Saw this over on ResetERA:
Reddit’s favorite mods:
Q&A with the devs:
One more question. My idiot colony members keep running back and forth between two of my domes until my colony starved because a group of them were the botanists to be growing my food. I have one dome for growing plants and engineering, one for education, and one for the retired. I put a med station, grocer, and diner in all 3 to make sure their basic needs were met. So I set filter parameters for each dome and they driving me nuts. I don’t want to quarantine them because then the older people won’t leave on their own nor will the kids who need to go to the learning dome. Any suggestions?
Thanks!
Ignore my last question. Got some mods to fix those issues.
If you haven’t listened to the alternate radio stations WOW! Except for one song, "Quantum Sonics" is amazing. I can’t believe I almost missed that extra music and it is right along the lines of the Fallout 4 radio chatter. Fantastic.
The sound track is definitely one of my highlights of the game. I am currently listening to the developers Q&A, if they continue to follow the Paradox model of adding DLC and patches, I think this could end up being my favorite builder/city game.
Like many Paradox games, the beginning is much more interesting than the end. I’ve never really had desire to play past Sol 100. There needs to be more depth to the end game.
Apparently the game logic is almost all in Lua (100KLOC), and they released it + a ton of documentation to make modding easier:
Patch is out.
Hallelujah!
The lack of this feature was literally the make or break on my refund of the game. I actually can’t believe it made it through any kind of QA without such a button.
But at this point I’ll just check in on the games development and get it on sale after the first few DLC come out.
The one thing really bugging me about the game is I have to do stupid stuff to make it hard. It is just so pathetically easy. I don’t know why Haimomont keeps doing that in their games. You’d think they’d learned after scathing remarks about Tropico being way too easy and no challenge etc.
Have you tried raising the difficulty? From reading here and elsewhere, you can make it quite challenging. I wouldn’t know, I keep starting over trying to be perfect.
Yea lol. Bad spots on Mars and hard traits, and slower rockets mod, and harder reproduction mod etc. I think I need a “single rocket that takes 10x as long and all the colonists suffer from massive radiation damage when they arrive kinda mod” haha.
I am finding the Church folks to be pretty hard so far. I’m not sure if the double birthrate is really going to be a feature. It is still early but I it seems entirely possible I’ll run out of money.
I enjoyed playing as them. You have to plan very carefully to ensure you can start exporting rare metals before your money runs out, and also don’t starve (the debuff to hydroponic farms can be a bummer).
They breed like bunnies, which I think is both a good and bad thing. The good part is the achievement that asks for 100 martianborn before Sol 100 is definitely attainable, the bad part is you’ll have a whole army of people without specialties or positive traits (unless you somehow have the spare resources and room for a school and university at that point in the game).
I’ve made a pair of mods for a fun challenge. Your a stowaway and everything is branched off the idea you have very little support as you take the lead in trying to develop the Mars colony. It is very difficult.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1354305506
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1354394454
A collection of mods from official ones to others that complete the experience and make the game more enjoyable: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1351728305
If you don’t want a more challenging game then don’t check the ES options nor increased travel time. The rest enhance the game quite a bit. Also includes more radio stations that fit the mood perfectly. Go to Mod Manager in game to select which ones you want. 1/4 of them are official mods from the developers.
Thanks for the list, and good work on the mods you made they look interesting!
My second shot with them was entertaining. My first breakthru was +20 colonist so started my first colony with 32 souls, between the sexy hunks and babes I brought along and double birthrate I had my first child within a Sol. I started a 2nd dome and built 42 spaces but the time my 2nd ship arrived I already had a homeless problems. Even building a medium dome my 3rd ship only carried a dozen all specialist of course. At which point the game turned in the Star Trek episode the Trouble with Tribbles. (Yes, I know i could disable births, but what’s the fun of that.) I did manage to put up a couple of schools and one university, but still homelessness was a never ending problem. Fortunately I had good water supply and found giant crops early on so the 5 farm I had growing giant wheat was sufficient. Oh I hit the 100 Martian born by Sol 52 or so.
Passages and stuff in the upcoming OPPORTUNITY patch (coming soon!).
Video ;)
Screenshots:
Forum post:
Definitely sounds like an improvement. I think this will become a good game with these updates.
There’s some interesting notes and I think this is a case where a developer screwed up their own game by not sticking to their vision, or going full on the other way. Let me explain.
One of the biggest problems with this game is most techs involving morale or work performance are meaningless. +10 to botanists who already work at 120 level? What’s the point? Our colonies already make so much food it’s not needed. BUT… they initially designed the game wherein each dome was a sealed entity. No one was supposed to move from dome to dome. Whoa. That changes everything! Suddenly those little tech upgrades DO make a difference because space is so critical and each bubble has to support so many things that can’t be shared (colonist-wise).
Before release they started changing their design document and allowed people to move between domes, which then led to the colonist filtering, but they never adjusted those tech upgrade numbers for work performance and morale. They need to drastically slash the starting values across the board so the techs mean something again since it’s easy as anything to optimize your entire planet.
I agree that things need tweaking. Again, some of my opinion is probably colored that I played a setup that was too easy because I totally ignored colonist skills and still did absolutely fine. Once some updates come out and I try it again I will play a tougher setup. The game also needs to become more interesting so I want to play more and build my colony to a grander scale. In my game I just played long enough to resolve my mystery and I was done, so I think my colony only had 125 colonists or so.