Initial reactions to CDPR's Cyberpunk 2077

 This is a game I started to wait for when it was clear it was coming to the market 'any day now', and finally did drop a few days ago.  I am NOT even close to finishing a first run of the game but have gotten to the start of what I consider to be ACT II.  I am playing in a way probably not intended by the actual producers at CDPR, but is fully within what is allowed by the game.  But before that, I'll give some of my biases right up front.  

-  I absolutely suck at driving games, and driving in this game is part and parcel of the world built for the game.  Don't ever expect me to like a driving experience in a game because when I drive IRL I can have very good situational awareness just by shifting my eyes to the various console readouts and to the mirrors so I know where everything is as I drive.  The smallest of head tracking motions means that I'm always facing generally forward unless I need to do a lane change with an approaching vehicle in that lane or one that is nearby that is in the blindspots of a vehicle.  You can't do that in first-person mode in most games.  And the driving controls with keyboard and mouse are far, far too reactive to my liking due to the time compression the game does to present it in a fluid manner, and the physics of the vehicles involved.  I will not be singing the praises of driving in this game.  My bias.

- I like to think out situations and actually, you know, role-play. That means I will try some very harebrained ideas out just to see how I can fail at them.  As an example I had one task that involved a minor gang takedown on an overhead covered walkway, and while the police were fine with the job I did, I noticed that there was still one active, hostile device just above me.  So I would spend a good 4 hours of my life looking for any way to get to it.  Including getting on to a fire escape on a building across the street, and trying to find a rooftop that would let me drop down to the walkway.  Or trying to jump up to a broken part of the upper walkway.  Or looking for simple set of stairs to get to the outer connecting walkway just above the crossing one.  There probably is one, but I couldn't find it.  From this you will now know why I'm not rushing forward.

- There are enough systems to work with in this game so that I do try to find a way to integrate my player character's skills and capabilities to my advantage.  When I find none, then brute force techniques will be employed.  Some times brute force is the best solution to a problem when skills, local geography, and threat analysis can yield no better solution.  Stealth is a thing in this game, and I'm used to outdoor stealth, not confined places stealth.  It's an area I, as a player, need to improve on for this game.  I need better skills for stealth as a player, plus extreme patience analyzing patrol patterns and such.  There are lots of missions to achieve this, and they do require a high integration of one's personal and player character's skills to achieve.  Sometimes people do have to go down...stealthily. 

So you get to play the main character "V", male or female your choice.  I'm choosing XX for reasons of personal preference.  You can go with a basic start as Nomad (outside of Night City), Steet Kid (Night City denizen) or Corporate (high society that runs everything, aristocrats basically).  I went with freedom loving, honest Nomad.  My initial stats were to concentrate on Cool (grace under pressure, keeping your cool in tough situations) with 3 spare points, Dexterity at 2 points for those times you just have to sneak around, Technology at 1 point because, well, it is the future after all, and then a last point into Intelligence.  Basically a cool-heavy dexterous girl of the wastelands able to tinker with things and not of average intelligence.  Later you'll get to the point where your cybernetics system that has been installed in your body gets one new component and here is where I will be playing this character.  

What is pretty much required is the eye upgrade (and you presumably already had that replacement done with a low grade system before reaching that point), and the palm grip for getting weapon and other functional connections via those devices designed for it.  That feeds your Heads Up Display (HUD).  You also get the cyberware in your head that runs the system, and a jack that is available on your left arm.  I am allowed only to upgrade what is already installed or replace with better.  If it isn't installed it will not be installed voluntarily.  There is a rationale behind this: while it can make the body a highly effective system, you also lose some of your humanity getting each tiny bit more.  That is the entire basis for Cyberpunk: what is the dividing between human and machine?  In fact if this character could find a way to remove the entire system, get cloned eyes, and generally escape the implants, she would do that as this system allows for a level of violation that you just don't have with a standard, non-upgraded body.  The most radical thing you can do in a world like that is to NOT have these things implanted in you and prefer old fashioned separate electronics pieces... sort of like the Amish or the Buddhists in the 2077 world though willing to use retro-tech.  Going retro is radical.  And why can't I just use the handy ammo readout on the gun or simply count bullets?  Such is life, but that is a self-imposed restriction on this run, just to amp up the difficulty a bit.  As if I needed that.

As a Nomad your character starts out in the wastes (I'll use the proper Badlands infrequently as it feels more like a Wasteland from other genres) and I was able to hotwire the problem of my car, get in contact with the person who hired me to get something, and ran straight into the driving problems in this game for me.  Luckily, I could avoid the guy floating in the middle of the road, and make it to the tower where I had to use ladders to make a connection, then drove out to meet my contact.  I am so glad that roads are optional out in the wastes!  I got in contact with him, was able to manage to get to the border crossing, bribed our way in and switched seats because, well, combat in vehicles.  That's a thing in this game.  And I got to experience the supposed fun of leaning out the window to use a pistol on our pursuers.  Survived that, and then we got into town, he parked the car and then came the montage of 'you just got out of the minor tutorial section, welcome to your new home'.

It's a nice montage.  

I would rather have been playing through it, though.  It is a blur of people, a few names, a few types of operations the two of you went on and...then you start at home in your apartment and get to go to get some cyber implants put in.  After that is the 'getting to know Night City' part of the game where I decided to ditch the main story until I could figure out what play was like.  Things are... complex.  When I found out there were lootable containers and stuff just sitting around that no one objects to my PC taking in the environment I got into being a scavenger.  This is a mode I use for multiple RPGs and since some of this stuff has no weight but does have value...well...time to see what the world provides.  I also ditched the car.  After taking it to the ripperdoc, I left it in the parking space.  Wasn't mine, anyways, but my partner's.  I promised to meet up with our fixer, but...that would be days and days away.  I decided to get to know the basic game mechanics as they worked out on the street and in buildings.  I needed my character build to firm up, and the streets shall provide you with that.

Game Systems and Mechanics

A bit about the game mechanics and meshing between weapons, armor and hit points or health.  It seems like most modern RPGs want to give the player more HP on a level up, and this then creates the dilemma of everything scaling to the player and, thus, the weapons you used earlier are less effective now as everyone gets better armor and more HP, too, though with a ceiling on them.  So you get armor because you need it.  But to respond to the need for more damage output, the armor you got is no longer as effective after a level up as it was before.  Thus you need better armor unless you are so good at the game that you can play in a way that precludes that.  And the weapons you have need to be upgraded or replaced sooner or later, as everyone else has gotten a leg up on protection.  For most players this becomes a tail-chasing problem and game developers haven't done much to alleviate it.  Back in the old days of Chaosium games system you did have a solution: static HP, static weapons and armor stats, but the ability to improve skills.  Unfortunately the D&D systems which granted HP on level-up was more popular and that is reflected in gaming to this very day.  That still has a death-grip on gaming.  CDPR has tried to mitigate it, but the tail-chasing continues.  Perhaps it is beyond game developers to make a game with a static HP, Armor, Damage system based on expectations that 'git gud' means getting a bright, dazzling level up and more HP.

No one on the development front has tried to do that as players have come to expect that glorious level up moment where they are significantly stronger than just a few seconds before it.  The moment HP, weapon damage or armor capacity goes up, you are then in a tail-chasing problem.  CDPR has tried to address this by limiting HP, but increasing weapon damage and the need for armor that is better: you are always going to be squishy if you don't get better equipment.  Luckily they dropped the entire weapon and armor condition concept which doesn't work well with the tail-chasing system.  As an example, I didn't know that there actually WAS a condition system in The Witcher III until after my first full playthrough.  How did I miss it?  Well I was having to upgrade my equipment and weapons so often that it never became a problem in the first place.  And once I did know the system was there... well I so rarely used it that it brought into question the concept of 'condition' for equipment in a tail-chasing system.  So kudos for making people still feel human under all that gear and built-in cybernetics and getting rid of condition for equipment!  If you could nail down the other two parts, then equipment condition could be brought back in a sensible manner: your good equipment will always be good, but you will have to work to maintain it.  They got that maintenance problem handled on upgrading weapons, but if that was changed to just maintaining them, then the world wouldn't have to be so loot based, and actual repair kits could be purchased for those not taking any crafting skill.

Not so much for adding a tail-chasing system into the game, though.  A 'legendary' piece of gear won't hold out for more than a couple of levels without improvement and some of the materials needed are ones you will just not find without breaking down similar gear or waiting until mission rewards start to offer them.  For a bit I had to upgrade my Technology stat and put perk points into automatically breaking stuff down for passive low amounts of XP and turning stuff with weight into weightless components.  You can buy components, but you'll go broke doing that and some you will not find in stores, early in the game. The crafting system is a real sink for resources if you get into it, and its vital component of a Nomad run, I think, since so much of their society depends on fixing what's left.  It's not bad as crafting goes, and the ability to add modifications to existing equipment later in the game is a real way to address character build deficits. 

The hacking system, including the minigame for breaching systems feels...adequate.  I would have expected that there would be a tiered system of automated and cybernetic equipment, that would remove the minigame once you got past a level requirement of skill (not stat) for that tier.  Getting to a higher tier means not having a minigame for the lower tier stuff.  Like all unlocking minigames its tedious... adequate, sure, but tedious.  How you get components and cash from a successful hack is beyond me as that is just magic.  Still it is one of the very few magical things going on that isn't well explained, and other games in other genres have done far, far worse than this.  And I assume things get better with higher skill and perk unlocks under the Intelligence stat.  Too bad I'm trying to be a Cool Technologist that can sneak around pretty well.

Perks are under stats, and its a nice system.  Perks were once, long ago, minor RPG mechanics to give a kudo to a player for getting to a certain level.  Now perks are a basic part of replacing a numerical skill system (reflecting background dice rolls and percentages) with snazzy systems that don't tell you what your actual chances of doing something are.  So tiers of perks are unlocked by a higher stat for that perk tree, though you can pick anything available, so that's a plus.  I'm not fond of the perkification of skill systems, perhaps modern players don't have room for numbers in their playstyle, and perks are a handy way to hide an actual skill system.  With a tiered unlocked perk system replacing skills, then there should be choices to get around some of the lower level checks entirely.  They can be mitigated, but never removed.  Have fun with minigames to proceed, YMMV.

The game system utilizes these stats and perks to address the actual game environment which is huge.  And, by actually role playing someone who isn't comfortable with driving in the city, I found that the design of the game and its rewards become evident through exploration on foot.  I did this just to role play, mind you, and started doin wind sprints, jogging at my normal rate, and then sprinting down a long sidewalk, then back to a jog.  After doing this for a bit, I was rewarded with a tiny bit of experience for using my Athleticism, it wasn't much but it was there.  If you enjoy jumping and climbing and clambering on crates, scaffolding and such, I found there is a hidden Acrobatics skill that I got some XP for using.  

For those used to the older Bethesda games, this is a way of rewarding the player for role playing by using their skills.  The same is true for sneaking around and stealth, though the world size is so big its hard to justify the amount of time doing it to get those rewards because you ae slow when sneaking.  Not good for long streets.  The game keeps track of what you are doing and rewards you for good role play, but in a very subtle and minor way.  Now if I could actually see these skills advancing because of this...or even devote some level up to them...ah, but that would add complexity to the perk system.  So you aren't told directly about these skills but they are there.  I would hope that doing wind sprints would not just up my stamina but also reduce the rate of stamina drain for physical actions.  Similarly I should be able to jump just a little farther and do soft landings from low falls with acrobatics.  I have no idea if this is happening, but it seems like it is.

This is an excellent way of melding the perk system with role play, and it is much appreciated.  The more you properly utilize your character build, the more you interact with the environment, the more you try to find out just what it is you can and can't do, you will be slowly, but surely, rewarded.  The game system does this silently and unobtrusively for the most part.  If you follow what the procedure is for post take-down cleanup, you will get rewarded a little a time.  In game skills that are not highlighted are there, and the more you do the better you get.  You 'git gud' by playing your damned character, and if that means tossing bodies into dumpsters after a mission, so be it.  And if you want fewer of the enemy to show up, you can do that in combat and stop unaware enemies from finding out their friends are gone.  Still, do it after a mission and you do get benefits.  Role play...if you don't care if the places you leave are littered with bodies, then you can expect the police to come and check out what happened and if you go back, they may want to take YOU down as the perp of a crime.  Lovely, no?  

And the best part of the hidden skill system is that you can get a free perk point when you level one up.

The Streets Shall Provide

It pays to use your cyber scanning capability, and to go after any item with a couple of dice above it which indicates randomized loot is available.  No matter your build you'll need that stuff for cash, crafting or for use in keeping your body going during combat.  Plus you can find lots of goodies as randomized loot, including better weapons and gear.  I became a studied looter and was clearing out entire blocks of the city at street level of their loot.  Got tons of missions to ignore, and that is part and parcel of the problem of missions being handed out... there needs to be a better system than this.  Still I got a chance to figure out how to take down better armed and armored people this way!  But only with good loot.  One of the earliest perks in the Technology tree is that of automatically breaking down loot into components.  If you are doing any crafting, this means you get low level components for free.  If you aren't, then there are plenty of drop off points where you can liquidate your inventory for small amounts of cash.  I recommend a low level of crafting for everyone, and even some basic stuff you can make is quite valuable, so you can turn a few bucks of loot into tens or even hundreds of bucks of items to sell.  Plenty of junk to loot in the world.  The Streets Shall Provide you with everything you need, really.

And that goes for experience as well.  As I've outlined, you get experience at small amounts for everything you do, and that includes the auto-breakdown of junk to components.  You are rewarded for crafting and that skill will level up slowly as you break stuff down or you craft new stuff, or as you update older equipment.  You can find or buy weapon schematics, and The Streets have provided my character with quite a few of those.  With a decent Intelligence you can unlock all your basic cyberware for hacking as things you can make to install on your firmware deck. And, yes, there are different skill levels for crafting, acrobatics, athleticism...and who know what else, and it is worth getting to them as some obstacles can be circumvented with a skill, not just Stat.  Of course you might not have enough of any of those, but, that is life, and CDPR usually leaves workarounds.

There is so much street crime by gangs that the police can't handle it all, and that is where Mercs come in and you are a Merc.  A Mercenary taking contracts, or not, to do missions, and street crime can be an instant mission as soon as the police put out the alert of one near you.  Most of those are small time affairs, but there are some big ones, real big ones, hidden behind those alerts.  At low levels it is necessary to think about your PC's skills and abilities and your own playstyle, and figure out how to get them done.  I had initially thought of a pistol/rifle build aiming for a sniper weapon later on down the line as it is a crafting recipe.  But a few times I started doing the mental calculations on enemy reload time and my own rate of travel.  Thus it became Katana Time.  I don't do melee builds.  No, really, the last and least satisfying way for me to play is melee.  As I did pre-order I got the Black Unicorn weapon in my inventory and it took up the rarely used Slot 3 in my weapons.  Once, during a fight I was switching between weapons and...there it was.  Enemies taking a long time to reload, distance not that far away, so it was time for the mad dash forward and swinging wildly.  That was one of the hardest early ops I had and it was taking down some Netrunners who had...well...not factory authorized limbs they were pushing.  I hated having my system hacked into and having to heal near constantly and guns just wasn't doing it.  The Black Unicorn was in my hands and I thought 'screw it, this might be too hard at my low level, but I'll give it a shot'.  Brute Force Was Used.  Worked, too.  Yeah one of them was cowering trying to use equipment to hide and yet peak out enough to hack my systems, but when I finally tracked her down, she pulled out a pistol.  I was less than two feet from her.  She never had a chance.  Thus the wild-swinging Katana build as back-up to stealthy gunplay was born.

I don't do melee style builds, I don't do stances, combos, power attacks unless by accident...nope.  My problems with automatic fire weapons is spread of fire.  I need to hit a target multiple times and that often can't be achieved at even medium range.  Burst fire is very good for that.  Even better is right on top of someone and swinging a melee weapon quickly.  Speed Kills.  Later on I would just do some bull rush tactics of sprinting in before an enemy even knew I was coming at them...and have gotten the fun of taking down people who should be far, far better than me at martial arts melee than I am by not letting them get a chance to show it to me.  Just don't hit those red canisters as they are all splodey, best to shoot those at long range.

The lesson learned: Learn to Adapt your playstyle.

One cute one I noticed under the Technology perks is not taking damage from your own grenades.  Yes, running in and just dropping grenades seems to be a feasible playstyle in this game.  Who knew?  Sounds like fun, of a sort.  Just pay attention to the red splodey stuff.

And speed.  Yes, speed without cyber implants is possible.  There is a mod for clothing that has a mod slot that increases movement, and I've seen it at 10 and 13.  There are no qualifiers to that whatsoever.  Start sprinting down long, open stretches of sidewalk, get your Athletics skill up and soon, very soon, you will become a low budget Flash.  Speed Kills.  I don't know if the effects stack, but if they do... well... you might become the fastest person without cybernetic augmentation that anyone has never seen.  In theory, holding a bladed or blunt weapon out while sprinting past someone might be enough to take them out.  That was a thing with cavalry and sabers back in the day.  I have no idea if that works.

The advantage of high speed on foot is exploration of the Night City at a faster rate than without mods to clothing.  You still get slow boosts to your Athletics skill, so its worth doing.  I didn't come to Night City to do the story...I know, that's a shock, right?  I mean I ditched the main story right from the start to get a playstyle and find things out.  I wanted to see what CDPR has spent so long in making as they are known for a decent level of detail in their games.  That, alone, is worth the price of admission.  Every district, every block, every building feels like it belongs there, and the differences between a low-end retail area now being a place for homeless and that blurring into adjacent industrial works very well.  Neighborhoods have their own visual style, but it isn't in your face.  You learn to discriminate between the districts and the neighborhoods within them, and see who moving from one neighborhood to another, one district to another, changes the dress of the people, the look of the buildings and the flavor of the environment.  Yet the buildings right on the border all fit together, and only the true shipping areas lack that, though they are well patrolled as those are true corporate holdings.

Your HUD gives you a minimap, but your best bet is to learn the streetwise skills of identifying landmarks, telling what sort of neighborhood you are in and then navigating via what you know about the area.  In the digital age this on the ground sort of streetsmart navigation is being lost.  Yet if you gain it you'll start to notice things that beg to be explored, alleys that you think should connect areas, stairs that go places you haven't been to, and you are rewarded by finding shops, randomized loot, and, of course, gang activity.  You can provoke or not, depending on how you feel, and I've run through gang areas so fast they had problems even realizing I had been there.  Now toss in climbing up crates, balancing over beams, jumping across spaces and you begin to get a real feel for Night City that you won't get depending on you Map and minimap.  Forget the missions, take in the landscape from Downtown to Badlands, and see how it all works together.  Because it does work together and you can start to feel how the flow of goods and people go in Night City.  I still haven't figure out how to get to the elevated monorail system, a good 20 stories up.  And the subway is just a fast travel point, which is disappointing as I was looking forward to subway tunnel investigation.  While no one really likes sewers, I would like to see what the secrets of Night City are that the corporations have literally buried.  To me, finding a manhole cover I could open would offer an entirely new way to get around the city, and find its secrets.  At the speed of a low budget Flash, true, but I can jog!  Life is too short to walk down the sidewalk.

Sadly most of the buildings are window dressing, with no real inside.  I know this after having my sole dropping through terrain glitch and looking up as I surfaced under the city.  Yeah, not much to render from under the surface of the city, and I was lucky to find a ramp that extended down enough so I could take it up and pop magically to the surface.

Bugs, Glitches, Irritations and Oddities

I have one quest that is bugged out, but its a sidequest, and not a major one.  I triggered the triggers, did what was necessary and...nothing.  I know it works because I had set it off earlier and know the procedure and went to a save before that to go out and do something else for a few weeks.  Its a higher level thing that I just couldn't take down due to level differences.  It happens.

People and vehicles pop in and out of being even as you look at them or the empty space they appear in.  I'll pretend that its just a glitch in my cyberware!  Though the vehicles are the worst.  I've seen this en mass with vehicles far away in the distance, and see their headlights on the road as they are coming towards me, and then they disappear one by one, never arriving.  Perhaps an advanced form of Fast Travel for the masses?  That isn't bad.  The truck that pops into being just as you are crossing the street... yeah, I could do without that.

NPC voice files not playing on phone calls or in meetings face to face.  The latter I can get subtitles for, but there is no real animation going on for the NPC.  A reload of a save can fix this.  For phone calls, I've found myself choosing blindly and having to intuit what the conversation actually is.  This not good, to say the least.

Loot icons showing but not being able to loot the object.  For a couple of instances this might be due to the model glitching through the terrain just enough to make it not lootable.  Nothing mission critical has had this happen to it, but I've seen it happen to dropped weapons and since part of the cleanup after a mission is typically getting rid of the weapons, that is a minor concern.

You care properly rendered for lighting effects, which means you have a shadow.  My shadow has had a T-Pose, later it was missing below the waistline and my hat has hidden my hair in the in-game mirror/make-up area.  This needs some tightening up, obviously, but is a low priority.  I mean in TW3 Geralt may be extremely light on his feet, but stairs are his nemesis.  At least I'm not falling down the stairs like he did!

The crime system needs something.  Once I've started clearing out an area, I expect that the gangs I've been taking down will have some real morale problems, especially as my Street Cred goes up.  And radiant crime is just... it needs something.  I do expect some push-back, yes, and if I'm able to push those out, then a gang should be facing real, long-term problems.  But it has been noted that in full Katana mad dash mode, the criminals are starting to call me a Cyberpsyco, which does bring a smile to my face.  And here I am without any real nasty augmentations, just fast clothing.  That and the puree effect must have something to do with it.  But, really, once I've cleared all the major crime out of a district, I expect gang members to start having a real bit of fear showing up. The ones who are psychotic, well not so much, but even they should know that their own self-induced psychosis is being outmatched by someone with a purpose who has chopped up most of their gang and shows now sign of stopping.  Crime needs a re-work, especially if I take out higher level functionaries of the gang.  I would expect some splintering, in-fighting and general chaos to start showing up when the rank and file are having to depend on people who no longer know nor care much about them even further up the food chain.  At possibly getting contracts from splinter groups trying to remove the original group.

Stealth needs something.  I can't place my finger on it, but it needs something.  Perhaps I'll need to do a bigger investment in Dexterity.  Or a better selection of alternate paths?  The Mission Critical ones have them, at least so far as I've found.  But stealth needs a next level beyond Hitman mechanics of watching patrol patterns and marking things that move that can see (robots, people, etc.).  Maybe something like a cyberchaff silent grenade or gas that makes areas temporarily unable to be scanned but leaves no smoke to be seen.  Or an actual stealth field with soft-cushion mod on clothing, to complete a silent, sneaky passage.  It feels so medieval to rely on older methods of stealth.  I can work with it but I expected something more.

Once you get to Act II, why does everyone and their brother want to sell me car or motorcycle?  I'm sprinting fast enough to keep up with some cars as it is.  Out in the Badlands, sure, I can see it because where I want to go there aren't no roads.  But I'm there to see everything which I can't do from a car or motorcycle.  Sure I'll find areas of Bethesda levels of models that should be at ground level floating in mid air, who cares?  I like to explore in Open World games, often more than actually going through the plot.  So can I let it be known by my Street Cred that I don't want a vehicle?  I got my crappy Nomad car back and its mostly going to sit out at a camp there because I have no use for it, either.  And I'm happy to ride shotgun!  Plus I don't have the money for a car or motorcycle.  I am in a continual rich to poor to rich to poor cycle just trying to keep my equipment up to date.  So, please, I know it is a major part of the lore and setting, but is there any way to turn it off?  Or at least stop people from sending me notices of this sweet ride they have until AFTER I meet them and get to know them?  Most of my message log is back up with this stuff.  If I wanted a cool ride I would have bought one already.  Instead I'm trying to find clothing too fast for my own good.  Priorities!  I should be able to go through someone who knows someone sort of deal to get a car, truck, motorcycle, etc. and that would feel organic to me.  I'm not rich enough to afford them and they are just sitting in my backlog of stuff I don't have time to do.

Plus can I put in a message to people with an 'urgent mission' and let them know I'm busy ATM? Fixers need to be fixed, more in the veterinary way. There are some places where I was just jogging, sprinting, whatever, down the street and I couldn't go 50' without getting 3 missions...or 2 missions and a deal on a car...sounds like a game show, actually.  Please?  Pretty please?  Get a message on someone needing me to steal something, then someone wanting someone else rubbed out, then a car, then a mission of search and destroy, then a cyberpsycho to be taken down non-lethally, and how about a motorcycle, eh?  Right, I'm tempted to start taking THESE people out who are annoying the hell out of me, especially as I'm headed to an organized crime takedown.  I should never, ever, get 3 missions from one fixer in 50'.  Period.  And how about these sweet wheels?  I am busy exploring the damned city and slicing criminals up, could it wait a bit?  Let everyone know the types of mission that ARE up my alley and those that AREN'T... in generally I'm not into the personal vendetta style missions.  Just, no.  Theft?  Ah, well my stealth skills aren't what I'd like them to be, so no.  Now a criminal gang leader that needs to be taken out either via puree or ballistics, that I'm up for. Search and rescue, generally OK, but situational.  I've got more missions than I can ever complete and this game is a completionist's nightmare.  Go racing!  My driving skills suck.  Have a shooting contest?  Oooo...do we get living targets?  Sit back and have a chat about a car...you know, I can make my own ammo and its the lowest and cheapest of components so, how about no and you'll get to live?  The car thing starts in  ACT II, but the huge number of messages I got just walking around, that was there when I was still trying to get my playstyle to firm up while not touching the main mission.  My mission backlog stretches all the way back to that and the only thing longer than those side missions is the vehicle offers.  Once I get some decent stealth going on I'll then tick that 'No Thanks' off on my phone, THEN you can hand them to me and not one second before.

Some views on my playthrough

There are some story plot holes, I won't go into those.  I never got to go on a real mission out on the streets with my partner, and that makes the main story less satisfying.  That is why I would have liked to play through that year and a half: I have no real connection as a player with these people, and it takes time to actually learn about them.  Most of the characters that are important are just fine, and those you can get a deeper connection with have well drafted and executed back stories.  Not all of them hang together all that well, sometimes, but there is enough there to show some real care and attention was paid to those few people who really matter.  The plot critical decisions would make a much bigger deal if I got to know those on the decision path a lot better.  A high end job from an old Big Time Fixer who has been off for a couple of years just doesn't mean much to me as a player.  I just have to take the guy at face value, and that's...well there is nothing there so I just have to go by how I'm playiing my character.  Honesty and Freedom are touchstones of the Nomads, and that means First Come, First Serve...with the exception being a Friend in Need as you will go through Hell, High Water and anything else that gets in your way to help a friend.  Double deal with me, backstab me, change an arrangement without talking with me and you will not like the results.  Do it at a critical juncture and I know you are untrustworthy in the extreme.  That will lose me some people I like, but am not a friend with them, sometimes fatally.  Such is life.  A deal is a deal, and if you want to take the cards up to deal them to your favor I'll either walk away or flip the table over and let you know how I feel, personally. 

I get the entire cyberpsychosis thing, and even how cybernetics can give an individual blinding fast speed for a fraction of a second.  Totally get it.  It's the disturbing udnerside to the man/machine dividing line and many minds will break down due to high stress, like combat or police work.  It's a fine line to walk between being a thinking, caring human and an inhuman machine who puts little value on human life.  Yet the emotions and psyche are still there, under all the machinery, and it can and does snap.  When someone examining my few implants tells me they aren't up to snuff, well, good.  My character is one who isn't willing to do that leap and all the fancy upgrades are meaningless.  Once I can start having equipment that can see through walls and I can reach out and hurt them with a high caliber round, I've gotten just about everything I need, TYVM.  As a Nomad I would think that I not only know how gear can be stripped down and repurposed, but what can go wrong with it.  The more complex the system, the more that can go wrong and cause it to fail.  Cybernetics are necessary, but the failure state of doing this to a person isn't in the equipment but the mind.  Staying free, keeping your identity, and generally not going bonkers are high on the priority list.  And the main story of the game doubles and then triples down on this. The mind is not an easy thing to fix, so keeping it is the top priority.

ACT II puts all of that into play, and the deadlines I do take seriously, though I know they are gameplay incentives.  You can't get through life alone, and that means finding friends, maybe even family.  But I'm a Nomad who left for a reason, and that was about my group joining a larger one and losing their identity.  If I feel strong enough to leave at that point, then I will be real careful about such things in the future.  Being self-outcast, self-exiled, I don't give that freedom up easily nor cheaply.  Yet through it all, Friends get priority, even if it kills my character.  I wasn't looking for a love life and there can be no promises on this plotline, and pure horrors are ahead.  Thus I need to be good enough to get through the trials that await.  And when I saw that my local gun dealer had a sniper rifle in stock in ACT II, I started to feel right at home.  All is well as sniping must be a Nomad priority, given the vast empty distances of the Badlands, the wasted lands, the forgotten lands where the law is that of Nature and She is always with us.

At this point my GTX 1080 graphics card bit the dust (and on later examination it was my motherboard's chipset reading the PCIe slots that went under...the diagnostics on the motherboard told me that on further inspection).  Waiting for a replacement to arrive.  It served me well for a long while, but all things will eventually fail. (So, yes, new motherboard,CPU, memory, and have a new graphics card which helped in the diagnostic procedure.  At 5+ years old, and a couple of generations behind when I got it, I am not surprised that the MTBF caught up with it.)

F4 Protagonist, Synth or not?

 I've watched multiple videos and read essays on the protagonist form Fallout 4 being a Synth.  They center on a few instances of interest.

First is that The Institute had already damaged the Vault computer system for life support and may have been able to rig up something so as to put a Synth duplicate of you in the Vault.  It is true that yours is the only registered as working cryopod in the Vault, and that, maybe, The Institute would spend time and effort to re-enable it and place a synth in there that looked like you.  It is to be noted that Vault-Tec equipment is not always up to par, and with a social experiment that was done at the last minute, the ability of The Institute to even figure out the system being used is questionable.  This system is custom made, unique and done on a shoestring budget after diverting Vault 111 away from whatever its original purpose was.

- If The Institute was able to do this, then where is the cryogenics technology in The Institute?  Surely, just for life saving measures, they would have a few of these ready to handle accidents or diseases that cannot be easily cured and need to be researched.  It's telling that your son, Father, has cancer (which was cured in the Fallout timeline prior to the Great War) isn't stuffed in one while The Institute seeks out the old cure for him.

- The use of VATS as an Institute form of targeting, seen in a terminal inside The Institute, is put in the protagonist, because you can use it without having a Pip-Boy, then why isn't it more widely available with Coursers?  Coursers offer a much better field test agent then you, the protagonist, and from observation only, Coursers are little better in combat than Gunners or even Raiders.  Higher tech equipment for more damage, yes, but accuracy leaves something to be desired.  This is either a coding error by Bethesda that didn't want to tie VATS to Pip-Boys (and given the Vault-Tec expansion one can see why that is the case) and tied it to the protagonist.

- Does anyone really trust the readouts of the cryopod system after it has been tampered with?  One can see keeping track of life signs during the early chilldown phases, in which a couple of individuals did perish according to the logs, but once you get frost on the skin, there should be no life signs at all.  A proper inhaled substances that prevents the blood from freezing would be in use, and the lack of life signs might actually be normal, though it is registered as deceased.  That brings up the point that this is a Vault full of non-radiation exposed individuals without mutations in their genome due to radiation, so why take Sean?  Why not cycle everyone out and take them back to The Institute to help bolster the genetic stock of the people there via slow replacements children from pre-war couples?  That is a plotline problem of the first degree beyond the protagonist being a synth or not, and as this is glossed over by both sides of the argument, I'll bring it up and point to the actual problems of The Institute itself.  Whoever authorized this kidnapping wasn't thinking straight or knew so little about genetics that they were 'winging it' on this decision.  This is the missed opportunity of Fallout 4: finding out that the people in the cryopods were actually in a deep freeze and could be recovered from it.  Combine Vault-Tec equipment problems, custom made equipment, Institute ineptitude and blindness as to the situation, and then putting in a remote recall system and the people of Vault 111 just might be saved.

Second up is the lack of memories on the part of the protagonist, and this is usually cited due to the Far Harbor DLC.  There are extreme problems as you do have memories from before the Great War and you can explicitly state them to others.

- Going to Graygarden you can remember what Dr. Gray was doing, and marvel that the experiment is still working.  That is an explicit memory made before the Great War of using Mr. Handy type robots by a RoboCo engineer to make a self-sustaining food producing farm.

- When arriving on the Prydwen and getting a medical exam, you can bring up a sarcastic incident when you were in college, about a one night stand with someone who was ugly enough that they may or may not have been human.  Yeah, that is going back to the college days of the protagonist and is long before the Great War or even getting married to their spouse.

- When you talk to Kent Connolly you can call up memories of episodes of The Silver Shroud and even remember sitting around and listening to the show with your family.  That is not something you would do with your infant and spouse as adults.  This is an event that would be a childhood memory of the protagonist listening to the program with their family as they were growing up.

- The Far Harbor DLC wants to railroad the player into not having pre-war memories beyond the day of the Great War, yet in the base game you do.  In fact you can go through the base game, recount ALL those memories and then immediately forget them when going to Far Harbor.  That is bad writing and plot development, and as a player I fully expected to bring these incidents up to disprove that the protagonist was a synth.  You aren't ALLOWED TO DO THAT, and that is robbing the player of Player Agency.

Third is that the protagonist takes environmental damage from radiation, like radstorms, while Gen 3 synths do not.  This is not brought up on either side and yet needs to be addressed as the player must deal with environmental radiation.  Gen 3 Synths do not have that problem as described by The Institute in their entire Gen 3 endeavor.  It's such a small thing that it needs to be brought up.  I've played with a mod that actually does that, though it doesn't remove rads from ingested material, it does prevent any rad damage to happen from the environment, and with that you have a lot more leeway in where you can go and what you can do than a normal human does.  Far from being a minor point, it is a huge one, and if you were a synth this would be part of how you were built from the inside-out.

Fourth a recall code.  If you turn against The Institute why not just use the recall code to stop you?  Plenty of loudspeakers in the place.  If you were made there, then you will have a recall code and you would be stopped.  Never happens.  Could there be 'reasons' for this?  Sure.  But who would violate basic safety protocols for 'reasons' that aren't explicitly stated?  The Institute believes that free will for synths have limits and that would include you. No one in their right mind inside The Institute would ever authorize such a thing.

Fifth is that all the personnel of The Institute refer to you as a parent of Father.  Now there is either a large amount of humoring going on here, or they actually believe that.  Creating a parental duplicate synth would be an important project in The Institute, even if 'secret', word would get out.  Particularly to those hostile to the protagonist, they could unlimber some harsh words under duress to point out you were made, not born.  They don't.  Even other synths treat you as human, and that includes Coursers.  It's a small point to be glossed over, of course.  Yet you do not find ANY project updates ANYWHERE in The Institute referring to you.  Not in SRB, not in Father's Quarters, not in Robotics, not in Advanced Systems, none.  If you are an experiment they would keep track of you and record results for analysis.  Doesn't happen.

Sixth is the curious cases of Synths that are identified as Synths that don't drop Synth Components on demise.  This one is easily overlooked by pro and con, but does deserve mention.  The first case is Gabriel, that you have a mission to recover this rogue synth that is leading the gang at Libertalia.  You can pre-visit the place and get rid of the gang there, which is drawn from Minutemen breakaways who went Raider.  It's interesting to note that group isn't there when you arrive on the mission.  At the end of it, when you get to Gabriel, you can go against orders and actually kill him.  On his body there is no Synth Component which only drops on death of a synth.  So what happened?  Obviously this place has been set up for this 'mission' to prove your abilities to retrieve a 'dangerous synth'.  To get to that point, however, if you didn't pre-visit the place then what happened to THAT Raider gang?  They are gone and this 'new' gang is in its place. Could it be that The Institute actually went in, got rid of the ex-Minutemen turned Raiders and then installed a compliant gang in its place with its leader brainwashed to go cataleptic if a recall code was stated?  That fits the facts.  Of course that can be marked down to Bethesda just not properly putting in the component on death...

- But there is a second time this happens and is a bit more difficult to pull off but can be done.  The place is Warwick homestead and the synth is Roger Warwick.  Join with the guy who suspects Roger of being a Synth and off him.  Roger Warwick does NOT drop a Synth Component on death.  Institute records report him as being a synth replacement, but he doesn't drop a the necessary component when killed.  Again, another coding mistake by Bethesda, right?

- When playing the game it is stressed how high value Synths are as property to The Institute.  They are willing to risk more assets to return a rogue synth.  Yet in two cases of individuals identified as synths, we can find that these were not synths due to lack of component drop.  So which is more likely?  A rogue synth forming up a Raider gang, or a paid-off agent who is a gang leader asked if he would like to relocate and get a hefty fee for playing patty-cake with The Institute?  It would have to be an awful lot of bottle caps, but I'm sure they could to that.  And as for Roger Warwick, was he ever really killed?  Synths are...unreliable...even when pliable, and isn't it more likely that Roger Warwick was brainwashed and sent back believing himself to be a synth and only a few problems with the brainwashing leads to a nervous farmhand to thing he is a synth?

- Would The Institute put a highly valuable, customized Synth into a Vault to 're-awaken' with some rudimentary memories and then not have a recall code installed in it?  Would it let such a synth go around without constantly monitoring it?  And that would mean more than a few crows or traders supplying information, because The Institute would want feedback on their project, wouldn't they?

- They did this with Zimmer and he hasn't been in very good contact with The Institute for years, would they want to repeat that mistake on an advanced Gen 3 with built-in combat capacity?  While Zimmer was a synth in charge of the SRB...or 'commonwealth police', he was a KNOWN synth that was the head of the SRB and he has gone out of contact for far too long.  Would they repeat that mistake with the protagonist? Unlikely. And it should be noted that Zimmer was a unique synth that also designed other synths, and his mission is to track down high profile cases in the Capital Wasteland.  Perhaps he was a bit TOO good at his job and being out of communications might be an indication that HE has gone rogue. Once bitten, forever shy in this case, and trying to put a Synth in charge of the entire Institute is going a bit too far for the place in question.

- Father as acting director of the Institute points to another problem, and one not brought up that often.  If he is an acting director then who is the actual Director of the Institute.  Be it upper or lower case 'acting' that institutional designation for any organization indicates the individual is only acting in the stead of another person who cannot be there to make decisions and participate.  Father has had a few years in this position, but no longer than Dr. Ayo has had working as the Acting Director of SRB.  What this means is that there is an individual, organization or group (take your pick) that does actively run The Institute, but who cannot be there and have put Father down in the acting position for them.  Even if you take over his position, there are no changes in policy that you can make: there is no post-game for The Institute to reflect the values of the new head of the organization.  As policy determines the direction of an organization, the titular spot you can get at the end of the game is meaningless: all directives remain in place and you don't get any policy choices because they have already been determined by someone else and cannot be changed until they return.  If the player is a Synth, then the question of how those who actually run the place in the way of policy will view the new leader comes into focus.  Indeed, it is expected that SRB, at the very least, will do a deep dive into the PC and see just what it is they can find, because it really is something closer to a Secret Police than just the SRB.  And if you were a specially ordered up Synth by the directives of Father, then there will be a paper trail or trail of information on that, and would require willing accomplices in Robotics.  You cannot find such individuals in the game, not even if you are the one in charge.  Is The Institute really fine with replacing its own people with Synths?  I suspect not, as Synths were supposed to be a subservient class, though they might have some talent at certain jobs they are not fully human.  If the objective is to replace humanity with Synths, then that underclass treatment would have stopped the first time actual sentience showed up in any Gen 3 Synth.

There are good, solid reasons and rationale behind the concept of the player not being a Synth.  The arguments for it are few, and involve an instance of VATS working before it should, and the false set of choices presented by DiMA in Far Harbor.  There are other and better ways to have a player question the humanity of the PC they are playing, and the few that we do get to put the question into play are weak.  As an advanced Gen 3 Synth the PC would not have the problems with radiation that they get in the game.  Also, by setting the various Synth patrols out as hostile to the PC, The Institute is putting a highly valuable and expensive piece of property at risk.  Father shows little emotional attachment to the PC and letting you loose was an 'experiment' and he attempted to give you 'closure' by letting you kill off Kellogg.  That level of detachment not just from the PC but humanity as a whole is one that would value the life of the PC more if they were property created inside The Institute than a human being.  By treating the PC like a normal surface dweller, they show the disdain that one would expect for a human.  They don't marvel that their creation has survived and come home, which would have been the expected reaction to the PC getting back to The Institute. 

It is the removal of Player Agency that brings this topic up from Far Harbor, and it is surprising that DiMA's question isn't rebutted easily.  I fully expected that after giving responses to Daisy, Supervisor White and the doctor on board the Prydwen that I would get multiple instances of memories from before the Great War, and if I had talked with Kent and was the Silver Shroud, I should get memories going back to my childhood. Do humans retain all their memories?  Yes, though not on a conscious level, so asking someone what they remember as their earliest memory means having that person pull up something from their early life after having most of it edited out of the conscious memory.  It is a way to save on internal cognitive overhead, and some people actually lack that and can have severe problems later in life with having remembered everything at a conscious level.  The question is unfair for self-perception which is something DiMA should know and recognize.  He has to off-load memories to continue functioning and humans have a similar system of internal suppression to gain unimpaired cognitive function.  People do have gaps in their memories, and using that as a chance to ask if you are a Synth is an effort in instilling self-doubt to the PC, if not the player.  Why not ask if you take external, environmental radiation damage?  That would be fair and an easy question to answer, and definitive of being a Gen 3 Synth.

Over all of this is The Institute's motto of 'Mankind, Redefined', and no one,  not once, asks what the original definition of mankind is and what it is being redefined to.  No one can even state it, which makes it a handy excuse to trot out for anything done for any reason.  A few people have to be replaced?  Well that is just part of redefining mankind.  Entire factions need to die?  Mankind, redefined.  Thwarting an effort in governing of the surface?  Well that needed redefining.  Any atrocity that treats those who have suffered from radiation damage as sub-human that need to be 'redefined' out of the picture is not from an organization that cares all that much about humanity in the first place.  Curie will tell you that ghouls are a victim of the Great War, and that would include anyone with radiation damage that can still function as a human, too.  The Institute doesn't see those on the surface as victims in need of help.  Thus their own humanity is called into question.  As a Synth you would be highly valued by The Institute, as a surface dwelling human you would need some 'redefining' if you hadn't gotten to them.  And The Institute only has one means of 'redefining' humans and it involves lots of bodies and rivers of blood, and only humans could get so obsessed with such an idea as to lose track of what makes them human in the first place.

Games as interactive alt-history

The sub-genres of historical games are those that cover historical and known periods and events, and then sets up a framework that represents what actually happened.  Everything from economic factors to societal factors, plus technology and its changes are all ripe for game mechanics in any historical game.  The majority of these games tend to fall in the Grand Strategy to Tactical simulation types of games, and these date back all the way to chess and was more regularized and modernized during the Napoleonic era.  Chess gives weight and movement ability to units based on social, religious, and military capacity, which makes for an interplay between those pieces on the board as representing how a ruler might attempt to maneuver the pieces of society and the military to gain victory over a foe.  It is a primitive sort of game, to be sure, as it doesn't vary pieces by culture, economy or technology, but then it isn't supposed to be representing an actual conflict in fact but one of extrapolation where these matters are considered to be roughly equal.  History, and regimes, are not so easily described and the varieties of peoples, religions, societies, economic practices and technology across the entire sweep of these things all help to define a game when it is set in a definite era or time frame.

A game like Third Reich from Avalon Hill described the immediate time of when World War II started and constrained it to the European, Western Russian and North African strategic theaters of war.  Nations had units that were built with Basic Resource Points (BRP) and any savings in those at the end of the year saw a portion of them going to grow the economy.  Any conquests of nations with BRPs also added to that economic total for the entire Nation, though didn't grow the economy.  Victory was achieved by taking a number of strategic cities or other locations, and that would determine the game's end.  The United States was an off-map power that would become available to the Allies when it declared war on Japan, another power not represented in the game.  Each player got to determine what to build each quarter, with some units, like ships or strategic units (submarines and ASW units) playing a part in BRP supply for the UK.  As this is a top-level game and personalities are not considered, the premise is that certain historical actions will happen , though there are some random alternatives that can influence the game but only at the start of the game.  The mechanics are set and relatively static, but the disposition of economic output is up to the players.  Gaining a nominal victory is difficult for either the Axis or Allies, though there are some benefits to the Axis early in the game which shifts due to economic factors to the Allies as the game unfolds.  It is possible to not declare certain wars, to declare wars on other powers, or seek to get an agreement with some powers if certain conditions are met.  Any start of the game depends on the skill of the players involved and history then revolves around the decisions made with the known game mechanics for movement.  An Allied victory isn't guaranteed even with the slight shifts in resources that amount to quite a bit in the latter stages of the game.

A more modern game, like Crusader Kings II by Paradox Design Studios, spans the early Medieval from just before the rise of the Vikings all the way out to approximately 1500.  That isn't to say that religious conflict didn't continue, as it did, but that the mechanics for that need to shift given the changes to societies and technology across the known world and take the New World into account.  CK2 is a dynasty centered game, and the player has a bloodline to protect and one that he or she will pass over to their heirs.  As such it has an important social dynamic that reflects the era, even when it has elements that aren't represented in a decent fashion, historically.  Wealth, prestige, piety, buildings, units and technology are all present, even if having a major amount of hand-waving at them for play balance.  Thus playing a CK2 campaign is an exercise in alternate history with the dynamics represented ones that were important to that 8th to 15th century world.  Are there elements left out, badly represented or downplayed in the game?  Of course there are!  Gavelkind inheritance was NOT the standard for that era outside of a few counties in Kent and Wales, so it is a bad conception of how to hand over power across generations that is aimed at game mechanics, not history.  The Holy Roman Empire was divided during the early years of Charlemagn's rule among his sons who had Kindoms under the Empire.  Thus the Empire, itself, was set for being fractured, even if one of his sons got the Imperial nod, the other Kingdoms had already been set up under that larger banner.  All members of that dynasty in the following generation got a claim to being a legitimate holder of the HRE, and that would pass down and cause major problems and see the HRE decline.  This was not Gavelkind in any way, shape or form, but the actual ruler creating a way to ensure that the dynasty would continue, even if it also set them at each other's throats after he died.  Of course if you take up that role, then you can try and change the dynastic situation, alter the line-up, and maybe do a few choice assassinations.  History isn't set in CK2, although the rulers do, typically, have things they want to do:  Nations or rulers have no perpetual friends, but they do have perpetual interests.  CK2 replicates that pretty well given the constraints of the game.

The Strategy and Grand Strategy games are the main venue for historical work, though the concepts of 'theater of war' would only slowly evolve as Nations grew in power and reach so that there could be separate 'fronts' and theaters.  Those concepts grew out of those first put down by Rome, Persia, Greece and other Nations, in which fighting one foe in one area might invite an attack from a different foe from another direction.  This caused a split in manpower allocation, resources, and would bring these ideas of 'front' and theater into being.  From simple single instances of two-front wars there would come a time of multi-threat wars that required more than one simple venue for practice.  Different games offer different dynamics for this.  The larger the scope, to the point where armies are a form of influence, could be seen in the game Diplomacy by Avalon Hill.  At he largest scale the pre-WWI game represented the attempt to spread national and imperial influence on a global scale.  Diplomacy as a game was a highly abstract one that was a first solid attempt to move the Grand Strategy game to a much higher level of representation to both simplify game play and yet leave complexities of how one supported influence abroad.  This concept would later be expanded by the game designer Greg Costikyan and Pax Brittanica, a game that still featured influence and diplomacy, but also represented much of the pre-WWI ethos and the rising tide of diplomatic and military spheres that would serve as the pressure for the Great War.  Players have to be aware of global tensions as their actions and activities can push the world and its Empires slowly into that fateful showdown.  A minor conflict in a far-off land may not seem like much, but if the tensions are already high then that might be enough to tip the balance.  Trying to defuse situations requires diplomacy among the players, to the point of actually making their own treaties and then deciding if they will abide by them.  By giving so much free-play to players, the ability to come into a dominant position before the Great War is a matter of skill, intrigue, military deployment and then seeing if enough of the influence of one's own Empire is enough to be in the predominant position when the Great War comes.  Britain is in the supreme position in this game from the start, and can simply lay basic claims to the entire world and not have to do much of anything else.  As such it is an easy to play Empire for novice players, while experienced players take on the role of 'Who will be in Second Place?' which is viable for all the major and minor Empires available in the game.

Game dynamics must represent the era being presented in some form, be it economic, political, diplomatic, dynastic, military or even personal.  Factions are a standard part of game play for most Strategy based games, though they can just be the Nation or Empires involved but can go all the way down to the family level.  Factions inside larger organizations are also a viable dynamic, thus in CK2 there can be factions seeking their own ends inside a Kingdom or Empire, and those might not necessarily by related to dynasty or might involved other dynamics between other dynasties that the player may not catch on to early on.  In Pax Brittanica there are no interior factions, but the ever climbing world threat meter which encourages circumspect use of force for only those things that truly matter.  These game dynamics represent certain aspects of the real world that were present, even if those who knew about them didn't understand what they were leading to.  In Europe, leading up to WWI, there was no understanding how the technology had changed the use of troops and their deployment.  Yet the Battle of Richmond which did have military observers from Europe saw what had happened there: trench warfare due to the high accuracy of rifles that could be reloaded very quickly.   The Gatling Gun was not understood as anything other than a form of artillery, even after Maxim had introduced his machine gun to the European powers.  The trench warfare in the US Civil War would be the way of the future when all sides had such technology to use.  Pax Brittanica assumes this continued leveling of technology as a 'given', and can't be influenced and, truthfully, wouldn't change the slow move into WWI.

Any time a player puts themselves in charge of a group, government, nation or military in a historical setting a new take on history begins.  One person with a slightly varied background or even the same background as witnessed in history is not a guarantee for history to replay itself.  That is true of any era so long as the AI for the other individuals is up to the task of simulating those goals and directives held by those who were in historical positions.  Yet battles can be determined not just by numbers of troops but by the quality of those leading them and the technology they deploy.  To get to mounted Knights in Europe requires the invention of the stirrup which allows for the transfer of shock to a horse from an individual mounted on it.  Without that a man on horseback could be a wonderful archer and might even do a bit of slashing with a sword or saber passing lightly armored troops, but the ability to concentrate the momentum and force of the horse and man via a lance is impossible, or at least impossible to stay mounted thereafter.

While an ancient invention, it took time to understand the actual utility of it in mounted warfare, which meant that armored soldiers on horseback with lances was a late term development as all the rest of that had to be discovered as well.  Once properly mounted and trained, a Knight on horseback was a truly armored unit, and it would only suffer once the longbow and crossbow technologies were up to the task of taking down the mount and/or rider at long range.  These are expensive people to train and maintain, and once they are available and made, they can begin to dominate the old scrum of hand-to-hand combat by outflanking front lines and attacking with force to shatter most defenses, save those that used polearms as no horse will impale itself on a prepared polearm defense no matter how well trained it is.  An AI must have the necessary scripts to properly evaluate such units and decide on their potential as part of an army. This means the game developers and designers must be cognizant of the history and approach of the people of the era a game is in.  Yet such AI must also have all the alternatives available to it, so that it can pick and choose among them for what best suits the current condition.

Warfare is the prime area for historical recreation as it involves conflict that changes the course of history, and that course can then be played out over the course of the game.  What the player does or does not do will influence the decisions of others in the game, be it AI or other human players.  Living individuals can take very different views on what to do given a set of tools and a mindset of what they wish to accomplish.  Games that allow for victory conditions based on goals, objectives, or completing a number of tasks can also take place outside of the direct military venue or be a part of wider and extended game play that also includes the military as aspects of that era.

Looking back on Third Reich, it has objectives on the map that, when taken in sufficient quantity, can determine victory conditions, and each Nation or Alliance has its own number to collect.  These are strategic objectives, and the point of warfare is to secure them.  This can be done through military conquest or via the shift of a government by events under the umbrella of a larger Nation or Alliance.  The region of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria typically do this in a given run of 3R as a pre-scripted event.  Random events, drawn at the start of the game, can also put Turkey or Spain into that category.  An entire branch of theory and alternate history is one in which Nazi Germany didn't attack the USSR so quickly and, instead, continued the westward push to steamroller Spain and then perform a multi-prong attack on Gibraltar.  That single port that allows the UK to trans-ship goods from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic is key to a larger offensive against the UK and, thus, the Allies.

The game rules have stipulations on how to drive fleets out of a port so they can't be there during a ground assault.  That is done via paratroop drop, and the German military did have paratroops from very early in the war.  Fleets at sea can be kept busy by opposing Fleets, thus a joint strike on Gibraltar using Italian and German Fleets to tie up the British Navy at sea is required.  As paratroops are neutralizing the defenses of a fortified position to some extent, a large push from the ground against the prepared forces of the UK in Gibraltar can start, and tactical air assets should be able to assist in that assault to neutralize whatever air assets are used in defense and to generally add strength to a ground assault.  It is no easy thing to pull off and requires cooperation between players if there is no single Axis player.  The result is a high risk operation with a good chance of success, as the air assets pummel the defenses as the paratroops drop to force the fleets out.  After seizing the port the UK's economy is crippled and its BRP allocation per year is greatly reduced.  This represents goods from the British holdings in India, Australia, New Zealand and the islands in and around Oceania having to go around Africa and thus be easier targets for a U-boat campaign in the Atlantic.  Givraltar is just one of the strategic objectives in 3R and does not come into play often nor easily, and requires planning and a bit of luck.

If performed well, then the Allies are in a bad state to defend the UK and the strategic campaign of U-Boats vs ASW assets shifts in favor of Germany.  Even when the US enters the war, the might of the US economy will not offset this shift in strategic advantage even if held for a single year.  The moribund African Campaign can now restart for the Germans as there is now a direct supply link through Gibraltar if the Axis forces move smartly across North Africa over French colonies which need to be neutralized if they are Free French.  That single operation in the European theater represents something that the German General staff had on the drawing board as a plan as they recognized the threat of an unsecured rear and a two-front war with the USSR as being strategically untenable.  Thus doing so is to alter the course of historical events for that run of the game and see what the results are.  There are still choices available to the Allies, but they are fewer and harder to execute.  Most players won't try this and, instead, try to optimize an eastern assault against the USSR in a mad dash to get strategic objectives and then force any kind of peace, at all.  The Axis will still be short a few places, true, but the choices at that point center on the Middle East or the UK itself.  An Operation Sealion might be attempted if all has gone swimmingly well after taking Gibraltar and then shifting air assets as fast as possible to the coast across from the UK.

That is the sort of planning and thinking that must go into a plan to change history, and to be done it must be executed well and the player have the game mechanics nearly memorized so that the important sequence of events are prepared and operations can be reinforced.  Delay in waiting for supplies can be lethal, as the Winter War demonstrated, yet in good campaign season being out of supply is simply waiting at the last part of the season for the strategic resupply lines to open up, though in preparation for winter that requires no late summer campaign.  Spain doesn't have that problems so the 'mad dash' solution across France to Spain and Gibraltar is viable yet requires good execution to pull off.

In the dynastic Grand Strategy RPG that is Crusader Kings II, a much, much wider set of options and limitations are handed to the player given any level of start from simple county to an Empire.  Working your way up from the bottom is one of the better and more challenging ways to play as it allows the player to learn the personalities involved and all the factors of culture, religion, dynastic policies for who inherits, and taking part in a Secret Society (or not) with the benefits and drawbacks those bring. Getting a throne and passing it down via one's family is no easy business, as there are many who want power of any sort, thus a player needs to understand the threats in their given area and learn how to deal with them.  Bribes can work, so can granting honorary titles, or even landing someone to satisfy them and, possibly, neutralize them into a dead-end position.  For those who are part of a dynasty you don't want to offend but do want to neutralize, handing them a City holding which runs under the rules of a republic may be a very viable thing to do.

Thus for a game to feature good mechanics of what happened in any era of history has that as a basis for creating alternative scenarios via game play.  The more freewheeling the game is over a historical period or multiple periods, the more the game developers have to create content for the variations in possible types of game play.  Short scenarios for a year of two on a single front of a wide-ranging war is relatively easy unless there is a rapid development of technology and deployment of technology via some sort of industrial system.  Staging features to be amenable to different rates of research, engineering and production require a system that fits a wide variety of possible products and how to research them, though that may be an out of map system done just by the game engine in a scripted fashion.  The more that falls under the player's direct control, the better and more robust the system has to be.  A game may be aimed at an historical period as a start date and then move that date back for wider ranging game play, and thus it will have to introduce mechanics to retard the research rate or renormalize the system to make technology seen at the later start date have a higher base cost to it.  Either are acceptable as database manipulation techniques.  By hard-coding in certain technologies, or locking them behind very steep research costs, a game can then introduce historical changes that they have tried to put beyond the reach of the player.  That can be frustrating to a player who spends a large part of their time researching that technology, and then find it granted automagically by the game mechanics running an early start date: good game play would indicate that such technology grants would need to be adjusted if the player has already unlocked them, perhaps kicking off a historical change earlier but having a very low adoption rate for a period of time.  In any event, the ability for players to utilize game mechanics to their advantage and optimize them still plays a part in the overall system and vital to alt-history in a given period of history.

Game developers who develop such games need to do a lot of research just to understand the period of history they will be showing and depicting it properly.  Stopping early tanks via light infantry is possible and requires a different set of equipment from standard small arms unless that suite of small arms has some effectiveness against early tanks.  Ballistics, explosives, toxic gas, and other forms of assault to slow or debilitate a tank might not be well represented in standard combat at anything above the individual level.  Representative units can be given a Close Assault Tactics capacity versus armor that changes the base attack score to represent that specialized equipment held by normal units, and anti-tank squads given a major buff to their own CAT, indicated by their representative marker, perhaps.  In a campaign that allows the design of specialized units, this form of unit may have a relatively weak attack against softer enemies but have a good attack against armored or hardened enemies.  Thus an anti-armor team may be utilizing a Recoilless Rifle group, bazooka armed individuals with their own ammo carriers, or have a squad that is equipped with anti-material rounds for a few individuals with heavier equipment.

The ability to continue such attacks over the course of any given battle may be limited, and that would mean having good training and high accuracy would become a paramount background piece of information for that unit type.  Longer training means fewer in the field, and that then requires having a good mix of light units, anti-tank or anti-armor units, and heavier armored units of one's own which could also feature a limited number of tank destroyers (tanks made to take out other tanks).  Further back in history the crossbow and English longbow marked the decline of Knights in armor on horseback and specially made arrows or bolts were created for high velocity armor penetration, yet only when these are massed into coherent units and trained as a unit do they become a game changer on the battlefield.  The same rule applies, and the training time for a longbow is substantially longer than that of a crossbow, yet arrows fired by such skilled archers may be far more effective than the relatively low training time crossbow groups.  Deciding on what to field, what mix of troops to have and how well trained and equipped they are then makes for interesting alt-history game play.

With a wider historical period comes wider divergence from the norm, which requires game developers have a framework for the activities in their game to properly reflect these changes from standard history.  The economic system needs to be well defined for the entire scope of the game, and even if it is highly generic like the Basic Resource Point system of 3R, it should have some basis in representing the actual economy and its sub-sectors either by direct investment or simple unit types being built.  Any reinvestment game mechanic that alters the game play requires that it have a well understood basis, and that effects are properly measured at the scale of the game, itself.  Again with BRPs there is a percentage increase in the base economy of unspent BRP's from the prior year, permanently.  There is a partial roll-over effect that can make an economy stronger over time so long as the entire budget is not spent.  In a game like CK2 the money is measured in gold pieces, that are, themselves, extremely abstract and not representative of actual gold but a measure of a treasury under control of the player.  A system of abstract currency is that there are nebulous ties to the actual, real currencies of a period, which makes an actual estimation of economic strength as measured in historical expenditures impossible.  The concept is sound, and investing in trade, military, religious or other buildings will garner something, even if it is just the generally non-fungible personal currencies of Prestige or Piety.  Trading in one currency to build a base in another type is a viable and valuable option, and should not be overlooked by any player in games that feature multiple statistics and currencies.

Games are very well suited for tracking things that are mentioned in historical context, but not something that can be easily tracked.  Thus, when we speak of the Moral Authority of a religion in historical context, there is no real world way to gauge it: there is no Karma or Piety or Faith currency accrued to the followers of a religion to grant derivative statistics that would drive Moral Authority.  Similarly in the currency of Prestige there is no currency that can be tracked, because we can't pin down what, exactly, will drive that in one direction or another.  As this is not a publicly traded currency or generated up in any real world way, there is no way to track it.  Yet games can establish a framework for these things and track them by attaching that currency generation to offices, titles, holdings, and even to individuals of certain capabilities that are generally accorded to have such things as part of their background, like via a bloodline.  And as in the past, so in the future, so that Political Power, the ability to Sway others via National Reputation and so on can apply in the post-medieval setting while the older currencies lose their relative value.  If done well then in the base game history will have a very high amount of fidelity to the model, so that players can understand just how the world as we know it was shaped by the forces that drove it forward. 

By playing in such a model, however, the players can also move in ahistorical ways that are also allowed by the system as this represents the effect of minor changes in history having a ripple effect, outwards.  One can start as a defender of the Roman Catholic Church in Lancaster under threat from the Viking invasion and turn around that threat and then research the history of Christianity and become a Waldensian heretic, spreading that heresy according to the lands held by that leader.  I've played as that person, becoming a heretic in the early 9th century and in less than a century it had ripple effects that were felt all the way to the Byzantine Empire.  By the late 10th century Roman Catholicism led by the Pope was no longer considered the standard form of Catholicism and the Pope and the Papacy had become heretics as the wildfire spread of that minor heresy hit Europe and even Pagan lands where it was found to be an appealing alternative to standard Roman Catholicism.  While actual Waldensianism wasn't invented, the heresy, itself, is a way to examine early Christianity and come up with a variant answer, and the sheer number of heresies that arose demonstrates that the name can represent a set of beliefs rather than the actual heresy created by Waldo.  Naming it after the founder that you were playing, doesn't really suit the game of CK2, while the broader definition within that branch of thought does, so that sticks as the defining type.  Yet all it takes is the holder in a single county seeking to beat back the threat of the pagans at the doorstep to achieve this, by having high enough learning and going to a religious focus for a decade or so. 

The ripple effects are something that historians would shake their head at as 'unpredictable', yet game designers who wish to keep a high fidelity to history create systems for the seen and unseen to help model those very effects.  Every time a new game of any historical context is started, then the real world history no longer applies.  The game mechanics and systems still DO apply so that things that didn't happen in our history can happen in a game.  From that history is shown to be contingent upon minor changes that can have profound effects on the outcomes that shifts individuals, peoples, societies, religions, Nations and the state of the World.  This goes beyond the lack of a nail for a horseshoe, yet that very concept demonstrates that history hinges on contingent events and that our current world is made of all those events that happened in a certain way to get the results we honor as history.  Playing games with a historical context that go beyond simple military ones requires some knowledge of the game mechanics and what they represent.  With that understanding and knowing how events are modeled in the game, different results by treating events in a different manner can and do yield different results.  That is the fun of playing such games as games: they allow for a greater leeway in asking the 'what if?' questions of history and seeing what the results might have been.  Alternate History used to be left in the hands of those writing stories, mostly science fiction or fantasy, and that was joined by historical context games by the mid-20th century and is now a permanent part of the gaming landscape. 

History professors and professionals may not like what has been done by these games, but that doesn't really matter as they haven't knuckled down to actually make good historical frameworks that can be derived from what we know of historical facts and events.  The field was left wide open to game designers who knew and loved history, though not as professionals: their heart, like that of a Waldensian Count, went in a different direction.  And as James Burke points out, the pinball effect of history is something that is very real and in play not just in the past but in the present as well.  The interconnected world of today isn't just about global systems of industry, commerce, tourism, culture and the like, but can be boiled down to asking a question: if you are in an elevator and the power goes out for good, what do you do?  How the real world changes due to the history and the systems behind it is a very real thing to understand.  Any gamer that delves into historical games will realize this as that is what attracted them to that game from the start.  What you do with history is all fun and games.  What history does to you, that is another matter, entirely.

Surviving Mars - A look back

The game produced by Haemimont Games and distributed by Paradox a few years ago, so any look at it now is a look back since it appears there will be no more DLC content for the game.  At its heart this is a form of city builder game taking place on an extra-terrestrial environment, and will have the expected mechanics of managing air and water as well as the standard resource gathering expected in this type of game.  As a city builder it is at the low end of the scale, meaning individuals matter and choices on who gets to be a colonist or not is important, at least early on in the game.  There are different modes to the game beyond standard game-play, like a Challenge mode and a Creative mode, so that specific challenges or just plain having fun sandboxing are available once the player is familiar with the game mechanics.

Surviving Mars depends on a game engine that works via a monthly pulse cycle for larger scale work (like maintenance) and more immediate pulses to keep track of the daily needs and supplies for the colony and the colonists.  Colonists have health meters covering health, needs and desires, which tend to interact with each other.  Social, shopping, gaming, gambling and other needs are a vital part of the game and those require buildings in domes that address those functions (groceries, bars, diners, clinics, etc.) that need to be staffed to fulfill those functions.  Keeping the sanity meter of colonists in the green is a part of the background of colony management up to the mid-game where social and other technologies can begin to address these concerns so the player can address higher level concerns of the overall colony.

To get a colony up and running requires sources of energy (wind turbines or solar panels), water (either from evaporators or sub-surface melting and gathering of ice), a breathable atmosphere in the domes, food, and drone hubs with drones to do most of the exterior work.  Concerns of the environment in the way of meteors, cold, dust storms, and some environmental features are part of game play and vary by location.  Resources to gather vary by location, and those resources of metal, concrete, water and such will also vary by location.  The colony is started on a grid map with a couple of sectors on the grid explored and the player can then prioritize further exploration or utilize deep probes (either provided or purchased) to get the basic scanning done.  Once done a cycle of very deep probing starts to reveal harder to access resources.  Drones can work with surface material, as can some automated equipment for concrete and water, but mining requires humans, so a colony will have to run on people with mines as part of the set-up.  Supplies can be purchased on Earth and shipped to Mars, but that is not a fast system and can be slowed down as a game setting.

Starting a colony requires getting a sponsor, which sets the difficulty level of the overall experience from very easy to hard, and then choosing the leader focus (with many different singular perks available to help out the colony and expand on some later decisions).  The first job is to choose the first landing site and get to work: there are usually some starter supplies and more can be included as part of the start game settings.  The objective is to get a colony started utilizing those materials, constructing what is easy to construct and getting all the resources in place so that the colonists can start producing food, metals and attending to other needs upon arrival.  That first arrival starts a timer of 10 sols (the largest time unit) but a live birth by a colonist removes it as this demonstrates the viability of the colony to your sponsors.  From there it is a game of expansion and tending to the needs of the colony, as well as dealing with a storyline that the game will send your way at some point.

This is a game that the designers claimed to have studied what would be necessary to survive on Mars and build a colony, yet some of the resources and choices are problematical.  Concrete, as an example, is something produced generically from a gathering device, which just scrapes the surface material, uses power from the grid and generates concrete and waste rock.  On Earth concrete is made up of a calcite based cement material with sand, gravel and small stones added in to give physical stability and structure to the cement material that bind it together.  Typically water is utilized in this and the resultant concrete needs to dry as it solidifies from the outside.  Large scale structures, like the Hoover Dam, were made with a continuous pour of concrete over molds that were then raised as some of the outer parts of it set.  In addition cooling pipes were put into that system prior to the pour so that the entire thing could undergo steady cooling as this is a chemical event that generates heat and can cause cracking on larger structures.  Another form of something approaching concrete is demonstrated in Lunar tefra that has undergone a molecular bonding across small pieces of material of similar molecular composition and is a form of vacuum welding.  Vacuum welding requires that close molecular type of the materials to allow for a true bonding between them that is, theoretically, seamless and is one of the most interesting types of welding available and is only practical in space with a hard vacuum.  Mars offers neither a ready supply of water nor a hard vacuum, and the concrete plant does not use water.

I was trained as a geologist in college and Mars has some simple things lacking on its surface, like hydrated calcite deposits necessary to make cement to make concrete.  There may be very small deposits of it, yes, and it is not a stretch of the imagination to say those could be available in a game setting.  If so then where is the water coming from?  The material in the deposit has to be processed, and that will remove some of the hydration from it to allow for the proper making of cement.  That water is not enough to make much higher volumetric sizes of concrete: more water is needed.

That would have made an interesting dual purpose building that takes in surface material and then provides cement and a small amount of water, or takes in water to make concrete.  Mars has the added bonus of having a lot of iron oxide on the surface, as that is what makes the planet the 'Red Planet'.  Now that same building could be made into a smelter, and it would provide a small amount of oxygen, water, metal (the game is generic on this, and aluminum can be gotten from this, too though in smaller quantities, but it is generic so keep it that way), cement and crushed slag.  In the other mode it would take in some water, provide oxygen, produce metals and concrete.  Adding in cement would be adding another resource to track, however, and the devs wanted to keep it simple.  The concept of an auto-smelter doing all this is not that far-fetched for real life and not that far out in game terms.  Instead of having to mine for metal, it would be gathered from the surface material, and there is a lot of that and it is many feet deep deep.  That would have made for interesting game play and feature an understanding of concrete as something that isn't pressure formed stone but an amalgam of materials with a cement.  Getting the cement would be the problem, though most of the other materials would make up the vast majority of the mix, so volume of cement necessary is low in comparison.

That is really a different way of utilizing the same systems already employed in the game to create a different set of production systems.  On surfaces that are rocky, a specialized crusher might be used in the single use system as it wouldn't be as easy to get yields of metal high enough to justify a full multipurpose smelter/cement/concrete system.  An all-in-one system like that would require maintenance...and if there is anyplace Surviving Mars actually fails it is in the monthly pulse maintenance system.

Every month (and the actual named timeframe doesn't matter and it could be weeks or quarters or whatever...most games from Paradox publishing utilize a pulse system for updating the databases behind the game) a bit of maintenance on a maintenance bar gets filled and the material to repair it is indicated on the bar.  Fine so far, right?  What happens is no one, or none of the idle drones, get tasked with actually addressing incremental maintenance.  The system is made so that maintenance is only done when something fails.  Take a moment to digest that.

On a planet far from any supply lines, with limited resources for a colony, locally, there is no daily, weekly or even monthly maintenance performed on equipment.  And the people need that equipment working to survive. For a few hours, a day perhaps, people might be willing to don environmental suits, but productivity will plummet and those suits only have a limited supply that will need to be refreshed from the overall systems of the colony.  And everyone waits for something to fail before doing something about it.  That is a non-starter and anything contrary to survival where you can't breathe the air outside and might freeze to death in a few minutes even if you could, is not the way any sane individual would run a colony.  When survival necessary tasks are not performed then survival becomes a very precarious thing.  There are mods attempting to address this and the general lack of understanding of how maintenance is actually done.  Public and most private buildings that house more than a few people have maintenance staff to deal with janitorial duties, maintain the HVAC, make sure the toilets aren't plugged up, refresh the consumable stocks of thing across the building and generally do everything necessary to make the building a fit workplace.  That is usually a daily activity.  In Surviving Mars no one does that, and just wait for the drones to do the scut work, and they will only do it when something has gone off-line for maintenance and might take their damned sweet time in doing it.  And if the materials necessary are pretty far away, then the inter-drone network might not be up to snuff for getting materials passed through the drones by the drone hubs, and you might go days, weeks or months without vital equipment being repaired due to lack of maintenance.  This in a place where if something critical fails everyone could die.

While it is supposed to make for 'exciting' game play, there is no way to schedule preventive maintenance.  Period.  This is a system designed to cause crises on a frequent basis, and heaven help you if it is a critical drone hub that has gone off-line that is one used to service life necessary equipment.  That is actually poor game design when trying to replicate how a colony with this sort of equipment would be run.  This system can be used, use, and it requires a severe investment in over-lapping drone hub control areas, and creating a few more vital hubs with restricted areas for dealing with the sudden failures that are supplied by the surrounding hubs.  Yet no one, in their right mind, would ever make a system like that for where survival is depending on automated drones to do repairs ONLY when something fails.  That should be a very last resort, not the way things are run on a day to day basis.  This system needs to be seriously revamped, overhauled and made into something that mirrors how things are done in the actual world.  And if that means I would have to have a few more colonists with a specialized workshop dedicated to managing that, then that would be fine.

Truly that is a very bad part of the game, right there, and it is such a large part of the game that it might disqualify it from the 'city builder' genre as most in that genre do maintenance tasks as a background activity where it is addressed at all.  Production of materials used for building and maintenance is done by colonists or shipped in from Earth at great expense.  There are buildings for specialized products that are generic and made by people working in them:  circuitry, machine parts, and polymers.  Those things are made up using energy for the building, and then a consumable supply or set of supplies.  Circuitry is made up of Rare Earth material dug out at specialized mines, Machine Parts are made from metal, and Polymers come from water and fuel (used on rockets and to power some systems).  I'm fine with that, really.  Yet these are also things that have been heavily automated in today's world, and base plastic feedstock for other work is done by automated systems: the days of someone hand tending to mixing and such are pretty far behind us.  The same is true with machine parts, as CNC lathes and end mills have been around for decades, and at a hobbyist level since the late 1990's.  And circuitry would require material for circuit boards, which are mass produced by machine, and fitted with semiconductors, also mass produced by machine, and then fitted on to circuit boards and for the less complex types those are also fitted by machines.  People can do these things, yes, and for complex circuit boards that is almost a necessity.  So where is the automated equipment for this?

On a game balance side it would be suitable for individuals with some skill in these areas to run machines to produce the consumables out of materials and be more efficient per hour than an automated system (using productivity and number of personnel as a game balance concept).  What the machines have going for them is continuous, though slower, output.  Too bad the idea was to ship people with lots of equipment to give them busy work when there are machines that could do that already.  Having people do it and be more productive would be a fun game-balance system, where it might make sense to have a few people doing stuff by hand at the start, but to then start making automated equipment or shipping it in from Earth so that a lot of the background maintenance and low level construction materials are made by machines.  Yes there is a mod for this and it is there for that very reason: the game, itself, makes no sense in this venue.

So that's two major strikes against the game for lacking realism of mirroring the real world and efficiently utilizing modern technology (not the 'out there' stuff of some SF) to ensure the safety and productivity of a colony far away on another planet (and it could be any planet that had a similar setting in a much higher SF category, say Stellaris).  Getting the colony started should be and is hard to manage, and a lot of pre-planning needs to go in and then the player needs to execute on their plans and adjust as events happens.  Artificial disasters that would have been stopped before they even started aren't necessary for this game, but as it focuses more on the management end of things rather than the actual technical end, it hands those out because of no one thinking of safety and maintenance as critically linked for survival. The focus of the game designers was on trying to achieve this survival via artifice, and not through overcoming obstacles and actual disasters of the types expected on Mars.

Visually it is a wonderful game, and laying out where everything should go and watching the drones get to work on it is a real treat, similar to watching an outpost station or any space structure being made in Stellaris.  Individual colonists have a thumbnail psychiatric profile, meters to show how they are feeling about things and the entire personnel management concept is available for those who enjoy that sort of thing.  The buildings and what they actually do needs an overhaul, and there are mods that add in buildings that would more naturally fit into the colony concept and attempt to add game balance via their own staffing, costs and maintenance mechanics.  The base game ones aren't all that good but do the job of having the player focus on the sorts of people to be brought to a rather limited colony.  As a bonus it is possible to actually zoom in on individuals and see what they are doing in most places, which is fun in a voyeuristic sort of way.

The stories should be more varied in such a game, or have many overlapping smaller decisions like in Crusader Kings II, which becomes a very personnel oriented system when it isn't a Grand Strategy RPG.  Surviving Mars falls in-between so many existing Paradox published games that it is one that is easy to dismiss as it doesn't do any of the things it attempts to do very well.  Would an actual colony and Mars be run anything like this?  No.  Anyone going there would know this is a one-way trip as even a few months without constant weight training will cause bone deminiralization and changes to heart strength.  With only 40% the gravity of Earth, living on Mars has severe ramifications to any prospective colonists.  Getting 'Earthsick' is done in the face of having to spend  years of building up muscle strength, rebuilding lost bone material and getting the heart used to actually being under the strain of 1g.  That individual may get 'Earthsick' and may not like Mars, but the process of going back would be severe, not to speak of the weakened immune system as is seen with people isolated running bases in Antarctica during the winter there.  Psychiatric problems would be expected, yet the way to deal with them is to point out the utter reality of the willing decision made by that individual.  Unless you land and immediately want back on the same rocket (which took weeks or months to go each way), there is little to no real prospect of return.  Go as a colonist to Mars is a one-way trip unlike that of any other colonist in history.

That is not to say that the game is bad for not realizing this actual problem!  There are infirmaries that the player can build on Mars, and they need to be open and staffed for all shifts to deal with a multi-shift environment.  As the Martian day, or 'sol' is just a few minutes longer than an Earth day, the circadian rhythm adjustment to work cycles will not be severe.  People used to working a day shift will suffer problems for working another shift, and that is something that should have been included in character profiles when choosing prospective colonists.  That would be handy to get people who like working the evening or night shift, or are flexible enough to work any shift actually appear in the screening process.  A simple additional trait check would allow for this to take place, with the assumption that if shift work isn't mentioned then the default is day shift only.

Colonist screening, back on Earth, is not very good at filling the pool of available people with those who can suffer a bit of hardship in their lives on an on-going basis.  Yet a simple check would be to take anyone who is a prospective colonist out camping for a week, with minimal support and help to see how they fare in a controlled situation where a modicum of roughing it is required.  This would help to weed out the prospect pool no end, and allow for traits that would hinder the prospective colony to show up early and be removed from the pool. Of the negative traits the ones of 'Idiot' and 'Glutton' would be easy to identify and the former could be politely told that they really aren't making the cut for various reasons.  Space travel and colonies in space are very harsh environments in which true idiots may not accidentally kill themselves but tens or hundreds of others by doing something incredibly stupid.  Space is an iron bar to such people, the Moon is a harsh mistress, and Mars is the nastiest task-master around.  There are times when warm bodies are needed for a colony, but choosing someone who might get many, many people killed by being an idiot is something that a player should only consider as a last resort and that person put where they can do the least amount of harm.  Why ANY sponsor would support idiots for a project they want to succeed is a very deep problem in the game mechanics for colonists.  Not a strike against it as those people can be sorted out of your prospective pool by the search tools provided, but why they even show up in the first place is beyond me.  Possibly for 'fun', of a masochistic sort?  If so check that 'assorted forms of fun' box for the game!

The game offers good choices on difficulty and a few bits, like maintenance, can be turned off, though you don't get achievements when doing so.  There are harsher choices available for the technology section (either a fully or mostly randomized research tree, instead of just lightly randomized), and ways to ask for more disasters or the entire planet suffering a severe cold spell for beyond the length of the game.  A setting for one group of colonists only is available as well as not being able to get food from Earth.  The game modes are various and the choice of what type of person will administer the colony will get differences in immediate small events that are generally short-term in nature.  I do have personal preferences in both setting and administration and those choices will change the way you actually develop a colony.

The skewed maintenance and game mechanics are meant to be challenging, when the actual challenges would tend to be deeper and harder.  Daily maintenance should be a real thing for the game, and breakdowns rare if the colonists are mentally stable and fit enough to do such jobs.  These don't need to be high end jobs, mind you, but necessary ones for people who want to earn their way as a colonist.  Maintenance and support functions are just that: necessary functions.  Necessary functions should be well regarded and people doing them treated with respect as these are dirty jobs that, if they aren't done, have real and even lethal ramifications to them.  Game mechanics for drone hub zones of control are good ones, so that large zones can be used for general control over wide areas, while smaller zones can help address problematic areas.  Putting depots down to facilitate the movement of supplies across a colony is a subtle game mechanic, and even when air transport is available on Mars, the basics cannot be overlooked.  Getting to a colony that mostly manages itself, internally, and only needs guidance for external and marginal expansion is a role the player will transition to over the course of game play.  Moving from micromanagement to macromanagement gives the player a good 'feel' for what they've put down and can applied their knowledge to address any problems that crop up during a given run.  That is a hard thing to do, going from day-to-day management to the long-term needs of a colony, and kudos for Surviving Mars for doing it well.

That is the strongest part of the game, moving from day-to-day or even hourly concerns at the very start to then managing a functioning colony as an overseer, of sorts.

There are features that are problematical, like the tunnels that only allow support functions (electricity, air, water) to pass through it, yet drones adhering to a static hub cannot transition zones of control via the tunnel.  Nor is it possible to build an inter-dome connecting passageway through a tunnel.  Really, if getting to different elevations for large drones that can take direct orders is possible then why not people in environmental suits?  The investment in those pieces of architecture is large, and providing a human walkable surface should be part of that investment.  It is a quibble, yes, and for game mechanics a player must show they understand the roles of the larger drones in colony development.  Once a drone hub gets established on the other side of the tunnel connecting lowlands to uplands, then development in the new area can proceed.

Managing isolated colony sites with no easy connections back to the main colony is a real and necessary growing step for playing Surviving Mars, so that everything learned when developing the main site can then be applied to new ones: the player should be familiar enough with the game mechanics to get a modicum of success via expansion of the colony on the game map.  Structurally that is well thought out, and even with the need to build tunnels, something like that would be necessary as the actual necessary resources tend to be at some distance from each other.  Setting up a colony just for mining, or just for scientific purposes is a real thing in Surviving Mars, thus specialization in function for new colony sites is something the player must take into consideration.

To sum it up, the things that Surviving Mars does well is at the large scale end of things and providing a good set of growth mechanics that a player will have to master from the very start of the game.  Expect the first few runs to fail for various reasons, especially lack of resources and running out of the starting budget.  Shipping Rare Earth material to Earth on return rocket flights will garner need cash infusions, though it is to be remembered they are also need for colony maintenance.  While there are some deep and extreme questionable decisions in colonist choice, they can be adjusted with search tools... mind you, home grown Idiots are your own problem for lack of a good school system.  Yes, you need one of those, though the Nursery tends to be a generic place to dump off kids as there are no (as in none) game mechanics for families, all the way down to not having family names associated with an actual family (the names are generic from what I can see).  Ditto the School which can be considered to be Primary and early Secondary education for unspecified general labor candidates.  The Martian University and higher level research institute are also available with later game research.

The difficulties are artificial and ramped up in nature, and the sidereal day or 'sol' actually covers a time period closer to weeks or a month.  Otherwise the hurdle of keeping a colony going for 10 sols would be the equivalent of 10 days, plus anyone having a child on Mars during that time would have conception take place on Earth...yet that is a major game event that can happen just a few sols into colony development.  What the actual time span covered in game play is...that is a bit hard to pin down.  Some of the artificial difficulties can be removed for non-achievement game play, like having a huge pool of colonists always available or having infinite money or resources.  And if you are looking for a more relaxing form of the game, then those settings offer it.

Personally I was expecting to see a bit more of what has actually been mapped on Mars to show up in game play and where you start.  Yet if you choose a custom start location, what appears is one of the few standard maps with resources scattered around it in a standard way for that region.  That is questionable, given that the entire surface had been thoroughly mapped when the game was in design, and creating a 3D database to draw from and smooth out for game play should have been a real thing.  That would have made it a bit more 'immersive' and allow for players to pick interesting areas with interesting terrain and surroundings and have that reflected in the game, itself.  But that was just a personal expectation, only.  If you don't like nitty-gritty resources grinds and city management games, then this will not be your cup of tea.  And if you are expecting something like CK2 levels of personnel interactions, then you will want to shy away from this game, as well.  As a city builder it starts at the very low end and works its way up to the very high end of city management, save that you are the one choosing sites, buildings and having to track resources, thus if you are expecting a more automated builder, then this is a warning flag that Surviving Mars isn't that sort of game.

Surviving Mars isn't a bad experience, by any stretch of the imagination.  Past its major faults, quirks, and quibbles, the game runs smoothly and well for what it is.  Yet it could have been so much more.  At this point it would require a DLC that overhauls some of the basic mechanics, adds in new ones to address actual automated equipment and put in personnel as something to focus on beyond the generic level.  Better and more diverse buildings, an actual maintenance system that makes sense, and perhaps a bit less of the sudden event style of emergencies and addressing some of the short and long term problems of colony growth would all be required to make the game more compelling.  Review the mods available for it to see if the way things are going in the mod community can address concerns, and make a purchase decision knowing that it is a game with major flaws in it, yet is still an entertaining game.  I put my personal threshold on the purchase decision at $15 and paid a bit more for the whole game with DLCs.  Not a bad game for a total of $20, but the entire package feels like a complete game, and is a decent buy at that price point.  I'm not a great fan of city builder games, yet Surviving Mars has the feel of a decent enough game in need of serious polish and some overhauling, even with the DLC content.