Colony Survival News

"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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Last week, we were talking about the planned overhaul. We were very enthusiastic, but we got quite some skeptical replies! We think we understand your concerns, and we hope we can convince you that we can prevent the feared issues from arising.

We believe Colony Survival is the most fun when you grow pretty large. Don’t stop at 20 colonists, recruit 200. Or 800. Or 1500! Of course, the game has to stay challenging, so the difficulty of the problems you face scale with you as your colony grows. Monsters keep becoming more numerous and stronger, you’ll need to produce more and more food, and overpopulation creates growing unhappiness that needs to be countered with happiness items.

But that means we’re punishing you for the thing we’re trying to encourage - growth. Currently, players are motivated to stay as small and as efficient as possible. Colonists have pretty high “upkeep costs” in the form of monsters, food and happiness items, so an inefficient colonist is a dangerous liability for the rest of the colony. In last week’s blog, we said we wanted to make things like textiles significantly more expensive. This would make a lot of current colonies unsustainable, with only the most efficient colonies surviving. This is not our goal!

While recruiting colonists is punished, there is another form of progress in the game that is actually extremely cheap. There is no durability or scientific regression in Colony Survival. Weapons and job blocks are usable for eternity, scientific unlocks will stay available and/or active until the end of time. While an inefficient colonist is a bad investment, these items and unlocks have infinite time to make a ‘profit’. No upkeep, no depreciation.

This means that raising the upkeep costs of colonists can literally make the game unplayable, but raising the cost of these “eternal improvements” could merely make the game… slow. And there’s a great way to boost your production in Colony Survival - recruit more colonists! That’s exactly what we want to encourage.



Currently, players will spend most of their time balancing things like the production of ammo, food and happiness items - the costs of having colonists. Unlocking things in the tech tree, or producing “eternal items” like weapons and job blocks, don’t require much items or time. A matchlock gun gets crafted in roughly 10 seconds, perhaps less. I’m not an expert, and it probably varied from gunsmith to gunsmith, but I’m pretty sure it took people a lot longer than that to craft a gun in medieval times, without machine tools or similar modern improvements.

So instead of having very high variable costs (punishing players for recruiting colonists and not being very efficient) and very low fixed costs (making it possible to complete the important part of the tech tree quite easily with only ~100 colonists), we want to overhaul the game to be more like the opposite. Crafting advanced items and unlocking end-game content should be a very substantial task that requires a huge colony with many workers, but these individual workers shouldn’t be too burdensome.

This shouldn’t exactly make the game easy or way less challenging, but we believe “setting up large scale production” is a more interesting challenge than “navigating the very unintuitive happiness menu and making exactly the right choices or your colony fails”.

We hope this is a better explanation, and we hope you’re also enthusiastic. If you are, or aren’t, please let us know in the comments or on Discord!



In the meanwhile, Zun has been continuing his work on improving the UI. He has added some nice small improvements that were pretty common requests: (not released yet)

• You can edit existing diplomacy rules
  
• You can close the quickstart menu with a close button instead of having to press F1 (was often problematic for Mac users)
  
• You can delete outdated worlds in the load menu now
  
• An in-game converter than can change SP worlds to co-op worlds and vice versa

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The Arch Temple by Saphrax, again


When we recently tested Colony Survival we were shocked to discover two things:

1. It’s possible to get pretty much to the endgame with only 100-150 colonists, while we want to encourage players to build colonies with at least 800-1000 colonists
   
2. Different parts of the tech tree have wildly different ingredients and prerequisites: there isn’t really a big major production chain that can be improved and expanded from the start of the game to the end

As talked about before, we want to change this dramatically. It’s a major overhaul so we’re still thinking and debating about the details. One thing we keep mentioning again and again in our discussions is “exponential”.

You’ve probably noticed that your expansion accelerates as you keep playing the game. Going from 0 to 50 colonists takes longer than going from 300 to 350 colonists. This is one source of exponential progress.

But we also want to introduce industrial tech that speeds up your production, and we want to add the “Repeating Scientist” who can boost the efficiency of certain jobs over and over again. This means that you’ll be able to dramatically expand your production.

That leads to a pretty difficult problem. We need to find a useful, consistent goal for these enormous capabilities. Something that is relevant both before and after the industrial revolution. Here are a couple of the things we’re thinking about:

Textiles

Textiles were a key industry during the industrial revolution. They were obviously important before that period though, and still highly useful today. Currently, making a piece of cloth in Colony Survival goes very quickly, and it has only limited usefulness. We want to make the initial cost of a piece of cloth a lot higher (but with the ability to improve your production) while requiring more of it in your production chains.

Steel precision parts

Humans have used metals in general and iron in specific for a very long time. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that in real life is hard to produce on a large scale - it also took until the industrial revolution until that was possible, although it was invented a lot earlier. We want to make the process of developing steel in Colony Survival more difficult and expensive as well. Large amounts of it will be necessary to develop industrial machines.

Another part of the metalworking problem is making precision parts. Think of the complex machinery in clocks and guns. This is something else that we can make more expensive in the beginning, but with the possibility to scale it up dramatically with tools like the lathe.

Data

The production and sharing of data is something that has been growing on an exponential scale for a very long time now. Just look at this graph of the production of printed books a couple of centuries ago:

Source


But that’s not a trend that is “over”, we’re still in the middle of rapid exponential progress. Here’s a graph of the current growth in digital data:

Source


We hope we’re able to combine these trends into a satisfying long term gameplay loop in Colony Survival. Instead of jumping from one disjointed part of the tech tree to another with completely different requirements, and completing all useful science with only 120 colonists, we want to make it so that there’s a satisfying path of continuously expanding production - producing lots of textiles for lots of colonists who use many hundreds of complex, expensive machines that assist in the production of more of these machines and in the production of lots of data, which can be used to improve the colony as a whole. We hope this sounds as good to you as it does to us!

At the moment, these are still plans, not things we're currently working on. We're still busy improving the interface. Here are two work-in-progress screenshots of changed menus:




Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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The Arch Temple by Saphrax


This week, Zun continued revamping the code behind the UI, and his efforts are starting to bear fruit! Some of the “standard UI elements” that are reused in multiple places look a lot better now - in our opinion, of course. We’ll continue like this for a couple of weeks - the results until now seem well worth the effort, and there are plenty of other rough spots in the UI that need some tender loving care.

Currently, the Colony Tab is a list of ugly buttons. At first, we wanted to make it a list of beautiful buttons. But we just realized that we could bring forward some of the most important elements that are now hidden behind a button, like the recruitment menu and the difficulty settings. They should be instantly visible and usable when you go to the Colony Tab.

Old UI on the left, updated UI on the right


Last week, we announced some pretty radical plans to overhaul a lot of the systems in CS. We received a lot of enthusiastic and helpful feedback so that’s good news! The overhaul is becoming very likely.
Our current roadmap looks roughy like this now:

• 0.7.4: An overhaul to make existing UI elements more beautiful and intuitive.
  
• 0.7.5 / 0.7.6 / 0.7.7: New UI elements like a better job management menu, clearer messages and alarms, a decent tutorial, and perhaps even blueprint builders!
  
• 0.8.0: A massive overhaul to the way unlocks and content are structured, with new systems like the Repeating Scientist (To Be Renamed) who processes Data - all planned in such a way that it can smoothly transition to an Industrial Revolution
  
• 0.8.1 (0.9.0?): Industrial content with new features such as multi-block jobblocks, pipes and electricity

Let us know how you feel about these plans and the screenshot with the updated UI!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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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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