Brainstorm ideas for the potential of this game.
This is an amazing game as is! The DLCs have continued to make it into a new experience over the last years, making ongoing fresh replayability one of the hallmarks of Surviving Mars.
Where can it go from here? If you have any suggestions for adds and especially, DLC grade new places for the game to go, reply here.
1) "International Cooperative Mode". This is RTS teambuilding on the same map. Each player picks a Sponsor and they work together towards the same goals.
2) RTS mode. The Space Race DLC is an obvious opening to add head-to-head RTS competition mode. 1-7 AI could become 1-7 Player opponents.
This would blow this game out of the star system! The landmark system becomes the score system, each player racing the others to be The First for every little thing. And either there is a "no mods" rule/mode or every player first gets access to upload everyone else's mods... for fairness.
3) The Below aspect, It seems an obvious add to build tunnel apartments and such.
Look at any episode of "The Expanse" on Ceres. Those luxury terraced apartments would make a fantastic addition to Beyond and Below, stretching down the caverns, turning them into luxury tunnels and tubes.
Perhaps the full two-sided luxury passage would be the equivalent of the "arcology" above ground?
So the below ground version would transform into a horizontal apartment segment with one, two, or three floors of terraced apartments, perhaps with shops along the ground floor?
These could be small, medium, large, and Arc versions. There can be more mundane and dirty versions as shown on the other asteroids of the belt in that show.
4) Speaking of Arcology... Those are supposed to be massive buildings, a small city of their own, with 100,000 to 1 million residents and everything they need inside. The Pyramid building in Blade Runner is a hint. Many of the buildings on Coroscant in SW are technically Arcologies, since they run thousands of feet tall, that's down into the clouds towards the surface.
Dubai has a long project to make the first one. Check it out. They are immense.
So, for this game, a super-dome requiring 1,000 of each resource, and thousands of workers to operate, providing every need and desire for every resident/worker. These are completely filled with floors, farms, gardens, workshops, apartments, green spaces, hydroponics, aquaponics, etc every building type in the game is built-in there somewhere, in multiples.
Could a true Arcology Wonder be unlocked once the Green Mars DLC has unlocked sufficient other Wonders? Maybe Wonder #10 could be a true skyscraper or pyramid filling entire grid squares and extending dozens or a hundred floors into the sky?
Arcologies should be ludicrously massive. So big every map should need a whole grid to be flattened to make room for their footprint. Which means you have to plan ahead and sic an army of drones on this. All your buildings may have to be moved aside from your terraforming area where you flattened four full grid squares to build the largest Arcology. Yes, 4 map squares. for one building.
So the DLC including these has the new "Space race" goal of building one at all, first too.
5) Aquaponics is the hydroponic growing of plants, in a water solution with fish inside. Also mussels or clams or oysters to filter that water they live in. Seems a natural add to the base game. Behind an unlock of some kind. Yields foods of plants plus fish plus mollusks of various kinds.
Imagine adding oysters to luxury restaurants? Add the Oyster Bar & Sushi bar to the game? Well they need that specific food grown locally...
6) fishfarm too, obvious addition. Can Ahi tuna be grown in anything less than a giant salt lake after open-air is unlocked? Selecting salt means other types of fish cannot be grown. But perhaps seaweed can?
7) Asteroids. There are many REAL asteroids in the Belt which fly by Mars, so to speak, close enough to add to the game. Imagine landing on Eros and exploring the real landmarks? Psyche which would be almost entirely made of Exotic Minerals and Rare Metals with little else mixed in. How much can you refine and return? Worth stranding your drones for more cargo capacity? Absolutely.
Ceres is the size of a moon. It has ice right under the surface, or ON the surface in some landmarks.
Perhaps the main large ones could become DLCs of their own, where you flip between tending your Mars and Asteroid settlements because both are viable survival mining camps at the same time?
How about those real moons of Mars? Phobos and Deimos? Great place to send an asteroid mission exactly as in Below and Beyond, but perhaps with much longer durations? If you send Rovers only they don't need food but they cant dig deep. If you send colonists they might die easier than down on Mars, from radiation concerns the planet protects somewhat more from? The competing colonies in Space Race would All be able to land expeditions on the same large asteroid or moon and compete to exploit the short list of landmarks? The actual moons of Mars seems an obvious add/mod to B&B as published.
8) Publish more planets. The Moons of Jupiter are obvious. Venus, where it is SO hot and acidic your maintenance costs are ridiculous. Mercury, settle on the dark side in deep cold or on the habitable (?) ring near the solar horizon. Moons of Jupiter. Go to Pluto with a camp on both the main planet and the moon.
The Moon of Earth. This would be a great new way to start the game. Going to the Moon to unlock technologies which you can then use to colonize other planets and moons of the system.
9) Add a Nuclear Power Plant. With the addition of radiologics we've already seen, (perhaps in a mod) lets add a regular Nuke power plant. Small, Medium, and Large plants with scaling outputs. With fusion reactors putting out 200 power per, (should be more) how about a small modular reactor putting out 25, M = 50, L = 100. This will require a nuclear waste dump, (a small concrete pond), and a steam cooling tower, like the carbonate factory towers. Make all that a standard part of the footprint of the power plant.
It is possible to research turning spent nuclear waste rods into everlasting "diamond" batteries... which in game could in turn power upgrade every Rover, shuttle, and bot forever without need to recharge.
Research upgrade reactor versions such as Thorium MSRs which can take that nuclear waste plus Thorium catalyst and "cook" the waste down from "hot" to low rad residue, another use of the same waste product. This would be a super cheap fuel for an MSR, waste from your other nuke reactors, (or regular fuel never put through one in the first place) plus Thorium which is cheap as dirt on Earth... And remove the meltdown risk the regular Nuke plants might have for game purposes.
10) Any and Many things found on the YT channel "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur." The physicist dives into every aspect of colonizing all the bodies of the solar system, among many other future subjects. A gold mine for inspiration for ten years of DLC development for this game...
11) What do YOU have to add?
This is an amazing game as is! The DLCs have continued to make it into a new experience over the last years, making ongoing fresh replayability one of the hallmarks of Surviving Mars.
Where can it go from here? If you have any suggestions for adds and especially, DLC grade new places for the game to go, reply here.
1) "International Cooperative Mode". This is RTS teambuilding on the same map. Each player picks a Sponsor and they work together towards the same goals.
2) RTS mode. The Space Race DLC is an obvious opening to add head-to-head RTS competition mode. 1-7 AI could become 1-7 Player opponents.
This would blow this game out of the star system! The landmark system becomes the score system, each player racing the others to be The First for every little thing. And either there is a "no mods" rule/mode or every player first gets access to upload everyone else's mods... for fairness.
3) The Below aspect, It seems an obvious add to build tunnel apartments and such.
Look at any episode of "The Expanse" on Ceres. Those luxury terraced apartments would make a fantastic addition to Beyond and Below, stretching down the caverns, turning them into luxury tunnels and tubes.
Perhaps the full two-sided luxury passage would be the equivalent of the "arcology" above ground?
So the below ground version would transform into a horizontal apartment segment with one, two, or three floors of terraced apartments, perhaps with shops along the ground floor?
These could be small, medium, large, and Arc versions. There can be more mundane and dirty versions as shown on the other asteroids of the belt in that show.
4) Speaking of Arcology... Those are supposed to be massive buildings, a small city of their own, with 100,000 to 1 million residents and everything they need inside. The Pyramid building in Blade Runner is a hint. Many of the buildings on Coroscant in SW are technically Arcologies, since they run thousands of feet tall, that's down into the clouds towards the surface.
Dubai has a long project to make the first one. Check it out. They are immense.
So, for this game, a super-dome requiring 1,000 of each resource, and thousands of workers to operate, providing every need and desire for every resident/worker. These are completely filled with floors, farms, gardens, workshops, apartments, green spaces, hydroponics, aquaponics, etc every building type in the game is built-in there somewhere, in multiples.
Could a true Arcology Wonder be unlocked once the Green Mars DLC has unlocked sufficient other Wonders? Maybe Wonder #10 could be a true skyscraper or pyramid filling entire grid squares and extending dozens or a hundred floors into the sky?
Arcologies should be ludicrously massive. So big every map should need a whole grid to be flattened to make room for their footprint. Which means you have to plan ahead and sic an army of drones on this. All your buildings may have to be moved aside from your terraforming area where you flattened four full grid squares to build the largest Arcology. Yes, 4 map squares. for one building.
So the DLC including these has the new "Space race" goal of building one at all, first too.
5) Aquaponics is the hydroponic growing of plants, in a water solution with fish inside. Also mussels or clams or oysters to filter that water they live in. Seems a natural add to the base game. Behind an unlock of some kind. Yields foods of plants plus fish plus mollusks of various kinds.
Imagine adding oysters to luxury restaurants? Add the Oyster Bar & Sushi bar to the game? Well they need that specific food grown locally...
6) fishfarm too, obvious addition. Can Ahi tuna be grown in anything less than a giant salt lake after open-air is unlocked? Selecting salt means other types of fish cannot be grown. But perhaps seaweed can?
7) Asteroids. There are many REAL asteroids in the Belt which fly by Mars, so to speak, close enough to add to the game. Imagine landing on Eros and exploring the real landmarks? Psyche which would be almost entirely made of Exotic Minerals and Rare Metals with little else mixed in. How much can you refine and return? Worth stranding your drones for more cargo capacity? Absolutely.
Ceres is the size of a moon. It has ice right under the surface, or ON the surface in some landmarks.
Perhaps the main large ones could become DLCs of their own, where you flip between tending your Mars and Asteroid settlements because both are viable survival mining camps at the same time?
How about those real moons of Mars? Phobos and Deimos? Great place to send an asteroid mission exactly as in Below and Beyond, but perhaps with much longer durations? If you send Rovers only they don't need food but they cant dig deep. If you send colonists they might die easier than down on Mars, from radiation concerns the planet protects somewhat more from? The competing colonies in Space Race would All be able to land expeditions on the same large asteroid or moon and compete to exploit the short list of landmarks? The actual moons of Mars seems an obvious add/mod to B&B as published.
8) Publish more planets. The Moons of Jupiter are obvious. Venus, where it is SO hot and acidic your maintenance costs are ridiculous. Mercury, settle on the dark side in deep cold or on the habitable (?) ring near the solar horizon. Moons of Jupiter. Go to Pluto with a camp on both the main planet and the moon.
The Moon of Earth. This would be a great new way to start the game. Going to the Moon to unlock technologies which you can then use to colonize other planets and moons of the system.
9) Add a Nuclear Power Plant. With the addition of radiologics we've already seen, (perhaps in a mod) lets add a regular Nuke power plant. Small, Medium, and Large plants with scaling outputs. With fusion reactors putting out 200 power per, (should be more) how about a small modular reactor putting out 25, M = 50, L = 100. This will require a nuclear waste dump, (a small concrete pond), and a steam cooling tower, like the carbonate factory towers. Make all that a standard part of the footprint of the power plant.
It is possible to research turning spent nuclear waste rods into everlasting "diamond" batteries... which in game could in turn power upgrade every Rover, shuttle, and bot forever without need to recharge.
Research upgrade reactor versions such as Thorium MSRs which can take that nuclear waste plus Thorium catalyst and "cook" the waste down from "hot" to low rad residue, another use of the same waste product. This would be a super cheap fuel for an MSR, waste from your other nuke reactors, (or regular fuel never put through one in the first place) plus Thorium which is cheap as dirt on Earth... And remove the meltdown risk the regular Nuke plants might have for game purposes.
10) Any and Many things found on the YT channel "Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur." The physicist dives into every aspect of colonizing all the bodies of the solar system, among many other future subjects. A gold mine for inspiration for ten years of DLC development for this game...
11) What do YOU have to add?
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