Friday Blog 158 - Big Future Change: Uncoupling Difficulty from Colonist Count

"Borg Invasion!" by Landru

In the past weeks & months, we've thought a lot about improving the ‘gameplay flow’ of Colony Survival. In past blogs, we’ve already shared a lot of our ideas, and we’ve received a lot of great feedback. Thanks for that!

This week, we were suddenly gripped by a new idea that would shake things up dramatically. We want to uncouple the size of the nightly monster assault and the amount of happiness you’ve got to generate from the amount of colonists currently in your colony. Currently, the amount of monsters that spawns at night is linked directly to the amount of colonists, and every colonist present in your colony generates “+1 Unhappiness by Overpopulation”, which requires you to distribute more and more happiness items.

We organized things like this to keep the challenge of the game appropriate at all sizes. As you grow your colony, the size of the challenge grows with you. But you run into a bit of the same problem as the one in Skyrim. Enemies in Skyrim get stronger as you increase your level. This makes it very important to make sure you don’t “waste” levels. Imagine boosting your Enchanting very high but not using it to craft powerful gear. Enemies will have become stronger, but you didn’t. The same thing happens in Colony Survival. If you recruit a bunch of colonists but you don’t put them to work efficiently, you’ll have made the game quite difficult. On the other hand, if you do work very efficiently and stay relatively small, the game will be a lot easier - while you’re missing out on some core gameplay!

So we’re thinking of completely changing that system. Let’s give an example. At certain in-game thresholds, we expect players to have roughly X amount of colonists. For crossbows, that’s something like 50-100, for matchlock guns more like 150-250. We want to add new stages of the game that will ultimately require players to have around 800-1000 colonists.

But instead of making it so that the amount of monsters and the amount of required happiness items are tied directly to the amount of colonists you have, we could tie it to these stages. Around the point you unlock crossbows, you’ll get assaulted by monsters as if you’ve got 75 colonists. With matchlock guns, the game will act as if you’ve got 200 colonists. And when you progress to printing presses and steam engines, it’ll be as if you’ve got hundreds of colonists more.

You could run a tight, efficient colony that deals with these challenges with lower amounts of colonists. On the other hand, players are free to expand to far larger numbers and “brute-force” these challenges. Why solve a problem with 500 efficient colonists when 1000 inefficient colonists can do the same?

We really like the sound of these ideas, but we’ve got a hard time working out the details. We’re thinking of multiple approaches.

A.) Meta-levels

In the overhauled Colony Survival, there will be a ‘Repeating Scientist’, and to progress, you’ve got to upgrade your jobs from level 1 to level 5, 10, 15, 20, etcetera. There could be a “meta-level” that has to be reached before you can unlock them. To get Guard Level 5 / Health Level 5 / Banner Range Level 5, you need Meta-Level 5. Every time you upgrade the Meta-Level, more and stronger monsters will assault your colony, and you’ll need to produce more and more happiness items.

Pros

Does the job
Pretty straightforward

Cons

Adds another level of numbers and abstractions
How to deal with setbacks? What if monsters overwhelm your defenses and slaughter half of your colonists?
It strongly favors a balanced approach where everything is leveled to [current meta-level] before upgrading to [next meta-level] above colonies that are more specialized in certain things

B.) Meta-levels but this time it’s different

There’s still something like the meta-level that has to be increased, but instead of just using regular Data-Science-Bags-thingies, you’ll have to use resources/currencies that are only earned by specific tasks like slaughtering monsters and distributing happiness items. Players can voluntarily increase and decrease the size of monster attacks. If they want to improve at a decent pace, they’ll have to choose to fight relatively large monster attacks.

Pros

Voluntarism!
Liberty!
More rewards/resources/currencies!

Cons

A lot of players are going to set the challenge very low and progress in a very slow, grinding manner, and then complain the game is boring
If the monsters are so easy to control, the challenge is way less exciting

C.) A more indirect way like pollution

Factorio has a complex system where the monster threat is connected to pollution. As you increase the size of the factory and keep it running for hours and hours, the pollution slowly spreads across the map, triggering more and more alien colonies to send attackers in your direction. We could connect the challenges in CS to something else in such an indirect way as well.

Pros

”It Just Works”, doesn’t require players to figure out new systems
Could automatically scale up and down

Cons

What exactly will we tie the system to? It will discourage doing that activity, like it currently discourages recruiting colonists.

We haven’t found a perfect system yet, so we’re still pondering and discussing the subject. We’d love to have your opinion about the systems mentioned above, and if you’ve got a better idea, please share it!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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