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If you're looking for reality in fictional entertainment, give it up now. It doesn't have to be real but believeable and in a game's case, playable. As an aside, do you find any other SF setting impossible to like because it doesn't mirror real life too? How about star trek teleportation? Lighsabers? Space elevators?
Seems like a very selective nitpick that arose from someone not having enough suspension of disbelief. Either that, or someone wants astrology club senpai to acknowledge his treasure trove of trivia concerning Mars.
You can't demand realism and then complain that you can't tell you're on Olympus Mons, because you really couldn't tell if you were.
"...an observer near the summit would be unaware of standing on a very high mountain, as the slope of the volcano would extend far beyond the horizon, a mere 3 kilometers away"
I can ask for realism when I click on the top of Olympus Mons and am told that there's a high chance of Dust Storms and Dust Devils when the top of Olympus Mons is above the atmosphere of Mars and wouldn't be affected by those.
The global Mars map is irrelevant to the game, to be honest. It's just a globe with different environment/disaster parameters for every square degree that aren't based on the terrain that's actually shown on the map, and then you get taken to a tile map pre-picked from 30 or so selections that are also not based on anything on Mars. You don't pick based on location name or what the real location on Mars is like, you're picking based on the parameters it gives you which aren't based on those at all.
In this case, I'm fine with a lot of other things in the game - main kickers for me are the confused timescales and the lack of relevance to Mars' specific geography and environment (and therefore to Mars itself).
It's not a strawman. It's rhetorical because you use it as a shield. There is an objective criteria to suspension of disbelief in fiction and it is it has to be believeable and fit with the rules of the fictional universe.
There is an additional constraint to video games, it has to have anti frustration mechanics. Adhering to realism on the timescale would result in lots of waiting and make the game boring.
How would you resolve the boring wait time and the real timescale issue and still make the game fun? How would you make it fun if we have to wait realistic time for a rocket to fly to mars with supplies? How would having real topography and less buildable space in a city builder make it still fun?
Have you read this about scale?
https://www.reddit.com/r/SurvivingMars/comments/85whb3/sizes_of_maps_and_sectors/
Even having a travel time of 10 sols instead of 1 (which is faster than current technology travel time but not constant 1g accelerate-turnover-decelerate) would mean you have to predict what you're running low on and manage resources better, and hope you get it right. Can't see a lack of 'fun' there. It makes the game more interesting in different ways. As for the clash between day/night Sols and Sols=a year for colonists, as I said the game would have to change significantly - if the timescale is 24.5 hr Sols and colonists still age in years (thousands of Sols) then obviously aging is not a factor in the game anymore. Coming up with a solution for that is beyond the scope of the questions I'm asking and frankly isn't my problem.
If anything having real topography would mean that you'd have more buildable space. Looking at the tile maps now, the planet has a ridiculous amount of small scale topography, while many areas of Mars are actually pretty flat. Again it'd depend where you are. The northern hemisphere would be flatter plains, the southern hemisphere is heavily cratered and more rugged. You could account for altitude effects (being above most of the atmosphere on the tops of the Tharsis volcanoes, or in slightly higher pressure areas at the bottom of Vallis Marineris and the Hellas basin). There could be seasonal effects too. All of that would make for more variation (and 'fun') and more verisimilitude, and actually give the game the right to have Mars in the title and actually mean it. Right now none of that is in the game though because as I pointed out the in-game characteristics of where you click on the global map has no relation to what is actually shown and known to be there on that map.
I don't feel the need to check. Even if it is subject to licensing, the publishers could still either choose to pay for that if they wanted to use it or make something derivative from it (i.e. at least look at the data and then make something that looks like it). It's not my problem though.
I have now, but they're figuring it out from top down. I assume tiles you zoom in on are 1 km x 1 km and the Sectors you build in are 100m x 100m each because I looked at things like people and objects and buildings in the dome and figured that the domes were about 30m in diameter, and you could fit about three of them side by side in a single sector so I rounded up to 100m. The poster there seems to be ignoring the size of the buildable objects and assuming that each tile map is one square degree and working down from that.
Either of us could be right (or we could both be wrong), it just depends on how the devs have designed it.
So you want change, but when asked for specifics, you recognize you have no alternative. Again, put it in numbers, how would you resolve the sol in terms of what it means (24hrs) and the game simulation in seconds with the player behind the screen not getting bored.
If we say 1 sol (24hrs+) takes 10minutes of real time gameplay, what would be the speed of simulation for mundane tasks like colonists walking around (takes at most 5 min) which if you argue for realism should take 0.03s. How would you then resolve the simulation of people not walking like the flash? If you take realistic aging time, how would you resolve realistic goods production times to mirror it? So do you want us to get stuck for 10hr real time waiting for a rocket to come to Mars in 10 sols? And if you speed it up, you won't see your colonists zooming about at light speed, and your production counter increasing faster than the time you need to place on solar panel.
You complain it's bad but shirk from the responsability of providing an alternative. Great!
It is your problem. More development costs will mean a more expensive game. Would you as the end user shoulder the extra cost for the sake of more realism? The license fee would not come as cheap as 100$.
My thoughts exactly. Going on these forums to look for game guides, I find myself remembering fondly legacy of kain. Let's drop the moral posturing shall we? ... hate it but do it honestly
Honestly the rocket travel time is the least of my concerns. A 1 day travel time is potentially realistic if the rocket can constantly accelerate-turnover-decelerate at 1+ g for the journey. Some variability in that would be nice depending on relative position of Earth and Mars. My only issue with that is that if the rockets are capable of that then surely we can power the colony with the same system from the start. A longer travel time would make things a bit more interesting in terms of planning, but I wouldn't expect a rocket to take 9 months of game time to get there and only be launched once every 26 game months (though if the time units were in years then that would mean that it'd take one time unit to get there but could only be launched every 2 time units).
What I want from the timescales is *consistency* though. If each unit of time is an (earth) year then rockets can take 1 unit of time to get to Earth and that can be an abstraction (or be realistic, see above), but then the colonists could age at one year per unit of time and we wouldn't have a day/night cycle. If each unit of time is actually a 24.6 hour martian day then the rockets can take however long they want to get there (depending on engine technology) and the colonists shouldn't be ageing on a noticeable level. But having them both mashed together and overlapping doesn't really make much sense.
I just gave you a load of specifics and you ignored them completely. And you also seem intent on taking everything i say absolutely literally and ignoring everything that doesn't support your idea of what I'm saying.
I've done a lot of explaining and providing alternatives. I'm not going to solve the problem on your demand because I'm not a game designer and I don't have years to spend on a game project to figure it out. I've said the game would necessarily have to be different in some ways that are beyond my ability to determine if they addressed it, and any reasonable person would accept that as an answer. I'm sure it'd be solvable but nobody would be able to come up with a solution overnight. Hell, maybe they could use a day-long unit for building the infrastructure until the colonists show up, and then switch to a year-long unit when humans arrive. Maybe that'd work, maybe that wouldn't. I don't know.
Now you're just being argumentative. There are ways that they could get around that anyway - just by doing some basic research on what is actually there and basing their map tiles on that would be better and wouldn't require any licensing fees. And frankly I'm sure NASA wouldn't be totally money-grabby about a game that actually used real mars terrain.
If we want to talk about places where more consistency with the time-scale is actually important, let's talk about those. Places where this would actually serve some benefit to enhancing realism and believability would be slowing down the aging of children. Going from newborn to contributing adult in 6 sols is indeed questionable. If we accept that for the purposes of aging and travel, 1 sol = 1 year, they shouldn't grow up so quickly. Even accepting that in a fledgling Martian colony children would need to contribute sooner, I would posit they shouldn't become contributing members until somewhere between 10 and 12 sols old, certainly not 6. We can also talk about crop growth rates. If 1 sol = 1 year, why does it take 5 years to grow a crop of soybeans?
These are things that could easily be tweaked to retain gameplay balance while adding a heightened sense of realism. The things you seem to care about are, however, entirely superficial, and would require a fundamental change in the structure of the game.