GreenGoo wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 9:48 pm
jztemple2 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 15, 2018 9:30 pm
Sid Meier would love this game, because he's the one that told game designers to give a player interesting decisions. Right from the start I was debating on how much to build, because I only brought a limited number of supplies in that first ship and I didn't want to call for a second supply ship for just a few items.
Maybe, but if this game is like most builders, this decision is only interesting for your first, or maybe first few games. After that, you know what you want and what you need and what you're capable of and the decision goes away as you utilize the best opening moves that play out the same way each game.
Sure it's possible to make a game where your first decisions depend on factors unique to each new game, but those are pretty rare. Builders almost always have priority build orders and once those have been established, there is little decision making at the beginning.
I know nothing about this particular game, I just found the suggestion that this game has interesting decisions when you first land to ring a little hollow, given the zillion of builders that have come before it.
If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and more power to the game.
I see where you are coming from and I agree that if it is a set series of priorities it could get boring. In Surviving Mars so far I have found some varieties of building sequences. For instance, when you land, you might be near a water source, or like in my case, there wasn't and I had to survey and finally find one a bit away, which required me to decide whether to prioritize putting up at a distance a water mine, a tank, power lines, pipes and a drone hub, which basically is a home base for worker drones, *or* to hold off on all that and use local water vaporizers that pull water from the atmosphere for the immediate future. Not very efficient, but maybe a better choice early on when I have other things to build. And as it turned out, it was a good decision, because a later survey uncovered three concrete sites farther beyond the water site, plus a second water site. This was all good, except it was far away from my starting base so I had to decide on whether to build the infrastructure for a whole industrial region, or just piecemeal it.
I had something similar happen with a couple of nearby sites. One was an underground metal source, which required a mine which requires human miners. So I would have to build my second dome nearby.
Except that there was a rare metals source in the opposite direction, which also needs humans which again means another dome. The problem now was that I didn't have the resources to build two new domes. Getting metals is good for building, but rare metals are exports for cash, which is also good in the long run.
Another aspect that drives decisions is the research "tree", which isn't really a tree but five different areas you can research, plus a pop-up "breakthroughs" branch which come up randomly or perhaps are triggered by some discovery. Some research projects just make things more efficient or happen faster, but some unlock new facilities, so that's another place where you have to decide which is more important.
A lot of what will drive decisions is the random distribution of resources on the map. If you really crap out and don't have, for instance, easy access to metals, you can fly them in from Earth. But that costs money, cargo space and just as importantly, time. So that's something else to think about.
There is a lot more micro-management in this game than say SimCity and so far it feels appropriate. There are a lot of balls to keep in the air, especially once the colonists start to arrive. I'd say that this is where the fun lies for me in the game. I've always liked builder or systems games that required me to stay hands on, rather than achieving some equilibrium point where I could just sit back and let things run, again something I see in Cities: Skylines. There is no equilibrium point anytime soon for me in this game and I'm fine with that.