Always a problem in city builders, or any sim game be it building a civilization or a tower, has the issue of the late game. For whatever reason, nearly every single one of them taper off from the early game glow of skin of your teeth management and the mid game settling out your plans. Once you reach the point where the only thing left to do is expand or finish off the tech tree, the fun slows down. You manage instead of plan. You sit back and relax.
In Surviving Mars, this usually happens by about the time of the Mohole or the space elevator. They capstone your colony and let it fall into the realm of self-sustainability with little to no fear of devastation even if you leave the game running all night. To date, I've only really seen two sims that 'fix' this: Dwarf Fortress and SimCity 4.
DF works twofold. Invasions which scale with the size of your fortress, pushing you ever onwards and upwards to defend yourself which scales the invasions even higher. This does cap though so the other fold is the one which people call FUN! Where you get hoisted by your own ambition (this can sometimes happen with the Mohole or the elevator but only if you're being lazy/haven't figured them out yet.)
SimCity kills you in the late game with its skyscrapers. Each one represents a huge leap in terms of the traffic you need to contend with and the amount of demand you have to work with. A potentially huge boon if you can handle it or the cog in a once beautifully run city if you can't. Designing around both getting a skyscraper takes enormous resources but more importantly, so does maintaining them. Even one can make you want to completely redesign a neighbourhood.
Now here's where this sorta turns into a suggestion/speculative post. How do you provide problems to a player once the colony is self-sufficient? You need a metric beyond Survival and we're seeing this in the upcoming update with workshops but thus far they just seem to be there to increase comfort (and a milestone, but that's just points on a scoreboard) which is mostly only there to determine whether people get it on. Having more colonists is not the goal. Once you have about a 150 or so, you can have a pretty self-sustaining colony between the farms and factories, only worrying about expanding when a mine is about to be depleted. A worry which goes away with the mohole.
So I propose having some things locked behind moral and possibly a rework of it. The earliest trailer:
Probably shows hints that this may have been part of the original plans. Colonists building stuff. Like a few other city builders before it, designating an area for construction then having only high moral colonists be able go out and build it could force the player to try building more than just a self-sustaining colony, to build a happy one so that things like the geodome require not just a ton of resources but people to want to build it in the first place.
In Surviving Mars, this usually happens by about the time of the Mohole or the space elevator. They capstone your colony and let it fall into the realm of self-sustainability with little to no fear of devastation even if you leave the game running all night. To date, I've only really seen two sims that 'fix' this: Dwarf Fortress and SimCity 4.
DF works twofold. Invasions which scale with the size of your fortress, pushing you ever onwards and upwards to defend yourself which scales the invasions even higher. This does cap though so the other fold is the one which people call FUN! Where you get hoisted by your own ambition (this can sometimes happen with the Mohole or the elevator but only if you're being lazy/haven't figured them out yet.)
SimCity kills you in the late game with its skyscrapers. Each one represents a huge leap in terms of the traffic you need to contend with and the amount of demand you have to work with. A potentially huge boon if you can handle it or the cog in a once beautifully run city if you can't. Designing around both getting a skyscraper takes enormous resources but more importantly, so does maintaining them. Even one can make you want to completely redesign a neighbourhood.
Now here's where this sorta turns into a suggestion/speculative post. How do you provide problems to a player once the colony is self-sufficient? You need a metric beyond Survival and we're seeing this in the upcoming update with workshops but thus far they just seem to be there to increase comfort (and a milestone, but that's just points on a scoreboard) which is mostly only there to determine whether people get it on. Having more colonists is not the goal. Once you have about a 150 or so, you can have a pretty self-sustaining colony between the farms and factories, only worrying about expanding when a mine is about to be depleted. A worry which goes away with the mohole.
So I propose having some things locked behind moral and possibly a rework of it. The earliest trailer:
Probably shows hints that this may have been part of the original plans. Colonists building stuff. Like a few other city builders before it, designating an area for construction then having only high moral colonists be able go out and build it could force the player to try building more than just a self-sustaining colony, to build a happy one so that things like the geodome require not just a ton of resources but people to want to build it in the first place.
