Tweet
A Game I'd Like to see made...
Just was rereading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars) in which Mars is terraformed enough for people to walk around outside without suits within a century.
It has occured to me that there haven't been any good games that I know of about terraforming. It always is abstracted, like in the sense that you could build a building that gives a breathable atmosphere, or civ2's mars scenario in which tiles can become earthlike one at a time.
I would like to see something where I can work on the atmosphere, landforms, and hydrosphere. I imagine a game in which I can arrange to crash asteroids into the planet to speed things up, but at the risk of causing widespread quakes. or I can take the slow road and try to do it all by chemistry and biology. The risk of things in the game would be that things could get away from you and have unexpected effects, like having an unexpected amount of poisonous gases released into the atmosphere because of failure to check out the local rocks, which kills off your biotas you've been releasing all these years. Or maybe you set off a volcanic age, rendering most of the surface uninhabtable, even in domes.
I expect the lowest difficulty level, the easiest, would be like Mars itself, where centuries of looking at it through telescopes has been done, maybe even explored by robot rovers before colonization, and Earth is nearby for supplies, as well as influx of colonists and investments by Earth Industry. Not to mention that Mars is almost ideal for a terraforming primer
On higher difficulty levels, You might have to try venus, with its added difficulties of trying to cool it down instead of heat it up, and also find a way to handle its slow rotation. Can it be sped up? Or maybe drop into another solar system and deal with a planet that hasn't been explored at all. find ways to import water, maybe. try to find a decent mix of gases for the atmosphere. try to figure ways to get a decent temperature. make the soil something you can grow stuff in. and so on.
I can't think of anyway to have any serious enemies, so it may become a sim type game. Kind of like SimEarth, but on another planet, and active terraforming.
Any Ideas?
It has occured to me that there haven't been any good games that I know of about terraforming. It always is abstracted, like in the sense that you could build a building that gives a breathable atmosphere, or civ2's mars scenario in which tiles can become earthlike one at a time.
I would like to see something where I can work on the atmosphere, landforms, and hydrosphere. I imagine a game in which I can arrange to crash asteroids into the planet to speed things up, but at the risk of causing widespread quakes. or I can take the slow road and try to do it all by chemistry and biology. The risk of things in the game would be that things could get away from you and have unexpected effects, like having an unexpected amount of poisonous gases released into the atmosphere because of failure to check out the local rocks, which kills off your biotas you've been releasing all these years. Or maybe you set off a volcanic age, rendering most of the surface uninhabtable, even in domes.
I expect the lowest difficulty level, the easiest, would be like Mars itself, where centuries of looking at it through telescopes has been done, maybe even explored by robot rovers before colonization, and Earth is nearby for supplies, as well as influx of colonists and investments by Earth Industry. Not to mention that Mars is almost ideal for a terraforming primer
On higher difficulty levels, You might have to try venus, with its added difficulties of trying to cool it down instead of heat it up, and also find a way to handle its slow rotation. Can it be sped up? Or maybe drop into another solar system and deal with a planet that hasn't been explored at all. find ways to import water, maybe. try to find a decent mix of gases for the atmosphere. try to figure ways to get a decent temperature. make the soil something you can grow stuff in. and so on.
I can't think of anyway to have any serious enemies, so it may become a sim type game. Kind of like SimEarth, but on another planet, and active terraforming.
Any Ideas?
but I don`t think lot of people would like it.
It doesn't even come with the classic SimGame packs. I'm just lucky I still have the Macintosh version.
- are a wonderful example of a piss-poor effort at creating a game envisioned well ahead of its time. I won't go into my rant about the bitter disappointment I feel with that game, but I used to mess with the bitmaps to visually simulate a terraformed surface (altered the overview maps, ground tiles, even some of the structures). I may still have some of my work in the dark, dingy corners of my harddrive. I'll see if I can't post a picture.
Comment