What exactly is the "Mars" connection in this game?

[evildrganymede]

I was expecting a colony builder that actually had some of the challenges specific to trying to y'know, *Survive Mars*, but it seems we've got generic map tiles under a Mars world map (and the tiles bear no resemblance to actual Martian topography except maybe in specific cases), Sols that may or may not last years, Earth-Mars travel times that are too quick, atmosphere that is too thick, and no CO2 ice. So I'm struggling to figure out what exactly this game has to do with Mars, specifically.

At this point I'm wondering if the devs even did any research into Mars at all for the game, because it's looking more to me like a generic space colony builder on a generic desert planet that shares very little in common with Mars at all - which would have been fine if they'd advertised it as such, but they didn't.

[AngerIsAnEnergy]

I would like there to be more restrictions on when a rocket could be sent to/from Mars in line with the way Mars and Earth orbit. But it would be difficult to achieve that in a game designed to be quite casual. The 1 sol day/night but is a year thing wouldn't work out well in terms of gameplay I suspect.

If I wanted that level of game realism I'd play Kerbal Space Program and try to build my own base on Duna or whatever.

The timescale used in Surviving Mars is a bit confusing to me to be frank, but I can get over that for the sake of gameification.

All the time I was playing this I forgot I was supposed to be on Mars - it stopped being relevant to me - but it didn't stop it being fun.

[evildrganymede]

I mean I just opened up the game and clicked on the locations of several volcanoes on the Mars map (Olympus Mons, Hecate Tholus, Pavonis Mons) to start a colony and when you go to the tiles there's no trace of any volcanoes there at all. Vallis Marineris? Not a canyon in sight on the tile map. South of Alba Patera, full of north-south grooves? Looks exactly the same as everywhere else. Granted these tiles are 1km squares (Assuming each grid is 100m x 100m) but they still look nothing like what we've seen of Mars at that resolution. In the game each location is just a different arrangement of the same steep mountains and plateaus and craters everywhere you go.

The global map could be anything, the tiles would be the same generic tiles. That's why it doesn't feel like a game about Mars. How can it be if it's the locations you click don't resemble what's supposed to be there? Why is that so hard to understand? Why is that so unreasonable an expectation?

[VA gamer]

The game would cost way too much to make and be completely unplayable with the scale and mechanics you mention. #endthread #it's a game

[Ashar]

You say you were expecting more? If you had done any research on it, you would have known what you were getting before you bought it. There have been people playing earlier builds on youtube for ages now, alot of youtubers got advanced copies 2 weeks ago for up-to-date looks at the game. If you really are into realism, it seems completely ludicrous that you didnt even bother to research the game before hand.

Everything you described about the game could have been discovered in the 1st 30 mins of playing the game, yet you have 4hrs playtime, so why did you keep playing?

[evildrganymede]

Originally posted by Ashar:

Everything you described about the game could have been discovered in the 1st 30 mins of playing the game, yet you have 4hrs playtime, so why did you keep playing?

Why is everyone here so freaking overdefensive about this? To the point of nosing around my game library even. WTF. My reasons for playing are none of your business at all. I don't have to justify anything about what I play or why I play it to anyone here, so that line of interrogation isn't going to get you anywhere. Stick to addressing the points in my post, and stop trying to find other reasons to attack me.

And actually, they couldn't have been discovered within the first 30 mins. I've even watched videos and pre-ordered the game too, and from that it looked like a decent space colony builder. Only on closer examination - having played it for longer myself - did the things that irritated me become apparent, because that's how things work sometimes. Anyone who claims they've never bought into something that they ended up being disappointed by is lying through their teeth. As it is, I still think it's a decent space colony builder - it's just that the Mars aspect of it is really overstated, which is my whole point here.

Either way, yeah, "it's only a game" so maybe everyone else here needs to stop with the rabid overzealous defence of it. I guess it was too much to expect a steam discussion board to be a place for intelligent, rational discussion anyway. I've explained my points many times here and still people go "you haven't explained what you want". There's not really much more I can say if you still don't understand the issue. I don't expect everyone to agree with me but the least people can do is attempt to understand what I'm saying.

And in the end, maybe a lot of this is even fixable. If they release a terrain editor or importer for Surviving Mars then maybe we can make our own 1km square tiles and I could make one based on Mars high res images and topography. Already there are mods for extending colonist life and rocket times. So again, there's no reason to be so zealous in your defence of the game.

[RJM]

I share some of the OP's frustration at how "we know science stuff" was used by the developers as a selling point - they even put together a little youtube film to show that there was some evidence for wind turbines being part of the toolkit for Martian colonisation - then threw realism out of the window everywhere it suited them.

Case in point - we know the Martian temperature range at the equator and poles right from the best case of summer at perihelion to the worst case of winter at aphelion. There would be no need for their random game disaster cold waves if they actually modelled the real temperature changes over the course of months. The southern pole would be in a "cold wave" pretty much permanently if it was set closer to its real temperature range of -70c down to -153c instead of a ridiculously balmy -1c. Nor would the game be giving an "elevation bonus" for wind turbines when the air pressure at the top of Olympus Mons is less than 0.02% of earth. You want your turbines in reliably windy spots as low down as possible for better air pressure.

If the game ticks were months rather than years the crop growing speeds would make a lot more sense, as would vehicle speed. Since when do potatoes take 5 years to grow? The genuine dust storms that sometimes last more than a year would be serious problems. I can see why they switch away from this stuff for game reasons, because there's no real balance to be struck between wind, solar and nuclear power when the first two are so incredibly unreliable on Mars. Every colony would want to start with a thumping great nuclear pile that was sufficient to power their projected expansion for decades.

That said, as others have pointed out it is at least a space colony management game inspired by Mars. I love the process of sending robots to prepare the way for the colonists even if it largely turns into made-up management sim silliness once you start making your first dome. It just badly needs the DLC to spice up the management side so it's worth replaying once you've cracked the formula and researched all tech/built all the wonders on one playthrough.

[evildrganymede]

Thank you, someone finally gets it.

As it is I dug around and found a Maps folder in the Surviving Mars directory structure, It has 30 hpk map files (which are compressed files which are the same format used in Tropico 5) but they have binary .grid files in them (called height, impassable, passable, and type) and some lua files as well, but I can't read or edit the grid files - and I can't find any way to edit them online either.

But the files all have generic names - BlankBigCanyonCMix_01-08, BlankBigTerraceCMix_01-15, etc. They clearly haven't made any maps that are for specific Martian locations here, which rather proves my point - they're just for terrain types. It also seems to imply that you can place your colony anywhere on the planet but ultimately what you'll see on the tilemap is limited to a range of only 30 different variations.

[AngerIsAnEnergy]

Maybe there are licensing issues to be able to use genuine mars image data?

[evildrganymede]

Originally posted by AngerIsAnEnergy:

Maybe there are licensing issues to be able to use genuine mars image data?

Doubtful, I'm pretty sure NASA data is in the public domain.

[AngerIsAnEnergy]

But for commercial use? Probably not.

For scientific and educational it would be encouraged.

It'll get modded in if there is any demand

[Zatheron]

i mean, if you want a game about actually colonising mars, there would be nothing there. because mars isn't colonized, and probably won't be for a very long time. you want a game where you just build rovers and pray they don't explode on contact? play kerbal. want a game that at least attempts colonizing something? play this. it isn't rocket science to reach a conclussion that the devs. at least took real science concepts and applied them to a game. metal probably exhists to some extent on mars, so boom, metal mines, surface metal from meteors. water probably exhists to some extent, most likely in ice form or slight water vapor, boom, water mine/vaporizor. i think that guy hit the nail on the head earlier, soft sci fi vs. hard.

[Pentraksil]

Originally posted by evildrganymede:

Either way, yeah, "it's only a game" so maybe everyone else here needs to stop with the rabid overzealous defence of it. I guess it was too much to expect a steam discussion board to be a place for intelligent, rational discussion anyway. I've explained my points many times here and still people go "you haven't explained what you want". There's not really much more I can say if you still don't understand the issue. I don't expect everyone to agree with me but the least people can do is attempt to understand what I'm saying.

No one is overzealous we just want to see how you would solve all this time simulation. At the end of the line it is a game. It is common sense, you are trying to implement realistic time system in space in a 40 dollar strategy game that is ment for entertainment. Again, you are going into that "omg intelligent discussion" like everyone here is stupid and you are too intelligent for this discussion. A lot of your suggestions would not really work in a game like this or it would simply be too dull and turn into a waiting game. Maps need a bit of variations to provide bulding challenge in a strategy game. If they would implement Mars topography it would be either too flat or too uneven for any kind of base building. If we were to have it realisticaly, we would not even send colonists to Mars because we still don't have the technology and a lot of the game would, again, be unrealistic in that sense. It is all a Sci Fi after all. Hell, even Kerbal cannot go with full realism when it comes to time passing, and it is set within our time period and it is a simulator (of a kind).

So, again, we understand what you want from a game....but the implementation of all that would not be that easy or necessarily fun.

And again, no one is overzealous in defending the game. The game has a lot of problems and it needs fixes and expansions to change things. But we just think you are too nitpicky for a game that was never advertised as being realistic or being a simulator. It has its base in reality to an extent which you somehow keep denying, saying it has nothing to do with it, which is just false. The devs did research about Mars and it is obvious that they did. But at the end of the day it was never ment to be completely realistic and the devs had to make compromises (some good some bad). It was never ment to be a completely realistic simulation it was not advertised as such, but you somehow expected it.

[bobbieboyd]

Originally posted by morph113:

Don't take the game too seriously, it's a casual but at times challenging colony builder and not meant to be 100% scientifically accurate. Just take it for what it is. Also the travel times are pretty fine, 1 sol is supposed to be 1 year. It's only visually displayed as day/night to give you a better visual indication and because it feels better or otherwise you probably would have a few day/night cycles per second which wouldn't look really good.

A Martian sol is approx 25 earth hours. Not 1 year. It tells you this in the game.
I agree with the original post that times are way off. Should take longer for rockets to arrive and aging is way to quick. It should be way more realistic

[morph113]

Originally posted by bobbieboyd:

Originally posted by morph113:

Don't take the game too seriously, it's a casual but at times challenging colony builder and not meant to be 100% scientifically accurate. Just take it for what it is. Also the travel times are pretty fine, 1 sol is supposed to be 1 year. It's only visually displayed as day/night to give you a better visual indication and because it feels better or otherwise you probably would have a few day/night cycles per second which wouldn't look really good.

A Martian sol is approx 25 earth hours. Not 1 year. It tells you this in the game.
I agree with the original post that times are way off. Should take longer for rockets to arrive and aging is way to quick. It should be way more realistic

Yes I know this. But in the game it also equals about 1 year if you take the time a rocket takes to travel or how old colonists get into account.

I mean you also have to make game design decisions, how on earth would YOU have designed it? Let's assume 1 sol is strictly 1 day, nothing more. Then colonists aging wouldn't be relevant, you wouldn't need new colonists as nobody would ever die from old age. It would eliminate a vital part of the game design. Also do you really want to wait 300 days or maybe around 20 hours playtime or how long it takes for a rocket to travel just to have it realistic? You want them to get rid of the sol timeframe and the day/night cycle animations etc. altogether and just call it years? I bet a lot of people really like the day/night cycle plus it's tied to some game elements like solar panels.

How would YOU have designed the time without breaking any of the games mechanics? There has to be a drawback. You simply cannot make time frames realistic.

You should see it similar to how it is handled in Cities Skylines. You get a day/night cycle and even week days etc. but a week in the game is actually technically a year or something like that, i can't quite remember. The same goes for the SimCity games. In a city/colony type of game with people who die and being born and day/night cycle etc. you simply cannot make the time frames realistic unless you cut out on certain game mechanics to keep it realistic.

[Pentraksil]

Originally posted by morph113:

Yes I know this. But in the game it also equals about 1 year if you take the time a rocket takes to travel or how old colonists get into account.

I mean you also have to make game design decisions, how on earth would YOU have designed it? Let's assume 1 sol is strictly 1 day, nothing more. Then colonists aging wouldn't be relevant, you wouldn't need new colonists as nobody would ever die from old age. It would eliminate a vital part of the game design. Also do you really want to wait 300 days or maybe around 20 hours playtime or how long it takes for a rocket to travel just to have it realistic? You want them to get rid of the sol timeframe and the day/night cycle animations etc. altogether and just call it years? I bet a lot of people really like the day/night cycle plus it's tied to some game elements like solar panels.

How would YOU have designed the time without breaking any of the games mechanics? There has to be a drawback. You simply cannot make time frames realistic.

You should see it similar to how it is handled in Cities Skylines. You get a day/night cycle and even week days etc. but a week in the game is actually technically a year or something like that, i can't quite remember. The same goes for the SimCity games. In a city/colony type of game with people who die and being born and day/night cycle etc. you simply cannot make the time frames realistic unless you cut out on certain game mechanics to keep it realistic.

+1

Not saying it is perfect, it should be a bit more balanced....but complete realism would negate a lot of mechanics in the game (or cause some problems)