Colony Survival News

Last week, we wrote about a new problem we encountered. With the plans for more spread out resources, it would make sense to make bronze more realistic. In real life, tin is actually a very rare resource. But if players require a second colony to produce bronze, those second colonies will be necessary very early in the game. That will be pretty difficult and confusing! We asked for help and received a lot of replies. They were very useful, especially this one from EZJ:

Bronze age trade wasn't one person organizing multiple colonies and trading between them. Maybe adding small NPC colonies that can trade rare resources in the early game before you can start expanding and getting those resources yourself?

That does make sense. Most bronze-smelters, historically, would not have personally set up a tin outpost, they would have bought some from a trader. In 0.1.0, purchasing flax seeds with gold coins was a fundamental element of the game. It was a bit confusing because it worked like very other crafter, and it could benefit from a better interface. But having a good way to buy "outside goods" (and to sell to "outsiders"!) would be beneficial in many ways. It could be a way to give players access to more resources that aren't available in the first colony, at a cost. And it could incentivize players to produce certain goods on a large scale.

We were already considering "MonsterForts", which would be custom built fortresses in other dimensions. With the other-dimension feature added, it would be relatively easy to add "friendly" fortresses as well. These could pretty much be NPC colonies! Perhaps you'd need to visit them to set up trade. NPC colonies have consistently been a very popular request, but we found it hard to imagine ways to add them, and to make them useful. We might be close to solving those problems!

But eventually, players want to move beyond purchasing exotic resources, and they actually want to go out in the world and find these ores. How do players recognize them on the surface? Zun suggested that we might add caves and put the ores there. That could be a solution! Another idea is to generate deserted mining towns on the surface of significant ore deposits. It would work, but it would simultaneously imply that you live in some kind of post-apocalyptic scenario. That would be interesting, lore-wise.



So, if bronze is rather difficult to produce in real life because tin is so scarce, what stops people from immediately moving to iron production? In-game, we could just require players to produce a lot of bronze to unlock iron, but we'd rather make it a bit more realistic. What exactly is difficult about iron production?

Apparently, the temperature required to smelt iron is a lot higher, and reaching a temperature that is twice as high requires more than just a double amount of fuel. It requires different fuels and different furnaces.

It's not just that. Iron ore is generally pretty unpure and needs to be refined before it's properly usable. If all these processes are done well, you get strong iron that doesn't rust quickly. But that's hard to do. Most early iron was probably brittle and rusted easily. It took a lot of experimenting to get it right.

We're unsure about the best way to translate these realities into interesting gameplay. We've been thinking about having dynamic tools for jobs: for example, foresters could use different axes, with better axes being more durable and allowing for faster logging. Perhaps there'll be a similar thing for smelting, with 'dynamic' fuels, allowing players to choose different options for different results. But it's complicated and we haven't fully decided on one solution yet. If there are any experts on metallurgy, we'd love to have your help :D

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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Last week, we wrote about the addition of longer crafting times to the dev build. This allows us to refactor crafting times. The total cost of daily necessities like food and ammo can’t change significantly (one day of food and ammo can’t cost two days of crafting). But permanent improvements like job blocks can be changed to be significantly more expensive in terms of crafting time. Currently, job blocks often have trivial crafting requirements and are made in seconds. Completing a job block should become more of a valuable accomplishment, especially the more advanced ones.

Currently, most job blocks can be made by the colonist operating the workbench, and by the player. The player has 0 crafting time. Nobody is going to wait 120 seconds for a new furnace if such an alternative is available. Should we remove a lot of recipes currently available for “player crafting”? Should there be an alternative “job block crafter” that takes a lot of recipes from the workbench?

Because we can increase the crafting time, we can remove some “ingredient items”. Instead of a job block taking 8 seconds to craft + copper nails/tools/parts that require 22 seconds to craft, the job block itself can just take 30 seconds + “pure” copper. But the workbench currently mostly makes these ingredient items and job blocks. Is it wise to remove all of these from the workbench?

While redesigning the crafting recipes and ingredients like this, it’s smart to keep our planned changes to resource distribution in mind. We’ve been thinking of the details there more clearly this week. When we started Colony Survival, we were thinking about roughly the Viking Era, 700-1000AD. With later updates, we added things like crossbows and the printing press, extending the timeline to ~1600AD.

Now that we’re thinking about making trade between colonies a more important part of the gameplay, we’ve tried to figure out when this became important in real life. It turns out long distance trade is already crucial when you’re producing bronze, because tin is a very rare resource. But civilizations started smelting bronze in 2000BC, nearly 3000 years before the start of CS’s current timeline!

Bronze is one of the earliest unlocks in CS. We don’t want second colonies to become important so soon in the gameplay. Do we “skip” it? Do we think of an unrealistic alternative (like tin being available everywhere)? Or do we extend the timeline to significantly before 2000BC, adding gameplay, progress and unlocks to the Stone Age? But which interesting, significant progression happened in the Stone Age, that we can utilize in Colony Survival? Domestication and selective breeding of crops and livestock seemed to have important consequences, but we can’t easily put that into the game.

We haven’t drawn any definitive conclusions yet, so let us know your opinion! How far back in time should CS start? How realistic should things be? Leave a comment here on Steam, or share your opinion on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Zun has mostly finished his work on the savegames. Previously, they were .JSON files. In some cases, they were prone to getting corrupted. They also required autosaves to save the data of all players who have been connected to the server, even if only a small minority of them have been connected since the last autosave.

The new savegames use SQLite. It should be quicker and more reliable. The problem above with the autosaves is solved as well!

This does have one serious drawback. Our dev-build of 0.9.0 already expects SQL saves and is incompatible with older savegames. No worries about your current worlds: they'll always be playable by using the 0.8.0 branch, and it'll take a long time before 0.9.0 is ready for release. But this does mean we can't easily release the new savegames as a 0.8.X patch. We could write a converter, but this takes a decent amount of time, and we'd rather invest that time in awesome features for 0.9.0. The new terrain generation and totally overhauled job/recipe structure will require new worlds anyway.

Another change that was completed this week is longer crafting times. In the past, all NPC actions were practically limited at a maximum of 15 seconds. This boundary has been removed. Previously, we worked around that boundary by making complex recipes that required many ingredients. Now that the limit is gone, we want to refactor these recipes. Intermediate steps like copper nails could be removed, with items just requiring "copper" and slightly longer crafting times.

Previously, crafting times were determined by the job block. Recipes at the tailor all take an equal amount of time. This can be changed as well now. Crafters can make both quick recipes take that only 1-5 seconds, and recipes that take for example 30 to 120 seconds. We want to use this new ability to make certain items take significantly longer to craft. Things like ammo should stay relatively similar, but items like weapons, which permanently improve your colony (instead of being "daily costs"), should take more effort from your colonists to produce. This ought to make them feel more valuable, and it allows us to add new features that allow players to reduce that crafting time again. For example, by crafting advanced tools for crafters to use, or by spending Colony Points to upgrade crafters.

Next Up: Overhauling the Crafting Recipes + Working on Trade Routes!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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As explained in the last couple of blogs, adding realistic logistics between your main colony and its outposts will be a massive overhaul. There's a large amount of interdependency and edge cases. We're now 99% certain that we want to do this.

The rough order looks like this:

1. Longer Crafting Times: Crafting should be able to take longer than 15 seconds, and different items should be able to have different crafting times at the same jobblock. These old limitations led to certain choices like complex recipes and separate jobs. That will have to be refactored.
   
   
2. Improving the Trade Feature: There should be actual, physical paths linking colonies, marked by milestones or buoys. These should determine the cost and waiting time for trading items.
   
   
3. The Outpost System: Currently, starting a second colony is an end-game feature that requires difficult-to-unlock Colony Starter Kits. These later colonies pretty much stand alone as sepate places with their own tech tree. In 0.9.0, it should be way easier to start new outposts, like a mining town. They should be more connected, all being part of the same civilization/empire. It will be easiest to set up a capital that is supplied by its outposts, but you should be able to develop these outposts as well.
   
   
4. New Terrain Generation: At the moment, useful terrain features like ores and the ability to grow certain crops are spread out like tiles on a chessboard. There's a large square on the map called "Far East" were porcelain can be found and rice can be grown, and another large square for diamonds and sugar cane. These large squares are separated by large areas of uselessness: desert, steppe, ocean.
   
   These ores and the ability to (efficiently) grow certain crops should be spread out more organically. You shouldn't have to traverse large deserts or steppes for your first outpost. It should be a more natural expansion, fueled by the desire to gain "that resource just over there". This requires a new world with updated terrain generation.
   
   
5. We should investigate whether it's annoying to fight monsters everywhere in this system. If so, that should be fixed.
   
   
6. Jobs should be more sensible and "upgradeable". Jobs like berry farmers should benefit from having larger areas. Jobs like wheat farmers could have similar yields on smaller areas if they use items like fertilizer. It would be nice if jobs like flax farmers have better yields if a beekeeper is nearby. Smelters should be able to use different fuels, and crafters should be able to use better tools for improved crafting times.

We haven't decided on all details yet. Will there truly be no realistics logistics within colonies? Will certain item types be constrained to "special" stockpiles - weapons and ammo can only be stored in armories, wheat in granaries, etcetera? We're still debating these issues.

While we were making plans for the future, Zun has still been working on and releasing small patches for 0.8.1. The full details can be seen in #small-patch-changelogs on Discord, but here are the last three updates:



Developing 0.9.0 will be a large project that's going to take a relatively long time. We do believe it's a good idea. The plans will make way better use of the large world. The game is able to support tens of thousands of colonists, but only rewards recruiting a couple of hundred. That's a lot of unused potential that 0.9.0 should take advantage of. We could've chosen a different direction, or focused on smaller updates, but we think this path ultimately will result in a better game, compared to the alternative paths.

Zun has already started working on a savegame overhaul for 0.9.0, and we're expecting to start working on actual new features very soon!

Op hoop van zegen!

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When we started working on the first prototype for Colony Survival eight years ago, we didn’t have a detailed plan worked out. Zun made a voxel engine, and I’d loved to see walking, working, living inhabitants in that world.

When Colony Survival was released into Early Access, nearly four years ago, it wasn’t much more than that. A voxel world where farmers, miners, guards and crafters could be recruited and set to work. But it didn’t have a real purpose. We just tried to copy some elements from history and the real world into a simulation. Do history and the real world have a purpose?

Complex philosophical considerations about the nature of reality aside, the history of human civilization does seem to have resulted in something. We’ve gained a lot of knowledge about biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, electronics and a lot of other domains. We’re constantly using that knowledge to build tools and machines. These items help us gain further knowledge, and they provide us with wealth, comfort and security. This cycle seems to have happened continuously, from the invention of writing and the wheel to the realization of flatscreens and bluetooth.

But these innovations seem to happen relatively spontaneously, without much top-down steering. Johannes Gutenberg wasn’t commanded by the king to invent the printing press. It seems his family was involved with mints and goldsmiths, acquiring knowledge and skill in metal working there.

When Charles Babbage built the first mechanical computer, he wasn’t following anybody’s orders. He inherited an estate, making him independently wealthy. He had a strong interest in mathematics, and partnered with Joseph Clement who could use advanced machine tools.

These inventors worked independently, but they did consciously try to produce the machines they invented. That isn’t even always the case. When Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, the first antibiotic, he wasn’t even looking for anything like that. He was investigating bacteria, and accidentally contaminated one of his experiments with a fungus. That fungus turned out to be penicillium, one that produces penicillin.



How do you add such innovations to a strategy game like Colony Survival? Telling a colonist “go invent penicillin now” is deeply unrealistic. But having it appear completely randomly would be strange and unsatisfying as well. The true “road towards inventions” seems to be like this. Make sure you’ve got a civilization of many, many millions. Most of these people will not directly work on inventions, but they’re vital to keep that gigantic civilization running on a day to day basis. Tens of thousands of people will have a combination of education, technical skills and some wealth. A part of that group will experiment and try to innovate. Some will fail, some will discover gradual improvements, and others will successfully invent new machines and theories that revolutionize the world, like the printing press and the theory of evolution.

With the Happiness System and the Colony Points System, we tried to add some of these ‘costs’ to Colony Survival. You can’t innovate “directly”, you’ve got to sustain a large semi-civilized group of people, which requires a relatively large and advanced economy. Feed thousands of goldsmiths for many generations, and finally, one will invent the printing press.

With that mindset, I thought about realistic logistics between many colonies. I wanted it to be a complex economy with many advanced colonies that all contain educated, skilled workers who can contribute to technological innovations. This requires a very complex trade network, with an enormous amount of connections between colonies. Setting up all these connections manually would be extremely tedious and unpractical, so that's why I thought about automated systems that utilize things like currency.

But we’re developing a game that should be fun to play, not a historical simulation that should be completely accurate. And thus, last week, we decided to take a different approach: one massive, advanced capital that is supplied by many outposts. This simplifies the required logistics, and makes it much more approachable for the player.

What should the purpose of this capital be? Just to make its inhabitants very wealthy and comfortable while exploiting the outposts? That would be pretty harsh. Solely to make technological progress, which can be used to… make even more progress? That’s not very sustainable and a bit pointless as well.

A B-25 assembly line at North American Aviation's Inglewood, California, plant. 1942. Source.

So, we’ve looked at historical top-down regimes. Ancient Egypt, where the faraos commanded tens of thousands of people to build the pyramids. The Roman Empire, where one city exploited three continents, which funded massive armies. The Soviet Union, which built many rockets and won all the first steps of the Space Race.

Some megaprojects like the ones above would be great, to give purpose to your capital and its network of outposts. Of these projects, we’ve mainly discussed “massive armies” this week. We’re pretty excited about that idea! That could be an interesting gameplay mechanic which consumes gigantic amounts of resources. In real life, situations like World War I & II are also deeply connected to technological progress, but in a more “intended” way than the “spontaneous” inventions mentioned above. Consider the Manhattan Project which produced the first nuclear weapons, or the German Wunderwaffe.

We’re considering adding a list of “MonsterForts”. These would be in a different dimension, which has to be accessed by some kind of portal or teleporter. The player would have to recruit, arm and train large amounts of soldiers in the capital, and would be able to send these to attack the MonsterForts. There, the reverse of the “night-gameplay” would happen. Monsters would have defenders on the walls, and a long line of colonist-soldiers would swarm the gates, trying to survive the hostile projectiles and to destroy the “MonsterBanner”. Destroying a number of these MonsterForts would be required to continue progressing.

Women are trained as engine mechanics in thorough Douglas training methods, at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, California, in October of 1942. Source.

Providing these soldiers with weapons, armor and other tools and equipment will require the efforts of your entire empire. Hundreds of miners, smelters, smiths and engineers will have to work. A large amount of foresters and woodcutters is necessary to supply them with fuel. Many farmers are needed to produce enough food. The armies can evolve throughout time, from simple spearmen, to fully armored knights, to riflemen.

This idea is still work-in-progress, and might be unceremoniously discarded like the Guilders-idea was. We've still got specific issues to work out (Can you build/destroy blocks near the MonsterForts? What will the reward be?) and alternatives to consider. It'll require a months-long process to set up support for alternative dimensions.

But we believe this will be a rewarding goal for both Colony Survival in general, and the system of outposts and realistic logistics in specific. Ultimately, you’re the judge of that. Let us know in the comments or on Discord how you feel about these ideas!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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