Many woes of Surviving Mars

[Morbus Bubbonicus]

The game would be great should some effort would be put into balancing and polishing.

1. Research
There are A LOT of worthless research. Which would be not THAT bad but the contrast of "good" and "crap" techs are apalling
Adapted Probes - who ever use probes? Autonomous sensors removes the very need for probes and any investment is better than buying probes. One autonomous sensor tower is enough to get scan levels to manageable levels and game pace is slow enough to scan entire map "manually".
Compact Passenger Module -comes so late in the game that by that time you will suffer from overpopulation already and excess population.
Deep Water Extraction - moisture vaporators can cover the needs of even the most advanced base and they will become more poerful later in the game.
Rover Printing - comes so late in the game that it is easier to order them from Earth, than to waste resources. Only practical application is to use this tech while on mystery lockdown.
Resilent Architeecture - becomes obsolete with turboscrubbing
Moisture farming - the most basic and demanded building comes at tier 4!!! I mean your entire base could be based on Mvs alone and you can build them in the end game? What is the logic behind this?
Dust repulsion - approx on the same tier as scrbber, and instantly becomes obsolete.
Conservation landscape - as terraforming comes as last techs this tech is a waste of time - at this stage you can assign several RCs to works fast enough.
Plasma cutters - as it is several techs away from Mohole, it serves next to no purpose - you don't need geologists at this stage.
Low-G Fungi - farms are so much more effective, with comfort bonuses, automation options and soil quality. Fungi perform worse for more resources. The only redeeming aspect is that it saves space.
Magnetic Filtering - 50% moxie upgrade would worth something, but Moxies are so cheap, that wasting research on this is insanely more costly than to build several more moxies- they cost 4(FOUR) metal and require 2(!!!) power and 2 metal maint.
Supportive Community and Martian festivals and another two of worthless reseach options. Because who cares about flaws and service comfort from decorations?
Holographic Scanning - comes when you suffer not from lack of colonists, but from overpopulation.


2. Terraforming.
My main problem with the terraforming:
It should be easier to finish than to start. It should be hard to make initial gains but then terraforming should gain momentum. Water should accumulate, atmosphere should be gained from forestation, forests should grow more the more you aready have.

Now it is diminishing returns. You get +20% from nukes and then it's 1-2% from nuke. It is NOT FUN. This approach encourages waiting game, where players launch rocket missions, then Alt+Tab to web surf to wait until mission will be done because you have LITERALLY nothing to do during that final stages of terraforming.

IMO to make terraforming fun first milestones should be hard, getting water, minimum temp etc. But then it should gain momentum and be easier, not the other way around. First steps should be challenging.
And second is that there are no reasons to research terraforming until you researched everything else, with the exception of waste rock utilisation. In all my games I saw no practical use for researching terraforming early and mid- game, because it literally have no use. I will not get any benefits from starting terraforming early on, except that I will spend less time because it will work on the background.
I tested it in one of my session, starting heat and atmo early - and by late game I still had negligable terraforming and main progress have been made by rocket missions.
The game and terraforming mechanics needs a serious balancing, if not complete overhaul.

Growing vegetation is, with 0.01% increase you will acieve more with one rocket launched than with tons of forestation plants. They cannot be boosted as a building, they only tech that boosts vegetation is just makes it 0.04...and it completely stops at 40% Vegetation. You can have 666 of them it just won't do anything. Vegetation is upside down in Surviving Mars - instead of spreading faster, it slows to a halt.
You will get more from one rocket mission than from dozen of large lakes. The only significant gain comes with athmosphere from carbonite processors. Other buildings gain you 0.15 at best. It is literally not cost effective to build any of said buildings as you can just launch and launch rockets...which could not fly faster. So you launch a batch of rockets, then Alt+Tab and get back when their mission is completed. Then you repeat the, process. It is interesting for the first time - when you do it for the fifth time it gets boring. And you need hundreds of launches for total terraforming.

3. Buildings and overpopulation.
We have no 3-tile building for gambling, gaming. And later on it is common to turn off upgrades that reduce working slots due to rampart overpopulation.
Fusion Reactor - the last thing you will need is a worker dependant power source. But it have its use late-game - to provide work space outside the dome. I place several of those to create a lot of work spaces.
But the problem is that late game you are encouraged to CANCEL or TURN OFF building upgrades to solve employmint problem.
Think of it, it's the game about future and everything moves towards miniaturisation and automation...and then the game encourages you to make buildings with lots of workspaces and less automation. We even have Workshops, that produce NOTHING and only serve to make colonists busy.
This design approach is counter-productive IMO.

There are many other issues but I think it's a start

 

[Troyen]

I partially agree and partially disagree.

The game would be great should some effort would be put into balancing and polishing.

1. Research
There are A LOT of worthless research. Which would be not THAT bad but the contrast of "good" and "crap" techs are apalling
Adapted Probes - who ever use probes? Autonomous sensors removes the very need for probes and any investment is better than buying probes. One autonomous sensor tower is enough to get scan levels to manageable levels and game pace is slow enough to scan entire map "manually".

Probes have a use...at the very start if you're racing for milestones against other colonies and ended up on a challenging map where the starting tile is not very good. But this technology won't help with that, so agreed here.

Deep Water Extraction - moisture vaporators can cover the needs of even the most advanced base and they will become more poerful later in the game.

I think this would be useful if it was moved up a tier. Vaporators can struggle in the early/mid-game when you're trying to set up farming, especially if your location is susceptible to severe dust storms and cold waves. The water extractors help here, but deep water comes too late, when the vaporator situation has improved.

Rover Printing - comes so late in the game that it is easier to order them from Earth, than to waste resources. Only practical application is to use this tech while on mystery lockdown.
Resilent Architeecture - becomes obsolete with turboscrubbing

Agreed, along with some of the other techs I can't fit into chopped-up quotes.

Moisture farming - the most basic and demanded building comes at tier 4!!! I mean your entire base could be based on Mvs alone and you can build them in the end game? What is the logic behind this?

This is part of the challenge though. If you had easily-accessible moisture farms available from the start, all water extraction would be essentially moot.

2. Terraforming.
My main problem with the terraforming:
It should be easier to finish than to start. It should be hard to make initial gains but then terraforming should gain momentum. Water should accumulate, atmosphere should be gained from forestation, forests should grow more the more you aready have.

Now it is diminishing returns. You get +20% from nukes and then it's 1-2% from nuke. It is NOT FUN. This approach encourages waiting game, where players launch rocket missions, then Alt+Tab to web surf to wait until mission will be done because you have LITERALLY nothing to do during that final stages of terraforming.

IMO to make terraforming fun first milestones should be hard, getting water, minimum temp etc. But then it should gain momentum and be easier, not the other way around. First steps should be challenging.

I think it's okay to have the parameters behave differently. It would be easier to make initial temperature/atmospheric gains compared to later on. Water seems to be constant. The real one that's annoying (and most of the waiting) is the vegetation. The 40% cap doesn't make any sense to me because you really are forced into waiting for the special missions. Vegetation would benefit from your model of difficult to start, but easier to finish (and it would work out well in that overall different parameter progression scheme since it's the last you usually finish, so making the 'end' easier cuts down on the 100% waiting).

Also, the vegetation blooms at 30/60/90% seem to be very minor. Buffing those so they're more noticeable would make the vegetation milestones more meaningful.

And second is that there are no reasons to research terraforming until you researched everything else, with the exception of waste rock utilisation. In all my games I saw no practical use for researching terraforming early and mid- game, because it literally have no use. I will not get any benefits from starting terraforming early on, except that I will spend less time because it will work on the background.

There is a use, depending on your location's disaster susceptibility. Getting to 50% atmo/temperature to stop the dust storms and cold waves is a huge milestone, especially when playing with max severity disasters. Early water is less meaningful (though I guess it lets you switch to the open farm sooner and not have to worry about food ever again, and slightly buffs your vaporators). It would be nice if vegetation did something though.

Growing vegetation is, with 0.01% increase you will acieve more with one rocket launched than with tons of forestation plants. They cannot be boosted as a building, they only tech that boosts vegetation is just makes it 0.04...and it completely stops at 40% Vegetation. You can have 666 of them it just won't do anything. Vegetation is upside down in Surviving Mars - instead of spreading faster, it slows to a halt.

Yeah, this is what made me break down and get a mod, because the 40% cap I think is ridiculous. It just adds 80 days of waiting for the special project to appear at a time where everything else on the colony is already solved and there's little else to do.

You will get more from one rocket mission than from dozen of large lakes. The only significant gain comes with athmosphere from carbonite processors. Other buildings gain you 0.15 at best. It is literally not cost effective to build any of said buildings as you can just launch and launch rockets...which could not fly faster. So you launch a batch of rockets, then Alt+Tab and get back when their mission is completed. Then you repeat the, process. It is interesting for the first time - when you do it for the fifth time it gets boring. And you need hundreds of launches for total terraforming.

I think the core heating building is faster than the rocket project. So atmo and temperature can be done through buildings (though there's a temperature lull when you hit 25% and GHG facilities stop being useful). I haven't needed hundreds of rockets though, even with vegetation I've launched maybe 20 terraforming rockets. What sol are you completing 100% terraforming?

3. Buildings and overpopulation.
We have no 3-tile building for gambling, gaming. And later on it is common to turn off upgrades that reduce working slots due to rampart overpopulation.
Fusion Reactor - the last thing you will need is a worker dependant power source. But it have its use late-game - to provide work space outside the dome. I place several of those to create a lot of work spaces.
But the problem is that late game you are encouraged to CANCEL or TURN OFF building upgrades to solve employmint problem.
Think of it, it's the game about future and everything moves towards miniaturisation and automation...and then the game encourages you to make buildings with lots of workspaces and less automation. We even have Workshops, that produce NOTHING and only serve to make colonists busy.
This design approach is counter-productive IMO.

There are many other issues but I think it's a start

Aren't workshops representing the dream of a utopian future, where everything is automated and so you spend your time on leisure?

I do think overpopulation grows rapidly out of control and usually have to start restricting births after a few hundred colonists because I don't want to deal with the micromanagement and expansion that I don't really need to finish the game. I could build more domes, but by then the mystery is already over and I'm just waiting on either a sponsor objective, milestone, or terraforming. There's often not a resource problem at the end, but maybe that's okay because I've essentially beaten the map and there's no hard victory screen.

 

[Mauer]

As for probes, they can be very useful as they allow you to deep scan tiles quickly to get breakthroughs faster, or to plan dome placement better when expanding into a new area for the deep deposits; though honestly it is now so easy to make money from other sources than rare metals that I rarely, if ever, end up exploiting those.

Population explosion has always been an issue, it is too easy to get good comfort levels and the little bastards take so long to be productive that most of the time I end up importing people as needed instead.

Vegetation yeah, I only ever fully terraformed once with expeditions because of this, I now use the mod with the vegetation workshops. I also don't see the purpose of the various types of vegetation from the seed spreaders, I know they increase fertility and there's one thing in the game, either sponsor or commander, that makes forest create vistas or research spots, but is the rest just cosmetic?

Drone-printing and rover-making I've only used once for fun too, it's much easier to just import anything you need, specially like I said before with the way money is easier to get from so many things now.

Unemployment by the way is not really an issue, it shows as a red number in the dome but it doesn't cause unhappiness or anything like that, it's just wasted potential; but if you have literally nowhere to put citizens to work then you're doing okay actually, workshops are supposed to be for that but they don't really produce anything so I rarely use them. IMO the better solution would be for them to produce something intangible like culture or social capital for use in late game mechanics, if there's another large expansion to the game.

 

[MrKnight445]

Just seems to me someone has never used chaos theory or played without mods.

 

[Ripley Riley]

Deep Water Extraction - moisture vaporators can cover the needs of even the most advanced base and they will become more powerful later in the game.

My max dust storms map disagrees with you. I needed water extractors and deep water extraction to help me bridge the gap until 50% atmosphere.

Low-G Fungi - farms are so much more effective, with comfort bonuses, automation options and soil quality. Fungi perform worse for more resources. The only redeeming aspect is that it saves space.

The farm automation tech applies to fungal farms.

 

[Morbus Bubbonicus]

My max dust storms map disagrees with you. I needed water extractors and deep water extraction to help me bridge the gap until 50% atmosphere.

Fair point but even then vaporators with enough liquid tanks looks like a more viable option for consistent water production.

The farm automation tech applies to fungal farms.

By that time your problem is mostly how to make colonists busy, than how to feed them.Prior to that, farms grossly outperform fungal and also provide comfort later.

 

[Livigy]

I do take issue with the probes. If you have ever played Japan you would know that probing = tech. If you ever 'outsource' tech research as Japan you are doing it wrong as you would get double the tech immediately for the same cost in addition to revealing plenty of deep scan anomalies.

I also tend to pick my maps based on breakthroughs available including deep scan breakthroughs, which means this tech is vital for me to grab those if I plan to use them early game. I will prescan my map before I play so I know where they are, sure not everyone would do this as it removes 'discovery' but I tend to want to play something 'specific' so I want to know my breakthroughs.

As for compact passenger module, tourism is a thing now. But typically compact passenger module is still early enough in the tree to grab for even your founder stage. This obviously is rng dependent and likely anomaly dependent in terms of keys and beakers. But if I am playing last arc I may hold out for it or if I find it early enough I will grab it for my founders. Again I suggest a Japan game with some early tech advantage through probes

I do agree with most the other issues though. But you did mention the rover printing is obsolete due to Earth, so why not also mention micro manufacturing and 3d machining? If you put a value on research early game equal to 'outsourcing' then buying your first buildings is well worth it compared to actually picking up that research entirely and maybe coming back to it when 7-10k research is achievable in a sol or two. You can go very far as a colony with just one or two filled buildings for electronics/robotic parts so skipping that tech is likely optimal. I point this out as some of your other concerns are about what is optimal.

 

[Mauer]

I was wondering playing as Japan the other day: Do you get twice the amount of tech from deep scanning at once or is it better to surface scan and then deep scan for double dipping the research points?

 

[Morbus Bubbonicus]

It is still a tech that is useful for one sponsor in certain situations. IMO techs should not be useful in super-specific situations only.