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Turn-based colony builder on the red planet Terraformers is out now

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After a while in Early Access, Terraformers from Asteroid Lab and Goblinz Publishing / IndieArk is officially out now with the 1.0 update. Another great looking game that offers Native Linux support.

You face the challenge of turning the rather barren Mars into a lush thriving planet, capable of supporting a growing number of people. In a way it's similar to Surviving Mars, however it's turn-based instead of real-time and gives you a procedurally generated world to start anew each time.

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Some of what's new in the 1.0 update include:

  • Found new cities on the nearby moons of Phobos and Deimos.
  • Construct new buildings, complete new space projects, and research new technologies.
  • Contend with five new events, including the catastrophic asteroid event.
  • Two new leaders, each with their own background, skills, and perks.
  • Weekly Challenge mode - play a specific game each week with modifiers and test your skills in multiple difficulties while having your success streak tracked.
  • New animations to make cities more lively.
  • Earn 62 new Steam achievements.
  • Go back to different instances of your colonies with multiple saves.

Curious about this one, since I'm a big fan of strategy games and I love sci-fi themes like this, I decided to pick it up and see what it was like. I can easily see why so many people like it, it definitely gives off that feeling of needing "just one more turn" so you can keep on expanding. Even though it can be a difficult balancing act on all the resources, the support and happiness of your people and the random events, it always feels pretty chilled out.

Available to buy on GOG and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
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3 comments

soulsource Mar 13, 2023
This is my current "just one more turn" game... The good thing is that a single playthrough doesn't take more than a couple of hours, so I can usually stop at some point during the night.

I'm exaggerating, of course, but it is extremely captivating, as you need to balance a ton of parameters with very limited options.
I can definitely recommend this game for everyone who likes card-games and turn-based 3-X.

(A word of warning: I haven't seen any bugs in 1.0 yet, but the last Early Access build was still quite buggy.)


Last edited by soulsource on 13 March 2023 at 1:44 pm UTC
Philadelphus Mar 13, 2023
I've been playing Terraformers a lot throughout Early Access (I enjoyed it so much I submitted an article about it almost a year ago), and they've added some nice improvements with the full release. The biggest one that comes to mind is that there's now an indicator to give you an idea of when you might get the dreaded "Rising expectations" event based on how well your luck has been going. (That's one of the few things I might change about the game: having expectations rise steadily rather than jumping. But perhaps they tried that and it wasn't as fun, who knows.) There's also a new weekly challenge and the ability to create your own custom challenge instead of using one of the preset ones.

Besides that you can now build cities on Phobos and Deimos, there are a bunch of new projects and some new leaders, there are some minor visual changes that make cities look a little more lively, there are some new major random events you can get which add some unique new mid-game challenges (like a planet-killing asteroid strike or needing to rescue refugees from Earth), and there's just generally bit more polish on what was already a solid game. On the easier difficulty levels I find this to be a great relaxing game, just picking projects and expanding my cities to a chill soundtrack, while on harder difficulty levels every turn becomes an engaging puzzle to utilize every available resource and trick to maximize resource outputs and keep happiness up to stave off defeat. If you like terraforming Mars and turn-based games, I can definitely recommend this one.
soulsource Mar 14, 2023
Quoting: PhiladelphusOn the easier difficulty levels I find this to be a great relaxing game, just picking projects and expanding my cities to a chill soundtrack, while on harder difficulty levels every turn becomes an engaging puzzle to utilize every available resource and trick to maximize resource outputs and keep happiness up to stave off defeat.
The easier difficulties can be a bit off-putting though. They are so easy, that I can imagine that new players don't realize that Terraformers can actually be quite difficult; except for the first few games where you are stuck on easy mode.

The game is really challenging on "Utopian" and above, but you need to grind through easy mode a few time first, to unlock both, the difficulty levels and the cards needed to win them...
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