History VideoGame / SurvivingMars

** [=SpaceY=]: Gimmick. An {{Expy}} of Elon Musk's [=SpaceX=] company that has an unusual playstyle. Advanced resources are cheaper and they have more drones to play with when a hub is built. Their Dragon rockets carry less, but need much less fuel to launch and you get ''five'' of them. With [=SpaceY=], it's so easy to just ship needed resources rather than get industry going; a good Sponsor for players who want to grow steadily and take things easy.

* BodyBackupDrive: Implied to be what Project Phoenix is, since it brings colonists back young when they die and the icon depicts a baby sleeping in a vat.

* BeliefMakesYouStupid: Zig-zagged. Your colonists can be religious, which is a strictly beneficial trait (+10 base morale and will never commit suicide) and one of the sponsors sending colonists to live in a high tech colony and work with complex equipment is the Church of The New Ark, but it is also the only sponsor that does not provide any research of its own.

* MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness: Largely very, very hard, with immense amounts of realistic detail about and attention given to the Martian environment, the likely conditions and challenges that would be involved in Martian colonization, and the geography and geology of the planet. Technologies, for the most part, are also very realistic, being almost entirely limited to concepts that either exist nowadays or are speculated to be within our current scientific capability (with the exception of Breakthrough technologies, which is where the game places all the outright science fiction ideas like BrainUploading, [[RidiculouslyHumanRobots androids]] or [[PsychicPowers telepathy]]). Even when liberties were taken in the depictions, the developers were usually very forward about admitting that they weren't realistic and were [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality implemented for the sake of gameplay]], e.g. making trips to Mars and back comparatively much faster than in real life or making colonists live in huge, transparent domes that are easier for the player to interact with rather than underground tunnels.
** Where this all goes out the window is with the Mysteries, where the game allows itself to pull all the stops and deliver an experience straight out of science fiction, which could involve anything from alien artifacts to actual alien invaders to crazy AI. Notably, at least in the beginning, the Hard difficulty Mysteries were all kept very much on the harder side of the scale still, focusing on the grimly realistic prospects of such events as [[spoiler: a devastating world war, a pandemic, or corrupt corporations killing people to protect their dirty secrets]].

* WholePlotReference: While all Mysteries refer to classical science fiction stories to some degree, "The Inner Light" drops all pretenses and essentially just plays out the exact plot of [[spoiler:the StarTrekTheNextGeneration episode of the same name. A line from the episode]] is even used as the Mystery's teaser, so it's not like they were being coy about it.

** This may well be a case of GameplayAndStorySegregation, however - while the game doesn't track any individual colonist's personal finances, several event and descriptive texts to seem to suggest that the colonists are getting paid and are spending money (e.g. the USA's MegaMall building mentions people come to it to spend money, and one event has you spending funding to outbid a rival who's trying to lure away your untrained colonists with promises of higher salaries).

* HostileWeather: Mars being Mars, the weather is ''quite'' hostile, though these hazards can be mitigated and eventually removed entirely by terraforming. Each location has four hazards, ranging from level 1 (extremely rare/never occurs) to 4 or 5 (extremely frequent). The four weather types are;

* BodyBackupDrive: Implied to be what Project Phoenix is, since it brings colonists back young when they die and the icon depicts a baby sleeping in a vat.

* BottomlessPits: Subverted in the trailer for "Below & Beyond". A guy from Mars throws something in what seems to be a bottomless pit... and then someone else protested because of that.

* OnceGreenMars: [[spoiler:The ''Power of Three'' and ''Inner Light'' mysteries reveal that Mars was once inhabitable, and populated by intelligent beings.]] With ''Green Planet'', you can bring the planet back to life.

** International Mission: Zeus rockets can carry more, colonists never become Earthsick, food carried in passenger rockets is greatly increased, and rockets slowly synthesize fuel on Mars. The Easy Mode sponsor recommended for first-time players, but experienced city builder types might find this too much of a breeze.

* AdamAndEvePlot: One of the starting game options, "Last Ark", means that you will only be able to send one passenger ship on that playthrough. If you don't build any Biorobot colonists then every colonist (of which there might be over a thousand) will be descended from twelve individuals.

Paradox announced in March 2021 that it was resuming development of the game with Abstraction Games, [[https://steamcommunity.com/games/464920/announcements/detail/5101988315910690731 starting by integrating community-made content through free updates]].

* VideoGameCrueltyPotential: Seniors don't contribute anything to the colony, with rare exceptions[[note]]such as Gurus or members of an Arcology hive mind[[/note]], regardless of their comfort level. This results in a popular strategy where upon reaching retirement age colonists get moved to a "retirement house" dome, which has only cramped apartments and no amenities at all, and eat raw meat or potatoes for the rest of their life, and the only reason they're fed at all is the fact that deaths from starvation result in a sanity loss for the whole colony.

* AWinnerIsYou: The reward for completing every milestone, including the complete terraformation of Mars and having at least 40% of the population in Workshops is... a small text window thanking you for your dedication and telling you that because of your leadership skills, mankind's dream of a bright future on Mars has been truly realized. Heartwarming, but [[{{YMMV}} possibly underwhelming in light of the titanic effort required to achieve it.]]

* ShoutOut: Has it's own page [[ShoutOut/SurvivingMars here]]

** Paradox Interactive: Pariah. A game development company with not much in the way of money or technology or manpower or rocketry expertise, but for some bizarre reason a knack for uncovering weird things on Mars. Bonus chance to uncover breakthrough anomolies and finding breakthroughs allows extra applicants. Their unique building is the Game Developer Office, which grants extra funding. Bit of an oddball faction to say the least.

** Job assignement becomes a nightmare if there are several domes (unless you meticulously adjust the number of workplaces and housings in each domes), because the AI has severe issues with the task of assigning colonists to work in a dome they don't live in, which results in your colony suffering from both unemployement and manpower shortage ''at the same time''. The shuttles are supposed to allow colonists to do exactly that, but they fail to do this in practice[[note]]They also serve to move various resources inside the colony, a task which they are rather efficient for[[/note]].

* AWinnerIsYou: The reward for completing every milestone, including the complete terraformation of Mars and having at least 40% of the population in Workshops is... a small text window thanking you for your dedication and telling you that because of your leadership skills, mankind's dream of a bright future on Mars has been truly realized. Heartwarming, but [[YourMileageMightVary possibly underwhelming in light of the titanic effort required to achieve it.]]

* GameBreakingBug: There is reports of the newer updates of the game didn't work on Linux.

* GameBreakingBug: As of March 24, there is a [[https://steamcommunity.com/games/464920/announcements/detail/3025829894161870993 small but critical soft-lock bug]]. [[https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2434359529&searchtext=rocket Fixed almost immediately by a modder though]]. There is also how reports of the newer updates of the game didn't work on Linux.

Paradox announced in March 2021 that it was resuming developpement of the game with Abstraction Games.

* AmbiguousGender: While most colonists are male or female, some have their gender listed as "other".

* HandWave: exists here and there. The MOXIE oxygen generator creates oxygen out of the extremely thin Martian atmosphere, but doesn't explain how. The Stirling Generator is a nuclear power generator that produces more energy when the core is exposed for some reason. Some of the breakthroughs are also bizarre, but ''just barely'' believable.

** International Mission: GameBreaker. Zeus rockets can carry more, colonists never become Earthsick, food carried in passenger rockets is greatly increased, and rockets slowly synthesize fuel on Mars. The Easy Mode sponsor recommended for first-time players, but experienced city builder types might find this too much of a breeze.