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You could have put it more diplomatically but you know what? On reflection I am perhaps asking too much of the game and its systems. The fact remains though that in 2 long playthoughs and inumerable sporadic and shorter ones, there simply isnt enough to do with, or for our people, or enough advantage to gaving lots of them. All a few extra hundread humans does is increase logistical burdens. I want to go on expanding and improving the lives of my colonists long after the actuall options to do so have boiled down to "build all the things you just built again, but up, and to the left" I want to fight for more elegant supply chains and more polished logistics, but the reall desison dense period all happens right at the very beginning, and after that solutions are rather known. The period between bootstrapping to something nearing self sufficency and the start of a mystery is very long and very empty. That is a desperate waste of potential.
Well, tbh we cant tell if we are simulated or not, yet the chance exists. So ...
There aren't terribly many ways to sugar coat when it's a player problem.
Pacing issues and lack of gameplay are a valid concern. That's why criticisms should focus on these specifics.
Instead there are these constant attempts to meme into existence ridiculous concerns like "colonists are treated like resources" or we trap them in a dystopian world. Those are not valid concerns. Frankly they're really emblematic of how the Internet generation needs to pause and think about why they have issues with a product before they start complaining.
This is a game. Some players will in fact treat them as resources. Others will build them Smart Homes and Hanging Gardens to make sure they have 140 comfort and live an enviable existence. How you treat your colonists is up to you, the player, and telling the Dev to change the game based on these self-made perceptions is worse than useless - it's just the player trying to impose their own vision of the game on other players.
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Reminds me of this person on Steam that, when I stated that we needed some method of population control, became hostile at me for suggesting the option of it be put into the game because it somehow hurt their playstyle and vision... Never mind the fact they were trying to force their views and playstyle on myself and anyone who disagreed with them at the same time...
Only, past a Tetris degree of abstraction, no game certainly not a game that purports to be about colonising mars, exists as a purely mechanical construct, they are all hybrids of mechanics and naritaves, and it as as fair to say that the naritave that the mechanics produce is unsatusfying as it is to say the mechanics themselves are overly limited, becase without the naratave and some degree of investment in it, you have a spreadsheet and a skinner box. (More spreadsheet than skinner box in case of Surviving mars, but any random distribution of rewards has it as an element.)
So I can say both "These mechanics no longer make me want to engage with them" and "I'm not getting the pay off for investing in this naratave" and both are legitamate complaints. Now it could be that Haremont decides to ignoe me and the worms I rode in on, it might be that others dont share my concerns. But trying to act like the only legitamatekinds of complaints are mechanical, is just the kind of policing, of ensuring the game fits your vison, as you are accusing me of.
For now I am waiting to see the first substantave patches to see what gets fixed or added, because mechanically theresnothing left for me to do, and naritavely the story the mechanics donttell a story that I am particularly intrested in right now (Being that of how all attempts to make a comfortable home on a new world result in bizzare social segregation or hellish overcrowding, death marches, and dystopian unemployment.)
Except you weren't complaining about thematic dissonance - two words that describe what you were trying to explain in the first paragraph.
You complained about how other players treated their colonists as resources. The game in fact can support both the "colonists are resources" mindset and the "we need to create a better future for people" mindset.
The problem, which the latter crowd often has trouble grasping, is that creating a better future is hard. People can create colonies with 140 comfort homes, but they don't because building Smart Homes everywhere is too costly and they'd rather save the electronics for research. They don't because high comfort (naturally) results in people having more kids, which in turn leads to overpopulation and a lowering of living standards unless there are drastic population control measures. They instead blame the developers for not "allowing" their utopian future.
And yet real cities never become "perfect" for this reason. There is always a new problem to resolve unless you start eliminating all semblance of choice for its citizens - like the radical social engineering choice of segregating based on gender or switching to androids. That Surviving Mars forces the "create a better future" crowd to confront the challenges of building utopian societies and the deep trade-offs needed to achieve this is not thematic dissonance. Indeed I find the extreme social engineering very amusing even though I wouldn't do that to my own colonists - because players who do this are living up to the actual challenge of building utopian societies and aren't content to just imagine themselves to be some great city-builder. They worked for it and thus deserve their fun.
You are thus disenfranchising all of the players who actually lived up to the challenge and made their virtual societies work. That is why your position is objectionable.
That said, more content is always better. And the game is lacking in content. That's why it should be what the community should push the developers to focus on, so the people facing challenges will have more challenges and more tools to meet them. Not this pandering to people who keep trying to achieve utopia but fail because they don't actually understand what building a utopia entails.
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I don't consider 140 smart homes an utopia. I totally agree that creating an utopia should be hard, but that should be due to it being impossible to please everyone at once, factions having different interests, your colonists not liking their family being ripped apart due to dome restrictions. Also, I consider the overpopulation as a valid game mechanic ridiculous. Your people are smart. They should know that getting kids which have no place to go is not a clever idea on mars. On earth you also have to think: Can I afford another child?
To not treat people as resource, they need to have the illusion of agency, of being more than a resource. If your main impression of your colonists is "Rabbits", then this is not given, and you will treat them as a resource and necessary evil. So no, the game does not support the "we need to create a better future for people" yet, because they don't feel like people, and definitely not like there is a martian society.
People are not smart. Some of them are literally idiots. Would they even know that there's a colony-wide housing shortage to begin with?
Moreover, they are not the ones spending to give a new home or a good education in Surviving Mars. The colony is. Why would people not assume that their kids will also have great lives if the colony keeps providing them with free stuff in the past?
Nope, if anything you're the one treating people as a resource; because you're insisting that they conform to your utopian ideals automatically based on game mechanics without admitting that your ideals rob them of free agency.
People having kids they might not be able to afford is simply people being people. That's why overpopulation happens and why real governments have to spend money on things like birth control programs to control runaway population growth. China's "one child policy" wasn't just some arbitrary law, it had to be enforced and resources dedicated to enforcing it.
And yet based on your premise the in-game citizenry should have already stuck themselves on the "one child policy" premise right from the start, just because the player leading the colony thinks they shouldn't "breed like rabbits".
By contrast those who really want to implement controlled population growth designed and executed actual social engineering plans. That's why there are colonies with segregated genders. That's an example of players actually treating a human problem as needing a solution, rather than just utopians trying to complain / mod their own vision into the game automatically with no effort needed.
Dealing with and managing large groups of people is in fact very often a frustrating exercise. That players keep complaining about virtual people failing to see the big picture and acting against their own self interest is a reflection of how these players have a very idealized and unrealistic view of how people are actually led and managed. They will not do things that are "good for them" just because you think so. You have to create the conditions for your vision to be implemented, and sometimes be willing to outright enforce these rules.
Moreover, most players are already finding it hard to manage relatively simple things like balancing work force with work demand. What would factionalism add to the game other than bizarre interactions? Are we going to see Geologists try to wage a civil war with the Engineers over who gets the gym? This isn't CK2. It's not a game of factionalism if you control a whole faction outright.
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Soon you will realize that your "trials and tribulations" have nothing to do with your population, which is 50% of the game (the other 50% being your automated systems).
Lol, I like how you attempted to redefine my self-created narrative about my colony - which by definition includes the people and the systems that support them. It really goes to demonstrate how disenfranchising other players is an endemic element of this culture of "complain my way to victory".