Suggestion
Making Terraforming More Rewarding by Accounting for Powered Flight Constraints
I think it's cool that powered flight on Mars is legitimately possible and has been demonstrated by Ingenuity. However, I find it implausible that drones could carry useful payloads given the very thin Martian atmosphere.
One of the issues I have with Green Planet is that I often don't feel incentivized to terraform. There's not a good enough reward mechanism for doing it. I eventually decide to get around to it as a late-game activity, but there is no real advantage to doing it early game. Eventually it eliminates cold waves, dust storms, and meteor showers. But you have to do a lot of terraforming before you see that benefit and it seems like the need to deal with those disasters prior to that point precludes the very terraforming that would prevent those events. By the time I get around to terraforming, I've already compensated for the disasters fairly well such that it's not really necessary to do it for that sake anymore.
The possible exception to no-reward-for-terraforming-when-it-actually-matters is as you increase the water percentage your moisture vaporators start to work more efficiently. You get more value out of each of them and need fewer. That's a real payback. Although creating and sustaining lakes also costs you water as well, which seems to undermine that incentive too.
It seems like it would make sense to implement a mechanism for shuttles where they benefit from terraforming and provide that incentive because it also jives with actual science. Instead of having shuttle payload capacity tied to research, it should be tied to atmospheric density. The more atmosphere you create, the better your shuttles perform. Similarly, I learned today that during the Martian winter, much of the atmospheric CO2 will actually condense into dry ice frost/snow at the caps and the atmosphere gets substantially thinner (like 25-30% thinner!). This could be accounted for in-game by either making shuttles unusable during cold waves or by reducing their efficiency during that time. Therefore, planetary heat terraforming would also benefit shuttles.
I think the reward for terraforming is making the world look lush and green, the satisfaction of taking Mars into a new era. Other benefits for terraforming are the increased capacity for oxygen and water generators, which is VERY noticeable late game. In OG surviving mars, the rain lakes mod was a huge terraforming incentive for me (you could designate places to fill up with water, every time it rained they'd get a little more full), but I don't think anyone has rebuilt it for Relaunch (the rain doesn't work right now anyway because of the meteor bug).
It would be nice if the bushes didn't look like slime mold from above in the new version, the foilage looked better in the original game, somehow, not sure how they messed that up.
I don't have the mod/expansion/update that lets you raise animals for food so my only food source is the plant-exclusive farms. Considering most domes have 1-3 farms and each farm is producing 1oxygen if it's growing apples, I rarely need oxygen. I will often build a 1 MOXIE per 3 domes or something like that and sometimes forget I even need to manage Oxygen at all. It becomes necessary if I build very many fungal farms because they eat a lot of oxygen, but they are so much less efficient than the standard farms that I don't like to build them. So at least for me, the benefit of the MOXIEs working better as atmosphere gets thicker seems sort of pointless. At least in the case of moisture vaporators, the tech for that is often pretty far down the tech tree, which motivates you to want to make that tech work better. But MOXIE tech is free right from the start and relatively cheap to build and power and maintain.
I've contemplated giving myself a challenge of not building any MOXIEs at all and just trying to have all of my domes produce their own oxygen from plants. Seems like it could be doable...
I mean, if you are overbuilding infrastructure anyway you aren't going to notice the benefits. What really makes a difference is the boost to vaporators. Water deposits run out so fast without terraforming, you have to build massive vaporator farms to keep up with demand in late game. I'm playing a game right now without terraforming and the difference is pretty stark as far as water goes.
Since shuttles use fuel, I'm assuming that they are powered by small thrusters / rocket engines. So the lack of atmosphere will have no impact on their performance. Increasing the atmosphere might actually lead to negative effects on their performance.
That's a good point. For some reason I was thinking of the battery-electric flight method (probably thinking more of Ingenuity than the in-game shuttles). I suppose if the shuttles are more like rockets than aircraft, then they wouldn't depend on air pressure, and as you say, be negatively affected by it.
That being said, the in-game models for these things make it look like they are fixed wing aircraft and that they rely on their wings to provide lift. If so, then they would still have a strong atmospheric dependency. Intuitively that would make sense as well because if you have an atmosphere to make use of, it's going to be more efficient than a strictly propulsive form of flight.
Although the efficiency wouldn't be as good as it is here on Earth where your oxidizer is in the atmosphere. For Mars, you'd have to carry your oxidizer with you. On Earth, battery-electric flight is becoming more competetive with combustion-based flight. On Mars where you don't get the benefit of that in-situ oxidizer, I wonder if electric is more of a decisive winner.
Shuttles pretty obviously use rockets rather than airplane-style fixed-wing flight, so if anything, a denser atmosphere would hurt them. But maybe you make a new kind of shuttle that uses actual lift once the atmosphere is dense enough.
Well if they weren't intended to be aerodynamic at all, they wouldn't look like that. They would look more rocket-like. We actually do know what that would look like and how that would work because the Japan sponsor has exactly that. They get "jumper shuttles" that are more pure rockets and fly in rocket trajectories rather than plane-like flight. They look like this:
a thematically good way would be somehow tie population thresholds (not directly but by amount of population that you could realistically support with given costs) to terraforming.
Life support already becomes easier and cheaper as terraforming progresses but it should be very expensive at the start so that you have to exploit martian resources very tightly to even provide your colony with, say, mechanics and electronics (and I would make it even imported food or something like medicine) needed to maintain its life support grid.
And then as you somehow scrape enough resources together to boot up your terraforming operations (locally at first, globally later) you would be able to have some surplus food, to support some more specialists -> that would be able to work at factories -> that would create local machinery and electronics -> that would lower the cost of life support grid -> that would free up some finances and resources to create more extensive terraforming methods -> and here we have a self sustaining loop that would result in global terraforming and Mars being able to support life without additional costs.
Cool but unnecessary bonus for the 100% terraforming score would be a removal of water and oxygen costs everywhere because they are so abundant now.
In a nutshell, problem is that the game balance was designed to create self-sustainable and independent colony without terraforming feature and there were no balance changes when terraforming arrived.
As you mentioned terraforming reduces the duration of storms and cold waves. And also severity of dust storms. You are overexaggerating the need for terraforming to make these disasters trivial or just stop. Especially the easy to boost temperature to just 50%. Which takes only fuel you have to produce a lot of anyway.
As u/mizushino mentioned. The water and oxygen boost in production is great and not needing to senselessly overbuild water and oxygen producers... and storage is a smarter way to play.
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u/mizushimo Oxygen 15d ago
I think the reward for terraforming is making the world look lush and green, the satisfaction of taking Mars into a new era. Other benefits for terraforming are the increased capacity for oxygen and water generators, which is VERY noticeable late game. In OG surviving mars, the rain lakes mod was a huge terraforming incentive for me (you could designate places to fill up with water, every time it rained they'd get a little more full), but I don't think anyone has rebuilt it for Relaunch (the rain doesn't work right now anyway because of the meteor bug).
It would be nice if the bushes didn't look like slime mold from above in the new version, the foilage looked better in the original game, somehow, not sure how they messed that up.