Resurrection in the name of Leonardo Da Vinci!
The game has updated. With a sandbox mode, which is kind of just skipping to the endgame where that's the case anyway (except for Water), but also with a lot of quality of life improvements like the Electronics Factory no longer requiring electronics to maintain (meaning it had to have a minimum production at all times, wtf). I'm about to start another game, I think, since Wolfenstein II doesn't work on my computer and SM is a tad better than Frostpunk.
my biggest issue with this game is that there is no win situation.
It sort of has 2 (as in they are obvious things to set as ultimate goals):
1) When you finish whatever mystery you have
2) When you have done every milestone
There's also potentially at 100 days in, when the final evaluation is, but that is before most mysteries have finished (and I've had them start after then) so it's really more of an "endgame has started" marker.
Like DF, it's very open ended. There's no definitive win condition, but you can challenge yourself in a lot of ways.
My last playthrough, I did my own challenge: I started as International Mars Mission, but I put on rules so that inports would grow more and more expensive, I couldn't import food, rocket travel took 3x longer, I could only get one colonist rocket, and so on, and also made a personal rule to
deconstruct all rockets instead of send them back. So I had 5 rockets total.
Earth was dying. I was the final Hail Mary of mankind, and that was why all the resources were drying up and I couldn't import food or more people. They were all dead, after all. Earth, itself, was dead. Doing it with a harder sponsor would have been better, but I'm a pleb.
It was actually both difficult and fun. The way colonists breed became very important, where before I was 99% immigrant and didn't care if people screwed. I quickly ran out of money (because no exports and expensive imports), and spent most of the early game scrabbling for resources, struggling to keep my electronics production ahead of my usage. Awesomely, mysteries are tied to population, which I didn't know, and that population number just so happens to be about the tipping point in such a scenario of when you overcome the initial struggle to survive and start to grow more quickly on your own. So the minute I started to feel more confident in my colonies success, Metatron showed up and issued a challenge.
It ended up being a pretty metal campaign, with multiple phases to the gameplay. The initial set-up before the colonists got there, trying to use each block of resources as efficiently as possible, then the initial colonization, where every day was a struggle to keep people alive without running out of electronics and dying the slow death, then a struggle to increase production in time with Metatron's demands, while still making sure my people were happy, screwing, and alive, and then finally a period of triumph after we beat the mystery, and the colony settled into a quick, easy expansion with plenty of resources.
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Topic: Surviving Mars (Read 6128 times)