First post

This was the first post I made on reddit, reposted here for completeness...

I was inspired by SpaceX's vision of colonizing Mars and thought it would make an awesome strategy game and so I decided to work on creating one. Please read this post and check out the screenshots if you like this kind of stuff, I would very much like to get as much feedback and ideas as possible.

The Story

The story starts in September 2029 and where the colonists arrive on Mars and you are asked to lead them to greatness. The environment is harsh and in the beginning many things need to be set up. You will have strive to reach one of the victory conditions before eventually Nato and the Sino-Russian alliance enter the second cold war on earth and will want to establish their sovereignty over the planet your people have come to call home. Depending on your actions you will only have about a century to accomplish this.

Game concepts

Population

The player will start out with only 10 colonists, but will increase exponentially with fresh arrivals from earth and natural birth rates and eventually reach in to the millions, if the player is skilled

Resources

The game will include traditional strategy game resources such as food or housing (living habitats), but the player can place buildings on the map either by building them with local resources (insitu) or purchasing it with earth currency (earth drop), making it up to the players strategy as to which resource path to focus on.

Technology

Technology is another well known strategy game concept, but in this game technology is mostly about developing the capabilities that are also found on earth and will include requirements to also build certain buildings (like a metal workshop or a bio lab)

Great projects

These projects require great amount different resources, technology ability and time. Example projects are "terraforming Mars", which will change the landscape and will unlock a whole set of cheap buildings, or "luxury space liners" (a fleet of gigantic Mars cyclers complete with cinemas and golf resorts) drastically increasing incoming settlers and income from tourism.

Here are some pictures, with explanation of more game concepts: http://redearth1.imgur.com/all/

Design philosophy

I want to make the game hard, so that the player will probably fail the first few times he/she tries it, but still learn something from each try so that he/she gets further every time and feels the satisfying feeling of progression. Given that a player can not learn to use an unlimited amount of game mechanics I want to make as many meaningful decisions out of the mechanics I can expect the player to learn. Meaningful decisions are important and hard in the sense that each option should seem about as alluring as the others. For example, when I started coding the game I had water included as a resource, but since it served the same purpose as food and oxygen (serving as population limit) I chose to remove it (water is very easy to extract on Mars anyway). Also I made oxygen a requirement for building bio factories and made a slider for how the player wants the ratio of food/oxygen output which made both resources relevant (basically oxygen is used to fast expand bio production and food as a buffer for population influx etc.).

Other technical choices

Intuitively I wanted to make the game real time instead of turn based, maybe because it feels more advanced. But thinking about it, it doesn't really make a strategy game better, when there is no micro controlling of units involved. Therefore it will be turn based. (Think about it this way, would real time make chess better?)

Also, since I don't feel there are any obstacles to creating this game web based with javascript, php, html, and since it can then be played by anyone with a browser, that is how I am making the game.

[Edit] Due to popular demand I will probably make the tiles much smaller and have buildings span multiple tiles as well as have real time as an option, but not for the initial beta release.[/Edit]

Screenshots

Game Start

Map screen
A view of the map screen. Building and background graphics are temporary.

Victory conditions
There are four ways to win the game. The three first are achieved by focusing science, earth currency or population. The last is a mix of all the above, where you have to use science, earth currency and Marsian working hours to produce nuclear weapons.

Policy decisions
There will be three policy categories to pick policies from. One is the "good colony" category that will boost relations with earth that will give you more earth currency and extend the time before earth attacks. The second is the "untraditional policies" category, which is a dystopian set of policies inspired George Orwell science fiction novel 1984. Policies in this category are very powerful but also come at a great cost. The last category is the "patriotic policies" category which focuses on establishing an independent nation on Mars. These policies will boost your tech and work output, at the cost of your relationship with earth.