I happen to agree: I like Austin's weather better than Seattle, but everyone I talk to disagrees with me. Don't get me wrong, I have no love of the 40+ consecutive days of 100+ heat, but overall, I'd take it over the darkness and cold of the Seattle area.
I didn't include crime rates just because unless they are super high, they don't really factor too much into the financial calculus of living in either place.
Mars Colony RTS could be an ancient back story to my game ...
A code is entered. Everything goes white, then off-white. A bit of orange sky and ground shows up. Sand. There is sand everywhere, on the ground and in the sky. It would get in your eyes, if you had eyes. The sand is blowing and going everywhere.
Something black slowly emerges beneath the blowing sand. It's fixed in the ground like a black hatch. As more sand blows a little more of the black hatch is revealed. There are tiny lines and squares not quite visible on the surface of the hatch. It's not a hatch at all. It's a solar panel buried in the sand.
Days pass, and just enough sunlight filters through, and magically somewhere below a machine has come to life. It has activated itself. It is unknown how long the machine has been buried beneath the sand.
Within a few weeks, the machine is visible. It is only partially buried. You have a choice. There are controls on the machine. It is not just a machine but appears to be a vehicle as well. Forward, left, right and reverse are the basic controls. You press forward and a gentle whirring noise starts, but the machine is stuck in the sand. You press reverse and the entire vehicle jiggles a bit but nothing more.
Maybe back and forth? You toggle between pressing forward and reverse. And, after a bit of this the machine starts to move a little more than jiggle. But, it slows. You've used a little too much power. A few more weeks pass and you can try again.
The batteries or whatever is powering this unit seem to be very low. But, you try again anyways to wiggle the machine out from being stuck in the sand. There really is no one else around. The sky, the ground, the sand, and this little vehicle with a solar panel on top of it. Today the machine seems to move a little more. And, over the weeks of recharging, more of the sand has blown away. You notice one other smaller button off to the side of the main movement controls. You press it, and an elaborate console appears.
Came here to say this, but just asteroids / O'Neil cylinders.
I (was going to say personally, but actually this is exactly what O'Neil said) find Mars settlement to be an unpleasant pipe dream compared with these options.
But, in the context of a game, Mars might be more fun.
ONI is a 2D (from the side) base / colony builder where you keep a bunch of workers alive. They need oxygen, food, shelter and sanitation, and a whole bunch of optional things.
You, as a player, can only tell what needs to be done. The workers will do it (whenever they feel like). You can prioritize jobs, and you can prioritize tasks per worker. (I.e. you want one to build, one to cook, etc)
Workers that are happy can take on more complex jobs. Workers become more happy if more needs are met, or with better quality (e.g. better food, nice bed, nice bedroom, nice place to eat, long breaks, good sleep)
You can automate a lot of things, but they’re all pretty hard. The game has pretty high difficulty and will be a constant challenge. There are many ways to solve specific problems, all with distinct advantages and disadvantages.
There are, for example, literally 10s of different ways to get food for your workers, plant based, animal based, or mixed. Animals require other resources (eg plants). The plants and animals usually have distinct requirements, like they need the environment to be hot or cold, or they need specific kind of food/fertilizer/water. The plants and animals will usually also produce some kind of resource. For example, there’s a type of animal that eats iron ores and poops refined iron, or one that consumes carbon dioxide and poops coal. There’s an animal that likes to live in a room filled with Hydrogen that will grow plastic fur, but it still needs oxygen to breath (so you need a room that has both hydrogen and oxygen in a certain balance)
The animals are all… creative.
All machines produce heat, so your base will very slowly heat up until you setup active cooling (which is a huge challenge). You can cool down the air you produce (oxygen) before it’s being circulated, or you can cool down the machines, or you can move the machines away from the base (somewhere isolated).
Some things require very cold environments or very hot. Some chemical processes require you to heat up a room or floor to over 400C, while food can be preserved near indefinitely in a room of carbon dioxide at -21C. (But workers can’t breathe in there so they better not get stuck in there).
You can create steam power plants by building steel rods into magma and cooling these rods with water, but have fun trying to keep your steam at reasonable temperatures because if uncontrolled your steam will be over 1000C and will certainly break something and escape your steam room and spread everywhere, destroying or killing anything on its path before condensing into water again.
Many of these processes require specific materials that can resist or transfer heat easily, or insulate heat, or doesn’t easily melt. Some materials are hard to get, or require starting new colonies on other planets, or require mining “ore fields” with rockets. (DLC content)
You can choose what materials to use in many buildings. For example, you can have a heat pump made of iron, but it will overheat very quickly so cooling it will be hard. You can make a heat pump out of steel, so it’s much easier to deal with but steel is harder to produce (it requires resources gathered that comes in low quantities inside eggs, or can be dug up from deep biomes which are very hot and will kill your workers without protection)
Store it on the Bitcoin blockchain in the OP_RETURN field [1][2]. Note that this is considered an abuse of the system and discouraged, but of all the systems available now, Bitcoin is most likely to still be around in some form in 500 years IMO.
- I'd be very surprised if Apple releases their AR headset without a similar-size (70% or more) investment over the preceding decade. RDT&E for environment-aware devices is incredibly expensive.
- Defense funding and procurement amounts often shock those not in the industry, but the truth is that the entire market for most of what the DoD funds is...the DoD. Sure, a lot of the components and IP can be reused in the commercial sector, but for most programs the DoD has to fund both the initial R&D and the unit sales, because the market is so much smaller and device sales are heavily restricted (e.g. ITAR). The DoD also has MUCH broader and stricter requirements for security, safety, reliability, and compliance with a daunting array of standards and processes than the commercial industry. To be clear, this is on net a good thing for the DoD and by extension the rest of the USA, but it does increase development costs.
Certainly there is profit being made by Microsoft here, that's kind of the point of partnering with the DoD. But the intuitive comparison of "DoD programs should cost the same as developing a commercial equivalent" that many of us make is fundamentally apples and oranges in both the product development and the economics.
