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

By Tom Sykes

You’ve already seen Evan Lahti play Surviving Mars for 13 of our Earth minutes, but ahead of its release on March 15, developer Haemimont Games joined us at the PC Gamer Weekender to offer a little more detail about its open-ended city-building strategy game.

Taking a cue from publisher Paradox’s Stellaris, the technologies on offer on the research screen will be randomised for each playthrough, with only a third or even a quarter of the total tech being available to players on each run through the game. Hopefully, this will keep it feeling fresh, by stopping players from falling back on the same strategies each time they start a new colony.

The above is only a glimpse of the full panel with Haemimont Games, however. If you’d like to watch the developer talking us through the early parts of a Surviving Mars mission, then get your peepers round the whopping 45 minutes of Martian footage I’ve stashed below.

 

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!