Personally, I enjoy the feeling of struggling to just barely survive on a hostile planet that's doing everything it can to scrape you from the surface. To that end, I play all my colonies with Level 5 Cold Waves, Dust Storms, and Meteor Showers. It forces you to play in such a cautious manner when you always have to be ready to have multiple disasters at the same time - especially early game with chaos theory before you get subsurface heaters. In vanilla if you get a dust storm and a cold wave at the same time it can wipe your colony if you don't have any water extractors running - but the "Lakes/Fountains Store Water" mod is a godsend, since you can just fill micro/small domes with lakes and use them as a very expensive heated water storage.
The fact that disasters can occur so close to one another also means that you need to massively overbuild your oxygen and water supplies - if you survive a 6-Sol great dust storm with half a Sol of oxygen left, you need to be sure that your MOXIEs can top up the tanks quickly enough before the next storm hits. I've lost a colony or two because I haven't been able to refill my tanks fast enough. I also love the changes that were made to pipe/cable leaks to make them more significant, I never bothered using valves before but now I slap them almost everywhere and I have to remind myself to always build some oxygen and water storage tanks for each and every dome. I had a Sol 200ish colony that ran into some pretty dang rough times when a few meteors strategically severed pipes when I forgot to keep making the emergency tanks after building half a dozen domes.
I like the Armageddon rule because the meteors are interesting and it's nice to be able to get those extra anomalies to scan when you don't have anything left on the map for your RC Explorers to check out. The meteor storms used to be incredibly devastating before they made the epicenter move around, I once lost a colony from a particularly malicious storm that was centered on my Sol 15 or so base because my drones kept repairing things and then another meteor would hit whatever they'd just fixed, draining my resources incredibly quickly. Nowadays it's more of a nuisance because the storm will pass through your base after a few meteors hit but I still make sure that I wait for repairs until the storm has gone by. I also like how it encourages you to sprawl across the landscape and spread out your infrastructure with multiple backups and connections for life support systems.
Mod-wise, there's a few that I pretty much always have to play with. I love Deposits Resource Multipliers because it felt like it was almost not worth it to setup a colony for whatever paltry 700 metal/rare metal deposits you'd found and I really dislike having to re-purpose my domes when the deposit runs out. I actually use Mod Config Reborn to up the multiplier to 5x and 10x (from 2x and 5x). I wish there was a way to select breakthroughs to guarantee because I would take Nano-Refinement (empty deposits keep working, slowly) in every single game I play. Martian Ice Melt is also very cool and makes cold waves a bit more interesting since it adds a bit of a reward for surviving the blasted things and for being forced to massively overbuild your power grid, and it synergizes well if you don't have subsurface heaters yet and are relying on extractors to supply water during combined dust storms and cold waves.
My favorite QoL mod is Passenger Rocket Tweaks, just for making it quicker and easier to see at a glance who all is going to the red planet and adding the "Are you sure?" prompt when you're about to back out and lose any time you've spent selecting thepoor bastards lucky volunteers. I also like Quadruple Capacity Arcologies since they just don't feel that strong or worthwhile when you can only have 32 people living in them - 128 people is pretty powerful but it doesn't unbalance things too badly and makes sprawling with small domes as an oligarch much more viable, which is nice early-game when you don't want to spend a lot of polymers on dome upkeep. View Colony Map is also one that I always use since it saves so much time reloading and going back to the main menu to setup your Mars mission when you dislike the map. (Sidenote: I would love to be able to save mission setups so I wouldn't have to select Sponsor/Commander/Game Rules every time).
I also use a few of the more balanced mods that add buildings, a lot of them from Silva such as the Panoramic Restaurant which looks really rad and is great for supplying luxuries without consuming advanced resources, and the Medium Apartments that fills a much-needed niche. The Mohole Prototype mod is pretty handy as well, very useful for the late game when you're having trouble keeping everything going with a single Mohole Mine even when it's fully upgraded. I used to use a lot more modded buildings but the colony design set DLC filled the game in so well that I use a lot fewer than I did in the past.
These are just my thoughts after 431 hours of Surviving Mars, I'm curious how other people play and what they enjoy doing in the game. Thanks for making such a fun and upbeat game, Haemimont!
The fact that disasters can occur so close to one another also means that you need to massively overbuild your oxygen and water supplies - if you survive a 6-Sol great dust storm with half a Sol of oxygen left, you need to be sure that your MOXIEs can top up the tanks quickly enough before the next storm hits. I've lost a colony or two because I haven't been able to refill my tanks fast enough. I also love the changes that were made to pipe/cable leaks to make them more significant, I never bothered using valves before but now I slap them almost everywhere and I have to remind myself to always build some oxygen and water storage tanks for each and every dome. I had a Sol 200ish colony that ran into some pretty dang rough times when a few meteors strategically severed pipes when I forgot to keep making the emergency tanks after building half a dozen domes.
I like the Armageddon rule because the meteors are interesting and it's nice to be able to get those extra anomalies to scan when you don't have anything left on the map for your RC Explorers to check out. The meteor storms used to be incredibly devastating before they made the epicenter move around, I once lost a colony from a particularly malicious storm that was centered on my Sol 15 or so base because my drones kept repairing things and then another meteor would hit whatever they'd just fixed, draining my resources incredibly quickly. Nowadays it's more of a nuisance because the storm will pass through your base after a few meteors hit but I still make sure that I wait for repairs until the storm has gone by. I also like how it encourages you to sprawl across the landscape and spread out your infrastructure with multiple backups and connections for life support systems.
Mod-wise, there's a few that I pretty much always have to play with. I love Deposits Resource Multipliers because it felt like it was almost not worth it to setup a colony for whatever paltry 700 metal/rare metal deposits you'd found and I really dislike having to re-purpose my domes when the deposit runs out. I actually use Mod Config Reborn to up the multiplier to 5x and 10x (from 2x and 5x). I wish there was a way to select breakthroughs to guarantee because I would take Nano-Refinement (empty deposits keep working, slowly) in every single game I play. Martian Ice Melt is also very cool and makes cold waves a bit more interesting since it adds a bit of a reward for surviving the blasted things and for being forced to massively overbuild your power grid, and it synergizes well if you don't have subsurface heaters yet and are relying on extractors to supply water during combined dust storms and cold waves.
My favorite QoL mod is Passenger Rocket Tweaks, just for making it quicker and easier to see at a glance who all is going to the red planet and adding the "Are you sure?" prompt when you're about to back out and lose any time you've spent selecting the
I also use a few of the more balanced mods that add buildings, a lot of them from Silva such as the Panoramic Restaurant which looks really rad and is great for supplying luxuries without consuming advanced resources, and the Medium Apartments that fills a much-needed niche. The Mohole Prototype mod is pretty handy as well, very useful for the late game when you're having trouble keeping everything going with a single Mohole Mine even when it's fully upgraded. I used to use a lot more modded buildings but the colony design set DLC filled the game in so well that I use a lot fewer than I did in the past.
These are just my thoughts after 431 hours of Surviving Mars, I'm curious how other people play and what they enjoy doing in the game. Thanks for making such a fun and upbeat game, Haemimont!