Surviving Mars Cheat Engine
Vinay Pettyjohn
After many ideas how to 'improve' OHOL, I can finally see. Trading, currency, lands, co-op? It won't give us any more fun. We will have new challenges, more dangerous things on a map, nerfed resources, more complex troubles. It's someway connected to what real fun is, but it's not the quintesence of it. The real fun is - living in chaos!
Question - how to make game more chaotic? You can't! Game is chaotic itself on early stage and spontaneously from time to time, it's up to players, or more likely, when things escalating between them. The more we building up our towns and 'civilizations', the less raw and chaotic life is, the more bored we becoming.
While teaching kids and caring for them is nice, learning tech tree gives satisfaction, building and finishing projects makes us proud, working in town is pleasant, the fun part is where the chaos is. Killing spree at rifts were damn fun, drama and roleplays are pretty fun, babypocalypse, griefers, even bear attack etc., because it creates so much needed uncertainty.
I'm playing some older games while being on quarantine, basically checking all games from 90s-till my computer can handle. The most fun game I've re-discovered is Carmageddon from 1997. It's a racing game, but... not normal.
Beside winning by going through checkpoints, you can kill all pedestrians or animals, your opponents wanna kill you by hitting on you, you can jump from one rooftop to other or fell from high height (game physic is awesome), hit barrels which gave you different bonuses and effects, and auto-repair gives you long race-life. You can do crazy shit and the havoc (a.k.a. chaos) you and your opponents creates is soooo good.
Personally I would like mass scale politics for the resources and territory holding, more map diversification. So when you are bored of surviving you could focus on expansions and upgrades.
Generally upgrading buildings could be fun and varied and would add value to cities. The problems could be always present but they should be different all the time.
I think a tower defence style game could be made out of OHOL with ease. Waves of animals or AI-controlled bandits attacking, and defensive systems, or just clever walling, maybe upgradeable walls with destructible hitpoints.
Catastrophes could be a thing, Tropico had it best if you didn't focus on housing, tornadoes hit you, if you had high pollution, storms caught the boats. Droughts destroyed the plants, the electricity went off, tsunamis or heavy rain or such. It always had a reason, you caused it by sparing on the upgrades, but it wasn't a bad thing always, you could redesign the town after, and be prepared for some of it.
I think adapting to surroundings and the conditions is a fun mechanic. For example, Banished served as an example for a lot of current strategical city builders, the main challenge was surviving the winter on low production and creating enough firewood to sustain the homes, while work was way slower during a short period. The themes are different like Frostpunk has an ice age, Surviving the Aftermath has nuclear spillage, Surviving Mars has dust storms.
The importance of adapting is fun, we could have dynamic food values, where you would need to create a certain food in a time period, or allowed to collect wild resources temporarily to get boosts on it. That would mean that overproducing and storing it would be less effective, heck, even some light food decay would be fun, maybe reusing rotten food for composting.
As for the conflicts, I would prefer an honourable duel system where you can decide who is right and wong cause things aren't black and white, this mob mentality posse punishing is far from justice, most of the times the conflicts have no true meaning, people just stressed or both of them think they are right, a skill-based duel would be fun, most towns got a lot of bored people who start killing each other anyway.
The other would be Fort fights or Castle sieges. Or even some sort of sport, where you don't die but you can compare to others.
With the 60 min max life, maybe 10 minute training for it would be enough, a bit more on casual side.
Also, imagine trying to set up an Eve camp in a jungle with mosquitoes flying out that you can't kill and you don't have protection against (at least not for a long while). Eve might try to smith and she drops the tongs because the mosquitoes bite her.
Oil is bad example. Once oil starts flowing its depleted by same players who build that rig, converted to kerosene and used on diesel well to fill dozen cisterns around the fields so it can not be stolen or wasted. Before water goes out town can be dead from other causes than starvation.
Most players don't realise that something runs out and don't have a chance to fix it cause they lack the experience for it. So while you nerf things in order to make things harder, still the very few veterans are the one to do it, and it isn't harder just more tedious to go further for iron or water.
It's not a city-wide pressure it's a personal pressure.
But the personal pressure isn't well implemented, cause some people leech off others and won't get punished for it, while others work hard to sustain them. Saw a grandma feeding all the kids and grandkids all alone, even helped out a bit but I wouldn't want to sacrifice a full life on it, preventing any sort of technological upgrade which I was the only one able to solve.
That's enough of a problem that we got core resource and not core resources, so the problem will always be the same so the approach can always be the same. Since water will run out and you need upgrades, you can just make it run out and upgrade. Moving all the water from a well and an upgraded well to a cistern, has the same effect as using up over time, but with the advantage of being able to work on higher-tech.
That's why the water system is kinda bad, the focus is not on optimally using the water and increasing output over time since there are no recharge level upgrades, especially after Newcomen is just input and output. Last time I did that, I was bored as hell to do it over and over, using up the rubber and charcoal, making new charcoal, running the well, halfway there I was like "rather just run out now, we don't even need this water, we just need to empty it so I can install that damn engine"
For normal players, there are only 2 states: you got water or you don't.
And it's not like that you don't have water and everybody scatters to make contact or solve the crisis, people just stand around anyway and try to survive from the resources they got.
The biggest problem I see is that people want to be helpful but they can't. And I can't even tell them how to be helpful as I'm helpless myself.
"go find another town" or "make carts, buckets and go 200 tiles, collect stones and take a shovel, make a well there and bring that water back here" kinda never happens cause If they could do it they would already do it.
The other problem is too much focus on gathering and input/output but processing it has no value really.
Pottery is good cause making the bowls takes time so I can gather clay and others process into something useful.
But making an adobe house is 90% gathering and building it takes no time when you got resources.
There are no static jobs, even if you got a city, it just acts as a collection point like you can stack up some butt logs and tell kids to process it, or maybe pies, but other than that there is a long stagnation where people can't do anything cause they got no resources to use up.
As a veteran, I even stopped cooking pies cause I do it too fast and people get bored cause they can't even do that. Some towns got this rush, all the veterans get together and we start making pen, flooring around the berry, buildings, etc. then all stagnates cause resources are further and we got no goals to work for.
The oil game is even worse, as destiny says, nobody knows where the oil is, what is there, what you need, even if you do find the oil spot, you cannot enter the biome and get it yourself, and nobody scatters to find others to do it, people just quit on it or do something else, even if you got gingers, no guarantee that they will do it, the other time I spent 5 minutes to convince the only ginger to come along with us, she made a fire and then went back to the city cause she didn't want us to tell her what to do and she never done it before, she didn't even comprehend why she would be the only one to do it. The other time we had 30 gingers and I was dropping a note for straight 10 minutes until found a guy who only had to assemble all the things I prepared for him.
The hero complex of veterans runs out and they already know that this takes a whole life and there is no guarantee it succeeds cause they didn't born with the right skin colour and that's just the worst feeling to have the skill, have the resources, but the game limits you from achieving that goal.
When we had unlimited resources, at least we had unlimited work, put those newbies to collect berries and make clothes, even if they slow it won't hurt others.
Water was a basic resource what you could convert into soil or food.
But by making water the bottleneck, the bottom level also stops, nobody is being able to work cause there are no resources.
Since effectiveness matters more, being ineffective is making you useless. Your time doesn't worth a thing. Newbies are ineffective, therefore useless. I enjoy their enthusiasm, but that alone won't make them useful, I want them to be useful, I want to thank them honestly but can't really.
This game needs more static jobs, processing resources so player numbers matter, their time matters. Create something out of nothing. it does not have to be food, it could be bricks or other construction material, it could be anything of value without the need for tedious gathering. There is no point for overproducing cause you won't get a profit. There is no point of staying in the city cause there is no goals to achieve, even if you would build a pyramid brick by brick, it would make it more interesting but there is nothing you can do without resources. And even since we don't even have horses and we can't get them, even the fastest veterans can't get enough resources to occupy all the other players. I enoy optimizing towns but lately, I don't feel I got enough tools to do so.
c80f0f1006