In management and sim titles, players are typically faced with the biggest challenges that particular niche has to offer. In a restaurant sim, for instance, you might be desperately trying to please all patrons during the lunchtime rush, getting every order spot-on and in a super fast fashion. That’s difficult enough, but at least you won’t have to cope with alien invasions or customers being sucked out of an airlock. Managing a space colony definitely isn’t for the faint-hearted. Survival colony sims are full of harsh challenges, but this setting just takes things a step even further.
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Which is exactly why so many space games have a heavy emphasis on doing just that. Sometimes the colony is the key focus of the experience, while other games include colony management as one smaller part of a wider outer space adventure. Whatever the case, though, these brilliant games will all have you juggling all kinds of responsibilities to keep your little space settlements running.
6
Oxygen Not Included
A Deceptively Deep Challenge
Oxygen Not Included has a great sense of humor, wonderful animation, and an adorably cartoony art style. It’s easy to be disarmed by its charm, then, but you’re making a big mistake if you underestimate this one. The duplicants you must care for in the game face all the risks you might expect from their inhospitable asteroid environment, from potential ailments to hunger and a lack of — of course– oxygen, and managing all these needs while ensuring that they keep up their work that is vital for the colony’s survival (expansion, maintaining power, gathering supplies, and so on) can become extremely hectic very quickly.
If you can successfully juggle everything, hopping from menu to menu to get a better understanding of everybody’s status and working conditions, you might find a spare moment to read a Dark Souls-style document or two, providing some fascinating context about the setting and what happened to our beloved Earth. Sophisticated physics also mean that you need to be aware of every move you make and how it could affect the duplicants, both individually and collectively.
5
Surviving Mars
The Myriad Challenges Of The Red Planet
Here in the real world, one of humanity’s greatest ambitions is to travel to and ultimately colonize Mars. The difficulties of establishing ourselves in such an utterly inhospitable environment, of course, are many and complicated. As we wait to see how our greatest scientists, engineers, and experts in a wide range of other fields tackle them, we can get some sense of it all from the excellent city-builder Surviving Mars.
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Shelter, food and water supplies, oxygen, waste disposal, buildings, vehicles, communications, a power system, and maintenance for all of these things are bare essentials for said survival. Even before all of that, you have to set up a company and manage a customizable budget to determine what you can bring to Mars in your landers in the first place, establishing the presence of remote-controlled vehicles like rovers to prepare the area before considering taking humans there. Even with a relatively stable base set up and a bustling colony, though, the joy of Surviving Mars is its unpredictability. The planet’s often-destructive climate can put many long- and short-term plans at risk, and depending on where you choose to settle on the planet, certain conditions such as dust storms are more or less likely. You’ve got to balance your risks, because you can’t avoid everything. Nor can you count on your colonists themselves in the long term, because they have changing moods to account for as well. The game’s a thrilling mix of balancing what’s in your control and what isn’t, in order to secure the most funding and keep conditions on Mars as ‘comfortable’ as you can.
4
Stellaris
One Of The Biggest Space Games Of All
In some space titles, the gameplay revolves entirely around the concept of building a colony and helping it to develop and survive. Stellaris, as players will know well, is a gigantic and intimidatingly ambitious game, of which maintaining a colony is just a small part. It’s a strategy title that delves into a little of everything besides, getting better as you play. From developing a trade empire to, if you wish, declaring war on the rest of the universe and leaving devastation in your wake, you can do as you wish.
The key, as with similar genre entries such as the Civilization series, is to play to the strength of the people you’ve chosen to play. Colonies are valuable whatever your playstyle, though, as they provide a new planet that you can develop as you wish to further your cause. Colony Ships are necessary to do so, as is a nearby planet that has a high enough Habitability rating to be able to support life (of whichever form you intend to establish a colony there). Different species and types of planet have their own requirements, and there are rights of diplomatic access to a planet that will be necessary too. From there, it’s all about the right production priorities to ensure that your new colony is adding to your empire rather than draining resources from it, which again involves a balancing act of construction priorities to keep inhabitats happy and supportive, yet productive.
3
RimWorld
The Spacefaring Life Is A Dangerous One
RimWorld is well known for being full of pitfalls that can be very difficult to navigate, particularly for inexperienced players. Still, as we’ve firmly established by now, that’s all par for the course when you establish a colony in space. Your colonists are known as pawns, and you’re going to be keeping them hard at work for most of your experience with the game. There’s a lot of freedom to build your base as you wish, in terms of sizing and layout, but the basic rooms you’ll need, from bedrooms to barracks, are really non-negotiable. The thing to keep track of in RimWorld is how your pawns’ needs scale upwards, with the rec room, for instance, offering increasingly sophisticated entertainment options as you develop the resources to provide them.
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Eventually, your colony will grow to have a well-equipped hospital and so on. This can be vital, because just as in Oxygen Not Included, sickness is an ever-present threat to be wary of. Your colony can also be raided for supplies, and when it is, a meticulously thought-out floorplan can pay off in a big way when you’re plotting routes to taking down intruders. Jobs like mining are very important too, so keeping your pawns on the most relevant tasks during the moment-to-moment of play can require considerable micromanagement. Some titles are scary enough to make you fear outer space, and this one certainly has its moments too.
2
No Man’s Sky
Colonies Are Yet Another Facet Of The Game
It’s fair to say that No Man’s Sky was a bit of a late bloomer, when it came to delivering on Hello Games’ initial idea for the title. Nonetheless, the team is at least to be celebrated for sticking with it during the post-launch backlash. It’s an open-world title that truly adapted to fan feedback. The end result was one of the most ambitious and now-iconic space games yet. The key appeal, for many, was the idea of exploring the universe together with friends, and to facilitate that, cross-platform play was implemented. Groups of players like to create their own colonies, by building bases that join together into a sort of outer space community, but there’s more to it than that.
In No Man’s Sky, colonies are technically referred to as Planetary Settlements. Larger planets may have multiple settlements, and they may each be working towards a different priority. It’s all about the number of responsibilities you want to take on, and how advantageous it may be to your cause to do so. The player can take the role of the Overseer of a settlement, which involves everything from broadly deciding the order in which projects are built to conversations with the locals to ensure things continue to run smoothly. Those in your settlement have to be kept happy, after all. If you spent a lot of time as Pribyslavitz’s bailiff in Kingdom Come: Deliverance‘s DLC, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect here.
1
Plan B: Terraform
Developing A Huge Population
We often imagine colonies on distant planets simply as small groups of intrepid scientists and adventurers. A dozen people, say. That may very well be how these setups start, in games and eventually in real life. Humanity’s ultimate aim may be to spread across the universe and find a new home (or homes), though, so it’s good to see a game that’s rather more ambitious in terms of population size.
Plan B: Terraform, at first, seems like a cross between Factorio and Terra Nil. It has the in-depth factory building of the former and the careful utilization of environmental-revitalization technology of the latter. Where it truly shines is in the way it blends both of these challenges and adds a sense of enormous scale. In this game, your planets can reach a population of one million people, so you’ll be crafting enormous colonies you have ultimate control over. In order to keep your colonists happy and ensure they have space to grow and the resources they need to survive, you can freely manipulate the land to build your settlements as you wish, flattening inconveniently-placed mountains and everything.
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