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Dev Diary 9: Opportunity by Boian Spasov from Haemimont Games

Hi everyone!

Surviving Mars was always planned as a game that we will keep improving and supporting post-release. The upcoming Opportunity patch is our first... well - opportunity, to add significant features to the game and evolve it in response to your feedback. In this dev diary, I will provide a brief overview with the shiny stuff in the upcoming patch and our reasoning for adding them to the game. All the features I am going to talk about are free and will become available to every owner of the game as the patch releases in the very near future.

Passages
The one issue where player expectations differed most from our own was Dome connectivity. We imagined Domes as isolated from one another and the gameplay centred on carefully rationing the available space and customizing each Dome as a separate mini-city. The overwhelming amount of feedback we received on the issue proved that the majority of players imagine Domes differently - as elements of a larger interconnected system.

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Luckily, we had already received some signals about this issue and have been working on a solution for a while. Allowing free unrestricted travel between all Domes on the map was never an option that we liked. It would create major problems on two fronts. First, it would trivialize planning, since every building is going to become immediately available to every colonist, regardless of distance. Second, it could never work with our individual simulation, since it would take many, many hours for a colonist to reach a bar in a distant Dome and then go to work in another distant Dome, causing him to miss his work shift and most likely suffocate on the way.

Still, a more limited solution was possible - allowing colonists to work and visit services in nearby domes, directly connected with the residential Dome of the colonist. Thus Domes become something akin to districts in a city, instead of each one being its own mini-city.

How do you connect Domes? With new constructions called Passages that can connect any two nearby Domes. They are placed similarly to cables, but can't be interconnected and have a limited maximum length. Each Passage takes a single hex both in the source and in the destination Dome for the entrance/exit on both sides. We experimented with other ways of connecting, such as joining the existing airlocks, but aligning and connecting Domes felt much more unpleasant in these experiments and sacrificing a useful hex for each new connection turned out to be an interesting tradeoff in the small Domes.

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But what if you want to create a system in which some Domes only receive visitors and workers from connected Domes? New policies in every Dome info panel allow restricting work and visits in connected Domes - these are similar to the birth control policy that we added in our previous patch.

Before we move to other new features, here are some additional details about passages that might be interesting for experienced players:

  • Passages are equipped with moving walkways that accelerate pedestrian travel in both directions.

  • They are not normally traversable for drones and Rovers, but you can place Ramps over them to facilitate traffic.

  • They connect both Domes for purposes of Power and Life Support grids.

  • Meteor strikes on passages cause fractures and might kill colonists inside.

  • If one Dome has a Power or Life support issues for a long time, passages leading to it will be disabled until the issue has been resolved.

  • Work performance and service comfort in connected Domes is slightly lower, so it is still more optimal for a Colonist to use workplaces and services in his own Dome
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Game Rules
I still remember how excited I was when Game Rules were added to Crusader Kings II. It felt only natural to add something similar in Surviving Mars empowering the players to further customize their games.

You can turn on game rules at the start of a play session but they affect the entire playthrough. We are shipping 13 game rules in Opportunity, most of them focused on customizing the game difficulty since we received lots of feedback about players demanding a more challenging experience. We are certainly not planning to stop there - we can imagine game rules changing entire game elements according to individual taste (alternative Wind Turbines, anyone?) and we can't wait to see what the modders will come up as well.

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Here is a complete list of the Game Rules coming in Opportunity:

  • Prefab Colony - start with enough prefabs to build the basics of a Colony and the first Dome

  • No Disasters - disables all disasters, except the ones coming from the Mysteries

  • Hunger - can't import Food from Earth

  • Inflation - import prices increase over time

  • Long Ride - rocket travel time to and from Mars is three times longer

  • The Last Ark (a.k.a. The Quill Challenge) - can call a Passenger Rocket only once

  • Amateurs - no specialist applicants

  • Rebel Yell - colonists periodically become renegades. Crime is more severe

  • Chaos Theory - tech fields are fully randomized

  • Winter is Coming - Cold Wave rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars. Cold waves increase power consumption even more

  • Armageddon - Meteor rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars

  • Dust in the Wind - Dust Storm rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars

  • Twister - Dust Devil rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars
Storages
Opportunity introduces new storage buildings for Water, basic and advanced resources. Storing large quantities of processed resources was a huge problem, especially in large colonies and the new storage facilities have been created to address this issue.

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The new Large Water Tank holds up to 1000 units of water (1500 with an increase from tech) while the new Storages hold up to 4000 resource units of the corresponding basic or advanced resource. These facilities are locked behind research. Unlike Depots, Storages consume Power and require a certain amount of construction materials.


Workshops
The final new feature we are introducing is a cycle of three researchable buildings called Workshops. But wait, wasn't there a service building named Art Workshop already in the game? We always wanted to have a dedicate place in which the colonists can be creative and make their own works of art, but the old service building was a poor choice for this and should've been named otherwise in the first place.

To prevent confusion with the new buildings, especially since one of them is a true Art Workshop, we are renaming the old Art Workshop to Art Store. This name is more similar to the names of the Electronics Store and the Grocer with which it shares functionality.

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With that out of the way, let's talk about the new buildings. The Workshops, called "vocation buildings" during development, are completely optional end-game buildings that consume advanced resources and allow colonists to pursue higher life goals once the colony has become self-sufficient and has an excessive workforce. All people employed in Workshops receive Morale and Comfort boost, as long as their Workshop is supplied with resources. They are also counted towards a new challenging milestone that requires 40% of your population to be employed in Workshops.

We know that many players will opt to ignore the Workshops and the corresponding milestone, opting for more practical benefits for their Colony. Still, we felt that it was important to provide a cycle of buildings allowing the colonists to pursue self-realization, to climb to the top of the Maslow's pyramid, signifying that the colony has grown enough to support that kind of lifestyle. The fact that this provides a new optional endgame goal is an added benefit. Hint - to reach 100%, just make sure that your last starving colonist is employed in a Workshop.

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Note that both the Workshops and the new Storages are locked behind new technologies and thus will require a new playthrough to become available in your game.

What do you think about the new features coming in Opportunity? Which one excites you the most? What game rules and buildings would you like to see added to the game?

We will announce when Opportunity will be released in the near future.
 
I know that terraforming isnt something on your agenda, however this is something that we would need to do if we are to ever colonise mars. This is done by emitting A LOT of greenhouse gases into the mars atmosphere to trap the heat and create an atmosphere that we can breathe without a spacesuit, with a little help from an oxygen mask. By doing this life can start to thrive and vegetation can grow... as you are going to be supporting this AMAZING game I would like to request that you partially consider having something perhaps a little similar to this... Some have said this would be too much like cities skylines but I beg to differ... this is Mars, mars is hostile, its still about survival but its also about the end game idea of making the planet habitable for all types of life. Please consider as this will blow the 'surviving mars' community away, no doubt about that!!
 
The hex attachment point isn't really a loss. I always have one extra hex that I just fill with a single hex statue. In reality the game works perfectly fine without those colonist tunnels.


For those asking for recycling... why? If there's recycling then we just have less need to go after resources making the game easier yet.
 
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The hex attachment point isn't really a loss. I always have one extra hex that I just fill with a single hex statue. In reality the game works perfectly fine without those colonist tunnels.


For those asking for recycling... why? If there's recycling then we just have less need to go after resources making the game easier yet.

Partly realism. Any sort of long term space colony mission needs to recylcle practically everything (not just water), so it doesn't make much sense that Surviving Mars doesn't place a greater emphasis on it.

And partly becuse it will help sustain large colonies into the very late game after most deposits on the map have been depleted. The Mohole wonder shouldn't be the end-all-be-all of very late game metals/rare metals.

Overall difficulty could be kept neutral by ensuring that the recycling system itself isn't easy to opperate at a high efficiency, and if nessesary modestly reducing the amount of metals/rare metals/concrete found in deposits.
 
Partly realism. Any sort of long term space colony mission needs to recylcle practically everything (not just water), so it doesn't make much sense that Surviving Mars doesn't place a greater emphasis on it.

And partly becuse it will help sustain large colonies into the very late game after most deposits on the map have been depleted. The Mohole wonder shouldn't be the end-all-be-all of very late game metals/rare metals.

Overall difficulty could be kept neutral by ensuring that the recycling system itself isn't easy to opperate at a high efficiency, and if nessesary modestly reducing the amount of metals/rare metals/concrete found in deposits.

Yea there would have to be significant balance adjustments. I've never needed a mohole even when using the hardest settings, so materials aren't too much of a problem at this point (unless one doesn't want to expand to other areas of the map).
 
Building that i was surprised not to see as options, at least for the religious sponsored missions, were chapel/church/cathedral. Thse would provide comfort and morale boost to those of a religious bent.
 
We are aware that some players would like to have more controls over the breakthroughs they receive and are currently considering a game rule for this. It is not on the immediate horizon, though.

If you do this could it be a pre-game selectable option? I like the ultimate randomness of the tech trees and not knowing what is going to happen. A weighted system, while nice for some, will just make the game more predictable which is something many of us don't want.
 
If you do this could it be a pre-game selectable option? I like the ultimate randomness of the tech trees and not knowing what is going to happen. A weighted system, while nice for some, will just make the game more predictable which is something many of us don't want.

If it's a game rule in the sense I think it is, then it is a pre-game selectable option by definition. They are outlined in the original post on the Opportunity patch, and while most of them make the game harder a few make the game easier and this would simply be one of the latter.
 
Haimamont - in case it wasn't apparent. Really looking forward to the update :)

For some strange reason I thought the update was coming out tomorrow, and now that I re-read the thread I'm bummed I was confused.

Haimamont - don't worry about breaking saves with the update. Just give people the option to rollback to previous build like other Paradox games - then you save yourself some extra headaches (and time)!
 
For some strange reason I thought the update was coming out tomorrow, and now that I re-read the thread I'm bummed I was confused.

Would that "strange reason" be the fact that this was announced on stream :) ? (
)
I haven't seen the date on the forums either, but I also haven't seen anything contradicting it.
 
While we are at the point of connecting domes with passages, can we have an option for:
  • resident buildings have a limit option on what minimum and maximum ages can live there ; basically an age-restriction option to control migration of colonists in domes( so you can have a dome for senior citizens and a dome for kids)

You can age restrict your domes already. Ive done this from the beginning. Also filter by sex, specs, perks etc etc
 
Anyone have an idea on what time we can expect the update, considering I think Paradox is in Sweden, and it will be April 25th there in less than an hour.

Any chance we are a couple hours away?
 
Anyone have an idea on what time we can expect the update, considering I think Paradox is in Sweden, and it will be April 25th there in less than an hour.

Any chance we are a couple hours away?

They announced the exact update time on twitter.

3 PM CEST (Stockholm time) which translates to 9 PM EST for people in the Eastern part of the US.

While that is later in the day then I'd like, at least I know so I can plan my day accordingly.
 
Question............

If you choose not to use passages, and play the game without them entirely, will the game continue to act the way it has been the past couple of months, or will there be other changes, that may effect that type of play now?