Surviving Mars - Paradox Strategy

Yeah, I figured. I just usually make 3 side by side - seems way easier to deal with than one of each which then becomes a nightmare to try and get a transport vehicle to target the right one.

I wonder if a resource-specific storage platform might push the priority level for a given resource? I can’t quite tell from watching the drones shuffle stuff around, but I’m trying to suss it out now.

Unfortunately, the inability to move colonists between domes is liable to torpedo my current game. I’ve got insane homeless people in my main dome and vacant apartments in my expansion dome. And I’ve got scientists working factories in one dome, and engineers working in research labs in the other dome! It’s madness! I’ve been firing people faster than the Trump administration, but they keep jumping back into the wrong jobs. If there’s one thing worse than resource management in Surviving Mars, it’s colonist management. Urk.

-Tom

Woof. Yeah, I haven’t gotten to my second dome yet (almost ready to have a second batch of colonist move into my first dome) but that will drive me crazy, as well, I suspect.

I’m up to three domes now, seen a little of this but not micro-managed it too much. BUT! You can.

Click on the dome. The Left-most button will let you filter by what type of person you allow to resettle. They work where they live for inside dome buildings. Outside ones harder to micro since I’m not sure what “walking distance” is yet. But once you kick them out, by reassigning to the new job/residence then you can say AND STAY OUT there.

If you have it sorted you can also close it to new colonists with the second to left button on the Dome screen. Looks like the open Stirling Generator icon. That may be useful to do right when you land a new boat of fresh faces. I wouldn’t leave it closed though as they can die of age, and you may want replacements.

I have had some luck with the domes more split science/bio in one, factory/food in another and a third is full factory and further from the two with food. So easier to just ban botanists there.

Oh, I’m well aware of the colonist filters. It doesn’t help when the colonists who can’t reach another dome are told they don’t belong in their current dome. Furthermore, this doesn’t help when you’re trying to keep Idiots out of important workplaces, or trying to focus productivity on one specific factory, or getting a medic to move to an infirmary instead of a research building, or trying to shuffle an unskilled worker out of a mine into a grocery kiosk If Haemimont expects us to manage Martian colonists the way we managed populations in their Tropico games, they still have some work to do on this game.

I had to build an intermediary dome so I could move my colonists from one dome to another. Seems like you pretty much have to specialize until you get larger domes.

It also seems like you’re going to make every resource in every scenario. Unlike the developer’s earlier Tropico games, I don’t get the sense that Mars colonies are going to be very different from each other. Maybe there’s more important stuff further down the tech tree, but for now, it seems like every colony needs the exact same stuff. I’m a bit concerned this is going to be another Cities: Skyline situation, where once you’ve built one city, you’ve pretty much seen it all.

-Tom

Well, this bounced off me pretty hard. Played it for 100 minutes, got 2 domes up and most of the production going, was making a decent income most of which was being directed towards outsourcing research and moving very briskly through the tech tree when it hit me: all I was doing was waiting on resources and research and sometimes doing finicky micromanagement with storage depots.

In Cities Skylines, even if you have seen it all, dealing with the ever increasing crush of humanity is an ongoing and scaling challenge. In this, the game plays itself in tiny habitats that don’t interact with each other.

As is my general policy with games I am on the fence about, I played it for a little less than 2 hours, stopped for a day and decided to see if I had any desire to play it again, and I don’t. So, refunded for now. Being a Paradox title, I assume 2 years from now it will have 5 DLC or so and 20 patches, and maybe when a rocket drops off a bunch of drones for me and depart I won’t have to manually hunt down each one and assign it to a hub. I vaguely remember Warcraft 3 having a “find idle worker” button that selected these things for you, and maybe Brood War did too, back when I had to wrestle with dinosaurs over precious mammoth meat before I could settle in for a night of gaming.

But yea, bookmarked for 2 years checkback.

Ahh good. Didn’t play the later Tropico iterations by them, so no comparisons for me.

Agree it looks like you need to make all resources, though maybe can get the tech early that gives you cash for “Martian Intellectual Property” which says it is re-researchable and maybe chose to just import resource always? Errr Martian Patents it is called.

As for moving between domes, yeah that walking distance. You need to make shuttles, which I guess is the shuttle hub. You can wait for it to pop in Robotics research or start as a Rocket Scientist. I don’t have shuttles yet. And since they can’t walk, my pops tend to stay put if I get them to the right dome in the first place.

I’ve been lucky? in that they seemed to prefer the buildings/domes/jobs that made sense for them coming off the rocket. BUT!

I think I am only content since I do not have shuttles yet. I read from the forums that they ignore the settings I just told you about. So maybe I’ll just get mad once they have shuttles and the ability to ignore my settings. Oh my.

I do remember thinking that it would be nice to arrange the auto hotbar at the bottom to the rovers of the same type were next to each other. Saw no setting, so I manually removed everything left to right to get to the rovers (since I wanted them to stay to the left) then removed them.

I readded them carefully in the order I wanted, and finding them once coated by dust was a PITA. As soon as I did, I notice it re-autosorted them by time of acquisition and they were back in the original order. GAH.

This is my main concern now I’ve sorted out the ridiculous Shuttle Hub situation for moving goods around. I’ve got a few domes going and my resources are increasing but I feel like I’ve almost seen everything after a few hours.

At least the Tropico games had some flavour and the setting lent itself to absurd challenges to act as roadblocks. It feels like the biggest challenge here is willpower or making sure you have enough mechanical parts to survive failures. Not sure why I cant just click and drag to select a bunch of drones and reassign them instead of having to click each one individually.

I really love the music though and it has the same visual charm that Tropico has.

4 hour marathon for me tonight, 4 domes now, yeah there are some rough edges but the game is fun imho.

The flying shuttles with 3x the carry capacity really should be a default unlock, the wait to get to them was brutal and really hampered my expansion plans for quite a while.

The politician starts with Martian Patents, and my European politician had to use it a few times to get around a cash crunch. It’s just a way to devote research to a monetary return, like setting a city to commerce in Civ. I can’t imagine it will be viable to commit research to something when you could just make it yourself on Mars. As near as I can tell, your goal is always to get a self-sufficient colony going.

-Tom

This looks really neat. I may have to try this one out.

Just looking at some of the screenshots of Steam friends, it looks like a strategy adaptation of a cross between OTC and the PI in Eve Online.

Bit annoying its unplayable on laptops because of no scroll / third button keyboard shortcut in the game. Means you cannot rotate dome pieces. :/

I think the R/T keys rotate buildings, don’t they?

-Tom

I’m in similar position, although I have an oval dome and just started on the Mega dome. Man, that’s a lot of resources.

Do you know why the game automatically pins random colonists to the bottom bar? In your screen shot I can see 2 of them. My game does it also, and I usually just click them and unpin them. I’m just trying to figure out why they show up like that.

In my game, the pinned colonist is a celebrity. They generate some income. Digging deeper it says $10M as other income which I assume is the celeb. Not sure units of time on the income.

I bought this on the X1 against my better judgement. So far however, I like it. The controls on console are fairly decent.

The main problem is that the text is extremely small and nearly impossible to read on my TV

To me, it’s one of those relaxing kind of games. The music is nice, you can go at a nice slow pace. I have so many stressful, rage inducing games, sometimes a nice relaxing game is needed.

Exactly where I am in this game, my second. We’ll see where I get today, but not feeling well and slept in. So any lack of progress is on me for today.

I see. Yes the basic goal does seem to be making it all there. I wonder though if using that tech to never buy one resource (never though it would cover all three) might not make a decent leg in a “Challenge Scenario”.

Sometimes the fun can be had in adding your own challenges in these sim/builder. Seen it in everything from The Sims to a horse racing sim. I am watching to see if that develops around this one since it already does a difficulty ranking and score. So “challenge leagues” seem like they may be easier to set up, and they know that crowd exists? /shrug

Yes, and I changed the second set of the hotkeys to something else I preferred. Beware:

It looks like the first column of “Rotate” - rotates.
For me, once rebound, the second column - cycles between skins.

Which if you only have one skin also neatly models “does nothing”.

Isn’t that true of about 99% of non-action PC games? I bought a Steam Link for $5, but haven’t used it because I figure all my games will be unplayable on it.

Oooh cheers! I will give that a go!

It worked. This game. Hmm. I like the story it tells I am not so sure about the mechanics yet though. I did grin that the “first martian” in my game turned out to be an idiot who could not be trusted near important machinery :)