I have watched the Q&A stream with Jacob and Robin. This convinced me to write down my feedback on the game. I am not so much trying to write this as a bug report, I am trying to give a sense of my priorities, as requested in that video. As such, this will be a long post. (BTW: I do like the game, even in its current state.)
Mac/Linux quality:
I play on Linux and don't actually know what problems are shared with Windows and what problems are not.
The game crashes too much, I guess that is probably Linux specific. I can actually live with a crash occasionally, but the thing that really annoyed me is that auto-saves are off by default. If a game has a more than expected chance of crashing, auto-saves should be enabled, imho. Cities Skylines is really nice in this regard, because it even does auto-saves in the background (I guess it uses a copy-on-write mechanism?). But since the current auto-saving in surviving mars is not slow, I don't see why it was disabled by default.
Loading a save game regularly (not always) crashes the game, unless I do it from within an already loaded game. This is a bug that makes the game look sloppily tested (on Linux) because it does work with a detour, so it can't be a big bug. (I think this issue has now been fixed.)
Graphics problems are sometimes driver issues instead of game issues, and I can't always tell the difference. The flickering shadows are apparently being worked on, so that is great. I also have disappearing pipes that I think are a game bug. And especially annoying: Zooming into a dome will trigger an increasingly bright light that blinds the camera after a few seconds.
Performance is worse than I think it should be. Especially when changing into another workshift: the game just hangs for a few seconds. I have yet to try the game on my newest pc, but the pc I am playing the game on does match the "recommended" requirements.
The last Linux related thing that I want to mention: Modding. I don't do a lot of modding, and I understood beforehand that this would be the first moddable Haemimont game. Still, the total lack of modding tools on Linux surprised me. I did pre-order the game, and was expecting feature parity between Windows and Linux regarding modding. If the modding tools can't easily be ported, I would have preferred to know that before the release. If they can easily be ported, that should preferably have been done already.
UI and (micro)management:
Inconsistencies: I totally agree with feedback about this. I'll give one example to illustrate why I think the UI is not as consistent as it should be: Drones load and drones status. Drone hubs have a really nice load indicator, and the "Drones Status" mouse-over is even better. Unfortunately, RC Rovers do not have this in the overview. The only way to view Drone load is (apparently) with mouse-over on the pinned icon. Rockets do not even have that mouse-over information, so I have to count the number of moving rocket-controlled drones!
Colonists: There is indeed a lack of aggregate information about colonists. I can actually understand that not having too much aggregate information might improve the perception of the colonists as actual individuals. I like to cycle buttons ("Next colonist" and "Previous colonist"), but it is often unclear what exactly I am cycling trough. And there is no way to cycle trough all colonists with a particular trait or specialization or age group. As far as I found, the only available cycles are "Homeless", "Unemployed", "Problematic", "Per dome", and "Per building". The cycle per dome is unintuitive to find, because you have to click one of the actual colonists, and this is not possible if no-one is visible in a clickable place.
Drones and Shuttles: These should indeed need less micromanagement, but they (especially shuttles) also need more micromanagement options. If it would be possible to cancel a shuttle doing resource transport, that would already help. Or even request one time (or recurring) shuttle resource transports from the shuttle hub. Or a shuttle range limit. Annoying things like a shuttle stealing a resource to repair something unimportant detract from the fun of the game. There really is a difference between colonists and machines in this regard. Dealing with a stressed-out colonist is fun, dealing with a thieving shuttle is not. Because of suspension of disbelief etc.
Gameplay bugs:
I'm usually not really annoyed by these unless they really break the whole play-through. But I must say there appear to be many.
Path-finding is perhaps most often mentioned and most annoying. Especially colonists deciding to walk and suffocate. But also the rovers: I have had a rover drive 180° away from its intended destination that was 2 hexes away (and totally blocked in, only reachable by drones, the rover shouldn't even try). The invisible (and seemingly dynamic) range the RC Transport will search for resources also annoys me. I have had rovers not pick up something close by and another time pick up something much further away.
One thing I am suspecting as a bug is that I don't see all "sector scanned" messages. Sometimes I have new anomalies that I really not saw any popup for, or when I do see a sector scanned message, I notice that the scan is a few sectors ahead from where I expected it to be.
In one of my play-throughs, no mystery has been triggered. I assumed for a long time this was waiting on more colonists to trigger the mystery, but I am far into that game already right now. I want to check if I selected the "None" mystery by accident when starting, but I can't find an option to do that. (And I really suspect this is a bug or extremely late trigger, not me being clumsy while in the new game menu.)
Disabled buildings are buggy. Drones will start working on a construction site if they already had the command before disabling the construction site. Disabled buildings should continue to deteriorate, but probably slower than enabled buildings. Right now they apparently sometimes deteriorate at the same rate, but sometimes they also just stop deteriorating at all. After loading a save game a disabled building can appear brand new, only to instantly have 100% deterioration when enabled again.
Missing things:
I really think we should have a couple in-dome variants for buildings. Highest priority for me: A stand alone small storage depot (like the current building attached depots in size) and an in-dome drone hub (preferable with the range centered on the center of the dome even if the building is not placed in the exact center of the dome, and probably a smaller capacity than the normal drone hub). Lower priority would be a small water storage (Making the lake drainable for water would be great, or perhaps a new drainable lake that is a full 10 hexes big, storing maybe around 30 water). Also an UPS for power storage would make sense. I assume these are all moddable, but I can't make them because I have Linux
Meteor showers have no teeth. Dust storms and cold waves are nice disasters (that could perhaps be a bit harder, but they are not nearly as bad as meteor showers). How meteor showers are right now, they actually make the game easier by providing resources and research, and doing nothing bad. I have not yet experienced a dust devil affecting my buildings, so I can't really say much about those. When a meteor hits a life support pipe, it should not lose air and water like a normal pipe leak, I think it should leak 100s of units every (in-game-)hour, not only a few. Or maybe even half the stored water/oxygen every hour, something like that. The same with domes that are hit. I wouldn't mind it when a direct hit requires immediate evacuation and ruins multiple in-dome buildings.
Not really missing, but included when it shouldn't be: Drones repairing their own drone hub as long as there is an electronics resource in range. Obviously the drone hub can schedule its own maintenance when it has not yet deteriorated, but how would a fully deteriorated hub do something like this??? Perhaps this could be a tech that International Mars Mission starts with by default, but not for the more difficult sponsors. I consider this a bit like the self-filling rockets. It is a feature that does not make sense, but it is helpful in not stranding a player during their first play-through.
Failover configurations. This may be a bit misnamed, if there is some event, I have no real problem with manually adjusting power switches and pipe valves. (Although configurable valves and switches would definitely be on my wish-list.) What I really think is missing, are options that allow collecting and charging but not providing to the grid. A simple way to do this is having tri-state water towers/oxygen tanks/accumulators: Charging only, Providing only, or Both. That may be the easiest fix to implement, and also to understand for new users. A full-blown automatic/configurable system with valves and switches that change state automatically is nice to have, but may perhaps only appeal to a smaller subset of users that includes me.
More hints for drones. From the video I understand this was removed in the case of storage depots, and I can understand that too much control does not always improve the game, but the "just distribute everything evenly" mentality the drones have now is not always a good fit for every play style. For example I would want a food depot in range for multiple drone hubs to contain all excess food, but also have 25 food near every individual dome for when colonists get food for themselves (due to other problems). Or: Extractors could have a depot in range for the drones that do the maintenance, but other drones could redistribute them further. Right now a drone could decide to place new resources at the other side of the service area near a depleted extractor just because the player had not yet disabled that depot and it is getting low. Having control over exactly what buildings are serviced by what drone hubs would be even better, but I suspect this may be a big feature.
Names: Right now we can only rename things that already have individual names. I want to rename things that do NOT have individual names. Homes, Drone hubs, Factories, etc. It really is useless to know that a colonist lives at "Smart Home" if your Dome contains 15 smart homes. Even if Drone hubs would be called #1, #2, etc, I could actually know what hub a drone uses without losing the selection by clicking on the hub name.
One last super small thing that annoys me: the minimum service area for heaters is 3 hexes, but I want 2 hexes.
That's about it.
Mac/Linux quality:
I play on Linux and don't actually know what problems are shared with Windows and what problems are not.
The game crashes too much, I guess that is probably Linux specific. I can actually live with a crash occasionally, but the thing that really annoyed me is that auto-saves are off by default. If a game has a more than expected chance of crashing, auto-saves should be enabled, imho. Cities Skylines is really nice in this regard, because it even does auto-saves in the background (I guess it uses a copy-on-write mechanism?). But since the current auto-saving in surviving mars is not slow, I don't see why it was disabled by default.
Loading a save game regularly (not always) crashes the game, unless I do it from within an already loaded game. This is a bug that makes the game look sloppily tested (on Linux) because it does work with a detour, so it can't be a big bug. (I think this issue has now been fixed.)
Graphics problems are sometimes driver issues instead of game issues, and I can't always tell the difference. The flickering shadows are apparently being worked on, so that is great. I also have disappearing pipes that I think are a game bug. And especially annoying: Zooming into a dome will trigger an increasingly bright light that blinds the camera after a few seconds.
Performance is worse than I think it should be. Especially when changing into another workshift: the game just hangs for a few seconds. I have yet to try the game on my newest pc, but the pc I am playing the game on does match the "recommended" requirements.
The last Linux related thing that I want to mention: Modding. I don't do a lot of modding, and I understood beforehand that this would be the first moddable Haemimont game. Still, the total lack of modding tools on Linux surprised me. I did pre-order the game, and was expecting feature parity between Windows and Linux regarding modding. If the modding tools can't easily be ported, I would have preferred to know that before the release. If they can easily be ported, that should preferably have been done already.
UI and (micro)management:
Inconsistencies: I totally agree with feedback about this. I'll give one example to illustrate why I think the UI is not as consistent as it should be: Drones load and drones status. Drone hubs have a really nice load indicator, and the "Drones Status" mouse-over is even better. Unfortunately, RC Rovers do not have this in the overview. The only way to view Drone load is (apparently) with mouse-over on the pinned icon. Rockets do not even have that mouse-over information, so I have to count the number of moving rocket-controlled drones!
Colonists: There is indeed a lack of aggregate information about colonists. I can actually understand that not having too much aggregate information might improve the perception of the colonists as actual individuals. I like to cycle buttons ("Next colonist" and "Previous colonist"), but it is often unclear what exactly I am cycling trough. And there is no way to cycle trough all colonists with a particular trait or specialization or age group. As far as I found, the only available cycles are "Homeless", "Unemployed", "Problematic", "Per dome", and "Per building". The cycle per dome is unintuitive to find, because you have to click one of the actual colonists, and this is not possible if no-one is visible in a clickable place.
Drones and Shuttles: These should indeed need less micromanagement, but they (especially shuttles) also need more micromanagement options. If it would be possible to cancel a shuttle doing resource transport, that would already help. Or even request one time (or recurring) shuttle resource transports from the shuttle hub. Or a shuttle range limit. Annoying things like a shuttle stealing a resource to repair something unimportant detract from the fun of the game. There really is a difference between colonists and machines in this regard. Dealing with a stressed-out colonist is fun, dealing with a thieving shuttle is not. Because of suspension of disbelief etc.
Gameplay bugs:
I'm usually not really annoyed by these unless they really break the whole play-through. But I must say there appear to be many.
Path-finding is perhaps most often mentioned and most annoying. Especially colonists deciding to walk and suffocate. But also the rovers: I have had a rover drive 180° away from its intended destination that was 2 hexes away (and totally blocked in, only reachable by drones, the rover shouldn't even try). The invisible (and seemingly dynamic) range the RC Transport will search for resources also annoys me. I have had rovers not pick up something close by and another time pick up something much further away.
One thing I am suspecting as a bug is that I don't see all "sector scanned" messages. Sometimes I have new anomalies that I really not saw any popup for, or when I do see a sector scanned message, I notice that the scan is a few sectors ahead from where I expected it to be.
In one of my play-throughs, no mystery has been triggered. I assumed for a long time this was waiting on more colonists to trigger the mystery, but I am far into that game already right now. I want to check if I selected the "None" mystery by accident when starting, but I can't find an option to do that. (And I really suspect this is a bug or extremely late trigger, not me being clumsy while in the new game menu.)
Disabled buildings are buggy. Drones will start working on a construction site if they already had the command before disabling the construction site. Disabled buildings should continue to deteriorate, but probably slower than enabled buildings. Right now they apparently sometimes deteriorate at the same rate, but sometimes they also just stop deteriorating at all. After loading a save game a disabled building can appear brand new, only to instantly have 100% deterioration when enabled again.
Missing things:
I really think we should have a couple in-dome variants for buildings. Highest priority for me: A stand alone small storage depot (like the current building attached depots in size) and an in-dome drone hub (preferable with the range centered on the center of the dome even if the building is not placed in the exact center of the dome, and probably a smaller capacity than the normal drone hub). Lower priority would be a small water storage (Making the lake drainable for water would be great, or perhaps a new drainable lake that is a full 10 hexes big, storing maybe around 30 water). Also an UPS for power storage would make sense. I assume these are all moddable, but I can't make them because I have Linux
Meteor showers have no teeth. Dust storms and cold waves are nice disasters (that could perhaps be a bit harder, but they are not nearly as bad as meteor showers). How meteor showers are right now, they actually make the game easier by providing resources and research, and doing nothing bad. I have not yet experienced a dust devil affecting my buildings, so I can't really say much about those. When a meteor hits a life support pipe, it should not lose air and water like a normal pipe leak, I think it should leak 100s of units every (in-game-)hour, not only a few. Or maybe even half the stored water/oxygen every hour, something like that. The same with domes that are hit. I wouldn't mind it when a direct hit requires immediate evacuation and ruins multiple in-dome buildings.
Not really missing, but included when it shouldn't be: Drones repairing their own drone hub as long as there is an electronics resource in range. Obviously the drone hub can schedule its own maintenance when it has not yet deteriorated, but how would a fully deteriorated hub do something like this??? Perhaps this could be a tech that International Mars Mission starts with by default, but not for the more difficult sponsors. I consider this a bit like the self-filling rockets. It is a feature that does not make sense, but it is helpful in not stranding a player during their first play-through.
Failover configurations. This may be a bit misnamed, if there is some event, I have no real problem with manually adjusting power switches and pipe valves. (Although configurable valves and switches would definitely be on my wish-list.) What I really think is missing, are options that allow collecting and charging but not providing to the grid. A simple way to do this is having tri-state water towers/oxygen tanks/accumulators: Charging only, Providing only, or Both. That may be the easiest fix to implement, and also to understand for new users. A full-blown automatic/configurable system with valves and switches that change state automatically is nice to have, but may perhaps only appeal to a smaller subset of users that includes me.
More hints for drones. From the video I understand this was removed in the case of storage depots, and I can understand that too much control does not always improve the game, but the "just distribute everything evenly" mentality the drones have now is not always a good fit for every play style. For example I would want a food depot in range for multiple drone hubs to contain all excess food, but also have 25 food near every individual dome for when colonists get food for themselves (due to other problems). Or: Extractors could have a depot in range for the drones that do the maintenance, but other drones could redistribute them further. Right now a drone could decide to place new resources at the other side of the service area near a depleted extractor just because the player had not yet disabled that depot and it is getting low. Having control over exactly what buildings are serviced by what drone hubs would be even better, but I suspect this may be a big feature.
Names: Right now we can only rename things that already have individual names. I want to rename things that do NOT have individual names. Homes, Drone hubs, Factories, etc. It really is useless to know that a colonist lives at "Smart Home" if your Dome contains 15 smart homes. Even if Drone hubs would be called #1, #2, etc, I could actually know what hub a drone uses without losing the selection by clicking on the hub name.
One last super small thing that annoys me: the minimum service area for heaters is 3 hexes, but I want 2 hexes.
That's about it.
