New Domes

Curiosity introduces five new Dome types to the game. These are not skins or variants of the old Domes, but entirely new models with new shapes, functionality and costs. With one exception, they do not require new techs to be researched. Each of them is unlocked together with one of the old Domes, potentially by an existing tech. This means that many of them may be directly available even when you load a savegame created before the Curiosity update.

• Micro Dome – a very cheap triangular Dome available at the start. No capability to host a Spire. Can be very useful when space or resources are limited or as an extension to an existing Dome when connected with passages.
• Barrel Dome – an alternative to the Small Dome, available at the start. It provides more usable space but has no capability to host a Spire.
• Trigon Dome – similar to the Medium Dome and made available at the same time. Cheaper to build, but provides less habitable space.
• Mega Trigon Dome – similar to the Large Dome and made available at the same time. Cheaper to build, but provides less habitable space. The triangular shape can be kinda tricky to position on some places of the map with a Dome that big.
• Diamond Dome – this is the only new design that requires a new tech, more specifically a breakthrough, so it will not be available in every playthrough. It is a rhombus-shaped Dome that has the capability to host two spires. We want to keep the “two spire” Dome configurations special and somewhat exclusive but with the new design, we are increasing the chance that you get at least one of the two available configurations during any of your games.

Command Center

The Command Center is a handy new toolset that provides historical data for the colony and the ability to inspect and manage multiple buildings, colonists or vehicles without selecting them individually. It has been developed as part of our effort to reduce the micromanagement and to provide a more informative overview interface for certain gameplay aspects. The Command Center currently offers five different tools:

• Graphs – view historical data for various colony metrics for the last 50 Sols
• Buildings – inspect and manage buildings, work shifts, workers and upgrades
• Domes – inspect and manage Domes and Dome Policies. Check average dome stats, as well as homes and jobs at a glance.
• Colonists – inspect Colonists and compare their stats, traits and interests. Locate problematic colonists quickly.
• Transportation – inspect and manage Drones, Shuttles and Transporters. Check Drone/Shuttle load at a glance and reassign Drones without hunting individual controllers in the normal view

Buildings and Colonists can be filtered by various criteria. If you want to upgrade only some of the extractors in the colony, you can filter out all extractors, quickly check them out in the view on the left side of the screen and upgrade only the ones that you want, all without closing the Command Center. You can use combinations of filters as well – for example, to hunt down all problematic colonists that live in a particular Dome.

The Command Center has been integrated with other existing game interfaces such as the Colony Overview and the Dome Filter – double-clicking a trait in the Dome Filter will open the Center filtering Colonists with this trait in the specified Dome. We plan to keep improving the Command Center and adding new options to it in the future, so any suggestions are welcome. Once the update goes live, please share what kind of information or management tools would you like to see added down the road!

Info Bar

I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating – I love mods! Not only they empower the players to expand the game and make it cooler, but we can also cherry pick the ideas that we like best and shamelessly add them to the official game.

One such mod that has been particularly popular both with the community and here, at Haemimont Games, is the Info Bar mod, created by Waywocket. We liked Waywockets’ info bar so much that we decided to add an Info Bar of our own to the game. As you can see in the screenshot, our Info Bar shows research progress but is otherwise very similar to the mod that inspired it. Thanks for the great idea, Waywocket, may your nickname live forever in our credits!

Tutorial

Until now I talked about the stuff I love – Domes, Mods and cool management interfaces. Let me tell you about the feature that almost every developer hates – the tutorial. Tutorials are notoriously hard to develop and maintain, and even a very good tutorial is often perceived as some kind of obstacle before the actual game experience. Still, tutorials may be necessary, as we learned the hard way with the launch of Surviving Mars. The feedback of many new players can be summed up by one simple sentence – “How do I play this game?”

Creating a tutorial after release may seem like a waste of effort, but we really want to make our game more welcoming to newcomers and we see this tutorial as very important for the future health of Surviving Mars. So we drew straws and my unlucky colleague Boyan was chosen to design and produce a comprehensive tutorial to be created by a pack of grumpy programmers (like wizards, programmers tend to be grumpy, but the ones working on tutorials are particularly so). Turns out Boyan took “comprehensive” a little too literally, so we now have a huge five-part monster of a tutorial on our hands. He is still recovering from the development of the damn thing, but we are quite happy with the result! It will certainly be helpful to newcomers, even if most of the existing players would never need it.

The original publication here

A “making of” video of the process behind writing the orchestral score for Haemimont Games’ / Paradox Interactive’s’ “Surviving Mars”, composed and conducted by George Strezov. The soundtrack features the fantastic musicians of the Sofia Session Orchestra with solos by Tsvetelina Beleva (alto flute) and Petyo Kolev (flute). The sonic style is a colourful mix between vintage synthesizers and minimalistic, airy orchestral timbres. Video shot by Milen Mladenov, video editing by Bohos Topakbashian.

Via Georgi Strezov

Passages
The one issue where player expectations differed most from our own was Dome connectivity. We imagined Domes as isolated from one another and the gameplay centred on carefully rationing the available space and customizing each Dome as a separate mini-city. The overwhelming amount of feedback we received on the issue proved that the majority of players imagine Domes differently – as elements of a larger interconnected system.

Luckily, we had already received some signals about this issue and have been working on a solution for a while. Allowing free unrestricted travel between all Domes on the map was never an option that we liked. It would create major problems on two fronts. First, it would trivialize planning, since every building is going to become immediately available to every colonist, regardless of distance. Second, it could never work with our individual simulation, since it would take many, many hours for a colonist to reach a bar in a distant Dome and then go to work in another distant Dome, causing him to miss his work shift and most likely suffocate on the way.

Still, a more limited solution was possible – allowing colonists to work and visit services in nearby domes, directly connected with the residential Dome of the colonist. Thus Domes become something akin to districts in a city, instead of each one being its own mini-city.

How do you connect Domes? With new constructions called Passages that can connect any two nearby Domes. They are placed similarly to cables, but can’t be interconnected and have a limited maximum length. Each Passage takes a single hex both in the source and in the destination Dome for the entrance/exit on both sides. We experimented with other ways of connecting, such as joining the existing airlocks, but aligning and connecting Domes felt much more unpleasant in these experiments and sacrificing a useful hex for each new connection turned out to be an interesting tradeoff in the small Domes.

But what if you want to create a system in which some Domes only receive visitors and workers from connected Domes? New policies in every Dome info panel allow restricting work and visits in connected Domes – these are similar to the birth control policy that we added in our previous patch.

Before we move to other new features, here are some additional details about passages that might be interesting for experienced players:

• Passages are equipped with moving walkways that accelerate pedestrian travel in both directions.
• They are not normally traversable for drones and Rovers, but you can place Ramps over them to facilitate traffic.
• They connect both Domes for purposes of Power and Life Support grids.
• Meteor strikes on passages cause fractures and might kill colonists inside.
• If one Dome has a Power or Life support issues for a long time, passages leading to it will be disabled until the issue has been resolved.
• Work performance and service comfort in connected Domes is slightly lower, so it is still more optimal for a Colonist to use workplaces and services in his own Dome

Game Rules
I still remember how excited I was when Game Rules were added to Crusader Kings II. It felt only natural to add something similar in Surviving Mars empowering the players to further customize their games.

You can turn on game rules at the start of a play session but they affect the entire playthrough. We are shipping 13 game rules in Opportunity, most of them focused on customizing the game difficulty since we received lots of feedback about players demanding a more challenging experience. We are certainly not planning to stop there – we can imagine game rules changing entire game elements according to individual taste (alternative Wind Turbines, anyone?) and we can’t wait to see what the modders will come up as well.

Here is a complete list of the Game Rules coming in Opportunity:

• Prefab Colony – start with enough prefabs to build the basics of a Colony and the first Dome
• No Disasters – disables all disasters, except the ones coming from the Mysteries
• Hunger – can’t import Food from Earth
• Inflation – import prices increase over time
• Long Ride – rocket travel time to and from Mars is three times longer
• The Last Ark (a.k.a. The Quill Challenge) – can call a Passenger Rocket only once
• Amateurs – no specialist applicants
• Rebel Yell – colonists periodically become renegades. Crime is more severe
• Chaos Theory – tech fields are fully randomized
• Winter is Coming – Cold Wave rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars. Cold waves increase power consumption even more
• Armageddon – Meteor rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars
• Dust in the Wind – Dust Storm rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars
• Twister – Dust Devil rating set to a new Max level for all locations on Mars

Storages
Opportunity introduces new storage buildings for Water, basic and advanced resources. Storing large quantities of processed resources was a huge problem, especially in large colonies and the new storage facilities have been created to address this issue.

The new Large Water Tank holds up to 1000 units of water (1500 with an increase from tech) while the new Storages hold up to 4000 resource units of the corresponding basic or advanced resource. These facilities are locked behind the research. Unlike Depots, Storages consume Power and require a certain amount of construction materials.

Workshops
The final new feature we are introducing is a cycle of three researchable buildings called Workshops. But wait, wasn’t there a service building named Art Workshop already in the game? We always wanted to have a dedicate place in which the colonists can be creative and make their own works of art, but the old service building was a poor choice for this and should’ve been named otherwise in the first place.

To prevent confusion with the new buildings, especially since one of them is a true Art Workshop, we are renaming the old Art Workshop to Art Store. This name is more similar to the names of the Electronics Store and the Grocer with which it shares functionality.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the new buildings. The Workshops, called “vocation buildings” during development, are completely optional end-game buildings that consume advanced resources and allow colonists to pursue higher life goals once the colony has become self-sufficient and has an excessive workforce. All people employed in Workshops receive Morale and Comfort boost, as long as their Workshop is supplied with resources. They are also counted towards a new challenging milestone that requires 40% of your population to be employed in Workshops.

We know that many players will opt to ignore the Workshops and the corresponding milestone, opting for more practical benefits for their Colony. Still, we felt that it was important to provide a cycle of buildings allowing the colonists to pursue self-realization, to climb to the top of the Maslow’s pyramid, signifying that the colony has grown enough to support that kind of lifestyle. The fact that this provides a new optional endgame goal is an added benefit. Hint – to reach 100%, just make sure that your last starving colonist is employed in a Workshop.

Note that both the Workshops and the new Storages are locked behind new technologies and thus will require a new playthrough to become available in your game.

What do you think about the new features coming in Opportunity? Which one excites you the most? What game rules and buildings would you like to see added to the game?

We will announce when Opportunity will be released in the near future.

More @ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-diary-9-opportunity-by-boian-spasov-from-haemimont-games.1088848/

I adore sci-fi games of all kinds, but my single favorite of all times is Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. I remember fondly so many things about this game, but in the context of today’s dev diary I want to talk about the so-called “secret projects”. They were an inspiring and very thematic adaptation of the Wonders of Civilization, that proved to me that the concept could work very well in a sci-fi setting.

With Surviving Mars belonging to a totally different genre, our Wonders ended up nothing like the secret projects in Alpha Centauri, yet for me, that was the very first inspiration for them. We wanted to create a set of special late-game buildings that evoke a sense of grandeur and epic scale, each of which feels like both an achievement and a reward on its own.

Each Wonder is a unique building, representing the pinnacle of achievements in a specific tech field. They are visually impressive, monumental buildings that quite naturally become visual landmarks in your colony once constructed. Wonders are locked behind high-level research, and each of them may be constructed only once per playthrough. As a whole, they feel much more “fantastic” than our regular buildings, based on futuristic sci-fi concepts and possibilities. Wonders are very expensive in terms of research, resources and time to construct, but once operational they provide unique and powerful benefits to the entire colony.

For a while, we experimented with the concept of not having all Wonders available in every playthrough but ultimately decided against this because the wonders ended up both too crucial for our end game and too cool to be available only incidentally.

As tradition dictates, there are seven Wonders, although I imagine many more will be created as mods or official content in the future. My favorite one is a highly experimental fusion generator called the Artificial Sun, but I already talked about it in an interview a while ago, so I plan to tell you about a few of the others this time.

The Mohole mine is inspired by the Mars trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson. It provides a constant supply of metals and rare metals from the depths of Mars – something invaluable late game when more and more resource deposits are becoming depleted. It also heats up the surrounding area negating all negative effects of the Cold Wave disaster for any building positioned close-by.

The Space Elevator is a wonder that speeds up cargo shipments to and from orbit. It can be used both to export precious metals to Earth and to receive resupply materials and prefabs from Earth at preferential prices. Once you construct it trade with Earth becomes much less restricted, not depending on individual rocket capacity and refueling. Since our space elevator is not equipped with life support, you will still need the rockets to get new colonists from Earth, but you will be able to order materials and prefab buildings in huge quantities, as long as you can secure the funding for them.

I feel very tempted to spoil all seven wonders now, but it is probably best to keep the wraps on at least a few of them until release. It will be fun to see how many you will guess correctly at the very least. And the ones that you don’t guess correctly are even more welcome as ideas for the future. So let the speculations commence! What kind of wonders would you like to see in the game?

More @ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/dev-diary-6-the-seven-wonders-of-mars-by-boian-spasov-from-haemimont-games.1069645/#post-23817197

While we don’t want to completely ‘spoil the surprise’ by talking in-depth about all of the disasters that could decimate your beautiful colony, you may safely assume that the environment on Mars is a harsh mistress. Sure, them rocks and that red sand may be looking pretty peaceful, beautiful even. But don’t be fooled. All of a sudden your Sensor Towers may be reporting an incoming Cold Wave that freezes everything in its path, turning the Red Planet white from extreme frost.

And what then?

Water storages will freeze, power consumption will skyrocket, and before you know it, your logistics will break down one building after the other. Worst of all – if a building stops working during a Cold Wave it will freeze solid, meaning that it can be repaired only when heated or after the cold wave is over. No water? Say goodbye to your crops. No power? Watch your Colonists freeze while your entire resource network shuts down, preventing the production of fuel, the extraction of metal and living on Mars altogether. Let it go far enough, and your Oxygen-producing Moxies might shut down. No water, no air and no power. You’re finished. Or well, your Colonists are at least.

The point is – a Disaster may be the catalyst that triggers a chain of events that end with critical failures jeopardizing your entire colony. And we don’t want that, do we?

So how do I protect myself?

I wanted to begin this paragraph with the words ‘fear not’. However, that would be lying to you. You should be very afraid and prepare accordingly.

Regarding the Cold Wave, your issues will probably centre around two connected things: power shortage due to your generators not keeping up with the increased demand, and draining of batteries if not enough energy is stored. Running out of power is of course potentially deadly.

You can counter this by placing Subsurface Heaters close to your most important buildings and the hungriest clusters of power consumers. That will heat up the area around the machine, letting your primary power supply continue working at normal capacity. Be wary though – the Subsurface Heater needs a lot of water to function, and as we know, water is not a resource readily available on Mars. There is one other hitch in this plan – the Subsurface Heater has to be researched first and is not readily available at the start of the game, so you will have to survive at least the first few Cold Waves without it.

Without the handy heater option or extreme overproduction of power, prioritizing critical buildings is your best course of action. Be ready to shut down facilities that are non-vital to conserve for example power or water. Just beware – as mentioned before, any building that stops working for a while during a Cold Wave will freeze, thus becoming unavailable until the end of the disaster. Choose wisely depending on what you have stored and be careful to keep your most critical resources flowing.

You see where this is going. In order to be Surviving Mars, you’ll need to have contingency plans in place, build a sturdy infrastructure and be clever about your resources. And above all – always anticipate the worst.

Would you like to know more?

The next Dev Diary will again be written by Boian Spasov himself. It will hit pretty soon so keep an eye out. You could also sign-up at survivingmars.com if you haven’t already. If you do that you’ll receive exclusive news updates and of course a number of other goodies in-game. Be sure to check it out!

All the best,

Stirling (Sebastian Forsström – Product Marketing Manager for Surviving Mars, or as Candyalien said, last stream…the guy who is in charge of the money!)

While setting up an automated colony staffed by the little drone guys can be a fun experience by itself, it also serves a larger purpose – paving the road for the first human settlements on the red planet.

But why would you need humans in your colony at all?

Thank you for the excellent question, Mr Skynet. The human colonists are required to perform many complicated tasks such as producing most of the advanced resources, managing complex underground mining endeavours and doing research. There are over 100 technologies, all unlocking new benefits for your colony. So, plenty of research to keep you busy!

The flipside is that your colonists are somewhat more delicate than the lowly drones. They tend to need functional life support, for example. And they kinda like medical care, food, entertainment… To sum it up – you need some kind of habitable settlements protected from radiation, the harsh Martian climate, supplied with all the necessities and, ideally, at least a few of the luxuries, that your colonists may want. I present to you… the Domes:

Beautiful, aren’t they? The Domes are, at least in my eyes, the most iconic pieces of art in the game. Inspired by the classic somewhat naive, somewhat optimistic retro sci-fi aesthetics, these points of light in the Martian night represent our idealized idea for the first human settlement on another planet.

Our goal was not hard realism. Realistically, a manned colony on Mars would almost certainly be at least partially underground, and even if dome-like structures are employed, they would probably not look like our Domes. However, an underground colony will not be very appealing to live in, and we wanted to create a place that invokes the sentiment “Wow, I really want to leave Earth and go live there!”

Building utopia

Domes come in various sizes, but all of them are mega-structures meant to house other buildings. Most of the buildings related to colonists can be placed only under Domes – this includes living quarters, research labs, certain factories and service buildings. Domes are expensive constructions, and space underneath is premium, so you are solving a spacial puzzle with every Dome you create.

Placing any building takes valuable space, and you have to maintain a careful balance between residences and workplaces. Food production, research and production of advanced resources can be distributed between Domes, but you can also create specialized Domes focusing on one particular gameplay aspect.

A dedicated farming Dome can feed a significant portion of your colony. A luxury service and residential Dome will provide comfortable conditions for the Colonists living inside, increasing their birth rate and morale. A mining Dome may be meant to service nearby resource extractors, located just outside the Dome, providing plenty of living space for miners and the facilities to handle the stress caused by their work.

The monumental central structure in a Dome is called a Spire. Most Domes can have only one single Spire, but the Spire grants a powerful benefit to the entire Dome, specializing it even further in a chosen direction. An Arcology provides residential space for numerous colonists, a Water Reclamation System recycles vital H20, while a Network Node boosts all research conducted in the Dome.

Livin’ the Mars life

So, we’ve already established that you will need Colonists to keep many of your buildings operational. It is good to keep in mind that some of your Colonists have individual specializations that allow them to perform much better in certain workplaces. To get the most of your buildings, you will have to either cherry pick the needed specialists from Earth or secure a way to train them in the Colony. Generally, workers are assigned to their workplaces automatically, but you have the tools to micromanage their assignments and work shifts if you wish.

The current condition of any individual colonist is represented by four key stats – Health, Sanity, Comfort and Morale. Letting any of this drop too low has negative consequences. Colonists at low Health can’t work, and if their Health depletes, they will die. Colonists with no remaining Sanity will suffer mental breakdowns and may gain negative traits such as alcoholism or gambling addiction (more on traits – below). Colonists at low Morale may become Renegades and start causing trouble in the Colony. Conversely, high stats may grant positive effects – for example, citizens with high Comfort are more inclined to have children.

Unlike the drones in the automated colony, your colonists are not created equal. Each possesses a different set of traits with each trait granting some different effect to the colonist. A hardworking colonist performs better at his workplace while an idiot may cause a catastrophic malfunction, shutting down the building. Some traits are exceptionally rare and may benefit the colony as a whole – having a Celebrity will secure additional funding from Earth, as long as the said Celebrity survives on Mars.

Just as a teaser, here are few more example traits with their current in-game descriptions:

• Survivor – Loses less Health without food, water, oxygen or when living in an unpowered Dome
• Nerd – Gains a temporary Morale boost every time a new technology is researched
• Hypochondriac – Will randomly visit Medical buildings and take Sanity damage if unable to do so
• Chronic Condition – Loses Health each day
• Guru (rare trait) – Randomly spreads other traits of this colonist to persons in the same Dome

As your colony grows, you will gain the options to cultivate certain desirable traits and treat some of the negative ones. And no, the definition of treatment doesn’t include setting up domes without Oxygen supply and encouraging the colonists with the undesirable traits to move there. You monster! 

You can filter the traits and specializations of colonists coming from Earth (but not of children born on Mars), as well as the individual Dome populations – if you want to create a Dome populated by Fit Middle-Aged Survivors and Sexy Nerds, you have the tools! You can even find some perfectly valid in-game rationalization to do so. Probably.

As you can see, I love the traits and their effects – it is a wonderful, expandable system that will only get richer as we continue to work on the game.

That’s all for today’s diary! Thank you for reading and have a wonderful holiday! See you in 2018, when I plan to write about something very mysterious.

*****

Thanks to Boian for another awesome Dev Diary – just tacking this on as I think it will also be of interest… 

Surviving Mars will be out in SPRING 2018

Also, Boian has been interviewed by PC Gamer – read it in full here!