Difference to surviving mars

[Karpatenhund]

Someone played both?

[kory]

they are both games about setting up on mars, and then the similarity ends.

[StarWolfer]

Yeah, completely different games. Writing about the similarities is useless, as there are none.

[Lantantan]

Hmmm I'll try: Surviving mars is a "Colony Sim" concerned with the well being of a group of hundreds of humans. "Terraformers" is an "Engine builder" more like a board game, where you're spending turns increasing your incomes of different coloured cubes. Does that make sense?

[Berserk Belta]

Originally posted by Lantantan:

Hmmm I'll try: Surviving mars is a "Colony Sim" concerned with the well being of a group of hundreds of humans. This is more an "Engine builder" more like a board game, where you're spending turns increasing your incomes of different coloured cubes. Does that make sense?

This is helpful, thanks.

[CryonicSuspension]

Surviving Mars is a city builder like City Skylines or MineCraft or something... you are an engineer / city planner literally building something on a barren planet.

You have to scout around with your vehicle, figure out where best to site your city ( based on surrounding resources ). You have to flatten the ground, move the rubble to refuse pits and it has to be pixel-perfect flat.

You need to power the dome, so you have to build solar panels and/ or wind turbines. Some maps will be windy, others will have more solar radiance. You have to lay electrical cables, to connect to the dome.

You need to build oxygen generators. You need to pipe water from a local water source. You need to grow food, and your workers like food variety.

Some food requires more water. Some food grows quickly, others slowly. There are different crop yields for each type of food. You need to use algebra to figure out optimum food production for your people ( you could lookup cheat sheets ).

Dust storms will come to trash your city and you need to survive and recover. There are other disasters that will happen but I'll keep those a secret!

With Terraformers, everything is abstracted at the level of a board or card game. If you want to build a specific building, it's like sitting in front of a 52 card playing deck in Texas Hold'em and waiting for Aces to come up. You flip cards and hope to get what you need.

You derive resources via exploration, which is kind of like finding treasure in a dungeon crawler. Those resources help to pay for whatever building you are trying to make. You can also site mines, to speed up resource gathering.

Building a city was as simple as trying to get adjacency bonuses for building similar buildings next to one another.

Bare in mind that the developers added something like 20-30 new buildings since I played the demo, so I'm not sure what the final version of the game is like.

[godcyric]

I am surprised that no one talked about the biggest difference.

Surviving mars is an RTS, real time strategy(tough it is pausable)

Terraformers is turn-based. You have plenty of time to think about your next step, and pick the wrong card(I knew I should have picked some tuber farms 20 turn ago!)

[Lantantan]

But the biggest most importantest difference is that "Surviving Mars" has an amazing, god tier soundtrack. The "Terraformers" soundtrack is fine, but started to grate after 50 hours. I wish more game devs would release extra soundtrack DLCs.

[CryonicSuspension]

I just finished my first 8 hour game in terraformers.

Surviving Mars deeper, more complex. Your citizens have occupations, wants and aspirations ( similar to the game Tropico ). Some colonists have unique traits ( I started listing them, but then decided to delete them because spoilers ). There are age demographics. They have gender and it can be difficult to balance population control. Space is incredibly tight. You won't be able to fit every amenity into one dome and you'll have people crying that they want more restaurants, bars and casinos.

You can have catastrophic events that resemble Matt Damon's "The Martian"
(2015) meets Sunshine (2007) that will send your colony into a death spiral because each person has a morale rating. I was really sad watching my colonists die one by one ( it happened one time ).

When I first played the demo for Terraformers I was literally, "I dunno if I like this... I like the exploration but the building is really simple". I still feel that way. I love the art direction. Some of the women are stunningly beautiful. The reason why I decided to buy Terraformers is because I started playing online poker for money and it can be incredibly mentally exhausting. So it's actually nice to play a simple game.

[Demiurge]

don't forget the awesomeness that is per aspera as well

[Rooks]

IMHO, the biggest difference has to do with the scale and how long games typically last.

My games of Surviving Mars easily take days (maybe weeks?) to play and finish. As you can imagine, this means the systems involved are much more complex, and it takes a lot longer to progress through the tech tree, explore the planet, and so on. It's great, and I enjoy it, but I know when I start a game, I know I'm in it for the long haul. It's very similar to other sim games, such as Civilization or Stellaris.

Games of Terraformers are MUCH shorter. There's also more RNG involved, in terms of deck building, leaders, and tech. After getting the 1.0 update, I jumped into the weekly challenge (at highest difficult of course!) and was able to finish it in a few hours, spread out over two days. It was definitely challenging, but I was able to find a leader/tech combo that worked for me and was able to win. However, there are many times where I wasn't so lucky, either because I made some wrong choices in the beginning, or perhaps the RNG was really unkind to me.

I find Terraformers more similar to Hades and Slay the Spire, in terms of play style (certainly not game mechanics). I can spend a few hours on a run, pick up some abilities/cards, hope they work with what I have, and maybe I'll get to boss. Perhaps I'll even win! And if I don't, that's fine, it's not like I lost days of progress. Maybe I'll unlock some new cards/abilities/skills, but more importantly, maybe I've learned what to do (or NOT do) on my next run.

If that type of game is not for you, I totally understand! I do feel sympathetic to fans of sim games that pick of Terraformers expecting Civilization or Surviving Mars, when it's really more of a rogue-like, IMHO.

[nizzemancer]

Originally posted by CryonicSuspension:

Surviving Mars is a city builder like City Skylines or MineCraft or something... you are an engineer / city planner literally building something on a barren planet.

I must have missed the part where Minecraft became a city-builder...

[nizzemancer]

Surviving mars is real-time (with pause) where you instruct your colonists to build buildings mine resources etc. to survive for as long as possible, You don't even terraform in it, you build a colony and try to keep it alive and well, you can play a round forever or until your colony is destroyed and you can't rebuild it.

This is a Turn-based game where you draw cards
you can then pay resources to place the cards on the map to generate more resources each turn.
You do this to in the long run be able to terraform mars by increasing it's stats with other cards and/or ackummulate a set amount of victory points while balancing your colonys other stat which is support, which is your lose-condition with expectations.

[CryonicSuspension]

Originally posted by nizzemancer:

Originally posted by CryonicSuspension:

Surviving Mars is a city builder like City Skylines or MineCraft or something... you are an engineer / city planner literally building something on a barren planet.

I must have missed the part where Minecraft became a city-builder...

It's OK, it's easy to miss. You need to play games for 40 years.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/952890/Surviving_Mars_Green_Planet/

[CryonicSuspension]

I posted the demo in my review:

https://steamcommunity.com/id/CryonicSuspension/recommended/1244800/