I honestly think the best approach would be to use old magma tunnels to establish a base deep underground. That provides sufficient shielding, and also gets the settlement closer to water reservoirs.

Don't forget perchlorate mitigation!

.. and the cold, and the storms…
hmmm

When, exactly, were we going to ship the rich people off to Mars? Asking for a friend.

Yeah, I guess. I've read on Wikipedia that a year on Mars gives a human 200 mSv of radiation. While the limit for US radiation workers is 50 mSv a year. So that's 4x the allowed dosis.

Still, I wonder how much that can be alleviated by metal shielding. A spaceship's outer walls are 5mm solid steel, and I've read somewhere that most of the radiation is particle radiation (not electromagnetic radiation), so that can be stopped with solid steel quite well. Unfortunately, I don't have any actual numbers, though.

Edit: Source

Edit:

250 mSv: 6-month trip to Mars—radiation due to cosmic rays, which are very difficult to shield against

Apparently I was wrong. It's not just particle radiation, it's actual electromagnetic radiation. Which is much more difficult to deal with.

Hmm yeah, airtight buildings are a challenge to construct.

That's why I've favored the people on Mars living in the spaceships. The building already exists, and is naturally air-tight (after all, it has been airtight for 6 months in outer space). But that has its downsides: less protection against radiation, mostly. (due to only having 5mm of steel and 200 kg/m² CO2 above your head instead of meters full of dirt and rock.)

Also need to factor in waste management as well. With sufficient bacteria and time, the effluents can be converted to compost. It will take a ton of algae bioreactors to prevent the CO2 generated from becoming toxic. Packaging can be buried, but I think it would be better if it was compostable as well.

We also need to consider fire suppression. A fire in a low gravity and/or high oxygen environment is going to be dangerous quickly and could harm critical systems. The fire suppression material itself could also imbalance the environment and , at minimum, could be a big hassle to clean up.

In regards to food growth, aeroponics can be fine tuned and automated, but this works best for leafy vegetables. Keep in mind that Mars doesn’t have the inert Nitrogen atmosphere that Earth does, so nitrogen fixing doesn’t work to our benefit, which means we’ll need to acquire sources of bio available nitrogen.

Phosphorous may also be a problem, since our best stores of that currently come from bird and bat guano.

oxygen could be produced from water and electricity though.

Heating/cooling: when you're exposed to 20°C water, it feels much colder than if you're exposed to 20°C air. That is because water has a higher density, and transports heat away from your body much faster. Now, mars has a very thin atmosphere. That means that it transports heat away from your body much more slowly. So even if it has -50°C, it will not feel likek -50°C on earth. Because you will feel only a fraction of that coldness.

I think that water is an important resource. Once that you have water and electricity, you can produce oxygen easily. And you need large quantities of water anyways.