One of the unique mechanics of Surviving Mars is the fact that you are NOT forced to start sending colonists immediately. While you can start Terraforming immediately, it is not recommended until you have a more extensive industrial base.
Note also that we will NOT discuss Terraforming yet. This section will discuss these phases for first-time players, assuming relatively easy game settings (no special rules and few disasters). With "profitability" always in mind, it's important to realize that Surviving Mars has three distinct phases:ġ) Early game exploration - which is defined by the period BEFORE you land your first colonist, and your main priority is finding a good rare metal deposit.Ģ) Establishment of your first Dome - which is defined by creating your first "profitable" manned settlement as a proof-of-concept that produces a profit.ģ) Expansion - which is basically replicating your early successes and / or exploring new ones. Self-sufficiency may allow your colony to survive indefinitely, but without profit your colony cannot deal with emergencies or expand its operations. In short, success in Surviving Mars can be summed up with these two lines: You don't have to worry about building a farm or polymer factory just as your colony is beginning to fall apart. With money you can buy food to feed your starving colonists, or arrange for a shipment of polymers to fix your broken battery. Players keep forgetting that you can import additional resources from Earth - using either a supply pod or your rocket - in order to make up for any shortfall. Instead, beginners should focus on the one resource in Surviving Mars which can fix any deadlock situation - namely money. There are multiple types of resource and a shortage of any single type can lead to deadlock. This is why - contrary to the advice of most Youtube Streamers - beginners should NOT aim for self-sufficiency to begin with. If you are unprofitable for too long then a situation can occur called a "deadlock" - wherein you can no longer acquire/produce specific key resources to keep your system running, causing everything else to stop running and fall apart. This can occur if your consumption of resources - particularly the maintenance of buildings - exceeds your production. However, engine-building games are suceptible to something called "systems collapse". At this point, the sky is the limit with regards to what you can build and achieve (and thanks to the Green Planet expansion, this end objective should be to fully Terraform Mars into Earth-like conditions).
Done consistently, this leads to a "virtuous cycle" wherein your produce more and more resources to the point you enter the state of permanent surplus. Newly produced resources are then converted into more investments which expand the engine. power plants, mines, colonists) which produce more resources. You start with a pile of resources, which you convert into investments (e.g. Surviving Mars is instead a management simulation - more specifically an engine-building game. Indeed most "survival" games are misleading because they are not really about survival - instead you simply collect more and more resources to build bigger and bigger things. Surviving Mars, despite the name, is NOT a "survival" game. For Terraforming, head to the very last addendum of the guide. This guide is also divided into a basic introduction section for first-time players, and an addendum filled with notes for advanced players. If you have just the base / Space Race version of the game you can check my original guide here: It therefore refers to some buildings that are available only in the expansions.
Note: This guide is meant for players which have bought not only the base game but also all the expansions (which you should, it's a really good game).
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