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Surviving Mars - colony management sim from Tropico devs

Self-Ejected

buru5

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I wonder how much Elon Musk has invested in this game.
 

3dfx

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Good, i very much liked Anno 2205 and also to a less extent Civ: Beyond Earth & Pandora: First Contact, so im excited about this.
Keeping my fingers crossed for our local games dev studio in this new endeavor and great news they found a new publisher for this tittle, kalypso are one of the worst.
 

Space Satan

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Paradox are greedy swedish jews but at least they are making decent games. Kalypso are stupid germans, who hoard great concepts and ideas and then turn them into a mediocre pile of shit. Because their motto of "Million flies can't be wrong" and the idea that a dozen of crappy games is equal to one great game is what they are famous for.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/17/surviving-mars-preview/

Surviving Mars brings hard science to colony-building
Adam Smith on May 17th, 2017 at 2:00 pm.

marshead.jpg


During the opening hours, you won’t see a single person in Surviving Mars [official site]. It’s a bold choice, having impersonal robots out there laying the groundwork of a colony, but the benefits are immediately obvious when watching the game in action. There’s a certain Factorium-like mechanical satisfaction to the flow of metal, creating supply chains that stud the surface with structures. The great advantage is the gradual shift from a red planet to a green planet though, even if those bubbles of green are few and far between.

More than any other city builder I can think of, Surviving Mars has the potential to show the life of a settlement, and it does that by beginning in a dead place.

I expect a certain amount of comedy from space colony management games. Whether it’s a comedy of manners stemming from the weirdness of alien visitors or a series of hilarious misadventures sparked off by a lack of oxygen or gravity, there’s room for all kinds of emergent farce. Surviving Mars goes a different route, treating its subject matter with a scientific seriousness. You won’t need to understand the chemical processes that go into creating a liveable atmosphere, or the dirty secrets involved in growing your own poo-tatoes, but you’ll be spending time ensuring basic resources are available rather than micro-managing colonists and their relationships.

mars1.jpg


There’s still plenty of work to do and the game won’t be released until sometime next year, but even the alpha footage we were shown at Paradox’s Convention last week was impressive. Visually, it’s a little austere but that fits with the tone, and makes the eventual colourful colony bubbles seem all the more dramatic. There should be a real sense of achievement in the transformation from dust and death to parks and recreation.

To get there, you’ll be laying lots of pipes and power lines, ensuring that generators (solar and otherwise) are hooked up to the buildings that require them, later doing the same for water and other resources. The surface of the planet is randomly generated once you get in close, and one of your first decisions involves picking a landing spot.

mars3.jpg


The pre-landing part of the game was the least convincing part of the presentation – you select not only a landing spot but a sponsor for the mission, which determines how much cash you have to spend on materials, rovers and pre-fabricated buildings. The combination of funds and the qualities of your starting area determine the game’s difficulty, which can be seen on screen measured as a percentage. It’s neat to be able to adjust the challenge in such detail, but there’s a risk that all of those choices will feel like difficulty sliders rather than important decisions about the future of your colony.

What I don’t want to end up with is a situation where picking a harder difficulty means I’ll spend a couple of extra hours doing busywork just to get things up and running. A big part of Surviving Mars’ appeal will be in that path to the first secure inhabitants, and building a colony dome is your first obvious long-term objective, but if the foundations needed to get to that point are always the same, it might not be a very rewarding journey the fourth or fifth time you take it.

And what happens once the colonists arrive? You can expand their colonies, adding new buildings for work and leisure, and eventually you could build more domes, creating a network of life. The actual construction and management is the core of the game, but there will be Martian mysteries developing alongside your colony. These can either be selected randomly, so that they’re an actual mystery, or selected by the player. Haemimont weren’t sharing many details but I’ll be amazed if one mystery doesn’t involve a big face and other traces of intelligent life.

mars4.jpg


As long as there’s no sad Gary Sinise discovering the secrets of the universe. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183523/

I was in the room for the Surviving Mars’ announcement and I was slightly concerned that Paradox were simply trying to replicate Cities: Skylines in space. It’d be understandable, given how successful that game has been for both them and developers Colossal Order, but putting a layer of red dust and chrome on top of a conventional city-builder wouldn’t make a convincing colonisation sim. After seeing the game up close, the most surprising thing about it is how little it resembles an Earth-based city-builder.

Sure, there are water pipes to lay and power cables to connect, but the environment is so harsh that it creates a separate layer – there are safe spaces for life, and hazardous places in which only machines can work. The inhabitants are precious, almost cargo to be stowed rather than functional parts of the colony. That will change, of course, as they start to work and play, and eventually breed. The game will track all of your achievements on the surface, placing them on a calendar, and the birth of the first Mars baby will be a significant milestone.

mars5.jpg


If I’m still not clear on what will happen beyond that milestone, it’s fair to say I’m looking forward to finding out. Surviving Mars might successfully combine the satisfaction of efficient systems with its resource-gathering robotic vehicles, and the aesthetic pleasures of a finely landscaped living area.

It’s the fragility of life in those domes, and the fact that bringing living creatures to the planet is an achievement in and of itself, that is most interesting. City-builders tend to see a settlement getting larger and denser as time goes on, but the colonies in Surviving Mars remind me of towns and villages at the edges of the world: self-contained and in need of great effort and infrastructure simply to survive, let alone to expand.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
http://www.pcgamer.com/surviving-mars-preview/

Everything we know about Surviving Mars, the colony-builder from the makers of Tropico
Including criminal colonists, mysterious anomalies, and disasters back on Earth that can affect your colony.

"I would be lying to you if I say we have never discussed this interesting side-scenario where the drones go into kill-all-humans mode," says Bisser Dyankov, producer at Tropico developer Haemimont Games, in response to a question about the studio's recently announced colony sim Surviving Mars. I'd asked about technology research in Surviving Mars, and whether it would be possible to unlock advanced AI for robots and drones, and if that could lead at some point to a robot revolt in the colony.

"The idea is obviously... it has been floating in the air," Bisser says.

Ivan-Assen Ivanov, Haemimont Games' technical director adds: "So something like a company-wide robot uprising, it's not off the table. It's not on the table as part of what we're showing now. It's definitely making rounds, around the table. We don't promise anything."

It's not unusual that the developers are being a bit cagey: Surviving Mars is in pre-alpha, and there's not even a playable build available for us to get some hands-on impressions. Still, here's everything we've learned about the survival colony-building game from the presentation and an interview at PDXCon in Stockholm last week—and keep in mind, some of this information may change during development.

You begin by choosing a corporate sponsor for your colony mission
In the opening moments of Surviving Mars, you pick from a list of sponsors: the corporation or country that will fund your colony and will act as a lifeline and supply chain. They'll send rockets containing supplies and equipment, and as you mine resources on the Red Planet, you'll be able to refuel those reusable rockets, and send them on back to Earth.

Choosing your sponsor will dictate your starting funds, provide you with certain goals and milestones, determine how many rockets you have available to send back and forth, and will influence how fast you can build your colony. Your choice of sponsor may even result in penalties if you don't meet certain mission parameters.

"There is a lot of differences [between sponsors]," says Gabriel Dobrev, creative director. "There is a large difference between the initial supplies that you've got, so probably more rockets, more funding, so you can buy more expensive equipment. Later on, the sponsors reward different behavior. One of them may want you to have as big a colony as possible, bring a lot more people from Earth, the other ones might want you to extract precious metals and send them back to Earth.

"So they all reward different type of behavior. And also, they penalize particular behavior, and even can have an end-game condition, like, if somebody dies, you're out, mission is cancelled, so you lose the game essentially."

Mars is based on real data, but maps are randomized
After outfitting your initial rocket with equipment (rovers, transport vehicles, and orbital probes to explore the terrain), you'll select a landing site on Mars. You'll be able to examine your landing zone for the resources it contains, as well as identify different hazards such as dust storms (which can block out the sun and cover solar panels with dust) or extreme cold weather temperatures that can raise power requirements and freeze water supplies.

The landing sites are based on NASA's Mars data of the planet's features—you'll even able to locate the landing site of NASA's Curiosity Rover using real coordinates. However, the maps you play on will be randomly generated to provide an environment that lies somewhere between reality and fiction.

You prepare your colony with drones and robots: people come much later
After landing, you'll dispense a small army of drones and robots to begin preparing for the eventual colonization of humans. Place solar panels to generate power (and store surplus power in batteries for use when the sun goes down—there is a day-night cycle), connect power lines to various modules, build a drone hub to dispense your busy metal workers, and construct a tower to scan the area around your landing zone. Discovering new veins of resources will be paramount to the success of your colony: while you can bring some materials with you on your rocket (like concrete, metals, and polymers) and have more sent from Earth during resupply missions, this will only represent a tiny fraction of what you'll need for construction. Most of what you need will come from your surroundings, not from Earth.

Don't expect your first human colonist to arrive for a while, either. Before you can take one small step for man, your terrain will be well-worn with the tire tracks of your drones.

"The first people will arrive later on when there is habitable space, and all of the things that are required for life and for survival of people," says Dobrev. "And this will actually be a big milestone."

In the meantime, you'll construct machines to process resources on the planet, creating cement for buildings and harvesting water by tapping into ice deep underground and pumping it to the surface. You'll also begin converting the thin Mars atmosphere into breathable oxygen to be stored in tanks. Also important: creating fuel to send your reusable rocket back to Earth.

When colonists arrive, they'll begin researching (and drinking)
Once you've got a habitable space for human colonization, you can begin receiving colonists from Earth. It's not instantaneous: as Mars and Earth orbit the sun, they are rarely close enough to each other for a quick rocket trip, so at times the arrival of colonists and other supplies may be delayed.

Once humans have set foot on Mars, they'll begin to extend your colony further across the map, build additional outposts, research new technologies, and of course, have a little bit of fun.

"Once we have a sort of stable and working colony there, a lot of advances will happen immediately, because people will be present there, thinking, exploring, researching, and so on," says Dobrev.

"There is also entertainment, which is, build a space bar," he adds. "Because you can't do without bars. That's a given."

You can decide what kind of colonists you want by filtering them by their traits
You don't have to allow just any John Q. Earthling into your Mars colony. Each human has traits, like ambitious, tough, frail, workaholic, survivor, and so on. This means you can set standards for who gets to join your effort on Mars.

"You can pre-select, you can filter for that, you can say 'I don't want any frail guys in my colony' but of course that will limit the number of people that will want to come," says Dobrev.

Once you've got humans in your colony, you can also sort them by trait into different areas. For example, you can relocate your workaholics into high-production areas and assign creative types to completing research. This isn't like Cities: Skylines, where your citizens determine their own fates and activities: you'll be able to direct your colonists to work at specific jobs and complete tasks.

Unhappy colonists can commit crimes, lose their minds, or just go back home to Earth
There are four important parameters you'll need to manage and monitor in your colonists. The most obvious is physical health: making sure they have enough food, water, and oxygen, plus insuring they live and work in domes with the proper amount of air pressure and temperature levels.

"We also have the mental health, sanity, which is how well this affects your psyche," says Dobrev. "If you don't feel secure in your environment or if you experience too often a crisis where you don't have access to oxygen, or you're going out on a very long and stressful mission, this is all going to have a reflection on you."

There's also colonist morale. "This is how much individuals' desires are aligned with the colony. If this gets too low, the individual becomes a renegade and he starts thinking about himself and doing his own thing instead of following the goals of the colony, and this is how you get crime."

How do you deal with crime? Form a Mars police force.

"At some point you will need to have some form of law enforcement. When a group of people becomes larger, potentially going to thousands, then you definitely need some form of structure in the society and making sure that everybody's not stepping on the toes of anybody else, more or less."

When your colonists are comfortable enough, they'll start having children
The fourth parameter is comfort level: how confident your colonists feel that they are in a suitable living environment. If the comfort level is too low, colonists can decide they'd rather go back to Earth, and will hop on the next available rocket home (provided, of course, there's enough fuel for the rocket to take off).

If a colonist's comfort level is high enough, they may decide to start having children, providing you with a new supply of colonists without having to call for more from home. This is especially important because while you may be dealing with problems in your colony, there might be even bigger problems brewing on another planet: Earth.

Earth might not always be there for you
Earth represents your supply chain for certain resources, such as food (until you begin growing your own) and especially for additional colonists (until you begin creating your own), so if your corporate sponsor runs into problems, or if the planet itself experiences a calamity, it could severely impact your colony. And that may just happen.

"It could be, for example, if you are sent by a corporation," Dobrev says, "it could go bankrupt. Or, there could be World War III, or there could be something making a disease that is essentially threatening Earth, so you can't really get colonists from there.

"Again, a lot of things that can eventually happen and we want to keep this element a little bit randomized, so that you don't always know what's going to happen to Earth and there is no ultimate security that Earth will always be there for you to help you out."

'Mysteries' allow for fantastical sci-fi events
Back to the robot uprising I mentioned earlier—and remember, it hasn't been confirmed, it's just one of many ideas that have been discussed by the developers. If there is an AI revolt, though, it would be part of special events the developers are calling 'mysteries.' While Surviving Mars is mostly based on real science and technology, the developers also want to allow for more wild, far-fetched situations.

"With the mysteries, we allow ourselves to go haywire, nodding to classic sci-fi and weird ideas," says Dyankov. "And the way the mystery is structured, it's a different story for each playthrough inviting the player to go and interact with it, having an effect on the gameplay. It could be something like an object materializing from [another] dimension, you know?"

Mars, after all, represents a new frontier. "Who knows what's there? Maybe aliens, maybe kill-all-humans."

Mysteries are optional, though
Not interested in fantastical events involving aliens, other dimensions, or robot uprisings? Want to stick to science instead of science-fiction? No problem. Players don't need to get involved with Surviving Mars' mysteries if they choose not to.

"The important thing with those mysteries is to understand that the player will be also able to, in the initial stages, say that 'I don't want to experience any mystery.' So the sandbox experience is there but the mystery is something on top that we invite the player to engage in with different playthroughs."

It's a sandbox
"The idea is not that there is any fixed goal," Dobrev says. "That you have to achieve this and then you're done. There is practically no victory screen. You play and you can set up your own goals. You can try to follow the mystery and get to its end. You can try to get the first colonist to Mars sooner or you can try to reach a self-sustaining level of your colony sooner but that's not a set goal.

"These are all goals that we'll be tracking for you and it will be easy if you want to follow them to see how well you're doing, but that's not something that we're putting in front of you and saying, like, you have to do this or you have to do that. It's a sandbox."

There's no release date yet, but Surviving Mars is expected to arrive sometime in 2018.
 

Burning Bridges

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Paradox are greedy swedish jews but at least they are making decent games. Kalypso are stupid germans, who hoard great concepts and ideas and then turn them into a mediocre pile of shit. Because their motto of "Million flies can't be wrong" and the idea that a dozen of crappy games is equal to one great game is what they are famous for.

The points are interchangeable, I have spent more time playing Tropico alone than all Paradox games together.

Tropico games may be lacking but at least they are fun. All Paradox games are half assed spreadsheets with broken functionality hidden behind a black filter and look like absolute ass.


europa_universalis_iv_common_sense-08.png
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/08/30/surviving-mars-preview-2/

Red means danger: how to survive in Surviving Mars

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The people living in my new habitat dome have jobs to do, that’s what brought them to Mars in the first place, but when they finish work they have two choices: they can either go to the casino or the bar. I could have built a gym or some other kind of leisure facility, but I went with the casino and bar combo. It’s what I’d want if I had to live in a dome on a hostile planet.

And make no mistake, Mars is a hostile planet. That’s why Surviving Mars [official site] can be so demanding.

Broadly, I think Mars colonisation will have three phases. I’m referring to the process of colonising in the game Surviving Mars here rather than preparing to deliver a TED talk.

The first phase involves populating the planet with robots. They trundle around setting up the infrastructure, making sure that when people arrive from Earth they can do all the fun things that humans like to do, like eating and drinking and sleeping.

smars4-620x337.jpg


So you set up power networks, harnessing wind or solar energy, and you set up batteries to store the power during the nights or on those occasions when the wind isn’t up to much. Then you make concrete and mine metals so that you can construct more useful buildings, and eventually you build domes. That’s when you enter phase two.

The domes are where your people live and after playing the game very briefly, I reckon those people might be the most interesting thing about Surviving Mars. Rather than living in settlements on the surface, they’re confined to the domes, only really leaving to get from one place to another or when commuting to the local exotic metal refinery.

Dome management, then, is very important. Throw a bunch of homesick colonists into cramped living quarters and only give them bars and casinos as social spaces, and they’re likely to develop some bad habits. You won’t see the individual members of your population wandering around like Sims, but they do have traits and can develop new ones if their surroundings encourage good/bad behaviour.

smars3-620x312.jpg


Migrate to a distant planet with a tiny population and spend your days working and drinking? That might lead to some problems down the line. And that’s why it’s better to have some variety in terms of leisure offerings in your domes, but providing that variety takes space and even though Mars is big and empty, your domes fill up quite quickly. Throw in a school and a health clinic and a few apartment blocks, and a small dome will be pretty much full. Bigger domes are more expensive and require more resources, but offer obvious advantages.

If you treat your colonists badly, or if Mars isn’t to their liking, they’ll take the next rocket home. You could just stop sending rockets home and turn Mars into a sort of prison planet, but connections with Earth are important. Depending on the sponsor you pick at the beginning of the game, you’ll have various equipment and resources right at the start of the game, but you’ll also need to figure out why the heck you’re on Mars in the first place.

Research is the key goal – like an Arctic outpost you’re out on the edge of nowhere to Do Science – but there’s nothing wrong with making a bit of cash along the way, so if you find deposits of rare minerals, you can pull them out of the ground and send them home. And you might be able to ask for supplies as well, provided everything is hunky dory back in the Old World, and your sponsors are still supportive of the mission. It’s not clear yet how that relationship will play out, but there could be some interesting twists in the tale.

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All of that will be revealed closer to release though. These are still the early stages of public showings for Surviving Mars. The game as I’ve played it is as solid as the shell of those domes but it’s impossible to gauge how well each of the three phases will work. I know nothing at all of the third, in fact, which is when martian mysteries might kick in, adding a touch of sci-fi suspense along with all that martian management.

The domes are neat microcosms, little bubbles of life within an automated world. If Surviving Mars is going to grab me, it’ll most likely do so by balancing the usual machinery of management games, which so often become self-sustaining loops once all of the elements are in place, with the more fragile environment of the human habitats. I saw an example of this when a storm drained my power supplies, forcing my people to rely on reserves.

smars1-620x315.jpg


When disaster strikes, the response requires a cool head. What can we shut down to preserve energy for life support systems? How long is this crisis likely to last and what are the essential facilities needed to prevent misery and death? There’s something dangerously picturesque about the scene as lights flicker out across the planet’s surface.

Whether Surviving Mars will maintain that tension, between pushing forward at pace and playing it safe, is up in the air for now. But there is the promise of something intriguing in the balance between an automated planet and the fragility of life beneath the domes.

Oh, and go back to the fourth paragraph of this article. If you weren’t screaming “AND OXYGEN, ADAM, DON’T FORGET OXYGEN” at the internet for the duration of the preview, you have failed as a Mars mayor before you’ve even begun.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamesn.com/surviving-mars/surviving-mars-mysteries

Surviving Mars' colonies can be invaded by the horrors of '60s sci-fi

suriving%20mars%20header.png


Haemimont Games wants the science in its city builder, Surviving Mars, to be plausible. It’s been one of the biggest challenges of the game according to the studio’s CEO, Gabriel Dobrev. “The sheer complexity of the game and the fact we want to stay as much as possible in the realms of reality creates problems,” he tells us.

One example of these challenges Dobrev gives is the game’s drone workforce. As your colony expands, you’ll build up a small army of constructor robots that weave around your base, maintaining and operating machinery. “We were going to make the drones flying because that was easier for collision,” Dobrev recalls, “but I was like 'No, we can't make them flying because that's very unlikely to happen’. It's possible but it's very unlikely.

“Yes, if you have a lot of advanced technology maybe one day it will happen but definitely the first drones will not,” Dobrev adds. “We did a lot of things like that everywhere we constrained ourselves because of how things would be.”

It’s clear that Haemimont Games are determined to stick to the rules of real science, then. However, this commitment has its limits, as they have also poured plenty of science fiction into Surviving Mars’ late game. As your colony expands you can come across ‘Mysteries’. When you do, odd things can start happening on your Mars base. Debrov wouldn’t go into much detail about what peculiarities can occur, but he did explain why the studio’s otherwise science-based game featured what amount to be very unscientific storylines.

surviving%20mars%20colony.png


“We wanted to have those two aspects and they were kind of contradicting each other. You can't do sci-fi and be plausible at the same time. So we settled on doing it like this: the core of the game is as plausible as we can keep it and then there are the mysteries. The mysteries are typically a little later in the game. With those we have no limits of what we can do.”

Debrov knows some of his audience may not be happy with the blend, saying, “You can turn [the mysteries] off if you only want the plausible core, or you can select a specific mystery or go for a random one. These are simple stories, [with] a lot of interactions and many endings, and stuff that can happen.”

Debrov keeps his lips tight when talking about what we might see when we push on into these mysteries:: “As the name suggests I don't want to reveal anything about the mysteries.” However, he did talk about how the team was inspired by the sci-fi stories of the 60s and 70s, especially in how both periods imagined what the future would look like - “this retro-futuristic style that we re-imagined and cleaned up a little and made a little more functional. You won't see any cables sticking out [of our drones].” He also mentions how those two decades had a grander view of humanity, with characters in the game reflecting this altruism, acting bravely on behalf of the human race rather than getting caught up in lesser human squabbles.

We did get a small concession out of Debrov, though, as he says that “at some point we will say this mystery is inspired by [the] work of Asimov and this mystery is inspired by [the] work of Arthur C. Clarke, or something like that.” Still, it seems like a strange decision to throw a sci-fi-shaped spanner into the works of a city builder that is meant to be as close to predictable reality as possible. To that, Debrov explains that there’s more to the mysteries than simply paying homage to sci-fi inspirations.

surviving%20mars%20optimistic.png


“[With mysteries] anything is possible and when it happens you just have to deal with it,” Debrov says. Mysteries only appear once you have learned the systems and mechanics of Surviving Mars. They’re a way to force you to re-evaluate the game and bend its systems to your needs. “You'll try things and sometimes you don't know what the result will be. Like, 'A mysterious object appears' and then people say, 'We can ignore it, build around it, or nuke it'. Maybe it will explode when you nuke it, or maybe it doesn't. It's kind of like that. It's not so much mechanic-based. You don’t know what's going to happen. Something happens and you're like 'Woah'.”

We’ve got our fingers crossed for a Forbidden Planet style of mystery that sees our moon base assaulted by an invisible creature conjured from the sleeping mind of a mad scientist. Or, you know, a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style rogue AI.
 

Infinitron

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http://www.pcgamer.com/surviving-ma...ic-and-optimistic-take-on-space-colonization/

Surviving Mars wants to inspire the next generation of astronauts
Watch an exclusive new video covering Haemimont Games' vision for its space colony builder.

Haemimont Games has just released their first video dev diary for Surviving Mars, their upcoming survival city-builder about colonizing the red planet. CEO Gabriel Dobrev took the time sit down with us for an exclusive interview about the challenges of setting up a comfy living space in a hostile environment, turning real science into fun gameplay, and what happens when everyone in your space dome suddenly wants to be just like the dumbest guy around.

PC Gamer: You mention in this video that you’ve incorporated a lot of actual science into Surviving Mars. What's your research process for that?


Gabriel Dobrev: So a lot of these issues have been tackled for a while now by different scientists. And all of this is summarized in a number of places. So what we had to do was cover, with the design team, all of the material in order to get acquainted with all of the current thinking about what’s going to happen. Because it’s not only about the science side of it. Sometimes the science is well-developed, sometimes not so well-developed. But the key here is, how do you turn that into actual, viable gameplay?

If I even look around, I just have a computer in front of me and a wireless [router]. And this is very complex machinery, but they look like a box. And as long as you plug the cables in, they just work. That’s a very nice magic we have, but you can’t have a good game with that. You know, you have to tell the player a little bit more about how they work and why they work. And you also have to, a little bit, kind of make ways for them to break so there actually is a game to play.

So where do you find that balance between accuracy and fun?


Take the example of the MOXIE ["Mars OXygen In situ resource utilization Experiment," an oxygen extraction system]—whatever the internal design of the MOXIE is, it’s just a box. And it just works. You plug in the power and as long as it has access to air, it just works. So we had to do stuff like, okay, there has to be certain cases where the MOXIE actually breaks and certain conditions where it won’t be able to work. So we, essentially, are finding ways to expose and explain a little bit of that technology and how it works to the player.

How do you feel about the way science is portrayed in games? Is there anything you guys are trying to do to change that?


We don’t really have an agenda in that sense. But from my end, I’ve always wanted to have more things to be explained and be real. Surviving Mars is a very good learning process, because we’ve really learned why you really have to sometimes simplify things. Because the actual thing that is going on is so complex, and the process of colonizing Mars is so complex and so many things can break in so many places, that we don’t really want to expose the player to all of that complexity. We somehow have to make it more manageable. But still, for us, it’s very important that it makes sense, and the problems players will have are some of the actual problems we will have when we actually go to Mars.

For example, the dust covering everything because there is a dust storm and a lot of machines stop working. Because they are clogged or just as a precautionary measure, they have to stop working otherwise they will just break. Also handing temperature, handling the radiation—in general, handling all the major hurdles people will have when they go to Mars. Being able to grow food on your own there is a big, big thing.

How did you decide on Mars colonization as the subject for your next game?


First idea was generally, outside of Earth. But then we quickly realized that … the type of things you will have to do to go to the surface of Venus or to the Moon will be very different because the conditions are so different. And the type of things you will have to produce on the surface versus the type of things you will have to bring in, also the general outlook of your structures, will be different. And since Mars is kind of the next thing that is very close on the horizon, we decided, okay, this is the one we will tackle. And then we actually realized that, by doing this, we will be able to tell people a little bit about what the actual problems will be so they can learn more. And I’m really looking forward to people playing the game and then saying, “Okay, I want to know more about this and what’s happening.”

What’s the longest, internally, that you’ve seen someone keep a colony going?


Oh, very long. We have games that are about 40 hours [of play time] on a single colony? And you pretty much have everything. You’ve got all the resources. You’ve researched everything you need. Really trying to do everything in the game. And even in that playthrough, it wasn’t all done. We tried to sort of break the game in a certain way to get the highest research possible. And this led to accumulating an enormous amount of money. The guy just had billions and billions. Because he was selling all of this research [output] back to Earth, and also selling various resources. But his colony was not big. Not even close to what you can get in terms of size. He was more focused on breaking that specific mechanic.

Then what's Surviving Mars' 'ending?'


We don’t have a stopping point and we are consciously avoiding providing any. Even in some games when you can continue the game [indefinitely], when you see that screen that kind of says, “That’s all,” you feel like that’s all. Because the game just told you. Five minutes before you were okay [to keep playing], and now it’s kind of like, well, it’s over. And we don’t want to do that. So really, it’s up to you to decide. We have these milestones you can achieve and some of them are not easy, at all. And you’re definitely not going to achieve them all in a single playthrough. Or maybe you will. That could be a goal—to get all of the milestones done in a single playthrough. But essentially it’s up to you to really decide how much is enough.

And you can play to really just establish a working colony. You know, that’s a very quick thing to do in a few hours. Your colony is set up. [Your colonists] are happy with their lives. You’re producing all of the resources you need for the colony. And you have this small, stable society. And then there are the mysteries [ed note: optional quest chains that introduce some more outlandish sci-fi elements to be uncovered], so you can play through the entire mystery. And typically, your research opportunities last way longer than that. So you can try to research everything you can get your hands on, which is going to take quite a while. So you really have to decide when it’s enough for you.

I’m curious about what your general inspiration was for the game's aesthetics.


The first inspirations were The Jetsons and Futurama. We love that, and we kind of wanted to do that, but we never had the opportunity. We wanted, even way before this project, to somehow incorporate that naive style and very clean things. Very functional at the same time. So that retro-futuristic style was really something we wanted to do and we decided maybe it was going to be a match.

And the second inspiration came from what we think and consider necessary on the surface of Mars. So if you have machinery that looks like the Curiosity rover, and you have to go there and live there—that rover looks like it’s going to fall apart any moment now. It’s a wonder that it hasn’t fallen apart yet. And if you have to go and live in that environment, you definitely don’t want the things around you to look like that. You have to feel very, very safe. And that’s why we wanted to have these very clean aesthetics. We think that is really necessary if you want to have people living there and feeling comfortable over long periods of time and bringing more people than a few highly-trained scientists. You need to have people going there because it’s really a better place to live.

Overall, are you wanting Surviving Mars to feel more lighthearted, along the lines of a Tropico? Or will it be closer to some of the other things you’ve done that are a bit darker?


There is danger, and there will be a lot of dangerous things. But this is not our focus. It’s not about the drama of the dangers you face on Mars. Our focus is more on the challenge of getting to Mars and settling it. So we didn’t want to make it a big problem, what’s going to happen if all of the sudden you lose power? So we wanted to sort of get away from that dark future kind of environment. It’s more about keeping it optimistic and positive.

You say that, but you’ve also mentioned several times that it’s going to be a difficult game. It’s going to punish you for playing poorly, like a survival game. What’s been your tactic for balancing that optimistic and accessible atmosphere with the difficulty?


We have a number of things that can change your difficulty. One of them is picking a mission sponsor. Some sponsors just give you a lot of things. Sometimes even, you can have all of the research done for you on Earth. So you might never even set up any research on Mars. It will go slowly, but you can completely rely on that. You can have a lot of food brought in, so you don’t have to set up these separate systems to take care of that. And with some sponsors it’s a lot tighter.

It also depends on where you land on Mars. If you land on a spot where there are not that many dangers and there are a lot of resources around, naturally, it will be a lot easier to set up the colony. If you need something, you can just move over a few meters and there it is. But if you land on a much harder position, you can see your water reserves depleting and you have no idea where you will get your water. So you have to scan more of the surface so you can maybe find frozen water underneath the surface. Or you can try to bring in some machinery that produces water, but that’s expensive in a different way. So you see this wall coming that you have to find a way around.

Planning against those issues is very interesting. So the difficulty varies greatly, and we absolutely recommend playing with the easier sponsors first just to get familiar with the mechanics and how everything works out, then try with the more difficult ones.

So who’s the sponsor that’s like, the really, really hardcore players pick it just to show off how good they are at the game?


I am not sure, honestly, about dropping names [right now]. But we have surprises there, let’s say. We have difficult ones that are really, really limited in what they can offer you.

There might be like, Joe’s Mars Colony Supplies and Sandwich Shack?


[laughs] When you see it, it will be very self-explanatory.

I hate to ask this before the game is even out, but—we’ve seen with most of the recent Paradox games, from the Development Studio stuff like Europa Universalis IV down to, you know, Cities: Skylines, this sort of ever-expanding with DLC strategy. Have you guys thought about if you want to go that route?


For the moment, we are absolutely focused on cleaning up the game, polishing everything and getting the performance and everything right. So we don’t have any particular decisions about what we are going to release. I would certainly hope so. Because my feeling is—the game is pretty long when you start to play, and there are so many systems interplaying with each other. And there is such space to explore, design-wise, in terms of different ways to tackle this problem. Different solutions, different approaches. We really don’t feel that we have exhausted the space [with the core game], so to speak. So I really am hoping that we have the chance to explore that fully.

Before you go, what's the most memorable thing you've had happen while playing the game so far?


I can tell you about something that is not a hallmark of what the game is, but is very interesting and crazy. All the citizens on Mars are different, and they have different traits. They are all unique in their own way. And we had for the first time in the office, a couple days ago, a 'Guru Idiot.' And the idiots, they just sometimes break stuff, you know. They just walk around and go to work, and everything explodes, and they’re just like, “Oh, whatever.” And of course, you may decide that you don’t want to recruit any [idiots] to come to Mars. But you can also try to invite them, and that’s also fine. You know, even if something breaks occasionally, you can fix that. But the guru is this rare trait of a person that sort of teaches everybody around him to be more like him. And in this case, they’re all becoming idiots. And in a colony full of idiots, everything just breaks because there are so many.

This almost reminds me of American daytime television. The implications of the guru idiot.


[laughs] You know, if it’s maybe one or two, it’s fine. But if it’s a whole bubble of them, then everything is literally falling apart. It’s a crazy, crazy thing. So we had a big laugh when that happened. Just anticipating what was going to happen when we saw that. And we’re still discovering these combinations of these different traits ourselves. And we’re looking forward to the first time that we encounter this or that combination that we’ve discussed, this will be very interesting when it happens.

Oh, I did have one more thing I have to ask as a metal fan. You did the Motörhead DLC for Victor Vran. Is there any chance we will ever be able to send Motörhead to Mars?


[laughs] I don’t know. This is such a licensing nightmare. We do have a very good relationship with the Motörhead guys. Unfortunately with Lemmy [Kilmister, late frontman] passing away, we can’t really ask—we can ask [guitarist] Phil Campbell and see if he wants to be on Mars. And that would be a very interesting sort of mix-and-match. But now that you mention it, I think Victor Vran can probably find a way to Mars. That’s a very interesting thing.

Yeah, especially if he became a guru. I could see some interesting implications with that.


Thanks to Gabriel for taking the time to talk to us! Surviving Mars is set to release in 2018, but Paradox is taking signups on survivingmars.com now.
 

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http://www.pcgamer.com/surviving-mars-resource-system-is-inventive-intricate-and-challenging/

An exclusive look at Surviving Mars' inventive, intricate resource system
Learn more about resources with this exclusive video.

In Surviving Mars, you're tasked with building a colony on the red planet, a gig that requires you to keep your colonists both alive and happy, while dealing with the perils of the surrounding environment. Resources are a huge consideration in any management game, and settling on Mars creates a bunch of headaches in this regard.

In the short video above, you'll learn a little more about resources and how they work in the game. Below, Boian Spasov, lead designer of Surviving Mars at former Tropico dev Haemimont Games, explains this system in more depth, and how you'll need more than money to keep your colony ticking along.

Can you talk about how resources work in Surviving Mars, and how that plays into the survival element of the game?


When we started working on Surviving Mars it quickly became apparent to us that a traditional city-builder resource system won't do at all. We put a concentrated effort to emphasise elements that are not common for the genre but are tightly tied to the survival aspect of the game, such as scanning for resources, deposit scarcity and transportation problems.

Our main objective was to create a rich, deep system where resources feel different from one another and are not just requirements for placing new buildings, but instead present different kinds of thematic problems. Your water towers may freeze. A metal deposit may run dry. A critical building may stop working because the electronics required to repair it is not available.

What are the different ways you can make money in the game? How do you gather resources?


First things first—on Mars money will not always solve your immediate problems. When a cable is faulty or a pipe leaks, you are not able to simply plug the hole with dollar bills.

Your limited funding is kind of a wildcard, allowing you to order prefab buildings, vehicles and resources from Earth. Delivery takes time though, so these may arrive too late to be of any use and you still need to be able to secure fuel for the return trips of the rockets. Funding is also kinda hard to earn—you can get it by exporting precious metals but such deposits are few and far between as by some other, more exotic methods such as pampering a celebrity in your colony.

As for the other resources, there are quite a lot of them. Construction materials such as metals and concrete are required to expand your colony and for maintenance. They are usually gathered from deposits and these deposits will eventually run out.

Advanced resources such as Polymers and Electronics are produced in factories and will be required in large quantities for more advanced buildings. Initially you will not be able to make them in the colony and will have to rely on supplies from Earth for them. Resource self-sufficiency is a huge milestone that cannot be reached trivially in the early days of your colony.

Most of your buildings require electricity to operate, which is another kind of resource to manage. Life support resources such as Oxygen, Water and Food are critical for the survival of your colonists. Each of these systems may fail in a different way, so it is always prudent to keep emergency storages and to always have a backup plan.

How important is it to pick the right spot to build your base in Surviving Mars? What other factors do you have to be aware of at the start of the game?


Even as you are setting up the game, you will be faced with several choices very relevant to the resources that you will have available later on. Where on Mars you will land? Do you prefer a dangerous location rich in metal deposits, or a relatively safer location with secured water supply? What will you take in your first rocket? Will you add additional probes to the payload, allowing you to scan more sectors before you pick your landing site?

Picking your colony location is an involved process. The first step is to customise the mission parameters. Different mission sponsors and the chosen mission commander specialisation will make certain gameplay elements much easier or harder for you.

Then you will determine the initial payload of your rocket. You can go with the default or customise it picking any prefab buildings, starting resources and vehicles up to the rocket capacity and the limits of your funding.

Next, you have to select a rough colony location anywhere on Mars. This choice will determine the topology of the map you play on. Different maps may be rich or scarce on certain deposits and will offer various environmental challenges such as Dust Storms.

Finally, you will be able to scan a limited part of the map with Probes and will have to select an exact landing site. At this stage you have to take care to plan both for nearby deposits and potential expands at this stage—the map is vast and different positions offer different advantages and challenges.

At the start of the game you land drones before your colonists arrive. How does this phase of the game shape what happens next?


The early game stage, the so-called "automated colony" is one of my favorite elements in the game. You are basically putting down the foundation of a much larger project—establishing basic infrastructure, securing essential life support, testing your tech against the dangers of the red planet for the first time and making use of the limited resources that can be exploited at this stage. This stage feels both safer, since machines are more easily replaceable than humans and incredibly crucial, because planning mistakes at this point can have far-reaching consequences.

Also, the drone workers are cute. I just love the industrious little guys and I hope they will remember this if they decide to take over my colony at some point in the future.

Can you talk about exporting, and how you can use that to make more money?


If is fairly straightforward—you can load a rocket with precious metals (one of the few things that have significant value on Earth, but a more limited use on Mars), refuel it so it can return to Earth and you get a small funding boost. Extracting precious metals and producing fuel require separate infrastructure. Precious metal deposits are scarce and require colonist workers so you can't really get to them very early in the game. Fuel is highly explosive and its production will put a strain on your very limited water supply.

Still, even if you don't discover a rich deposit of rare metals, you can get to self-sufficiency with careful planning and prudent usage of your starting funds. As I said earlier, it is not a game about money. Funding is often less important than vital little things like oxygen and power that we take for granted on Earth.

How conscious do you have to be of factors outside of your control, like meteor storms?


Disasters are a thing in the game as much as you want them to be. You can pick a very safe map, or challenge yourself with a more aggressive location, braving seasonal Dust Storms and extreme Cold Waves. Each of these disasters offers a different set of challenges—for example a Dust Storm will reduce the effectiveness of your Solar Panels, making you rely on stored power and alternative energy sources. It will also clog your structures with fine dust, forcing you to perform maintenance more often, thus putting a strain on your limited resources.

I still remember one game in which a huge meteor landed right in the middle of my initial landing site, devastating all my vehicles. I am talking about a one-in-a-million chance here, something that hasn't yet happened in any other playtest that we've made. It is as if the piece of rock decided it will be jolly good fun to screw up my colony in particular. Still, I landed a second rocket some time later and eventually managed to salvage some materials from the ruined vehicles and recover—it was definitely a very memorable playthrough!
 

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