DEVS pls read this one

[Lord Wilbur]

I want to start by saying that so far I've enjoyed this game very much, but I've found some issues/difficulties in it and i developed some suggestions that i would like to share with the developing team because i think that this game has an extremely high potential that's still quite undeveloped. I'll try to keep this message as short as possible but some of the things I want to say need some word to be explained, let's start:

1. The generation of roads is a little bit messy especially when there are many buildings concentrated in a little zone, and that makes the movement of workers sometime a real nightmare.
   
2. That one is linked to the first one. Workers move in a really weird way sometimes. For example: I noticed many times already that if a worker must move a resource to a building A that's directly connected with a road to a building B most of the times makes his job in the right way without any issue, but sometimes happens that for the same thing they go through a building C, D, E before reaching the right destination delaying the delivery and slowing down the entire logistic network. This issue seems to be linked to some "particular" road layout and/or buildings setup but I was not able to determine the real cause for that.
   
3. I know that is possible to setup the allocation of resources and prioritize the production of what you need but if you don't allocate/prioritize anything sometimes workers act in a real dumb way. For example: if you produce a resource A and a resource B that both require a resource C to be built but you have only one mine of this last one, in absence of any allocation/prioritization I'd expect that my worker deliver alternately the resource C to the two factories or even better they deliver it to the factory that has in that moment a lesser stock, but soemtimes happens that they keep feeding one factory and completely forget the second one. I noticed this one particularly with parts/electronics production and I had it in many games already where my workers kept feeding the parts factory with aluminum even if I had more than 10 parts in stock and 0 electronics and I had all my buildings waiting for electronics to be built while I didn't need parts at all in that particular moment, the only way I had to stop them actin in that way was to prioritize electronics or shutting down the parts factory.
   
4. Let's talk about food production now: the system seems pretty ggod now but I noticed something quite weird... A food factory produces 1 unit of food out of 1 unit of chemicals and 1 unit of ice (that I found is a really rare resource in comparison of what you need) every 10-11 sols and if you upgrade the factory you obtain an even better production rate for a relatively low resource cost for the building and if you can find enough ice to support the production, what i find weird is that when you reach the stage of liquid water on the planet you can start to produce ice from that but the production rate is really low compared to a superior ice drilling plant and you need a lot of buildings/resources to build an infrastucture capable of producing enough ice for your superior food farms, or you can research the crater farms (and that's even weirder) that for a huge amount of resources and infrastructure buildings produce 1 unit of food every 40 sols making this research (10000 RP) completely useless...
   
5. Then again: Wokers and worker hubs. As for now you need to spam a lot of worker hubs to keep your production efficency high enough and in my opinion it's not a totally bad mechanic but i find that for the numbers of them you need they need too much space. I think it should be a nice idea to make worker hubs a really little building so that people can put them in every little hole between their buildings if they want (for instance a worker hub should be a simple recharge station with a tiny resource deposit so it shouldn't be such a big building), or eventually bundle 2 or 3 workers in every worker hub

For now I think it's all if I come up with something new i'll add a post to this list. I hope some dev will read this post and give me/us some answer and/or explanation about these things.

Keep the good work!

[cswiger]

Per Aspera has a topographic map of Mars, and roads are constructed in a way which considers the changes in elevation. A short road which goes over hills like the rim of a crater may take longer for drones to traverse than the longer road which goes around the crater.

So the creation of roads and the movement of drones becomes more understandable once you take changes of elevation into account. (This gameplay mechanic is also used in railroad simulations like Railroad Tycoon and Railway Empire, but is not commonly found elsewhere.)

The movement of resources is a little funky. They appear to be using local pathing for each drone without having a dedicated movement plan from source to destination for each good being moved. If you have enough worker hubs which are evenly distributed, it usually works well enough. If you don't, you get hotspots and factories being starved of resources.

Implementing a global fair distribution chain using M:N scheduling for transporting resources between M producers and N consumers is possible, but is a hard problem. I don't expect the developers to implement ideal logistics, because the player needs to have agency and needs to have logistic problems which can be addressed by placing buildings.

If this still annoys you, use one of the mods which allows for multiple worker drones per worker hub. That will help balance out resource distribution hotspots vs starved factories. It will also remove most of the gameplay challenge regarding logistics management.

[cswiger]

Oh, forgot about #4. Deposits of chemicals and ice which can be mined are finite, although you ought to have plenty of the materials needed to complete the game.

However, if you want to keep going with a large population after you complete the final stage of terraforming, the Water Treatment Plants and surface farms produce endless resources. They aren't intended to be balanced in terms of out-producing mines working on deposits.

[wraith_73]

Originally posted by cswiger:

Oh, forgot about #4. Deposits of chemicals and ice which can be mined are finite, although you ought to have plenty of the materials needed to complete the game.

However, if you want to keep going with a large population after you complete the final stage of terraforming, the Water Treatment Plants and surface farms produce endless resources. They aren't intended to be balanced in terms of out-producing mines working on deposits.

Fair enough, but if you are at a level of terraforming that you can create farms, then you've pretty much beat the game already. On earth, one farm in the US can feed 150 people in a standard year. In the 1930's, it was 4 people a year. On Mars, with super advanced technology on a newly terraformed planet, a farm can feed less than 10 people a year using seed that was genetically manipulated to survive on Mars.

This being the case, the terraforming of Mars is a failure. If (when) the AI malfunctioned or was sabotaged , the ability to produce food would vanish. The capacity for a humans to replicate the efficiency of an AI with all the resources this one has is a fleeting dream. At best you would have a 1 for 1 food situation, and eventually, a global collapse.

[cswiger]

Farming yields are usually expressed in terms of calories per acre, or people fed per year per acre. Normal farm yields are anywhere from several million calories per acre for genetically modified crops like corn to a few hundred thousand calories per acre for livestock used for meat and dairy.

The yield you quote for US farms in the 1930s reflected more sustainable farming without extreme use of fertilizers, pesticides, and heavy agricultural equipment. The infrastructure needed to produce such resources and the petrol/lubricant and spare parts for your agri gear takes up space which you need to consider, not just crop fields alone.

Feeding 1-2 people per acre is fairly straightforward using sustainable farming without external infrastructure. Feeding 10 people per acre is doable using polyculture techniques such as seen in Asia. Feeding more than that per acre requires major external agricultural support and long term sustainability is more challenging, often needing 20+% of the fields to lie fallow for a year on a rotating basis to avoid soil toxicity.

[wraith_73]

Originally posted by cswiger:

Farming yields are usually expressed in terms of calories per acre, or people fed per year per acre. Normal farm yields are anywhere from several million calories per acre for genetically modified crops like corn to a few hundred thousand calories per acre for livestock used for meat and dairy.

The yield you quote for US farms in the 1930s reflected more sustainable farming without extreme use of fertilizers, pesticides, and heavy agricultural equipment. The infrastructure needed to produce such resources and the petrol/lubricant and spare parts for your agri gear takes up space which you need to consider, not just crop fields alone.

Feeding 1-2 people per acre is fairly straightforward using sustainable farming without external infrastructure. Feeding 10 people per acre is doable using polyculture techniques such as seen in Asia. Feeding more than that per acre requires major external agricultural support and long term sustainability is more challenging, often needing 20+% of the fields to lie fallow for a year on a rotating basis to avoid soil toxicity.

The space take by farms in the game is far larger then an acre. Especially when you aren't just talking about crater farms. Most farms look to be hundreds of acres and I'll stand by what I said, in the event the AI failed, for any reason, life on Mars would end if this is the best that modern technology can produce in a yield.