Pacing Mars

"The trap that holds you down
The safety of your net
Creates a yearning to regress"

 

Chiasm - Delay

 

 

I'm finally ready to uninstall Surviving Mars. GoG claims I've spent 359h,45m playing this good game which could have been a great game. Of course, this being a city simulator, at least 4/5ths of that is AFK time, cooking dinner or playing Dwarf Fortress or Darkest Dungeon or clicking through unemployment pop-ups in Stellaris while my Martians monetize more technologies and plant more trees.

 

Welcome to Nyctimus, 356 sols (days / years) after its founding, viewed from its initial landing site now known as Lycanthrope Loch. Technically, the atmosphere has been breathable for at least fifty sols, but I kept the domes up because, well, I decided I like domes. So there.

(they look like shiny boobies... heheheh...)

Therein lies the problem. I feel no particular incentive to open up the domes. Terraforming adds a much-needed end-game stage, it's true, but its interplay with the rest of your colony-building is shallow at best, and also brings to the forefront one of the myriad small problems I cited back when Surviving Mars first released:

Pacing.

Surviving Mars is an object lesson in poor pacing.

Remember this?

A rover caught in a dust devil.

At the game's launch, this was one of your nightmare scenarios. Not just drones but rovers required both electricity and cleaning. Your colony's early stages amounted to teleoperating without a net, struggling to maintain a functional mechanical work force long enough to establish the various life support functions for human settlement. Having one of your rovers dusted into malfunction halfway across the map meant deliberately shifting your priorities to a power / repair expedition, all the while hoping you weren't throwing good machinery after bad.

These mechanics could certainly drag out past their plot relevance until they became pure drudgery. Once your priorities shifted to human settlers, rover maintenance rapidly grew onerous. But, instead of being shortened, this first colonization stage via teleoperation was removed altogether. Rovers are now self-cleaning, you're handed more powerful wind turbines for power, right from the start, and instead of consciously weighing your oxygen / water / power needs you can just plop down a self-sufficient habitation dome and immediately start your colony.

 

At the other end of the story, every run-through of Surviving Mars featured a randomly-generated "mystery" or long-term challenge, usually alien contact or some kind of political event requiring massive resource investment. Unfortunately these trigger a bit too early (usually before you fill your second dome) and did more to break up the rising action of colony building than to provide a satisfying boss encounter. By the time you finish a "mystery" you'll still be faced with half a campaign's worth of reiterating shiny boobies all over the landscape.

 

Terraforming would seem to fill that end-game void, but in practice it's merely a separate minigame. I decided to quit when I discovered that vegetation stops spreading at 40% completion, with the remaining 60% being doled out by the game itself at its own convenience as "special projects" artificially inflating the campaign's timescale. So where two years ago I'd run a colony about 50-100 sols after a mystery ended before losing interest, terraforming merely doubled that timespan while eliminating the last remaining challenges like disasters (cold snaps, dust storms, meteor showers) which might have spiced things up. I finished building space stations for Gene Roddenberry's imaginary counterpart in sol 123. This is basically what would happen if Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star thirty minutes into the movie then spent another hour farming moisture for your entertainment.

To reiterate:

Vanilla Surviving Mars suffered from a slightly overextended micromanagement first act and a rushed final act leaving you building redundant domes to fill your time.

The new and improved version of Surviving Mars deprives you of the first act altogether, stretching the dome building routine in both directions by demanding you stick around to wait for "seeding" special project availability... all the while failing to address and even worsening its premature expostulation problem.

The sad part is that, as I said two and a half years ago, there is a lot to like about Surviving Mars. The resource management and infrastructure maintenance are as good as any other city simulator, and the exploration and disaster angles add both proactive and reactive incentives. It banks well enough on its retro-futuristic, hopeful vision of exploration, plays smoothly with intuitive controls, offers a variety of side projects into which you can sink resources. But, aside from my smaller quibbles about writing quality and whatnot, it lacks an overall vision for proportional escalation. And, instead of realizing the problem, its developers have only further flattened their plot diagram after release.