Im sorry Silva and LukeH, but the trains are not good

[Pringels09]

I would have liked for it to be a review but it's just not there yet.

Let me first say: I have always loved your work and your mods and I hope you keep doing it even tough everyone is bashing you. And please take the following words a genuine critisism. I have a good amout of hours in this game and I've seen mistakes that just shouldn't have happened

Trains ... trains, they are (like the enitre dlc) on paper, a pretty good idea. And honestly they are pretty good and useful. But there are sadly some problems.

The Good:

• They are an incredible tool to extend your reach of your domes in the early to mid game, I've seen a lot of people use them like shuttles, but thats not their intended use (I think). They are best as an transport to and from a resource site, colonist will use the trains to get to work and thanks to the background calculation of surviving mars they don't even loose any productivity. You can have them travel for their entire workshift and they will still produce resources (Which I find hilarious)
  
• They are cheap to setup
  
• They can be completly constructed at either end ¹
  
• Their assosiated tech is pretty good and makes them viable in the lategame (although not that useful)
  
• They are calculated the same as passages e.g. your colonists will work (but not live) in a dome thats on the other side of the map and only suffer the "Not working in home dome" debuff

That sound pretty ok, maybe a bit stiff for 7€, but as long as I'm helping valuable and trustworthy comunity content creators means I'm fine with it. But sadly (And I have to say this truely saddens me) we didn't talk about

The bad:

• The storage is not split up like any other storage in the game (WHY?!?) which sounds, on paper, like an interesting idea. But it is bad. They are constantly full which leads to the newest conversation with yourseld that I guess every player had: "Why isn't my rare metal beeing transported? I set everything up correctly. ... Oh it's full of fuel. Wait, this just gets used as a normal stoage if no other is nearby with a higher desired amount? Now thats ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ stupid". Yes you heared correctly they will just fill your station up with whatever they feel like even above the desired amount. Fuel, Black cubes, metal, you name it. If you dont have storage with a lot of desired amount your train network will break. This leads to a lot of unessesary micro management, all out of the idea to not split resources (Honestly I see no fix for this, just remove it)
  
• ¹ Yes I lied, like the trailer. You do need a drone hub on range of every piece of track if you wanna keep it long term. The reason is easy: Stuff breaks, and you have to fix it. And that pretty quick otherwise your colonists will suffacate even tough it's still perfectly connected it's just missing a piece on the other end of the map and your train wont return until it's fixed, even with the return button (Why is that even there). So if you dont have a transporter and a commander ready to sprint out at any time you are ♥♥♥♥♥♥. Or just build drone hubs everywhere, but at that point you probably dont need trains
  
• You can't actually build on the same hex as pipes since their pillars are in the way so I still end up with a line spagetti with any more then like 6 tains
  
• But even that gets highly impractical since TRACKS CAN'T PASS OVER EACH OTHER, I meam you guys already destroyed the idea of a mars public transport system in the trailer (This is fine for the job it's supposed to do) and now this? If you haven't planned everything out, get ready for some redesigning
  
• Destroying stations will destory the assosiated trains with it

Now from this we can already see a few issues. But all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. I've, to this point, tried to avoid the bugs and I will still try, but some will seep trough my soul. To this point most of my critisim was focused on questionable design flaws. But now we'll get into the meaty stuff. But before that I'd like to reiterate that I love Silva and LukeH and their mods have been always on point (I will go into the human aspect of this later). But lets firstly get into

The ugly:

• If at some point the station is offline (Energy, repairs, meteor) means you colonist will just walk to the next staion and suffocate or die otherwise on the way.
  
• (Sometimes, cant reproduce) the drones will not use the machine parts from itself to repair the station
  
• The train are way to expensive
  
• They are slow as hell (even with the upgrade tech) which has no relevance thanks to the calculation, except for the colonists, which can starve, freeze and suffocate on the track and regularly do so.
  
• The new commander is useless, tracks are already cheap, the stations are easy to research and build (Just give him 2 lage stations since you have to destory the first station anyway most of the time
  
• It doesn't blance the items inbetween the stations. If you have a desired amount of 10 in you input station and a desired amount of 5 in the output. And you have currently 8 stored, then it will move NOTHING. Thought you could skip the annoying resource shuffling between hubs in the early game? No, wrong dlc, it got even worse!
  
• Drones will move resources back and forth between 2 stations in the same drone hub range
  
• Colonists wont move to a better dome, if it's in range. All my scientists are currently doing a 4 hour commute + 2 hours waiting time. A train network that can only be topped by (insert county here). Even though they have the nicest smart homes there
  
• You cant filter the colonists that can use the train (Not so bad, but needed)
  
• Tracks can only connect directy to stations, so no manifolds, big train networks or any kind of nuance whatsoever
  
• You can't destory broken tracks you have to repair them first
  
• 24 Colonists waiting in a staion is too little for bigger projects
  
• You can't set the desired amount individualy, so if you wanna have 50 food stored in the station you better also store 50 electronics

In conclusion: I has a lot of problems and is currently a low of work to use effectively. Can I recommend it? I dont know, I tried to find an answer but I have no idea (which is the reason for this forum post). Do I regret buying it? No, definitly not. It's a good concept and has a lot of good uses it just needs a bit more polish and playtesting. Would I buy it again? Yes, if only to support Silvas and LukeHs amazing work.

I said I would go into the humans aspect: I dont know Silva or LukeH, I think this is their first commercial product, with a pricetag and a pricetag sets expectations, I think it's clear that not everybody likes the system. But I trust them to fix at least the mistakes, the design choices are on them. We don't know if they were rushed or pressued into making somthing they don't specificly wanted. Guys the gaming industry is a horrible employer, give them some slack, they have already shown greatness and just have to do it again.

If Silva or LukeH read this: Please take this not as the the hate it writes, but the love it tells, I love you guys and surviving mars. And all of this is not written to hate or keep you guys down but to get the best that this dlc and in fact the game has to offer.

Wow, this might be my longest post yet. I'm sorry if this reads like a brick, english is not my first language . What do you guys think? Am I wrong in every point? Does anyone actually care what I think? Have you had intercourse with my mother?
I would love to hear your thoughts.

[Grimmrog_SIG]

7€ for such a small dlc with hardly any content added to the game nor any true benefit, thats a weird pricing concept here.

[Alex]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Grimmrog_SIG:

7€ for such a small dlc with hardly any content added to the game nor any true benefit, thats a weird pricing concept here.

THIS! IS! PARADOX!
*kicks grimmrog down the endless DLC chasm*

[BrotherAdso]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย neutronstar:

Is it perfect? No, not at all; and I consider the inability to use some sort of tunnel to get up on the plateaus quite problematic. But... I have a colony that has a station out to a couple of remote mining areas shipping resources back, and another train shipping resources out to my remote sub-colony, and it seems to be working. If a meteor takes out a section of track, I send out my "Union Pacific Rail Maintenance" crew, and I'm back up and running.

I've already got $7 worth of enjoyment out of it. I hope they fix the "connecting different elevations" thing, though.

I'm going to echo this sentiment. Trains add some fun and interesting options without introducing gamebreaking bugs or ideas that are poorly grafted onto the original game. They give new ways to plan your colony in general and new ways to expand it over time. They have problems - BoredPeon does a good job describing them. But they help to take a new, creative and fun step and is worth a look for that reason, even with limitations like not moving up slopes.

Here in the US, the price of this DLC is the price of a few draft beers at a bar. Surely even one or three quick games of Surviving Mars using these new options and the mini stories they help you tell is worth that.

I hope we get some free patches on these in the future for things like colonist AI in finding a station, or a cleaned up UI for resource allocation between stations. But its overall a good mod, especially compared to the poorly integrated hot mess that was Below and Beyond on arrival.

[Jon_Smith]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย BrotherAdso:

I'm going to echo this sentiment. Trains add some fun and interesting options without introducing gamebreaking bugs or ideas that are poorly grafted onto the original game. They give new ways to plan your colony in general and new ways to expand it over time. They have problems - BoredPeon does a good job describing them. But they help to take a new, creative and fun step and is worth a look for that reason, even with limitations like not moving up slopes.

Here in the US, the price of this DLC is the price of a few draft beers at a bar. Surely even one or three quick games of Surviving Mars using these new options and the mini stories they help you tell is worth that.

I hope we get some free patches on these in the future for things like colonist AI in finding a station, or a cleaned up UI for resource allocation between stations. But its overall a good mod, especially compared to the poorly integrated hot mess that was Below and Beyond on arrival.

I find this review funny,

Basically its, 'it wasn't the hot mess the previous DLC was so I'll turn a blind eye to the fact its kinda half baked and not worth $7 cause beer'.

Don't lower your standards because the last stuff they put out was so bad.

I totally get the sentiment about beer btw, but for digital content, its a different thing, you aren't paying for a physical product, put in context of the cost of the full game. Its worth maybe $2-3

[Kalshion]

Frankly this DLC is a bit lacking in some areas and really should've been tested before it was released.

1. No passthrough. Trains can't pass through one station and to another, this means that rather than having *one* station at one dome which then goes through to multiple domes on a *single* track. You have to set up multiple stations at dome A, then multiple at dome B, and make a spagetti wire of tracks. Now, we do have the large stations but that doesn't help solve the main problem of passthrough, after all:
2. People do not switch trains, this is one of the things I believe was mentioned in the trailer (can't recall since I can't view the trailer right now, steams been having some very weird problems this past week).
3. I can get that this might be a bit difficult, but really the stations should've been capable of being set up *inside* of the domes. We have buildings that already poke out of the dome itself so why can't we get this set up for here as well?
4. Trains themselves: they flip around on the track which bugs the ever living daylights out of me (as a person who works on 3d models and has made scenes before, I find this to be a cheap way to turn the trains around, which the best solution would be to add an almost full circle track at the end of the station for the train to run on when leaving)

This is actually one of the reasons why I do not like it when modders go the paid mod route, I get that they would like money for their time (and given how bad the job market is right now, I really can't blame them) but if you are going to do that, then you need to put out a better quality product.

Trains is something I've always wanted since I first played this game, and it always bugged me that it didn't have it (heck, very VERY old games like Outpost 1 had them) so it always rubbed me wrong that this game didn't have them at the onset.

To be honest I can only hope that as time progresses the problems with this DLC will be fixed and more content will be added to help deal with the problems that myself and others have listed. However, as it stands, the DLC isn't really worth the current price.

[Bored Peon]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Kalshion:

1. No passthrough. Trains can't pass through one station and to another, this means that rather than having *one* station at one dome which then goes through to multiple domes on a *single* track. You have to set up multiple stations at dome A, then multiple at dome B, and make a spagetti wire of tracks. Now, we do have the large stations but that doesn't help solve the main problem of passthrough, after all:

Ironically being able to change elevations could have solved that as tracks go over or under other tracks.

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Kalshion:

This is actually one of the reasons why I do not like it when modders go the paid mod route, I get that they would like money for their time (and given how bad the job market is right now, I really can't blame them) but if you are going to do that, then you need to put out a better quality product.

You cannot blame the modder for that. The developers and the publishers were the ones to rubber stamp it.

[Berserk Slayer]

Some constructive criticism here. Surprising, from the thread title I expected the message to be a simple "avoid this DLC".

[Sticky Wicket]

โพสต์ดั้งเดิมโดย Kalshion:

Frankly this DLC is a bit lacking in some areas and really should've been tested before it was released.

1. No passthrough. Trains can't pass through one station and to another, this means that rather than having *one* station at one dome which then goes through to multiple domes on a *single* track. You have to set up multiple stations at dome A, then multiple at dome B, and make a spagetti wire of tracks. Now, we do have the large stations but that doesn't help solve the main problem of passthrough, after all:
2. People do not switch trains, this is one of the things I believe was mentioned in the trailer (can't recall since I can't view the trailer right now, steams been having some very weird problems this past week).
3. I can get that this might be a bit difficult, but really the stations should've been capable of being set up *inside* of the domes. We have buildings that already poke out of the dome itself so why can't we get this set up for here as well?
4. Trains themselves: they flip around on the track which bugs the ever living daylights out of me (as a person who works on 3d models and has made scenes before, I find this to be a cheap way to turn the trains around, which the best solution would be to add an almost full circle track at the end of the station for the train to run on when leaving)

This is actually one of the reasons why I do not like it when modders go the paid mod route, I get that they would like money for their time (and given how bad the job market is right now, I really can't blame them) but if you are going to do that, then you need to put out a better quality product.

Trains is something I've always wanted since I first played this game, and it always bugged me that it didn't have it (heck, very VERY old games like Outpost 1 had them) so it always rubbed me wrong that this game didn't have them at the onset.

To be honest I can only hope that as time progresses the problems with this DLC will be fixed and more content will be added to help deal with the problems that myself and others have listed. However, as it stands, the DLC isn't really worth the current price.

+1

The lack of a through train option, and the issue with not switching trains is just clumsy and only adding logistic problems overall.

A through train-station system is the most logical and obvious way to go forward so that you can organically grow and expand the network like in RL.

Visually also, a through-train system would look better.

[Eagle 11]

some things i have observed, add to the issues:
one track is 2-way, one-direction on each side, yet you cant run two cars simultaneously on it.
also apparently the wagon cant reverse on the same track because as they are only one-way for some reason ?
also they are limited to only 2-car per train or am i missing something ? perhaps there is an upgrade for it, idk
if storing metal and concrete is allowed(it is by default), the trains will endlessly transport those unnecessarily back and forth instead of actually useful things like machine parts.
I assume this is happening because Station A area has storage full for those, yet Station B has storage with space, however once the goods have moved over to B from A the situation reverses.
The extra techs for trains unnecessarily clutter up the tech-tree, would have been better if they had their own Transportation column. As far i have observed pure vanilla provides the best tech progression as you tend to get useful things.

[Bored Peon]

Okay, so I figured out why the trains could not be used underground.

The maps are buggy as @#$%. You get into the large caverns and you can barely even build in them because the the ground is "uneven" even though it is cleared and is flattened graphically. Since the trains act lie passages rule wise the ground has to be flat and not uneven.

So for in order for the trains to work underground it would have required fixing the buggy maps first. Which is something Absucktion should have done before considering themselves finished with the project.

Which is a shame because the train mod would have been nice for underground being able to move colonists to far ends of the caverns. Having to rely on shuttles for that really sucked. The below part definitely needed something besides just the shuttles to allow colonist movement.