Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Blood_Librarian]

That's pretty metal, I'd boot my game back up and start playing if my GPU didnt die.

[dennislp3]

I found this game horribly simple and repetitive with practically no replay value....I got a refund within my 2 hours (played for an hour and a half I think).

Did they ever do anything to spice it up with patches?

[Teneb]

I enjoyed watching LPs of it, but I'd never be able to play it as it is. It just seems so... plain.

I find it pretty relaxing and tend to play while watching youtube or netflix.

[Karnewarrior]

I enjoyed watching LPs of it, but I'd never be able to play it as it is. It just seems so... plain.

It's not really as plain as it looks, particularly with mods. So, basically, it's a Paradox game.

I found this game horribly simple and repetitive with practically no replay value....I got a refund within my 2 hours (played for an hour and a half I think).

Did they ever do anything to spice it up with patches?

In typical Paradox fashion, yes. Although I started playing it pretty late, so I couldn't say what they did. I will say that it has plenty of replay value though - the Mysteries really are different, so you can play through at least that many times, since thesemi-random landscape and mystery will combine to make each colony pretty much unique. Plus you can always come up with self-imposed challenges like my "Earth is Dying" run.

The only thing I wish they'd do is give us more variety in buildings, but that's solved pretty easily with mods.

[ChairmanPoo]

I enjoyed watching LPs of it, but I'd never be able to play it as it is. It just seems so... plain.

I find it pretty relaxing and tend to play while watching youtube or netflix.

Meh. You can do that with the old simcitys. Or DF.  All of which are more complex.

Denisip3: maybe Oxygen not included is more on the lines of what you want? Its shaping nice, IMO. Asteroid colony sim. Last update allows  you to explore other asteroids though I've not gotten there yet.

Really its a shame it doesnt have its own thread

[dennislp3]

THanks for the recommendation...I actually have that already and I am pretty happy with how it plays!

[forsaken1111]

So, Green Planet is out along with a free update.

The free update includes:

1. Landscaping! You can now level terrain, remove those fuckoff-huge rock outcrops in the way of your ideal dome location, and make massive ramps to span the height differences between Martian plateaus. Can also change the surface texture. Just a visual thing but you can finally get rid of the old rocket scorch marks or make the area outside your dome look nice and uniform. Drones can do landscaping or you can use the new rover, the RC dozer, to do landscaping projects far from your drone hubs. Landscaping requires waste rock when you are filling holes or raising terrain, and gives you waste rock if you are lowering terrain. Dozers on automatic once you have the rover AI will drive themselves to any landscaping project to help and will deliver or haul away waste rock. Example: https://youtu.be/GCxoupxnZjw?t=94
1a. Oh also you can build those rock outcrops back up again if you like the way they look.
2. New special projects, such as launching high speed comms sats and redirecting meteors toward your colony's map to maybe get extra metals/polymers and also maybe accidentally hit your colony!
3. 2 new "buildings". One is a 'rocket construction site' where you can build your own rockets (once you have researched the tech). The other is a larger waste rock dump site. Waste rock is now used in landscaping and terraforming, and can be moved around by rovers.
4. 20 new events to add some content to the mid/late game.
5. Reworked tech tree screen. It's a lot better.
6. Lots of optimization. Even late game now the game runs well on my computer. It used to start to chug around 3-4 hundred colonists
7. It's not mentioned much but you can also now shift-click to queue rover orders, and click-drag to band select drones and rovers and such.

Green Planet

Well the big thing here is Terraforming. You can terraform Mars! This works by influencing 4 statistics, Atmosphere, Temperature, Hydration and Vegetation. Each of these goes from 0% (martian normal) to 100% (earth normal). You influence these in various ways, either by using buildings to pump out greenhouse gas to raise the temperature or by sending rockets out to redirect water-ice asteroids to Mars to raise the hydration. Eventually you can, with enough work, make the skies blue and the ground green. I especially like planting forests around my domes and now I grow all my food in open farms outside.

And speaking of domes, once your terraforming gets far enough along you can open your previously domed cities and even build a 'capital city' which is totally open and HUGE.

It's been a lot of fun so far. The endgame used to kind of drop off once you finished the mystery and all of your sponsor goals. Now you have another, larger goal. Make that red planet green.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/952890/Surviving_Mars_Green_Planet/

[Trolldefender99]

I bought surviving mars. Thanks for the update The green DLC sounds amazing, and having a huge city on mars sounds cool.

Been watching quill18 play it pre-green DLC and it actually looks quite fun. And for 10 dollars thats cheap. I know it has a free weekend I could have tried, but I bought it anyway. I saw enough of quill18 videos to know I'll like it.

[Akura]

Rimmy did a video on Surviving Mars that gives a pretty good look at the game.

EDIT: Playing the free-weekend version of it now, currently in the tutorial that first gives you people to not kill (semi-)accidentally. Something is really bugging me about the Living Complexes. They appear to have a central elevator, since there's no other physical path to the upper floors, but the elevators themselves are impossibly aligned.

Spoiler: Picture of what I mean. (click to show/hide)

The blue doors are what I presume to be the elevator, but they aren't connected. Above the first floor's elevator, there's the empty floor of a bedroom.

[Karnewarrior]

Huh. I barely ever build the living complexes anyway, since I prefer the apartment density and I rarely need the extra housing happiness, but you're right, that is a bit messed up. Maybe bring it up on the pdox forums? Seems like something they would fix in a patch, and probably isn't super complex compared to the other stuff they're doing like adding new mechanics.

[Zangi]

Obviously is a teleportation device, not an elevator.

Watching these posts.

[Gabeux]

Weird I haven't commented on this before. I have the game and the season pass since launch, but only did one full playthrough in which I failed by an inch to get the main mission done before it timed out.
I kinda realized they were gonna put terraforming one day, so I waited a looong time. The game changed (for better) decently enough, but I still don't think it's a game everyone would like. For one, it gives out that Cities Skylines/Tropico vibe of "You can fail, but it's hard to fail." I feel in Surviving Mars if you don't think before you do stuff, eventually you can bring yourself to a state of things constantly breaking, or constantly being zeroed on some critical resource (like Food or Machine Parts). To me this is worse than outright failing, because it keeps you in a limbo of not really progressing and not really failing.

All it takes is a little planning and it goes much smoother. In one of the previous updates, they added rival colonies that you can trade and interact with a bit, along with Expeditions. This makes the pacing much better and also lowers the chance of falling in the 'limbo' I mentioned.
When it comes to Terraforming, I didn't get to it yet since I feel it's safer to go with a strong build/econ as it can take a long while to bring those parameters up. I do like the gamestart that lets you buy a RC Dozer (landscaping rover) right in the start, though!
The Landscaping stuff is soooo nice to have! It really annoys me on sandbox/builder games when you cannot do anything about obstacles and are just forced to deal with ugly terrain. Now you can flat the hell out of Mars, which makes good-looking connected Domes much easier. Certain maps do have mountains, but still it lets you makes ramps, so it's really cool.

Regarding the elevator, I'm pretty sure it became a top-ranked reddit post in the past. Not sure if the person who did it thought no one would notice, or if he's low-key waiting to use "this is a Turbolift!" excuse.

[Karnewarrior]

It's the elevator from Willy Wonka, and it goes sideways as well as up and down. 

Gabeux, I kind of get what you're saying about the fail condition. Thankfully, some of the game rules help with that. the one passenger rocket rule means you only have one set of colonists to fuck up with, and the increasing import cost can make it difficult to import new materials, making colonists valuable. Combined, they give something of a soft lose condition in losing all your colonists - If you do, you don't explicitly lose, but you're basically stuck.

[RulerOfNothing]

It's the elevator from Willy Wonka, and it goes sideways as well as up and down. 

Gabeux, I kind of get what you're saying about the fail condition. Thankfully, some of the game rules help with that. the one passenger rocket rule means you only have one set of colonists to fuck up with, and the increasing import cost can make it difficult to import new materials, making colonists valuable. Combined, they give something of a soft lose condition in losing all your colonists - If you do, you don't explicitly lose, but you're basically stuck.

I'm pretty sure that losing all your colonists is an actual lose condition, though maybe they changed that.

[Akura]

Do colonists only do things up to one dome away? I've got two residence domes, a dome linking both, and a farm dome on the opposite end of that. I just brought in a large load of new colonists, most of them botanists to work the farms, and they're refusing to take the farm jobs. And when I manually assign them the farm job, they lose their housing, and vice versa. The distance between the residence and farm domes is actually shorter than the walk from the landing pad to the the domes when they arrived.