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Crystalline can only be found on Ice Worlds which only LIS and Zolarg factions can be on. The world is also really tough aswell, resulting in micro-managing, or aka: Treating the game as an Idle game, only building one mound, enough water and food production ot cover it, and then one of every resource producer. Then you wait until you get to reneable ore/gold.

Crystalline can only be mined through natural deposits, or placing synthetic crystalline, but I think it should be more like a Synthetic Crystalline farm.

Or the patches you can place can regenerate as well as grow. Think Tiberium. If you could place a patch and the synthetic variety could regen, and do so up to a higher maximum than you can ever get by merely building it initially, say... it could regen slowly up to 2000 units of crystalline per patch, that would actually be really good, since as Zolarg, it's your ONLY source of sugar materials. Because nobody sells any on the market, and nothing lets you artificially buy it as Zolarg as well. Even if you could, it likely would be under quantities of 5K, which is more or less insignificant to be under it for artificial purchases of highly needed resources.

Zolarg has the Ore Enrichment facility, they could have the Crystalline Pit, which is about 3x3 but produces crystalline at the cost of rum, since based on material costs, it seems Crystalline uses alcohol as a growth catalyst.
Here's some ballpark cost numbers.

2000 Rum
500 Crystalline
1000 civics
400 antanium
10-20 Worker (dunno a good number, probly even 30?)
3x3, or 4x4.

Then the LIS have the Regolith Compactor to produce Ore, and then the next level of it (dunno, haven't played LIS since two patches ago) so let's have a Crystalline Synthesis lab. That could work as the United Earth's version, maybe just a Crystalline Farm? Unsure. Not too aware of the LIS naming and structure design scheme. Could just be a Crystalline factory.

It would probly cost some of every resource up to that point, I'm unsure where Crystalline is used in the LIS tech tree. IF anything though, it would probly be a large building as IMO, the Zolarg are alot better at turning things into metals that realistically make no sense, but are alot more simple as a result as well. Since the Zolarg are able to digest Crystalline into Sugar, and turn ore into a compound that jsut makes food way more beneficial.

Maybe there'll be an Antuara-using unholy structure that'd create artiifical Crystalline from atmosphere or some other really unused resource? Then again, such a building could probly just turn copious amounts of energy into Crystalline, after all, Unholy Power Spires make so much energy, that if you do it right for energy management (Aka using Money Pits intsead of Elder Mounds, which Money pits do more, and WAY better too), you barely need any. Like... a Huge-sized colony probly only need about 50 of the things at absolute maximum. A small Colony can easily get by with 10 if every square is used up.

This post is a collection of a lot of ideas and features I think need to be added. Some of these have been requested by other people but I am putting it all in a big collection and explaining how it would work together. I will be working on this post for a few days so expect to see edits adding new ideas. I will make the textures, with help from a friend, if this post becomes popular enough. Considering the amount of ideas here, this will take a while. I understand all this could be an unrealistic amount of additions but I am doing my best to make it reuse all of the existing code to the fullest. Thank you for still reading, a lot of people would have left by now!.

Please tell me what you think of all my ideas!

The first part of my ideas is a new planet type: Geyser World. I already made a post on it but I will go more in depth here:
Planet Details:
Buildable Rovers at Start(UE):
-Lunar Rover
-Rover
Starting Rovers(UE)
-Lunar Rover
-Rover
Non-Buildable Buildings:
Small Water Pump
Small Solar Panel
Starting Atmosphere: 10 million
Resources Contained(numbers are for medium world):
Ore deposits(around 7)
Regolith deposits(around 5)
Steam Vents(around 10)
Rock Fissures(around 20)


New Resources (items):
-Boiling Water: Looks a lot like water
-Mineral Water: Looks like water but with little spots in it.

New Vehicles:
-Heat Resistant Waterbot: Collects boiling water from boiling water deposits.
Cost: ore: 100 steel: 2 wheel: 6
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base.

-Treated Waterbot:
-Heat Resistant Waterbot: Collects mineral water from mineral water deposits.
Cost: ore: 1000 steel: 20 wheel: 6
Tech Required:Basic Mineral Resistance.

New Tech:
-Basic Mineral Resistance:
Cost: 20 steel
Prerequisites: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Unlocks: Tiny Mineral Extractor

-Mineral Resistance:
Cost: 25 research
Prerequisites: Basic Mineral Resistance
Unlocks: Small Mineral Extractor

-Thermodynamics:
Cost: 500 research
Prerequisites: Geyser World Base, Human Base, Mineral Resistance
Unlocks: Thermoelectric Generator, Advanced Water Condenser

New Resource tiles:
-Steam Vent(1x1): Just a tile that exists. Looks like a crack in the ground, has a puff of steam coming out. Counts as another kind of terrain, kind of like salt water or lava. Damages rovers and buildings nearby, similar to lava. Will not spread. Contains no resources.
-Rock Fissure(1x1): Just a tile that exists. Looks like a crack in the ground with obsidian inside Counts as another kind of terrain, kind of like salt water or lava. Damages rovers and buildings nearby, similar to lava. Will not spread. Contains no resources.

New Buildings:
-Water Condenser(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Used:2
Resource Production: Twice as much water as small water pump.
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Build Cost:500 ore, 20 steel, 1 gold
Built By: Builder Bot
Upgrades to: Advanced Water Condenser

-Tiny Thermoelectric Generator(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Generated: 2
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Build Cost: 200 ore, 200 regolith
Upgrades to: thermoelectric generator

-Thermoelectric Generator(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Generated: 5
Tech Required: Thermodynamics
Build Cost: 2000 ore, 250 steel, 5 gold

-Advanced Water Condenser(1x1): Built on steam vents.
Power Used:5
Resource Production: Six times as much water as small water pump.
Tech Required: Thermodynamics, Advanced Construction
Build Cost:5000 ore, 200 steel, 100 gold, 50 aluminum
Built By: Advanced Builder Bot

-Tiny Water Conditioner(1x1): Built on normal terrain.
Power Used:2
Resource Production: Turns boiling water into water, same amount as the water produced by a small water pump
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base
Build Cost:500 ore, 20 steel
Built By: Builder Bot

-Small Water Conditioner(1x1): Built on normal terrain.
Power Used:5
Resource Production: Turns boiling water into water, same amount as six small water pumps
Tech Required: Thermodynamics, Advanced Construction
Build Cost:2500 ore, 50 steel, 10 gold, 2 aluminum
Built By: Advanced Builder Bot

-Tiny Mineral Extractor:
Power Used:5
Workers:1
Resource Production:Turns mineral water into a very small amount of gold.

-Small Mineral Extractor:
Power Used:5
Workers:1
Resource Production:Turns mineral water into a very small amount of gold.

The second part of my ideas is another new planet type: Soaring Cliffs. It is a similar idea to the water world but will play differently. It goes great with the avian race idea below.
Planet Details:
Buildable Rovers at Start(UE):
-Rover
-forest rover
Starting Rovers(UE)
-Rover
-forest rover
Buildable Workers at Start(Zolarg):all
Non-Buildable Buildings: none
Starting Atmosphere:5 million
Resources Contained(numbers are for medium world):
Ore deposits(around 5)
Fir Trees(a lot, similar to forest world)
Cliff Face(replaces large drops that are adjacent to land)
Large Drop(generated similar to water on the water world)

New Resources (items):
-Krypton Gas: Think Helium-3 but its Krypton

New Tech:
-Rare Animal Zoology:
Cost: 20000 research
Prerequisites: low atmospheric zoology, 5 mil atmosphere

New Buildings:
-Mountain Goat Pen(2x2):
Build Cost:200 wood, 20 ore
Built By: Forest Rover, Greenbot.
Resource Production: Wool 10/Minute
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, Soaring Cliffs Base OR Rare Animal Zoology, 5 mil atmosphere


-Weaver's House(1x1):
Build Cost:200 wood, 20 ore, 10 wool
Built By: Forest Rover, Greenbot, lumberbot.
Resource Production: Wool 10/Minute
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base 5 mil atmosphere

-Rope Bridge(1x1):Built over water, salt water, ether, gas deposits(see next suggestion) or air.
Build Cost:20 wood, 10 ore, 2 cloth
Built By: Rover, Avian Rover, Forest Rover, Avian Forest Rover, Builder Bot
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


-Rope Bridge NS(1x1):Built over water, salt water, ether, gas deposits(see next suggestion) or air.
Build Cost:20 wood, 10 ore, 2 cloth
Built By: Rover, Avian Rover, Forest Rover, Avian Forest Rover, Builder Bot
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


-Rope Bridge Anchor(1x1):Built on land and cliff faces. Just a decorative road to go along with the rope bridge.
Build Cost:20 wood, 10 ore, 2 cloth
Built By: Rover, Avian Rover, Forest Rover, Avian Forest Rover, Builder Bot
Required Tech: Human Base OR Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


The third part of my ideas is yet another new planet type: Gas Giant. The Progression would be based around floating helium balloons due to how easy it is to float in a planet with a very dense atmosphere.
Planet Details:
Buildable Rovers at Start(UE,LIS):
-Balloon Rover
Starting Rovers(UE,LIS):
-Balloon Rover
Custom Lander(UE,LIS):
-Balloon Lander
Non-Buildable Buildings: none
Starting Atmosphere:500 billion
Resources Contained(numbers are for medium world):
Regolith deposits(around 5)
Gas Deposit(contains infinite xenon, covers most of the world. Generates like water in water world but even more frequent.)

New Vehicles:
-Ballon Rover: Works similar to a lunar rover but can fly over buildings.
Cost: ore: 100 helium:20 wheel: 6
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base.
Can Build:Tiny helium-3 condenser, helium-3 condenser, helium compactor, regolith compactor, storage tank, suspended storage tank, regolith crusher.


-Ballon Builder Bot: Works like a normal builder bot but can fly over buildings
Cost: ore:100 wheel:6 helium:50
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base

-Small Builder Zeppelin: Works like a normal advanced builder bot but can fly on gas deposits.
Cost: ore:1000 wheel:6
Tech Required: Geyser World Base, Human Base, advanced small scale construction

-Balloon Lander Airborne: Airborne version of balloon lander. Can land on gas deposits or normal land.


New Resources (items):
-Xenon Gas: Think Helium-3 but its Xenon

New Buildings:
-Balloon Lander(1x1): Can be built on Gas Deposits or on normal land.
Power Produced:2
Housing: 2 colonists
Can Build: Balloon Rover.


-Tiny Helium-3 Condenser:(1x1):
Power Used:1
Build cost: Regolith 20
Resource Production: Turns atmosphere to helium-3 at a quarter of the rate of a helium-3 extractor.


-Helium-3 Condenser:(1x1):
Power Used:1
Build cost: ore 20
Resource Production: Turns atmosphere to helium-3 at the rate of a helium-3 extractor.


-Helium Compactor:(1x1):
Power Used:1
Build cost: regolith 20 helium-3 20
Resource Production: Turns helium-3 into a small amount of regolith

-Storage Tank(1x1):
Storage: Ore 1000 Regolith 2000 Helium-3 500 food 100 water 100
Build Cost: Ore 100 Helium-3 25

-Suspended Storage Tank(1x1): Built on Gas Deposits
Storage: Ore 1000 Regolith 2000 Helium-3 750 food 100 water 100
Build Cost: Ore 150 Helium-3 100

-Floating Helium-3 Condenser(1x1): Built on Gas Deposits. Looks like a water condenser but white and with a balloon on top.
Power Used:1
Resource Production: Turns atmosphere to helium-3 at the rate of a helium-3 extractor.


The fourth part of my ideas is a new race: Avians. These part people part birds have close ties with united earth, and use many similar technologies. Some of the items here are from the soaring cliffs idea listed above gas giants.

Avian Tech:
Low atmospheric zoology and rare animal zoology they can unlock the same way as humans.

New Resources (items):
-Feather: Used to make some flying vehicles.
-Bird Steel: A lightweight yet strong metal used in more advanced flying vehicles.

New Vehicles:
-Avian Rover: Works like a normal rover but can fly over buildings and terrain features, similar to the airborne lander.
Cost: ore: 5 wheel: 6 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: Small solar panel, small vehicle factory, small water pump, greenhouse.


-Avian Forest Rover: Works like a normal forest rover but can fly over buildings and terrain features, similar to the airborne lander.
Cost: wood: 40 wheel: 6 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: Fir Trees, Charcoal Hut, Wood Hut, Goat Pen, Chicken Coop, Water Well


-Avian Builder Bot: Works like a normal builder bot but can fly over buildings and terrain features, similar to the airborne lander.
Cost: ore: 15 wheel: 6 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: everything the builder bot can

-Avian Constructor: Builds some unique avian builds/
Cost: ore: 150 wheel: 8 gold:20 Feather: 6
Tech Required: Avian Base
Can Build: everything the builder bot can

Avian Lander Airborne: Airborne version of Avian Lander.


New Buildings:
-Avian Lander(1x1): Similar to the normal UE lander, the lander the Avians start with.
Power Produced:2
Housing: 2 colonists
Can Build: rover, forest rover, Avian rover, avian forest rover.

-Chicken Coop(2x2):
Description: "Avians like Chickens a lot, so they keep them as pets. Many think that avians evolved from chickens, although the more plausible theory is that they actually evolved from a white variant ravens."
Resource Production:Feather 10/minute
Cost: Wood:200 Ore:20
Built By: Forest Rover, Avian Forest rover
Requirements:Avian Base, 5 mil atmosphere


-Enclosed Chicken Coop(2x2): An enclosed version of the chicken coop
Resource Production:Feather 10/minute
Cost: Ore:2000, steel 250, gold 100
Built By: Builder Bot, Avian Builder Bot
Requirements:Avian Base or rare animal zoology, low atmospheric zoology


-Avian Solar Panel(1x1): A version of the normal solar panel that can be placed in the air or on land.
Power Production: 8
Cost: Ore:250, steel 10, feather 10
Built By: Buildr Bot, Avian Builder Bot
Requirements:Avian Base

-Wind Generator(1x1): A passive generator that must be built in the air.
Power Production: 12
Cost: Ore:250, steel 20,gold 10, feather 20
Built By: Avian Builder Bot
Requirements:Avian Base


Some WIP textures are below, along with a few pictures of what this would look like in-game:
Soaring Cliffs as Avian Race:

Gas Giant with United Earth:



Textures(WIP):
I'm making a texture pack with the textures if anyone's interested.
Cliff Terrain:

Cliff Face:

Air:


Gas Deposit:

Prepare for a wall of text, throwing this to see what sticks, what doesn't.
As usual, the cost, speed, and other stats of suggested things can be and are up to the developer.

Bold names are whole Ideas, with underlined Names being each part of that idea if it has more than one.

More Reptilian Probes
The Reptilians, I feel, should eventually just move from slave labor to a mechanized workforce.
As a result, I'd like to suggest more types of Probes.

Ore Probe
Alt Name(s): Ore Mining Probe
Description: Those pesky Eruption Ores are no longer out of reach!

Purpose: To mine Ore deposits, main point of this though is that the Probe can move over obsidian and lava to get at ore deposits in the direct middle of lava planet eruptions.

Obsidian Probe
Alt Names(s): Obsidian Cutting Probe (Name is as such due to how Obsidian is irl "mined" and it's with cutting/scalpel and piercing tools).
Description: Clear lava fields of Obsidian with ease!

Purpose: To mine Obsidian deposits, like the Ore Probe, it's mainly more for going where bugs cannot.

Diabolic Probe
Alt Names(s): Crystalline Probe, Crystal Cutting Probe (I imagine Crystalline to be glass-like, only a bit tougher, but still capable of fracturing into shards and pointy edges.)
Description: Your bugs are doing a passable job. now do an amazing job of mining Crystalline.

Purpose: Again, mainly suggested for the hovering, but also this Probe will have a far higher carry capacity, to help accommodate for the fact that crystalline on lava planets eventually just gets out of control, or to help fill your storage even faster, depending on whatever PoV fits the reptilians best.

Aluminum Probe
Description: Harvest Aluminum in places Bugs can't go!

Purpose: Hovers, lets you harvest Aluminum after eruptions.

Gold Probe
Description: Collect that shiny, shiny gold in places too hazardous for Bugs.

Purpose: Hovers, can Harvest gold in lava fields.

Have a Probe for just basically every deposit a reptilian could ever need one for. I alos mention hovering, because it what Probes look like they do, even if they're probly more just flying. Probes can't do insectoid operations, however.

Faster Probes
Probes, IMO are too slow. I feel it should have the advantage of Pavement speed boosts, only all the time, since they fly. I'd like their main purpose to be an almost total replacement of your workforce for more efficient and better units. But in this process, they'd lose all bonuses for paths, save for...

Gravity-Controlled Lanes
I'd also like a special type of path that only works with probes and other Hover/Flying units, but doubles their speed, or something close to it, and infact works as an obstacle for anything that can't fly or hover, by reducing speed by just as much, with a max decrease in speed resulting in a total of 0.2 units of speed. but that's more just for consideration than a real wishlist item.
For visuals, it'd look like a purple tile with a blue glow coming off it. For stats, I figure it'd take like 50 power a piece, and would give off alot of light too. Or not.

Macrocondenser
Purpose: Literally just a 2x2 version of the Microcondenser, only far more powerful for water production, for those colonies that might one day just be building microcondensers like they're nothing.

Gold/Aluminum Grow Bed
Description: With the power of overpowered Science, placing ore, water, crystalline, and gold, somehow creates... more gold, but also aluminum!
Purpose: A combo of a gold Grower and an Aluminum Grower, but now it's either 2x2, or 3x3.

Water Pools resist Eruptions

I don't mean it'll STOP them, but it makes it less likely that an eruption happens within 8 tiles but only in locations where there's 3 tiles of water all around one tile of water.
If an eruption cannot happen because Water Pools are all blocking it from happening, the Eruption happens where the least water pools are located, the blocking effect is ignored.

Water Pools and Lava will constantly clash if directly next to one another and both are filled enough to visibly touch, reducing lava count, but also eventually destroying water pools to create obsidian.

Lava Repulsion Matrix
Description: After spending so long on such a hostile environment, robotics-enhanced and enslaved insectoids have finally created something to repel lava!

Purpose: Literally does what it says, repels lava, forcing it away rather quickly, but costing stupid amounts of energy, and it's 3x3, but has excessive range.
Or, dev, you can imagine it's a "build One" type of deal with less power usage. Sort of like a Capitol in a United Earth Colony, only it's not the government building.
Works on eruptions as well, preventing them within a smaller range.
Very Expensive though compared to everything else, and requires a large workforce, I'm thinking, someplace in the 1K-10K range of Workers.

Hell, it could be 5x5 and probly still be worth it imo, it'd be like a Wonder, takes ridiculous amounts of stuff to make, but gives you really good benefits.

Incomplete Artificial Planet
Difficulty: A Literal Nightmare.
Description: You know nothing of Difficulty.

Resources: Steel Mounds, Aluminum Piles, Circuit Cases.
Obstacles: Pits, 0 Starting Atmosphere, and a constant reduction of Atmosphere of 1 Billion/Million per second, Very little starting resources on even Abundant settings.

Factions: Only Reptilians, OR, a purely mechanical new faction later down the road (if that'll ever happen.) I'm thinking... some kind of race that salvages other tech and canonically feared by all, even the Reptilians, due to how they literally cannibalize technology and only live in ship graveyards, or remnants of gigantic space husks of abandoned super-projects.
This faction, in my mind, would be sorta like raggedy metal robot zombies, like maybe destroyed or malfunctioning robots possessed by souls of various other factions? Could even be a horrifying remnant of the "Aliens" faction referenced by alot of United Earth and LIS buildings.
The starting unit would probably fly, with all early and even mid-game buildings looking sort of crappy and disheveled, with the motto "It just works" behind all art design, until the late-game structures which look pristine and VERY chunky/tough.

Rundown: This planet can only gain deposits from meteors landing at purely random locations, with no real discrimination when it comes to map edges, meaning corners aren't safe, unlike in Lava Planets.
Everytime a Meteor lands, it creates pit randomly, but where it doesn't, it creates various metal-based deposits and purely at random. Sometimes none is created, and alot of Pit tiles are placed instead.
A Pit is a useless tile that represents that there's literally nothing there but darkness and space. it can be replaced, but the tile to do so is very expensive.

However, wreckages could also crash into the map, creating either absurd amounts of material of only durable goods and nothing raw beyond Oil, but having a massive range to the affected area, if anything, make it so it's always blobby-in shape for spawned material piles.

Pits would spawn like massive rivers to begin with.

The Size of the map as it currently is, will increase the likelihood of meteors or wreckages smacking into the map area. Reason I don't say wreckages wouldn't make pits, is because something like the framework for a planet to give it it's gravity, a ship or even station wreck crashing into it, would stick into said framework, since said framework has to be MILES in depth.
But the Pits spawn semi-frequently, but become way more common as you increase past say... a Small map size. Pits will spawn even MORE excessively if you expand the map border.

If it was possible, I'd have an ability for the base tile type to be changed, as if making a path, but without actually blocking building upon it. Purpose of this would be to make it so that you can repair the framework, complete the artificial planet, and then just create a death planet or something, I dunno, while more complete tile types would result in both faster movement speed, building ontop of them, AND resistance to pits forming to replace said tiles.

Forgot to mention, this planet will occasionally be hit by Asteroids, which will create Lava, that after a while, create pits, unless Water pools, at that point do as I suggest, and create obsidian at the expense of sacrificing lava tiles. Asteroids will create stupid large holes of pits, but they are VERY rare, with all sorts of materials forming a wall around said holes.

Strategy: The whole map would be about placing structures at random and scattered all over, while hoarding stupid amounts of resources as all kinds crash about, with really no real sort of safe areas coming along until far in the tech tree.

Purpose: For the Ultimate Difficulty. The place would look like the framework for a low-class artificial planet left to collect dust in space, but has since drifted to the very tips of the galaxy, or even universe, which is why Pits are a solid black color.
It's to test if someone can truly move on their toes and adapt to any situation. And to also make the stubborn and masochistic suffer. >:D

Note: If this does get added to a secret list of "Things I'd love to add" then I promise, I will contribute to most if not all of the art assets, you just worry about the actual operation of the thing. :3

Upgrade Menu
A button in the bottom left of the screen, always there, but not always filled via the menu that comes up if you click on it.

It's a scroll menu, with a bar ofcourse, and it only displays in each item the [Original Building] with an arrow next to it pointing to the [Upgraded Building] and a Button next to that for Upgrade One, with the resources indicated near or on/under said button, black text being that it's all good, you can upgrade fully, and easily, and red text indicating that you can't upgrade it fully
One more button next to that, the same thing, but for Upgrade All.

Purpose of this is to allow players a way of easily viewing upgrades they have tech-access to. This includes buildings they have no resources for.

You can start the upgrade building process even with not enough resources, but a dialog could warn you that it's a bad idea if the building is crucial and you can live without it until construction is done.

Allow construction of a building without the needed resources
I never got why I can't do this tbh, I can queue up more than I can build, if I have the resources to build only one of say... vehicles, workers, or buildings.

Multiple Levels for Reptilian Government Building
I forgot the name, Sorry ^^;

Uses for Lava
This isn't even an idea to only pertain to Reptilians, I feel any that have access to the Lava World relate to this.
I think beyond waiting for it to cool into obsidian, you could use it in the late-game to collect as a resource and convert it into other resources you can't get in a Lava World, but with a ratio of at least or at most 1,000:1 of Lava into any resource not mined on Lava Planets.

Lock Obsidiobugs behind Lava World Start tech
You can't get Lava in an Ice or Desert World.

Lava Worlds can't change Atmosphere
It's not possible to reduce it visually below 500 Million, since you don't need alot of condensers, at least not atm, but with eruptions going off basically all the time, this would make sense. This way, you also don't need to balance consumption of atmosphere of Lava Worlds for new buildings, although you'd have to take Desert worlds into consideration, unless Lava Worlds got their own specialized, more unhinged condensers past the Microcondenser if that is ever a thing.

Replace Landing Pod with Surface Habitat Vessel with Human factions on inhospitable worlds. If Humans will ever get that kind of treatment to be allowed onto Ice and Lava Worlds, this is maybe how you could do it.

That's all the ideas I can both remember, and think of at the moment. Enjoying the game even still, not been too active on here, mainly due to being a tiny bit busy/distracted.

So, my idea is about a planet that start off at a high atmosphere and forces the player to survive in harsh environments until they lower the atmosphere to below 15 million. The pictures below are for the UE game style, I will include LIS later, but my pictures and description below should be good enough for bast to just plop everything into place in case he happens to like my idea enough to include it in the game.

Red crystalline deposit
Crystal resource indicator option in place of regular blue.
"Hell" rover, mines crystaline and builds basic structures.
The state of the ground when the game is started. The planet will have an atmosphere of 40,000,000. When my idea is done, LIS will have greater atmosphere reduction potential due to having access to diamonds. UE won't have it so easy here though.
at 30,000,000 atmosphere
at 20,000,000 atmosphere
at 15,ooo,ooo atmosphere.
Normal colonist wearing high atmo gear instead of low atmo gear.
Dark Micromine. white areas are transparent so don't pay attention to those. Only UE will use these.
Dark Regolith furnace. The white areas are transparent and the image will show up black against the dark ground.

This map will be brutal for UE but medium for LIS. The main reason being that UE doesn't have a brutal world and LIS needs some easier worlds. LIS will be able to use crystalline to gain direct access to ore, while UE will have to use crystalline to mine regolith, with they can convert to ore. Lis will also be able to access diamond mines because diamonds will be instrumental in making more effective terraforming structures than those of UE. As a result of LIS having better terraforming equipment due to diamonds, they will be able to reduce atmosphere faster but UE will be in it for the long haul.

Here are the playing styles for LIS and UE:

UE:
Start with one hell rover, which collects crystalline, and one dark lunar rover(image will be added) for regolith mining. Once you have 200 crystalline, build a dark micromine. Use the lunar rovers to collect regolith from that and continue to collect crystalline and build more dark micromines. Then, build a he3 extractor, regolith compactor, and a water extractor, which uses he3 and regolith, just like the normal one. Use crystalline to build a dark regolith furnace(image will be added) for more power and crystalline storage. Simply put, it's the same brutal playing style as the ice world except flipped on it's head and with UE instead of LIS.

The player will continue to build up their he3 and ore production as normal and build their colony normally, but they will have to hurry because they will have to build up their rum production to make more crytalline via the same green crystalline patches as ice planet. Once the player has enough rum production to produce enough crystalline, they will continue on the regular UE path. I will also be throwing in a crystalline generator later in the game, since a big colony would need to stop micromanaging eventually. There is not a big demand on crystalline yet but I'm sure that bast will come up with something to balance the scales, so a crystalline generator for UE/LIS should be added to the game.

Once the atmosphere is at 30 million, regolith extractors will become available, and that's when everything starts to get a lot easier for UE players, but from 40 to 30 million, UE will have a hard time. I will be making images for a more advanced UE atmosphere reducer soon. We already have small and medium reducers.


As for LIS, I will keep developing their strategy. I wanted to do the ultimate simplification for bast so that if he wanted to, he could plop this into the game and it would be just the same as the ice planet for LIS. All dark version structures on this planet would cost the same as original structures. For instance, a dark regolith furnace would produce as much power and consume as much regolith and cost as much crystalline as the regular regolith furnace. The same goes for the dark micromine and any future dark structures added for this planet. If I'm right, aside from the additional atmosphere reduction building that I am making, everything should be able to be plopped right into the game with no added work, and no numbers are needed on my part since the only new structures are dark structures that have the same stats as their lighter counterparts. That only reason for the dark versions is because the light versions would've looked out of place as they were white and blue while this planet is dark and red.

Gonna post ALOT of my ideas for the Zolarg faction. As it stands, compared to say... United Earth, the Zolarg tech tree is VERY small.
You can reach it's end in under a day, while United Earth takes atleast a week if you suck sorta, or probly 4-5 days if you know what you're doing.

As it stands, there's currently alot of buildings that don't do much for a "late-game" colony, atleast not as much as it COULD. I will go through each one, and suggest an upgrade for each that currently doesn't exist in any capacity, if I'm wrong on if there's no better upgrade, then let me know!


Brew Pit.
This produces about 2 rum per second, according to my stats page, so that's an estimate, however even with 91 fully staffed and operating, it doesn't equal enough rum to make more than 1 crystalline patch.

Suggested upgrade: Unholy Brew Tank. At the cost of Antaura, Water and Food, this could produce well up to 50 rum per second, and be just as large as a Brew Pit, with probly about 6 workers. Likely could cost Antanium, Antaura, Wood, and Ant Paste, maybe Civics as well.

Suggested Upgrade: Brew Ravine. At the cost of some sugar, water and food, this produces less food than the Unholy Brew Tank and takes up more space, being 1x3 diagonally top right, to bottom left length-wise, but also takes less workers, only 3. Could cost antanium, alot of Civics, Tons of ant Paste, Gold, and maybe Wood.


Supply Pile.
Ofcourse, it increases storage of literally everything, but just by a little bit.

Suggested upgrade: Unholy Pit of Stuff. Would be 2x2, but would store at least 4 times more things than 4 supply piles, since it'd look like a mystic-inspired, cool hole in the ground filled with stuff, and holes hold more than piles.
This wouldn't cost Antaura to run it, but could cost Antaura to build, but less amounts of other resources compared to a money pit, since you've got basically magic doing most of the digging.

Suggested Upgrade: Sugar Matrix of Supply. Could be just as big as a Supply pile, but would contain more, being a tall sugar-powered silo that uses sugar power in ways to miniaturize the contents. (or could be a constant Antaura draw maybe?) Would require workers to keep running, and maybe 50-100 power.


Shrine of Mystics.
Produces Antaura.

Suggested Upgrade: Unholy Temple of Mystics. Would be 3x3 or 4x4, but produces WAY more antuara than a Shrine of Mystics. Needs more workers also, but also could be a tech-required building for other researches.

Suggested Upgrade: Monolith of Mystics. Would remove the worker cost of Shrines, but would cost power and produce more Antaura than a Shrine. It would cost ALOT of antanium, Antaura and Civics to produce, but no Wood whatsoever. Or it could cost no Antaura.


Mound.
Gives 200 population room and produces a decent amount of food per second.

Suggested Upgrade: Unholy Mound of Whorship. Would be a 3x3 building that would likely contain atleast 2 times more, and would produce Antaura instead of Food as an addition.

Suggested Upgrade: Hive. Would be just as large, just a taller structure, and would cost primarily Antanium, Ant Paste, Civics, and Aluminum.


Aluminum Mine
Essentially an endless source of Aluminum, provided you have the time, effort and resources to keep placing them.

Indirect Upgrade Suggestion: Unholy Core Mine. This would be much larger, but uses Antaura to power itself along with alot of power. This could also be an upgrade to the Mining Operation, it could take WAY more workers, but produces a little bit of everything one could get from the ground.


Synthetic Crystalline Patch
A placeable patch of Crystalline, you can get 400 of it from this.

Indirect Upgrade Suggestion: Crystalline Growth Pit. Would be a 3x3-ish structure that costs alot of Rum to run, but produces Crystalline. Would cost Crystalline and Rum, maybe also Aluminum and Ant Paste. Would use Power to increase the growth rate of Crystalline, maybe 200 power?
Could also cause

Indirect Upgrade Suggestion: Crystalline Growth Node. Would be a 1x1 structure that costs Antaura and power to run, requires no workers, but ends up creating Crystalline patches near it that regenerate and expand at a rate needed for high crystalline demands.

Mega Tree
A really big tree that gives 800 wood.

Indirect Upgrade suggestion: Unholy Chamber of Growth. Clones colonists, and produces a bit of everything gained from plants, so wood and sugar mainly. Costs Antaura and power to run alongside a steady supply of water and a decent workforce. Dunno on costs and size.


New Building Suggestion: Pit of Terraforming. Burns wood and Ant Paste consistently in order to produce atmosphere.

Alt Idea: Antauran Utopian Pillar. Costs alot of Antaura to consistently produce atmosphere up to 11 million atmosphere. Or 16 million, either way it produces it up to a point and either temporarily turns off once that point is reached,


New Building suggestion: Gross Shape. Uses Antaura to absorb atmosphere above smog-levels, but looks really gross and wrong. Just a big ball of concentrated pollution. Could produce Pollution as a physical resource.


That's all I can come up with, sorry for the huge wall of text, I just really enjoy Zolarg, and want more to be added, so I'm doing my part as best as I can!

This topic isn't meant to be a complaint, it's just my ideas of what could be done to improve on the existing planets' designs. I realize that bast isn't working very much on new content and I support that, since what he is doing now is better for the game than making new content. I just figured that I would cover all of the planets for my planet-hub topic. That way people can get my opinion of all the planets.


earthlike Planet specific ideas:

earthlike planet summary: I think that this planet is fine as it is. It's supposed to be a training planet that gives the user the perfect conditions to build a colony, so I think it should be left alone. There are some ideas that I have regarding all planets that also apply to this planet, but I don't have any ideas regarding this specific planet. I do believe that every race should have this planet type so the player can learn to play this race under the best conditions, with the exception of zolarg because they already have a world with the best conditions to grow, their just a harder species to manage overall. reptilians and LIS get the abandoned world, which is earthlike but doesn't have any ore.

Waterworld specific ideas:

Waterworld summary: This planet is really fun to play because you have to be carful how you design your colony layout. I wouldn't chancge anything about this planet and I'm not going to suggest anything because all of the ideas that I have bast is already going to implement soon. There are other ideas that pertain to all planets that apply here, but no specific ideas come to mind when thinking about this planet.

red planet specific ideas:

Red Planet Summary: I really like the simplicity of the map, and I like the laid-back feel that you get when playing it. I also like how quickly it allows you to grow your colony. There is not much more that I would like to see added to this planet aside from the general ideas that I have below that don't apply to any planet. This planet is very well-designed.

red badlands decorations: I think that the red planet map should generate decorations that resemble badlands structures, or weird rock structures that form because wind wears it down into awkward shapes. This should make the map aesthetically pleasing.

generated lake-bed rivers: per the dry lakebed tile idea below, i think that rivers of those tiles should be generated on red planet maps. This allows the red planet to become just like an earthlike planet once terraformed, with rivers that produce infinite amounts of water. It gives the map a more dynamic feel.

Dust storms: These planetwide storms can last for months and would make it more difficult to see your colony. Solar panels would stop working, but you could implement a windmil to take advantage of the storms and it would produce more during these storms than normally. You already have added the ability to block out light by subtracting alpha from an overlaying object to simulate night time. You could create another overlay object for storms and give it a reddish-tan hue. Then just add moving particle affects and wind sounds and your done. These should disappear once the planet is terraformed. There shouldn't be a damage factor to these storms as the dust is too fine to really wear anything down.

Dynamic Terraformation: I think that this planet type specifically could benefit from dynamic terraforming and should be the first to receive such a feature if added since it's one of the most played maps.


Lunar specific ideas:

Lunar Summary: Lunar world is my favorite map because you can jumpstart your colony before you even get your first immigrant. I like the fact that it's terraformable and the regolith challenge is fun as well. There are a few features that could be added to make this world more immersive though.

Jagged rock decos: Since a lunar planet has no atmosphere, it has no wind on it's surface to smooth and erode rocks, so you should see some really jagged rock formations. I think this would add some aesthetics.

craters: I think that large circular patches of darker terrain tiles should exist on the map. These terrain tiles would act the same as lakebed tiles in that they will become water tiles as atmosphere increases. Craters should be random sizes and distances between. I would even have them generate partially off of the map and across region maps to give a very appealing region view. This may might that craters could envelop most or all of some maps, and some maps might get no crater tiles at all, but that's the beauty of it. the player should also have the option to fill in a crater tile or water tile using regolith where they would otherwise use ore on other planets. The player should be able to turn regular tiles into crater tiles as well with the cost of money.

meteor showers: these showers would pummel structures below periodically. Any that land on empty tiles could generate regolith nodes and could have the chance to generate mini-craters that would fill with water upon terraforming, this is why I think we should have the ability to turn crater tiles to regular tiles, and vise versa. The damage from these meteors shouldn't be catastrophic, but it should cause some damage depending on the structure. These meteors should stop once atmosphere is above 1 mil.

Atmosphere leach: Since most planets like the moon aren't big enough to keep an atmosphere forever(there are exceptions), there should be a significant drain on atmosphere that must be compensated for. It could also be a benefit if a colony's atmosphere is too high though. A drain of 5k per minute would be a challenge at first, and you would have to beat that mark in order for condensors to operate.


Forest Planet ideas:

Forest Summary: I don't have much to say about this world, it's pretty straightforward albiet annoying at the start. Not really a big benefit to this world aside from the fact that you don't have to mess with the atmosphere at first until you get bigger. I'd honestly play abandoned before forest any day. Here are some ideas I have in mind though:

Rivers: this should be an addition. Any forest world requires lots of water in order for trees to grow.

mega trees: i think that mega-trees should generate on the map at first and begin to spread. Players could try to preserve these so that they'll have a huge supply later on. Once they they're gone, they're gone.

Asteroid planet ideas:

Asteroid summary:
I like the asteroid world. It's just like lunar, but harder since you don't have alu nodes. I used to play this world back before we had ways to get infinite diamonds. Might take a crack at it again to see how far I get. I have a few ideas regarding this world.

craters: the same concept as the lunar planet.

meteor showers: the same concept as lunar planet

Extreme atmosphere leech: asteroids are definately not large enough to keep an atmosphere for long. Because of this, they are drained by 50k per minute. 100 minutes is all it takes for an earthlike atmosphere level to drop to 0. Major benefit later in the game though when atmosphere is increased rapidly by pollution.

Awkward rotation: An asteroid has a very randomized shape in real life. it can be elongated, flat, and even spherical. Because of this, days and nights on this planet last for random times. Short nights lower colonist energy. Short days reduce happiness. long nights can increase colonist energy and long days can raise happiness. This amount increased or decreased would only apply if the length of a night or day goes past the minimum or maximum limits. if a limit is exceeded, the same amount of energy or hapiness is taken away or given, no matter how far past the limit a day or night is.

Abandoned World Ideas:

Abandoned Summary: I really like the abandoned world map, but my idea for a twilight themed abandoned world would add a mystic and ancient feel to the map. I'd like to see a much darker themed map than the light and cheery theme that it has now.

Rivers: aside form the twilight idea I would love to see rivers on this map.

Ice planet ideas:

Ice summary: I like the ice planet because it's a challenge to get through the crystalline bottleneck. I do have some ideas though:

glacial/ crystal decos: a slew of icy/crystalline decorations would look good for this planet.

unstable melting: When you heat up an ice planet, there's no telling where the oceans and rivers will form and where the actual land will be. Ice melts very unpredictably, so there should be no indication as to whether each tile is a lakebed or regular tile, but they should both still be there and have the same texture. It should be set up to where rivers will form as if randomly and instantly. This would be part of the real-life challenges of terraforming an ice planet, so would make sense here. Sometimes your colony gets destroyed just like in lava world, sometimes you get lucky.

Underwater crystal farm: This new building would need to straddle water and land and would be four-way rotatable so it can be placed in any orientation as long as the front 4 tiles are on water and the back 2 squares are on land. It is a 3x2 structure, and it consumes moderate amounts of water, crystalline, and alcohol to constantly produce large amounts of crystalline. The concept behind it is that some crystals grow faster in a water solution with the nutrients it needs to grow. Water also allows the crystals to grow much larger because gravity is much weaker in water as we all know. The fact that the structure would have to straddle land and water means that the planet will need to terraformed before a player can place on of these and get rid of their green crystals.

desert world:

desert summary: I don't have much to say about this map, haven't played reptilians that much. I do think that it could use some aesthetics though, just one flat plane of land is nothing to get all excited about. But here are some of the ideas that I have:

Yellow badlands decos: weird yellow rock forms, crackly ground, rough patches, and some shrubbery and cacti. These should randomly dot the landscape and would really up the aesthetics on this map.

Tar(oil) pits: instead of water flowing through the map, tar pits would give it a more desert feel, as you find these pits naturally in deserts. just like rivers on the earthlike planet yield infinite water, these pits should yield infinite oil. The major downfall with this benefit is that you need workers to collect the oil, and that can be pretty tedious and may slow down performance.

raise the atmosphere: Since deserts are supposed to be hot, we should raise the atmosphere to above earthlike. This also corrosponds to my thermal idea below. In addition to this, I would recommend adding a fully terraformed stage where atmosphere is reduce to between 5 mil and 15 mil. I'm not saying that deserts don't exist when atmosphere is at perfect levels because the saharrah wouldn't exist if that were true. It's just that since bast still hasn't added any thermal or moisture level factors to terraforming, I thought that lowering the atmosphere was good enough to simulate raising the moisture level and lowering thermal levels to make the planet cooler and wetter.

dry-lakebed tiles: I think that the dry lakebed tile idea would particularly help this planet as once it is terraformed from dessert to earthlike, you'll have rivers flowing through the landscape.
Sandstorms: Not to be confused with dust storms, the storms are much shorter, yet can be devastating to colonists and buildings. These storms should cause colonist sickness, slow down movement, and accelerate the decay of structures by a certain amount for the duration of the storm. Depending on the direction of the storm, walls placed on the map will block the storm from getting into your cities. It's best to surround your cities with walls so that you get as little exposure to the storms as possible, just an extra challenge. These storms should cease once atmosphere is reduced to earthlike and life is brought back to the planet.

Lava planet ideas:

lava summary: I liked this planet at one point, but I think it's rather pointless to play being that it doesn't have an end-goal and you're colony is never safe no matter how far down the atmosphere goes. My list of lava ideas on my planet hub topic should cover all of the ideas that I have for this planet, and they all still stand.

Fissure vents: These gigantic cracks in the planet spew forth ash and toxic gas into the atmosphere. Because of this, atmosphere is increased by 2 thousand atmosphere a minute, even if the atmosphere is reduced to between 5 and 15 mil, atmosphere will still pile up, requiring you to build more buildings that use up atmosphere to balance it out. The only thing that would need to be added is a passive loop that continuously counts down 60 seconds and then adds 2k to the atmosphere number value. Good luck terraforming this planet.

ideas for all existing planets:

Dry Lakebed Tiles: I've suggested this a few times, but basically dry lakebed tiles should replace water tiles in low and high atmosphere planets. These tiles can be built on, but watch out, because when atmosphere goes over 250k or falls under 30 million, these tiles will turn to water and any buildings on them will be destroyed. There should be an apparent difference in color shade or texture between regular tiles and the dry lakebed tiles. remaning Ice deposits should also turn into water deposits at the same atmosphere level.

Dynamic terraforming: I've mentioned this a couple of times too. It's simple, if atmosphere goes too low, the terraformed planet becomes barren, just as if it were a red or lunar planet; if atmosphere goes too high, then the planet becomes hotter, becoming first a dessert and then eventually a lava planet, with all the eruptions and lava spreading we know and love. . I also think that atmosphere requirements for all atmosphere stages for region games should be multiplied by the number of tiles on a region. This gives the player a longer playthrough and also encourages them to develop cities on every tile. I think that downside is worth it and it would be a fun challenge to work towards. I think that aside from the tiles changing texture, trees should generate across the map on empty space once atmosphere either rises past 5 mil or falls past 15 mil. I also think they should disappear while outside of those ranges.

Thermal factor: I feel like there should be some sort of challenge regarding keeping your colonists at a good temperature. Perhaps you could add a meter in statistics that indicates thermal level of the entire colony. Too hot or cold and your colonists will become sick and loose energy and hapiness. An earthlike planet, or any planet that's been terraformed to between 5 mil and 15 mil, will not affect the meter at least, but too much atmosphere and the meter will start to go up and too little atmosphere will start to subtract heat from the meter. You should be able to build coolers or heaters to supplement the loss or gain of temperature. Currently most planets start out at no atmosphere, which means that they will start out cold. Lava is the only planet that would add the the thermal meter at this time but I think that the desert type planet should have high atmosphere so it can add to the meter.

Regions acting as mc campaigns: Now, some people would disagree with me on this, but I think it's totally fair to call region mode and sort of "campaign mode." This is because with regions, you get a longer playthrough and it takes longer for you to develop the space given to you. I also think it's fair that region mode requires premium, as most well-developed apps offer a free trial(single map mode) and full version with campaign mode(region mode). Some of yall might disagree. but here are the main ideas that I have in mind:
- design random mandatory goals to have a chance to pop up for each tile a map occupies that grant the player money, research. civics, happiness, or other resources, kind of like quests. But these would be more like story-line quests. a medium map would contain four of these quests. These should take a decent amount of time to complete and should make the game progress slower.
- design smaller optional side-quests that pop up randomly occasionally and grant smaller bonuses.
- each tech should require a certain number of complete story-line quests before being unlocked, even if you have enough research. There would be only one quest per tile so this would encourage players to develop all the tiles to complete all of the available story quests.
-Make individual map progression depend on the completion of story quests. For instance, you can add a population cap that unlocks after the quest is complete, and for medium maps with four quests, you could increase the cap in increments to allow the player to develop further after each quest, but not indefinitely until all quests are complete.

Overall I think that these ideas for campaign mode should add a very interesting element to regions mode and would make it more worthwhile and entertaining to play and a player might be entertained for a very long time before becoming bored.




But anyway, those are my ideas. I wanted to go over each planet so that everything was covered in my planethub topic. I'll paste this link so yall can access it easily. Let me know what you think and which ideas you like/dislike.

H3110 guys!

It’s very strategical to have some important deposits to spread themselves, such as synth. cryatalline deposits and trees, they duplicates themselves after some time and spawn new next to them, it’s a important way to save the cost for the instant-harvest resources, especially for the crystalline, in the game we have nothing like a crystal grower to get some stable crystalline supplies.

However there’s one thing inconvenient thing in such gameplay is that, rovers and harvesters tend to deplete any deposits they see, this is bad because it also removes some strategical spots for spreading, it gives extra trouble if you wish to have sustainable supplies from those spread-able deposits.


So here comes my idea, HARVEST CONTROL ZONES.

This is a zoning tool that prevents the strategical deposit spread sites to be razed by the dumb rovers, without using walls (in fact, walls are actually useless because somehow the rovers can get ‘glitched’ into the walled zones...) Rovers can still pass through these zones, however, they cannot harvest deposits in these zones, so these strategical deposits are protected as long as the zones aren’t removed.

Hopefully it helps around the matters of spreadable deposits.

BTW I somehow figured out there’s potential for other zoning tools for this game. Such as blueprinting tools for city planning (but probably also produces lots of unwanted entities).
Your ideas? (^ω^)

H3110 guys!

It’s very strategical to have some important deposits to spread themselves, such as synth. cryatalline deposits and trees, they duplicates themselves after some time and spawn new next to them, it’s a important way to save the cost for the instant-harvest resources, especially for the crystalline, in the game we have nothing like a crystal grower to get some stable crystalline supplies.

However there’s one thing, the inconvenient thing in such gameplay is that, rovers and harvesters tend to deplete any deposits they see, this is bad because it also removes some strategical spots for spreading, it gives extra trouble if you wish to have sustainable supplies from those spread-able deposits.


So here comes my idea, HARVEST CONTROL ZONES.

This is a zoning tool that prevents the strategical deposit spread sites to be razed by the dumb rovers, without using walls (in fact, walls are actually useless because somehow the rovers can get ‘glitched’ into the walled zones...) Rovers can still pass through these zones, however, they cannot harvest deposits in these zones, so these strategical deposits are protected as long as the zones aren’t removed.

Hopefully it helps around the matters of spreadable deposits.

BTW I somehow figured out there’s potential for other zoning tools for this game. Such as blueprinting tools for city planning (but probably also produces lots of unwanted entities).
Your ideas? (^ω^)

I'm sorta not a good person to ask that, but It depends on your faction.

LIS on the Ice World is the hardest experience you're likely to have in the game so far. Crystalline needs to be processed for power, your only source of it for a LONG time. Crystalline will later run out, when you also need a decent Rum production line to plant more crystalline to keep the lights on.

Zolarg on the Ice World, on the other hand, is a bit tougher, since Crystalline is used to make sugar, which will eventually run out also if you also don't make more rum production to plant more crystalline so you don't starve all your people to death by accident.
Granted, this can easily be circumvented by sending 3 million food via a capitol or consulate equal to level 5.
This can make Zolarg easier than the LIS hands down as at the end of the day, if you do it right, you shouldn't need to import food for a long while, unless you started with anything less than a Small+ or Abundant resource world and wasted time in not rushing the tech tree as quickly as possible.

It DOES however make it very hard to get overzealous with expansion compared to the easier worlds where over-expanding isn't as heavily punished.

In Ice Worlds, if you run out of Crystalline at any point and can't mine anymore, you are completely done for. That planet will never progress further. Ever.

If there was a loss condition, that'd be it for Ice Worlds, since you can't buy Crystalline in any capacity, and I'm actually unsure if you can gift it to others.

In short: No other planet-type even holds a candle to Ice Worlds for difficulty and it's all due to the lack of being able to trade Crystalline.

This is for those that are having a problem harvesting enough Crystalline.

So.
In order to get crystalline faster first you need to plan ahead and not use it immediately for the micro mines.
The fastest way to get it is to continuously build regolith furnaces near crystalline deposits.

We all know however that you only have a limited amount (very big on a mega world but still limited).
The trick is in the Synthetic crystalline.

The synthetic deposits actually do spread albeit slow (I sadly can't tell you the time it takes though). The best way to farm it is to build the deposit in a place where the rovers can't reach (preferably the corner of the map or in a square completely surrounded with walls).
Then you just need patience.

If you build about 5-9 initially, after about 30 min. you will notice a big change. The deposits actually slowly create new ones overtime.

So if you wait long enough you will have a never ending supply of crystalline.

I hope I helped someone with this :-)

Here is a collection on concepts that I am leaning towards for My Colony 2 as of today (20200624). This is all subject to change and I can be convinced by the community of anything, so keep the suggestions and feedback coming. This is going to be a super long post featuring all of my thoughts on MC2 thus far. Feel free to criticize anything and everything here. My feelings will not be hurt and nothing is set in stone. This is a starting point for community discussion to help make MC2 the best game it can be!

Relationship to My Colony 1
MC2 is an entire new game, not an upgrade to the original, or a version 2.0. It may use completely different concepts. It will not be tied in to the same server. Game files will not transfer over, as MC2 will probably have completely different buildings/tech tree, etc.

This does not mean that MC1 will be going away. I will continue to support the original and the server indefinitely. I realize that a lot of people like the style of game that MC1 is and do not want anything to change, so the original is staying where it is. It may continue to receive new content as well as bug fixes, but I do not plan on any further changes to the gameplay mechanics or core engine going forward.

That said, as long as MC1 remains popular and people keep playing it and paying for it, I will keep the game going.

Business Model/Monetizing
This is the least fun part of development, but a necessary one in order to make creating a game feasible. The business model for MC1 was tacked on as an afterthought, and reflecting back I do not like the concept of certain structures and units being premium.

None of this is set in stone, but here are my initial thoughts on the business model. My Colony 2 will be a straight paid app on all app stores, with everything unlocked at the base price, no in-app purchases. No advertising anywhere. The exception is on Ape Web Apps and the Ape Market, where it will be free, everything unlocked, but with no access to multiplayer or custom content. Maybe only one map type available.

Current My Colony 1 is basically already like this on Desktop, with the mobile client being free with additional IAP, so this change just makes the mobile version match up with what is already on desktop.

Now, I do anticipate the dissatisfaction of Android players not having the free version in the Play Store. However, Android support for Progressive Web Apps is sufficiently advanced now that you can just install the Web version to your homescreen like an app and it's hardly any different. Same with iOS. And MC1 will still be available for free like it always has been.

No free version on the mobile app stores will likely mean less players, and I understand this. But I like the idea of just buying a game and having the whole thing, not worrying about IAP's and not having any advertising.

Client/Server Structure
The biggest change to MC2 is it's design from the ground up as a multiplayer game. This does not mean that you cannot play single player, but it is being designed specifically for multiplayer.

MC1 has limited multiplayer, which basically consists of chat and trading/gifting resources. You can play together on a multiplayer region, but all you are really doing is sharing atmosphere and seeing thumbnails of other players' colonies. Not really very multiplayery (is that a word?). The MC1 multiplayer is also global and centralized, meaning everything has to go through the global My Colony server.

My Colony 2 multiplayer will be decentralized, meaning no global server that everybody plays on. Why am I doing this, because it seems like a downgrade? Look at every game out there with real global multiplayer, not just chat and trading. That takes massive infrastructure, and you pay for it with either a monthly subscription or endless IAP's. That's the only way it's really possible, and I don't think anybody wants that if you really stop and think it through.

The only realistic way to add real multiplayer to the game without investing in a massive infrastructure and charging big money for the game is to decentralize it. And since I am not Blizzard and do not want to spend my whole life maintaining MC2 servers, I am adopting a decentralized approach.

What does this mean? My Colony 2 will actually be designed as two separate applications in one, the client and the server.

The game client will be fairly light weight. It's job is to receive data from the server application and render it to the screen, and pass instructions as to what the player wants to do onto the server. That's pretty much it, and it should be fairly performant. Even though the game is moving to 3d, I still expect it to perform better than MC1, simply because 3d hardware rendering performs better than 2d software rendering.

The game server is much more interesting and is where all of the game mechanics take place, but since the server does not have to worry about handling the UI or making drawing calls, it actually has a bit more overhead to work with than on MC1. The two most expensive operations in MC1 are the rendering and the pathfinding. In MC2, the server is eliminating the rendering, and I also want to greatly reduce the pathfinding, leaving more headroom for actual fun stuff, like game mechanics simulation.

So in MC2, the game relationship is between client(s) and server. Whenever you create a new game in MC2, you are creating a new server, and then connecting to it with a client. The server is saved and retained between plays, where the client only exists while it is in use, and is not saved. So the point I just want to get across is that the client is really not that important, the server is.

The server and client code are both included in the My Colony 2 game. You will have the option of starting a regular game or creating a dedicated server. When you start a regular game, you are spinning up both a client and server and creating a 1-1 connection between the two right on your device. You can also make your game joinable by friends or others on your local network for multiplayer.

You can also create a dedicated server. When you create a MC2 dedicated server, you will be presented with a special server GUI that allows you to be in full control of the game. The server will continue to process game data as long as it is running, even if no players/clients are connected. A dedicated server will be able to establish custom game rules and parameters, and have mods installed that will be transferred to any client who connects. You will be able to make a dedicated server open to the public, or by invite only, or by specifying a list of accounts who are able to join. It's up to the server. A dedicated server will be able to moderate it's players however they want, the server can adjust resource levels, ban players for cheating, or anything. It's all up to the server owner.

The game data is saved only on the server, and the server owner will be responsible for making backups. I expect game files to be a lot bigger than MC1, so I am not going to be implementing Cloud Sync, which is known to cause corruption on larger files anyway. The ability to export and backup data will be built right into the game as usual.

Because of the way it's designed, even if you only want to play single player, it still may be desirable to set up a private dedicated server. For instance, you could run a private MC2 dedicated server on your powerful home PC that is always on/connected to the internet. Then you can connect to your server from your tablet/phone/laptop/another window on your computer, wherever you are, and your game is always there waiting for you, and all of the processing is being done on the more powerful computer.

The Game World/Game Files
In MC1, the game world is divided into cities and regions, and each city is a separate game file. In MC2, there are no cities and regions, there are planets.

This is something I am aping from Minecraft. A planet is like a regular city file in MC1, except is extends out in every direction to infinity, so you do not have to worry about running out of space for your city. A planet can have multiple cities and multiple players building cities at the same time.

Planets will be procedurally generated, and new areas will be generated in real-time as needed. Each planet type will have different biomes like in Minecraft, so that different environments and different resources are available in different parts on the planet.

This system means that you will have to build up trade networks with other cities or make additional settlement outposts across the planet in order to bring more resource types back to your colony. In MC1, practically every resource in the game is available with a square mile of your lander. This doesn't really make sense. In MC2 you will have to go out and find resources, and then build up a network for bringing them back into your city.

Technically, the MC2 world is still a big 2d grid like in MC1, but each tile does have an elevation, a z-index, for varied terrain elevations. Different resources might be found at different elevations and in different biomes. You will also be able to adjust the terrain in-game, like building up dirt to level out construction areas. There will be flat areas good for building, low canyons, and hilly or mountainous areas.

Also like in Minecraft, the terrain is generated on the fly and only transferred to the client in "chunks" as needed. So your client will only contain the data for the area that you are currently looking at, and the immediate surrounding areas. As you scroll around the map, areas you are no longer looking at will be disposed from memory as new areas are loaded from the server.

Construction / Resource Gathering and Rovers
I would really like to get rid of Rovers completely and simulate everything. It's not that I hate rovers, they are so helpful and adorable. The issue is with the pathfinding. Just driving rovers around the map takes up a huge percentage of the MC1 processing time, for what is essentially a visual effect.

Pathfinding is both CPU and memory intensive on anything larger than a medium sized MC1 map, and in MC2 the map sizes are being expanded infinitely larger. It's not just as simple as "only path finding around a certain area from the rover." Before you can even calculate pathfinding operations, you first have to generate a pathfinding map and load it into memory. The maps will be more expensive than in MC1 owing to the introduction of terrain elevation, as there will now be cliffs to work around. Each time a new structure is placed the pathfinding map needs to be recalculated. With the game being multiplayer, this will have to be taking place on a larger scale. It is one of the features holding MC1 back, due to all of the CPU time that must be dedicated to solving rover paths.

The issue of course, is that everybody likes rovers. Even I like rovers. Would the game be less fun without them? I don't know. If you could just turn off Rover Rendering in the engine settings and you didn't even see them, but everything continued to operate as normal, would it make a difference to the game, or would it matter? Maybe it would, maybe it wouldn't.

Everything a Rover does can be simulated for a fraction of the CPU and memory cost.

This is the largest part of MC2 that I don't have an answer to. I can't just remove rovers because that would be a blow to the fans of MC1. I also cringe thinking of all of the months wasted on optimizing path finding and the 1 star complaints about performance, all relating to a path finding feature in what is essentially a city building game.

There are options.

I could always just keep rovers in the game as they are and just keep working around the processing issues that come with it. In a single player game or a server with only a few active players at once, it probably wouldn't be a very big hit.

I have also considered just simulating rovers, sort of like colonists are just simulated in MC1. For example, you don't even have to build your own rovers. But when you place a new construction order, little rovers drive up onto the construction site and build your building anyway. These rovers do not exist on the server, but you see them building on the client. Same way for moving resources around. On the server it is just simulated, but on the client, you see a rover driving around doing all of the work. This would still require path finding, but each client would be doing their own path finding on the visual rover effect, and the player could turn it off if it became a performance issue.

If the client could just visually simulate things like rovers, colonists, police cars, busses, etc, they would all still be there visually making your city look alive, but the server wouldn't even have to worry about them.

Maybe there are other options too that I am not thinking of? All feedback on Rovers is welcome. I want the game to be performant, but I also don't want to go against the fans, so please let me know what you think either way.

Graphics
MC1 is a software rendered game using the HTML5 canvas element, arranging .png and .svg tile images onto a 2d isometric grid. Most of the graphics processing is done by the main CPU and not the graphics card, so graphics performance is largely defined by how good your processor is. This is why the game runs a lot better on desktop vs mobile, or even on iPhone vs android, and iPhone processors tend to be a bit better.

The problems is that the CPU also has to process the game, so trying to do everything at once gets expensive, especially on mobile devices.

My Colony 2 is moving to WebGL for graphics processing, which is a javascript based implementation of OpenGL that handles rendering on the GPU. This should lead to far better performance on most devices.

My original idea was to use Blender for all of the games building models. The graphics were going to be awesome. But when I dug into Blender and started working with it, I remembered how I am not actually a graphics designer, and it was going to take me forever to make all of the models for this game.

My other idea was to make blocky pixelated type graphics using my own Voxel Paint application (https://www.apewebapps.com/voxel-paint/). This means lower quality visuals but much higher output and probably better rendering performance as well. It's also so easy to use that anybody could make their own MC2 models, my wife even offering to help design structures for the game (she is a big Minecraft fan).

At the end of the day, My Colony 1 was never known for high quality graphics, but I thought that with MC2 I could really make it look great. After putzing around with Blender though, I have to acknowledge my own personal limitations. Basically, I can either spend months learning how to make great 3d models in Blender, or I can spend months working on the game code. I know which one I'd rather do. So I am probably going to go with the pixelated look, simply because it is something that I can actually do myself within a realistic timeframe, and it will also go well with the next point I'm about to explain, which is modding.

I know some people will not like a pixelated looking game. This is one of those areas where I have to say "tough," unless somebody is willing so supply me with hundreds of 3d models free of charge, which is what it is going to take in order to do this properly.

Modding
Customization is going to be huge in MC2 compared to the original. Given the global online multiplayer in MC1, custom content could not realistically be allowed in the game. The decentralized nature of MC2 changes everything though, and modding and customization, as well as all of the tools needed to make it happen, are going to be baked right into the client.

In MC2, the basic "unit" of the game is the building. Everything is going to be pretty much based on buildings, and their relationship to each other. This is basically how MC1 works as well, so this is nothing new. What is going to be knew is My Colony 2's build in Building Editor.

I am going to be creating MC2 using the games' bulit-in editor, and so the same editor I use to make the game is going to be available to all players.

Each building in the game is going to be stored as a building file, and the base game will ship with all of its standard building files, which will be loaded at runtime. This differs from MC1 where all building data is stored in a single JSON file that is shipped with the game, which cannot be easily edited.

A building file will contain three parts.

The first is the JSON formatted definition data, with information about the name of the building, what it does, what it generates, etc. All of the properties that a building can have will be stored in that data.

The second part is the model information, which will essentially be an embedded Voxel Paint file.

The third part is a small (maybe like 64x64 pixel) thumbnail or icon representing the building, which will show up on the construction sidebar and various places throughout the UI.

The three above parts are all packaged into a single file which can be added to the game client, posted online for easy sharing, or what have you. A dedicated server can include custom building files that will automatically be distributed to clients when they join the game. Each building file will have a unique UUID and version information, so if a client already has the same version of a building file that a server does, it will not need to re-transfer the data upon connection.

This system is actually a very powerful change over the original My Colony, and unlocks essentially limitless possibilities for the game. This also makes it a lot easier for the community to participate in development of the game. A creator who makes a great building idea can distribute it online where it is tested out and balanced by the community. If it works in practice and everyone likes it, the file can be included in the base game.

If you want to host a crazy dedicated server with a bunch of custom buildings that totally change the game, you can do so.

I have no idea what kind of buildings people will dream up, but including the content creation tools right into the base game will be huge, I hope. And I plan on making the process as easy as I possibly can, so that anybody can create a building. Using Voxel Paint, if you have an idea and the ability to build a house in Minecraft, you should be able to make it a reality. And being able to make something and then instantly import it into your game makes it simple to test out concepts and balance them right there on your own device.

It's possibly that nobody will care about modding or making buildings, but it still doesn't hurt to add the tools right into the game. If nothing else, it will still make it easier for me to create new content for updates, versus having to go through and edit JSON data manually.

However, it's also possible that everybody will be making custom content and the game takes off in crazy directions that we never even imagined!

It could even be possible to allow mod creators to somehow sell their mods in-game and get paid in real money, maybe through PayPal or something. That is a thought for another day though, and not a current actual plan.

Conclusion
These are my current thoughts on MC2 as of this day. Like I said, nothing is set in stone yet and everything is subject to change. I wanted to put everything out there so that the community knows what page I am on and where I am headed, and has time to stop me if I am about to drive over a cliff.

Remember that I am open to all feedback, so if you have ideas, please don't just be quite about it, or don't just complain about them in a Discord chat somewhere, because I probably will not see them. Part of being a game developer is getting hate e-mail on a regular basis on why my games suck, so believe me that your being critical of the above ideas will not hurt my feelings, and will be nothing new to me.

The whole purpose of doing all of this beforehand is to get real feedback from the community so that MC2 can go in a direction that we all like and we will all have fun playing. Once I start getting into the code, it gets harder and harder to make changes, so if there is something you don't like, now is the time to mention it. Think of all of the things I could not effectively implement in MC1 because they would require massive time-consuming changes to the entire engine. So getting ideas in right now is how we avoid that.

Like MC1, I'm trying to make something fun that I myself want to play, not a game that is going to just nickel and dime players with constant ads and IAPs so I can sit on a yacht somewhere. I think the new decentralized play model will allow the game to outlast the original. Basically, if I get in a wreck and die, the MC1 server will be forever down within a few weeks. With MC2, once players can make their own servers and create their own content right from within the game, what happens to me becomes more irrelevant, which is the way it should be.

Anyway, if you got this far, then thanks for reading my small novel. Please give some thoughts to where you want to see the game go, or discuss it with other players and really think about all of the concepts I laid out here. I want to start working on the game soon, maybe as early as mid-next month. I plan to start with the world-generating engine and the in-game building creation tools first, so people can start testing that out and seeing what it is like to make their own content.

So between now and then, if any of the above ideas are way off the mark, I need to know now. So think about it, let me know, and thanks for helping me create the follow-up to My Colony. I think it's going to be fun!

In time for the weekend, My Colony 2 has just been updated to v0.27.0 and should be hitting all platforms shortly! This update has a critical fix that might actually end up killing some existing colonies, so you are going to want to read on to find out what's new!


First for the big change. As I was implementing one of the new buildings for this update (the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory), I noticed that during it's production cycle, it was not consuming any Alien Artifacts. I tweaked with the building in the game editor a bit, and still no consumption. Upon further investigation, I noticed that no building was consuming any resources, and it's been like this all along!

How I missed such an obvious flaw is beyond me, although I don't know if anybody else really noticed it either. It's easy to overlook a bug that actually benefits you, I suppose. Looking back though, stockpiling resources did always seem a bit easier in MC2 as compared to MC1.

Anyway, I went ahead and fixed the issue, loaded up my main colony, and it immediately died. Stockpiles of Ore, Gold, Wood, Charcoal, Crystalline, Rum, Uranium, you name it, all quickly evaporated. My settlements had been running so long on a balance based on zero resource consumption, I never built up the necessary production and gathering capabilities to handle the industrial output. Needless to say, it pretty much brought my entire colony to a standstill. Not only that, but since I had several settlements connected to the same resource pool using trade depots, every single one was brought down to a grinding halt!

It actually took me several hours to recover my game from this calamity. In fact, the fix required me to alter the stats of several buildings, because it became plain once resource consumption was factored in that many buildings were either under producing or over consuming resources. Because of this, production and consumption stats have been altered in this update for the Sugar Extraction Lab, Tree Farm, Charcoal Factory, Uranium Enrichment Facility, Canteen, Gold Synthesis Lab, Ore Fracking Operation, and Rum Distillery. I think I have a reasonable balance going right now, but of course there are likely things that I have overlooked. If you find structures that need rebalanced because of this changed, either buffed or nerfed in some way, let me know in the comments to this post.

Now, while I was trying to figure out this new balance, it was actually quite difficult to do at the beginning, as My Colony 2 lacks detailed resource consumption/production stats like you would find in My Colony 1. At least it did lack those stats, as this update now adds a new Resources tab to the Statistics window!


As in My Colony 1, you can select each resource to see the breakdown on which buildings are providing/using a specific resource, which is a huge help when trying to work out and balance your settlement production levels.


Of course, the resource stats are not exactly, and cannot be exactly as they are in MC1, due to the nature of resource pools in MC2. Resources in this game are not kept per-player or even per settlement, but are rather stored in dynamic "pools" that can change as time goes on based on the existence of logistics stations, outposts and other such structures. This made putting together the stats collection and reporting a bit more difficult than it was in MC1, but it's mostly working here now. To view the stats of a resource pool, you have to move your camera/viewport to a settlement first, and you will be shown the stats for the resource pool that you are currently active in. At some point I will probably make it possible to view a list of all resource pools and which settlements they are connected to, I just have not gotten to it yet.

Moving along, this update brought a few big changes to roads, changes that I started working on a few updates ago and neglected to finish until now.

Firstly, roads with either production or consumption properties (such as the Solar Road) are now finally functional. Prior to this update, you could build a huge Solar Road network with 200 tiles, and it would only produce power based on the first tile placed. Now, they work as you would expect.

Next, Roads are now actually factored in to the path finder, and their "drive speed modification" stats now actually work! You may or may not have noticed, but before this update roads had basically no impact on what your Rovers did, other than providing an aesthetic look. Roads are now fully functional, and will work in basically the same manner as they do in MC1.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, you can no build roads (and some other structures) anywhere you want, no settlement required!


Wouldn't it be nice to build a big beautiful highway connecting all of your settlements together? You couldn't do it before, but you can now! Roads can now be built anywhere, as long as you have an appropriate Rover in range. The resources used to pay for the roads will come from your closest settlement to the road in question (the closes settlement owned by the player building the road). The only restriction is that you can not build a road in a chunk/settlement that is "owned" by another player.

The Game Editor now also allows you to specify other buildings, besides roads, that can be built out-of-settlement. The only one right now is the Commemorative Plaque, since I figured it would nice to be able to place signs along the side of your highways.

Moving along, I did a lot of focus and work on performance optimizations in this release. When a map had larger settlements, the game was starting to get so laggy (at least on my M1 Mac) that it was barely playable anymore, so something had to be done. Obviously there is always more performance work to be done, but here are some of the changes so far.

Firstly, I reduced the radius of chunks that are generated around the camera, and I lowered the time that it takes before the engine clears out chunks that are no longer active around the camera. This provides a pretty large reduction in memory usage when you are in a big settlement, as it can reduce the number of .vpp models loaded in memory significantly. At some point I will probably make this a setting in the Engine Settings window, so people with epic desktop computers and RTX video cards can turn their chunk render distance way up if they want to, but since most players right now are using a smart phone, I decided to lower the default setting.

Speaking of default settings, most of the "pretty" engine settings, such as Anti Aliasing, Depth of Field, Dynamic Shadows, Fancy Water, etc, are now turned off by default. These you can always just turn back on in the settings menu if your machine can handle them, but I wanted the default settings to be low so that a new player wont get in the game and immediately experience lag if they are using a lower end machine.

A lot of improvements have also been made to the server code, which runs on a separate thread from the renderer. There was a pretty big issue where the game server would lag down hard if you had a ton of rovers in your game, since every "tick" a rover checks to see if it should be building something or not. To address this, the server now keeps track of whether or not there are actually buildings under construction, and so Rovers will only check if they should be building when there is actually something to build. Makes sense, right?

Moving along, since the last update introduced the Excavator and digging, it basically became possible to turn the Desert World map into a little water world by digging out your own lakes and rivers. Because of this, it only made sense to allow all of the water based structures and units to be constructed on the desert map.


You are now free to terraform your Desert World map into the holiday paradise that your colonists have been yearning for.

Next up, this update adds the classic Crystalbot from MC1, and with it comes the ability to create and grow Synthetic Crystalline Deposits. Be careful though, because the Synthetic Crystalline is a cancer that is as aggressive as ever, so I would suggest not building it too close to your settlement...


My original inspiration for Crystalline (back in MC1) was the Tiberium from Command and Conquer, a substance that provides power but that also spreads and can become an environmental catastrophe. For this reason, you need to take extra precautions when dealing with the synthetic stuff, as it can easily get out of hand if you let it.

I think I mentioned earlier in this post that the Ancient Alien Microchip Factory has been added to the game. This along with the Crystalline stuff requires two new techs, Ancient Alien Manufacturing and Crystalline Synthesis. I also added the new Luxury Townhome, a decorative housing unit for Premium players.

Since I was on the topic of new Research, I will mention the final engine change to this update. Players who are either in a hurry or want to speed through a new game can now instant-unlock new research using Ape Coins. Like I mentioned in the last My Colony 1 release notes, I am going to be looking for better ways to monetize the My Colony games without resorting to heavy advertising, and this seemed like a reasonable way that is totally optional and does not fundamentally change the game for existing players.

So all in all, this was a pretty big update for My Colony 2. I would suggest that all players be careful when they first open their games after the update, and to comb over your settlements and their research stats, because there will probably be things you need to change, particularly if you have an older established colony.

Moving forward, my near-term plans are to continue expanding the Alien/Quantum tech trees. I am also going to be bringing a Galactic Board of Trade to My Colony 2 in some form (gotta work out the details on that one), and I will also probably be adding a Spice World (not related to the Spice Girls) to implement some of the Spice suggestions from @Architecture1134 and others. There is also a lot coming soon to the original My Colony and to Colony Wars, but more on those another day. All in all, a lot of excitement coming to the My Colony Universe of games, and I should probably put together another episode of the My Colony Podcast to discuss it all. But until then, check out the new update, enjoy, have a good weekend, let me know what issues you find or suggestions you have, and stay tuned for more!

https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

#mycolony2

For starters, I’m assuming the region concept will be used in mc2. If that is incorrect, then most of these ideas should still apply as long as we get the ability to have a multi-mapped city.

What if each building starts as a construction site that requires workers.

You would need one construction site for each building footprint size. For instance, to make a bank, you would need a medium square construction site(2x2).

The site will be in charge of upgrading itself to the building of your choosing, but it can only upgrade to buildings that have it’s same footprint size. It also needs workers to progress toward completion and would complete the build at the end of it’s worker round, at which time it will also release its workers to go work somewhere else.

Different building choices can require different worker round times And worker amounts, and some of the more advanced buildings could require certain unique things like A constant supply of robots, alien arts, ether, oil, or water during construction on top of the base resources required for construction.

Using this method, you can plan out your city’s layout with these sites and then upgrade some of them to official buildings when the need arises.

As for resource collection. I have an idea there as well:

This is kind of going off basts idea to have resources underground. My idea is going to be simple to implement yet challenging to play with.

First, I think it would be simple if resource deposits were procedurally generated in layers and overlapped several cities in a region, just like water does now. To view these deposits you would use a filter(kind of like sim city filters for water, power, etc.). Not every map would have every kind of resource, in fact, there’s no guarantee that a given map with contain any deposits. Instead, the player will have to build their cities based on where resources are on a planet/region. However, to find said deposits, you need to survey for them. They won’t ever show up in the minerals filter until you do.

Queue the idea of surveying: For starters, the lander should be equipped with basic surveying equipment so that when it enters a map, it can survey that map for ore or regolith deposits. This allows a player to start on any map and Then search for ore or regolith. It cannot survey for any other resources however. It also takes some time to survey each map, and as we know, in early-game you need that time to build your food and water sources ASAP.

In later phases, there will need to be better survey buildings to survey for more advanced resources and in wider areas around the map they are in. For instance, an ancient alien survey tower could survey all resources and reveal deposits in one map every 10 minutes in a radius of 10 grid tiles around it’s home map. If it’s in a medium map, the top-most square could count as the center-point.

Consequences of this type of system:
This system will cause ore and regolith extraction buildings to no longer produce resources indefinitely. Instead, you would have to constantly rebuild extractors in new places to continue to get those resources as previous locations are depleted. While this wouldn’t be too much micromanagement as long as the deposits deplete slow enough, the player will never reach a state of full automation like we can get to with mc1. Therefore we should consider adding additional buildings that can produce those resources indefinitely that the player can get later on in their game. For example, the insectoid’s core mine could be buffed and become the ultimate continuous source of raw resources for them while consuming rare resources. For humans, an asteroid collector could consume starships and yet produce a continuous supply of raw resources. And reptilians have to technology to just warp in all the resources that they need in exchange for money and other valuable resources.

Idk, what do y’all think?

GeneralWadaling said:

MizarAlcor said:You can import the crystalline from Stargate instead, then research the Crystalline Synthesis, and build the Crystalbot to start spawning the Synthetic Crystalline.

LIS humans however, outside from Ice World, can not build any bots to spawn Synthetic Crystalline, as they can not build the Crystalbots.

Humm actually GBT (Galactic board of trade) is the easiest access to it, if you play online colony :D

Yes, but the only problem is if you want to play offline, honestly i feel like needing crystalline to be able to make crystalline is a bit ridiculous (playing as offline UE), make it something with maybe 500 Alien artifacts or maybe even what is produced via center of aritificial learning, acient alien instructions, but just something other than crystalline please

Just wanted to bring this up incase Bast forgot, or maybe has as a different idea to implement later, buuuuut...

United Earth cannot build Tundra Rovers, the only human builder capable of building Synthetic Crystalline Deposits.

Or the flaw is the fact United Earth can even research the tech to allow Synthetic Crystalline to begin with.

To be totally honest, I wouldn't mind if the tech was moved FAR up the tech tree near Next-Gen energy generators, and to have United Earth build structures that can fabricate Crystalline, though at a somewhat slow rate, versus say... an equivalent building for the Zolarg, Reptilians, and/or LIS, while on a planet Crystalline is native to.

Hello commanders.

This post will integrate all of my previous ideas with refinement, plus some new ideas.
The ideas will be updated or added in the comments.



WARNING : EXTREMELY LONG POST



For the objects, the colour of the text represents the following factions.

• United Earth (UE)
• League of Independent States (LIS)
• Alpha Draconians (AD)
• Zolarg Empire (ZE)
• Neutral

Gameplay Suggestions

• Demolishing Buildings
  In case you don't need some of your own buildings.
• Cancel queued productions
  In the game there's not yet any ways to cancel queue, which means inflexible financial management when you're running out of credits.
• Area of effect damage
  You know currently we don't have a way to counter the swarming troopers besides producing lots of troopers. We need something explosive...
• Garrisoning
  One of the classic features of C&C style RTS that will make urban warfare better!
• Able to control buildings
  If some building is able to make research or has special actions, this is needed.
• Make training queues building specific like in My Colony
  It is a bit difficult to manage units and unit productions if trained unit just pop up in a random barracks/factory. So I think this will make troop training process better.
• Visible construction range
  This will help placing buildings without tapping somewhere else you cannot place building.
• Power meter
  As the game's power mechanism is not yet complete, this is an necessary suggestion.
• Researches
  Some research elements can change the tide of the war. This will make more amazing battles.
• Superweapons
  Why not?

Units

• United Earth
  
  • Commonwealth Infantry (T1)
    

    United Earth's proud protectors of prosperity and order. These troopers are put under 3 years of various training before they come into services. With their full loyalty and strict discipline, they are one of your reliable soldiers on the battlefields.

    
    It is just renaming the in-game infantry.
  • Commonwealth Rocket Infantry (T1)
    

    Rocket Infantry Camp is one of the divisions of United Earth's military, where newbie troopers are being trained into anti-tank specialists at the battlefronts. Carrying BOAR launchers, they take out enemy vehicles and aircrafts. Best companions of infantries.

    
    It is just renaming the in-game rocket infantry.
  • Engineer (T2)
    

    Not all soldiers fight at the battlefronts. These nerdy engineers who complete their school at military universities are one of the examples. Anything about machines and computers are not a problem for these engineers, they are even able to modify alien machines.

    
    This thing is already in the game, but why not give them some descriptions as well.
    Can repair civilian building when garrisoned into.
  • Jetpack Infantry (T2)
    

    Jetpack infantries are adopted by United Earth military, due to their high mobility and aerial advantage over most units on the ground. Besides as an effective scout on battlefields with rough terrain, they can also make effective assaults on infantries.

    
    This thing is already in the game, but why not give them some descriptions as well.
    In addition, I want to give it a stealth detection ability.
  • Space Marines (T3)
    

    Elite of the elites. Space Marines Corps represents the United Earth's iron fist power, established since 2061. Entering the Space Marines Corps is definitely one of the dreams of United Earth soldiers - given the best training, able to use the high tech gadgets, paid with highest wages, and of course, chance to become hero like Sarge! Most of them are cladded with power armours, though some commandos do not to wear them.

    
    Tier-3 shock troopers that uses plasma guns.
  • Marines Commando (T3)
    

    Experienced, outstanding marines will be promoted to commandos, which they will be put into military labs to receive another 3 years of training to master various difficult skills and have some bioengineering modifications on their body. Once they have completed the course, they are SUPERSOLDIERS.

    
    UE commando can terminate infantries quickly with their heavy machine gun, tough as a tank, and can instantly blow up enemy buildings and vehicles using dynamites upon close contact.
  • UE Harvester (T1)
    

    Supply lines that are too far away from the home world are hard to maintain. In this case, local resource extraction is the mean to make supplies cheaply. That's why these mining machines get some use on the battlefields.

    
    (•ω•)
  • ‘Hound URV-25’ Recon Rover (T1)
    

    These unmanmed vehicles are not a very new stuff to military even in the year of 2051. They can be remotely controlled, which they have greatly decreased unnecessary casualties during scouting tasks. Low cost and small size is also the reason it becomes popular. Now we can even install a machine gun on it, allowing it participating in combat tasks.

    
    I just simply give the rover a code name. BTW @bastecklein do you plan to give it stealth detectors? :)
  • ‘Ocelot’ Light Tank (T1)
    

    The ‘Ocelot’ series light tank has been inside UE arsenal for more than 10 years, as one of the standardized light tank due to their balanced combat ability and a reasonable manufacturing cost.

    
    Code name given.
  • ‘Tigerclaw’ battle Tank (T2)
    

    ‘Tigerclaw’ battle tank is the bigger cousin of ‘Ocelot’ light tanks. While shares the similar chassis design, this tank is mounted with a dual 83mm gun turret, which provided the tank with better firing efficiency and firepower. There are rumours about in the first deployment of these tanks, one tank can destroy 5 enemy tanks of similar classes by average before being destroyed.

    
    Rename the medium tank in the game and give it a code name.
  • ‘Jaguar’ Heavy Assault Tank (T3)
    

    Like its code name tells, ‘Jaguar’ heavy assault tank can quickly destroy enemies with its devastating firepower. Its 134mm plasma gun can penetrate any armour, while it has a portable regenerative shield for extra protection. They are one of the backbones in most tank formations.

    
    Heavy tank of the
  • ‘Thunderstorm’ Missile Tank (T2)
    

    ‘Thunderstorm’ is the new generation of self-propelled missile launchers in UE arsenal. This mobile missile battery has two modes. Artillery mode allows it to destroy enemy from a long range. Defender mode allows it to respond to threats from the air by launching volleys of missiles.

    
    Depends on your needs, you can switch between two modes quickly.
  • Striker UAV (T2)
    

    A full development of UAV (military drones) in recent years has successfully replaced manned aircrafts, which UAV comes in with a smaller size, lighter weight, and more capabilities in ground support missions. Striker UAVs are one of the variants developed, which carries a explosive missile for hit-and-run attacks.

    
    Light attack aircraft. Can target both land and air.
  • Attacker UAV (T2)
    

    Attacker UAV specialises heavy bombardment tasks, extra plated with sturdy armour for protection. Every liberty delivery includes 3 bombs for your foes!

    
    Bomber craft.
  • Gunner UAV (T3)
    

    Gunner UAV is a hovering heavy gunship. This heavy aircraft releases pulses of plasma shots that blasts enemies into ashes, while its heavily plated armour hull can withstand lots of punishments from anti-air weapons.

    
    Heavy aircraft that flies and fires slowly, but with a large ammunition capacity that allows continuously bombarding the enemies using the plasma gun. The plasma gun is also anti-air.
  • ‘Angler’ Patrol Boat
    

    Even though not much improvements has made on these old-fashioned speedboats, they are still effective defensive recon boats in UE arsenal. It is cheap, it is nimble, and its machine gun can respond light ship attacks.

    
    Here also gives a code name to the in-game patrol boats.
  • ‘Grizzly’ Amphibious Transport (T1)
    

    Amphibious transports has its most significant importance in beachhead landings during operations in oceanic planets.

    
    As well, give the in-game amphibious transport a code name.
  • ‘Aegis’ Escort Ship (T2)
    

    The seas can be as dangerous as on the land, ships may get attacked by aircrafts and submarines. ‘Aegis’ Escort Ships are hence built to protect the shores and the seas with flak guns and torpedo launchers.

    
    In addition, detects submarines. The big drawback of Aegis Escort Ship is it cannot attack land units.
  • ‘Tidebreaker’ Missile Cruiser (T3)
    

    Traditional battleships with large caliber guns are becoming obsolete in UE arsenal and are replaced by these more lightweight but stronger missile cruisers - the new generation backbone of the navy. Besides wielding higher accuracy than cannon artilleries, it can change firing modes for different situations, either the long range mode for hitting the enemies from a safe distance, or medium range mode for heavy firepower but at a reduced distance.

    
    Backbone warship.
• League of Independent States
  
  • Militia (T1)
    

    These militias composes the majority of LIS infantry divisions, comes from various colonies of LIS. Though they lack professional training like soldiers of , their devotion to free the colonies from United Earth (and other autocratic sovereigns) is irreplaceable. Their motto: ‘The blood of the martyrs will water the seedlings of freedom’.

    
    LIS basic infantry that uses old-fashioned rifles to fight. Cheap to train, but relatively weak on battlefields.
  • Grenadier (T1)
    

    Grenadiers are basically militias who utilises explosives, which their grenades are effective destroying combat vehicles and buildings.

    
    Anti-vehicle infantry.
  • Hacker (T2)
    

    Not all systems can be hacked and taken over remotely, in this situation you'll need field operations. That's what these hackers are hired for, they infiltrate a building, hack into its systems, and put it under LIS's control.

    
    LIS equivalent of engineer, but it cannot repair buildings.
  • Saboteur (T2)
    

    Disruption warfare is one of the tactics of LIS, aimed to bring down normal operations of the enemy. The saboteurs do the dirty job, they sneak into the enemy's base under the help of optical stealth generators, they can steal credits from enemy silos and refineries, they can turn down generators, facilities and even weapon systems.

    
    Infiltrator. Stealthed all the time. Consumed when entering enemy building.
  • Laser Trooper (T2)
    

    Laser is one of the affordable yet powerful choice of weapons. Under years of development, LIS is capable creating devices that launches a hypercharged beam of laser capable to cut through thick alloy composite armour, even in a long range. Leading to the birth of Laser Trooper Division, it further proven LIS has independent military capability to protect themselves, and set more colonies free from United Earth.

    
    Shock troopers. Has a decent reload speed. Excels taking down aircrafts and tanks.
  • Blue Cross (T3)
    

    Blue Cross are the elite marksman of LIS military. They hide in shadows where bare eyes cannot see. They can take down armoured Space Marines effortlessly. Even drivers inside the vehicles can be killed only using one shot.

    
    LIS commando unit. Stealthed if stationary. Also detects stealth. If the target is a vehicle, it may turn the vehicle into a neutral, captureable status, which a UE engineer, a LIS hacker, a Zolarg missionary or a Draconian hyjacker can capture the husk to convert it to own faction.
  • ‘Marauder’ Attack Jeep (T1)
    

    Attack jeeps are modified from old jeep designs, they have missile pods installed on the top. The high horsepower engines remains their high mobility. When they encounter the enemy, they'll unleash a volley of rockets, devastating enemy light vehicles and aircrafts. LIS usually utilizing it for a guerilla warfare.

    
    Anti-vehicle anti-air light vehicle.
  • LIS Harvester (T1)
    

    Though they are assembled using second handed components and husks from black markets and chop shops, they still work in the same way as it should be, which its standard can compete that of United Earth's version.

    
    Equivalent of UE harvesters.
  • Scorch Tank (T2)
    

    Even though in this era, flamethrowers are still very effective destroying fortified defenses. With the improved composition of fuel used by these Scorch Tanks, almost anything can be reduced to ashes. Burn baby burn!

    
    Anti-infantry anti-building tank. Clears out enemy garrisons in buildings.
  • ‘Hunter’ Cruiser Tank (T2)
    

    Like the code name tells, it hunts for preys. These tanks utilizes strong firepower and high mobility in most terrains to destroy enemy tanks quickly at their weak spots. Though its armour is not very reliable at all.

    
    Battle tank of LIS.
  • ‘Lancer’ Beam Tank (T3)
    

    Beam cannons on these experimental beam tanks are not ordinary as you expects, its beam can vaporise anything within seconds. The beam tank not only having a strong firepower, it can switch between modes - At mobile mode it is a strong battle tank. At deployed mode, it has doubled firepower and increased firing range.

    
    Heavy assault vehicle of LIS.
  • ‘Rat’ Light Self-propelled Howitzer (T2)
    

    Cheap-to-go artillery vehicle used by LIS for siege and fire support tasks. Though it is an artillery, it can mobilize quickly for quick response.

    
    LIS artillery.
  • ‘Sparrow’ Patrol Copter (T1)
    

    These patrol aircrafts are the eyes of LIS military in the air, they effectively searching for enemies, even those hidden in somewhere not noticed by others will not be able to escape from their sensors.

    
    Recon aircraft. It is armed with an anti-infantry machine gun. Detects stealth. (This aircraft does not occupy aircraft landing pads.)
  • ‘Red Hawk’ Fighter Jet (T2)
    

    Conventional aircraft for surface support operations and enemy aircraft interception. The coaxial machine gun and the missile pods would help them manage most enemies in the battlefields.

    
    All-purpose fighter jet.
  • ‘Piranha' Waterbike (T1)
    

    ‘Piranha’ waterbikes swifts like wind, specialised raiding enemy ships using rockets. A squad of these waterbikes can be unstoppable.

    
    Hit-and-run light ambush vessel.
  • ‘Salmon’ Transport Submarine (T1)
    

    These small submarines are specialized for crossing the seas secretly, carrying an assault team inside.

    
    Troops may embark on or evacuate from the submarine when the submarine is surfaced. When submerged, only anti-stealth units and torpedo weapons can detect them. Detects submarines.
  • ‘Swordfish’ Corvette (T2)
    

    These simple corvettes composes most of the naval forces of LIS. A pair of powerful ship gun will blast enemies into the skies.

    
    LIS warship.
  • ‘Stingray’ Nuclear Submarine (T3)
    

    As the backbone of LIS navy, these submarines has high combat capabilities. While sneaking in the seas, they sink the enemies without being noticed. When they surface, they launch volleys of missiles that bombards the enemies miles away.

    
    Backbone warship of LIS. Stealthed when submerged. When surfaced, the missiles can also attack air units. Detects submarines.
• Alpha Draconians
  
  • Extractor Drone (T1)
    

    Whenever you are seeing mineral fields are disappearing in an weird way, there might be stealthed Alpha Draconian mining drones digging them. Stealth device protects extractor drone in most cases.

    
    Alpha Draconian harvester unit. It is rather an ‘infantry’ more than a vehicle. Detects stealth.
  • Sentry Drone (T1)
    

    Besides on battlefields, sentry drones can be also seen in prison camps and slave camps, or in riots. The minigun equipped on them shreds the flesh of any living things.

    
    Basic ‘infantry’ of Alpha Draconians.
  • Ambusher Drone (T1)
    

    Harnessing the powerful ion beams and being stealthed when standing by, no vehicle can stand for more than few seconds when swarmed by them.

    
    Anti-vehicle 'infantry’ of Alpha Draconians. Stealthed when idle.
  • Hijacker Drone (T2)
    

    Hijacking devices on this drone are able to take over a facility within seconds, especially useful in battlefields. It also has minimal armaments for self protection against patrols.

    
    Equivalent of engineers and hackers.
  • Executioner Droid (T3)
    

    Executioner Droids are superior combat droids that their combat capabilities can be compared to a commando, only one can be assigned to one Alpha Draconian warlord. They are also the only droids given with a personnel teleporting device, which helps them bypass the defense line safely and launch sudden attack on the enemy's weakest spot, or evade from most dangerous situations.

    
    The droid can teleport itself at any explored location of the map. Armed with a beam gun that continuously damages enemy.
  • Modular Combat Hovercraft (T1)
    

    A hovering small bunker that obtains armaments from drones that it consumes. Uses anti-infantry minigun when no drones inside.

    
    Each MCH can only receive one drones for armament upgrade. Recieving a Sentry will obtain a double minigun turret. Recieving an Ambusher will change the main weapon into a stronger beam gun. Recieving a Extractor will give it a stationary stealth generator. Recieving a Hijacker will obtain an EMP emitter that unmobilizes the target enemy. Drones who have entered will not return, due to components being assimilated. Amphibious.
  • Piercer Hovertank (T2)
    

    Piercer hovertank uses a fully flexible autocannon as a weapon with two firing modes. Tank cannon mode attacks land units, while flak mode attacks air units.

    
    Anti-vehicle or anti-air battle tank. Amphibious.
  • Monitor Hovertank (T3)
    

    A new class of artillery researched by Alpha Draconian engineers, which it is installed onto a modified, stable hovertank chassis.

  • Devastator Hovertank (T2)
    

    Alpha Draconians has make use of their advantage of owning major ether reservoirs, leads to this infantry devastating weapon under use, at the cost of breaking 133 galactic military regulations.

    
    Anti-infantry vehicle. Clears out garrisons in buildings.
  • Dominator Hovermech (T3)
    

    Dominator Hovermech, the steel behemoth of the battlefield. Its beam-emitting eyes can stare anything to death.

    
    Heavy warmech.
  • Judge Gunship (T1)
    

    A nimble, light jet propelled gunship carrying proton launchers.

    
    Gunship aircraft.
  • Eliminator Saucer (T3)
    

    One of the ultimate destruction weapon of Alpha Draconians. The saucer unleashes a super powerful destruction beam when flies above enemies. Nothing will survive under its strong fire.

    
    Bomber aircraft with extremely low mobility.
• Zolarg Empire
  
  • Swarmers (T1)
    

    Unity is the power - that's the motto of the entire Insectoid race. That is especially reflected on these swarmers, make up of various insectoid workers.

    
    Melee squad. Quick and cheap to train, extremely dangerous in a group, though they generally has a weak toughness
  • Rangerbug (T1)
    

    Insectoid militias that uses a primitive hand cannon to fight against enemies, which they are common local defense forces in Zolarg Empire.

    
    Ranged anti-vehicle infantry of Zolarg Empire. Can be switched to stationary mode (flak mode) that changes their attacking target from land to air.
  • Martyr (T2)
    

    These martyrs are suicide bombers, faithed and determined fighters of the Zolarg Empire. Fires of explosion will purify everything!

    
    Suicide bomber infantry. A large group can breach heavy fortifications if given appropriate support.
  • Missionary (T1)
    

    These religious missionaries will make way for Zolarg Empire - Influence buildings through devine powers... Somehow works.

    
    Equivalent of engineer, hacker and hijacker. Can heal infantries inside the same garrisoned buildings.
  • Apostle (T2)
    

    Apostles are usually the leaders of Zolarg militias, who ‘delivers the divine message from the Emperor’, fortifying the morale of the fellow brothers. Besides boosting morale, it also provides adequate firepower, from their heavy machine gun.

    
    Heavy infantry. It rides a beetle.
  • Awakened (T3)
    

    The insectoid warriors that have awakened their power controlling energy flow surrounding their body. They can release energy blasts from their hands, or unleash deadly melee attacks.

    
    Shock troopers of Zolarg Empire. Detects stealth.
  • Redeemer (T3)
    

    The redeemers are insectoid warriors with mastered supernatural powers. Besides able to attack like awakened, it also has a ability to brainwash a small group of enemy, permanently turning them to own side.

    
    Zolarg commando. Detects stealth.
  • Attack Rollercraft
    (Notes: Insectoids call wheeled vehicles ‘rollercrafts’.)
    

    These highly mobile attack rollers are manned with a driver and a grenadier, which explosives mixed with sticky ant paste are tossed to enemies at close range for most destructive effect.

    
    Anti-infantry vehicle. Can temporarily unmobilizes enemies blasted by explosives.
  • Landship (T1)
    

    Zolarg Landships are primitive tanks, wielding high toughness from thick armour (and a decently strong main cannon). It is also a effective infantry transport on land.

    
    Anti-vehicle tank. Can carry up to 8 infantries.
  • Siege Landship (T2)
    

    A heavier version of landship. It is not just tougher, its cannon can fire more than one type of ammunition - Cannonballs focuses on countering tanks and destroying fortifications from a long distance, while napalm will set fire that scorches the infantries.

    
    Note that it does not do anything carrying infantries. Napalm can clear out garrisons in buildings.
  • Boarding Party (T1)
    

    Boarding parties of Zolarg Empire are not just terrible in the space but also equally terrible on the seas. Their ship will quickly ram onto yours and the boarding party will soon tear your ship into useless scraps.

    
    Navy melee ship. It is also a troop transport, can carry up to 8 infantries.
  • Ironclad (T2)
    

    A rather modernized warship of Zolarg Empire. Slow, but has devastating ship cannons.

    
    Ranged melee ship.
  • Bumblebee Squad (T2)
    

    A flying group of winged Insectoids, with a duty to throw bombs onto enemy army, or sometimes aircrafts.

    
    The only Insectoid airforce unit.

Buildings

• UAV Control Tower (UE aircraft factory) (4 aircraft capacity)
• Experimental Tech Centre (Tier-3 tech building)
• Flak Pillbox (UE anti-air defense)
• Torpedo Platform (UE heavy naval defense)
• Plasma Cannon (UE heavy defense)
• Propaganda Centre (UE combat support/research building)
• Space Uplink (UE superweapon)
• LIS Command Lander (LIS command centre)
• Encampment (LIS barracks)
• LIS Ore Refinery
• Burner Generator (LIS power generator)
• Garage (LIS vehicle factory)
• Seaport (LIS naval yard)
• Black Market (LIS Tier-2 tech)
• Data Bank (LIS Tier-3 tech)
• Bunker (LIS basic land defense, garrisonable)
• Gunner turret (LIS basic anti-infantry anti-air defense)
• Hacker Camp (LIS combat support/research building)
• Airfield (LIS aircraft factory) (4 aircraft slots)
• Laser Tower (LIS heavy defense)
• Sea Sentry (LIS naval defense gun platform)
• Missile Silo (LIS superweapon)
• Depot (LIS silo)
• Microreactor (AD power generator)
• Central Command Hub (AD command centre)
• Drone Pad (AD barracks)
• Raw Material Teleporter (Refinery)
• Launcher Node (AD basic defense)
• Offshore Launcher Node (AD naval defense)
• Stargate (AD vehicle & aircraft factory)
• High Frequency Node (AD Tier-2 tech)
• Conquest Center (AD Tier-3 tech)
• Secret Operation Centre (AD combat support/research building)
• Stealth Field Generator (AD special defense)
• Ether Storm Generator (AD superweapon)
• Home Mound (ZE command centre)
• Forge (ZE refinery)
• Outpost Mound (ZE barracks & basic anti-infantry defense)
• Rangerbug Burrow (ZE anti-air defense)
• Stockpile (ZE silo)
• Landship Workshop (ZE vehicle factory)
• Drydocks (ZE naval yard)
• Command Post (ZE Tier-2 tech)
• Shrine of Destiny (ZE Tier-3 tech)
• War Academy (ZE combat support/research building)
• Temple of Doom (ZE superweapon)

I have a question and after searching to see if it has already been asked, for about an hour and a half, I guess I'll start a new question. Gods I hope this is in the right area. Ok, so I'm playing offline (I never play my colony online) and I'm playing the humans (the United earth ) and I'm on an earth like planet, and it gives me the new option to spend research points and 100 crystalline to learn to grow synthetic crystalline. I don't think there is any way to get crystalline , except as a reward for watching a video , so if I do got some, and I spend the research and crystalline, what do I need to build synthetic crystalline? I really want to, but as of last year, only certain planets had the ability to grow crystalline. So, will it even be possible to grow synthetic crystalline on an earth like planet, and if so......what do I need to do to grow it if I ever get some real stuff to spend on the Research? I've been playing this game for over a full year, I even have an older version still on my pc with the lottery ticket glitch in it that allows you to charge anything for lottery tickets and still sell a ton....I play that when I'm not in the mood for a challenge , and just want to enjoy the game for the sake of playing. Any help at all would be most appreciated.

For my agricultural idea I've put together some herbs and other plants that aid in the rpg/adventure aspect of the game. Some of these plants can create powerful elemental resistance potions or elemental catalysts needed to cast spells. Some are very picky in terms of the biome that they want to grow in, yet others can be grown anywhere.

Flaming Peppers:
grows wild in - deserts
grown in - hot biomes only
use - ice resistance potions, fire arrows, fire catalysts.
growing info - the plant can be harvested without breaking and regrows peppers over time. crops need to have one square of room all around to grow(prevents easy mass production).

Frost Melon:
grows wild in - tiaga, tundra
grown in - cold biomes only
use - fire resistance potions, ice arrows, ice catalysts
growing info - grows just like the flaming peppers and has the same spacial requirements.

Rubber tree:
grows wild in - jungle
grown in - hot and temperate biomes, but not cold biomes.
use - shock resistance potion, potential source of rubber, which could be a crafting material.
growing info - grows like any other tree, drops rubber bark and the normal drops when broken and should drop saplings so that becomes a renewable source of rubber bark.

Zing berry bush:
grows wild in - tiaga, forest, jungle
grown in - tiaga, forest, jungle only. It needs shade to grow
use - static arrows and shock catalysts.
growing info - can be harvested without breaking the plant and will regenerate over some time. They need to be planted adjecent to a tree in order to produce berries. growing next to rubber trees provides a bonus to growth and fruit growing speed.

chamomile:
grows wild in - grasslands
grown in - anywhere.
uses - health potions
growing info - grown on grass or farmland, grows faster on farmland. Spreads fledgling plants to adjacent squares to make it easy to mass produce.

sugar cane:
grows wild in: swamp, jungle
grown in: anywhere
uses: potions and food.
growing info - must be grown next to water.

Char lilly:
grows wild in - must be crafted with various fire related ingredients.
grown in - hot biomes only
use - provides nectar for inferno bees. Inferno bee hives in turn produce fire catalysts instead of honey.
growing info - char lillies are sterile, so they must be crafted in order to make more. they can be placed next to one another and must grow on farmland. The rate at which inferno hives produce fire catalysts is directly related to how many of these lillies are placed in range of the hive. This would make it easy to mass produce fire catalysts, which will be needed more and more as you progress through the game.

Frostbite Orchid:
grows wild in: must be crafted from frost/ice related items.
grown in: cold biomes only
use - provides nectar for blizzard bees. Blizzard bee hives produce ice catalysts from the nectar.
growing info - also sterile and have to be crafted, same hive mechanics, just for a different element.

Static Azalea:
grows wild in - must be crafted from shock/static related items
grows in - all biomes
use - provides nectar to tempest bees. Tempest bee hives produce shoch catalysts from the nectar
growing infor - same as char lillies and frostbite orchides, but for the shock element.

night shade:
grows in: at the lowest depths of caves.
grown in: caves only
use: this plant contains the essence of corruption, an element that causes poisoning and madness. Can be used to make corruption arrows that turn enemies against one another and is also used in black catalysts.
growing info, must be grown on farm land in caves. must have at least one tile of space on all sides.

Glow coral:
grows wild in - the depths of the ocean
grown in - underwater only.
uses - this plant contains the essence of blinding light, this light is an element called holiness and can be used to craft holy arrows which cause massive damage to undead/corrupt enemies and set them ablaze, and is used in white catalysts.
growing info: must be placed on sea floor with one tile of room all around.

aetherial kelp:
grows wild in - underground ether rivers and oceans.
gown in - underground ether sea floor
uses - all cure potions that restore full health and remove all negative status effects, used in ether breathing potions, and used to make ether catalysts for ultima spells
growing info - very rare plant. grown on ether sea floor, must have three tiles of space all around to make mass production difficult. Harvesting the plant doesn't destroy the plant and it'll regrow it's harvestables over time.

Castor Bean plant:
grows in: jungle
grown in: jungle
uses: highly potent ricin poison that can inbue weapons and projectiles with poison damage. Also, there could be a possible poison catalyst if poison is to be an element, but let's assume it's not. Poisons would also be needed to make antidotes to rid yourself from being poisoned. Could also be used to make poison vials that would imbue all arrows and mele weapons with poison for a short time.
growing info: this plant will replicate a phenomenal rates by spawning fledgling plants right next to it or up to 2 tiles away, so all you have to do is plant on dirt and you'll have a ton of these in no time, no water required. Harvesting destroys the plant, but yields a lot of castor beans. Mass production should be easy, but these plants will kill all plants and animals near them, and there is a risk of poisoning yourself as you harvest them unless a protection method is implemented, such as rubber gloves. This makes these plants a pain to control for farming, but it's worthwhile to farm them. These need to be mass-produceable so that you can make lots of antidotes, poison vials, and poison arrows to aid you in your adventures, and poison is a pretty easy to come by thing in most rpg games.

aqualemon:
grows in: all levels of the ocean
grown in: all levels of the ocean
uses: water breathing potion and can be consumed as food for hunger and water breathing for a small amount of time.

Catalysts:
fire - used as ammo for fire spells. Made from flaming peppers, wax, and charcoal.
ice - used as ammo for ice spells
shock - used as ammo for shock spells
black - used as ammo for dark/poison/necro spells and can be used as ammo for fire, ice, and lightning spells. When used that way, it adds poison damage and boosts the elemental status effects that the particular spell imbues on the enemy.
white - used as ammo for healing/light/holy spells and can be used as ammo for fire, ice, and lightning spells. When used that way, it adds holy damage to the spell and boosts it's overall damage.
ether: can be used for any kind of spell and is mainly used as ammo for ultima spells. Ether catalysts should be very difficult to obtain.

potions and consumable:

potion of fire resistance: reduces fire damage and the likeliness of being set on fire, which does damage over time.
potion of frst resistance: reduces ice damage and the likeliness of being slowed or frozen in place.
potion of lightning resistance: reduces shock damage and the likeliness of being stunned or knocked back.
tea: crafted from water, sugar, and chamomile. Basic health potion.
antidote: this common potion needs to be easy to make because the player could get poisoned quite often.
all cure: made from aetherial kelp and other highly rare ingredients, this potion brings you back to square one so you can keep up the fight without having to retreat.
potion of water breathing: allows the player to breath under water for a time, vital for venturing deep into the ocean to get things like glow coral.
Potion of dark vision: allows you to see invisible enemies and objects and allows you to see night and underground as if it were day. Not completely required as enemies that use invisibility should uncloak for a time to let the player strike them. Would be made from black catalysts and other rare ingredients.
cleansing pack: a semi-common consumable that would cure most common status ailments other than poison, corruption, and blindness. Its made from soap, cotton, and water. Soap is made from animal fat and charcoal. It would need to be easy to mass produce as the player will often find themselves under a negative status effect.
eye drops: made from salt and water, salt comes from salt deposits under the ocean(and possibly in deserts), cures blindness.

Bees:
wax: harvested from hives and apiaries. Can be used to make candles, fire arrows, and fire catalysts.
Honey: restores health when consumed, can be used in better tiers of potions and consumables.
smoker: pacifies bees for a short time, allowing you to destroy their hive or apiary or harvest wax and honey. made with iron, charcoal, and zing berries, breaks after 64 uses.
Honey collector: made with wood and iron, used to harvest honey and wax from hives and apiaries. The amount of time it takes for a hive or apiary to fill with honey is directly related to how many plants you place in the range of the hives/apiaries. Chamomile flowers have the best affect, but all other plants can be used. Hives and apiaries increase plant growth speed and fruit generation speed of all plants around them by 20%, and if the ranges of hives/apiaries overlap then this effect can stack up to 5 times.

wild honey bee hives: occur naturally all over the world. The hive will attack if the player or other mobs get's too close, regardless of whether they intend to do harm, but the smoker tool can pacify them for a time. the hive will drop wax and 1-2 queens when broken.
apiary: crafted from wood, wax, and 1 wild or domestic queen bee. Bees will attack the player even though they are cultivated, but the damage is much less and apiaries that have been smoked are pacified for much longer than normal. Apiary bees will not attack a player for standing near the apiary, unlike the hive. However, hostile mobs that enter the range of an apiary are automatically attacked, making them good defensive turrets. However, this consumes honey, and they can't attack if out of honey, so it's important to not harvest defensive apiaries, and to put harvesting apiaries in a spot where they won't encounter hostility. The player can manually insert honey or catalysts(depending on the type of apiary) into the apiary to refuel it for battle. It will even drop itself when broken, allowing easy relocation. However, the apiary has a substantially reduced range compared to the hive.

elemental bees:
elemental siphon: used to siphon elemental catalysts from elemental apiaries. Elemental apiaries will attack the player with the elemental damage of their type when attempting to destroy or harvest from the apiary. The same apiary rules apply here regarding attack parameters, range, defensive action against hostile mobs, and smoke effect duration.
Inferno apiary: made from an apiary, a number of fire catalysts, a char lilly, and lots of charcoal. Drops itself when broken, allowing easy transportation. Only operates in hot biomes, produces fire catalysts at a speed directly related to how many char lilies in it's range. The lilies will die after a long time of use, dropping a depleted char lily that can be recharged by cooking in a furnace or with one fire catalyst. The inferno hive will always produce more catalysts than you'll end up using recharging the lilies, but you can get even more catalysts out of it just by cooking the lilies.

Blizzard apiary: made from an apiary, a number of ice catalysts, a frostbite orchid, and lots of ce. All of the rules for the inferno apiary apply here, just for the ice element. frostbite orchids can be recharged using ice catalysts or by crafting them with ice.

tempest Apiary: same rules apply as blizzard apiary but with the lightning element. Made from an apiary, a number of shock catalysts, a static azalea, and lots of rubber. static azaleas can be recharged with lightning catalysts or by crafting them with zing berries.

well, that's all I have for now, it's a big list of ideas, but I think it would make for some interesting gameplay mechanics. Let me know what you think.

On update 84 Bast mentioned that he was going to be adding more resources that would be unique to only one type of planet. This is because he wants people to have a reason to use gbt. He may already have his mind made up regarding which resources he wants to do, but it's always good to have backup ideas. If you can think of any more resources that could be added that I haven't included here, please feel free to post your ideas in this thread.

Asteroid planet:
Iridium: it's a known fact that a large portion of asteroids have large amounts of iridium in their composition. Iridium in real life has an ability to withstand intense heat, which is why people make crucibles with iridium that can melt other metals like iron(which acts like lava when it melts). This resource would be perfect for the lava world, as you could add dark versions of later-game structures that require iridium and obsidian and would be impervious to dangers of the lava world. Shouldn't be a royally expensive or hard to obtain, but it's the fact that millions of units would be required to make a lava colony safe from the lava and eruptions, and even more as the colony grows. Another use for iridium would be to make more efficient trash incinerators, and you could make the alien steel refinery, alien ura enrichment pants and advanced alu gens, and human triantanium plants require iridium. This means that each colony will either have to do some importing or trading to progress to the current end of the game.

Ice Planet:
Liquid nitrogen: I've talked about this before, but an ice planet would be so cold that liquid nitrogen rivers could form on it's surface. This resource could be the best resource for reducing the atmosphere. Since mc has no thermal element to terraforming, removing atmosphere would simulate removing heat, and you can add a very efficient atmosphere reduction plant that consumes this resource, and I guarantee that almost every late-gamer will buy into this resource. Once the ice planet is terraformed, however, those rivers of nitrogen should be replaced with water, so it's bast to leave this planet cold and barren. I would replace the water with nitrogen again if atmosphere is reduced back to under 250k again though, just to prevent the player from permanently loosing their reason for playing on a hardcore map. I imagine this resource being expensive as it's being gathered on a hardcore planet and it would mainly be used by late-gamers who should have that kind of money.

Lunar planet:
Titanium: Scientists in real life have found that the moon has 10x more titanium than earth does. This titanium is very strong and very flexible, even more than iron, meaning that it can be used in the construction of very tall buildings. The tall structures and tech and even the drone and turbo drone could require titanium to be built. This makes it so that titanium is needed in order to progress through the game, so I wouldn't make it too expensive, but still, it should cost a pretty penny. Deep mines would have to be dug in the ground to obtain titanium, so the deep digging tech would need to be researched before a player can produce titanium, and I would make it so that the planet needs to be terraformed as well before titanium can be obtained. But once you start getting titanium, you can start making lots of money.

Forest Planet:
Animals: I've thought long and hard about this one, I think it makes sense. a forest planet would have it's own ecosystem of animals ripe for the picking. Lots of different types of buildings that already exist could use animals, and this resource also opens up the possibility for more structures. for example, wool farms and fish hatcheries could require these to initially stock themselves. A slaughter house could be a mid to late game food producer that primarily relies on constant consumption of animals. You could build an aquarium on water with animals that brings in tourism and money. For production, I would start out with a hunterbot's shack, and then progress toward a ranch, and then a full-blown breeding factory where animals are crammed into closet-sized cubicles(you could make that building consume money due to constant lawsuits from PETA, joking of course, I too hate the abuse of animals in real life).

I imagine this resource to be a relatively inexpensive commodity that most mid-level colonies could afford in decent amounts. While I wouldn't make them vital to progress through the game, I would make them a way to make your progression easier, and with it's wide array of uses, this resource would definitely see some profit.

Desert Planet:
Glass: In real lafe, a desert is a glass-blower's paradise because of the unlimited amounts of sand you have available to you. Glass could be harvested directly from the ground without needing sand to be added as a resource though. You could implement melteries that take glass from the ground directly. Reptilians could also have the technology to turn crystalline into glass at astounding rates, but only on the dessert planet. Glass would melt too easily on a lava planet and crystalline doesn't exist on abandoned worlds.

Glass can be used to make many things, from antique glassware shops that produce money while consuming glass, to ship windows(make ship factories consume glass as well), to fishtanks and aquariums. I think glass could be used in several ways. Glass could be consumed by the alien microchip factories, as silicon is the main material used to hold the circuits in microchips together in real life. Glass is just a less pure form of silicon. Plus, it also makes things interesting if humans need glass for many of their structures and products, they have to get it from the reptilians. Although some things should be the other way around as well, humans having what the reptilians need. I see glass as being a very cheap commodity, albeit a human colony would need to constantly supply millions to their colony for expansion purposes.

water world:
Pearls: This commodity is mainly a tourist resource, but you could still implement uses for it on other planets. For instance, you could implement a large jewelry story that consumes diamonds, gold, and pearls and makes tons of money.

Leather: The abundance of salt in the water of this planet allows for the process of tanning animal hides on this planet. Once the colony gets large enough to trade, they'll be able to produce leather from those animals. A leather factory would consume water and animals to produce leather and food.

leather can be consumed by the advanced clothing factory(since you can make leather jackets, belts and boots), and you could add an IKEA warehouse inc. factory that would make money by consuming leather, wood, wool, plastic, and steel to make furniture.




Well, those are my ideas for now, I'll add more when I come up with them. Let me know what you think.

Planet Type: Shadow

Orbits around: black hole

day/night cycle: eternal night, but darker, solar energy non-existent.

Atmosphere: 2.5 million

Solid terrain features: a dark, almost featureless surface, very disorienting to look at.

Liquid terrain: Black water - a mixture of water and dark matter. Non-trade-able. Can be used as a crude heat source, but not for drinking. It tends to heat up quickly when in motion as dark matter tends to create pure energy when it's particles collide.

surface resources: gold, uranium, aluminum, glowing purple crystalline, ice

surface plant-life: luminous trees that provide small amount of light and lumber

Planet specific resource: Dark matter - a very powerful energy source once it is separated from black water. It's every civ's final energy source and can be used to power a large fraction of a region, but is very costly and would be very difficult to keep in stock. Dark matter is also healing to insectoids. They soak it up like a sponge and can gain powerful abilities from it, such as higher intelligence and more control over antaura.

Other features: This planet is darker than regular night, with barely any ambient light coming from the black hole's accretion disk. The player must rely on lights to be able to see their colony in order to manage it.

Races to inhabit this planet: Insectoids only.

Progression:

- a portable altar is built from crystalline. It provides only one job.
- water from ice patches is sacrificed on the altar(s) to produce a small amount of antuara.
- A black bug collects black water from black water bodies.
- An enlightenment chamber uses antaura to purify the water to render it drinkable, but the dark matter is absorbed by the insectoids, raising their IQ's, so it vanishes.
- crystalline is used to dig for ore.
- ore is used to make black water furnaces. A black water furnace mixes black water to create heat. That heat is in turn used to melt crystalline into sugar.
- subterranean sugar farms are built that automate sugar using water, requiring more enlightenment chambers and portable altars.
- After the player starts to build mining projects, then they are back on the regular insectoid's tech path, although they won't have another source of drinking water until they start to mass produce antaura, as black water is in the ground as well, so no wet mounds or cones. For mid game, another building called the dark altar can be used to separate black water into pure water and dark matter, although not all of the dark matter is preserved. The amount of water that is produced is much more than the enlightenment chamber.
- The player now has a small supply of dark matter. They can either chose to sell it, or they can use it in a couple of different ways. It can be used in new medical buildings as it is healing to insectoids, it could also be used for new research buildings that would study the strange material, or maybe it could have some entertainment and tourism uses.
- In later game, a shadow temple would be used to mass produce dark matter and water while consuming tons of antaura.
- Finally, a building called a spire of darkness would be the insectoid's best source of power. Except on this planet, they have an unlimited amount of dark matter. For other colonies, getting this level of power will come at a cost.

Other info:

I was thinking that since this planet would be darker than night, insectoids needs some new lighting. The insectoid glow lights are cool, but perhaps they could do with some better ones. Perhaps crystalline or ether could be used to make good lights. I'm suggesting a new crystalline steet lamp that could come in three different colors: blue(to fit in with ice world) red(for lava world), and purple(for shadow world)

The new Water World map coming in v0.77.0 is the first map to be available to every civ in the game, and was designed to be fully playable by every civ. By far the hardest to get started though will be the Reptilians, as Crystalline is a vital Reptilian resource, and it is not present on the Water World map. That said, it is still possible to get a Reptilian colony up and running on Water World, but it will take careful planning and resource management at the beginning in order to get the colony off the ground.

As long as your map starts you with at least one Ore Deposit and one Aluminum Deposit within harvesting reach, you should be able to spin up a successful Reptilian base. If you start the map and do not have access to at least one each of those, you might as well quit and restart. Remember that the Construction Probe is a flying unit, so you can move it to different islands in search of the resources you need. You want to start on an island that has both, or an area that has two islands close enough together that a small bridge will be able to connect them, as you cannot waste your initial resources on excessive bridge building.

The strategy is to basically get to the Medium Range Star Gate as soon as you can while spending as few resources as you can to get there. Once you have the Medium Range Star Gate, you can import Crystalline and then build the synthetic kind using the Enslaved Extremeobug. The Medium Range Star Gate is not cheap though, and will require more Antanium than you start out with, meaning you will also need to build an Antanium Impactor. You will also need two Microreactors in order to power everything.

So to begin, you should build 1 Microreactor, a Powered Materials Silo, and a Slave Gate. Then produce Gold, Ore, and Aluminum bugs and start harvesting. When you can afford it, first build the second Microreactor, and then the Antanium Impactor. After that you are just waiting until you have enough resources to build the Medium Range Star Gate.

Once you have the Medium Range Star Gate, you are basically home free and can build anything you want, as you now have the ability to import and export all Reptilian resources. The trick is getting to that point, as building one extra structure can put you in a resource position where you will never be able to recover, and will ultimately lead your map to a dead end.

To build the Synthetic Crystalline Deposit, you will need to import Crystalline and Rum from the Medium Range Star Gate. You can export Gold or Aluminum to generate the required funds. Once you are growing Synthetic, your map should be good to go. Just make sure you find a nice secluded place for it, as Crystalline Spread can be problematic for a settlement.

Although it's harder to get started, the Reptilians can have a fully functional and self sufficient Water World base. It just takes planning and patience!

Hello guys!

As what @bastecklein have announced about, nanotech and the nanites will be introduced to other civs as well in the later update.
(reference post: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=36234)

When nanotech meets Insectoids. What will be the result combinition?
At least these would be innovations.
Here are my ideas, hopyfully you guys liked it :D


Insectnoid Robotics (tech)

Wondered how Insectnoids have come over with the ideas of, Robotics?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don’t know how they imagined that lol
Robotics knowledge should help them to learn how to build nanites :)

Automaton Assembling Yard

A workshop where the skilled insectnoids put all the pieces together to build automatons, one kind of crude yet functional robots that can get the job done.

The recipe for insectnoid robot is microchip + antanium + aluminium + software + ant paste + wheels.

Nanocrafts Workshop

Only the smartest and most skillful craftsbugs are capable of crafting one of the finest things in the world - the nanites. This workshop has every tool and automatons needed for creating these tiny nanotech products.

Nanite production facility for Insectoids. Needs robots to run, as well multiple ingredients including microchips and crystalline.

Nano-Infirmary Hive

Make use of nanites to deliver medicine accuately, this high tech infirmary hive can cure almost all diseases that an Insectoid would have.

Upgrade of Infirmary hive (from Part 1 of the series).

Nano-bloodletting Station

Enhanced using nanites, this clinic in insectoid fashion will terminate all diseases an Insectoid would experience in their life.

In case Bast just want something simple as that.

Unholy Nano-Nerve Stimulator

Once it was impossible to inject Antaura into any Insectoid indivdual. But now with nanites, we can directly inject Antaura-carrying nanites to stimulate and turn the tiny brains of Insectoids into... Super-smart brains. Notes: You have been warned about some potential permanent side effects, including evil personalities.

Ultimate (right now) education facility for any Zolarg colony.

Nano Ether Juicer

Tired of collecting Ether all by yourself? Here, I’ll introduce you the Insectoid innovation that nobody ever seen - an ether symthesizing device nicknamed ‘Ether Juicer’. By reacting crystalline, uranium and helium-3 in ant paste under strong electricity, mixed with from nanites and Antaura, a small stream of Ether is created, and tapped into barrels.

Finally we can have something that automatically creates ether. Yay?
Ohh, almost forgotten. It does not hire workers, the job is get done by the automatons (robots). You know the dangerous radioactivity.

Insectoid Nano-Bioreactor

When you have water and some ores, as well some nanites and tons of power, you can literally create any biomass in the galaxy, from food to lumbers, from wools to ant pastes.

Bioreactors can be useful...

Nanocircuit Foundry

By utilizing the nanotech advances, you can create thousands of circuit boards in this Nanocircuit Foundry in a minute.

An ordinary example to utilize nanotech in electronics.

Nanobakery

Nobody ever imagined nanites can be used for processing more nutritous food that way, even the Insectoids themselves. Just dump barrels of sugar and ant paste, mixed with some raw food, into the reactor. In a few minutes, the nanites casts magic onto these ingredients, creating one of the most innovative food, Nanocakes.
Don’t worry, nanites won’t left in the nanocakes, it’s 100% safe to eat.

Humm... Now I’m imagining how it would taste like...

Nanite Paste Hive

Creating ant pastes now won’t need any labor. The nanites will do the job for you - more productive than the old methods.

An upgrade of the Paste Hive from Part 2 of the series.

Nano-Crystalline Farm

If you think the Crystalline Growth Chamber isn’t fast enough at producing crystallines, this nanite-operated Nano-Crystalline Farm will satisify your wish.

(I’m still try to churn out something useful)

Nano-Alchemy Hive

The power of nanotechnology will elevate Insectoid alchemy to another level - Not just tonnes aluminium and gold can be created, it also creates uranium (and cobalt).

Ignore cobalt if nothing the insectoids can utilize the cobalt.
Upgrade of the Unholy Alchemy Hive from Part 2 of the series.

These are just a few ideas that may be obvious things that bast has already decided he will implement, but hopefully some of these ideas may help. And Before you start blasting me about how bast won't ever put a pvp element into my colony, you should check the updates and announcements page under update 75, since bast includes the possibility of a pvp element with federations.

The ideas below represent an entire concept when applied together. This is how I would implement pvp between federations in my colony, but like all of my other concept ideas, it's mainly here to present new thoughts to the developer on how certain concepts could come together, and I don't expect him to just take this entire concept and put it in the game.

First off, I think that any pvp feature should be optional, just as bast said. But I do think that there should be some risk involved with enabling pvp and joining in federation wars/rivalries. I don't think that the risk should be catastrophic, but being attacked by someone else should come with some major disadvantages.

I think that in order for a rivalry/war between two federations to continue, a certain percentage of the federation should be regularly and actively involved. This way, people have to be actively participating in the rivalry in order for it to continue, so time and effort would need to be put in. While a rivalry is going on, all colonies in those federations are given buffs that increase income and production speeds of certain resources, so a rivalry would be good for business, as it also is in real life.

However, those that chose not to participate in a rivalry will not benefit at all from any benefits that come about by attacking enemy colonies, only active colonies do. This way there will be no freeloaders. I also think that there should be a cooldown timer that forces players to remain pvp active for a while after they've attacked another colony. This way colonies can't attack other colonies and then quickly disable pvp mode to avoid retaliation. However, if you accidentally enable pvp and haven't attacked anyone, you can immediately disable pvp. I also think that each colony should only be able to have one debuff affecting them at a time, but they could have multiple buffs in effect. Any further attempts to double-debuff an enemy would result in the attacker wasting a debuff chance and using resources that they could have used on another target.

Now, here comes a system of buffs and debuffs that I think would fit the pvp feature nicely. With these status effects, each colony could specialize in a certain kind of attack, or take on a certain support role in a rivalry, thus adding a bit of an rpg element to this system, but shouldn't need to get too in depth or complex with it. Below is a system of classes, point systems, and buffs and debuffs that a player can cast on other friendly or enemy colonies. Bear in mind that in order to receive a buff or debuff, you need to be in pvp mode. All buffs and debuffs require certain buildings in order to be unlocked and improved, and the best status effects require more complex buildings.

There would also be four different scores attributed to each colony that tell what kind of contribution that colony makes to the war effort and what their specialty/class is. Each class would be specified by a certain building, and only one of six of these buildings can be constructed at once in a colony. Whichever building is built determines the war class of the colony and what it specializes in. The buildings can be upgraded in tiers, giving more and more unique advantages for each tier, but also becoming more expensive. The classes are as follows:

A vanguard heads straight in and attacks the enemy headlong, splitting their focus between offense and defense. They can be capable attackers and defenders, but would more often than not pose as a distraction to the enemy, spreading their attacks and defenses onto multiple colonies at once with the splitter cast, and protecting themselves with the feedback loop cast. They focus on collecting offense and defense points.

Unique advantages: the vanguard's unique advantages focus on reducing the durations of all debuffs that they are targeted with, reducing buff/debuff cooldowns, increasing the amount of targets that a vanguarde can hit with the splitter cast, and on the highest tier, enabling the vanguard to attack an enemy and "taunt" them, thus forcing them to target the vanguard for their next attack. The taunt can also be used in combination with splitter to affect multiple enemies, forcing them all to wait on each other to take turns attacking the same vanguard before they can target another colony.

An empowerer is good at preparing their allies for an initial attack on an unsuspecting enemy. The buff their allies to strengthen them for the battle to come, and they join the ranks of vanguards in attacking and distracting the enemy. The Empowerer can counter some debuffs with buffs, but it proves to be a very inefficient counterer and can easily be picked out by an assassin if it causes too much bother in the heat of battle. It's best for this class to do all of it's buffs before battle and save the debuffs until the heat of battle. An empowerer will rack up offense and utility points, with relatively few defense points.

Unique advantages: The empowerer's unique abilities focus on buff potency, the amount of targets that splitter can reach, duration reduction to any debuffs that it experiences. And on the highest tier buildings, Empowerers gain a 1 in 5 chance to apply a buff to themselves automatically if they cast that same buff onto an ally without negating a debuff or being negated by a debuff. This allows the Empowerer to easily empower themselves while they are empowering other colonies in preparation for a battle, but doesn't help the empowerer during the heat of battle.

An assassin makes calculated strikes. Their attacks are very potent and can be made even more potent thanks to the charge cast. They are often supported by vanguards that strike before the assassins to get the initial attention from the enemies. They need not worry about protecting themselves in battle because of this. Even if they are attacked, they can retaliate quickly by using the dimensional reflection buff, thus giving their enemy a taste of their own medicine. An assassin can be good at countering buffs with debuffs, but not as effectively as they can attack an unprotected enemy. This class will have mostly offense points, with a little bit of silencer points as well.

Unique advantages: the Assassin's unique advantages focus on debuff potency and cooldown, dimensional mirror cooldown and cost reduction, increased potency and decreased cooldown on a buff affected by the charge cast, and on the highest tier, giving the assassin the ability to attack an enemy with an "evasive" attack, thus forcing the enemy to not be able to retaliate against the assassin for a certain amount of time. The enemy can target other colonies during that time though, just not that particular assassin.

The counterer focuses on offense and defense. They use their casts to negate a buff or debuff. They use the splitter and feedback loop buffs to cast negating buffs and debuffs onto themselves and other allies. The assassin might target a counterer with a potent attack at just the right time, during the counterer's cooldown time, if the counterer becomes a bother to it's enemies. So learning when to take action to help your allies and when let up for a while to lose attention from enemy colonies is a must for this class. The counterer gains equal amounts of defense and silencer points.

Unique advantages:The counterer's unique advantages focus on cooldown and resource cost reduction to all buffs and debuffs, increasing the amount of extra targets that splitter can give you, and on the highest tier, a counterer can "silence" an enemy, preventing them from attacking or defending any target for a duration, if they successfully negate that enemy's debuff or buff. The silence effect has a 1 in 5 chance of happening for each successful counter.

The healer is solely a supporter and defender, defending colonists by negating debuffs with their buffs and using buffs on allies just as utilities to boost their performance. The healer gives potent buffs and defenses to other players and is the pillar that holds up the federation in the war. They can use the charge cast to further increase the potency of a buff, which they would use to further strengthen allies. Assassins will target these the most to slow them down so the enemy will be without support, and counterers can also silence Healers by negating their buffs with debuffs. But healers are really good at empowering all of the other classes, which in turn will retaliate if one of their healers is attacked. The healer focuses on collecting defense and utility points.

Unique advantages: The healer's advantages focus on buff potency and cooldown, increased potency and decreased cooldown effects of the charge buff on all buffs, and on the highest tier, if they successfully counter a debuff with a buff, that buff's cooldown is reduced by 75%, allowing them to deal large amounts of counters in rapid succession as long as their buffs aren't re-countered/negated by an enemy.

The Commando is like an empowerer in that it buffs allies in preparation for battle, but instead of joining in the frontline assault like empowerers, commandos hide under cover of distraction and take out enemy defenses with tactical casts. They are extremely efficient with countering buffs with debuffs, yet they can't defend allies against debuffs. The commando is the hardest class to play as their position on the battlefield is an awkward one. And while they are really good at ripping enemy defenses away and preparing allies for battle, they themselves can't directly attack or defend anyone. Only choose this class if you're experienced with the pvp feature and your federation needs people of this class, otherwise you'll find yourself having a really bad experience with the pvp element.

Unique advantages: The commando looses the ability to buff people that are already affected with a debuff and the ability to debuff an enemy that's not protected by a buff, and debuff potency and duration is set to 0 so that if a commando successfully negates a buff, the debuff doesn't affect the enemy as an attack like it regularly would. This forces the commando into it's role turns debuffs solely into a means of breaking defenses instead of attacking directly. The commando also gets cooldown reduction to all debuffs, buff potency, increased splitter targets, and on the highest tier structure, the commando has a 1 in 5 chance of completely removing a buff or debuff's cooldown after casting it successfully. This means that the commando can hit many more targets than any other class in a period of time, allowing it to somewhat carpet-bomb enemy defenses or empower massive amounts of allies before the battle.

Major Benefits in participating in PVP: As factions war against each other, the colonies contributing to the war effect will share in the spoils of war. In order for Federations to start a war, both Federations must fromt a certain amount of money, and then each week after that start of the war, that same amount of money must be paid by each federation. Each week, a tally would be taken of how many successful attacks and counters were dealt by each federation. Both numbers are added together to get the Federation's battle score, and the federation with the highest score wins all of the money from all participating federations for that week. This can be used in a free-for-all war that includes multple federations as well as just a regular rivalry between two federations, and the war can continue as long as the federations want it to continue, provided they have enough money to put forward. The winning federation is required to split the winnings among it's participating colonies, but how much a percentage of the win that it keeps to itself is optional. Just bear in mind that nobody will participate if there is not a big enough reward.

Debuffs:

Benefits of debuffing enemies: When you debuff an enemy that doesn't currently have any status effects without being negated, you permanently gain a small amount of potency towards the debuff you casted and you get offense points that go to your offense score, which can be seen by other members of your federation. If you successfully negate a buffed enemy with a debuff, you gain silencer points towards your silencer score that other members can see and you permanenty gain a very small percentage chance of not being negated each time you cast a debuff or buff, even if your buff or debuff was countered correctly by a defending enemy(this also applies to buffs/debuffs casted with feedback loop). Finally, if you successfully negated a buff or debuff that negated your original buff/debuff on the same enemy, you will gain 2x silencer points and you get 2x more percentage added to your negation-block chance.

Brownout: Forcefully syphon energy from your enemy to temporarily add to your power capacity. Is negated by the Syphon buff but can negate the repair nanites buff. Casting this debuff successfully without having it negated will permanently add a 2% increase to the caster's power capacity that scales with their power capacity.
Category: Techno-warfare

EMP Blast: Blast your enemy with EMP waves that temporarily damage power producing buildings, causing a complete power blackout. the effects of the emp blast are shorter in duration than the brownout, but cannot be countered by simply increasing power production like brownout could. Negates the Syphon Buff but is negated by the repair nanites buff. Successfully casting this debuff without negation would award the caster with a permanent 2% faster build speed on all power producing buildings.

Plague: Inflict an enemy with a nasty plague that lowers the health of it's colonists over time. By treating the population of that colony like guinea pigs, you gain a boost towards research production. A plague will never kill a colonist directly, the lowest that a plague would bring a colonist would be 5%. This is avoid any colony from dying out because of warfare. Negated by the healing nanites buff but negates the probiotic bursts buff. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster a 2% increase in build speed of hospitals and scientific structures.

Famine: Target your enemy's food supply and reduce the amount of food they produce for a time. Negated by the probiotic bursts buff but negates the healing nanites buff since people can't heal without eating food. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster a permanent 2% increase in food storage.

World eater: You release a rare silicon-based life form that eats stone and metal into your enemy's colony. The creature quickly reproduces and infests all of the enemy's ore mines, viciously attacking the miners.. The enemy suffers a substantial reduction in production rates from any structure that relies on holes in the ground, including excavation sites, core mines, regolith extraction co.s, fracking plants, etc. The world eaters are trained to build storehouses for the ore they collect and share it with their masters. Successfully casting this debuff without having it negated will permanent multiply the attacker's total storage capacity for raw resources by 1.02, thus adding an extra 2% capacity in relation to the capacity they already have. This scales with resource capacity and applies to all resources that come from the ground, including alien arts, ore, gold, ura, alu, rego,
Category: Geo-warfare

Tectonic disruption: Pummel your enemy with earthquakes that make working in tall buildings extremely hard. The target suffers reduced work productivity depending on how potent your attack is and can't build or destroy any buildings during the duration of the debuff. Successfully casting this buff without negation will grant the caster 2% faster construction of any structure that classifies as a tall building.
Category: Geo-warfare

Splitter: A very costly and high tech buff that allows you to direct your buffs and debuffs toward two targets at once. In order to successfully target two allies/enemies with a particular status effect, you need to cast splitter on both targets in rapid succession(casts are no more than 5 minutes apart), otherwise the splitter buff/debuff would be wasted on only one target and the caster would have to wait the long cooldown in order to cast it again.
Category: Offensive Warfare

Malicious Sanctioning campaign: you target an enemy with a campaign to invite it's population to immigrate to your colony, thus leaching population away from them. Requires tons of civics to cast and a colony would have to be well established in order to have access to this attack and would need to have tons of space for new colonists. Negated by the repopulate buff but negates the Friendly sanctioning buff. Once a caster's housing space is filled up, the campaign will be ended, thus avoiding any homeless people. Successfully casting this debuff without running out of housing space or being negated will grant the caster a 2% increase in build speeds on all housing structures.
Category: Political Warfare

Purge: Purge your colony of any overly complacent colonists, forcing them to immigrate to your enemy. These colonists will immigrate to the enemy regardless of whether they have housing room or not. If the enemy doesn't have housing room, the immigrants because homeless and detract from their happiness score. This buff requires a lot of civics and would have a huge cooldown. Successfully casting this debuff would grant the caster a 2% increase in build speeds for all tourism structures.
Category: Political warfare

Blockade: Block and enemy's trade via gbt and all import/export/immigration buildings other than the Stargate. is negated by the subspace detour buff but negates the hyperspace transport buff. Requires starships to cast. During the blockade, the prices of all of the import/export stuctures besides your highest tier import/export building(stargate for humans) are reduced by 20% and the rewards gain from the exports are increased by 20%
Category: Economic Warfare

Subspace disruption: Disruption your enemy's Stargate connection, rendering their most advanced immigration and trade building useless. Negates the subspace detour buff but is negated by the hyperspace transport buff. During a disruption, your highest tier import/export building gains a 20% import price reduction and a 20% export reward increase.
Category: Economic Warfare

Buffs:

Benefits of buffing allies: There are good benefits to turning your colony unto a support colony that buffs it's allies. When you successfully negate a debuff, you permanently gain a small amount of resistance to the debuff that you negated, and you get defense points that go to your overall defense score that other members can see. When you cast a buff onto an ally while they aren't affected by any status affects, then you gain points towards your utility score, which other members can see as well, and you gain a potency increase to that buff.

Syphon: You temporarily sacrifice a portion of your power to add to an ally colony's power levels. Designed to negate the brownout debuff as long as the caster has enough extra power to successfully supplement that colony's needs as well as the extra demand for power that the brownout debuff adds. Unfortunately, the emp burst debuff negates this buff.
Category: Techno-warfare

Repair nanites: sends a swarm of nanites to repair any damage in an ally's technology caused by an EMP blast, immidiately negating the debuff. The brownout debuff destroys these nanites as the high electric demand causes electronics to overheat, vaporizing the nanites as they try to fix the damage. One side effect of getting hit with this buff is that they repair damage caused by other means, thereby repairing building infrastructure by a significant percentage.
Category: techno-warfare

Healing nanites: you send a swarm of healing nanites to an ally colony to heal it's occupants. Completely negates the plague debuff, but is negated by the dyson sphere debuff. Hospitals also heal sick colonists faster depending on buff potency.
Category: Bio-warfare

Probiotic bursts: gives an ally colony rapid food production for some time. This buff requires a large amount of food and water to charge, but when casted onto an ally colony, it releases massive clouds of genetically modified probiotics in the atmosphere, which help crops grow fast. negates the dyson sphere debuff, but is negated by the plague debuff.
Category: Bio-warfare

Ultrasonic resonance: Blast your ally with ultrasonic waves that purify the earth of any world eaters. Obviously this counters the world eater debuff. The resonance shakes ores and minerals loose from the rocks for easier collection. This adds a significant boost to production in all buildings that rely on holes in the ground. However, this buff does nothing against the tectonic disruption debuff.
Category: Geo-warfare

Cryonic infusion: calm an ally's planet down with the freezing power of cryo-science. Negates tectonic disruption, but world eaters are impervious to the extreme cold. The severe cold causes blue crystalline to grow on the surface of the planet, no matter what planet it is, and there is a percentage chance for each lava tile on a lava map to instantly turn into obsidian. Both of these benefits depend on buff potency.
Category: Geo-warfare

Repopulate: you sacrifice a portion of your population to save an ally from dying off by repopulating their colony. No resource or tech requirements. Not designed to negate any debuff, but designed to prevent any colony from dying off. This is a very low tier buff, and would be the first buff to be unlocked, so it really shouldn't be possible to kill off an enemy colony to where they can't recover, since they could always get reinforcements from allies. In fact, I could see some colonies specializing in this buff by increasing their population size way beyond their population requirements. Negates the sanctioning campaign debuff but people won't want to move to that colony if it been afflicted by a purge from another colony.
Category: Political Warfare

Friendly Sanctioning campaign: Help your ally by welcoming all of their homeless into your colony. The buff only stops when either the caster runs out of housing or the target runs out of homeless. negates the Purge debuff but is negated by the Malicious sanctioning debuff.
Category: Political Warfare

Subspace detour: Allow your ally to connect to your gbt via their stargate, thus allowing them to make trades. This negates a blockade debuff, but is negated by the subspace disruption debuff. Side effects from this buff include a reduced cost in civics for each gbt transaction and the reduction of cost and increase of reward from importing/exporting from the stargate or highest tier import/export building, depending on buff potency.

Wormhole: You create a wormhole above your planet that links to a wormhole above your allie's planet. Because of this, allies can travel more effectively without the need of a stargate. Negates subspace disruption but is negated by blockade. Has the same effect on gbt as subspace detour, but applies the cost and benefit modifiers to every tier other than the top tier import/export building.

SOS: This buff can only be applied to the colony casting it. It's basically a cry for help. Other allies can see a list of SOS reports for their federation and see the colony being attacked and identify the attacker. Afterward they can proceed to buff their ally in danger, or retaliate against the attacker with a debilitating debuff. There is no requirement or cost to cast this buff, you just have to have a communications device, consulate, or capital.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Feedback loop: Can only be applied to the caster, casting requires large amounts of power and the tech required with be pretty high to unlock this buff. Once this buff is casted, the caster can target themselves once with any buff, essentially being able to defend themselves instead of having to rely on another colony for counters. The feedback loop would come with a large cooldown, so the caster would have to choose wisely on.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Dimensional reflection: Reflect a buff or debuff back onto an enemy or ally, thus negating any effect on the caster completely and immediately. A high tech and a lot of resources required to cast this buff and comes with a long cooldown. This buff doesn't prevent an attack, you have to cast this buff during when you are experiencing a buff or debuff.
Category: Defensive Warfare

Charge: cast this buff before casting another buff or debuff to multiply the potency by 5. This also increases the cooldown of the buff being affected by 5. The most expensive buff in the game and comes with the highest cooldown.

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Now with all of that out of the way, I want to remind everyone that I'm not expecting this whole beast of a concept to be plopped into the game. I hope that bast at least takes a consideration of the concept and uses pieces and parts from it, but I mainly just want to see the game grow to become more popular and hopefully some of my ideas play a part in making that happen. I will be making changes to this post to constantly refine it based on what I learn about what is feasible to do and what bast's plans are, so stay tuned.

Right now the ice world is semi playable, but crystalline is impossible to renew. Before the update is finished it would be great if something to make more crystalline was added. This is a concept that I came up with, but i am awful at inkscape so I have no picture.

Crystalline centrifuge:
Costs:
2000 regolith
200 helium-3
100 steel

Tile area: 2x2

Converts regolith and helium-3 into crystalline

Production speed: Same as steel refinery but with crystalline as the output.

Hello @bastecklein!

Although I'm much less active on forums for these months, I do have an idea I wish to share. I had this idea since several months ago, a turn-based galactic civilization strategy game. Now here are the (not-so-detailed) details I have in my mind at this moment.

- What the game idea is about -

- Gameplay Mechanics -

Hopefully you like these ideas so far.

This planet should be for humans and insectoids.

The jungle is a dense, wet, hard to traverse landscape, with mega-trees, small mud deposits, oil deposits, sugar cane, choffee trees, and brierleaf bushes dominate the landscape. Water is more abundant, but not to the point of being like water world. The mega trees are abundant enough to spread faster than they are harvested, so the player will always have a supply of wood and the mud deposits will give clay when harvested, but in much greater supply than normal clay mines. These make the planet a lot easier to colonize, but this is balanced out by briarleaf bushes.

The bushes don't spread, but they pose as hard to destroy obstacles for the player as nothing can pass through them. These bushes can't be bulldozed and would yield 1 wood per harvest, but have a total of 25 wood, so you can imagine how long it would take to get rid of them with just forest or lumber bots. Eventually the player should be given a quicker way to get rid of briarleaf bushes. One way could be to implement a scorcher bot that gathers 5 charcoal per harvest from briarleaf bushes, trees, and mega trees. It would be a quick way to get a small supply of charcoal going, which would be essential for ore production in human colonies. A fire bug carries out the same function for insectoids and gathers charcoal from all trees.

However, this map has one major advantage, choffee beans. This new resource can be combined with sugar to make chocolate, or with sugar and water to make coffee, which could be used for all sorts of creative purposes. Some ideas are mentioned below for both humans and insectoids:

Humans:
choffee bot: harvests cocoa trees for choffee beans.

chocolate mixing plant: consumes choffee beans and sugar to produce chocolate, this can be built on any planet.

coffee mixing plant: consumes choffee beans, sugar, and water to produce coffee, this can be built on any planet

choffee farm: consumes water and produces choffee beans, can only be built on jungle planets.
Candy store: consumes chocolate and sugar to produce a small amount of food and money.

Candy Store: consumes chocolate and sugar to produce small amounts of money and food.

Choco land: a tourist attraction that requires a massive regular supply of chocolate and smaller supplies of rum, food, and water, but provides tons of tourism and money. the attraction can only be built in jungle planets and is made entirely from chocolate, which is why it needs such a large supply.

coffee shop: where everyone with a sweet tooth goes to hang out. Consumes Coffee to produce entertainment and money and restores colonist energy. Can be built on any planet and could be a creative way to increase the tolerance of high commute distances. Perhaps if a colonists energy is low, no matter what they are doing, they will stop what they are doing and look for a coffee shop, so long as they have enough money and there is a coffee shop in range of them.

nutrient enrichment plant: since choffee beans naturally contain lots of healthy nutrients, this plant will pull the nutrients out of the beans and use them to enrich food. This structure consumes food and choffee beans to produce much more food and can be built on any planet.

skin treatment center: since choffee butter naturally improves skin quality, many women flock to the skin treatment center to be bathed in it. Consumes lots of choffee beans and rum and produces lots of money. Can be built on any planet.

Insectoids:
choffee bug: same function as the chofffee bot

Choffee farm: the exact same building as the humans.

chocolate mixing vat: same function as chocolate mixing plant for humans.
coffee mixing vat: same function as coffee mixing plant for humans.

Altar of choffee: the insectoids view choffee beans as holy and can't get enough of the stuff. They even built an altar to the choffee gods. Consumes choffee beans to produce a small amount of civics and antaura.

Candy market - has the same function as the candy store for humans

communal bowl of boiling coffee: works in the same way as the coffee shop for humans.

shell shining center: insectoids have discovered that choffee beans do a great job at polishing their exoskeletal shell. serves the same function as the human's skin treatment center.

advance food fortification center: upgrade to the food fortification plant, consuming choffee beans and food to produce much more food.

choco-land: same building as humans.

ore transmutation altar: consumes antauara and chocolate and produces ore, albeit slowly.
gold transmutation altar: consumes antaura and coffee and produces gold, albeit slowly

Game progression
Human progression would be rather similar to forest world, getting ore from charcoal. Insectoids use the antaura from the altar of choffee to transmutate chocolate into ore and coffee into gold.

Anyway, that's all I have, let me know what you think.

This would be a good time to produce a building that specifically brings in one type of race, like maybe an upgrade to the slave gate that allows immigration from the Zolarg Empire. Then there could be jobs that could be specific to one race...arbiters and brewmasters could be draconian only, or jobs could be set to only allow certain races as workers, that way it makes more sense for insectoid housing to exist, and for insectoid specific jobs to exist. It's just an idea, something I've thought should be in place for a while.
Regardless of if bast does that or not, what about:
Insect Fattener- It turns out if you overfeed your insects, they will start to vomit up sugar and ant paste as they get sick from overeating. Collect both these resources from the poor bugs! Consumes Food to keep those insects fed, and water to clean up the gross insectoid germs!
Slave Labor Camp- Using state-of-the-art insectoid technology, create your own Labor Camps for those insects to work! Creates many valuable resources for your colony! (This is the draconian version of the labor camp like they have their own version of the mining pit too). Requires a couple of Reptillian supervisors to make sure those insects don't slack off!
Drunken Market- It's a well-known fact that tourists and citizens alike act much dumber when they're drunk. Here you can get people drunk and sell them terrible knockoffs for high prices while their inhibitions aren't in the way! Transforms 2 rum, 1 pottery, 1 painting into $3000, and creates unhappy people! Can entertain 30 tourists (I'm not sure how many it should entertain, 30 seemed reasonable).
Plastic Polymerizer- I'm sorry, I couldn't come up with something clever for this one. Uses bandwidth, power, 1 oil and 1 water to make 80 plastic.
Hacker's Den- Tired of how all that coding work nets you so little software? How about having that code be used to steal other people's programs instead! That coder will bring in much more software now! Uses much more bandwidth and a bit more power to net you much more software.
Triantanium Impactor- Using antanium, uranium, and helium, you can create a decent amount of triantanium to use to usher in the newest age of technology. Uses 1 u, 1 an, 1 he to make 40 triantanium. Requires bandwidth, power, and software as utilities.
Robomaker's Den- Provides housing and job(s). Uses aluminum, software, microchips, and crystalline to make robots.
Cell Phone Factory- Tired of hearing your younger citizens complain about the slow postal system? Want to make the elderly colonists feel stuck in the past? Well, start making and selling cheap cell phones that will stop working as soon as the warranty ends! (Warning: small chance phones may explode!) Produces civics as a byproduct of people feeling the illusion of being able to contact customer service (even if they are always on hold). Transforms 1 microchip, 1 plastic, 1 software into $200. Uses power, robots, and bandwidth as well.


New Tech- Next-Gen Technology: Costs 30 million research, 3 million civics, $8 million, 5k plastic, robots, and triantanium. (Can modify costs, just what I thought of based on other draconian techs) Needed for everything after this point:
Next-Gen Chip Transporter- Tired of how slow the normal transporter is? Using plastic and other state-of-the-art materials you can upgrade those last-gen transporters into the future! Now requires bandwidth, but produces 30 microchips per round in return. (or alternatively, produces chips at the same conversion ratio, but at a drastically increases speed).
Ultra-High Frequency Node- Are your people complaining about not having enough internet access? Does it feel too slow for you? Well never fear! Using next-gen fiber optic technology, you can make superior nodes to provide all your people with bandwidth!
Deep Space Hacker- Using next-gen data-stealing technologies, upgrade your deep space interceptors to hack even the most secure transactions and communications! (not sure how much of an upgrade it should be, but should definitely give you more money and research, but should now also get you civics from hacking into secure government databases halfway across the universe).
Next-Gen Triantanium Impactor- Using next-gen technology you can create massive amounts of triantanium! Creates 140 triantanium from 1 an, 1 u, 1 he. Utilities: robots, bandwidth, and power
Next-Gen Polymerizer- you know the words by now, using next-gen technology, blah blah blah :P. Produces 160 plastic per round using same components as original polymerizer.
Next-Gen Microreactor (upgrade from hybrid microreactor, because I thought of this idea but don't want to step on wadaling's toes)- Using the power of next-gen technology, create absurd amounts of electricity! Uses bandwidth, triantanium, and helium to make power. Also requires water to stop from overheating.
Next-Gen Materials Extractor- Uses crystalline and helium to make 50 of each of the raw materials instead of 15.
Actual Reality Gaming Station- Using next-gen "virtual reality", make video games so realistic they are actually happening! You can drop blocks on insectoids in Antetris, crush them with candy in Sugar Crush, stomp Sectoombas like your favorite video game characters Drario and Druigi, and best of all, play first-person shooters like Crush of Insects: Drac Ops as yourself! Requires sugar to keep those "virtual" insects fed, as well as software and robots to add that extra realism to the game! Produces money that draconians have mooched from their parents, as well as civics for helping the draconian military crush any insectoid rebels. Provides entertainment for citizens and tourists.

I'll add more ideas if I think of them, just had a couple of immediate ones and I wanted to post them.

Draconian Automatic Market

Where the Draconains can bring their things to exchange something else they need in this automatic market. But of course, the exchange ratio is always unfair. Never underesyimate the trickness of business runs under reptilians!

Randomly consumes a little amount of a resource, it’ll produce another random resource and money.

Draconian Construction Yard

The construction yard is the basic structure for managing and planning any larger construction in any Reptilian colonies - It is the only place you can build Floating Constructor, the bigger brother of construction probe.

Floating Constructor (Unit)

The Floating Constructor has larger construction capability than any average construction probe, which they are able to create massive, amazing structures for Alpha Draconain colonies.

Larger Automated Hydroponics Lab

A larger, multi-deck hydroponoics lab for growing more food for larger populations.

Serves as the modest upgrade for the Automated hydroponics lab.

Draconain Crystalline Refinery

An all-in one automatic facility, combinding gold grower, aluminium grower, crystalline enrichment, e.t.c, which will harness the power of crystals to bring you a wide range of minerals! Requires robot to operate and tinker the machines.

This is a real industrial class refinery, for larger development scales. Before you have this thing, most importantly you should have a stable source of crystalline.

Global Raw Material Extractor

Known to be the most powerful experimental class mining drill in the world, nothing in underground will escape the awesome power of thr Global Drill. This thing can hollow any minerals inside a large asteroid within weeks. However because it’s too powerful that it may destroy the entire planet, it still requires some control measures, so it hires robots inside it.

Serve as the upgrade of Raw Materials Extractor.
Trivia: Alpha Draconians might have used that as a weapon...

Ether Crystal Farm

Ether can help crystalline grow even faster under extreme radiation. With this machine you’ll be difficult to use up the amount crystalline it produces. However because ether is unstable with unknown reactions under the condition which the Farm works, it needs 24 hour control under the frequently-updated softwares and robots.

Better crystal farm - Which the automations makes it possible to yield more than before!

Interstellar Starship Relay Station

The logistic network is always the important lifeline of any large commonwealths, because you’ll always need to transport important materials and human resources around. Where the important colony is, where this facility lies to resupply the transport vessels. Robots are hired to ensure high task efficiency.

Literally a spaceport for Alpha Draconians, but without entertainment purpose.
The one with entertainment purpose will be introduced in another post.

Greater Shipworks

Here, harness the power of automations, everything in this shipworks are totally automated. Enjoy the high efficiency it brings.

These would All be excellent biomes for an earth like world. You forgot 3 important ones though:

Swamp- lots of water and clay. That’s the only reason people go there.

Taiga - an arctic forest. The trees provide more wood than forest trees but it’s harder to get water and food here. There’s also the fact that you can get natural sweetener from the tree sap.

Tundra - The coldest earthlike biome. Mostly Ice with sparse trees and rocks. Little to no resources but would serve as a good Hardcore survival area.

However, not all mc2 worlds will be earthlike, so let’s think of biomes for each planet. We also have to remember that the biomes will change into other biomes as terraforming happens.

I’ll go ahead and list some lunar biomes for a good example of how biomes can change with planet terraformation.

Lunar biomes:
Lunar plains - large areas of flattened lunar regolith. Great for building on a large scale. These will become grasslands When the planet reaches the habitable zone.

Lunar badlands - filled with craters and densely packed rock, this area wouldn’t be a worthwhile place to be if not for its large reserves of organic compounds used to synthesize oil. The densely packed rocky soil will prevent plant growth, while atmospheric winds will whether the crater formations into sand to create a desert once the planet becomes earthlike.

Lunar Frostlands- tiny pieces of ice are strewn all over this area. It will be a good place to start a colony as it contains lots of water And is relatively flat. Trees will start growing in this area once the planet becomes earthlike, turning this biome into a forest.

Lunar Iceland’s - filled with many large ice deposits, this Place would be a better place to start you colony with than frostlands, but will become a swamp after the planet becomes earthlike. The main benefit of this area is the absurd amount of clay than can be gather.med from it’s shallow ponds.

Lunar arctic - Sheer cold greets those who dare settle in this area, but the naturally growing crystalline is a valuable reward for doing so. The ground is completely covered in many kinds of ice, and it’s the composition of the ice that allows the gradual formation of crystalline over time. This area will loose its ability to spawn crystalline over time once the planet becomes earthlike, at which Point it will become a taiga biome. Imagine a taiga with naturally grown crystals, sounds almost like something out of a fantasy game.

Lunar glacier - the most extreme area on a lunar planet. No special resources, just ice, as far as the eye can see. It will still be all ice after the planet becomes earthlike, becoming a tundra biome.

Lunar crevice - a giant crack in the ground with many defined and sharp rock formations. This is oddly the best place to get regolith do to miners being able to build Down the sides of the crevice and strip mine outward from multiple elevations. However, it gets weathered away by want and flowing water when the planet becomes earthlike, becoming a canyon and attracting tourists.

Lunar lowlands - these are similar to lunar plains, but will fill with water to become rivers and seas once the planet becomes earthlike. You can build here at early game, but you’ll lose any buildings that get flooded at least halfway to their top by water

Lunar caves - a very rare Occitan ever. Often caused by exposed lava tubes and can contain small amounts of obsidian and uranium, but the lava has long since cooled. Will turn into a cave biome when the planet becomes earthlike, therefore losing any obsidian within.

Lunar mounds - natural mountains caused by tectonic plate movements don’t exist here, but the sides of giant craters will do. Will obviously turn into mountain biomes once terraformed.

Lunar wastes - an area containing garbage piles and deposites. Challenging to settle this area but will yeild lots of different resources, including aluminum And plastic most of all. It will become a waste dump once terraformed and will start spawning pools of mutagen, which can be used in genetic experiments.

Anyway, I hope I can get others to do biomes for their favorite non-earthlike planets and make them able to become other biomes at certain atmosphere levels.

Amorphus said:These would All be excellent biomes for an earth like world. You forgot 3 important ones though:

Swamp- lots of water and clay. That’s the only reason people go there.

Taiga - an arctic forest. The trees provide more wood than forest trees but it’s harder to get water and food here. There’s also the fact that you can get natural sweetener from the tree sap.

Tundra - The coldest earthlike biome. Mostly Ice with sparse trees and rocks. Little to no resources but would serve as a good Hardcore survival area.

However, not all mc2 worlds will be earthlike, so let’s think of biomes for each planet. We also have to remember that the biomes will change into other biomes as terraforming happens.

I’ll go ahead and list some lunar biomes for a good example of how biomes can change with planet terraformation.

Lunar biomes:
Lunar plains - large areas of flattened lunar regolith. Great for building on a large scale. These will become grasslands When the planet reaches the habitable zone.

Lunar badlands - filled with craters and densely packed rock, this area wouldn’t be a worthwhile place to be if not for its large reserves of organic compounds used to synthesize oil. The densely packed rocky soil will prevent plant growth, while atmospheric winds will whether the crater formations into sand to create a desert once the planet becomes earthlike.

Lunar Frostlands- tiny pieces of ice are strewn all over this area. It will be a good place to start a colony as it contains lots of water And is relatively flat. Trees will start growing in this area once the planet becomes earthlike, turning this biome into a forest.

Lunar Iceland’s - filled with many large ice deposits, this Place would be a better place to start you colony with than frostlands, but will become a swamp after the planet becomes earthlike. The main benefit of this area is the absurd amount of clay than can be gather.med from it’s shallow ponds.

Lunar arctic - Sheer cold greets those who dare settle in this area, but the naturally growing crystalline is a valuable reward for doing so. The ground is completely covered in many kinds of ice, and it’s the composition of the ice that allows the gradual formation of crystalline over time. This area will loose its ability to spawn crystalline over time once the planet becomes earthlike, at which Point it will become a taiga biome. Imagine a taiga with naturally grown crystals, sounds almost like something out of a fantasy game.

Lunar glacier - the most extreme area on a lunar planet. No special resources, just ice, as far as the eye can see. It will still be all ice after the planet becomes earthlike, becoming a tundra biome.

Lunar crevice - a giant crack in the ground with many defined and sharp rock formations. This is oddly the best place to get regolith do to miners being able to build Down the sides of the crevice and strip mine outward from multiple elevations. However, it gets weathered away by want and flowing water when the planet becomes earthlike, becoming a canyon and attracting tourists.

Lunar lowlands - these are similar to lunar plains, but will fill with water to become rivers and seas once the planet becomes earthlike. You can build here at early game, but you’ll lose any buildings that get flooded at least halfway to their top by water

Lunar caves - a very rare Occitan ever. Often caused by exposed lava tubes and can contain small amounts of obsidian and uranium, but the lava has long since cooled. Will turn into a cave biome when the planet becomes earthlike, therefore losing any obsidian within.

Lunar mounds - natural mountains caused by tectonic plate movements don’t exist here, but the sides of giant craters will do. Will obviously turn into mountain biomes once terraformed.

Lunar wastes - an area containing garbage piles and deposites. Challenging to settle this area but will yeild lots of different resources, including aluminum And plastic most of all. It will become a waste dump once terraformed and will start spawning pools of mutagen, which can be used in genetic experiments.

Anyway, I hope I can get others to do biomes for their favorite non-earthlike planets and make them able to become other biomes at certain atmosphere levels.

There should also be similar types of biomes for non-lunar planets, for example “Martian Badlands” for badlands of a Mars-like planet. An alternative would be to drop the prefix completely so that the terrain would correspond to the name, e.g Badlands, and the type of surface would depend on the planet.

You can import the crystalline from Stargate instead, then research the Crystalline Synthesis, and build the Crystalbot to start spawning the Synthetic Crystalline.

LIS humans however, outside from Ice World, can not build any bots to spawn Synthetic Crystalline, as they can not build the Crystalbots.

MizarAlcor said:You can import the crystalline from Stargate instead, then research the Crystalline Synthesis, and build the Crystalbot to start spawning the Synthetic Crystalline.

LIS humans however, outside from Ice World, can not build any bots to spawn Synthetic Crystalline, as they can not build the Crystalbots.

Humm actually GBT (Galactic board of trade) is the easiest access to it, if you play online colony :D

Well...that wouldn't help because the synthetic crystal deposits require crystalline too...and I think the crystalbots might need them as well. And Mizar's point that at least there is a point on offline UE when you can get renewable crystalline (outside of research converter, but without the diamond crystal reactor it's hard to reach that point anyway), is better than what offline LIS gets. To me, there's no reason why he couldn't fix both, and allow crystalline to be purchased at the space elevator and the online black market.

H3110 guys!

I’m finding more possibilities using nuclear technology for performing wierd and crazy means of production.
And yup, I’m pretty crazy now.

Before talking my main ideas:
Credits!
Nuclear waste idea redeveloped from @Luker124’s post: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=32487
Starship fuel idea takes reference from @Totillity1’s idea from his post: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=32592#p32651 ; and also the game developed by Bast - My Starship.


Okay here it begins!

NEW RESOURCES
• Nuclear waste (nw) -These radioactive and harmful waste are produced from nuclear reactors and alien class productions using uranium (except enrichments). Toxic level is 500, so you have better keep an eye on its quantity.
• Starship fuel (sf) - Ordinary fuels like oil are not strong enough to achieve faster than light travel. Something stronger has to be used. Its life can be lengthened with uranium.


NEW BUILDINGS!
Notes: green building names indicates the building produces nuclear waste.
• Ether Refinery - Refining oil with some uranium and crystalline will give one of the most expensive resource (as ether market is dominated by the evil Alpha Draconians) in the galaxy - Ether.
• Crystalline Plant - Here’s the way you can obtain crystalline without bothering your rovers - You can actually grow crystals in a lab emviornment, which radiation used for catalysing the growth. Consumes rum and crystalline with some uranium.
• Nuclear Waste Radioactive Decay Chamber - A lead-sealed chamber, which gives the standard (and the slowest) way to dispose nuclear waste safely.
• Nuclear Fuel Regeneration Facility - Bring uranium back by fusion reactions using helium-3 and nuclear wastes.
• Starship Fuel Refinery - A large refinery, which are specialized for synthesizing starship fuels using ether, uranium and helium-3.
• Radioactive Food Enrichment Facility - It sounds evil and mad, but the food produced are safe as strict de-radiation process is performed and ensure there’s no harmful radiation left. Produces more food using nuclear waste and sugar.
• Nuclear Decay Reactor - Decay of nuclear wastes also releases some energy. Make use of it to kill two birds with one stone by disposing nuclear waste and generate electricity.
• Radiotherapy Centre
• 2nd Generation Alien Uranium Enrichment Facility - Make use of quantum technology and complicated quantum computing, to obtain much more uranium, while also converts nuclear wastes. (to know what’s 2nd Generation Alien Tech, please have a look in this post: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=32444 )
• MegaFood Lab - Make use of radiation to mutate crops into gigantic plants, which increases food productivity by at least 50 times! (P.S. food safety may not be secured) Consumes water and uranium.
• Mutation Lab (Alpha Draconians) - (warning: evilness included) A secret facility, it looks like a spa centre, but actually it is a lab for performing mutation experiements. Consumes uranium to generate research.

More ideas are coming!



Promotion here, @Totillity1 has some awesome ideas about blackhole technology and more. Read his post here: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=32652

I know that many players have been patiently waiting for the next My Colony 2 update, but now the way is finally over as MC2 has just been updated to v0.31.0, and along with the usual bug fixes, this update brings with it a massive new content dump! So what all is inside? Let's take a look!


If you look at the screenshot above and think that something seems a bit fishy, then you would be correct. This update adds fish as a new resource, and you will now see them swimming around in the oceans on the Water World map! Fish are technically a Terrain type object in the game engine much like Ore and Gold deposits, except this is the first terrain class that can be generated in the water. The object also rotates in a circle, to give the appearance that the fish are swimming. They will spread too, similar to synthetic crystalline (although at a slower rate). The oceans on Water World are so overflowing with fish, that I doubt anybody will ever run out.

To go along with the new fish resource are the also-new Fish Dropoff structure and the Trawler unit, which are available pretty early on in the game and made with models provided by @spamdude . The Fish Dropoff can store 2500 Fish and also converts some of it into food, but once you unlock Salt Water production, you can also build the shore based Refrigerated Fish Bins for additional Fish storage. In addition to the new content, the existing Fish Hatchery gains fish storage and slight generation.

Moving on, there was a massive dump of community submitted MC2 models on the Official Discord Server recently, with contributions coming in from @spamdude , @SPARKY0303 and @DoYouHaveAnyOats , so please take a moment to thank these three users for their contributions to the game! In the screenshot below, you can see many of the new structures.


New buildings provided by @SPARKY0303 are the Hospital, the Virtual Music Experience and the Integrated Nuclear Reactor. The Hospital was a much needed upgrade to the two infirmary structures which were increasingly unable to keep up with the medical demands of larger colonies. The Virtual Music Experience adds a new semi-early game entertainment structure for your colonists (which also generates some money) and the Integrated Nuclear Reactor is another much needed structure, providing a power boosting upgrade to the existing Small Nuclear Reactor.

In addition to the new Fish related content already mentioned, further contributions from @spamdude include the new Medium Software Studio, Advanced Drilling Platform, Integrated Warehouse, and Medium Security Station. The Medium Software Studio, Integrated Warehouse and Medium Security Station each represent new mid-game upgrades to some of the existing structures that badly needed upgrade options, with the new Integrated Warehouse in particular adding storage for many resources that the regular Warehouse did not cover.

The new Advanced Drilling Platform might just be everyone's new favorite structure. Currently the most expensive building in the game and requiring the new Ultra Deep Excavation tech, the Advanced Drilling Platform consumes Helium 3 (as well as a fair amount of Power, Water and Bandwidth) while producing Ore, Regolith, Gold, Aluminum, Oil, Salt Water, the new Clay resource, and even a few Alien Artifacts! Clearly you are going to need to get your hands on some Helium 3 in order to operate this thing, but you can either find it in the Galactic Board of Trade, or the new Integrated Nuclear Reactor also produces enough Helium 3 to operate one Advanced Drilling Platform. I have also added a new Helium 3 Tank to the game, since it is clear that more He3 storage will be needed going forward.

From @DoYouHaveAnyOats we have three new structures, the Elementary School, High School and the nonsense Fish 'R Us building.


The two school models to me looked like they required an Atmospheric environment, so they are only available on worlds which would have an atmosphere. They both sit below the current Vocational Training Center in terms of education output, but are good early game education structures. The Fish R Us is similar in mechanics to the existing Canteen, except it utilizes Fish instead of Rum. I'm not going to post a picture of it here, you just have to see it in-game.

There are a few other new structures to arrive in this update as well. The new Ancient Alien Quantum Physics tech unlocks two new Alien structures, the Alien Solar Tower and the Quantum Food Silo, which both represent much needed Alien upgrades to existing structures. Climate Science Theory tech has also been added to the game, and unlocking it will allow you to build the new Nuclear Water Synthesis Plant, which I felt was needed particularly on the Lunar and Abandoned Worlds.


On top of all of the new content, some tweaks have been made to some of the existing items in the game. I have increased the charcoal output of the Charcoal Factory, slightly reduced the rum consumption of the Canteen, increased the spice and ether storage on the Lander, added a small amount of Helium 3 and Salt Water storage to the Lander, and added several new upgrade paths for existing structures to take advantage of the new content.

There are also some technical changes and fixes. Firstly, I corrected an issue where players who were not logged in to an Ape Apps Account were unable to play the game. I fixed a bug where MC2 was unable to load using the new Ape Apps Launcher. Structures can now be placed directly over Terrain objects, doing so will automatically bulldoze the terrains underneath. I corrected several technical issues with the Galactic Board of Trade. Fixed a bug where you could no longer properly build Palm Trees or Synthetic Crystalline deposits. There were also several minor fixes and UI tweaks made to the game.

All in all, this update includes 1 new Terrain object, 3 new Techs, 2 new Resources, 1 new Unit, and 16 new Structures. I want to thank everyone who contributed content to this release (as well as bug reports and suggestions), and I hope that you all take a moment to show them some gratitude as well! This update took a bit longer than normal, but I think you will find that it was worth the wait. It should be available to play right now on the Launcher and on the Web, and should be hitting Android and iPhone over the coming days, so let me know what you think, let me know what issues you find, and stay tuned for more!

https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

#mycolony2