You can certainly make your life harder on purpose by inviting alcoholics and antisocial creeps.But no matter which setting I played on, I didn’t find that the individual personality quirks and flaws of my colonists that’re displayed when you’re sorting through prospective recruits created much in the way of interesting scenarios. Cash is so scarce that there is no margin for error at all, and you have to execute every phase perfectly while budgeting down to the last scrap of metal to end up with a livable environment. At the other end of the spectrum, selecting Paradox Interactive goes… about as well as you’d expect having a major interplanetary colonization effort funded by a mid-sized Swedish video game publisher would go. The International Mars Mission is essentially “Easy Mode,” with nearly unlimited funding that makes it very difficult to fail – people can’t breathe money, but with sufficient wealth you can constantly import everything you need from Earth on a precise schedule and never have to become self-sufficient. There are also several mission sponsors that have different advantages and drawbacks, some of which entirely change how you play. Selecting from a nearly endless number of available colony sites allows you to decide how abundant certain resources are, as well as how often you’ll have to deal with natural disasters like meteor strikes. Luckily for those who would rather simply build an interesting Martian ant farm than constantly fight off a colony-wide cataclysm, there are lots of ways to tweak the difficulty to make Mars more survivable. At the worst of times, I was frustrated that I had nothing to do but wait for a new round of funding so I could order a rocket from Earth to provide a much-needed injection of crucial resources and get the production loop working again. At the best of times, I felt like I was in a sci-fi movie where I had to figure out how to get life support back online before everyone died. A break anywhere in the chain can lead to cascading, catastrophic failure. Since resources are constantly consumed to maintain every structure and power cable, rather than just when they’re first built, production needs to be kept up at a minimum baseline at all times. According to Surviving Mars, people need food, water, and oxygen to live. Just about everything comes down to having enough of the proper resources and the ability to get them where they need to be, creating a complex supply chain puzzle. How was I supposed to know that if I didn’t get a machine parts factory running quickly, I’d lose my ability to generate electricity and have to watch helplessly as everything falls apart? It’s the kind of game where I’d recommend you watch someone else who knows what they’re doing play it and take in the basics of keeping a colony’s lights on before diving in yourself. How was I supposed to know that I needed a machine parts factory quickly?It became a lot more fun once I’d failed my way into a better grasp of its systems, but that initial learning period was more frustrating than anything else. As I was learning the ropes I spent a lot of time sitting around confused about what to do next while I waited for a crucial advancement to become available in the semi-randomized tech tree or for my pool of prospective colonists back on Earth to refill. To be fair, Surviving Mars is mostly a sandbox game in which you’re free to run your colony as you see fit, but there are certain benchmarks you’re encouraged to hit, like maintaining a colony of at least 100 people. They will also unlock asteroid mining and tunnel colonization.Getting all of these pieces to work together is no simple task, and you’re given relatively incomplete, almost bare-minimum advice on how to do so.
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