You have to be intentionally horrible to get decent numbers of people to break

[jpinard]

Note: I am not a strategy genius. But...

Food proc, med station, grocer, apartment. Supply water and electrical and there's almost never any conflict or issues. It's boring and eliminated the need for half the buildings. How bad is it?

I used hard difficulty options, plus mods to increase trip time, lower birth rates, make it harder to have kids, went to the top of Mars where it's frigid, and tons of dust storms and dust devils. Sol 100 passes and only had one person break and that's cause I decided I was no longer going to bother turning off outdoor factories when it froze. And I just couldn't be flussed to give them any amenities. AND I forced them to work night shifts.

There are serious balance issues in this game, so bad they negate a bunch of gameplay. I'm kinda confused how this wasn't tuned before release. It's not like we have that many dome buildings to choose from. The lack of a building needed by residents, since there's almost none to choose from to begin with, should have a massive impact on morale. Couple that with way too generous tech tree items and morale just isn't a factor in the game. In all my games I have to force them into terrible situations to have fun.

My last game before this - after I'd run out of things to do, I threw everyone with any flaw into a mega dome with just crappy apartments. Food available and NOTHING else. Not even a grocer. Two people broke out of hundreds over 40 Sols. The funny thing is I'd saved up a whole ton of loners expecting they'd truly go nuts being packed in 200 other people. Nope.

Sorry if this turned into a rant. Didn't mean it to be. Lot of potential here. We just need more meat to the game.

 

[zenstrive]

Huh, you must be so lucky. I always get some earthsick colonists early on cramping them on apartments and forcing the to work outdoor harvesting REM and Fungus.

 

[jpinard]

Huh, you must be so lucky. I always get some earthsick colonists early on cramping them on apartments and forcing the to work outdoor harvesting REM and Fungus.

Do you filter your applicants or just let anyone in? I start with living quarters cause they're cheaper to build, then add apartments after that to cram people in. But I still have separate domes. One for seniors, one for engineers and their tasks, one for science/geologists and their tasks, and then one for everything else.

 

[zenstrive]

I filter the idiots mostly

 

[sortulv]

Sanity is not morale. The breaks are a result of people loosing their sanity - which is recovered by sleeping or visiting the doctor... (which explains why they don't break).
Morale is what you loose when you stuff them in cramped quarters and remove their stuff. That should cause rebels I think...

 

[jpinard]

Sanity is not morale. The breaks are a result of people loosing their sanity - which is recovered by sleeping or visiting the doctor... (which explains why they don't break).
Morale is what you loose when you stuff them in cramped quarters and remove their stuff. That should cause rebels I think...

Yea I kinda clumped it all together. The main problem is techs to boost morale and work performance are meaningless in this game if you don't isolate colonists to their starting dome. After Haimomont posted their upcoming patch notes and some of their design divergences it's apparent the values the game uses now were set for isolated domes, not the game as it is where colonists can move between them. I just really hope Haimomont changes these values so the researched techs actually mean something again, along with the need for different spires. Because right now, all I ever need is the arcology spire unless I'm short on water. That's a whole lotta useless spires left over.

 

[Xeorm]

Sanity issues shouldn't be an issue if you're paying attention. Sanity loss is pretty controllable. Lose sanity for working outside, heavy workloads, and disasters. Generally, you shouldn't have issues there. They are noticeably rare, and I think that's by design. The concept is more to provide a steep penalty for not taking care of your colonists.

Given that you mentioned not doing out-dome activities nor heavy workloads in your crazy dome, I'm not at all surprised that you didn't get any sanity breakages. You've built a dome ill-suited to create them.

 

[jpinard]

Good point. But that also brings up an issue in that basically engineers and geologists are the only ones ever at risk of having mental issues since they’re the only fields that need to travel outside.

 

[Xeorm]

Good point. But that also brings up an issue in that basically engineers and geologists are the only ones ever at risk of having mental issues since they’re the only fields that need to travel outside.

Heavy workload's amazing, as is having things working at night. Just about everyone aside from botanists are potentially at risk if you're trying to get the most out of your colonists.

 

[MarQan]

I agree, I felt the same after a few hours.
The game is not balanced enough to provide a real challenge, and its simulation is not deep enough to make it a good sandbox.
Not to mention your infrastructure options make it extremely micro-intensive to have big colonies, which are ultimate limited by the Mohole's production.

But Opportunity update is coming with some additional difficulty options.
Although they're not fixing the core problems, at least they add some variety while they figure out how to implement some meaningful changes. At least that's what I'm hoping for.
So at least we'll get some challenging games until then.

 

[Elendar]

Do you always play in an area without meteors, dust storms and etc? Try losing some of your infrastructure to disasters and not having enough power/water for them. The colonists will leave.. or just die off.

 

[jpinard]

Do you always play in an area without meteors, dust storms and etc? Try losing some of your infrastructure to disasters and not having enough power/water for them. The colonists will leave.. or just die off.

For reference my last game was in an area of very few resources and 4 bars of dust storms, dust devils, and cold.

 

[NickMart]

I'm currently doing a Russia playthrough with full-bar disasters on everything but dust devils. Some say there were suicides. But that's fake news. Everyone is happy on Putin's Mars.

I think cold-waves are the real kicker: you either shut down all your outside industry... or you run it 24/7. Out of dome + night shift + disaster is enough to crack folks who don't have the martianborn techs preventing sanity damage from disasters and out-of-dome work. And if you decide to shut-down, then you need to have enough excess manufacturing capacity to handle all your metal + polymer production shutting down for a few sols (until you get subsurface heaters setup anyway).

 

[MarQan]

I'd also add that although you can finish the game on just 2 domes, there's still in expanding as fast as you can, increasing your max score, adapting to random maps.
Still, completely failing is pretty difficult after a few hours of experience, but that doesn't mean you can't push yourself.

 

[jpinard]

I'd also add that although you can finish the game on just 2 domes, there's still in expanding as fast as you can, increasing your max score, adapting to random maps.
Still, completely failing is pretty difficult after a few hours of experience, but that doesn't mean you can't push yourself.

But this is called "Surviving Mars" not "Mars Resort Sim" lol.

 

[MarQan]

Ohh, I agree that in general it's a developer's job to balance the game to be challenging, without the player constantly restricting themselves.
I'm just saying that there are currently ways in which you can have a challenging game if you wish.

 

[jpinard]

Ohh, I agree that in general it's a developer's job to balance the game to be challenging, without the player constantly restricting themselves.
I'm just saying that there are currently ways in which you can have a challenging game if you wish.

Oh yes definitely. I've created a few mods to do this.