I got 100% in Surviving Mars and a couple design flaws don't let this game be Above and Beyond.

[RafaMonteiro]

I have been playing this game for over 1 year, got all the trophies on PS4, that includes main game, Space Race, and Green Planet, played maps with over 1000% difficulty, got to over 1500 colonists and all that. There is pretty much no side of the game that I didn't explored and my conclusion is that there is 2 design flaws that bring this game down from being great.



1. Births and aging colonists
In paper this concept does sound good, having an organic colony that progresses over time, the founders die and leave martian borns to conquer the planet. In game though things are far from good, over time there is no way for you to deal with the ever growing number of babies and elders. If let uncheck your domes will eventually shut down due to the lack of workforce since elders and babies will occupy residential spots, if you forbid births you will have to keep bringing more and more colonists to replenish the workforce as people get older.

The only way you can deal with all this is by building a complete separate dome for kids and elders, and since there will be no one to actually work there you will be constantly bombarded by "colonists are departing" since the needs of the elders won't be satisfied. This is not only a nuisance, but breaks immersion, and forces the player to "play badly" to hopefully make the elders leave the planet.



2. Lack a proper resource chain

As a die hard fan of Sierra back in the day, playing tons of hours of Ceaser 3, Zeus, and Pharaoh, I have to talk about resource chains as a way to develop a city. In Surviving Mars you only have a 1to1 resource system, metal turns into machine parts, rare metals into electronics, fuel into polymers and those are all the "advanced" resources in the game. On top of that there is no need to have different types of food, during hundreds of hours in this game my colonists only ate potatoes and drank water.

As a different type of resource, the people also want entertainment, exercises, social, and other things, but those aren't in a very good shape either. A small dome can survive just fine with 1 restaurant, 1 small bar, and 1 infirmary, its actually good that you don't let them be to happy because you don't want them to pop out babies to fast. Being happy or sad just means that, or they will leave or they will have babies, so the optimal way is to be somewhere in between and only add a building when you think you can support the population spike while tearing it down afterwards.



Both of these things combined makes the game quite dull. At the beggining there is no variety of what to build or where to build, the early domes will be always the same. By the end it becomes a chore to control the population but if you don't your colony will eventually spiral out of control, the lack of workforce becomes the lack of resources and everything explodes from there, not only that but you always have the feeling that you are running out of time, that a disaster is coming, that you cant relax or take your time. In a game where the main focus is to develop a colony in another planet having to manage individual people is not the kind of micromanagement you want.



This is just my opinion, I could go on for a while but I don't want this wall of text to get to big. Coming in a games subreddit forum to talk bad about the game is not the greatest idea but I only do this because I love building games and there is not that many good ones today. Surving Mars has the potential to be great and hopefully we will get a second game with many additions and fixed.

Would love to see your thoughts on the game, what can change, what is good as it is, what you want of a second installment.

 

[MylilPwny]

When you get to endgame and have build everything and unlocked everything, there is not much else to do, so i started to build megacomplexes. I started to increase the amount of colonists and specialized my domes into sectors. The flatten tool, and allowed us to create amazing colonies, ramps and features. My main problems has always been lag, stutter and poor performance when i reach this stage. My computer is modern and around the 3500 EUR mark, with a 100/100 fiber connection, so i think my end is covered. Optimization would aid a great deal to build large designs.

The problems you listed above with colonists and babies, is my 2nd problem. I reported this many times and so have others. The solution here, is to never retire in my opinion. We should not have seniors, unless the game give us productive things to use them for. Right now, they are obsolete/useless and a burden.

The new expansion that just arrived, added some new content, which is grate. But i do miss more resource sink in the endgame. This could be done with missions and events. I think we could use and expand on the rival colonies. Make them enemies and allies. Help and assist eachother on missions, terraforming, sabotage, hostile operations etc. I feel this part is severely lacking, and the current options are terrible with hardly any consequences. There should be meaningful interactions between allies and enemies, with real gain and losses, based on whats going on. Trade agreements between allies should be improved.

Another thing for me, would be that if you ally with someone, you can share bases with them. With underground and asteroids being a thing, we could world switch to our allies aswell. Having a trade station and share common goals. If you are enemy, you could setup a hostile base that would use officers to sabotage their missions, recruit their colonists and steal tech, resources etc from them. Perhaps being able to blow up their rockets. But this should be difficult, it should be hard to make a base on hostile territory. This should scale with the game difficulty.

Just my current thoughts.

 

[link12313]

Seniors should be allowed to work in special slots in schools to improve them. That way a dedicated seniors and children dome would be worth it. They should also be allowed to work in simple jobs like the grocer or really anything that is not a profession job.

 

[Lillegre]

Seniors should be allowed to work in special slots in schools to improve them. That way a dedicated seniors and children dome would be worth it. They should also be allowed to work in simple jobs like the grocer or really anything that is not a profession job.

Stem reconstruction - regular tech - Becoming a Senior takes longer (20 sols, unlocked by default by Doctor)
Forever Young - breakthrough - Seniors work and have babies until they die

 

[MylilPwny]

Stem reconstruction - regular tech - Becoming a Senior takes longer (20 sols, unlocked by default by Doctor)
Forever Young - breakthrough - Seniors work and have babies until they die

Yes, but forever young is gated behind a breakthrough tech and not available each game. This should changed and part of an endgame tech tree. The same with the different domes etc. There is no good reason for this not being available each game. In fact, they probably should not be a tech at all. They should unlock together with existing tech instead. Forever young, should be instead of stem reconstruction and all domes should be for the largest dome tech. There are more examples of this, but if they insist on keeping it individual techs, then a lategame techtree would be a compromise imo.

 

[fsantoianni]

If we come to it, all open-ended city builders have this problem. Once you have built everything and unlocked everything, you reach a state of "now what"? The fun is not in the end, but in the way towards it.

That's why modern games, including this one, have an "achivements" section. You can start a new game, do everything, unlock everything, but you used one mission sponsor and one mystery. If you want to mark the other's achivement, you'll have to start a new game.

 

[MylilPwny]

Yes, i agree. But when it comes to seniors and dome design, this should NOT be gated behind some random breakthrough. Personally, i love designing large, complex designs in the endgame. That is what i currently use endgame for. The best update for me, was the terraforming update, where i could flatten ground, make ramps etc. It allowed for large designs. I cant tell you enough how annoying it is, to be robbed of large domes of different shapes and utility. The senior part, is just horrible design in general, when they become utterly useless. I appreciate that there are groundbreaking breakthroughs only available on a random playthrough, the idea is good, but not for these particular things. One example is the extractor AI, eternal fusion, service bots, alien imprints, cloning and Positronic brain to mention some of the best ones.

 

[LeeNelsonAuthor]

Seniors could be docents in museums and art galleries, and Vistas where tourists view those landmarks. Work in libraries.
Those seniors with degrees could "retire" but be added to the staff at universities, raising its stats for half of their remaining years.
And those without degrees could be docents or work in unspecialized jobs such as grocers and etc.
Libraries could be a new building for adding to school or research domes, upping their stats? They could give bonuses based on the specialties of the staff. (as could the schools themselves)

 

[Trivium]

The game is sadly focused on the early to mid game. There is nothing to do in the end game after you have finished everything which is kinda sad!
The kids and seniors are not much of a problem after you get massive domes and optimize the production output of the ordinary workforce. The game lacks endgame challenges/story bits/mysteries etc.
After reaching 200-300 SOL 500 colonists even on max difficulty everything becomes a piece of cake. GP partially changed that but it takes ages to reach 100% vegetation (it's very luck dependent as well) and in the end it just looks ugly as the nature spreads only around your buildings and not by itself as it should be. You get some green dots/spots on the map but it just feels wrong.