Paradox is giving Cities: Skylines a sci-fi cousin set on Mars

Paradox Interactive has explored the history of Europe and the future of galactic politics, but now it’s working with developer Haemimont Games to show one of the steps between those two extremes.

The publisher announced today that it is bringing the game Surviving Mars to its PDXCON fan event in Stockholm this weekend. Surviving Mars from Haemimont is a colony-management sim where players must build and then maintain a habitat on the barren red planet. The game is due out in 2018 for PC, Mac, and Linux as well as PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Surviving Mars will give Paradox a sci-fi take on the management genre, which is a space the company currently dominates with its megapopular Cities: Skylines.

“We feel that strategy and management games are at their best when they let the player experience the unique story being told by their decisions, and Surviving Mars is going to have that in a big way,” Haemimont chief executive Gabriel Dobrev said in a statement. “Your colonists aren’t just working to improve production, they’re struggling to survive.”

Through that struggle, players will learn about the trials of living on another world on a colonist-by-colonist basis. These martian settlers will present challenges, and you will have to come up with useful and creative ways to deal with those problems.

“We’ve wanted to work with Haemimont Games for years, and it looks like the stars have finally aligned,” Paradox boss Fredrik Wester said. “Expanding our management-strategy catalog has been something we’ve wanted to do for some time, after the successful launch of Cities: Skylines and building the player community around that genre. Finding a developer who shares our core design tenets is always gratifying, but with Haemimont and Surviving Mars we’re going to be giving our players a new experience that’s uniquely their own.”