Friday Blog 154 - Criticizing CS

A lot of our menus, like the science menu and the stockpile, are “handcrafted” in Unity. Other menus, like the colony menu and a lot of the pop-up menus there, are generated from code. This code can also be used by modders for their own custom menus.

The old code didn’t offer a lot of options, and it resulted in pretty bare-bones menus. Zun is currently working to upgrade this code, giving us more formatting options, allowing us to present them in a more beautiful and intuitive manner. Currently, this doesn’t have any impressive visual results yet, but when it’s done it should pretty much instantly transform a decent part of the UI.

Something else this week did have very concrete results. We’ve had some intense discussions about the current content. Two weeks ago, we also talked about 0.8.0, but we were mostly talking about content to be added pretty much after the end of the current tech tree. But this week, we were talking about radically restructuring the tech tree that’s already in-game. I made a small “map” that explains how the current tech tree feels to me:

Fullscreen From left to right: 1# The banner range upgrades; #2 The stove and related happiness items; #3 The upgrades regarding metals and weapons, culminating in multiple colonies; #4 The health upgrades

The banner range upgrades have a nice, consistent feel to them. It’s clear that recruiting more colonists results in a bigger safe zone. But it’s separated from the rest of the tech tree.

There’s a bunch of “bad” science surrounding the stove. A lot of the unlocks have weird prerequisites related to their predecessors; requiring honey to unlock fish, requiring fish to unlock olives, that kind of thing. And these unlocks are often not useful in isolation: a fisherman is useless without a stove to turn raw fish into edible fish. Thirdly, once you’ve unlocked all stove-related science, you’ve got pretty much all of the happiness items you need to get to the endgame.

Then there’s the health sciences. They’re pretty much disconnected from the rest of the tech tree. They’re a fun diversion for the curious, but not much more than that.

There’s one main line forward, and it starts with the science related to new ores and metals and how to convert them into weapons, added in 0.4.0. When that’s finished, there’s a massive threshold added mostly into 0.7.0, with advanced science bags, gliders, colony starter kits and traders. They’re hard to unlock, and when that’s done, they don’t offer any practical benefit until you’ve actually travelled a long distance and set up a second, distant colony. And then the only purpose is new happiness items - which aren’t really needed when you’ve got an efficient small colony.

The current tech tree isn’t the result of one coherent strategy. Over the time of multiple years we prioritized different problems and tried to fix them with different solutions. The tech tree reflects that: it’s a patchwork that’s pretty disjointed in a lot of places. Some parts rely heavily on science bags, others ignore it pretty much completely. Some parts have very light requirements, while others become a lot more costly pretty randomly.

We want to fix that. The tech tree should be a more unified whole, consistently rewarding the same type of activities. Steps should be short and simple in the beginning, but should smoothly grow harder but more rewarding over time. Each unlock in the tech tree should be useful by itself, and shouldn’t rely on three following unlocks before they have tangible results.

The tech tree shouldn’t be over when you’ve got 150 colonists. One way to do this is by extending the tech tree with meaningful, rewarding content, and we definitely want to do that. But we also want to make it more “labor intensive” to reach the end of the game. Even the current content should require more colonists.

The game should still be challenging when your colony grows, so currently, there’s a lot of costs that scale as you recruit more colonists. Every new colonist requires food, happiness items and it will attract more monsters (requiring you to produce ammo and recruit guards).

But balancing this is pretty hard. Some (more experienced) players will run very efficient colonies, where all colonists spend their time on important tasks. Other colonies won’t be like that, with long walking distances, idling colonists and colonists crafting items that aren’t very relevant. These could just be inexperienced players, or players focused on building a beautiful colony instead of a hyper efficient one. If the game is balanced properly for this second category, the first category will quickly build up huge surpluses and won’t encounter much challenge as their colony grows bigger. They’ll also reach the end of the tech tree much quicker.

So we’re thinking of introducing more “fixed costs”. Instead of pushing for efficiency by making colonists themselves very expensive, we want to make “progress” itself more expensive: an example would be the Repeating Scientists who use data (talked about it in this blog) , but also by making science and “permanent items” like job blocks and weapons more expensive (more labor intensive, especially). This should negate the negative effects mentioned above. To balance out these increased costs, we might make the "daily cost" of having a colonist a bit lower, with for example a bit less happiness items being required, especially at the start.

Implementing this requires us to overhaul the entire tech tree and the full production chain. We’re reconsidering the costs of all science and all items. If we’re going to do this, it’ll be a massive overhaul, and we hope it’ll be worth it. But your opinion is important. What do you think of this analysis? Do you recognize it in your own playthroughs and do you think it’s important to fix these? Or are we completely missing the mark and/or overstating the negative consequences? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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