Mars: 2025
Mars: 2025 is a free Web-based MMOG operated by Andrew V. Zakharov (aka "Devil")and Dmitry M. Kentsis (aka "Ashkael"), two Information Technology systems administrators in Russia. The game is an off-shoot of Earth:2025 and Earth players began in 2007 to migrate to The New game, which promised changes that Earth players had asked of Swirve.com president Mehul Patel for years. Mars is free but some premium features require a paid subscription.
The creators have also attributed their desire to create a game other than Earth to the language barrier barring many of the Russians they know from easily playing the English-based game. At one point there was a language-conversion tool that the Russian players were using, but due to security updates installed by Mehul the Russian version stopped working. The game thus far has two interfaces - English and Russian - and Spanish and German are on the way.
Players must build countries from scratch, and are ranked according to the networth of their countries. They are encouraged to form alliances with other countries, and clans with other players. There are currently five game variants: Primary, Alliance, Tournament, Express.
History of Mars: 2025
Development of Mars began in November 2006. Beta testing with a large contingent of Russian players began in January 2007. The first server, that for alliance play, went online Feb. 1 2007 and players from Earth began to move to the new game.
Gameplay on Mars
Introduction
Mars: 2025 is turn-based, and players build a country beginning with turn one. As a country grows, by gaining land, population, technology, military, buildings and resources - tons of food and oil - the game uses basic formulas to calculate a country's rank and a person can see their status in a scores screen.
Countries begin with 1 km² of empty land, a small sum of money, tonnes of food, 100 troops and some civilians.
Mars players begin ruling their country as a Monarchy form of government, but there are other types of governments, which all have their own strengths and weaknesses. A country's government can be changed any time through revolution.
Players in Mars:2025 can play either as individuals or as part of a clan. As an individual, the only way to win the game is to create the country with the highest networth and earn a higher rank. However, clans are ranked in several ways. They can win through either the highest average networth, the highest total networth, or through having the most members.
Clans may also organize wars against each other, and often do.
Servers
There are four servers in Mars: 2025: Primary, Alliance, Tournament and Express. Each server has its own community, politics, and message board.
The main differences of servers are:
Primary |
Alliance |
Tournament |
Express |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
Minutes per turn |
30 |
20 |
25 |
1 |
Max turns (stored) |
80 (80) |
120 (120) |
100 (75) |
500 (500) |
Clans supported? |
No |
Yes |
No |
No |
Other rules |
-Cheap UN membership |
-None |
-All countries are UN members. Free of charge. |
-No public market. |
Message board |
||||
Characteristics |
-Moderately paced server |
-More involved war strategy, clan intrigue. Time flows faster than Primary. |
-Fast-paced, uses ladder system of play to determine rank each monthly reset (the better you do, the higher game you play). |
-48-hours long and extremely fast paced. Players are all alone, no alliances, no public market. |
Turns
Play on Mars is turn-based. With turns players can construct infrastructure, explore for land, attack other countries, sell goods and technology on the public market, spy on other countries and send foreign aid to other players.
The goal
The most basic function of the game is to have the largest networth out of all countries, thus placing a player at the top of the scores chart. Side functions, depending on the server, can include warring with other countries or alliances.
In order to gain networth, a player gains land to construct as much buildings as possible, in turn producing resources and military, which all add to a player's overall networth. Land is a precious resource that can be gained through either exploring (explore rates dwindle the larger a country's area is) or attacking a country - known as a landgrab - and taking their land. When a country is attacked successfully, it not only loses land, but buildings on the land (which can be destroyed and built up in your country as you see fit), technology points, money, food and military resources. The attacking country will also lose some military resources and some turns (depending on government type).
Game story
Like other text-based games, Mars contains a back story as part of the entertainment of the game, designed to more fully immerse a player into the alternate reality on the Red Planet.
A full prehistory has been written for the game.
Extended features
Mars is similar to Earth in nearly every way except for several in-game features not available in Earth, such as:
- Target search
- Market analysis
- History analysis of a country.
- Viewing the country statuses of members in the alliance through a clan page.
- In-game clan foreign relations information.
- Spy operation trading between countries.
- Clans have a common spy op database
- Clan hosting and message boards.
- One-account login for all game servers.
- Clans/Alliances of five or more people will automatically carry over to the next rest.
- Once a person is part of an alliance they will remain tagged as part of that alliance until they are either kicked from the tag or choose to remove themselves, including between resets. A person's new country would be automatically placed in the same alliance each reset.
The target search, market and history analyses are premium features that require a subscription, however the other features are available through the basic free registration.