Colony Survival News

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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For some weeks now, we’ve been seriously considering implementing realistic logistics. We’ve been sharing the progress in our plans. This week, the team agreed on some basics, but we simultaneously discovered the full implications go a lot deeper.



In last week’s blog, we mainly talked about logistics between colonies, with long paths marked by milestones and shipping routes. I assumed we also wanted realistic transport inside each colony, but Zun suggested that we could skip that. Current logistics could keep applying to “intra-colony-logistics”. This would make the start of the game easier for new players, and would in general just save a lot of hassle and performance. Transport in between colonies seems to be the more interesting challenge anyway.

But… the plans also involve making it easier to set up new colonies. We’re considering focusing the monster threat in one spot, making the rest of the world monster-free. That would make it a lot easier to “expand wide”, to build many colonies that are each relatively spread out (without the need to hide everything behind walls and moats). That contradicts the plan to only have realistic logistics between colonies.

A potential way out could be a wholly different approach to what constitutes a “colony”. Perhaps banners become a lot less important, and you just have Outposts, with smaller ranges than the current maximum banner range. In the “Outpost Range” logistics would be “magical” like they currently are in a colony, but in between Outposts, you’ve got to do realistic transport. This would be a pretty massive overhaul to the gameplay though! We’re very careful about making such big steps.



While designing the “Guilders Plan” mentioned in the previous blogs, I was thinking about realistic societies. Societies where ultimately, most goods are used by individual consumers with relatively unstable, fluctuating needs. These consumers live spread out through the entire country and demand all kinds of different products that are produced in wildly different locations. One month a household orders a washing machine, the next month it needs a bicycle, and another month it buys a new laptop.

Do we want that in Colony Survival? Should the endgame look like a continent filled with many colonies, all relatively equal in size and importance, each one importing and exporting many goods to and from all other colonies? An alternative could be a hierarchy like the one in “The Hunger Games”: one rich and advanced Capitol, supplied by impoverished districts focused on specific industries like textiles and lumber. This would radically simplify the logistics system! Such a situation could do without Guilders and complex automated systems. Items flow from the outposts to the capital. There could be a “backflow” of tools and some other bare necessities, but that would be it.



This is going to be a huge update with consequences for all major systems. Production chains will change, the monster threat will change, the entire goal of the game will shift. There are plenty of good reasons to do so: we’re seeing a lot of opportunity for exciting new gameplay. But dealing with all edge cases, crossing all the t’s and dotting the i’s, is difficult. Scope creep is real. So once again, we’re asking for your input! How important is realistic logistics inside colonies, versus logistics between colonies? Would you prefer a complex network of interdependent colonies which requires automated systems to keep the balance, or do you think a hierarchical model with a capital supplied by outposts results in better gameplay? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Last week, we attempted to explain our plans to add some kind of economic system to Colony Survival. These ideas are connected to many of our other plans for the next big update, and related to frustrations about current systems. I skipped a large part of the context and went straight for a complex explanation with a lot of numbers and imaginary examples. Lots of people found this to be very confusing, for good reasons! Today, I'll try to explain our plans in a more sensible way.

Let's start by looking at an example of a randomly generated world in current Colony Survival. You spawn in the center of the world. Your colony inhabits only a very small portion of the entire spawn region, and all resources from that region can be found and grown in that very small portion. All ores spawn everywhere, and all "spawn crops" can be grown anywhere in the spawn region. There's no important reason to set up a second outpost in the spawn region.

At the very end of the game, players get the ability to start a second colony. You're meant to traverse the entire spawn region, and then you've got to cross an "inhabitable region": an ocean, a desert or a steppe. When you succesfully do that, you enter a new region with unique crops and some extra ores, for end-game luxury items. Again, one colony will gain access to all of these unique resources in that region.

Resources can be traded between colonies. This happens purely via an interface menu, and is not connected to anything you've actually got to build in-game.



We loved the fundamental ideas behind this plan, but we're not very happy with the execution. After staying in one place for nearly the full game, players are suddenly expected to travel through multiple kilometers of empty landscape until they cross an arbitrary line. It's asking a lot, while the rewards aren't worth it for many players.

So, we're thinking of a big change. We'd love to build a new world, where resources are scattered through the map and each location has unique benefits and drawbacks. The current world already renders a "temperature" and a "humidity" for each chunk of the map, and combined with something like "fertility", we could realistically make certain parts of the map more suitable for some crops and less suitable for others. Farming in the perfect spot yields large harvests; building in a less perfect spot results in diminished harvests. Some crops would love high temperatures while others are more suited for lower temperatures, etcetera.

Basic ores would still be found easily, while more "advanced" ores like iron, coal and gold would only be available in certain locations, which could be found with for example the current compass tool. Instead of walking many kilometers to cross an arbitrary line, players will actually have to scout the terrain and make an intelligent decision about the placement of their colonies.

Your network of colonies has to be connected via actual physical paths. These could be roads, bridges and tunnels marked by milestones, or waterways marked by buoys. Later on, we could even get rails with trains/minecarts. The cost of trading between colonies will be determined by the length and efficiency of these connections.

Map made with Inkarnate

This system should offer a more gradual introduction to multiple colonies, make setting up these colonies more fun, and make the rewards for doing so larger. To prevent players from having to set up the same defenses against monsters again and again, we want to implement a way to redirect most or all of the monster threat to one specific place, like a well-defended capital or a special castle.

Now, last week we tried to explain a system of "Guilders" which was considered confusing by many. Here's where they become relevant. The way your colonists spend their working time has changed throughout the updates, but the amount of seconds they can work in a day hasn't. Let's say there's 300 "labor seconds" per colonist in one day. On average, per update, they'll be spend roughly like this:



In 0.1.0, every colonist needed food and attracted monsters, resulting in the necessity to craft ammo to fight these monsters. So for every 10 colonists, you need a majority of them to craft food and fight monsters just to sustain these 10 colonists. A small proportion of time is spend on "Perma-Crafting": crafting items that are perpetually useful, like workbenches and bows. The rest of the "labor time" can be spend as players wish.

In 0.4.0, a bunch of science bags were needed to make progress, demanding a share of labor time and giving purpose to "extra" colonists. In 0.7.0, things were made rather difficult with the introduction of happiness. Now colonists needed a bunch of special items to stay happy. If you failed to produce them, the resulting unhappiness would hamstring your colony. This was rather punishing, and in 0.8.0 we switched to the system of "Colony Points", retaining a lot of benefits from the happiness system while removing the large punishment.

For the next big update, we want to give job blocks the ability to have longer crafting times for specific recipes. For example, crafting a matchlock gun should be able to cost for example 150 seconds, instead of 15. These extended crafting times should be reserved for the "perpetual upgrades". In return, the daily requirements to keep your colonists alive, food and ammo, should become a bit "cheaper" in terms of labor time. Their cost should be reduced even further to compensate for the addition of "delivery time", now that items will have to be physically delivered from one place to another.

In historical times, before trucks and trains, delivering bulk goods was difficult and costly. Your wheat and firewood probably didn't travel very far to get to your home. But simultaneously, valuable and 'transportable' items like golden adornments, silver coins, silk and spices did get traded between distant places. In the Bronze Age, civilizations already set up far-ranging trade networks for things like tin and charcoal. Ötzi's axe was made from copper mined hundreds of miles south from where he lived.

Trade in Colony Survival should be relatively realistic, and should thus be based on similar considerations. Items should have default values, based on something like "expected labor time" and "expected utility". The delivery costs should be based on the length of the path and the weight of the item. Ötzi's axe has a high value and a relatively low weight, so even in Bronze Age circumstances it makes sense to trade it over a distance of hundreds of miles. But a low value, high weight item like wheat (one year of copper axes is still one axe; one year of wheat is a lot of wheat) won't be transported similar distances, not for the average man at least.

Bronze Age trade networks weren't set up by one Supreme Emperor who determined where every single item should go. Thousands of merchants existed, who throughout the centuries learned the best ways to deliver valuable items to the right consumers. So we believe the trade networks in Colony Survival shouldn't be based on a single players intuiting all the right choices either. Players should be helped by performing some basic calculations for them: "how valuable would it be to have item X here" and "how costly would it be to deliver item X here". If the delivery makes sense, it should happen, and otherwise it shouldn't. By default, a day's worth of food shouldn't cost two days worth of delivery time, that's not viable. To represent these values to players, it would be best to pick one way of representing it. This could be "Guilders". These would be closely connected to crafting time. Items that take a long time to craft are often more valuable than items that can be easily made.

• "Coppercolony" has produced a Copper Axe for 10 Guilders. Delivering it to "Craftercolony" costs 20 Guilders. It would be worth 50 Guilders there. Deliver it!
  
• "Farmcolony" has produced wheat for 3 Guilders. Delivering it to "Distant Exotic Colony" costs 50 Guilders. It would be worth 5 Guilders there. Don't do it!

If you're determined to make "unprofitable" deliveries happen, you could manually raise the price of the desired item. A better way would be to improve your logistics though, for example by digging a canal and creating a trade route for ships.

The Guilders aren't meant to create another level of complexity that has to be navigated by players. They are meant to take an intended level of complexity (realistic trade, with some possible deliveries being worthwhile and valuable but lots of other possible deliveries being a complete waste of colonist's scarce labor time) and to summarize that large set of data (production costs, delivery costs, ingredient value, end product value) and make it quickly and easily available for players, so they can more easily understand their colonies and make better choices.

There are loads of other things I'd love to say about 0.9.0, but this is already relatively complex. We hope we've explained ourselves better now. We'd love to know whether this is clearer, and what you think of these ideas. Let us know in the comments or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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We’re still working on the details of implementing ‘realistic logistics’. As explained in last week’s blog, I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles. When bigger population sizes and larger distances came into play, it became harder to understand and steer the production process. A handful of precise questions regularly appeared in my mind:

• Do my workers waste a large part of their working time walking from their homes to their jobs and back?
  
• Do my workers waste a lot of time idling at their job, because the required resources aren’t available?
  
• Do my workers waste a lot of energy hauling low-value resources from one side of the map to the other, while these resources could have better been produced or processed locally?

In essence, these are all questions of efficiency. And that’s kind of the point. With the introduction of realistic logistics, building an efficient, sensible layout for your colony becomes a lot more important. This should become a fun and engaging challenge, without being frustrating and tedious.

While the automatic transport system in Kingdoms and Castles is very fun, it becomes more unwieldy in the later stages. It still works relatively well in that game, but the planned logistics in CS will involve larger distances and more complex production chains, without the benefits of a clear top-down view. I was deeply concerned that similar automatic systems would become irritating and opaque in CS.

So I was trying to think of a system that would work well in our game. A clear, consistent system that would work for small and large colonies, on both small and long distances. One that would properly handle low-value and high-value items. Suddenly, I had an answer. Value! Money? Worth. Currency. Prices. Something in that direction. All the questions above are questions of value: is crafting time and transport time well spent?

A “Philippus goudgulden” from Dordrecht, source

Let’s describe an example. Imagine we’ve got “Guilders”, coincidentally the pre-Euro Dutch currency with medieval origins. Let’s say the average colonist works 300 seconds in a day and earns 30 Guilders with that labor. In this hypothetical example, a baker only needs wheat to bake bread. This costs the baker 20 seconds, which would translate to 2 Guilders of labor costs.

The baker is situated next to stockpile Food Corner. Wheat is available from three stockpiles. Ten pieces of wheat are carried by one deliverer.

• Stockpile Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time, and the wheat itself costs 5 Guilder.
  
• Stockpile Seaside: 150 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 3 Guilder.
  
• Stockpile Very Fertile: 1000 seconds of delivery time, wheat costs 1 Guilder.

I've just written this example and have no ideas which stockpile is most cost-efficient, but some simple math should help us solve this problem.

• Next To The Walls: 30 seconds of delivery time for 10 wheat = 3 seconds per wheat = 0.3 Guilders of delivery cost (10 seconds of labor for 1 Guilder) = 0.3 Guilder delivery cost + 5 Guilder wheat cost = 5.3 Guilder total cost
  
• Seaside: 1.5 Guilder delivery cost + 3 Guilder wheat cost = 4.5 Guilder total cost
  
• Very Fertile: 10 Guilder + 1 Guilder = 11 Guilder total cost.

It seems obvious that stockpile Seaside is the most optimal choice. But we’ve haven’t looked at the full picture yet. You, the player, could hand out “contracts”. Imagine you’d pay 7.5 Guilder for one bread. With Seaside wheat (4.5 Guilder) plus the costs of the time of the baker (2 Guilder), the colony would have 6.5 Guilder costs for 7.5 Guilder worth of bread. One Guilder of “profit” for every bread!

But with Next To The Walls wheat, the cost increases to 7.3 Guilder, removing nearly all profits. Last and least, with Very Fertile wheat, there isn’t even a profit: 13 Guilder of costs for every bread.

Next To The Walls wheat should only be used as a last resort, and it doesn’t make any sense to haul Very Fertile wheat across the map. Perhaps making bread at all doesn’t make a lot of sense: what if in a similar timespan, Luxury Meals can be made, worth 20 Guilder for only 5 Guilders of cost? 15 Guilders of profit makes 1 Guilder of profit look a lot less attractive.

On the other hand, the results could be easily changed by some actions from the player. The “contract” for bread could be upped to 15 Guilders per bread, suddenly making even the Very Fertile wheat profitable. Raising the price of a contract would simultaneously raise the price of that product when it's used as an ingredient by colonists. This explains the differences in the price for wheat between the stockpiles from the example.

The player could also improve the transport route from stockpile Very Fertile to stockpile Food Corner, with roads and bridges, a shipping route or rails. If this reduces the transport costs far enough, Very Fertile wheat would become the optimal choice.



The idea isn’t to force players to do all of these calculations. The costs should relate to sensible, in-game things. Everybody understands that placing smelters who need ores close to miners of these ores, reduces the delivery costs of these ores. It makes sense that delivering heavy items is more expensive than delivering small, light items.

The colonists themselves should take the value of the products they are crafting, and the costs of ingredients and delivery, into account when making their choices. This will automatically focus them on doing efficient things, and will stop them from dragging resources across the map without serious benefits. The “Guilder-value” of your actions should be clearly communicated to players, without making managing a spreadsheet the core of your activities.

We hope we can accomplish this, and love to have your opinion and input! To test our ideas, Zun has been building a simple 2D simulation. Last week, I asked whether you wanted to see some footage of the simulation, and there was definitely some interest. I made two short GIFs to showcase its features:
A steady network in action Setting up a network

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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Last week, we've shared the results of our survey in regards to implementing realistic logistics. The response was overwhelmingly positive! We’ve also read all the comments on the blogs, and the discussions on our Discord server. There are some opponents, there is some hesitation, but the general mood seems to be one of excitement! We’re very seriously considering implementing realistic logistics.

While the concept allows for a lot of extra features, it’s not without its issues. Making the system completely automatic means you’ve got little control over where items go. Making the system completely manual will be very tedious, and difficult for newcomers. It’ll have to be a mix of automation and manual input, but making this system fun and intuitive to use is quite the challenge.

There are many different kinds of logistics the system has to facilitate. The easy cases to solve are small colonies with clear ‘directions’. Miners produce ores which have to go towards the smelters. Farmers produce crops which have to go towards bakers and cooks.

But this quickly becomes more complicated. Smelters, bakers and cooks all need firewood. What if they’re not all in the same location? What if one group consumes much more firewood than the others?

How about jobs, like the workbench, that create a lot of items with loads of different ingredients? And how do we handle long distance trade? Is there one system for item transport, or are there different systems for logistics within a colony versus logistics between colonies?

Some things we’re strongly considering to combine with realistic logistics are:

[h3]1.) A Reworked World[/h3]

Our current (0.8.1, before realistic logistics) design idea is different useful areas, separated by “useless” terrain.

New World --- Ocean --- “Default Terrain / Spawn” --- Steppe --- Far East

The idea is to start a relatively self-sufficient colony in each unique area, and use it to get all the crops, jobs and ores that are unique to that area.

With the realistic logistics, we’re thinking of a wholly different system. Ores, and other useful things like fertile land (with hopefully a sensible system that makes different pieces of land optimal for different crops), should be spread throughout the world - but not all in the same location. Perhaps your main colony is near a source of fertile land and iron. You’ve got a fishing outpost on the shore, and a mining outpost in the mountains to gather gold and coal. Deep in the woods, you’ve got a small colony that gathers wood and saltpeter.

Instead of the current “magic”, completely UI-based trading, trade should involve physical connections between the colonies. It would be good if you could build actual roads that speed up the colonist walking speed. To indicate trade routes, you could need to build milestones next to the road. For shipping routes, there would be buoys. There would be a primitive map that indicates the location of colonies, major stockpiles and the trade routes between them.

[h3]2.) Streamlined Crafting[/h3]

Currently, lots of items require specific and detailed ingredients. Bows need bow strings, there aren’t merely iron ingots but also wrought iron and iron rivets, lots of things require not merely copper but also copper nails and/or copper tools, etcetera, etcetera. Because of current technical limitations, we can’t let item crafting take more than 15 seconds, so we used these ingredients to allow us to let certain items take a more sensible amount of crafting time.

We intend to remove these technical limitations, and that could also allow us to remove these “cluttering” ingredients. Things would “merely” require ingredients like wood/copper/iron, not specific processed versions of it. That would make implementing a realistic stockpile with logistics easier as well.

This would temporarily reduce item variety, but this would rise again with later updates that add for example industrial content. But these items would work in a similar fashion, with "rubber" being "rubber" and not "rubber piece", "rubber ring", etcetera.



To work out these ideas, we’ve been doing a lot of research and discussion. Zun has been working on a simple 2D simulation that allows us to test some of our ideas. We can include some moving footage in the next blog if there’s interest! I’ve been testing Kingdoms and Castles on the recommendation of Vobbert and multiple players. That game already includes realistic logistics. It’s a lovely game that works brilliantly, and their system works mostly automatically. I did notice that logistics became a bit unwieldy at high colonist numbers, and when I started building more distant outposts. Job prioritization became a lot harder as well. It’s still properly manageable in Kingdoms and Castles, but their maps are a bit smaller, and it’s a lot easier to keep a proper overview with their top-down perspective. We think Kingdoms-and-Castles-style-logistics will be pretty confusing in Colony Survival, especially when you’re dealing with a larger variety of items over a longer distance.

We're still discussing and testing different ideas, and if anybody can recommend specific systems, we'd love to hear it!

Bedankt voor het lezen :D

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