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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/

Here’s what you need to know to get started with Surviving Mars – the ultimate beginner’s guide!

Surviving Mars is an amazing survival simulation game from Haemimont Games, known for the Tropico series. As its name suggests, Surviving Mars is all about surviving, on Mars. You and a few billion dollars are all that stands between your handful of colonists and domination of the red planet.

Surviving Mars at its core is a management game, where your main aim is the efficient use of resources available to you. You’ll have to manage all types of materials, deposits, colonist’s needs, oxygen, food, water, maintenance, research, and various other systems that will demand near-constant attention (depending on the difficulty you choose).

While this guide won’t go over everything you need to know (since discovery in Surviving Mars is half of the fun), these tips and pointers will help you establish a colony on Mars and avoid wiping out your brave colonists.

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Redundancy. After spearheading humanity’s first-ever Martian colony, I’ve realized redundancy is critical. You’re building one pipe between the oxygen pump and the habitation dome? Build two. Your power grid is clustered together? Make two or three groups of solar panels instead, and throw a few wind turbines into the mix for when the sun goes down. One farm? Try four.

When help is 34 million miles (or 55 million kilometers) away, your only hope is that when something goes wrong—and it will go wrong—there’s another option to fall back on. That’s the key to Surviving Mars ($40 on Green Man Gaming).

Life on Mars?

Things aren’t looking too bad on Mars these days, though. I hesitate to call the situation “stable”—I know better than to jinx myself. A meteor shower or an ill-timed dust storm could probably do some serious damage. And that’s ignoring the two colonies I abandoned when troubles mounted.

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By Daniel Starkey

It’s been said that city simulators are best thought of as a series of stocks and flows. You have essential buildings that supply resources, which are then distributed in a grand pattern etched by your design. Your success, then, depends on how artfully and effectively you’ve crafted your settlement. If that is the measure by which we are to judge city simulators, nowhere is that more beautifully or essentially or thematically distilled than in Surviving Mars.

Space is hard, and Mars isn’t any more forgiving; your goal is to command a mission that can endure the punishing conditions of the Red Planet. You can take the reigns of an international consortium, a major private enterprise, or any number of real-world space-capable nations here on Earth. From there, you choose how to guide your Martian colony. Insofar as many simulators allow a degree of role-playing, your time on Mars is yours to do with how you will. But your progress is constantly evaluated by your sponsor country or organization, offering some very loose targets like “get colonists” and “keep them alive for a while.” Beyond that, the direction is yours.

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By Marcello Perricone

Colonizing another world is a tremendous undertaking. It involves sending a preposterous amount of materials and spending a gigantic number of years and money to get a few human beings to another alien rock – a rock many – if not all of them – will never return from.

We often forget the sheer cost of such an endeavour, but anyone who’s moved countries can tell you that regardless of mental fortitude, uplifting your life is hella hard. Uplifting to another planet entirely must be soul shattering.

Unlike other colonization games, Surviving Mars makes that human cost exceedingly clear. From the moment you land your first rocket in the Red Planet to way after the first Martian baby is born, it’s an uphill struggle. Constructions wear and tear, colonists age and die, and everything requires maintenance – Surviving Mars really earns the “Surviving” part of its title.

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