Ape Apps

There should be colony ranks for public colonies. So if a colony has like 2000 colonists or more, on its website it could say "Popular" or some kind of title next to the colony name. Same thing for commonwealths. In the Commonwealth choosing tab, it could say "Inhabited" next to the name if there are more than 10 colonies in there. Just so people get more pride in accompolishments in their colonies and commonwealths. It could inspire people to play more y'know.

Also, you could get a pile of resources when you reach a certain level of colonists in your colony or commonwealth. Or you can even unlock a TECH when you reach like a million colonists.

I also have Building Ranks based on how much a building produces. There are no ranks for buildings that take resources.

I added Colonist Ranks. These will display next to every colonist's name when you select them OR when you go to the list of colonists. This may degrade performance, so maybe there should be an option to turn colonist ranking off. There are based on how much a colonist works.

Colony Ranks:
Vacant: <=3 colonists
Household: >3 colonists
Neighborhood: >25 colonists
Town: >50 colonists
Lively Town: >150 colonists
City: >1000 colonists
State: >5600 colonists
Nation: >10000 colonists AND Independence
Populated Nation: > 15000 colonists And independence
Planet of Life: > 50000 colonists
Expanding Planet: > 250000 colonists
Overpopulating Planet: > 1 MIL colonists
Holy Planet: > 2 MIL colonists

Commonwealth Ranks:
Vacant: 1 colony
Solar System: >1 colony
Lively Solar System: >4 colonies
Combined Solar Systems: >8 colonies
Tiny Galaxy: >25 colonies
Galaxy: >50 colonies
Lively Galaxy: >75 colonies
Parallel Universe: >250 colonies
Holy Commonwealth: >260 colonies

Building Ranks:
Useless: <100 dollars of resources resources produced
Useful: >100 dollars* of resources produced
Productive: >1000$ of resources produced
Amazing: >1,000,000$ of resources produced
Mass Producer: >100,000,000$ of resources produced
Holy Producer: >1,000,000,000$ of resources produced

*bastecklein, you can decide how much each resource is worth.

Colonist Ranks**:
Lazy: <1 minute worked
Interested: >5 minutes worked
Productive: >10 minutes worked
Holy: >25 minutes worked

**minutes are in real life minutes. Also, the timer only ticks when the colonist owner is ONLINE, and NOT in the background.

NOTE: I havent worked on rewards for titles yet.



PLEASE VOTE ON THE POLL ABOVE HONESTLY. THANK YOU!

You can probably guess what the above structures would be used for. A border station would allow you to transfer colonists from 1 map to another. An interplanetary transport station would allow you to send colonists to other member of your commonwealth in the event that they may need more colonists than they can effectively produce themselves.

Border Station:

The idea behind how the border station works is simple. It's a 1x3 structure and you place it on the edges of a region map. Being that it's a 1x3 structure, it'll show up on any maps that are right next to the current map in the direction of the edge that it's on. So basically, if you built it on the right edge of the map, the map directly to the right of the current map would also have the same border station in it. In cases where one medium map meets up with 2 small maps, you would only need to build you stations on 2 different spots on the same edge, one above the center of the map, and one below, so that they can show up on both the small maps as well as the medium map.

So these buildings would have a value in them that you can set. This value determines how many colonists are to be stored in the station. A basic station would only store 30-50, but more complex stations could allow tens of thousands to be stored. The station would pick from the population randomly, regardless of position or wealth, and store them. It can only store the colonists for 5 minutes of game time before releasing them back into the same map, so be sure to close the map and open the destination map right away. Once the destination map is open, the release countdown is reset and you have 5 minutes to change you mind. Otherwise, there sould be a button to release the colonists immediately into the destination map.

This feature would be very useful in that it would allow users to send colonists to areas of a region colony that needed them, potentially preventing a colony from dying out. You would also be able to jumpstart a new map by sending lots of colonists over to a map that's already had it's city built but doesn't have any colonists. It would also get rid of the need for cloning facilities on maps that are supposed to focus on producing specific resources. You could also have a map that speciallizes in human cloning and transfers it's colonists to other maps.

Interplanetary trasport station:

Now for the second structure. This one is fairly simple. Think of it as "gifting" some colonists to another member of your commonwealth. The transactions cost civics, starships, oil, food, water, and money in amounts depending on the amount of colonists being transported. Here is another place where liquid nitrogen could come in handy, because people would need to be put in cryosleep. Once the transaction is completed, the map sending the colonists will experience the drop in population, and then the receiving colony's map(whether a region map or a single mapped colony) would receive the colonists as a gift, in the same way that they receive gifted resources. A colony could play a very important role in boosting the population of it's commonwealth. It could also be a way to reduce your population in case it get's out of hand instead of killing them off.

I generally save posts in the Updates section of the forum for My Colony release notes, but the upcoming update (which I will hopefully be releasing before this weekend) introduces some major changes to the game engine which people should be aware of, particularly those with large single-city (non-region) maps.

Firstly, I had originally said that the main update to v1.0.0 was going to consist of online leaderboards and that sort of stuff. Once I started coding on it though, one small engine tweak here and there ended up leading to another, then another, then another, and before I knew it I had rewritten significant parts of the underlying game engine. At this point, I have used up so much of my time on engine updates that trying to implement the leaderboard stuff would push the update back until mid-January, since I am going to be traveling soon for the Holidays and will not have any time to work on My Colony.

The core of the engine changes will be explained in detail in the release notes, but I wanted everybody to be aware of several issues that will effect players, particularly those with large colonies.

Age

My Colony always kept track of colonists' age internally, but because of the way the game simulated colonists prior to v1.0.0, almost every single colonist was stuck in the 18-35 year old age range. Starting with My Colony v1.0.0, a new Birth/Death model has been added to the game, where colonists will now age properly, have children, and eventually die. Life expectancy is based on a variety of factors (mostly medical access).

Colonists can give birth when they are between 16 and 40 years old. For a new colony this is fine, but consider an existing colony, particularly a large one with several hundred thousand colonists or more. You will be starting out with a huge group of colonists in birthing range, so you will experience something of a baby-boom right at the beginning. However, these colonists will begin aging, and will eventually all retire and ultimately die at the same time. New births will also quickly taper off once the initial group of colonists moves out of the starting range.

For brand new colonies, I do not expect this to be much of an issue, as populations will start out small and the distribution will be more evenly spread out. But for the existing colony, there might be some issues associated with the Demographic Cliff that your colony might find itself falling off of (Perhaps My Colony is a preview for Japan/Europe).

Now ultimately, I do not believe that this will be as big of an issue as it seems, at least not the death part. Pretty much all large colonies already have the ability to scale up population quickly if needed, using Cloning Vats, Star Gates, and the like. New immigrants and new clones all show up to the colony in the 18-35 age range, so I do believe that any massive loss or mishap can be quickly corrected with little effort. If you know how to grow a colony into the 6-figure population range, you probably already know how to get new colonists fast.

A bit more complicated is the retirement part of the equation, however this also may not be as bad as it seems. With other changes to this update, productivity output is (in most cases) significantly higher than it was before, and a large non-working population can pretty easily be sustained by a smaller working population, particularly in late-game which is where most people will be who are impacted by the demographics issue. You just need to have more housing now than you would of had to before non-working minors and retired people were a part of the mix, but I think that this is a reasonable and realistic feature for a game such as this.

Amenities

The other large factor coming in this update is the increased need for amenities, like Education, Medical, and Entertainment. Before, these things were more of an afterthought, and you really didn't need them to keep your colonists happy. Now they are an important part of the game. You will need to have sufficient Education, Medical, and Entertainment facilities within range of your housing in order to keep your colonists happy and healthy.

Work Range

Simply put, after v1.0.0, colonists will not travel more than 50 tiles distance from their home to get to work. There isn't a lot more to say on this, but you might need to look at the layout of your city and make sure things are in the right place to account for this change.

Why the Changes?

Although I will go over this in great detail in the full patch notes, I believe that after the initial shock of the changes, most players will think this update is a major step forward. I can tell you from the testing I have done so far on colonies of all types and sizes, I have found overall game performance to be improved across the board, for pretty much every colony type and scenario. Running a 200x200 map with almost 300k colonists and virtually no lag is a fairly enjoyable experience.

The new engine updates are also going to lead to a couple of features that have been long sought after by the My Colony community - Mass Transit and Crime.

The changes also offer a significant reduction to game save file sizes, which should reduce the occurrence of save file corruptions (which are usually caused by failed cloud-sync).

Again, I will go over everything in more detail in the patch notes, but please be aware of what is coming!

I like #1 better. Artificial colonists that show no emotion and only need power to operate would be good but it may take from the difficulty of the game. Maybe we could make it so that the player has to build expensive mainframe centers that remotely control all of the robot colonists. In order to be able to have more robot colonists, you have to have more mainframes. This would make it expensive to have many robot colonists out at once.

Or, you could go another way with this:

New tech: Digital consciousness: Humans have reached the point where they can now download their consciousness into an artificial body and live forever.

Features of artificial colonists: no age limit. Entertainment still needed. food and water consumption rate reduced. 16 hour shift time due to their artificial body not needing sleep. These types of colonists will only be created when a colonist becomes old and is about to die. Then, that colonist can become an artificial colonist if the player has purchased the digital consciousness tech and has built the required structures.

New structure: Artificial body part factory: this factory can produce body parts that are part organic and part synthetic, and perfect mesh of the two. This building generates a resource called hosts because it builds synthetic bodies. Consumes food, water, plastic, oil, steel, gold, chips, alien artifacts, triantanium, and crystalline.

New structure: Consciousness downloading center: does exactly what it's named for, downloads the colonists very being and self awareness into the artificial brain of an artificial colonist. Consumes lots of power and alien artifacts. This building generates artificial colonists.

Culture around artificial colonists: These colonists are revered as the pioneers of advanced technology and are regarded as immortal. All colonists dream of being one some day. The only problem is that you have to grow old and die to become one.

This idea was sort of inspired by the dragoons in starcraft, where warriors would be downloaded into war machines called dragoons upon death. In sc II they are called immortals.

So that's my take, let me know if you like it.

This idea is based off of my other blast furnace idea, but with some tweaks.

Planet terrain: Dark, charcoal gray ground. No atmosphere. 1 day on this world is ten days on earth as the planet spins slowly. Lead deposits would come in as a new terrain type. They would be solid at night, yet would melt into puddles of liquid lead during the day, killing anything caught in it. Once the planet is terraformed, this puddles become water-filled instead of lead-filled. Atmosphere is 0. Solar panels don't work at night time.

As with the last blast furnace idea, solar radiation exposure during the daytime should be a danger here, affecting health of colonists. However, I propose a different way of dealing with it. Those pools of lead would be useful for this, and I feel like it would be possible to add a leaded version of all of the housing buildings and have the player only be able to build those opposed to regular housing structures.

Of course, this introduces a new resource called lead. I was thinking just make it untradeable, but if bast can find more uses for it in other colonies then more power to him. This resource would be required to build housing and could be used for other structures designed to prevent or reduce radiation exposure. I also recommend adding a mid-game path block that covers over rovers and colonists to shield them while they walk to certain places, but at first, colonists will need to walk in open sun. You're probably asking yourself "if lead melts into puddles on this planet, why build with it?" You would be right to ask such a question, but let's assume that those buildings are room temperature inside and the insulation in the walls contains lead. If that's not enough, then just roll with it I guess, it's just a game.

In late-game, when the player's colony begins to develop their plastic industry, another untradeable resource could come into play: RadSheild. This resource acts in a very special way. Colonists would consume any available Radshield as it is created, but would only consume one each for every 24 in-game hours, and only during daytime, which lasts for 120 in-game hours. Since the day cycle is ten times slower on this planet, colonists would consume about 5 of these per day cycle, so that's a lot of lead being flushed down the drain(pardon the pun) each day.

The principle behind this resource is to combine plastic and lead to make nano pellets of encapsulated lead that would travel the bloodstream and provide an internal barrier to radiation. Since plastic desn't digest or degrade quickly, it can move throughout the bloodstream over the course of a day and block radiation without releasing its contents into the bloodstream, which could be lethal. To make sure that a buildup of older pellets that might burst doesn't occur, the pellets are designed to leave the bloodstream within a day after entering it. This resource would allow colonists to free-roam the map without losing health. This is especially necessary once the planet is terraformed. This resource would be a pretty tough one to manage as your colonists are going to eat it up at first, and you'll need to adjust your production based on how many colonists you have. I would make simple radshield factories that only produce a little at a time, so the player would need to built lots of them, and then I would add a much more advanced factory, which would support many more people.


Now, as for the day and night cycle. I feel like this planet needs a thermal factor. I don't think this needs to apply to add planets, but especially for this one. During the day, your colony heat score will rise, while at night, it'll fall. If the score becomes too hot, colonists expend more energy and consume more water. Whereas when in extreme cold, colonists lose energy and consume more food. Of course as we know, if energy depletes, health starts to deplete, so don't let the extreme climate kill off your colonists, build heaters and coolers to manually manage the heat level. There should also be a Goldilocks zone where colonists regenerate energy faster. For each tile taken up by a building, the amount of space between the extremes and perfect zone should increase and the effect of climate on heat level will increase. This allows for a bigger margin of error, but also requires many more coolers and heaters, or more powerful coolers and heaters, to maintain a perfect heat level. This scaling feature should apply to regions as well, and the effects of heaters and coolers in one map should effect the heat level of the entire region, allowing for maps to specialize in managing heat for the entire region.

At early game, building simple coolers and heaters would do the trick, and you would need to manually deactivate and activate coolers and heaters to adjust the heat level. mid game, you can build a thermostat, which would switch any coolers and heaters within it's radius on or off to manage a target temperature. you would probably need multiple clusters of these. At end game, a region-wide temperature control center should be added that would act as a region-wide thermostat that takes account of how many of each type of heater/cooler are in each map and switches them off and on to manage heat throughout the region. This should be fairly expensive.

I have just completed work on My Colony v0.72.0, which should be going out to all platforms over the next few days. This release contains a whole slew of general bug fixes, both region and non-region related, as well as a few new structures and a new change to unemployment.

Firstly, I think that I may have finally solved the long-standing "my rovers wont move" bug, which people have been complaining about for a year or so. Now that I have written this, there may well be 10 comments below proving that I have not solved it, but I am pretty sure that at least it is a lot better now than it was before. The issue is that some time ago, I added code so that the engine would save commonly used paths and re-use them again instead of going through the pathfinder every time, which saved a lot of cpu usage. Somehow though, I forgot to clear out those saved paths whenever new structures or terrain features were added to the map. So if a path was ever created, and then later on, a building got placed somewhere along the path, the game would go back and try to find a new path, but the engine kept giving out the old retained path over and over again. The retained path would eventually be killed if it failed enough times, but this was creating a constant loop where sometimes rovers would just sit there trying the same path over and over again, or if a ton of rovers were moving at once, they would completely lag out the game while they each tried to resolve the same broken path over and over.

So anyway, there is a better than zero chance that this issue is fixed now, but please (and I am sure you will) let me know if I am mistaken.

Next on the list, I have implemented a change in employment reporting. Before, if a colonist did not have a high enough IQ to take a job, they would become a student. If there were no schools available, they would just keep looking for an education until they could find one. This had a couple of effects. One, it could create lag on large colonies where colonists kept looking for schools over and over. Additionally, it created higher rates of unemployment while there will still jobs available. Players would wonder why colonists are not filling jobs when there are so many workers available, when the actual reason is that many of the colonists were too dumb to work in the jobs that were unfilled.

To address these issues, several changes were made. Now if a colonist cannot find a job, they will look for school once. If they can't find it they will either a) go to the bar and drink their woes away (find entertainment instead), or b) lose faith in your government and become a protester. Later on when they have become sufficiently happy again, or tired of protesting, they will retry their search for a job or school.

Next, the way unemployment is calculated has been changed. Before, unemployment was simply the number of colonists minus the number of filled jobs. Pretty simple. The issue was that since the simulated colonists (new colonists created after your population passes 2000) found jobs and lived their lives based on statistics from the non-simulated colonists, the unemployment rate in some cases would be artificially high as it was counting students and retired colonists as workers, and so simulated colonists were not finding jobs since their employment rate was coded to match the rate of the non-simulated population. Now, students and retired workers are no longer counted among the unemployed. These stats are now reflected on the statistics screen.

In addition, the unhappiness stats now account for colonists who cannot find an education. These stats were previously not accounted for, skewing the other statistics higher than they normally would have been.

In the coming updates, I want to add new colonist births, and also accelerate the rate of aging among the population. I then plan to include nonage and dotage into the population, where colonists will not work under the age of 16 or over the age of 70, or some other arbitrary numbers. Perhaps these numbers can be set in a new social policy.

For players of the desktop Native Client, all script errors should now be written to a .log file saved in the ~/Documents/My Colony folder on the device. Key word should.

Finally, the Reptilians got three new structures in this release. They finally have an embassy to establish diplomatic missions, the Foreign Outpost. In terms of regular structures, they get the Potters Den, which is a small housing unit which also creates pottery. Also they get a public housing structure, the Homeless Shelter, which also provides a mediocre education to those who live there.

One last word about the Android crashes before I wrap up here. From the stats I have gathered, it appears that over 90% of the crashes happen in offline games vs online games. I am wondering if this is related to the game scanning WiFi for nearby players to trade resources with. I have added some potential fixes related to the TCP/IP networking, but whether or not that have an impact remains to be seen.

That's all for today's update. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

Started a totally new colony .
186 colonists - stats shown every thing is fine ( show unemployment 0 homeless 0 rating 98 %
Using Render colonists clicking on them Shows colonists working at labs or steel plants .
NO jobs filled zero every building has NO employs .
colonists walking around going in and out of buildings
Housing for 186 NO housing shows colonists living in them .
Been running this colony for 20 mints no changes tring to force colonists to change jobs ( which again all building empty but colonist stats shows colonist work at a job .
Going to load a colony that is built up and see if any effect .
BUT at this time it is not possible to get colonists to work or to take a home and yet all the stats say every thing is fine BUT again Every building shows 0 colonists working and every home shows 0 colonists living in them .

I am finally putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.86.0 patch, which should be hitting all devices within a few days. I had planned for this to be a huge exciting content update, but then once I started working on it, I began running into one problem after the other and it ended up taking way longer to complete than I had anticipated. As a result, there are a lot of engine changes in this update but no content additions, so from the outside it may look like I've spent the last two weeks doing nothing. Rest assured though, there are some improvements to the game in this release, so let's take a look!

The first major change, which actually inadvertently started a domino effect of changes to the engine, was a total rewrite of the way the game saves files. As most of you know, when My Colony first came out there was no such thing as Regions, and so the concept wasn't even considered during game saving. Once Regions came out, many of the engine mechanics had to change to accommodate having multiple game objects processing at the same time (the individual city you are playing, the region itself, and the minor updates to the surrounding region files).

With all of these changes happening to different game objects at the same time, the game saving function remained the same as before. I sort of duct taped a solution together which worked pretty good for the most part. For instance, I had never personally run into any major issues with saving a Regions game. However, there were always reports of problems with saving in Regions, particularly with Resources and Technology levels not saving. This is unique to Regions, as it shares a single Resource and Technology pool among many different game files.

In addition to Regions, the structure of the game itself has changed considerably over the last three years, and over time, layers upon layers of different ideas have been cobbled together in the code creating a mess of sorts. To resolve all of this, I decided to completely change the manner in which game data is saved to the system. The new method allows making saves to multiple game objects at a time, instead of just the currently active game object. For example, prior to this update, when you were playing a region, the overall Region file did not save until you chose "Exit to Region" from the game menu. With this new update, you no longer have to Exit to Region for all regional data to be saved.

This is all well and good, but I didn't anticipate, or rather appreciate, just how many parts of the code were tied into the previous game saving functions. This lack of preparation on my part led to a major issue in the pre-release code on Ape Web Apps where saving a regional city would cause all colonists to lose their jobs and become homeless. Which is not good. It was like doing a fire-drill with each save, except after the fire-drill, the colony would never recover. So that was fun, and working through that led me on a breadcrumb trail that resulted in little changes and fixes all throughout the engine.

As if that wasn't enough though, I also decided to make major changes to the way virtual colonists work. Virtual Colonists are the "colonists" in your colony when your population exceeds 2000. These colonists do not actually exist, but the game instead uses statistics to simulate their education, housing, entertainment, and industrial output. With today's changes, the accuracy of this simulation should be greatly increased, especially in regards to education, which was barely simulated before.

On top of those significant engine changes, I also decided to completely rewrite the way colonists find jobs! I know, too many big changes for one update. There were so many changes here that I could write a whole article about it, but to avoid putting you to sleep, I will give the general overview. With this latest update, the game now keeps track of a "now hiring" list, sort of like a classified advertisement page. Whenever a business has an open job, it adds a now hiring record containing the x:y location of the job, the IQ requirement, pay, etc. Whenever a colonist doesn't have a job, the game takes the now hiring list, and sorts it for that colonist based on location from their house, how it matches their IQ, how it pays, etc. They then start at the top of the list and apply for the jobs. If the job is within a certain range of their house (40 tiles I think) and they meet the requirements, they will take the job. If they don't find one, they will lower their standards a bit. If they still don't find one, they will enroll in school. If they don't find a school to enroll in, they will be mad and complain about lack of education.

This change actually works pretty good, but there is a computational penalty when sorting the job openings. When only a handful of colonists are looking for jobs, it's no big deal. But if you conduct a fire-drill and the entire colony looks for work at once, you might experience a lag in the game of several seconds or more. I will need to look into a fix for this at some point soon.

Ok, so that addresses the bulk of the engine changes I made. There are some other little things here and there that you might notice, as I actually changed so much that I can't remember it all. But since there were so many changes, I would expect to see bugs as a result. Please let me know in the forum what you find!

Let's move on to non-engine related changes. First off, on the main Region city selection screen, the game now shows the name of the city on the overall map.

I will probably add a toggle to turn this on/off, I just did not get to it this time. This is mainly for mobile/touch players, since they don't have a mouse and therefore do not see the mouse-hover popup box that Desktop players see on this screen, making it hard to tell which colony is which.

Next up, I have consolidated most of the Commonwealth management settings into the main Commonwealth section of the statistics screen, so you no longer have to dig through the Policy menu to find everything.

If you look closely at the above, you will probably also notice the next thing I added. That's right, you can now finally change your Commonwealth Tax Rate! This has been requested since Commonwealths first came out, and I apologize for not adding it sooner, but it's there now. I have also capped the Commonwealth Payroll Assistance at 500%, since some of the levels on the server were insane.

Moving on, I have added a new feature called Layout Templates. This is mainly for Regions, but you can now save a "Template" of your current map and export it to the file system to share with other players. When you activate a template on your map, you see a ghosted image of the template buildings overlayed on your colony (you can turn the image on/off) that you can use as a guide for building. This is mainly for players who have designed certain build layouts and want to share the layout with others. I imagine it would work best on an empty regional map with no resources. You can find the template options on the bottom of the General Statistics screen.

There is a new engine setting that allows you to turn Gamepad input on or off. It has always been turned on from the beginning, but there was a concern that if you were playing another game on your desktop while My Colony was open, My Colony would be processing the gamepad inputs from the other game. If you find yourself in this situation, you can now turn off gamepad input completely from the Engine Settings screen.

There have been some minor changes to Colonist processing. Entertainment facilities now increase energy and happiness at a faster rate. In addition, colonist happiness will also slightly increase when they are at home. I have also increased the starting colonist IQ range to make them a bit smarter by default (will not impact current colonists, only new arrivals). And finally, I have further increased the rate that colonists age, since I still think it's too slow.

And last but not least, there were a couple of changes to existing buildings. The Mass Driver trade capacity has lifted from 100 to 300, and the basic Greenhouse now has a slightly faster production rate and a higher storage capacity.

So anyway, for me this was one of those updates that was pretty large, but for the general players of the game, it should seem like a pretty small patch. Hopefully nothing major has been broken, but continue to let me know what bugs you find. I should note that on the Android and Windows clients, there is a new "Send Feedback" button on the My Colony sidebar that will allow you to send a message or bug report directly to my Inbox, and I will add this to the Desktop, Web, and iOS versions at some point too. A lot of times people leave bug reports in the app store comments, and those are easy for me to miss.

That's all for today;s update though, let me know what you find, stay tuned for more, and thanks for playing My Colony!

The list of complete changes coming to My Colony v1.0.0 just keeps growing. So far Regional map generation and Power/Bandwidth utility grids have been completely rewritten, and now I am adding another major change to the list. Currently in testing, the way the engine handles colonists is now also being completely rewritten, as it applies to their jobs, entertainment, housing, education, and medical. Basically, the entire colonist simulation engine is being rewritten, which, along with the other changes already mentioned, is making v1.0.0, at least under the hood, almost a completely different game....

Before discussing the new changes in detail, I should explain how/why the existing system came to be. Colonists were first introduced to the game in v0.3.0 (July 30, 2016) at a time when the biggest housing unit was the actual Lander that you started out in. The game was designed as the Colonist being one of the central features of the simulation. Each colonist had a name, a job, his own stats, and went about his life in the colony. He had an energy level, a happiness level, a day/night sleep cycle, and so on. The intention was for each colonist to be a unique entity with it's own relationships, feelings, etc, sort of like in the Sims.

As time went on and the game grew though, it started morphing into more of a city-builder type game VS an individual colonist simulator. So as more (and bigger) buildings and features got added to the game, the original system based on the individual colonist was simply expanded and adapted in order to keep pace. Eventually the game got to where colonies with populations in the hundreds of thousands and even millions were possible, but the core colonist simulation engine remained as it always had been.

Simulating that many individual colonists brought along major performance and memory issues, especially on mobile. I tried to work around it by implementing a "virtual avatar" system, whereby after a certain population, the game just extrapolated out statistics based on a virtual avatar, where by one "real" colonist would represent 5,000 or more "virtual" colonists. This worked OK for performance, but it always caused strange statistical problems for things like Entertainment, Schooling, Medical, and Work. For example, if one colonist would get sick or unhappy for some reason, all 5,000 of the "virtual" colonists he represented would also take on his sickness/anger, which would lead to situations where 500 virtual colonists are not working.

For the last few years, each update is a constant battle against the old colonist system, with performance issues and complaints about certain stats not lining up as expected. Game functions like Entertainment/Medical,Education barely work in a consistent manner. Moreover, the colonist day/night cycle, which I thought was somewhat neat/unique/realistic to the game, was often confusing for new players who couldn't understand why nobody was at work in their buildings.

Anyway, I think it's long been time for a change, so with v1.0.0 I am stripping out pretty much all colonist-level individuality and data, and moving to a pure statistical model, more in line with a traditional city-simulator type game. After this update, the colonists you see walking around are pretty much for show only, and will no longer have their own individual stats. You will not be able to click on a colonist to see his name, where he lives, what is job is, etc. You will not be able to assign a colonist to a specific job. The individual colonist no longer matters.

So that's the sad part. It's sort of sad because I liked all that stuff about the game, but the reality is that those kinds of things are for a different type of game that My Colony no longer represents, and keeping them in the game has only caused performance issues and forced strange workarounds in the code.

So let's discuss the new system that is currently being tested. Starting with My Colony v1.0.0, all colony stats, including productivity, health, happiness, IQ, etc, are based on (roughly) on the overall land value/approval rating of the specific areas of your colony. It sounds more confusing, but I will explain more.

Housing structures are now the basic unit responsible for generating statistics in the game, taking place of the individual colonist. Housing structures now have internal statistics based on the availability of Schools, Entertainment, and Medical facilities in their proximity. While not yet implemented, there are also internal stats for Crime, which I plan on adding (along with Police Stations/Prisons) in v1.0.1 or v1.0.2.

While these numbers might be tweaked before the final release, you basically need enough Medical to accommodate 5% of your population, enough Schools for 20% of the population, and enough Entertainment for 15% of the population. These facilities must also be within range of the housing units. Medical facilities need to be within a 50 tile radius, schools 35 tile, and entertainment 25 tile. So basically, on a small sized map, an entertainment facility in the center of the map can theoretically service the entire map.

For work, job sites have to be within a 50 tile range of available housing. Jobs are prioritized by distance to house, IQ requirements, and pay. IQ level is impacted by the School rating of the housing unit. Each housing unit keeps track of the average travel distance it's residents must take to get to work, which impacts it's land value/approval rating.

The approval/land value rating of a structure is based on how fully it's needs are met in those categories, with Crime soon to be added as well. When colonists look for new places to live, they will place priority on high value dwellings first, and only reluctantly fill in the slums if necessary. When crime is implemented, criminals will originate from slum areas of town, so the more low-value areas your colony has, the more crime will be generated. Crime in turn will further lower the value of the area.

With this new system, the colonist day/night cycle is gone. As long as approval/land value conditions are good, buildings will be operating at full capacity at all times, so there is no more sitting there waiting for workers to come back on duty.

Some people will not like this new system as the change is large and will probably render many existing city layouts ineffective. You now have to think about the macro-conditions of each area of your city, making sure that there is sufficient medical, education, and entertainment for all residential areas. Since these stats were largely underutilized before, most existing cities will probably have shortages right off the bat. I plan on introducing new education and medical facilities as I get further along on the v1.0.0 update, as they will probably be needed.

There are some positives that come along with this change. Firstly, save file size and memory usage is greatly reduced, as the game no longer keeps a reference table of all workers/buildings. The game no longer conducts the expensive job/medical/school/entertainment search routines for individual colonists, which involved expensive operations of sorting all in-game structures by distance from each colonist, and then weeding through destination candidates one by one.

I estimate that most colonies will see improved performance with this change, particularly on the high end. In addition, this new system will allow me to implement probably the most requested feature of the last 3 years - mass transit, which I tentatively plan on introducing in v1.0.3 with either a new subway or monorail system (depending on what I want to draw). Since the engine no longer has to figure out paths for each individual worker, it now only needs to make sure that a mass-transit system is fully connected to itself, and then figure out a building's distance to the overall transit network, making it's implementation much, much simpler and less performance intensive than trying to resolve mass transit paths for each individual colonist.

So I've written a book here, but the reason for the long write up is because this is probably absolutely the single largest engine change to the game since it first came out, and it represents a complete rewrite of one of the core mechanics of the game. I am trying to design it in a way that will not feel overly different to long-time players and will not be overly disruptive to existing games, but with a change on this scale, you know some people will be impacted.

If you have issues/observations with the new system, you can post them in this thread. I will be working on this particular part of the game for a few more days here. Be advised, that if you open a colony on v1.0.0 from this point on, the engine changes are sufficiently large that re-opening your game in a pre-v1.0.0 client may cause issues, as v1.0.0 deletes a lot of depreciated properties from in-game objects.

ok just now 1.39 pm my time payroll hit 0 colonists colony gets around 450 payroll hits time of day 1.44 pm number stays the same
colony gets to 700 and something time 1.46 pm Two mints later payroll hits again colony goes back to 0
ill keep updateing this each time it happens but looks like it starts once the colony is over 500 colonists .
ps food water and all other stats still 100 %
time 1.59 pm payroll hits colonists go to 0 also payroll wile comes fast is random from two mints to ten this time just got the 800 colonists filled when it hit .
208 pm payroll colonists goto 0 i added more landing pads so colonists would come in faster full at 895 colonists
9 mints for that payroll this only happens at payroll the colony filled taht time and ran without lousing one colonists untill payroll hit
2.15 pm payroll back to 0

yes have you read through all these reports ?
EVERY stat 100 pecent spamed health care centers and if you read through YOU would see many OTHER report teh very same thing .
BUT hey no matter lets PRETEND bast wants the game to kill of half the colonists every payroll In a new colony that ONLY has the gray 1 sick colonists health center .
LOL lord a NEW COLONY only has access to that ONE gray health center that HOLDS ONE sick colonists and it can TAKE hours to even get the small white health center and a colony that new can EASLY have 900 colonists .
So lets pretend EVEN you have started a bran new colony it has LITTLE research yet only has access to THE gray One sick colonists health center and the dome park and internet cafe as it takes a wile to build up mean wile every 5 mints 900 Colonists just up and die ,
so thats the way this new UPDATE works .
LORD almighty a NEW colony does NOT have access to health care NORE edcuation NORE rec except very very basic and it can take HOURS to get enough research to buy the tech and HOURS more to get all the correct resources .
YOU do relize EVERY health center BUT the gray one take CIV points and EVERY ONE BUT the small white health center take CHIPS .
SO mean wile you just dont have any colonists ???
LOL go it amazes me no one seams to relize a NEW colony has NO access to this STUFF and it can take HOURS to get access .

so here we have a update that means NO NEW colony can maintain a steady COLONISTS population .

Hello guys!

Map-specific service utilities have been mentioned for couples of times in the past.
They can make a good challenge for the game on specific maps.

So today, with this post, I’ll make a recall on this idea and introduce my thoughts as well.

Survival utilities would be similar to services like healthcare and security, but they’re on a higher priority, as the utilities are required for SURVIVAL on certain planets! A lack of these utilities will cause a serious health problem, eventually causing deaths.
The reason I don’t prefer modes like power and bandwidth is because I want a special emphasis on COVERAGE RANGE. Like heating systems on tundra planets cannot reach too far as there’ll be heat loss over distance and exposure to coldness. It’s not reasonable for me to have the buildings deactviated for insufficency of these utilities, as building should run without those utilities, when terraforming is complete, or on other types of planets.
The demands for the survival utilities not just comes from the residential areas, but also workplaces. So number of workers in workplaces also counted as demands for these utilities.
In addition the demands will last permanently long per colonist, unlike healthcare and education.

For the buildings, the colour of the names represents different races as follows: Human and Insectoids.

Here supposes all buildings have the same service range.

So let’s have this as example of Survival Utilities.
<Heating System>
Utility needed in: Tundra Planet
In such sub-zero coldness, even common heaters can’t do much warming up the shelters. So here, you must have stronger heat sources to make sure your colonists won’t froze to death.

Heating Provider:

• Simple Steam Cycler
  

  There’re simple appratus you can recycle heat from generators and furnances, to boil water to steam, the steam are piped to the indoor radiators, and then cooled steam are cycled back to collect heat again. Not much it can do as it works in a rather primitive way.

  
  Heating serves at most 10 colonists.
  Uses 5 power.
  Size 1×1
• Small Heat Hub
  

  A heat distribution device in a smaller scale. It has got an independent heater for heating up the externally-insulated heat pipes, which the pipes are connected to the vents of homes and workplaces.

  
  Upgrde of Simple Steam Cycler.
  Heating serves 30 colonists.
  Uses 10 power.
  Size 1×1.
• Heat Hub
  

  A standard heat hub that can keep the entire town not so chilly. A powerful heater is used for keeping the heat distribution network hot enough.

  
  Heating serves 200 colonists.
  Uses 80 power.
  Size 2×2.
• Nuclearthermal Hub
  

  The electrical heater is replaced by a nuclear-powered ones. Just for a tiny amount of uranium to fuel it up, it’ll bring the neccessary warmth for many.

  
  Upgrade of Heat Hub.
  Heating serves 1800 colonists.
  Uses 10 power.
  Consumes uranium.
  Size 2×2.
• Warmstone Hearth
  

  In an old fashioned way of Insectoids, stones with high heat capacity are heated up inside the fiery hot hearth that burns sugar directly, and then the stones are distributed to everybody as primitive personnel hand-warmers.

  
  Heating serves 20 colonists.
  Burns sugar slowly.
  Size 1×1.
• Hot Tower
  

  A powerful burner that keep the indoors of a mound warm enough when fueled with sugar.

  
  Upgrade of Warmstone Hearth.
  Heating serves 250 colonists.
  Burns sugar.
  Size 1×1.
• Hotmound
  

  The Hotmound is a essential heating facility for a tundra Insectoid colony and also a good place for a relaxing hot bath after long shifts.

  
  Heating serves 900 colonists.
  Entertainment serves 30 colonists.
  Uses 80 power.
  Size 2×2.

So, after playing for some hours, I've decided to make a list on what I'd like to see.

These won't all be directly effecting gameplay but are meant to make the game more user-friendly.


1. Optional Accounts: You would be able to make a My Colony Account in which you can save colonies on. This will allow users to log into the account from multiple browsers/platforms and play their colonies on multiple platforms. Meaning a player playing on the native client could switch to a mobile device.

2. Military/Militia: Creating a colony is not easy, you will meet some resistance.

My idea is you would eventually be able to create Militia. Specifically, Militia Soldiers, Patrol Bots, and Patrol Ships.(Space ships)

Militia bots and soldiers would be able to patrol and try to break up riots/protests, at the risk of accidently killing colonists(Which lowers your approval rating and the overall happiness.)

As a Colony, you won't be able to attack other colonies or capitals directly, but Capitals would be able to.
Capitals get access to Soldiers, Tanks, Transport Ships, Cruisers, and Dreadnaughts. (In addition to militia units.)

A few new buildings, Weapons factory, Training Area, Barracks, Space Depot. Also the Command Center, and Tank Factory for Capitals only.

United Earth, Zolarg Empire, and League of Independent States are all at war with each other, and you would be allowed to send units to them to fight against the other nations. These capitals won't normally attack any colony with a large force unless the "Front" moves far enough away from it. (Only if your charter was not originally from that faction)

All Commonwealths controlled by players would be neutral unless they attack first or the Front goes far enough away from the entire commonwealth.

If your colony is attacked and defeated, you will be annexed to the faction or Commonwealth that attacked you. If it was an AI faction, you will have a 1 day delay before you can request annexation to anyone. It's 3 days delay if it's a player commonwealth. The attacked can demand a maximum of 5% of your total money as tribute. No other resources will be touched. (Besides population loss from the fighting.)

Capitals can send units to help defend a colony or to be used as a staging point for an attack. Also, if you fail to pay taxes to your capital, your capital will be allowed to send a raiding party to your colony to pillage the money. The raid can take up to 30% of your total money, along with damaging infrastructure and possibly killing colonists.

That's really all I can think of for this.

3. Removal of Protesting: This feature seems to be...broken, or not fully thought out. Many times I find colonists protesting for no reason or for a reason they bring on themselves. I tend to see colonists protesting their low health instead of going to a clinic to get healed. I also see colonists protesting absurd commute lengths even though they could've picked a closer one.

4. Quitting Jobs: Colonists should be allowed to quit their jobs and find a new one if they don't feel happy with their current job. This can be commute lengths, salary, etc. Letting them be freely able to quit and get a new job may remedy the issue.

5. Personal Transports: Colonists would be allowed to purchase personal transport vehicles. They would drive from their house to a parking lot, from there they would walk to their job, and the amount they walk would be their commute length.

6. Shops/Stores/Consumer goods: Colonists can spend money they earn buying items from stores you can build. This is mainly to help the colony gain extra income.

7. Entertainment Tweak: If a colonist is unhappy they will seek entertainment to increase their happiness instead of protesting for no reason until their health kills them.

8. Tabbing Out: Your colony will continue to run even if you're not currently tabbed onto it, just as long as the game is still loaded.

9. Payroll Assistance: When payroll is paid, payroll assistance will arrive instantly regardless of whether or not the capital player is online. The capital players will be billed the amount once they log online.

10. Bug Fixing: This is self-explanatory. I'm not going to elaborate on it.


Well, this is a list, feel free to add to my ideas or make your own ideas.

This happened to me 8 times, and follows the "workers refuse to get a job" not explained by distance, colonists being unhappy, colonists being too rich to care for jobs(which I honestly think makes half the player quits because it has no warning message), or fire drills.

Once this sets in for long enough, the colony loses contact, the game cannot update from the windows green "click here to update" button, the web version is stuck at "loading" before I even login even with all firefox addons disabled or deinstalled fully, online colonies in the windows version can't save or can't load (either way they're dead and have never revived), and changing an account and rebuilding from scratch doesn't help unless you also change your real life ISP, which would change the IP.

I suspect some sort of auto-ban runs super-predictably often when trying to save the colony from the colonists refuse to go to work problem --- which may force some players to:

-Reload from backup, looking like a cheater for it?

-Complain a hell of a lot, causing a not-so-automatic ban?

-Make odd trades (selling high materials in large quantities because they're selling buildings colonists refuse to work in)?

-Making uneven trade as a friend is offering super cheap help to save the colony from the workers refuse to go to jobs problem?

-Have large colonies which may trigger not so much as an IP ban but more of a file size / bandwidth triggered stuck state (with the game trying to contact the server with enormous file every fraction of second because the server always refuses them), which triggers the IP ban proper?

In any case if the problem is hard to figure out, YOU NEED TO HAVE ANALYTICS TO KNOW WHAT TENDS TO HAPPEN BEFORE THIS PROBLEM TRIGGERS because re-building a colony to maturity from scratch 8 times, only to have the last time result in an IP ban, tends to aggravate people into quitting a game they otherwise would have loved.

P.S.: I am not going premium for regions until they have proven to be free of both late-game-destroying bugs:

1- the IP autobans(?) or server won't connect no matter what which affected me, my cousins, 3 friends, and basically everyone I know in real life. Considering quitting a year doesn't fix it, maybe it's more of a "game can't contact server for some other reason" problem.

2- the worker won't work even if I raze everything but some solar panels, a single houses, an entertainment facility that doesn't require colonists working it, and some simple jobs matching the number of colonists present, storage full of 10 million food and water, and wait real life 2 days for the colonists to find the job next to their house!! (starting with educated, healthy colonists, happy with 50 cash each with no-IQ-required jobs and solid government approval)

The solution to untrackable bugs is analytics, analytics, analytics!

I hope everybody is having a good week! Today after several weeks of work, I am putting the finishing touches on My Colony v1.0.0 which will be heading out to all platforms over the coming days, just in time for the holidays! There is not a lot of new content in this update, and pretty much nothing that I had originally planned to add to it is here, but that is ok! What you get instead is almost a total re-write of the underlying simulation engine, which I think will improve performance on most devices, greatly reduce save-file sizes (and save corruption instances), and greatly expand the possibilities for new features in the coming updates. With all of that said, let's take a look at what has changed. This will probably be a longer write-up than most, so sit tight!

First of all, I really wish I had more time to work on this update, as I do not consider it to be complete by any stretch of the means. Sadly though, because of the time of year I had to push the update now, otherwise I would not be able to release until sometime in January. For one reason, I have a lot of family stuff coming up for the holidays. Also, the various app stores do not process submissions during this time of year (so that their employees can have some holiday time off), particularly iPhone, so I have to get the update in now before the release window closes. So I want to apologize to everybody for the lack of new content and incomplete nature of this update, given what I had promised previously. I hope you are not too mad at me, especially since it has been about a month since the last update! I did put a ton of hours into this one though, and I think (hope!) in the long run the game will end up being a lot better for it.

Since these patch notes are longer than normal, I will split them up into sections.

Game Data

First I want to talk about some game file changes. Since the format of the game has evolved a bit since the first release of My Colony in 2016, there have been a lot of properties and settings added over the months and years that are no longer applicable today. I have done a little bit of cleanup and reorganizing of the game data in this release, and if you have an older, larger colony, the first time you open it in v1.0.0 it might take a little longer to load as this cleanup procedure takes place on your game data, possible up to a minute or more. This is normal. Afterwards, the disk size of your game data should be a lot smaller, which should be great for all versions of the game, as save file corruptions are sometimes a problem on various platforms. It should also make cloud sync a whole lot faster and more reliable. I believe it will also help with issues where web browsers like Chrome delete My Colony saves to keep the game under the browser's storage quota. Just for an example, the save file for my main colony which has around 270k population is now only about 600kb, which is a massive reduction from before.

I am working on a way to export an entire region game (and all of it's sub colonies) into one single backup file. I had meant to have this feature ready to go for this update, but simply ran out of time. Be aware that it is coming soon though. The new file size reduction is one of the reasons why I am able to implement this feature properly!

Regions

There is a large change to how Regions are generated now, when playing on a map type that features a river terrain, such as Earthlike, Abandoned World, and Lava World. The River formations are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of on a map-by-map basis, giving the entire region a more continuous look and feel. So now when you start a new region on one of these map types, it will have to generate the river template, which may take a minute on slower devices. It is a one-time thing though, so I think the time trade-off is worth it.


In addition to automatic region generation, you can now also include a template file that the game will use to create your region. The template parser works best when using a 250x250 black and white image, but it will accept any image file you have. For example, consider the following template file:


When applied to a Lava World region, will create the following regional map:


These new region generating and templating features can make for some very interesting regional maps!

Once you are inside of a region map, you will notice some additional changes. There is now a 1 tile green border surrounding regional cities. If you mouse-over this border, you will see the name of the adjacent city in the region and if you click on it, it will ask you if you want to switch over to that city, without having to back out to the overall regional map first.


In addition, you can now order a rover or other unit to drive onto that green border area, and the unit will be transferred to the adjacent city. Players have wanted this feature since regions first came out, and it basically works just as you would expect it to.

Simulation Changes

This is where the changes start getting big, but I have tried to implement them in a way that will hopefully be unnoticeable to most players. For v1.0.0, I have rewritten the core simulation engine from scratch, moving it from an individual colonist based simulation, to more of a macro simulation using buildings as the core point of focus for the game. This change was mainly done for performance and scale. When I had originally created the game, I did not really expect colonies with more than a few hundred colonists at most. My original inspiration for the colonist part of the game was a title I found on Steam called Spacebase DF-9, which sadly got abandoned by it's creators. But in that vain, each colonist had it's own stats, it's own bank account, it's own mood, name, health, happiness level, job, house etc. With a few hundred colonists, this works out pretty good. With 100,000 or even 1,000,000, this becomes a CPU and memory nightmare.

Over the years I have done various tweaks and hacks to try to get around this design issue, but it's never worked out perfectly. At the end of the day, there was no way to get around the fact that the way that the game was originally envisioned and designed was simply no longer compatible with the way that the game had eventually turned out. My Colony has become, at it's core, a city simulator game based in outer space. It does feature things that you will not find in a traditional city simulator game, but at the end of the day, this is what it has basically morphed in to. So I have made changes to the game to better reflect this reality.

The individual colonist, as he has existed in prior versions of the game, no longer exists. He has been replaced by statistics. The game now operates on a system based on the residential structure and it's proximity to available amenities, such as entertainment, medical, educational, and work. This is now reflected by clicking on a building and looking at it's stats screen.


Where a colonist decided to live is based on the overall value rating of the residential property. Where a colonist decides to work is based on the location of the job site in relation to occupied residential buildings. Therefore, maintaining full productive capacity requires balancing all of the desirability factors for your residential buildings and keeping your job sites in range to those buildings.

It may sound complicated, but it's really not. In general, a colony that was well designed and balanced before this update should still work without too many issues. I have tried to design this in a way that would be as minimally disruptive to existing colonies as possible.

The largest potential issue people will see is in regards to medical care. Simply put, before medical care was barely required, and now it is absolutely required. If your colony lacks medical facilities, people will die. If you start seeing people die every month for no reason, make sure that you have enough medical clinics!

This new simulation engine has changed the way approval rating is calculated. It is now a function of the overall value of every residential structure, weighted by the number of colonists living in that structure. Overall colony approval rating will impact production in this way: if overall approval falls below 30%, you will start to see riots, which will in turn decrease the number of people who go to work. To make the transition to v1.0.0 easier, I have disabled rioting for this release, to give players time to balance their colonies. It will be activated in v1.1.0 though, so you should not ignore it.

In a way, it is sad to make this change, as I've always liked having the ability to select a colonist and see where they live, how happy the are, give them money, etc. These options are now gone from the game, along with certain policy items that were related to individual colonists. That said, the change has reduced the memory consumption of the game significantly, and will also allow the game to grow in ways never before possible, so I think that overall it will be a good thing, and I hope people are not too disappointed by it!

Colonist Lifecycle

Colonists now age properly in this update, and they will also have babies. You now need to balance your colony in a way that can support children and elderly, who are unable to work. Before you could just have a 1:1 ratio of population to jobs, now you cannot. A new section has been added to the population stat screen that lets you see the current age distribution of your colonists.


Colonists will work between the ages of 16 and 70 and they will have kids between the ages of 16 and 40. After the age of 50, they have a chance to die of natural causes, and that chance is higher or lower based on the health rating of your colony.

This has been the hardest part of the game to balance in this update, and will probably take several updates to get it right. You do not want the birth rate to be too high at the beginning of the game, because it is hard to take care of babies when you are just starting out. However, you do not want it to be too low later on, because you need enough new workers to support the aging population.

As I said, this will probably take some time to get right. It will be a bit more difficult for large existing colonies, because before this update, almost all colonists were aged between 20-35 years old. If you have a large existing population, all of these people will probably be retiring around the same time. To ease these issues, I have added new deportation policies to the game, with the options to deport all elderly and children.

Random Changes and Improvements

The Stats screen now has two new sections, Utilities and Game Data, both of which were going to be a lot cooler than they are now, but I ran out of time. Keep an eye on these, because they will be getting better in the future.

On the main construction sidebar, you can now right-click on a building to quick-jump to the encyclopedia article for that structure. In addition, mouse-hovering over a building now shows a bit more information, such as the entertainment/medical/educational capacities of the structure.

For vehicle construction buildings like the Small Vehicle Factory, you can now mouse-over them when they have multiple units queues up to see exactly which types of units are currently in the queue.

On regional maps, the day/night cycle is now synchronized across the entire region. Before now, one city could be daytime, and the city right next to it could be night.

Tourism has been revamped, much in the way the rest of the simulation has. You will now probably make a lot more money on tourism than you had previously.

The Overview statistics window now displays the total number of real-life hours you have played the game (since v0.91.0, as it was not tracked before then), as well as the amount of game-time that your colony has been around.


There is now a new Medical build category.

When a colony under embargo starts paying taxes again, they now regain their "motherland relations" at a faster rate.

The Brood Training Center now provides some education.

Increased the number of students for the Transcendent Academy, Mound of Scholars, and Internet Relay Booth.

Increased medical capacity of the Bloodletting Station, Healing Pods, and First Aid Station.

Increased the guest capacity of the Large Park, Paste Treatment Spa, Torture Booth, Live Autopsy Slab, Suppertime Arena, and Internet Relay Booth.

Added slight Entertainment and Education boost to the Real News Station.

Added slight Education boost to the Live Autopsy Slab.

New Content

New Unit: Ether Rover
New Structures: Ether Storage, Integrated Medical Clinic, Small Hospital, University, Ant Paste Rejuvenation Clinic

What's Next?

There is still much to be done. I would have preferred to just work on this update for three months and add everything I want to it, but I did want to give everybody something to play over the holidays. My immediate plan for My Colony v1.1.0 is to add the #1 most requested feature since the game originally came out, Mass Transit. I already have the entire system mapped out in my head and I think it's going to work well, and will function within a single city and even across region. This means you will also be able to have houses in one region map where people work in the adjacent region map. So this is what will be coming in v1.1.0, unless there are major issues with this update, in which case it will be v1.2.0.

After that, I want to implement crime and security, which will be the focus of the next update. Crime is already factored into the land value rating of all buildings, so a lot of the work is already done. I just need to do the work to finish it off. If I had more time, Mass Transit and Crime would have been done in this release, since I have already started implementing both "under the hood."

Finally, I promised online competition and leaderboards for this update, and I just didn't get to them. I have not forgotten about it though, but I am pushing it out until after Mass Transit and Crime, as I have already sort of started on Mass Transit and Crime, and I think people will probably get more out of those two features anyway. So I am tentatively scheduling the online competition update for v1.3 or v1.4.

Beyond those, that is all I have planned in the near future for major gameplay changing updates. After that it will be back to the regular bug-fix and content update grinds. I do still need to flesh out the other civs a bit more. At some point I want to add AI controlled factions, as I want to add a new map type that is already inhabited by a primitive species and you will either have to coexist with them or exterminate them. But that is a little bit further down the line.

So that's all for v1.0.0. It should be hitting all devices over the coming days, so be on the lookout. Let me know in the forum what issues and requests you have. There are literally a ton of engine changes to this update and so I do expect problems, but with your help I will get them all ironed out over the coming updates.

This happens to be the 100th major update to My Colony, and I want to thank everybody who has been with me over the years, helping me create this amazing game that we all love! I never could have imagined when I first started on it in 2016 what it would have eventually morphed into. A lot of the greatness in the game comes directly from suggestions I have gotten from you guys, so thank you to everybody who has supported the game over the years, and stay tuned for a lot more to come in the future!

(All is for Human races only)(United Earth & League of Independent States)

​

First things first, I apologize for there being any grammar mistakes, am doing this from my phone, and I also don’t like to be too formal because I don’t really see a point of it.

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Do I need to get rid of Trash and limit the amount of Atmosphere I have?

Atmosphere and Trash have absolutely no negative effects to your colony(as of right now), in fact it’s best to get as much of these two resources as you can. Reason for that being that Trash can eventually be used to make Plastic (Small Recycler) and eventually Plastic and Aluminum as well! (Medium Recycler)Also, if you really wanna boost your the amount of Atmosphere you have, the incinerator ( 2x2 building) produces a TON of atmosphere at the expense of burning away a lot of trash. Atmosphere can be used eventually to create a lot of water which is really useful in some colonies. The Ant Paste Synthesizer consumes trash as well to make Ant Paste.
(Do note, Atmosphere and Trash may effect gameplay negatively in a future update, however as of right now it does not)
(I personally currently have 42.8 Billion atmosphere, and 12.6 Billion Trash)
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Aluminum! If you have this resource in your world DO NOT use all of it! Save as much aluminum as you possibly can because one it goes away, there’s not another way of making more until you get Alien Tech or you unlock the Medium Recycling Center! Aluminum can also be pricy at times aswell, but with that being said it is also an option to purchase it from the trade market, and also the Uranium Enrichment Facility allows you to purchase some Aluminum in amounts of 100.

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Uranium Enrichment Facility? This building requires Uranium and Aluminum in order to function. It takes in 1 Uranium and produces 2. Meaning every time the bar is filled you will receive 1 Uranium.

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Best way to get Civics? The most efficient way of generating high amounts of civics for United Earth is the Imperial Propaganda Office, while the Investment Bank generates more, the IPO is more space, and cost (the second clue for the challenge is a building not looked highly upon for it produces a resource only useful for the government and pubs) efficient considering the IB requires 4 tiles, 5k workers, and a couple thousand resources as well as $2.5M.

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Best way of generating Research? The most efficient way of generating resource is without a doubt the Center for Artificial Learning. It generates about 1100 Research a second at max worker capacity.

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What is the Department of Fish Mating Studies & is it Worth it? The DFMS is and was designed to simply be a building to send extra colonists to work without damaging your production lines. It simply just generates Research in amounts of 1 extremely fast while using Money, Rum, and Software. It can hold 5,500 workers, and it is a 3x3 sized building. It isn’t worth it if you have to worry about the resources required to build it, it is simply a job filler.

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What is Tourism? Tourism is a quick way of earning passive income without the need of consuming a lot of resources. While you do not get resources produced by it you do get money. The amount of Tourists you can support can be found to the right of your Population number and it has the symbol of a colonist wearing a blue shirt, a red hat, and is looking through binoculars. Tourists will come in from the Space Port, and to increase your Tourism capacity, simply build more tourist buildings.

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How do I get rid of Depression in my colony? In order to cure the depression within your colony simply build more entertainment buildings.

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How do i cure Fatigue? Fatigue is caused by your colonists having to take too long of a trip in order to get to and from work, entertainment, education, and medical buildings. It is best to keep all of these buildings at an absolute max of 50 tiles, and a preferred max of 25 tiles. This means the path the colonists would have to walk, not a direct route through buildings. (like pac-man)

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What is Ether and where can I get it? Ether is a resource primarily obtained by the Draconian and Zolarg race, however recently League of Independent States have been granted the ability to obtain it as well. When i say obtain i mean actually produce it from a source. The source can be found on Abandoned Planet and is found by Ether River tiles that have an infinite amount of Ether. This is obtained by building the Worker/Vehicle that can get get the Ether. Ether is used for human races for only two buildings currently, those being the Advanced Cloning Facility, and the Ether Tree Farms. Both buildings are the best for what they both do. (Immigration & Wood)

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Is it useful to always Group Up my rovers? In most cases yes, however do not group them up if they are harvesting resources because it will slow down the rate at which you get said resources. If the rover is strictly for building, then yes group it up. Also, group if you are experiencing high amounts of lag.

Also, it is best to place a Resource Depot next to the resource you are harvesting (at most one tile away). This way the rovers do not have to take trips back and fourth and can constantly pick up and drop off immediately.

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Why is Mobile so errr poor quality in some ways?

Well when it comes to this, and it’s from my experience considering I am a mobile player only and I do not actually own a computer. (am using an Iphone 8+) You have to consider the processing power of mobile phones, I mean, think of trying to calculate hundreds of buildings, manage the population, manage new buildings being built, the trees growing over time, the GDP of your colony, and more all at once. While many say this game is poorly optimized for mobile, it honestly is really optimized. While yes it may fry your phone and murder your battery, the fact that it’s possible to run something of this size at all from something in your pocket is insane.

If your colony is lagging horribly it’s best to group up your rovers, limit the number of buildings being built as low as you can, zoom in away from the majority of your buildings, and turn your settings down. With that being said, if you play in a Region you shouldn’t worry too much about lag however if your a single city colony, if you start experiencing lag even though everything i just listed is being done, then unfortunately there’s not much you can do.

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What are Starships?Starships are another Endgame resource that does not currently really have a use other than for selling it for high amounts of money, I sell about 150k at a time and make a good $10-15 billion. Also, don’t sell it as a contract in the Trade Market unless you are doing it as a way of storage, nobody ever really buys them. If you want to make money, I would sell directly.

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What is the Regional Bussing Authority? This is a recently added mass transit feauture that is useful simply for Regions only, it allows you to place one of these down in a Regional City that just has Housing & Colonists only, and place one down in an adjacent (right next to) Regional city that just has Jobs, and the colonists will then come from one city to another to work. It does not allow colonists to move from one city to another and stay there, they will only work. From what i have seen, 1 bussing authority transfers 400 colonists to an adjacent city. And as far as i know it is stackable. However in my personal opinion, it is better to just build the Housing and Jobs in the same city.

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Is there a way to stop babies from being born? Unfortunately there is currently no way from stopping babies from being born within your colony, however there is an policy option granted by building the Hall of Congress that allows you to deport children from your colony.

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How long does it take for them to grow up? If i am correct, and note i have not confirmed this nor has anyone else confirmed this for me. But it takes 15 minutes for a month to pass by in the game. The aging system is actually based on in game time so they will grow up based upon time, so it might take a good day or so for one generation of kids to grow up and begin working.

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What are Embassies and are they worth it? Embassies are basically like a friend system, they allow you to build a building that allows a quick way to gift resources and send messages together regardless of if they are talking in global chat or not. Also, if you are human for example, and you get an embassy from a zolarg/draconian race. you will then also get zolarg/draconian colonists as well. and vice versa if your another race. The cross-race system has no benefits or downfalls, it is simply just a for looks or for bragging rights type of thing.

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Is the arcologies worth it? if you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it even after i describe what they are then they are not, also note, the black/normal arcology consumes less resources than the Fantasy Arcology and has 500 medical slots, 2k education slots, 500 tourist slots, and 10k housing population capacity. However the downfall is it has 7k worker capacity. With the new addition of the sliders allowing you to make it so no one will work in it, it has become more useful if you need more education/medical/entertainment, however the Fantasy Arcology houses 16k people with no jobs or anything else, however it does use resources like Toys, Rum, and Cloth.

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Is there any way to passively generate Clay without the need of constantly building Clay Mines? Yes! if you build the Ultra Deep Dig site (built by drones) then you will get more alien artifacts as well as some clay over time!

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Lastly, I just want people to understand this. This game is not something that will be perfect, I mean, it can, and it already basically is. But of course there will always be bugs and issues. That’s just apart of expanding a game. Not to mention that this game isn’t on some million dollar budget, it is made by one, amazing person, someone who makes hundreds of different games, all free to play! Bast is only human, so please do cut him some slack on some things okay...? Yes there are some issues with My Colony, some big, some small. But we gotta take it one step at a time and we gotta help bast, not bombard him with a million problems at once and expect him to fix it all in that moment.
Bast is the only developer I know. He is the only person I know that actually gets this involved with the community and actually reads all the forum posts and provides feedback. Like I personally could never! The amount of time, and patience that would be required to have something of this scale and keep it in tip top shape to ensure thousands of people are happy at once? Like that’s honestly insane, yet bast somehow manages to do it flawlessly. So @bastecklein, I would like to say thank you.Thank you for giving us something that brings us all together, and something that we can all enjoy. To the part of the community that has been here with us and has supported, guided, and provided helpful feedback. Thank you.

I hope this answers some questions you may have!

​If you have any other questions, please comment below and I will do my best to answer!

Posted 11-30-2020 (30th of November)

Update Version: 1.10.0

Hello guys!

Today I'd like to introduce a new colonist system for MC2.
Since in MC2 it's the time earlier than the United Earth (or early United Earth) which the technologies are not maturely developed, a colony might not support many people but bears important missions. I'd suggest every colonists you receive are specialists, and you cannot change their specializations.
So in MC2, I'd say even obtaining colonists will be in a different way. You have to order for colonists, with specific specializations mentioned.

Here, I'll introduce my ideas for types of specialists.

• Technicians
  Technicians are probably the type of colonist you need the most. Since they are needed to keep your colony running smoothly - this includes base maintenance tasks and manufacturing. Besides, they also stand an important role in engineering related researches.
• Biologists
  Another type of most important part of your colony is being the Biologists, primarily responsible for taking care of food supplies of your colony, they usually work in advanced hydroponic farms. They are also needed for lifeforms researches.
• Medics
  As there are more colonists in your colony, the health risk increases. Medics will be the one to provide healthcare services to your colonists, keeping everyone healthy and fit. On the other hand, they are researchers of health and disease issues.
• Geologists
  You cannot expand your colony without the help of geologists. They can survey the surface of your planets that can find somewhere worthy to expand into. More importantly, they can spot for new resource deposits that shall bring your colony some potential wealth.
• Astronomers
  Astronomers still have their own roles when they are "grounded" in the colony. They are responsible for things related to space and the atmosphere of the planet, such as orbital control and launching cargo pods heading back to Earth. Moreover, they are still crucial to astronomical researches.
• Administrators
  Admins are needed for taking care of a larger colony - you cannot have extra access on colony policies, and more importantly, higher colonist uplimits, without their coordination efforts. Sometimes they are involved into social researches.
• Guards
  The space is just another wild west but even "wilder". To protect your colony from possible hazards, like angry natives and impostors in disguise of colonists, you'll probably need them.

The job system will also be different with the new specialists system, each type of specialists is counted independently (notes, this has no connection with micromanaging colonists like in early MC1 versions). Specialists will prioritize filling the job slots that requires their specialization. If there are no specialist slots left they will instead take generic job slots or become unassigned when all slots are filled. Generic job slots are filled by surplus idle colonists regardless of specialization, and generic job slots won't count towards specialist employment rate since those job slots can be filled by anyone.

Hopefully @bastecklein can have a look.

If you have further thoughts, please share with us - every suggestion is a significant improvement.

Hello again!

Looking back into the commercial and entertainment buildings in MC1, most of them are pretty much optional, since they can be simply replaced by buildings that can churn out billions of money and entertains large masses of people respectively.

As a result, you get pretty plain colonies dominated by very few variety of buildings at the end. This can be a boring sight, to both player themselves and the colonists.

Hence today, I'm presenting my rough idea of start considering colonist quality of life in terms of variety.

By that, I do not mean introducing more classes of "service demands". To keep things relatively simple, and not to complicate the gameplay, the diversity elements has nothing to do and do not share the same mechanics with the 4 existing service satisfaction rating (entertainment, education, health and security), hence not a factor of administrative approval ratings of a settlement, and no coverage mechanics is considered - the diversity elements applies settlement-wide directly.

Now into the details - First, what is a QoL element?
All people of a society have different wants and needs, even a person's demands or wishes can span across multiple aspects of life. What makes a society successful is not just valued by its capability utilizing resources, but also how its people benefits from the fruits of their hard and honest work.
Each QoL element represents an aspect that caters higher needs and improves quality of life of colonists. Below are all the ideas in my mind:

• Homeland Contact
  Some colonists are more comfortable when keep in touch with things they are familiar with, like older social network and family of distant homelands they come from. Some communication infrastructures can satisfy such needs, and if possible, establish interstellar mail and delivery services greatly helps.
  Certain Earth-themed decorations also provides minor improvements of this aspect.
• Social
  What makes a comfortable and forward-going society is a society that people keep socialized and connected that they can support each other. A place large enough for gatherings is just what you need to begin.
• Relaxation
  At times colonists not only need to rest their body, but their strained minds as well. They need a place to clam down and pacify themselves. Having parks and meditation space are the most effective, but many non-vigorous recreational activities such as exercises and grabbing a booze will do the trick as well.
  Certain decorations also provides minor improvements of this aspect.
• Dinning
  Ever getting enough of plain standard rations that your tongue simply rejects it? Then it's time to improve your meals with higher standard cuisines!
• Environmental Comfort
  Simply plain steel plates and concretes everywhere can be depressing. What about some refurnishing to make the colony more beautiful and appealing?
  All decorative buildings improve environmental comfort.
• Housing Comfort
  Home sweet home!
  More advanced housing, particularly those more luxurious, or with high level of automation that smart systems are installed, provides higher housing comfort.
• Games
  From excitement from competitive events to alternative experiences form simulations, they all can diversify a colonist's life experience and provide happiness from achievement.
• Luxuries
  The highest standards of life imaginable or even beyond imagination.
• Commodities Access
  A good flow of commodities, goods and services in local market can effectively take care the smaller demands of colonists.
• Information
  Questions, confusions and lack of options troubles people. Not all directly have the answers, but one can always provide them the ways to find a solution - letting the information flow.
  All education buildings provides some information flow. However, a powerful public media infrastructure provides the largest flow of information that can satisfy the colonists' curiosity.
• Spiritual Support
  Beliefs, faith, religion or even simple psychologist services caters spiritual needs of colonists, which at desperate times, can keep them from depression of dangerous levels.

Next, how do QoL elements works?
Every building yields scores of the life quality aspects they are relevant to, for the settlement they are located. Every colonist also generates demands of every element in their home settlement by 1 point each.
The satisfaction rate of one aspect is calculated by
Then satisfaction level of an aspect is defined based on the percentage value of the satisfaction rate.

Each element will provide Happiness bonuses based on the satisfaction level, which will be explained in the coming section.


Then what do QoL element affects?
QoL elements affects happiness score of a settlement.
Before explaining the QoL elements' actual effects I'll first explain my idea of Colonist Happiness.

Colonist Happiness is a quantitative value which is affected by administrative approval ratings and QoL satisfaction.
My proposed formula:
All settlements begins with base happiness score of 100.
Approval rating is a direct multiplier to all other elements - the changes in approval rating can greatly affect the result happiness score.
To prevent protests and riots, the result happiness score should be maintained above 100.
Every QoL element with at least Poorly Satisfied adds happiness score.
Taxation policies - higher the tax rate, the more happiness is negatively affected. It is a plain negative value factor.
Harsh policies like rationing, martial law and overwork policy applies lower-than-100% multiplier to happiness rating, so use these policies sparingly.

By satisfaction level, a QoL element yields the following happiness score:
remarks: It's rough value without considering other factors and hence it may not be balanced.


How would the QoL diversity (and happiness) mechanics helps with the gameplay? Most important of all, it encourages players to construct buildings (particularly decorations) and resources (that are without large demand and just sitting in stockpiles) normally won't be used. Of course, the new demands arise from QoL needs for raising happiness rating may also give rise to some building ideas. Ultimately this helps with expanding diversity, which can make colonies flying with colors instead of only few buildings.
On the other hand, the QoL elements can pave way as an element for tourism, which the QoL factors or happiness ratings can be attractiveness factor that defines your tourism revenue - a possible way to make tourism more powerful to be a considerable source of income again compared to that in MC1.


This concludes my ideas this time. Hopefully you'll find something useful in my ideas!

So since my last list got more attention then I anticipated, I'll make another.

1. Protesting: Protesting is broken in a way. Many times colonists protest for reasons outside of our control or for reasons the colonists caused themselves. (Sometimes there is no reason) A fix would be having colonists trying to fix their own problems before resorting to protesting.

Such as:

If Health is low they seek medical attention first instead of protesting themselves to death.
If Commute Length is too long they'll quit their jobs to find a better one instead of protesting.
If Happiness is low they'll seek entertainment instead of protesting.
etc.

2. Crime, Militia/Police:

A few crimes would be added in that can happen.

1. Mugging: A single colonist loses their money.
2. Break-In: A portion of the colonists in a building lose their money.
3. Robbery: A commercial building is robbed, causes problems for that building.
4. Murder: A colonist is killed.
5. Riots: Protesting groups turn violent and damage buildings around them.

Illegal Immigrants, colonists in poverty, or homeless colonists are more likely to commit crimes then others.

New Buildings:

Police Station-Those working there are cops.
Small Prison-Holds 500 prisoners.
Large Prison-Holds 5,000 prisoners.

Prisoners are removed from the total population and after a while the prisoners will decrease in numbers as long as there isn't as many going in as out.

Ability of Cops:

Patrol: Cops will patrol for crimes being committed.
Suppression: Cops will attempt to suppress and disband protests and riots. Failure will result in the riot becoming worse or a riot starting. Riots result in damaged buildings and possibly dead colonists.


That's all I have for now.

Fatigue is caused by long workdays and long commute lengths. You can fix that by changing the workload to light in your consulate or re-organizing your colony to have adequate housing within 20 tiles of the work building. Fatigue is shown in individual colonists by their energy level.

Homelessness is what it is; There isn't enough housing to give each colonist somewhere to live. To solve this build more houses that are at within 20 tiles of a work building.

Poverty is caused when colonists are very poor. You can solve this by giving all colonists a stimulus package or by raising their salary.

Health is when colonists are severely fatigued or when they do not have enough food or water. You can solve this by making them happier by giving the colonists money so they will stop protesting or by building hospitals.

Unemployment is when there are not enough jobs for colonists to fill. Solve this by building buildings that need a lot of workers.

Depression is the one I am least sure on. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think that its when colonists don't have enough entertainment and it can be solved by building entertainment buildings.

This planet type is basically a Mercury-type planet. A rocky planet with a rocky core instead of an iron one, and a very close proximity to the sun. The sun beats down on Mercury's surface, cooking the day side to extremely high temperatures. Mercury turns at 2 mph so you can imagine the days and nights to be extremely long and to have drastic differences. The nights are very cold, while the days are hot and radioactive enough to cook a man/insect/reptile in his skin. For the sake of simplicity though, I wouldn't worry about planetary rotation or temperature change from night to day times. Instead we will focus on the radiation exposure that the colonists will get, and challenge the player to find ways to reduce and eventually deflect radiation from areas that are highly populated or traversed.

New colonist stat: Rads: This stat affects the max health and energy of the colonist. As this stat climbs, their max health and energy falls. Eventually, if the exposure get's too much, their max health will become 0 and they will die instantly. I don't think that this is going to violate any fallout/bethesda copywrite/trademarks because this is on a different planet and doesn't involve nuclear warfare. Radiation exposure would only happen during daytime and would subside at night.

New building type: electromagnets: these buildings will reduce the rate at which colonists gain rads in a certain radius. As the player progresses, he can get better magnets with better reduction power and better radius's. In fact, the alien magnet would completely deflect all radiation in a very wide area. These buildings require tons of power and possibly artifacts for the alien one.

New building type: radiation treatment centers: these would use the latest technology to reduce colonists rad count. The first center should be added very early in the game since outside of the rover, new colonists arrivals would have no way to heal since the first magnet type would not be very powerful and they would still gain rads at a fast rate.

Lander: The lander provides impervious resistance toward radiation for colonists while they are inside of it, and it heals these colonists once they come back in at a very fast rate, faster than the most advanced radiation treatment facility actually. This would be to ensure that at least two people would survive if everyone else died of radiation poisoning. Just be sure not to give them big commute distances. This is also to give the lander another fundamental purpose so people don't destroy it.

New resource: Magnetite: An untradable resource that will be used to build magnets that reduce/deflect solar radiation from certain areas. Magnetite is not found on the surface in the form of nodes, the player must create temporary mines that allow them to collect it. This requires a new tech called "Solar Wind deflection theory." Eventually the player will get the core driller, which would provide a steady stream of magnetite as a side effect.

New vehicle: mag rovers: These guys are used to build magnetite mines and gather magnetite from them.

New Tech: Solar Wind deflection theory: unlocks the collection and use of magnetite to build electromagnets to reduce colonists exposure to solar radiation.

New Tech: Core conditioning: unlocks structures that are used to dig down to and change the makeup of the planet's core, specifically to molten iron so that it can generate a powerful and permanent magnetic field.

New Terraforming stats: Distance to core and core viscosity:Distance to core determines how far down the core driller has gone and how much distance it has before it can be upgraded to a core filler. The core viscosity stat determines the base rad exposure rate that a colonist would be subjected to if they were to be outside the range of all magnets on the map. As this stat lowers, the base rad exposure lowers, until eventually both equal 0 and the planet now has a working and permanent magnetic field.

New buildings: Core driller and core filler: These two core buildings will be responsible for drilling down to the core and filling it with molten iron so that the planet develops a powerfull magnetic field of it's own.

Core driller: Has a change to produce massive spurts of either ore, gold, alu, or ura at the end of each worker round and would provide a constant supply of magnetite. The deeper the driller digs(based on the distance to core stat), the better chance for better resources and better amounts of resources. Subtracts from the "distance to core" terraforming stat. There can be only one core driller on the field at a time.

Core filler: once the core driller has reduced the distance to core to zero feet, it can be upgraded to a core filler. This building consumes massive amounts of iron and uranium to both fill and heat the core. The core filler decreases the core viscosity stat. Once the stat reaches 0, radiation comes a thing of the past and the player can now work on planetary atmosphere if they haven't done so already. The core filler can only be obtained via upgrading the core driller, it cannot be built on it's own, thus it should not be added to the build menu.

Resources: This planet contains all of the resource nodes that are found on Red planet. The only new resource that would be added here, and untradable(since it wouldn't be needed elsewhere) is magnetite. There should be no added difficulty regarding resources or any more bottlenecks than usual besides maybe a bottleneck concerning magnetite. This will be a planet that either UE or LIS can colonize. Since there is no atmosphere, zolarg are out of the picture, and so are reptilians since their slaves don't have space suits yet.

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Right now this is just a concept that I am sharing with everyone. I have no images to help my cause on this one as of yet, and I don't have much time for now to draw anything since drawing takes me hours to do that I don't have. If you like this idea, please vote on it or send us some pictures that could be put in the game if this idea is even partially used.


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This post discusses how I play the Human race.

Current results are:

-99%+ satisfaction, with little riots of 1-2 ppl from ages to ages
-scalable from a tiny colony to any size wanted
-medium profit, costs are directly proportional to scale
-workers always work, they don't retire anytime soon

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Method:

0. the best map is the largest you can have at start. save a lot of costs later.

1. take your time.

2. keep population under control. fix set objectives. you should have 20% of unused habitats and 95% of jobs filled at any given time.

3. focus on science at start, then money, artifacts and civics. the objective is to be able to reclaim independence asap then build the better version of the different factories and aluminum generators.

4. always have at least this amount of money : (( colony economies / number of colonists ) + mean economies of colonists) = 275, or ( colony economies ) = ( number of colonists * ( 275 - mean economies of colonists ))

5. if your colonists start protesting, or have more than 500$ in their wallets, tax ALL of their money ( they will all riot, have 0% happiness and your approval will drop to 0.) then give all of them 250$. they will all get back to 100% happiness and resume work, as well as rising approval to 100%.

6. no tourists allowed. in big colonies they may disrupt the control over population growth. build walls around your landing pads, stargates... and turn your immigration setting to off whenever it is not needed.

7. always overproduce. you should be able to produce at least one and a half more than what you consume, for all resources, even electricity. the only exceptions are colonists and science.

8. don't be afraid to burn robots / microchips / alien artifacts to produce other resources. you will never go in shortage thanks to 7., and they usually produce unholy amounts in short period of time.

9. always ensure available habitats, hospitals and some sort of divertissement next to any factory. the shorter the distance the better.

10. respect rule 2. when you apply rule 9.. every single factory is it's own environment that have to be taken individually.

11. to reduce costs and land use, mutualize habitats, hospitals and divertissement over a few factories. it is all about finding a good compromise between spreading in little chunks and centralizing.

12. always have backup power that can run either without resources or on He3 and turned off all the time. if any power shortage leading to the death of the entire population with no resources left happens, He3 is one of the last to deplete and don't cost anything anyways. this backup power is not taken into consideration when it comes to rule 7. it shouldn't be able to run the entire colony but give enough to restart the normal production of electricity, which will then be used to restart normal production.

13. have a minimum surviving state. if the scenario of 12. happens, you have to be able to run your colony forever with only a few colonists (no more than 15), then repopulate from this.

14. the most important resources are: food, water, money.

15. disposal of trash is really important. recycle a part of it, but don't assign more than 1% of your population for it. burn the rest, and scrub the excessive atmosphere generated.

16. always contain trees, synthetic crystalline or any resource that can expand. always. if you are on the forest map your priority should be to dispose of all that wood while following 3..

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I may have forgotten a few thing at the time I write this. But it still gives the general guidelines and rules I use for all of my human colonies.

Anyways, thank you for reading all of this or at least checking it.
And sorry if it is too long or confusing.

Sobeirannovaocc said:I like this idea, very original. It would be very different in terms of gameplay from the map types already in the game though, but it's not a concern.
Also, might want to think of an advantage of playing this map, like a resource, or more powerful buildings... I don't know, but for now there's no interest apart from diversity and challenge (which is already great).

I suggest a little thing : solar panels wouldn't work as well as in normal worlds

Solar panels not working well is a great idea. This is not a suggestion for a new planet, it was meant to be a suggestion to give the abandoned world a twilight theme with a few new challenges. The abandoned world gives LIS players earlier access to sugar via sugarcane that any other human world, and tourism via the abandoned buildings, and it needs no terraforming.

But I also said that the abandoned buildings could be upgraded to become fully restored versions of themselves that would function as they once did. They don't have to be strictly for staving off twilight sickness, they could provide any number of advantages once fully restored. I'd like to think that the abandoned buildings could act as healing towers that employ nanobots to heal people as the go about their day. The colonists won't have to go up to the tower, they will just heal as they do their regular routine. These towers should have a reasonable range and I wouldn't make the healing rate too quick or colonists would never starve, even if there was no food or water. I also wouldn't let the effects stack if a colonist is in the range of more than one tower. You could also cause the towers to stop the aging process or even cause older colonists to de-age towards a certain prime age, which would be a specific number in the 20's. If that's not an advantage, then I don't know what is. I know that there is more than one type of abandoned building, so the statue could do something else. Maybe the statue could act as an "ethical" mind control tower that makes colonists think of work as fun and makes them get happier the more they work.

I would think that the tech to unlock these buildings should be the "ancient alien language" tech that already exists in the game. This makes sense, because if you know the language of the people that built the abandoned structures, you will know what that structure was used for and how to restore it. Once a player unlocks this tech, they would be able to build more of these towers on their planet to make sure that they fully cover their colonists. But this should only be a feature for this planet type, and they shouldn't be able to build these on other planets.

This would give the twilight abandoned world a big advantage, because players that colonize this world would have an easier time dealing with things that regularly damage colonists, like fatique, and they would never have to deal with age as long as they've made sure that the towers' ranges cover the entire map. If my idea for the abandoned statue is used, the player would have an easier time providing entertainment. and keeping the colonists happy.

Let me know what you think of that idea.

Once a colony has gained independence should be able to choose to enslave thier colonists and make them work for free. There would be an enslave button in the colony management section that enslaves your colonists. Of course in order to enslave your colonists you will need to build a new slave managment headquarters where robots are used to force your colonists one by one into slavery(the time it takes to enslave each colonist is 5 sec). risks of enslaving colonists include being denounced by other colonies and a chance for a slave rebelion. If a rebelion occurs it will cuase major damage to your buildings and you colonists will be freed(if it suceeded). In order for a rebellion to be superseded you will need to have enough robot policemen to supress the uprising. Robot policemen are a new rover unit made by the robot factory. They can fight multiple rioters at once.

There is a life form out in space that threatens to devour the entire universe. Inspired by the infectious Phazon planets in the metroid prime series, I give you the "living planet". It's sole purpose is to grow giant spores that travel to other planets and infect them, slowly turning the entire planet into another living planet.

The most basic material that makes up all of the living planet is, for now we'll call it "corruption," but I'm sure bast could think of a better name. This corruption can exist in many forms and eats rock and metal alike to produce more corruption. This is how a planet is converted eventually. Any living thing that comes into contact with this material will ether quickly be consumed by it, or in some rare cases, transformed by it into horribly mutated, feral creatures, also known as the "turned". These creatures will then attempt to drag colonists away and expose them to corruption. Corruption also can't be stored in containers made of anything but plastic or Steel, as both aren't natural materials and can't be broken down by corruption.

The way that we would apply this to My colony is this: Create a map composed of two terrain types, ground, which consists of solid corruption, which isn't harmful to colonists and can be built on, and then for the second terrain, pools of corruption should be generated on the map. This terrain can be traversed but not built on. Corruption can be collected by corruption bots, which can't be harmed by the material, and then that corruption can be converted into regolith(rock), crystalline, gold, aluminum, and uranium. Ore must be obtained via regolith the old fashioned way. Colonists that venture into the pools of corruption are either killed immediately or turned. These turned would then seek out other colonists and drag them into the pools of corruption. The only way to stop colonists from venturing into those pools would be to put up walls around them, but that would also prevent you from harvesting the resource. Even if no colonists become turned, I would still spawn turned creatures on the map from time to time. And I would spawn more depending on the gdp of the colony. as colonists start taking from the planet, it gets angry and sends it's hordes after them(factorio inspired this idea, since you get attacked be biters for polluting the air).

In order to combat the turned, I recommend implementing security turret walls that fire at them, and a mobile bot that fires atthem as well. Bast can decide if the turned could fight back against these and damage them, but I think it would turn that planet into more of a zombie apocalypse map than an mc map if you constantly had to worry about maintaining defense. Stronger versions of the bot and turret could be added for late-gamers as well.

In order to kill corruption efficiently, you must apply ether. Otherwise corruption has to be electrified to convert it back to rock and metal, and the process is very slow. Ether and corruption annihilate each other to produce the rocks and metals once consumed by the corruption. A lot of pure energy is released as well. You can actually terraform the planet into an earth-like planet as well by injecting ether into the planet. The ether would spread towards any corruption left inside the planet and destroy it. But this would require many millions of ether and you wouldn't be able to obtain any more corruption from the planet. Certain buildings could use ether to more efficiently turn corruption into certain resources, and since pure energy is created once the two resources annihilate each other, you could make a pretty potent power plant that uses the two and generates massive amounts of regolith as a biproduct, and this could be done on other planets as well, making corruption and ether high demand resources in gbt.

This map would be a very hard map to play, possibly death level, but maybe just brutal. The most dangerous factor is the turned. If you are building ample security then you should be fine, but the don't think you can just build a huge colony without defending it, because you could get quickly overwhelmed and wiped out. Once the planet is terraformed into an ether planet, the turned die out and rivers of water should replace the pools of corruption.

My inpiration for this suggestion comes from the following problem. No matter how good I treat my colonists there is one stat that ALWAYS causes them to dislike their Overlord: Fatigue. Long distances to their workplace (even though it is not that far in my opinion) will get them tired. So what if you could just shorten the distance?
This is why I thought of the following ideas:
+Infrastructure: Unlocks the 8x speed roads. Cost: 2.000 Research. Requirement: Advanced Small Scale Construction
+Public Transportation: Unlocks Bus Depot(Building), Bus(Vehicle) and Bus Stop(Road). Cost: 10.000 Research. Requirement: Large Scale Construction
+Regional Travel(Premium feature): Allows Space Elevator to transport colonists between cities with a Space elevator in a region. Cost: 25.000 Research. Requirement: Tall Construction.
-Bus Depot: A building in which 10 buses are maintained and built. You can't build more than 10 Buses at one Bus Depot. Cost: 10.000 Ore, 3.500 Steel, 200 Gold, 2.500 Aluminum, 250 Power, 20 Colonists(blue collar)
-Bus: A vehicle that can be build at the Bus Depot. Transports up to 200 Colonists. You can set between which Bus Stops it will travel. Cost: 100 Ore, 70 Steel, 10 Gold, 30 Aluminum, 8 Wheels
-Bus Stop: A road that acts as stops for the Bus. Only at Bus Stops can Colonists enter/leave a Bus. Comes in all road types and has a neat sign. Maximum of 5 assigned Buses per Bus Stop. Cost: Initial cost of the road type, 5 Steel, 1 Aluminum

This is just a cool idea I had and wanted it in the game. I have absolute confidence that realizing this idea will be extremly difficult as you have to keep track of all Colonists in the Bus. Especially complicated is the travel between cities of the same region, as you would have to keep track of all the colonists in these cities. So realistically speaking this is only a good idea in theory. Would be still helpful if this would get realized in some form. 😃
Thanks for reading. 💖

Hi bast wile i do have this junk chrome book i alos have two phones both nndroid one bran new the other less then a year .
Anyway the same issues i posted about under bugs are still accuring so ill tell you how Using android to see the issue .
OK so First the colony in question is 6 hours 46 mints old this will let you see it IS not caused by how the colony is set up .
so I have just two citys the first only has two colonists the second once i got over 700 colonists now just over 800 colonists Every time payroll comes around the colonists just disapire .
now first Housing stats show every thing green value around 90 % structural 100 % accessability 100 %
entertainment 100 % education 100 % medical access 100 % daily commute 80 % or so --safty 100 %
food 47 k water 280 k so as you can see every thing is covered.
now every time payroll hits the number of colonists goes back to 0 just like was happing in my other colonys what starts it or why it just stopped in my other colonys i cant say I can say ITS not because they are leaving or Just because some die .
But let goto stats now as the colony refills each time rating goes to 100 % its at 96% now total deaths 530 total births 111 GRAPH shows population go from 0 to 800 the 7 or 8 times its happened now
BUT very first thing that happens is health clincs fill up so they come in sick have every thing AT 100 n% makes
no difference .
anyway Use a android phone make a colony gte the population Over 800 be sure all things are covered and you will see your self .
this is not because of set up as at Only 800 colonist every thing is right next to housing .
again as to why it starts or what makes it stop i dont know but its a reacuring issue .
And any larger colony it hits then you will defintly hear about it from other people lol
ps colonists dieing so fats that i have over 500 deaths in 6 hours yet every thing is 100 % i checked and recheck the 8 or 9 times this has happened But even STILL the whole even takes 5 mints each payroll no way colonist should be able to all up and die in 5 mints even if i had no food or water or services at all that can take hours having done it intentaly i know lol .

bastecklein said:You know it just dawned on me guys, I don't think it's the payroll that is killing your colonists, it is probably the lack of medical facilities, since the birth/death calculations also happen on the same time interval as payroll. Make sure you have enough medical facilities in your colony.

Hi, Bast. Made new colony of LIS at abbandoned world. For ~400 colonists i had 49 first aid stations. Food, water and money are in excess. Prior to every payday - colonists went off all work places (stats i.e. 0/0/10), and after "time to pay your workers" the counter of colonists in resources string became 0. all vanished. this happens independently of paying. just when the window appear. autopay didn't solve the problem

i also noted, that at the time when colonists go out of their work running header at the bottom says that "there is an ongoing health crysis in %cityname%. will %username% do something..."

now for 912 colonists, i have 46 medical clinics. however the situation hasn't changes. in statistics the numbers are 14 births, 163 deaths, and 24225 immigration. autopay didn't solve the problem. stats of concerns show NaN% and diagramm ~30% respectively for uneducated, depressed and health. Despite education, entertainment and medical buildings are built within 3-5 tiles of houses. health stat show 0%...

i didn't notice this at my bigger colonies, despite lesser amount of medical buildings and their distance from buildings.

MC version 1.0 for win 10 x64 downloaded from ape-market

Not much to say I noticed this as well .
here is one thing that effects it is your population = jobs you will always get part filled buildings as many colonists are ether off work or in a health center .
lets say you have 2000 colonists you will have alest 200 or so that wont take a job .
thing is the colonists can switch jobs any time they like and education factors in more then High IQ means they take the better jobs .
the only real solution IS one getting education - health - entertainment all 100 % which means over building then adding 10 % MORE colonists then your jobs show you need .
2000 jobs 100 % home ratings means 2200 colonists then EVERY job will stay filled .
O and IF all of one type building then the far ones will fill last .
say a row of UP graded ore to steel plants a row of 20 the ones far away will stay empty sometimes even if you have the extra colonists you need .
The colonists are lazy now and hate walking more then around 15 tiles lol .

cry8wolf9 said:Well maybe not so quick.
Since your taking a look at models.
Are you keeping the same model for structures? Like entertainment, government, ect.
Also what about the races? Same or are there going to be different ones? Would this be a good chance to suggest new ones?
Any lore ideas yet to base the buildings and builders on?

Sorry cry, but you might get more than you bargained for with my reply.

So I am not exactly sure what you mean by "models," but I don't want the design of the game to be limited by what was there in MC1. There might be a tendency to think "well this is just MC1 with just 3d versions of the landscape and buildings," etc, but that is not my thinking at all. There is no reason that the tech or building tree has to mimic what was in MC1, and the buildings don't just have to be 3d versions of their MC1 counterparts. There is no reason why MC1 needs to have a lander, silo, solar panel, greenhouse, refinery etc, unless they make sense in the context of the game. Same thing applies to Rovers, which is why I continue to raise the question as to whether they need to exist in the same form as they do in MC1.

This is not to say that existing MC1 stuff does not belong here, what I am trying to say is that this is an entirely new game, there is nothing wrong with starting on with a new slate.

In terms of lore/races/civs/etc. My thought is that MC2 would be on one hand smaller in scale than MC1, but at the same time much larger.

What does this mean? So My Colony 1 basically encompasses a large area of the galaxy with thousands of planets and the three principal races. And all of the races are still official "lore" for the game, of course. Additionally, a "planet" in MC1 is basically limited to a small plot of land, and you can go from a lander touching down on a dead empty world to a booming metropolis in a matter of days.

I want MC2 to feel completely different, like when your lander touches down on the Red Planet (or whatever world), you are just a lander and two tiny colonists alone on a massive, dead, empty world that you must tame, and all of the resources you need will not just be sitting there waiting for you upon arrival.


Here is how I sort of see it in my head. All lore for the game universe comes principally from the following titles: Colony Wars, Colonial Tycoon, Death 3d, My Starship, Deimos, Deimos 2 - End of the Earth, Deimos 3 - High Noon, and Sarge. If you wanted to put the story in a chronological order, I think it would go like this:

• My Colony 2
• Deimos
• Sarge
• End of the Earth
• High Noon
• Colony Wars
• Death 3d
• My Colony 1
• Colonial Tycoon
• My Starship

I see MC2 as taking place during the first human exploration and settlement of other worlds. The Deimos series (plus Sarge) takes place in the early days of United Earth, where they have just a couple of settlements. The LIS is starting to form, but is not officially recognized yet, and has not yet broken off from U.E.. Colony Wars takes place shortly after the events of Deimos 3, where the LIS formally declared independence (in the form of a surprise attack) and fights to break away from United Earth, which they are eventually successful at with eventual aid from the Zolarg finally tipping the war in their favor. Death 3D takes place during the middle of the LIS war, and features the demise of some of the Deimos-era heroes, along with the United Earth Presidency, where power is moved over to the General Assembly instead. My Colony 1 and Colonial Tycoon are both post-LIS war, where the three civilizations and also the Alpha Draconians, which are now known to humans but have been known to the Zolarg for a long time, are all branching out and colonizing this part of the galaxy. And My Starship takes place somewhat later, where much of this part of the galaxy has been colonized and commerce/war is going on as usual between the various factions.

So that is a general overview of the MC Universe lore. The nature of My Colony 1 and 2 make them harder to place firmly on a timeline, since a game can last "years" and span throughout the whole timeline. But I do like to see My Colony 2 start at the very beginnings, not to far from our present day, because I think it would be neat to see the original few lonely colonists roughing it in hard times on a barren world, which is what going to Mars is going to be like in real life.

It has given me some ideas for some changes VS MC1 though.

In MC1 you are like a mayor or a governor starting a city. In MC2, I see the player as more of a company landing on part of a new planet for fun and for profit, but mostly for profit. You begin with a certain amount of money, and initially to get more colonists, you have to finance another launch from Earth, which results in another Lander showing up with two or three colonists. The Lander can be broken down for scrap parts once it arrives. I think you will also be able to order up a supplies lander from Earth for a lower cost, which has no colonists but whatever materials you need to order, or foot/water etc. However if another player is also on that planet and there are already colonists nearby, they may join your settlement instead of having to bring in new people. You get more money by exporting resources back to earth.

Eventually your settlement grows into a city and the nature of the game changes from one of having to ship materials to Earth for survival to a self-sustaining colony. But I think it will be a slower, more drawn out process VS MC1.

Having multiple players on a planet will also allow for a planetary economy to grow, where trade networks between settlements are made and colonists move from one player to another. Eventually a planet can be built to a point where Earth is no longer required. In MC1, each player has his own planet, but in MC2 I would rather see all players on the server on the same planet, with the planet itself being near infinite in size, with different resources and terrains on different parts on the planet. There will of course be support for multiple planets on a server, but I do not think the game will be as fun if everybody starts with their own planet, as on MC1. On MC1 it was needed because a planet was, at most, a few square miles in size. In MC2, a planet is like an actual planet.

I don't know if there will be terraforming as in MC1, or if so it will be way, way slower.

As for other civs, my plan is to just have Earth/Human. If somebody wants to create a mod with another civ built out, they are free to do so. If it's really good and they want it included in the base game, I will consider it. But it's not a part of the initial plan.

Today I have released the 0.44.0 update to My Colony to all platforms. This update is another mixture of bug fixes and content updates, including the all new concept of waste management. Here are the details, with commentary to follow.

My Colony v0.44.0 Changelog

New Stuff

• New Resource: Trash
• New Structures: Microincinerator, Incinerator, Small Trash Pit, Landfill, Small Recycling Center, Medium Recycling Center, Conference Hall, Advanced Medical Research Center, Unholy Brew Pit
• New Premium Content: Blue Residential Tower

Changes

• Warehouses (of all sizes) now store Crystalline.
• Canceling building construction mid-way now returns all resources back to the player.
• New Galactic Emperor one-time windfall profits tax for online colonies.

Notes
I will discuss some of the additions and changes in a bit, but first I wanted to briefly mention some of the bug fixes that have been introduced. So I think that everybody knows the rover path-finding has been an issue for the last few updates, and it may well still be an issue now, but I think I have finally gotten it reduced to a manageable level. Please still issue bug reports on it though, because this one is a real pain.

I saw in the logs that most of the path finding errors were related to the path finding worker thread running out of memory. Several changes were made to address this. First, the engine's collision map is now only updated when new structures are either added or removed, whereas before it was being updated on a regular interval.

In addition, now when a rover (or colonist) decides to move from tile A to tile B, instead of going through the normal path finding routine, it will first check if both the starting and ending points are currently visible to the player. If the answer is no, then instead of going through full path finding, the game will just quickly check if there are any obstacles blocking the units path. If the path seems clear, the unit will become invisible for a simulated amount of time based on the distance between the two points, and then reappear at the destination. If its not obvious that the path is clear, the regular path finding will be used. Commonly used paths are now also saved and reused by rovers instead of going back to the path finder. For instance, if you are harvesting Clay, the game remembers the path from the clay mine to the warehouse and will keep reusing it until an obstacle appears in the way.

These changes greatly reduce the number of times the engine has to call up the path finder thread, providing both performance improvements and memory usage reductions.

I have also added a cap on how much immigration and colony statistics data that your game file will retain. Before it was unlimited, which could lead to large save files with colonies that have been operating for a long time. This change should reduce file sizes a bit, along with compression and save times.

There were also bug fixes added that related to lottery, taxation, and the amount of money the game assigned to new colonists. A glitch had arisen where there would be colonists walking around with trillions of dollars in their wallets. A change has been made to where this will no longer happen for new colonists, but if you have existing ultra-rich colonists, they will still be ultra rich.

Now on to the addition of Trash. Human residential structures now generate Trash, and it is up to the user to manage it. Right now there are no negative side effects, so colonies have a change to get on top of the situation. This will be changing soon though. Trash buildup will soon impact the health of the colonists, based on a ratio of trash per colonist. The threshold will be fairly low on trash too, although don't ask me what it is yet, as I will figure out the balancing at the time of implementation.

In a similar way, excess atmosphere will start causing colonist health issues. Once atmosphere surpasses the 15 million mark, colonists will begin getting sick. Unlike trash, the effect is much more subtle, so if you are worried about balancing trash vs atmosphere, I would advise that trash is the larger concern by far. Again, the exact numbers are unknown still, but I will figure out the balancing during implementation.

There were other changes and fixes in there which I don't remember off of the top of my head.

Moving on, I want to talk about what is coming next for My Colony. I already mentioned the changes related to Trash and Atmosphere. I planned on adding a lot more Zolarg this time, but I didn't get around to it. Next time I plan to implement most of the suggestions for Zolarg as found in this thread by @IIIStrife: https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=800

Also, for Premium players, I will be adding a new Creative Mode (offline only). It will basically just be a sandbox mode where everything is free and unlocked, and you can just build whatever you want.

So anyway, that's all I've got for now. Enjoy the update, report the bugs, and have fun!

I have a few ideas after playing for a while. I think some of these are pretty good, some not that good. Feel free to give your own ideas or feedback. All ideas are meant to be standalone ideas and not all ideas will work with others as suggested.

1. Fixing Protesting: Too often I see colonists protesting for no reason, or because they won't fix the issue themselves. (Such as the colonist protesting about their low health while there's a medical facility with empty patient spots 5 tiles away.) I'd like to see colonists seeking out a way to fix their problems and only protesting as a last resort.

2. Quitting Jobs: Colonists should be able to quit jobs if they feel a new job will give them a better time. This can be for better pay or commute length. This goes with suggestion 1.

3. Personal Transports+Parking Lots: Colonists would be able to buy personal transports and drive them to work. They would drive from their house to a parking lot then walk to work, this walking distance becomes their commute length. This means a colonist who lives 120 tiles from his workplace can drive to a nearby lot and walk 5 tiles to work.

4. Commodity Resource
Commodity Workshop
Commodity Sweatshop
Commodity Shop

Commodities would be made at the production facilities and then used by tourist trap buildings, and commodity shops. This adds another way to make money from colonists and tourists buying commodities.

5. Military

Now this is the hard one since it's been said this isn't a war game. Unfortunately I think in this simulation game with different factions, nations, and empires, not having a war mechanic of any form would be missing out on a huge amount of potential for the game. Especially with these "Federations" that are rising. Having war would add a new level of depth to the game because it wouldn't be solely a war game. So, here goes.

New Buildings:

Arms Factory-Makes Weapon Parts
Ship Factory-Makes Vehicle Parts
Barracks-Produces Militia+Soldiers
War Factory-Produces APC+Light and Heavy Tanks
Shipyard-Produces all the ships.
Transport Pad-Sends ground troops to Transport Ships and vice-versa.

New Resources:

Weapon Parts-Used for Infantry
Vehicle Parts-Used for ground and space vehicles.

Units:

Militia
Solider
APC
Light Tank
Heavy Tank
Patrol Ship
Transport Ship
Frigate
Cruiser
Dreadnaught

Now, I'll explain how this works.

If you are a colony:

You can build all the buildings and access all the resources, but you may only build Militia, Soldiers, APC, and Patrol Ships. You have to have unemployed colonists to recruit them. You can't attack anyone at all. Your capitol is able to request units from you, you can only send Soldiers and APC's. Militia and Patrol Ships remain at the colony. Military is not a big focus if you aren't independent. This adds a military aspect without making it a "war game" as most of the players are colonies and not independent nations. Heavy war focus is reserved for a smaller number of players.

If you are independent:

You have access to all units unlike colonies. You can attack other players and the NPC factions. You can have alliances(Federations possibly too) with other commonwealths. You can also have a state of war where you're allowed to attack. Warfare and military is a larger focus here. You can request units from your colonies, they don't have to send them. You have to send Transport Ships to pick up or sent any units to/from your colonies. You can send Militia and Patrol Ships to you colonies and send them back. Units sent from your colonies can be sent to attack.
Your ships are meant for difference purposes.

Some units have special abilities.

Militia: They can be ordered by the local government to police protesters. This can help break up protests and get rid of protesters but can result in people being killed and damage being done.

Frigates: These have an advantage over Patrol Ships when attacking them.

Dreadnaughts: These can bombard the surface during the ground assault.


Stages of Battle:

Space Battle-The defending fleet fights against attacking fleet. If the attackers win we move onto ground assault.

Ground Assault-Defending ground forces fight against the attacking ground forces and any aerial bombardment. If the attackers win the planet is annexed. If the defenders win the attackers can break off or from a blockade.

Blockade-The blockaded planet can not import or export anything. They can not make or accept trade offers. They cannot send units, have units requested from, or be sent units until the blockade is broken or lifted. The blockaded planet can try to break the blockade or if only a colony, a capitol can also try to break the blockade.

NPC Factions:

United Earth, League of Independent States, and Zolarg Empire will always be at war. They will control territory with shifting fronts. Once the front moves past a commonwealth the faction may ask you for an alliance, declare war, or nothing at all. They won't attack players very often, even if you're part of an enemy NPC faction. They're more likely to if you are. They're also more likely to if your commonwealth is at war with them or you're allied to one of the other factions.

Being Annexed:

So let's say you get attacked and you lose, then what?

Colony: You lose population from bombardment and soldiers being killed. Buildings are damaged and you've been forcefully annexed to anther power. The attackers can demand up to a max of 5% of your total money as tribute. (only one time) The attackers can't impose any other tributes on you for 7 days and you can't request annexation by another commonwealth for 2 days.

Capitol: It's the same thing but before you're fully annexed you can also choose a new colony to be the capitol of the commonwealth or choose for the entire commonwealth to be annexed. Penalties and limitations are the same but colonies annexed along with a capitol can't be charged the 5% tribute.

In the grand scheme of things, I think military would add a new layer of depth to the game and not trying to would be refusing to utilize a massive amount of potential to make a good game even better. But, it would only help those who choose to participate in it. I know I don't have everything about it sorted out and there's holes in my idea but this is simply a skeleton of 1 possible system.

I think these ideas are all good in 1 way or another, feel free to leave a comment,

I 100% support this. There could be buildings that supply x number of colonists with self-driving electric cars (so you can put the vehicle building anywhere and not worry about colonists having to walk home after parking). This building could require a constant supply of robots (to drive the cars).

A 3 building upgrade system could be the initial building halving commute length for X colonists and requiring a flow of microchips. The upgrade adds more cars and so halves the commute length for lots more colonists. (be nice if the colonists with the longest commute got first pick) The third tier adds lots more vehicles, reduces commute lengths to 1/3 and requires loads more power (for the centralized driving AI) and a constant supply of robots.

I really like that but an alternative could be travelator paths. They could require power, slow rovers a bit but be super duper fast for colonists. Cost steel, microchips, aluminium and plastic or something like that.

Today My Colony v0.54.0 (v0.54.1 on Android) is being pushed out to all platforms and should arrive on your device shortly. This was originally intended to be a big Reptilian update but there were several engine changes that took precedent this time. Details below!

My Colony v0.54.x Changelog

New Stuff

• New structures: National Flag, Torture Booth, Drone Pad, Gold Grower, Aluminum Grower
• New Unit: Uranium Extractor
• New ad-free Structure: Pavement Lit

Changes

• Memory and File Size Reductions
• Firedrill/Employment Changes
• Opening existing online games now requires an Ape Apps Account
• Added engine support for variable color units and structures

Notes
The new Reptilian content is generally geared towards making the Lava World map playable. I had a lot more planned for this update, but I wanted to get it released in a timely manner, so it will have to wait until next time. Barring any major engine changes or glitches, v0.55.0 will have a lot more Reptilian stuff.

On to the engine changes. Since the last few updates, the #1 reason for crashes and getting stuck on the loading screen on mobile (especially on Android) was the game running out of memory. The reason for this is that when I designed the game originally and there were only 8 different structures to build, it made sense to load all of the assets at the beginning when you first entered the game. Today though, there are over 320 different structures and almost 50 vehicles, and many structures can now be flipped which adds extra graphics assets which need to be loaded. Because of this, you have probably noticed that the game was taking longer and longer to start up at the beginning, and sometimes it never started up at all. This was due to the game using up all of it's allotted memory from the operating system. The issue was particularly bad on Android, where the memory cap is far less generous than on Desktop computers, even on newer devices that ship with 4 gigs of RAM.

To get around this, My Colony will now only load graphics assets, on demand and as-needed. There are likely still some bugs to be worked out related to this, so let me know what you find. You might notice buildings or ground tiles not appearing right away. Generally they will show up in a second or two. Zooming in and out can also make them appear quicker some times. It might be a small annoyance, but I think the tradeoff will be worth it. Particularly on smaller colonies, the memory reductions can be quite significant.

Another new reduction in this release has to do with save file sizes. I have started compressing some of the building related save data more efficiently, which should reduce the file sizes on some saves. Your mileage will vary depending on the layout of your colony, but on my main colony, my file size was reduced by a little over 10% (compressed). I didn't do a before/after on a non-compressed colony, but it is probably similar.

Moving along, there have been significant changes to the Firedrill system, as well as the way in which 'simulated' colonists find and fill jobs. Generally, the amount of time it takes for your colony to settle back down after a fire drill has been sped up significantly. Also, simulated colonists now find and fill jobs significantly quicker than before. I realized that I forgot to apply the same improvements to the speed in which they find housing, but that will probably be in the next update.

These changes were in part to address a lot of the complaints people have about unemployment and jobs being filled. The old method had simulated colonists fill jobs based on the general unemployment rate of the colony at large, so if you had massive unemployment, they would find jobs slower, and if you had low unemployment, they would find jobs faster. In my mind, this offered a more realistic simulation, as it doesn't make sense (in 'real life') to be able to just call a fire drill and suddenly an economy is back to normal. Judging by the forums though, I think most people perceived this part of the simulation as a bug, so it has been removed. Simulated colonists will now fill jobs at their earliest convenience.

What has not changed though is the colonists' daily cycle. In general, a healthy colonist will have his day divided into 3 parts: work, sleep, time off. So if your colonists are 100% employed, which is unrealistic but somewhat common in this game, then you should at most expect 33% to be on-duty at any given time. I know that many people perceive this aspect of the game as a bug also, but to me, changing this would make the game sooooo easy, even easier than it already is.

Next up, the engine now supports adding a bit of color to certain in-game structures. This is mainly necessary for the upcoming Colony Wars game, and an example can be seen in the screenshot below:

The flags on the building now take up the color that was set in the Overview tab on the statistics screen. I might expand this more to other structures, but it was primarily put in for the benefit of Colony Wars. I also noticed that it is not working right on iOS yet, so I still need to figure that part out.

Finally, there has been a suggestion in the index for lighted roads. I made some engine changes and added one in there as a test, but I want to see how it impacts performance before expanding it further. To be determined.

So anyway, that is it for today's release. Much more on the way, so stay tuned!

I am encountering an issue, not really sure if it is intended or not, but it involves the immigration of new colonists for the Alpha Draconians.

I build up all of my resource buildings, get myself a Mid-Range Stargate so I can get some cash for more workers and drones and such, and the gate does its usual thing of 'producing' new colonists. But, like the other races, does not start filling them up without proper housing.

A little while longer, I build a house to start up my Civics production with the Square of Arbitration. Then suddenly BAM! 17 colonists show up and try to cram into one house. I build up some more to get all of them at least in a house, I stop at 20. BAM! 16 more colonists show up. Sitting at 36/20 colonists/housing, I am rather concerned if this is going to continue...