Missing the point. Its still just building the same few buildings over and over. The game is good but its thin, theresnot enough in the survival side or the city builder on mars side to sustain intrest.
Have you never played an Impressions style city builder before? They're all about small numbers of generally applicable buildings and walker or building aoe (or in this case dome) management. If anything this game has more than usual.
What's missing is a third tier of production that could be exported to earth. We have raw materials, we have secondary materials that serve as maintenence inputs (not enough of these) and now we need tertiary outputs that use the secondaries and make profitable exports.
Like how about software companies that use electronics as inputs, or banks, or law firms, or pharmaceuticals, or agritech. Stuff tropico did + more modern stuff based around services and tech services?
And where is the deeply built out tourism chain? I'd pay a fortune to spend a month in a reasonably developed Mars colony just dicking around kicking rocks on an alien world.
Or the robust dock + teamsters system of tropico rather than the current DIY transport rovers for long haul? Why can't I build a spaceport and set import/export priorities in the mid game and not have to manage individual rockets?
I also want some fellow colonies to trade and fight with and a more robust international model. Surely other sponsors would want to attract the Mars colony to their side, and just as surely they'd settle their own colonies that I could trade food and metal with.
That's the stuff I want. Services are well handled and I totally disagree with you there. The problem is that other than a short manufacturing chain and infrastructure buildings there's nothing else to do on Mars. You can't build the sort of complex economy that you can in tropico so it all feels sort of pointless.
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