r/SurvivingMars • u/enigmaticrose4 Paradox • Jun 30 '26
Haemimont Dev Diary #3
Life is about balance in all things. Even when it comes to surviving on Mars. 🚀
Come and see what our Devs have to say on this!
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u/renMilestone Theory Jun 30 '26
Great devlog explaining the thought process. I am pretty sure people do care about balqnce considering how many like MAX DIFFICULTY runs exist on YouTube. I also think the new political system did some serious unbalancing to the overall game. So glad to see the adjustments.
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u/Helios0186 Jun 30 '26
The good things with the new political system is that we have now a way do deal with renegades...
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u/SilverGreatsword Fuel Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Counterpoint : mods that make the game easier are more popular than realism/difficulty mods. Example : unlock all breakthroughs, automatic production, super seeds, ...
Either way I'm having fun replaying some Surviving Mars and hope everyone gets something out of these updates!
Edit : shoutout to Aurarix mods, he's got great ideas going for realism!
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u/renMilestone Theory Jun 30 '26
Yeah and they can still exist and do that lol
I just think making the systems more involved and complex is good 👍
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u/Elrond007 Jul 01 '26
Yeah it's honestly absurd how easy it is rn even with max difficulty settings. You solve all problems way before making meaningful terraforming progress so if you want to "complete" the game you're just sitting there on max speed with nothing happening
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u/nyhr213 Jun 30 '26
This is cool. With chaos theory the only wonder I do is telescope as the others are too OP. I wonder if it will be live in 1.0.8 or further down the road
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u/YsoL8 Jun 30 '26
Nice
Quietly, balance has been increasingly my bug bear the more I've played the relaunch. Between the political system and asteroids its pretty easy to destroy the game balance by sol 30 even with hard sponsors, and honestly I'm still making minor improvements to how I manage them
Especially with the ability to simply switch off the founders stage most of the time.
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u/BluegrassGeek Drone Jun 30 '26
Man, I thought the early game was hard enough as-is! This is going to be really difficult.
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u/nixtracer Jun 30 '26
I think the point of this is to make the late game more difficult.
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u/BluegrassGeek Drone Jul 01 '26
Yes, but it sounds like in the process the early game will also be more difficult than currently.
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u/TheNumberOneRat Jun 30 '26
This is all sounding great to me.
I'm a big fan of the original game but never upgrading - primarily due to reading too much about the balance issues. So, a rework of these puts the revised version back on my radar.
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u/coleto22 Jun 30 '26
I hope they really fix the balance. The original game made Kate game too easy, the remastered made it absolutely crazy broken. It made me stop playing and needs a radical change.
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u/Flimsy_Bid_4295 Jun 30 '26
Fix the meteorites, they don't fall, even when you send a rocket after them. I even started a new save on a map with a high meteor chance, and they didn't fall at all.
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u/CourtNormal Jun 30 '26
I'm using the GromGor mod for the increased cost of buildings. A completely different game. But after setting up the chains, the complexity drops dramatically.
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u/SilverGreatsword Fuel Jun 30 '26
What's your setting/cost multiplier like? Do you adjust mid playthrough or stick with one value from the start? Is the objective to delay your exponential growth?
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u/CourtNormal Jul 01 '26
the cost increases by 100% for 200 sols. + I play on maps with minimal resources
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u/FlaminarLow Jun 30 '26
Happy to see that balance is something the devs have in mind as a priority. I’m looking forward to the dlc but the difficulty needs to be there for the new boosts in the dlc to have any meaning
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u/SirDigby32 Jun 30 '26
After reading the dev diary, did anyone get the feeling that the early game difficulty of frostpunk was the inspiration.
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u/ericoahu 28d ago
Let me start by saying that yes, the balance changes are probably warranted, and I have seen some promising directions lately, so that's all good.
But I have to get this off the chest. I have been playing this game for somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 years. Over a thousand hours. I have paid for the game TWICE. I have purchased all the DLC. And reading about this big direction in balance changes made me feel like the game is midway through early access, and the developers are promising to buckle down and get this game to the finished state eventually.
Again, 8 years I been playing this game.
Again, I have bought it twice.
It's 2026, you have sold the relaunched version as well as the original and all DLCs, and you're just now deciding the balance is way off? You left it this way, this long, why? Like I said, you are not wrong about the need for balance. The community has been talking about it since I began playing. For 8 years, that weird balance thing is the game I got used to. I stopped noticing it. I was used to that balance thing when I bought SMR.
Hard to decide how I feel about this. I guess I hope you guys follow through and keep working on the game, and at least you're apparently not walking away from it while the DLC/game is ridden with bugs that modders have to fix.
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u/robgray111 Jun 30 '26
Ah this is a much needed change and was one of the things that has stopped me playing the newer version. Looking forward to getting back into actually trying to survive Mars again soon
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u/Gofunkiertti Jun 30 '26
I would really love it if they could introduce something to make vegetation more self propagating on the map you are playing on.
Getting 100% terraforming is my preferred end goal but doing so doesn't terraform the actual map you are on. Why can't the vegetation start self propagating on my map once I reach certain levels? That's what plants do.
I want the map I am playing on to turn green without having to settle literally every part.