I've been playing Surviving Mars and I want to talk about it. (This ended up being pretty long, sorry).
Surviving Mars is a resource management city builder that's about building a colony on Mars. It was released in 2018 by Haemimont Games and Abstraction and published by Paradox (yes, THAT Paradox).
It's okay.
Alright, that sounds weird, but let me clarify. It's my cozy game. Other people play Stardew Valley as their cozy game, I play Surviving Mars. It's a pretty easy game, honestly. I have to go out of my way to make it more difficult for myself, and even then, it's not THAT hard. Despite that, I don't think of it as a great game, or even a good game, it's just okay. This is weird as it should be at least good, I play it pretty often and it has elements I love, but it doesn't get up that high. It's only recently that I think I figured out why, and I'm going to share that journey with you.
I think it starts with the tech tree. Well, "tree" is a bit of a stretch. It's a series of columns and you research one at a time in each column, and you can only research what you can see. And you can only see one tech in each column at one time, unless you "reveal" it via various systems. Each tech is simple too, typically only unlocking one building or upgrade at a time, and not needing anything else except the previous tech in the column. Which isn't really a problem, except, well, some of the techs are weird.
There's really one that stands out, it's called Decommissioning Protocol. City building games like this often require you to build something unoptimiably at first, just to get things going. Eventually you need to tear it down and move it. You can't do that here, you can shut it down, or even abandon it, but it STAYS in place, unless you have Decommissioning Protocol which allows you to dismantle the building and get back some (but not all) of the resources you put into it. This is not the first tech in the tree either, it's further down and if you don't know it's there (like a first time player would not), it could cause serious issues. I suppose that by the time you need it, it's bound to be revealed in a normal game, but it's still annoying, so much so I consider it the most important tech in the entire game.
Later there's a series of techs that unlock "wonders" that are like super versions of the generic things you've been building already, but only a a few are really that much better than just building a lot of the generic stuff. And one of them, a radio telescope, is a science boost, that comes at the end of the tech column, where it's mostly useless.
The resources always feel a bit off. It's like they had ideas for some of them, but didn't quite finish them. Oxygen and water are the two biggest necessities of the game, and are, off. There's a machine called a MOXIE (which is really real, and there's one on Mars right now) that make oxygen for the colony and it always feels over powered. My current game I have the tech accessible upgrade which increases production 50% and I got a special even that basically doubles it. One MOXIE is enough for all my 3 surface domes and likely can support one more. That's without accounting for the farms that also make oxygen, or doing anything special besides powering the damn thing.
Water on the other hand is needed for so much it's silly. You need water for the colonists, water for the farms, water for making fuel and water for making polymers, which are also made of fuel. So you need twice as much water to make polymers than anything else. In fact, polymers need the most resources of any product in the game, which includes people to work in the manufacturing plants. And then there's waste rock, that you'll have more than you know what to do with by the time you get to mid-late game when you can start turning them into more concrete, which is just in time for the wonder that will just MAKE concrete for you.
And then comes the DLCs. Oh yes, it has DLC. Most are cosmetic, adding new designs for buildings, and music, but there's actual content there too. One adds animals, including ranches to feed your people. I can't remember if the base game had it before, but the colonists have a trait called "vegan" and will complain if you have ranches. They'll still eat the generic food in green boxes, since they can't tell one from the other anyway. Another adds trains! Yes, trains, which the basic stations are always end points and. . . I don't use them much. I've been trying, but I still don't understand how they work.
Then there's the Space Race DLC. It gives unique buildings and rovers to the different sponsers, which are kind of fun. But it also adds rivals, which aren't even half baked. Your interactions with the rivals are simple, at best. You give, trade or request resources from them, but early on they may just ignore you, and there's no reason to do much with them. You can trade techs, but there's no negotiations on what to trade for what, they'll offer one thing for another, and once you trade one tech, you can't trade anothe for a while, and, in my experience at least, that first tech will somehow get to the other rivals before you even get the option to try trading it. It's good for techs you don't have, but it's kind of useless in the long run. Of course you could insult, spy or even steal from your rivals, but to what end? You can trade for almost eveyrthing they have, and it's not like you'll build an army and conqure them or anything.
The Green Planet DLC allows you to terraform Mars, which is a great end game project. It even has it's own tech column, which is priced the same as the regular columns. This creates a kind of new player trap where this column, as well as the next DLC's column, are the first visible techs a player will see. It would be easy to invest into them instead of the techs the player ACTUALLY needs to build out the colony. At the same time, a vet player might want to as advancing the planet's terraforming can remove nearly all of the potenital disasters the game has. I do love the terraforming thing as a final goal of the game, and it's something I do persue in long term games. That said, some of the techs are of questionable value (do I really need to transform the terrain faster?) and the order feels out of step with what the player should want to do at any given time.
Finally there's Above and Below, which adds the ability to land on and mine asteroids, and explore a vast cave system. Again, it's kind of a new player trap. While getting to the asteroids is a much harder task, getting underground is so easy it's practically accidental, and that could harm a new player. The tech tree is just like Green Planet, and has the same flaws. Worse, unless the player is going for a challenge game, it's unlikely someone would build a pure underground or asteroid colony (I'm not actually sure how the latter would even work, but I might try it sometime).
Still, this can all be mediated out. It's unlikely a new player will just buy all the DLCs and get the disaster experience, and even then, they'd catch on quick not to mess with the DLC stuff too early. And heck, there are plenty of mods for the game, you can even create your own, it includes a mod editor with the game. Some of those mods are a lot of fun too, and I recommend going through them.
That's not the real problem. The real problem, though is revelaed by the clock.
Okay, the clock isn't the problem. The game ticks off time in terms of "Sol," which is made of 25 hours giving a day night cycle. Great, night means solar panels don't work so your power usage may be limited in the dark. And it effects colonists. . . But that's about it. Still, it looks cool.
But then you get your first martian born colonist. They're kids for 5 Sol then can be put to work. Wait, isn't a Sol a day? Well no, it's not, it's actually a YEAR. The day night cycle is just because all city builders have day night cycles. Okay, that's fine, but wait, the kids age up to work age in 5 years, 5 Martian years. Which means they're, what, 8, 9 years old? Just shy of 10 at least. That's weird. And people retire at 61 Sol, so like 100+. Wait, is a Sol an EARTH year? But it's also a day, and a Martian year and. . .
It doesn't really matter hoenstly. But it pointed me directly at the colonists and how they work. And they don't work, like at all.
The idea is each colonist is an individual with traits and skills and your job is to put them to best use and manage their traits. Traits can be postive or negative, and providing ways to minimize the negative traits and encourage the positive ones is part and parcel of the game. Well, should be. That's the thing, after the first dozen colonists, the traits and skills mean less and less as the game goes on. There's even a building that can remove negative traits, and later even add positive traits. Honestly you spend most of the game managing children that can't work and seniors who won't. You can't even follow the family lines back to the original founders, there's just no mechanism to do it.
The entire colonist branch of the game is just unfinished. So much so that I got a mod that unlocks a "biorobot" that are basically colonists, but they don't age or die and can be built as adults. It's been the most fun I've had with the game because I just plug them in and go. Basically, I removed the whole side of the game, and at best nothing changed, at worse, it was better.
And this is the point where I found what was actually wrong with Surviving Mars: It's not really finished. Things aren't done, or they couldn't be done because of other mechanics. The tech tree's nature made it impossible to slot in the DLC techs in as future advancement. The colonists have to live and grow quickly because of the day night cycle, and they have traits, but they become more and more meaningless as the numbers grow. Resources are weird because it has to accomidate having colonists do some of the work, otherwise you wouldn't need them at all and what's the point in that?
The thoughts and ideas that led to the various elements were never seen to their end and given the polish they needed. Balancing where the wonders sat could have been done if there was more connecting branches in the tree instead of going with the columns. Colonist traits could have been made more impactful and their histories could have been done. It seems the whole colonist angle was added on and that's show by the fact that NONE of the DLCs deal with the colonists AT ALL. They're just cogs in the wheel.
Again, the game is NOT bad. It works, there are a few bugs and glitches, but rarely game breaking. Despite my complaints, I can pretty easily put together a functioning colony and enjoy watching Mars go from red to green. Most of the issues can be worked around. It's just it never feels like it's done, like it's missing an element to raise it up beyond "okay."
Do I recommend it? If a city builder is your thing and you want something besides build roads and windmills, sure, on sale at least. It scratches an itch without being offensive about it.
That said, I'd like to see an improved version of the game. The core functions of the game work pretty work and the idea of building a colony is good enough that it deserves another shot.
So that's really why I posted about this. I've been working on a design document for a spirtual successor to Surviving Mars. It'll never be made into a game, I can't do that, but it's fun to think about how to fix the issues with the original game while expanding on it in new directions. Of course if I'm going to do something different, I'm going to do something different. So for now, it's called Exploring Venus.
I've written way more than I expected today. I'll probably post some of the document later over in the creative board. I'll link it here when I get it going, but for now I need to relax for a bit. Thanks for reading this way too long rant about a game I actually enjoy playing.
Surviving Mars is a resource management city builder that's about building a colony on Mars. It was released in 2018 by Haemimont Games and Abstraction and published by Paradox (yes, THAT Paradox).
It's okay.
Alright, that sounds weird, but let me clarify. It's my cozy game. Other people play Stardew Valley as their cozy game, I play Surviving Mars. It's a pretty easy game, honestly. I have to go out of my way to make it more difficult for myself, and even then, it's not THAT hard. Despite that, I don't think of it as a great game, or even a good game, it's just okay. This is weird as it should be at least good, I play it pretty often and it has elements I love, but it doesn't get up that high. It's only recently that I think I figured out why, and I'm going to share that journey with you.
I think it starts with the tech tree. Well, "tree" is a bit of a stretch. It's a series of columns and you research one at a time in each column, and you can only research what you can see. And you can only see one tech in each column at one time, unless you "reveal" it via various systems. Each tech is simple too, typically only unlocking one building or upgrade at a time, and not needing anything else except the previous tech in the column. Which isn't really a problem, except, well, some of the techs are weird.
There's really one that stands out, it's called Decommissioning Protocol. City building games like this often require you to build something unoptimiably at first, just to get things going. Eventually you need to tear it down and move it. You can't do that here, you can shut it down, or even abandon it, but it STAYS in place, unless you have Decommissioning Protocol which allows you to dismantle the building and get back some (but not all) of the resources you put into it. This is not the first tech in the tree either, it's further down and if you don't know it's there (like a first time player would not), it could cause serious issues. I suppose that by the time you need it, it's bound to be revealed in a normal game, but it's still annoying, so much so I consider it the most important tech in the entire game.
Later there's a series of techs that unlock "wonders" that are like super versions of the generic things you've been building already, but only a a few are really that much better than just building a lot of the generic stuff. And one of them, a radio telescope, is a science boost, that comes at the end of the tech column, where it's mostly useless.
The resources always feel a bit off. It's like they had ideas for some of them, but didn't quite finish them. Oxygen and water are the two biggest necessities of the game, and are, off. There's a machine called a MOXIE (which is really real, and there's one on Mars right now) that make oxygen for the colony and it always feels over powered. My current game I have the tech accessible upgrade which increases production 50% and I got a special even that basically doubles it. One MOXIE is enough for all my 3 surface domes and likely can support one more. That's without accounting for the farms that also make oxygen, or doing anything special besides powering the damn thing.
Water on the other hand is needed for so much it's silly. You need water for the colonists, water for the farms, water for making fuel and water for making polymers, which are also made of fuel. So you need twice as much water to make polymers than anything else. In fact, polymers need the most resources of any product in the game, which includes people to work in the manufacturing plants. And then there's waste rock, that you'll have more than you know what to do with by the time you get to mid-late game when you can start turning them into more concrete, which is just in time for the wonder that will just MAKE concrete for you.
And then comes the DLCs. Oh yes, it has DLC. Most are cosmetic, adding new designs for buildings, and music, but there's actual content there too. One adds animals, including ranches to feed your people. I can't remember if the base game had it before, but the colonists have a trait called "vegan" and will complain if you have ranches. They'll still eat the generic food in green boxes, since they can't tell one from the other anyway. Another adds trains! Yes, trains, which the basic stations are always end points and. . . I don't use them much. I've been trying, but I still don't understand how they work.
Then there's the Space Race DLC. It gives unique buildings and rovers to the different sponsers, which are kind of fun. But it also adds rivals, which aren't even half baked. Your interactions with the rivals are simple, at best. You give, trade or request resources from them, but early on they may just ignore you, and there's no reason to do much with them. You can trade techs, but there's no negotiations on what to trade for what, they'll offer one thing for another, and once you trade one tech, you can't trade anothe for a while, and, in my experience at least, that first tech will somehow get to the other rivals before you even get the option to try trading it. It's good for techs you don't have, but it's kind of useless in the long run. Of course you could insult, spy or even steal from your rivals, but to what end? You can trade for almost eveyrthing they have, and it's not like you'll build an army and conqure them or anything.
The Green Planet DLC allows you to terraform Mars, which is a great end game project. It even has it's own tech column, which is priced the same as the regular columns. This creates a kind of new player trap where this column, as well as the next DLC's column, are the first visible techs a player will see. It would be easy to invest into them instead of the techs the player ACTUALLY needs to build out the colony. At the same time, a vet player might want to as advancing the planet's terraforming can remove nearly all of the potenital disasters the game has. I do love the terraforming thing as a final goal of the game, and it's something I do persue in long term games. That said, some of the techs are of questionable value (do I really need to transform the terrain faster?) and the order feels out of step with what the player should want to do at any given time.
Finally there's Above and Below, which adds the ability to land on and mine asteroids, and explore a vast cave system. Again, it's kind of a new player trap. While getting to the asteroids is a much harder task, getting underground is so easy it's practically accidental, and that could harm a new player. The tech tree is just like Green Planet, and has the same flaws. Worse, unless the player is going for a challenge game, it's unlikely someone would build a pure underground or asteroid colony (I'm not actually sure how the latter would even work, but I might try it sometime).
Still, this can all be mediated out. It's unlikely a new player will just buy all the DLCs and get the disaster experience, and even then, they'd catch on quick not to mess with the DLC stuff too early. And heck, there are plenty of mods for the game, you can even create your own, it includes a mod editor with the game. Some of those mods are a lot of fun too, and I recommend going through them.
That's not the real problem. The real problem, though is revelaed by the clock.
Okay, the clock isn't the problem. The game ticks off time in terms of "Sol," which is made of 25 hours giving a day night cycle. Great, night means solar panels don't work so your power usage may be limited in the dark. And it effects colonists. . . But that's about it. Still, it looks cool.
But then you get your first martian born colonist. They're kids for 5 Sol then can be put to work. Wait, isn't a Sol a day? Well no, it's not, it's actually a YEAR. The day night cycle is just because all city builders have day night cycles. Okay, that's fine, but wait, the kids age up to work age in 5 years, 5 Martian years. Which means they're, what, 8, 9 years old? Just shy of 10 at least. That's weird. And people retire at 61 Sol, so like 100+. Wait, is a Sol an EARTH year? But it's also a day, and a Martian year and. . .
It doesn't really matter hoenstly. But it pointed me directly at the colonists and how they work. And they don't work, like at all.
The idea is each colonist is an individual with traits and skills and your job is to put them to best use and manage their traits. Traits can be postive or negative, and providing ways to minimize the negative traits and encourage the positive ones is part and parcel of the game. Well, should be. That's the thing, after the first dozen colonists, the traits and skills mean less and less as the game goes on. There's even a building that can remove negative traits, and later even add positive traits. Honestly you spend most of the game managing children that can't work and seniors who won't. You can't even follow the family lines back to the original founders, there's just no mechanism to do it.
The entire colonist branch of the game is just unfinished. So much so that I got a mod that unlocks a "biorobot" that are basically colonists, but they don't age or die and can be built as adults. It's been the most fun I've had with the game because I just plug them in and go. Basically, I removed the whole side of the game, and at best nothing changed, at worse, it was better.
And this is the point where I found what was actually wrong with Surviving Mars: It's not really finished. Things aren't done, or they couldn't be done because of other mechanics. The tech tree's nature made it impossible to slot in the DLC techs in as future advancement. The colonists have to live and grow quickly because of the day night cycle, and they have traits, but they become more and more meaningless as the numbers grow. Resources are weird because it has to accomidate having colonists do some of the work, otherwise you wouldn't need them at all and what's the point in that?
The thoughts and ideas that led to the various elements were never seen to their end and given the polish they needed. Balancing where the wonders sat could have been done if there was more connecting branches in the tree instead of going with the columns. Colonist traits could have been made more impactful and their histories could have been done. It seems the whole colonist angle was added on and that's show by the fact that NONE of the DLCs deal with the colonists AT ALL. They're just cogs in the wheel.
Again, the game is NOT bad. It works, there are a few bugs and glitches, but rarely game breaking. Despite my complaints, I can pretty easily put together a functioning colony and enjoy watching Mars go from red to green. Most of the issues can be worked around. It's just it never feels like it's done, like it's missing an element to raise it up beyond "okay."
Do I recommend it? If a city builder is your thing and you want something besides build roads and windmills, sure, on sale at least. It scratches an itch without being offensive about it.
That said, I'd like to see an improved version of the game. The core functions of the game work pretty work and the idea of building a colony is good enough that it deserves another shot.
So that's really why I posted about this. I've been working on a design document for a spirtual successor to Surviving Mars. It'll never be made into a game, I can't do that, but it's fun to think about how to fix the issues with the original game while expanding on it in new directions. Of course if I'm going to do something different, I'm going to do something different. So for now, it's called Exploring Venus.
I've written way more than I expected today. I'll probably post some of the document later over in the creative board. I'll link it here when I get it going, but for now I need to relax for a bit. Thanks for reading this way too long rant about a game I actually enjoy playing.
