulty modifiers. If you embark at like 500% difficulty, you're probably going to struggle. I've had it recommended to me that you should harder and work down until you find your comfort zone as it's possible to make the game trivially easy and you'll blow through everything very quickly.
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Mar 16, 2018 20:23
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:So what should be the first building you have your intrepid pioneers work on. A polymer factory? That seems to be my bottle neck more often than not, since I think it’s the first thing that you “need” which isn’t available on the Martian surface... but it always seems a toss up between that or a reliable source of metal. What do they do in the streams with the founders/next 12 colonists? Most people seem to go for just getting them comfortable and fed, as popping a baby out will let you bring in new dudes faster. Then yeah it's usually polymer production as that doesn't require an in-dome slot. E: ahh gently caress it I might just buy this drat game. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Mar 16, 2018 |
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Mar 16, 2018 20:53
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DreamShipWrecked posted:Is it possible to be self-sustainable, or is it just "live til you die"? The resources do run out, after all. Supposedly there are infinite but slow-to-extract deposits. E:  Let's go boiiiiiis.
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Mar 16, 2018 21:32
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If I dig out a bunch of concrete, can I build over the ditch it leaves behind?
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Mar 16, 2018 22:02
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Alkydere posted:Yup. The quarry hole will remain but you can build on it just fine. Probably hurts your wind-farms if you put them down there. Ah, nice, there's one right in the middle of an eventual great dome location but I want to mine it out.
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Mar 16, 2018 22:28
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Agean90 posted:why do i have to build a space bar to satisy space drinking You can't have a space barbeque because fire doesn't work in space air, the space bar has a special space filter that it runs your space drink through.
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Mar 16, 2018 23:25
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Superconductive computing is a pretty great breakthrough.
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Mar 17, 2018 03:07
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A good thing about vaporators is that they don't switch off during cold snaps, whereas tanks and mines will, so they're a valuable backup even if you aren't using them primarily.
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Mar 17, 2018 05:00
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Hot Dog Day #82 posted:The hint about putting supply depots near areas where drones overlap is a great suggestion. Right now my Martian colony is doing the tried and true “throw poo poo to the wall and see what sticks” method of colonial development, but hopefully in my next game I’ll actually think out how I want my colony to grow better. Hover over the funding tab in the colony overview, it will give you the rare metal price per unit. I think it usually starts about 22 million but I dunno how much it changes. E: loving hell a meteor storm will just irreversibly destroy your colony if it hits it. It instantly breaks any buildings and destroys/ruptures cables it hits. I basically would have to rebuild the entire colony from scratch at this point. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Mar 17, 2018 |
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Mar 17, 2018 05:07
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I'm on 39 people on 440% difficulty and am going to meet my export goal by day 55 I think. This is going fairly well!
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Mar 17, 2018 13:57
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DreamShipWrecked posted:Cool, glad my idiot colonists won't travel thirty yards to satisfy their needs and would rather just go crazy. That's part of the appeal of larger domes, you don't need to build as many service buildings.
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Mar 17, 2018 15:54
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Bhodi posted:You need to dedicate 3 cheese slices to the basic needs right? Infirmary, diner, electronic store in one, then bar and open air gym? Eh you can get away with one honestly. I go with Diner, Grocer and Infirmary with a 1 tile park in the middle and that will let most people do alright. You can put a high end thing like a casino in another slice if you want. But you don't need to satisfy every need.
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Mar 17, 2018 15:55
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A six day cold snap is certainly something 
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Mar 17, 2018 16:51
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I think I'm finding that most of my job allocation issues are actually population and skills issues. As in, I don't have enough people or qualified workers. If you ensure a good supply of them they do work in the right buildings I think, and it helps to specialize your domes. I put all my engineers into my first medium dome, moved the factories there, put the polymer factory outside it, and then made the rest of it into the childcare/education dome. It's working very well. I'm looking to decomission my second basic dome once it's mined out its metal deposit, and rolling everyone into the medium dome except for the first basic dome which I am coverting over to dedicated agriculture, with the basic dome comfort tech and the farm comfort tech it should be more or less self solving as far as comfort goes and food can be supplied across domes.
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Mar 17, 2018 19:20
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I believe the game actually does take into account the geography of where you are and will put deposits in geographic features.
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Mar 17, 2018 19:34
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Jeoh posted:It'd be nice if I didn't have to manually ferry around resources to fix broken buildings. You don't, really, that's what shuttles are for. Or if you build your depots and drone hubs right, they'll do a bit of balancing themselves.
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Mar 18, 2018 00:22
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Webguy20 posted:So I'm playing the tutorial session and I think I just ran myself into the mid game around SOL 25. I've used up basically all my money (I did a lot of outsource researching) and have 3 domes up that are mostly full. Now it is like "whats next?" It doesn't seem like sending rare metals back gets you much money at all. It gets you 22m per unit, or should unless you have something that changed it. It's mostly there to help you with supplies, but you should look into at the very least securing a supply of metals and a factory to process them into machine parts, that will cut down greatly what you need to import. Your goal is to expand your workforce and research technologies, as tech will unlock the lategame buildings and make you much more efficient.
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Mar 18, 2018 00:36
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Enzenx posted:Funding per unit of rare metals actually depends on your mission sponsor. It ranges from 20 to 30 million. Ah ok well Russia gets 22m/u at least. If you get more than that then even better.
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Mar 18, 2018 01:00
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I'm not sure whether tunnels are needed honestly. I think if you added them you should add a penalty to crossing domes, so it's something you can do but in-dome buildings are much better. Because a major crux of the game is that larger domes let you stack more buildings in them. You can do an awful lot by preferring specific types of colonists in domes and specializing the services to match. Different specialists prefer different kinds of service, and you can do things like boot your old people out into a dome with spare habitation space while putting all your adults/kids in a dome specced for childcare and development. Then split off your specialist types into other domes based on what you need them to do. Honestly I think it works well and gives you a really good incentive to build bigger domes. If I had to suggest any sort of transport infrastructure it would be roads as an alternative to flying drones and transport routes. As well as things that require hundreds of colonists to actually achieve. Currently I'm on 450% difficulty and I'm about finished on everything while using only two domes.
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Mar 18, 2018 01:58
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uPen posted:This really seems like a game that will be 100x better with mods. I agree with this. There's a really solid foundation here, what it could really use I think is some late game challenge, the early game is very good, but stuff like the mohole mine kind of trivializes the game. More really elaborate endgame stuff where you need dozens of domes to make it work, that'd be cool.
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Mar 18, 2018 04:48
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Demiurge4 posted:I found a mod tools folder in the game directory. They have a bunch of example mods and the .lua files have notes and documentation on what each line does and how to make it all work, super good. I think a lot of the systems would work better if there was a more pressing reason to use the alternate options, like sure you could make crops produce oxygen but what's the point when moxies exist? If you had events in the style of rimworld that could actually shut down some ways of doing things for very long periods of time, I think it might make alternate solutions more important. Dust storms and cold spells are easily countered at the moment, I think, and are basically just a matter of storage capacity or overproduction.
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Mar 18, 2018 05:26
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gently caress me but the steam reviews for this are garbage. Piles upon piles of people just throwing in the towel because they didn't understand stuff. Chakan posted:I haven't found a use for waste rock, and I have several dump sites filled with it. Will there be some tech that lets me convert it to usable materials? Or am I doomed to eventually drown in boulders on sol 10K? You eventually get a technology to convert it into concrete but it was literally second to last on the list for me. The tech randomization is a right bastard sometimes and honestly I think it could do with being a bit different because it fucks the pacing up something fierce when you unlock fusion power after researching stuff to make your wind turbines generate 20 power each.
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Mar 18, 2018 06:03
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Fans posted:They're garbage for every game ever. I wouldn't worry about them. Yeah but they're like, aggressively bad and full of people making factually incorrect statements because they don't know how to play the game and apparently didn't bother to look at any of the menus? I'm kinda worried it's going to sink the game honestly because it's really promising once you get it. I'm going to post the one I wrote to see if anyone has anything they can think to add to it: quote:I think this is a good game when all is said and done. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 06:06
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I wondered about that but I thought that surely someone couldn't have played a colony management sim before and not known about the importance of haulers..? Or played tropico and not learned that teamsters are the backbone of all industry. Drones are like, one of the first things I import more of.
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Mar 18, 2018 06:21
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Fans posted:I will tell you one thing though, they really need the ability to reassign drones to new hubs that isn't doing it individually. It's not a big deal for the easier difficulties where you can just import more and ignore that, but on the harder ones it is a fucker and needs fixing. It is a bit annoying yeah, I mean I didn't have too much trouble with it on 450% but it's still a bit of a pain that doesn't really need to be in there. Just being able to shift click multiple drones or box select and click on a hub to reassign them would be good.
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Mar 18, 2018 06:25
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Pirate Radar posted:I tried the International starter at first just to get the hang of things, but then I switched to Russia/Oligarch for the fuel bonuses and sweet arcology towers. I’m finding things a lot more interesting when I’m actually measuring out resources and struggling to stay on top of things instead of just ordering more from Earth by the truckload. 200/sol starting research sucks though. I strongly recommend playing it this way, the game is really at its best when you have to deal with a lot of scarcity. I think honestly it's frankly just an easy game full stop, or at least it's a quite predictable game a lot of the time, your main challenge is dealing with weather events messing up your timing which is mostly an issue at the start and on high difficulties, but it can be really fun while it's in that stage.
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Mar 18, 2018 14:43
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RE: drone reassignment, turns out that actually you can literally just disassemble drones into a nebulous pool of "prefabs" and then rebuild them at any hub instantly. I think that's how you're supposed to do it.
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Mar 18, 2018 15:21
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nessin posted:I don't think resource scarcity makes the game difficult, it just makes it longer. Maybe there is a balance there between trying to be as quick as possible with as few resources as possible, but so long as you can get an early chain up and running to earn money, you can manage any resource problem. Meteor showers are definite bullshit if they land on you though I didn't have too much trouble with dust storms because you can close your solars which will save you some trouble. I think mostly your goal first needs to be securing a supply of rare metals because that's your lifeline, it gets you steady funding and can keep your going until you can get more self sufficient. I definitely had a really good balancing experience with my game trying to decide what I wanted to spend my money on and planning how I could get up and running before I ran out of rare metals. I think the game's at its best when you're always thinking how you need to expand to acquire new resources which is why I advocate for scarcity. If I was going to change the game I would add the possibility of slow-to-extract but limitless resource deposits, so that you can build up a sort of foundation level of supplies, but you wouldn't be able to support many domes or machines with them, so you'd need to then plan your expansion to other resource fields to increase your base maintenance capacity. Then on top of that you'd have your exports and your exhaustible deposits to give you fast expansion resources. Then I'd slow research right down and probably cut export prices too/make imports progressively more expensive so that you have to focus on developing your own industry.
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Mar 18, 2018 16:42
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The university I think is really an example of the game doing well with colonist management, you literally just build it and it automatically trains people in specializations you need, then if you set your domes up properly they'll automatically go move to the dome where their jobs are. As a note, some buildings like the university and the school don't actually need staff, their job slots are for people using them, so open the nightshift to get people educated quickly. Same with the sanatorium spire.
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Mar 18, 2018 17:54
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IcePhoenix posted:After looking through some of the posts about specializing I think I need to rethink how I build domes. My evaluation goal was to have 200 colonists at sol 100 and I ended up building lots of apartments + the spire that houses people, but this often leaves me with too many people to work every job. I may have to stop building so many apartments and start building at least twice as many domes. That being said, I really wish there were more building types. Triboelectric scrubbers are helpful for sustainability, they basically blow dust off things around them, so put one near each of your drone hubs (both those buildings use electronics for maintenence) and build all your outbuildings near them. Then you only have to pay the upkeep on the scrubber. Polymers scale basically with your workforce because you only need power and people to make them, so your main limitation is going to be metals/rare metals which again you can cut a lot of use out of by using the scrubbers. Fans posted:Once you research the Sanatorium you can put it in the Idiot dome and cure idiocy for good. It can't cure idiocy by default unless there's a breakthrough for it that adds that functionality. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 18:22 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 18:19
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Protip: Triboelectric scrubbers work on buildings inside domes through the walls  E: oh god I built a gently caress dome and now people won't stop having kids heeeeelp 85 out of 400 people in the colony are children and my population exploded by about 200 in the last 20 days from all the loving. E2: Protip2: Triboelectric scrubbers work on each other... OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:31 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 19:11
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Bedurndurn posted:So two tribo-thingies next to each other are immortal? And so is anything else near them? Specifically they won't accumulate dust or need maintenence unless something happens to them, so they'll still be damaged by meteors or dust devils or being frozen, but it cuts your everyday maintenance bill to zero, yes. just takes power. Don't forget to expand their service area to maximum too. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 19:38
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That's sort of intentional, the whole thing's supposed to have this retro futuristic vibe to it. It can look really nice once you get some things set up.
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Mar 18, 2018 20:54
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King Doom posted:Has anyone had any success with childcare domes? I built one, filled it with nurseries, schools, playgrounds and an automatic grocer and diner and toggled children off in all domes but that one and made it child exclusive and now instead of moving there on their own they just sit wherever they spawned and die in the gutters. They will not move unless I manually make them and it's pissing me off. I erm, don't think children work well in their own dome. You will have much better luck with more of a "procreation dome" setup where you make it comfortable and have a bunch of housing, then put a medical spire with the birth rate upgrade in it, and a bunch of nurseries schools and playgrounds. I think kids need adults around to look after them? If you stack up comfort you'll get people loving like rabbits and then the young unspecialized adults can move into a college dome with a bunch of universities/exercise fields to get them educated/fit, then they can move into specialist domes once they've qualified. E: also yea maybe you need shuttles? I built all my domes right next door to each other and I get a lot of movement though so it might be distance related. This is my gently caress dome, you can see it basically exploded my population: 
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Mar 18, 2018 |
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Mar 18, 2018 21:56
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