f13.net

We talked a little about Surviving Mars in the "What are you playing" thread and most people had heard that it had crappy documentation and refused to try it until that was fixed.
Just to let you know, the latest patch features a decent five part tutorial that tells you everything you need to know to get started with your colony. I played through it myself and if it had existed when I first started playing I wouldn't have had to watch YouTube tutorials.
If you decide to try it just accept the default settings on your first game. They select a sponsor and commander that give you a lot of benefits to make your first colony more likely to succeed. Oh, and pick an easy landing spot with lots of resources and not too high a disaster rating. Expect to crash and burn a few times anyway but that's half the fun.

I remember we had some talk about this somewhere (Discord maybe?) but the consensus then was sort of meh. Steam reviews are still Mixed but it's on sale for $24 and I haven't played a good city builder in forever. I probably shouldn't buy it, since I'm going to be working 14 hour shifts 7 days a week for the next month, but... is it fun?

I've played it.

It's.. okay. The big problems with it are that it just isn't that deep of a game and is incredibly easy, even if you turn on some of the difficulty-enhancing options and select a hard starting area. Once you get the basic supply chain going there is almost zero difficulty left and you're just going through the motions. There are some fun moments to be had, and if you're looking for a more casual builder then it can be a decent choice.

I'm glad I didn't pay for it.

Tried this recently.  Bug in the tutorial left me wondering how to play.

What was the bug?

Whatever objective I was doing didn't trigger.  Something with the hauler, I believe.

Strange and annoying. I thought the tutorial was bug free.

Maybe it was a potato bug

Humble Bundle is offering the deluxe edition of this for free... if you link your steam account with the, And sign up for their newsletter. Still pretty painless as offers go.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/surviving-mars-deluxe-edition-free-game

I still replay this one from time to time. It's nice to terraform Mars once in a while.

Was bored and looking for something new to try and remembered that I had picked this thing up as an Epic Game Store Freebie.

Seems sort of ok, but man, I really need to figure out how to get shit to actually produce faster than I suck it up.   My first "trial" play through after doing the tutorial went sort of ok, until I ended up with 3 or 4 separate "base" groups scattered across the map, and suddenly ended up constantly completely out of the advanced materials (Protiens, Electronics and Machine parts i think).   Couldn't even ship them in from earth faster than I was burning through them keeping shit repaired.

Seemed like no matter what I did, i simply couldn't get enough Engineers to stay in my facilities + Geologists to keep mining stuff.  Topped it all off by ending up about 6 hours into the game when suddenly I realized i was consuming about 5x as much food as i was making and my entire colony started starving to death (note to self: Bad idea to rely on the free food the dropships give you once you are at capacity and no longer trucking people in all the time).   Really need to figure out what a good layout is for kitting out the various sizes of domes, as obviously whatever I was doing wasnt quite right.

Anyone got any suggestions?

(also, someone please, PLEASE tell me there is a mod out there that fixes the absolutely fucking moronic need to suck up an interior space tile in a dome simply to place a connecting path to another dome.  Whoever decided they needed to do this instead of simply having the connecting paths connect to the EXTERIOR of the dome needs to be shot).

It feels like the rare game that Paradox said "well, that's enough, we're not going to keep trying to make this one better" about. This kind of game is for me such a fragile conceptual space: I either love it to fucking death or I can't make myself keep going. Sometimes I just do not understand why it's not hooking me no matter how much I think about it. I think maybe it's when the input-output relationships are just too obvious and it feels like there's only one optimal build, but it's not just that. It's also when I just don't even understand how a building system works, it's when a system seems to work against what's being simulated. It's also when AI behavior is too fucking stupid or too predictable. I feel like my perfect builder has to have agent-based AI close to Dwarf Fortress or maybe Rimworld--some randomness of traits, some unpredictability of reaction, some emergent outcomes that are not like before. I can't stand a sim builder that plays more like a puzzle game: do this, do that, do it in the order you're supposed to do. Surviving Mars doesn't feel entirely right in any of these ways but it's not entirely wrong either? Like, I can play it and not immediately hate myself but I also can't get hooked on it.

It's an enjoyable game right up until the point it isn't. I played it with most of the DLC (other than the last one) and loved it, until I got big enough that some domes needed a certain type of resident. Then it was a guessing game of looking through every dome's resident and telling them that "No, Roberta, you're a fucking engineer and we need engineers in Dome C. Why the fuck are you sitting in Dome D starving to death instead of going to get a job, you lazy slag?" The constant micromanagement of AI job placement matching living quarters was just the opposite of fun.

Yeah, that was one of the things I noticed pretty early on in my first whack at it.   I ended up with about 5 separate "dome clusters" of 2-3 domes each (must resist urge to bitchslap whoever decided that domes must be stupidly close to eachother to bridge with tunnels, yet put all the resource clusters just far enough apart that it's basically impossible to get the domes close enough to connect and still get the resource inside the influence area of the dome), and it was a freaking nightmare.   Like, I have an entire dome full of engineers connected to a dome with my engineering shit in it, and the fuckers won't sort themselves out without me literally having to manuallly click-click-click-click to tell them to move somewhere else.  Domes should have some kind of weight slider on them or something so I can set it to like "50% Engineers" or something....

Super annoying once you get to the point where your colony is starting to get self sustaining off of Martian born offspring, because then you end up with shit like an Arcology dome with 40 odd residents who are all "non specialized" and even if you dump a university or two in there and train half them in desired professions they are apparently too stupid check the wanted adds for the dome across the street or some shit.

There is a mod out there that extends the range that population will travel to get to a job from their apartment. It probably adds to system load or something, but I never noticed a problem.

Likewise there was a mod that increased connector length too.

This is all from memory -- I haven't played it in a while.