Per Aspera

It's a love-it or hate-it kind of game. If you're looking for an interesting game about terraforming mars specifically, it's great. If you're here for the logistics, base-building etc, don't bother. The logistics is wonky, but here's a free tip: intersperse your infastructure with drone hubs. Just get used to a pattern of power + maintenance, place some mines or factories, link them with some drone hubs. odds are that if you are used to other games, you don't have enough drones. Even very early on, you want to quickly get above 50. Blue Mars adds a bunch of interesting stuff, although it's very frustrating that buidings with a "water" variant need separate placement. That is, you can't build dual-function buildings on land, watch it flood, and then continue to expect to use them. Docks and shipyards also have frustratingly few places to be built without constant re-building. Over the course of a freeplay, i think i replaced them about 10 times (not kidding) due to water levels rising from 400 to 540 meters *very slowly* without any water input from my side. The way the game works overall is very neat, IMHO, the campaign is interesting, and the planet looks very pretty once it's all blue-and-green. The only things i would'ved wished to see: -automatic destruction of mines. This gets tedious fast -hubs for 5 drones. I terraformed the planet with about 600 drones; this gets tedious fast. -A mirror array on the south pole. -thermal plants are genuinely useless. Their locations are too sparse, the power you get is pathetic, but worst of all, fusion is way stronger and just a research away. Swapping with fission should make fission way less OP (double the output of wind with no downsides, all it costs is uranium which you only use for this so it's plentiful even with how rare it is), but frankly thermal plants could get 10x the power output and still be weak. They would be much better as a reliable source of terraforming gas or local heat. -please let me crash Phobos too. Please. i ask for nothing more. just let me do this. Please i beg you. No more moons for mars.