crewed mars landing's minigame is mathematical impossible !

[cancer352]

That's totally annoying: crewed mars landing's minigame is mathematical impossible in the last step at landing. I lost the whole mission. I researched that puzzle on paper and it is unsolvable. Minigames should be created in a manner that it is mathematical solvable !!!

[Thineboot]

Do you still have the raw data? Would you share it?

[cancer352]

@Thineboot : No, they are gone. As you know you have only a limited number of turns to achieve the goal. I got additional 5 radioactive points and 4 - 5 fire points every turn and these had to be eliminated inside the turn. Electric power was needed too. The result was that there was no chance to produce the wanted points and instead I got a pile of useless blue points from the elimination of the dangerous points.
Because of the limits and rules it was mathematically impossible to achieve the wanted points inside the limits of the turns and at the end the whole mission was lost.

[Thineboot]

A mathematically unsolvable mission wouldn't care about the payload or any other bonus or malus. As long as it's above 0% - I haven't seen one yet - it's mathematically solvable no matter how low the chances may be as long as the available commands offer a combination that makes it possible even if that means you'll have to be a lottery winner in every single task.

That said, even in the early stages they had models to predict the possible outcome of a mission. They've trained crew and optimized systems to prevent failure. Sometime they just failed because pure oxygen would never catch fire or low temperature couldn't affect the flexibility of materials and others paid the price for their negligence.

While MH is a game and failure is part of gameplay there is absolutely no prediction other than keeping track of everything outside of the game, either in your head or on (virtual) paper which is a shame.
Astro-, Kosmo-, Taiko-, Spatio-, Vyomanauts are all just descendants of Laika not capable of refusing to ride a burning fuse instead of insisting on a stable mission planning. While space exploration was always a risk it's most of the time a calculated risk. Not knowing what's lying ahead, not being capable of planning ahead unless you write down everything.


Before I start writing an essay lets head back to the initial statement of cancer352: minigame is mathematical impossible.

As a player I can decide whether to save money and raise the difficulty or spending more money and get some buffs for the tasks lowering the difficulty.
Without any knowledge about the chances other than running RL time consuming tests and sacrificing virtual Whatevernauts it's just a frustrating experience. And I don't care whether cancer352's claim is true or false, whether there was a tiny theoretical chance to finish the mission or not. If I'm capable to send a manned mission to Mars I'm capable of calculating chances, too. And I'm not talking about an unknown tiny asteroid hitting a critical part of a spaceship enroute to Mars. That journey is a bit longer than a lucky flyby of the Moon.

If I want to solve puzzles I can play a puzzle game - and I love good puzzle games.
If Mars Horizon wants to be a puzzle game, so be it. In that case I won't bother the devs anymore with annoying posts they don't want to answer. Being polite by saying thanks for your time - you may be wrong but we don't answer anything because you may have a point, which happened not only to me - drives people away instead of building a dedicated community. I'd like to love this game because it has big potential and I love the theme.


Lead a major space agency as you guide humanity to Mars in this strategy simulation game. Construct a base, design and build rockets, conduct missions throughout the Solar System, and write your own history of Space exploration. Created with support from the European Space Agency.
Please don't take the money and only deliver the basics as this will harm future projects. I've seen this happening with a game before, a successful game followed by a promising concept funded by the EU[www.biolution.net] going down the toilet in a rush. I won't brag with my accomplishments but lets say I know how to play and I know how a developer can loose interest once the funding ends. Popular user-defined tags for this product: Management, Education, Space, Strategy sound very familiar, just replace Space with Science/Medicine.

[Tolkien Book Fan]

Cancer, did you save before attempting that Phase? I found that landing Task impossible the first time I tried it, but then the RNG gave me better Drift commands the second time.

Heat, radiation and drift are assigned to random commands in every mission they appear in. They can easily make bonuses impossible, and sometimes the whole Task, as I have been complaining since I bought the game in January. Drift has gotten so infuriating for me that I have quit playing, even though I was in the endgame for my fourth Agency. Getting the Well Done, Director achievement is no longer worth this slog, and I'm usually willing to play a game for one more time after it stops being fun to get one more achievement.

[cancer352]

I've studied mathematics for several years, so don't tell me I'm a donkey. I wrote that problem down on paper and tried to solve it in advance and therefore it showed that it was impossible to solve inside the limited number of turns !
By the way: The reliably was 97 %, so that's not the reason.

[Shahadem]

The whole point of engineering and planning and technological development is to make the likelihood of success greater than 99%. So why are the odds in this game closer to 3%?

That's just not a fun or fair or realistic system. In reality things almost never go wrong. So it should be in a game as well.

[corisai]

Originally posted by Shahadem:

That's just not a fun or fair or realistic system. In reality things almost never go wrong.

Yesterday India's lost their would-be-GSO satellite :)

[cancer352]

Thanks for the news, you can watch India's failed satellite on space.com. In history there were many fails in rocket science, like the explosion of the chinese "long march 3b" or the famous soviet N1 rockets. ...and you should never smoke when putting fuel into the rocket.

Concerning Mars Horizon you should play it with autoresolve on for all missions, so you have a way out if a mathematical puzzle is unsolvable. Happy gaming !

[e.issaly]

interesting subject, have you factored the best payload and the best astronauts' buffs in that equation? with adequate funds and/or a lucky launch, some missions are completly trivialized.

[corisai]

Originally posted by e.issaly:

interesting subject, have you factored the best payload and the best astronauts' buffs in that equation?

This!

AFAIK mars crewed landing do not allow to change payload, but crew buffs are very powerful tools. On my Normal game I used 100% mars preparation & 99% payload relability combined with tier 3 crew that provided +1 to each resource for every manned action. That made mission trivial.

[cancer352]

you can even send a chimpanzee to mars, he will reach it because the R&D is so advanced in the late game. So no problem. The future will show :-)

[elaxitity]

Auto-resolve makes it so that you don't need to do a phase, but you need it to be successful (based on payload reliability)