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Surviving Mars - colony management sim from Tropico devs

miles teg

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Jan 18, 2015
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Ah it's so depressing to read this. I was hoping for a rimworld like gameplay and some Anno management gameplay to organize logistics between the domes. Nothing so complex, I guess?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
What exactly is depressing? Nobody has said anything about the game other than an LOL TRANNIES screenshot. There aren't even any reviews.
 

fantadomat

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Hahahahaha,my pride and accomplishment is that i am the only person ignored by Infinitron,maybe i will try and become developer of incline just to troll him. Curious if there is any engine good for rpg making without the need for programming knowledge. Something turn based,like spiderweb games.
 

Blaine

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Yeah, I was hoping this game would turn out to be at least decent, but according to pretty much everything I've read it's entirely skippable.

I'd like a meaty 4X, city building, base building, and/or resource management game set in a desert or on a desert planet that's actually good sometime this decade. I don't know why, I just really want to play a good game in a desert.

I think the last playable game primarily set in a desert was New Vegas, but that technically wasn't this decade.
 

fantadomat

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Yeah, I was hoping this game would turn out to be at least decent, but according to pretty much everything I've read it's entirely skippable.

I'd like a meaty 4X, city building, base building, and/or resource management game set in a desert or on a desert planet that's actually good sometime this decade. I don't know why, I just really want to play a good game in a desert.

I think the last playable game primarily set in a desert was New Vegas, but that technically wasn't this decade.
Frostpunk is coming in a day or two,it looks very promising. Would certainty try it out.
 

Blaine

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I say I want a game in a desert, nigga suggests one that takes place in a freezer.

Side note: There are such things as cold deserts, but they still pretty much look like deserts.

The game does look interesting, but it's actually over a month away from release still.
 

fantadomat

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I say I want a game in a desert, nigga suggests one that takes place in a freezer.

Side note: There are such things as cold deserts, but they still pretty much look like deserts.

The game does look interesting, but it's actually over a month away from release still.
Sorry i misremembered the month mate. Also Frostpunk looks very deserty to me,a lot of nothingness and shit climate. If you want sunny desert,well you can play/replay anno 1404,it have some desert maps. If you are in to RPS try out "Homeworld Deserts of Kharak" if you haven't done it. It is a ....good game,not great but fun and finishable without getting boring.
 

Jenkem

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Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I helped put crap in Monomyth
this game is fun and I take umbrage with fantadomat's view as he complains about things that are doable in the game. the game has flaws for sure but the foundation is good and you can make the game as challenging as you wish via start locations.. currently battling both regularly occuring meteors and cold snaps and it's fun
 

ERYFKRAD

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Strap Yourselves In Serpent in the Staglands Shadorwun: Hong Kong Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
I say I want a game in a desert, nigga suggests one that takes place in a freezer.

Side note: There are such things as cold deserts, but they still pretty much look like deserts.

The game does look interesting, but it's actually over a month away from release still.
You might want to look at Kenshi. It's early access and stuff, but a significant part of the landscape includes deserts.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
OK, reviews.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...w-offworld-things-are-just-itching-to-go-awry

Surviving Mars review - offworld, things are just itching to go awry
Dome Alone.

jpg

recommended-large-net.png

The Tropico team plays it relatively straight on the red planet - but trouble is never far away.


Survive Mars? It took me the best part of a day to decide where to land. And with good reason: there's a lot of stuff to think about from the very off here in this wonderfully detailed planet colonisation sim. I'm not sure that on my most recent attempt at surviving Mars - spoiler: I didn't - I was any quicker at finding a parking spot than I was on my initial outing.

Firstly, what to name the initial rocket? Tricky business! I tend not to rename things in games these days. Not quite so much, anyway. Soldiers? Too many of them, and they only die on you. Cities? Who is bolshy enough to think they deserve to decide what an entire city should be called? But a rocket? Christ, there is romance to a rocket. Romance and the suspicion that they will be in limited supply. I was going to call my first Surviving Mars rocket Feynman, but I couldn't bring myself to type that in given the dim view he sometimes took of the whole space mission stuff. So I went with Hawking. He has been in all our minds this week, of course, and he has always struck me as the kind of man who would enjoy getting his name stuck on a rocket.

What to pack in the rocket? An eternity of fretting. (This is why I've never progressed very far with Dwarf Fortress, which Surviving Mars, at times, kind of reminds me of.) And then the landing zone. This stuff is crucial. Not only do you get to spin a beautiful globe of Mars to pick your spot, probably choosing, your first few times, between a few suggestions the game has made for you in advance, when you finally do pick that spot you then have to pick a smaller spot within it. You use up a few probes to reveal the terrain in any sectors that look promising - nice and flat for building stuff - and then you try to slot yourself in between resources. Concrete's crucial in the early game. Metals would be nice. You can make oxygen pretty much anywhere and ditto electricity. What you're really looking for, I think, is water. Your first landing brings no people with it, just drones, and with drones you try to get the essentials running - oxygen, electricity, water - and then you can build your first habitation dome, plug it into the grids and pipes and start thinking about making food and calling in some actual human crew.

Early on there's a lot of this kind of stuff: connecting things to power sources, plumbing things in, learning which resources various buildings need, working out how to conserve the excess power and water and oxygen that you're eventually creating. Surviving Mars is dense and knotty from the start: solar panels - stop me if you've guessed this - require sunlight to work their alchemy. They unplug you at night, while turbines don't work as well if you build them in a valley. Concrete factories chuck dust everywhere, as do landing spaceships, and this dust damages everything. The cables you string across the landscape get worn through and start sparking, the pipes can get hit by meteors or just spring leaks because pipes are basically massive jerks.

jpg

Shuttles allow you to hide your weaknesses from yourself - on my first game I was relying on metals from Earth for far too long. (I had to move this shuttle, incidentally, because it was blocking my power cables. I should not be allowed a space shuttle.)

What makes it all comprehensible, though - and while it takes a few minutes, even the stupidest colonist like me will get there eventually - is that every individual thing works very simply in and of itself. Take that first dome: you're going to need oxygen and electricity and water, and once you've served the production problems you can just hook them up. The more complex resources? Well, hopefully you brought some of them on your starter shuttle, to get you through the period of early expansion. Anything that requires humans to make - and fancier resources often do - will have to wait for humans to arrive, and for humans to arrive they have to be able to eat and breathe.

Another thing that gets you through the hard stuff is that, man, it all looks so wonderful. Shadows move slowly across the red soil as the day passes, solar panels fold neatly into the ground as darkness falls. The degree of control you have over the parts of your toybox - this is the kind of game where you can tell a factory to stop production over night if you fancy - is matched by the intricacy of the visual simulation. You know a machine is getting clogged with dust because it starts to look a bit pinkish and gritty: Martian conjunctivitis. You know a waste area needs expanding because it's filled up with neat piles of rubble.

Bringing life to all this stuff, before the humans arrive, are the drones, which will only work within certain areas - proximity to shuttles or drone hubs. These kinds of things both drive and control the pace of your outward expansion. Alongside building things, drones are a bit like neuroglia, I think: they keep everything ticking over as long as they have resources to do so. When they don't have the resources to do so, Surviving Mars displays a very convincing eagerness to spiral out of control terribly, terribly swiftly.

jpg

The tech tree has been different each time I've played, but I've yet to be snookered by its various iterations.

It's all those simple things, working together in close proximity. A factory fails and you find that you don't have the resources to repair it. Because the factory was making other resources - and because it's failed - suddenly you're out of two resources at once. Snowball Mars. Sure, if you're playing one of the easier game arrangements you might have a bunch of shuttles ready to shunt any resources you need over from earth, but doing that too often is going to tank your economy and then you've got another problem to go along with your breaking factories.

Humans, as you might have guessed, only complicate things. The little domes they live in, with their glass bubble tops, reinforce the idea that Martian colonists are basically lab rats, and the game is eager to double down on this notion. Humans have a range of traits and impulses and skills, but for my first few games mine were terribly willing to develop gambling addictions or alcoholism. I wasn't building enough of the right kinds of facilities for them, and I was forcing them to work at night, which was probably a drag. Also, though, Philip K. Dick was right: Mars just brings out the worst in people.

Despite everything that can go wrong - and despite my uncertainty as to whether this is ultimately a city builder or a survival game - there is a winning kind of optimism to proceedings that keeps me going even when Mars grinds me down. It's there in the beautiful tech screen where research can be spent on perks that scroll far into the future - smart buildings that need less maintenance, planetary survey boosters that don't require power or upkeep. Just when I think I couldn't love this screen any more, one of the tooltips drops in a quote from the great William Osler. Swoon!

jpg

What can we say about Dong Fu?

This optimism! It's there in the gloriously busy animations that become visible when you zoom in to watch a drone repairing cabling, in the sense of wonder when you investigate a distant anomaly only to find the bones of Beagle 2 and realise afresh: Oh, god, yes, I'm actually on Mars, aren't I? It's there in the industrious sprawl of the game, buildings of increasing ingenuity spreading out from a core of electricity and pipework that starts to feel like a central nervous system.

If you are the kind of person who needs all this to be going somewhere, Surviving Mars has you covered. Mission evaluation goals crop up as you play, and each campaign builds in narrative thrust around a selection of mysteries - mysteries that aren't fundamentally that mysterious, if we're all being honest, because you know they're coming from the off. The purest pleasures, though, are the quiet rewards of hard work and a tidy mind: colonies that stretch across an entire map, every section explored and covered with busy robots and busy people beetling away without losing their minds or wrecking the economy. The steady click and purr of optimisation.

At times, with a sim like this, success can seem kind of disgusting, as unfettered wilderness is buried alive beneath factories. Here, though, it genuinely seems to say something positive about spirit. This is a game that manages to remain optimistic about human can-do while never forgetting that Mars looks like a bit of a dive and it's going to be properly awful trying to live there. Awful, but interesting. We will go to Mars to find out who we actually are.
 

Blaine

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You might want to look at Kenshi. It's early access and stuff, but a significant part of the landscape includes deserts.

Strangely enough, I was doing just that a couple of days ago, and have been following the game for years. I'm still not too sure about it, but I imagine I'll pull the trigger someday, possibly after v1.0.


Holy shit, I haven't been to HOTU in years. Talk about a blast from the past.
 

fantadomat

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this game is fun and I take umbrage with fantadomat's view as he complains about things that are doable in the game. the game has flaws for sure but the foundation is good and you can make the game as challenging as you wish via start locations.. currently battling both regularly occuring meteors and cold snaps and it's fun
Soo people are to buy the game and wait for the mods to fix it? In my post i am even bias toward the devs,the assholes have their studios an hour away from my home. I do wanted for fellow Bulgarians to do some incline,but this ain't it. The game is not hard at all,i did go with the Russians and some hard mystery on a medium starting place,and what make the game hard was the boredom. Also meteorites are annoying shit. The game have some potential for modding,but it is not worth for the what it is now.
 

Jenkem

その目、だれの目?
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Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I helped put crap in Monomyth
this game is fun and I take umbrage with fantadomat's view as he complains about things that are doable in the game. the game has flaws for sure but the foundation is good and you can make the game as challenging as you wish via start locations.. currently battling both regularly occuring meteors and cold snaps and it's fun
Soo people are to buy the game and wait for the mods to fix it? In my post i am even bias toward the devs,the assholes have their studios an hour away from my home. I do wanted for fellow Bulgarians to do some incline,but this ain't it. The game is not hard at all,i did go with the Russians and some hard mystery on a medium starting place,and what make the game hard was the boredom. Also meteorites are annoying shit. The game have some potential for modding,but it is not worth for the what it is now.

I'm doubting if you even played, because you said you picked Russia but then black people came.. but Russia was only the sponsor, the applicants come from world wide.. Maybe they gave you a bunch fo black people to get them off Earth?

some things you stated that make me feel as though you played for an hour and didn't understand things:

Drone AI is bad - in my experience it is pretty good, you need to know its range and have material storages in its range so it can work.. if things are outside of its range yes it won't do anything. I have several drone hubs that overlap slightly and the drones will bring materials from one end to another in a daisy chain, so that the next set of drones can grab it and bring it where it needs to be

your colonists left = colonists will leave if they are homesick (mostly due to being homeless or unemployed) or have the tourist trait (which you can say you don't want any of these people when requesting colonists)

"A working strategy that i found out a bit later is to buy as much research rovers as possible and grab the +100 research tech for them." - this is where I know you are either retarded or full of shit. while yes this works for a few hundred research points, there are diminishing returns, the more explorer rovers you have you receive a penalty to research so this 'strategy' is buying a ton of them for research is a waste of money and retarded.. getting 2-3 more is realistic.. "getting as much as possible" while still grabbing +100 each is bullshit

protip: if you had built a dome and put a research institute in there you woud have employed your people to make them not want to leave and have gotten a lot more research than buying tons of rovers, there is also no diminishing returns on institutes (unless built in the same dome)

so you failed to set up a supply chain and the colonists thought your place was a shithole and left and you blame others? classic eastern european
 

fantadomat

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this game is fun and I take umbrage with fantadomat's view as he complains about things that are doable in the game. the game has flaws for sure but the foundation is good and you can make the game as challenging as you wish via start locations.. currently battling both regularly occuring meteors and cold snaps and it's fun
Soo people are to buy the game and wait for the mods to fix it? In my post i am even bias toward the devs,the assholes have their studios an hour away from my home. I do wanted for fellow Bulgarians to do some incline,but this ain't it. The game is not hard at all,i did go with the Russians and some hard mystery on a medium starting place,and what make the game hard was the boredom. Also meteorites are annoying shit. The game have some potential for modding,but it is not worth for the what it is now.

I'm doubting if you even played, because you said you picked Russia but then black people came.. but Russia was only the sponsor, the applicants come from world wide.. Maybe they gave you a bunch fo black people to get them off Earth?

some things you stated that make me feel as though you played for an hour and didn't understand things:

Drone AI is bad - in my experience it is pretty good, you need to know its range and have material storages in its range so it can work.. if things are outside of its range yes it won't do anything. I have several drone hubs that overlap slightly and the drones will bring materials from one end to another in a daisy chain, so that the next set of drones can grab it and bring it where it needs to be

your colonists left = colonists will leave if they are homesick (mostly due to being homeless or unemployed) or have the tourist trait (which you can say you don't want any of these people when requesting colonists)

"A working strategy that i found out a bit later is to buy as much research rovers as possible and grab the +100 research tech for them." - this is where I know you are either retarded or full of shit. while yes this works for a few hundred research points, there are diminishing returns, the more explorer rovers you have you receive a penalty to research so this 'strategy' is buying a ton of them for research is a waste of money and retarded.. getting 2-3 more is realistic.. "getting as much as possible" while still grabbing +100 each is bullshit

protip: if you had built a dome and put a research institute in there you woud have employed your people to make them not want to leave and have gotten a lot more research than buying tons of rovers, there is also no diminishing returns on institutes (unless built in the same dome)

so you failed to set up a supply chain and the colonists thought your place was a shithole and left and you blame others? classic eastern european
Hahaha a lot of assumptions there mate,and all of them are wrong. Are you butthurt or something? I see that you didn't play as Russia and went for the super easy international mission like the noob you are. With Russia all the people i checked were Russians,even the black ones,and yes i didn't checked all of them.
And i take offence on the "played an hour" part,it took me at least 4 hours until i uninstalled the game,also it took me like 5 minutes to get the game and its loop,it seems it is far too complex for a simple minded person like you. The game is some basic level of complexity,you place shit in the range of shit,it is a game placing raged shit around resources. Only way to loose at the game is too run out of resources on the map and don't have enough for maintenance. As for the research institute.....from what i remember it needed tech....and tech is random. The core gameplay loop is researching priorities and mining resources so you have enough shit for maintenance.It is boring and tedious game that nothing interesting happens in it for the first few hours....maybe even for the whole game. If you think that this game is complex,then you are very simple person mate.
 

Raghar

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Jul 16, 2009
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22,506
Yeah, I was hoping this game would turn out to be at least decent, but according to pretty much everything I've read it's entirely skippable.

I'd like a meaty 4X, city building, base building, and/or resource management game set in a desert or on a desert planet that's actually good sometime this decade. I don't know why, I just really want to play a good game in a desert.

I think the last playable game primarily set in a desert was New Vegas, but that technically wasn't this decade.
anno 1701?
 

Jenkem

その目、だれの目?
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An oasis of love and friendship.
Make the Codex Great Again! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. I helped put crap in Monomyth
this game is fun and I take umbrage with fantadomat's view as he complains about things that are doable in the game. the game has flaws for sure but the foundation is good and you can make the game as challenging as you wish via start locations.. currently battling both regularly occuring meteors and cold snaps and it's fun
Soo people are to buy the game and wait for the mods to fix it? In my post i am even bias toward the devs,the assholes have their studios an hour away from my home. I do wanted for fellow Bulgarians to do some incline,but this ain't it. The game is not hard at all,i did go with the Russians and some hard mystery on a medium starting place,and what make the game hard was the boredom. Also meteorites are annoying shit. The game have some potential for modding,but it is not worth for the what it is now.

I'm doubting if you even played, because you said you picked Russia but then black people came.. but Russia was only the sponsor, the applicants come from world wide.. Maybe they gave you a bunch fo black people to get them off Earth?

some things you stated that make me feel as though you played for an hour and didn't understand things:

Drone AI is bad - in my experience it is pretty good, you need to know its range and have material storages in its range so it can work.. if things are outside of its range yes it won't do anything. I have several drone hubs that overlap slightly and the drones will bring materials from one end to another in a daisy chain, so that the next set of drones can grab it and bring it where it needs to be

your colonists left = colonists will leave if they are homesick (mostly due to being homeless or unemployed) or have the tourist trait (which you can say you don't want any of these people when requesting colonists)

"A working strategy that i found out a bit later is to buy as much research rovers as possible and grab the +100 research tech for them." - this is where I know you are either retarded or full of shit. while yes this works for a few hundred research points, there are diminishing returns, the more explorer rovers you have you receive a penalty to research so this 'strategy' is buying a ton of them for research is a waste of money and retarded.. getting 2-3 more is realistic.. "getting as much as possible" while still grabbing +100 each is bullshit

protip: if you had built a dome and put a research institute in there you woud have employed your people to make them not want to leave and have gotten a lot more research than buying tons of rovers, there is also no diminishing returns on institutes (unless built in the same dome)

so you failed to set up a supply chain and the colonists thought your place was a shithole and left and you blame others? classic eastern european
Hahaha a lot of assumptions there mate,and all of them are wrong. Are you butthurt or something? I see that you didn't play as Russia and went for the super easy international mission like the noob you are. With Russia all the people i checked were Russians,even the black ones,and yes i didn't checked all of them.
And i take offence on the "played an hour" part,it took me at least 4 hours until i uninstalled the game,also it took me like 5 minutes to get the game and its loop,it seems it is far too complex for a simple minded person like you. The game is some basic level of complexity,you place shit in the range of shit,it is a game placing raged shit around resources. Only way to loose at the game is too run out of resources on the map and don't have enough for maintenance. As for the research institute.....from what i remember it needed tech....and tech is random. The core gameplay loop is researching priorities and mining resources so you have enough shit for maintenance.It is boring and tedious game that nothing interesting happens in it for the first few hours....maybe even for the whole game. If you think that this game is complex,then you are very simple person mate.

so you didn't even get into the mystery, stopped playing after the initial geting your shit set up phase (which you clearly didn't do well since people wanted to GTFO) and I guess the game is complex.. for you. research institutes are a tech that needs to be unlocked, you are correct, I unfortunately used the wrong term and I apologize. However you should have known that research labs are available from the get go and is the initial research building... yes institutes need to be researched as they provide a lot more research points than the labs... having tiered buildings in a city builder must be too complex for you.

also fyi the sponsor selected is not the only thing that changes the difficulty, start location matters too.. you can pick russia and a safe place to land with low level threats and be fine, you can take usa and go to a place with lots of meteors, cold snaps, dust storms etc. and have a worse time.
 

Hellion

Arcane
Joined
Feb 5, 2013
Messages
1,582
So I reached the "Marsgate" end-game mystery, which started with
some Earth corporation sending secret, unidentified Rovers on Mars, which after a bit of research turned out to be illegal weapons platforms

and ended with
me reporting their illegal weapons to the UN, which made the corporation order its Rovers to attack me and turn my defenseless base to ashes, because a Metals shortage prevented me from erecting Defense Turrets in time.

10/10 would blow the whistle again.
 

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