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I'd be curious as to what games people have played that give a feel for martian economics. For a long time, my favorite was the classic Outpost, despite its mysterious chemicals and counterintuitive interface. Lately I've been obseesed with 1602, even though it's hardly futuristic, it has a genuine feel for the difficulty of maintaining a technical infrastructre.
Are the any other games that you'd reccomend? Anyone want to design an open source mars sim?
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I'd be curious if Outpost two has a better economic engine than the first one, or the main improvement is that you get to blow things up. I've stayed away from it beacuse the packaging promises mars combat, and I'm really bored by the war rats scenario.(Gripping Hand)
Alpha centauri is a fun play, I really like the tech tree... but other than futuristic packaging, it doesn't seem much different than the older civilization games. The basic concpet is the same, compete with other players for planetary dominance.
I could be way off here, but I have this belief that mars is going to be hard. Harder than Antarctica, harder than waterworld, harder than the empty quarter of saudi arabia. When I think about the underlying economics of shootemup warfare, it's only possible because the environment is rich enough to allow it to happen. So any scenario that has lots of people killing each other on mars, strikes me as unrealistic as bug eyed monsters and martian canals. I think indentured servitude, even slavery is possible. But killing people for political reasons is a waste of every precious resource we have.
...and that's why computer wargames only interest me when they're comic book fantasy like starcraft, or set on earthlike planets.
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So any scenario that has lots of people killing each other on mars, strikes me as unrealistic as bug eyed monsters and martian canals. I think indentured servitude, even slavery is possible. But killing people for political reasons is a waste of every precious resource we have.
I also find the prospects of war on Mars, at least in the beginning stages of colonization, a remote possibility. Mars will probably make Antartica look like Hawaii which means people will have enough logistics problems trying to survive much less getting together the equipment and supplies needed for a war. When/if Mars gets terraformed though and a relatively large population crops up, I think it's possible that wars on Mars could break out. I hope not, but human nature seems to be violent and politically passionate. It's very rare to find a society at any point in Earth's history that never went to war or glorified it in some way, so somewhere in the far future it's possible humans will be gearing up to do some thrashing on those pigdogs over the next hill.
To achieve the impossible you must attempt the absurd
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