Surviving Mars: Martian Express Review (BamBam)
I can give Martian Express a cautious recommendation.
A very cautious recommendation.
Do trains have a niche in this game? Yes. Absolutely.
They are far cheaper to maintain shuttles. A shuttle network guzzles fuel, and trains only use a little bit of power.
They are far lower tech than shuttles, accessible at the beginning, and the upgrades are pretty cheap.
They can operate in conditions shuttles can't.
They are very good at rapidly moving large quantities of resources, which is not necessarily a good thing. (more later)
They can move air and water back and forth, and the track is far more robust than piping or cable.
BUT...
They only work on relatively flat maps. No accommodation exists for maps with plateaus, valleys, etc.
They aren't very good at 'sharing' resources between bases.
The tracks can be obscenely expensive to set up. I built a track that covered 2/3's of the map and it cost more concrete than a Mega Dome. They gobble up concrete. The trains themselves can be pretty pricey as well.
Tracks are built or demolished as a single unit; you cannot repurpose a track once built. If you want to upgrade or reorganize your train network, you basically have to demolish and rebuilt it in its entirety.
Tracks are VERY FINICKY in how they are laid. 'That curve is too tight', 'you need to clear those rocks first,' etc.
Moving air or water is very tricky. Honestly, I wish they just had a utility hookup like a water tank.
Drones tend to store whatever the hell they want in the train stations. I say, Don't put the fuel in the train stations, and they stack the stations full of fuel anyway.
You cannot move individual trains between separated sets of rail.
You cannot choose whether you want to make colonists commute or move. Many a colonist was working a job in a different dome 1/4 of the map away with my supply train.
And most importantly..
They are far more difficult than shuttles to use.
Trains are very good at SEND ALL THE EVERYTHING TO POINT X but terrible at SEND SOME STUFF TO POINT X BUT LEAVE THE REST. For instance, I (accidentally) sent a huge chunk of my food supply to a small mining outpost in the middle of nowhere. I looked around thinking, Where the hell is all my food, and the trains had shipped it all to one base. With shuttles, you place a stockpile, you say, I want 12 food in this stockpile, and the shuttles do the rest. Trains have no functionality like that. It's just, SEND ALL THE EVERYTHING. Also, they are vulnerable to the whole THE STORAGE IS FULL WHICH MEANS THE SUPPLY LINES WILL SHUT DOWN AND PEOPLE WILL DIE, but that is very common theme in resource management games in general.
Now that I've got that griping in..
Trains work great when you just want to move a lot of stuff and don't care about volume. Want to move all your waste rock to a processing area? Trains might be what you need. And you can use them to artificially increase the range of your domes to access resource deposits, which is wonderful. A train is far cheaper than a mining dome. Want an unmanned outpost that exists solely to send water and concrete back to base? Trains fit the bill wonderfully. Don't want to build an independent life support grid for a mining outpost you're going to abandon the second it runs dry? Build a train. Too bad you can't repurpose the track you built to get to the mining outpost for another mining outpost. Unless your track is very long, trains usually outpace the rate drones can fill stations. Trains are strong in many of the areas where shuttles are weak, but shuttles are so much better implemented.
I do like the trains, and will use them in future playthroughs. But they are so damn temperamental.