Colony Survival News

Pathros

Last week’s blog announced a pretty dramatic plan to uncouple the amount of monsters and unhappiness from the amount of currently recruited colonists. We still had some questions about the precise implementation though, and we received a lot of comments to help us with that! We’re now thinking of determining a “Civilization Level” that is linked to multiple factors like unlocked tech, amount of colonists recruited, and “monster magnets”, special monuments that quickly raise your Civilization Level. These monuments take quite some time and resources to craft, and when they’re placed in the world they rapidly raise your Civilization Level. When they’re removed, the monuments are destroyed (so you can’t rapidly place and remove them without cost), and your Civilization Level will drop again. A high Civilization Level will allow you to unlock new tech and continue your progress, but it will also attract more monsters and increase the demand for happiness items.

Zun has continued revamping the UI. It’s going to be a very substantial update that will add new UI features, reorganize older features and improve the look of a lot of UI elements.





This part of the blog will concern wider societal problems that are certainly tied to us and our work indirectly, but are not directly related. If you strictly want game-related updates, stop reading here.

This week, we arrived in the second half of 2020. We don’t want to adopt any controversial viewpoints, but I guess we can all be in agreement that up to this point, in regards to world events, the year has been intense, suboptimal and worrisome.

The contrast got particularly big when I visited the Waterloopbos last Sunday (see pic above). Large parts of the Netherlands lie below sea level, so they need decent protection or they will flood. Currently, we mostly rely on computer simulations to test old and new coast defenses, but in the 20th century we built physical scale models and tested them with real water. The Waterloopbos was one such place where these models were built. Here’s Tom Scott visiting it right before Covid-19:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFkoLYrJGCM
Apparently, according to Dutch law the government must ensure our water defenses are prepared for weather events that are so bad they only occur once every 10,000 years. At the Waterloopbos, technical experts made sure our country was ready for that.

I can be pretty skeptical about the Dutch government, it’s not perfect, but not once in my life have I feared flooding and after 27 years of inhabiting and roaming this country I haven’t got a single complaint in regards to water management. There have been a couple of instances where water rose to a high point and floodplains that seldomly saw action got filled, but that only increased my faith that things are managed decently.

When I walked through the Waterloopbos, I noticed a skilled level of engineering and knowledge of water that far exceeds my own. I have no reason to doubt them, and I don’t know any Dutch person who does. It’s not a politicized, partisan issue. Companies don’t have to make statements about it. Flooding is bad, we need well-funded experts to stop it, and that’s what was organized. And thus, we don’t have to worry about it and can focus on other things, like developing games.

That’s the sanity that I was used to. We reach an agreement about which risks we want to prevent, we assign a bunch of experts to do so, problem solved, and we can all focus on our daily lives.

Things seem to be going a lot different in 2020. Perhaps it’s because we’ve grown older and it’s par for the course to realize things aren’t perfect. Perhaps we’re exaggerating problems that have always existed. But we feel like there’s a wider consensus that things are going off the rails.



Covid-19 seems to be a massive problem. In Europe and the US, over 300,000 people have died, despite invasive and disruptive measures that heavily disrupt the economy and people’s well-being. This situation was not inevitable: countries like South Korea (282 deaths), Mongolia (0 deaths), Taiwan (7 deaths) and Vietnam (0 deaths) prove that it’s possible to successfully and quickly contain and prevent the further spread of the virus. Key ingredients seem to be a quick response time, the widespread adoption of facemasks and large amounts of testing.

The societal and economic destabilization, compounded by pre-existing problems, seems to have reached a boiling point in the US. Legitimate issues have led to peaceful protests, but also to violent riots, destruction and increased polarization and partisanship. To a lesser degree, these same issues are spilling over to Europe.

We’re seriously worried about these issues. And we’re trying to look for a root cause. Strong systems don’t collapse randomly: at first, they get hollowed out. Did our systems get hollow? Why? How hollow are they? Can they be fixed, and how? These are very complex questions, and we don’t have all the answers. We don’t believe any single person, party or movement has them either. We’re probably going to require a whole lot of listening and talking, and as little partisanship as we can manage.

One of the things we believe is relevant is a transition from traditional media to new media. Releasing Colony Survival gave us some experience with that. If you’re interested in hearing about that, we’ll write about it in a future Friday Blog. But this is probably already getting quite controversial, so let us know how you feel about this blog first! Do you worry about the direction the world is heading in? Should we be saying anything about this subject at all? Tell us, here or on Discord!

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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"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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