is a "sol" in this game a day or a year?

[Jak9090]

hello, there's happenings in the game that don't seem to fit the timescale of a day per sol or a year per sol
such as ship speed from earth and back, time things breka down, time colonists die of old age, breed etc

or is it sorta just a compromize situation for gameplay?

 

[Vardicd]

Yeah that's my understanding, they've stretched the Martian Sol to fit a time play of 1 year for gameplay purposes.

 

[DragonShadow]

I get it's probably for flavor, but they should've just gone with years, lol.

 

[DominusNovus]

Though it irks me to do so, think of it the same way you'd think of how long a day-night cycle lasts in Cities: Skylines, even as you watch the actual calendar date skim by.

 

[GsusNSV]

This is actually a pretty tricky one. Regarding the day-night cycle (how the lightmodel of the game changes) it is a Mars Day. Regarding the simulation (rocket travelling, people aging, etc.) it is actually closer to an Earth year, but this is not precise. The reason for which we decided to adopt this double standard is that almost nothing can realistically happen in a single day and the game would look quite weird if days flash by so fast that the gameplay is at the pace intended by us. It is often done in city builders, but creates somewhat of a cognitive dissonance when you dig into it.

 

[grandad1982]

It's both. Its also neither.

It's a gameplay conceit.

 

[unmerged(193745)]

Yeah okay I get this is kinda for gameplay but it is completely emersion breaking. People then literally work 4 months straight then have 8 months off which is ridiculous. Then crops take like 10 years to mature? Wtf? The timescale doesn't work at all. It was like there are 2 or 3 games shoe horned into one timescale and they all conflict with each other. It is a bad system period.

I get why they wanted it they had a meeting "crops should take time to grow" cool they did that then another meeting "people should work in shifts" cool we'll do that. "we should have a day night cycle for solar panels and have them track the sun" cool do that to. Was there a meeting about these systems working together? Apparently not.

I like the game but it's very clear when you play it there are a lot of ideas but no cohesion at all. They threw everything at a wall and just hoped it would stick.

 

[TTnarg]

Just think of it as a typical sol. There are 354 sols* just like it in a year. But even at 10x speed you dont want to be playing a 100 year long game.

(*I did the maths)

 

[Promethian]

Gameplay trumped realism, again, like it should in every situation in which gameplay and realism come into conflict.

 

[tomstegmeier]

schrödingers sol

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Yeah okay I get this is kinda for gameplay but it is completely emersion breaking. People then literally work 4 months straight then have 8 months off which is ridiculous. Then crops take like 10 years to mature? Wtf? The timescale doesn't work at all. It was like there are 2 or 3 games shoe horned into one timescale and they all conflict with each other. It is a bad system period.

I get why they wanted it they had a meeting "crops should take time to grow" cool they did that then another meeting "people should work in shifts" cool we'll do that. "we should have a day night cycle for solar panels and have them track the sun" cool do that to. Was there a meeting about these systems working together? Apparently not.

I like the game but it's very clear when you play it there are a lot of ideas but no cohesion at all. They threw everything at a wall and just hoped it would stick.

The alternatave is to have the map flicker likea strobe light, colonists a subliminal suserus of motion like time lapse photography.

Though another thing that rather breaks is how little society changes in your colony over what can often be hundreds of sols/years. The same shops the same vices unchanged by shifts in lifetye or scoety from beginning to end.

 

[UncleGamer]

Actually brought this up in the Q&A, they acknowledged the issue and will be making a correction for this to have proper time keeping that makes sense.

 

[Fox_NS_CAN]

It does make sense already (yeah, in a "sort of" kind of way).

If you want a day/night cycle to be "one day", you'd have to wait a painfully long time for a rocket to arrive, stuff getting built, or things to be researched. Or, your day night cycle would have to go by way too fast. (Like "Eled the Worm Tamer" mentioned above, it would be like a strobe.)
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?members/eled-the-worm-tamer.1235155/
So gameplay-wise, it makes sense to do it the way they did it.

 

[ManaaniWanderer]

I could see them stea...I mean "borrowing" Skylines systems and for the sake of simplicity/not having solar panels constantly spazzing out have them remain tied to a "year" of day/night while crops/people etc do a day by day system.

 

[Eled the Worm Tamer]

Just think of it as a typical sol. There are 354 sols* just like it in a year. But even at 10x speed you dont want to be playing a 100 year long game.

(*I did the maths)

Actually a year on mars is 697 sols, so its so much worse than that.

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

I actually like it how it is... Then again, I've played games where they have a single day/night period represent a day, season, and year, so...

 

[Imgran]

To the OP: The answer to your question is "Yes."

 

[Wandering Sentinel]

Personally I think you can suspend your disbelief a bit more easily if you treat each Sol as if it's an average day for that colony for that year, or one of the more important days in the year if you do a lot of things in one day.