Ape Apps

Some users on Windows 10/11 have been reporting that EZ Diary entries are missing after the recent update. I am not sure of the cause yet, but you have be able to find them using the current steps.

First open the file manager and navigate to the C:\Users folder. In Users, there should be a folder that is named after your Windows account username. Open that up, and in there you want to open a folder called AppData. This folder is hidden by default, so if you can't find it, you need to go to Folder Options -> View -> and Show Hidden Files.



You then browse to the Local folder, then the Packages folder. In there should be a folder called 61083ApeApps.EZDiary_d2yynnfvsn014f or something similar. Open that up, and then there is a folder called LocalState. That would be the location where Windows stored your EZ Diary files if they are still there. The entire path looks like this:

C:\Users\YOUR USER NAME\AppData\Local\Packages\61083ApeApps.EZDiary_SOME RANDOM CHARS\LocalState

If your Diary files are in there (they will have a .ezj file extension), just copy them out of that folder and put them somewhere you will remember. You can then open them by going to the Folder icon and Open Diary within the EZ Diary app.

Hope this helps someone!

#ezdiary

Hey @hissyfit99

On Windows 10, if your diary still opens there, open it up and from the File menu use the "Backup Diary" option, and then on Windows 11, import the diary in a similar manner.

You can also sign in to the app with your Ape Apps Account and turn on the Cloud Sync option in Diary Settings which should also carry it over from one installation to the next.

Help! My EZ Diary App on my PC won't let me unlock the diary. The box to type in my password does not
appear. "Cannot Open Diary" appears on the screen. I upgraded to Windows 11 and this happened. I went back to Windows 10 and it is still there.

When I go to Diary Settings the only colour option is to change "Theme Colour" which changes entries. I am looking to take the entire diary off darkmode. How do you do it? When you download the diary it shows pictures of darkmode and regular mode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A building file will contain three parts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

Yes, you need to sign into both with your Ape Apps account. Then from your diary, go to the menu, (File on desktop), Diary Settings, Cloud Sync.

So there really isn't a way to easily crack the password protection without reverse engineering your diary file. How important is it to get into the entries? Because you can also create a new diary file if you haven't added much to the old one yet.

HELLO COMMANDERS!
I just had an amazing discussion with @Luker124 about what will happen in Colony Wars.
Here, I'm presenting the ideas about the story of Colony Wars, involving all 4 civilizations.

Pre-War
In the vast Milky Way Galaxy, lies 3 great civilizations - The Humans, the Insectoids, and the Reptilians.

Humans are the new rising galactic power - The establishment of United Earth government changed everything. The rebirth of humanity from the disastrous failure, with all the humans together. Making achievements beyond what Roman Empire had, the extensive colonization has brought new unimagined opportunities and prosperity.
However, the corruption does not disappear as the dawn of a new era shines on the humans - the desire of the powerful politicians are endless. Further tightened security policy on member colonies, unreasonably heavy taxations, and even legitimating exploitation of labour, all these are just for benefiting those with power, at the cost of those powerless, and breaking their promise of a free and fair society (though the promise had always been a lie since the beginning).
Ruled by a corrupt government, with no will to reform, more and more people of this new commonwealth, especially from the lower classes and colonies, were not happy with this situation. With some of them having strong anti-commonwealth sentiment and advocating overthrowing the General Assembly through revolting against.
The General Assembly, of course, were always prepared to suppress resistance in their colonies using their proud Space Marines, and always actively search and destroy any hidden insurgents in their vast commonwealth. Despite their efforts, the opposition was not silenced, it was growing stronger and stronger, under the support of an organisation they had not discovered yet - LIS.
Meanwhile, with their neglecting attitude on galactic politics, they were not aware that another new threat from afar had already been approaching them.


League of Independent States, abbreviated as LIS, had been working in the shadows for decades, waiting and preparing for a best chance starting a decisive independence war, to free people from tyranny under the United Earth General Assembly.
There was not yet any concrete information about where and when this organisation was founded. Only one thing is surely correct about them - Where people suffer, where they are, and they're here to resist tyranny.
Despite United Earth government already expecting there would be ‘insurgents’, however, their influence were far beyond than they expected, especially in colonies with strong opinions opposing policies of United Earth - LIS influence grew through means of secret propagandas, cooperation with black markets, and even providing planning support to anti-commonwealth activities.
Unlike United Earth, they were aware of the importance of galactic diplomacy, they understood they were not able to fight Space Marines without sufficient external support, even having thousands and millions of militias ready to fight. They had one potent choice, known from the black market intel - Zolarg Empire, which LIS recently established contact with them.

The Insectoid Empire of Zolarg, or simply Zolarg Empire, was also a recent rising power. Once enslaved by Alpha Draconians, they revolted against slavery a century ago and retrieved their civilization from the hands of Reptilians, under the leadership of their wise and brave leader - Emperor Zolarg.
Emperor Zolarg is eager to develop their civilization to a new level, for restoring the dignity of their race, and stop the history of being conquered by anybody else. Through their agricultural knowledge from their ancestors, industrial knowledge stolen from Alpha Draconians, and their own newly pioneered bioengineering, their hard power had been thousand times stronger than the beginning. In the same time, the social and cultural development of the Empire had reached new heights, with ancient religious traditions and technological advancements coexisting in harmony (except the use of… ‘soulless’ robots still under debate), and a successful communal society for large populations.
The new page of Insectoid history was indeed glorious, but not easy. Even they successfully set foot to become a supernova of galactic power, it did not mean Alpha Draconians won't take their revenge someday, sooner or later, and also most of their brothers still not freed from slavery. Their primary mission was still further strengthening their national power, and if possible, finding an ally, in order to fight against the almost all-powerful Alpha Draconians.

The Reptilian Empire of Alpha Draconians, or more referred to as Alpha Draconians, is an old warlike civilization with a strong national pride, that existed longer than other civilizations in the Milky Way Galaxy before The Ancients (that disappeared for unknown reasons). One of their possible origins was they were migrant Reptilians from another galaxy, as told in their historical documents.
Alpha Draconians had vast territories in the Galaxy obtained from conquests and annexation, but their name was not well known in the galaxy - Due to their secret style of ruling. Only some powerful political figures, and those under direct rule, know about their existence. Their spies and covert agents widespread across the Galaxy, watching over people, controlling propagandas, delivering absolute orders to their puppet governments, and assassinating any opposition or disobeyed, everything were under the will of the Inner Circle of Lords, and the supreme leader Overlord.
Not just having a strong secret influence, most of their national power are unmatched. Having the most superior technologies, sophisticated industrial machines, most educated elites and a ruthless robot army (that is especially feared by the Zolarg Empire). What are these national powers being built on? The effort of others - slaves, tributes and stealing.
The old empire might still look well, but with more and more problems rising within. Since the Insectoid Uprising and establishment of the Zolarg Empire, they are losing more cities and slaves, shaking their economy and national pride to their foundations. With economy performance dropping year by year, and the core Reptilian society began questioning the ‘invincibility’ of the empire, the Overlord had been facing heavy pressure. Meanwhile, another political crisis was emerging between the Inner Circle and the Overlord - the competition for the throne of absolute power.
Overlord, eager to strengthen his power, planned to begin another conquest, to search for manpower and resources, and, of course, attempt to prove Alpha Draconians was still invincible. And their eyes were set on a civilization - Humans. At the blink of a civil war, and having a corrupt government, a perfect target for Alpha Draconians to secretly intervene, disrupt, and ultimately, conquer them with the might of war machines once they were exhausted fighting.


The Beginning of the War - Terra Nova Incident
Coincidentally, both LIS and Alpha Draconians were looking for a good chance to start a war, but for different aims, different ways, and they had no connections.
The tension between human colony Terra Nova and the United Earth General Assembly had created an opportunity for them.
Terra Nova was a colony under United Earth, yet with the presence of LIS. People of Terra Nova, from workers to their governor, agreed that the United Earth government was too corrupted to rule them, decided to take action in a non violent way, becoming the first colony ever to refuse paying tax to the General Assembly.
Alpha Draconians understood what LIS was trying to do - try to provoke United Earth to take the strongest military actions ever against their people, to be a reasonable excuse to start the war. To ‘accomodate’ the needs of LIS and make progress on Overlord's plan, Alpha Draconian covert agents in the General Assembly began their covert operations, paving path to the military actions step by step, through persuading works, blackmailing and misinformation campaigns. An embargo was first being passed in 4 days, and then a blockade was passed a week later. And after 3 months of ‘debate’ and ‘arguments’, and the ‘Friday Coup’ (controlled by Alpha Draconian agent) happened within the period that caused the cleanse campaign on the opposition party, a decisive pass was made on the decision taking violent military actions against Terra Nova, ‘without’ any objections, leading to the Terra Nova Incident.

The dispatch of Space Marines 35th Regiment (SM35) had angered hundreds of colonies, and people of Terra Nova as well. Things had progressed as LIS wished, they began rallying up resistance fighters in the hideouts in Terra Nova, preparing for their final phase to begin the first phase of war - a surprise attack.
Without much resistance, SM35 occupied Terra Nova under the lead of Colonel Harold Franklin. Soon Space Marines recognised they were in a weird situation - Terra Nova did not strongly resist at all as they arrived. However, it was too late. Just a few minutes after they had noticed that, LIS militias led by a militia officer Admiral Beuford P. Tots ambushed all major forces of SM35 at every street and alleys of the city, causing heavy loss of well-equipped marines. At the same time, LIS revealed themselves in the public for the first time, declaring war on United Earth - marked the beginning of the Human Civil War.
Very soon United Earth's forces retreated from Terra Nova, leaving the colony under LIS control. LIS declared independence of this colony a day after, renamed it Independent State. This city was the command centre of LIS throughout the war, which will be the capital city of LIS after the war.


Early Human Civil War
The United Earth Security Council was in a big chaos after the Terra Nova Incident - unexpectedly attacked by an enemy and almost lost the entire SM35, and little the Security Council knew about LIS. Even though garrisons and national guards were immediately told to prepare and mobilize to respond any possible LIS attacks, however, still not able to stop LIS - either fighting at broken morale or without enough time for full preparations - Since they had no idea where LIS forces would start their attack, and these rebels were well prepared already.
LIS, taking this advantage, launched a series of scattered yet successful attacks in neighbouring systems. Just within the first two weeks of the war, United Earth lost 15 colonies, 45 main trade routes or supplies, and countless soldiers either captured or killed.
However, LIS did not have the upper hand for long - especially after the original Security Council Chairman, Bofors Kaiserton, was replaced by an experienced Marshal called Bradley R. Johnson. The Security Council was soon reorganized by Bradley to stabilise the mess, launched propaganda campaigns to restore the morale of United Earth forces, and began studying the tactics of LIS forces, which the studies could had begun at the first day of war, but got delayed to 5 days later (day 6), due to Bofors unable to stabilise the chaos.
Around 3 weeks later, under the coordination of the Security Council, LIS began losing their ambush advantage, due to their patterns being tracked by Security Council and United Earth forces began being able to predominate the battlegrounds before LIS did so, forcing LIS forces to fight against United Earth forces directly. The Battle of Ferris Mountains on day 37 was a major defeat for LIS, which the local United Earth garrison of Ferris Mountains, instead of being ambushed, baited LIS forces to their doom. The next day (day 38), LIS changed their general combat tactics from sneak-and-attack based to direct confrontation based. Since that battle the loss of United Earth was stabilized at a lower rate. The civil war reached the second stage, the period when major battles were fought.


Mid Human Civil War
Despite losing early advantages, with the introduction of newer weapons and black market technologies LIS forces were still able to maintain their offensive pose in the war for a while, still surprising United Earth forces, in various battles pushing their front straight towards the Solar System.
The most well known new weapon LIS introduced during the war was the Apollo-3500 Beam Emitter, which were equipped by their heavy infantries and installed on specially designed combat vehicles, the weapon itself is able to melt most armour into slags by emitting high energy beams. They caused large troubles to traditional armoured combat vehicles, especially proven in the Battle of Harbinger Greenlands (which led to United Earth giving up the Ares-4 System) that the 196 th Armour Regiment of United Earth experienced a brutal defeat under devastating laser fire of 44F Laser Battalion and 44G Laser Battalion of LIS.
Another major battle featuring LIS new weaponry was the Siege of New Paris that lasted for 15 days. The introduction of Javelin-E ‘Incognito’ Missiles in the last day (though a bit too late) decisively ended the battle, these missiles were designed not interceptable by AEGIS Theater Missile Defense System used by United Earth and successfully breached the fortifications of New Paris Citadel in an almost effortless way.
Meanwhile, 49 more colonies revolted against United Earth rule under LIS support, providing minor battlefronts for LIS to push forward further into United Earth territory.
Amount of LIS territory occupied reached a peak on day 59, which over one-fifth of United Earth territory was taken over.
The offensive pose of LIS lasted until United Earth, though later, also began introducing (a limited number of) experimental weapons into the battles, and the return of Space Marines Corps with upgraded equipment, reorganization and replenished manpower. From that time on, the tide of war had changed favouring United Earth, they began pushing LIS back.
Just 2 days after New Paris was occupied by LIS, this city was back in the hands of United Earth, under the strong firepower of Space Marines 12th Regiment, and LIS forces here were still too tired to fight. After the Second Battle of New Paris on day 73, LIS lost a large proportion of major forces and the overall offensive formation breached. In later times, LIS major forces were defeated one by one, setting LIS forces back quickly.
With that moment the situation largely disfavored them, LIS decided to take a risky move - Reveal and use their secret weapon stationed in New Bavaria, either to devastate United Earth capital city that would put United Earth into mess again, or at least buy some time to find a foreign ally.
The risky move was well known as the ‘Interstellar Missile Crisis’ event. On day 88, LIS broadcasted a message through hijacking the communication hub in Coloniae Leon, threatening they had a secret mass destruction weapon that could never be intercepted once launched, and its range could cover all United Earth territories - Interstellar Warp-Speed Missile (IWSM) with Disaster Warheads derived from Instant Terraforming Bomb Project data found in occupied government labs. And, the first missile, to be launched within 24 hours, would fly straight to the capital city of United Earth - planet Earth.
United Earth offensive operations were halted due to the short chaos caused by the seemed inevitable threat. The United Earth Security Council soon ordered the search for their missile base as the countdown had begun. 7 hours later they located the missile base, and 9 hours later Space Marines 2th Division arrived in New Bavaria. The battle in New Bavaria lasted for 7 hours, at the last hour the missile base was captured, with most of the IWSMs destroyed at the site immediately.
LIS did not waste the time by sacrificing their secret weapons. During the Crisis, LIS secretly contacted the Zolarg Empire and shortly reached an alliance agreement with them - for their common pursuit of freedom and liberating people from suffering, and they needed each other. The entry of the Zolarg Empire would bring the war to the third stage, the time when things had been becoming more complicated than just a civil war between Humans.
What about Alpha Draconians? The Overlord was pleased by the situation so far, the plan had been successful. While humans were busy killing each other, the Overlord ordered mobilizing their robot armies into the back of United Earth territory through means of secret portals prepared by covert agents. While Alpha Draconians were making preparations for the takeover plan, one thing the Overlord was not expected to, and not knowing would happen - the Zolarg Empire, their nemesis, would interfere with the war very soon. On the other hand, the political enemies from the Inner Circle, were scheming a plan to pull Overlord off his throne.


More Than Just a Civil War
Just when people of United Earth thought the war would be over soon with the defeat of LIS. 8 days after the Interstellar Missile Crisis (day 96), the Zolarg Empire declared war on United Earth, in the name of helping their allies - LIS, and officially began mobilizing their troops to the borders of United Earth.
War from another civilization put the United Earth under mass panic. Not just because the war that was supposed to end soon would become even longer, such a scale of invasion from another civilization of a different race was something humanity never had experienced.
Zolarg forces flanked United Earth from the other side, putting United Earth in an unfavorable situation - A war of two fronts. The back of the United Earth was left underdefended (not undefended) due to major forces being put into LIS fronts, leaving the borders only garrisoned with only a small number of troops. Even though the Security Council ordered splitting the troops to the borders in order to stop the Zolarg offensive, the border defenses were breached faster than imagined, garrisons were unable to hold the line before reinforcements had arrived. When the reinforcements reached the Zolarg fronts, a couple of cities and colonies had already been occupied by the new enemy.
At first United Earth forces on the Zolarg fronts attempted to make quick offensives against Zolarg forces in order to re-concentrate on LIS again. However, after a few offensives they found Zolarg forces were difficult to remove - Everytime an Insectoid base was ‘removed’, a new base was rebuilt quickly and pumping out loads of new troops as nothing had happened. Later they found out it was due to the Insectoids established complicated yet useful subterranean tunnel networks that allowed rapid reinforcement on the planets, with entrances hard to be detected using traditional sensors. United Earth troops on Zolarg fronts quickly changed their tactics to mainly defensive with very minimal offensive progress, until their sappers were equipped with new tunnel sensors they began able to retake some territories.
Meanwhile on the LIS fronts. Thanks to the Zolarg Empire entry into war, LIS now faced much less pressure from United Earth forces. Now they were able to at least sustain their defensive lines. After their IWPM were modified to smaller missiles and cheaper designs and put under use, they were able to make small offensive progress for a few days, still threatening some of the strategic locations of United Earth. However, the LIS fronts fell into a stalemate for the rest of time.
The unexpected news of the Zolarg Empire's intervention in the Human Civil War delivered to Alpha Draconians. Overlord was not informed about that until 6 days after the entry of the Zolarg Empire into the war - his political enemies from the Inner Circle controlled information flow in Overlord’s chamber through bribing the Imperial Informats (internal messengers of Overlord’s Chamber). The Overlord, knowing schemed by his political enemies, was angered, but also worried about his plans to secure his position in the throne. The Zolarg fronts in United Earth was exactly the location where the secret mobilization concentrated at. At this rate, his great plan would fail easily if the troops were discovered by either humans or insectoids, and it was just a matter of time, sooner or later.
With his ominous worries, the Overlord assigned extra supervisors into the Ministry of Expedition in order to secure his control on the conquest of the human race. However the Inner Circle had an upper hand - the Ministry had already been hijacked by their covert agents. The newly assigned supervisors of Overlord were soon silenced and puppeted by the Inner Circle.
The Lords of Inner Circle now had control of the Overlord’s expeditionary forces in United Earth - With just a slight attention created by the expeditionary forces to let Zolarg forces to notice, it was enough to ruin the plans of the Overlord, to further destroy his reputation, and ultimately pulling him off the throne.


The Incident that Changed the War - Barracuda Blues Events
On day 165 of the war, an event took place on colony Barracuda Blues, a colony lying behind the Zolarg fronts, inside the territories of United Earth. This incident had changed the entire war - from confrontations between mainly United Earth and LIS, to a war that 3 civilizations together defending against Alpha Draconian invasion.
Just within a night, the base on Barracuda Blues disappeared, with remains of weared-off tank armour and charred grounds indicating there was combat. The only thing left was reports about unknown alien contact of hostile inorganic objects and strong energy sources detected by base on neighbouring planets. The United Earth Security Council received the reports 8 hours after the incident had taken place. A global investigation on Barracuda Blues was ordered 2 hours later.
4 days after the investigation had launched, inspectors reported an unimaginable discovery - a hidden facility, camouflaged by cutting-edge field generators of unknown origin, full of unidentified machines in dormant status, and a colossal device suspected to be a long range stargate portal that was the origin of energy detected.
Informed about such discovery, the United Earth Security Council (cautiously) saw that as an opportunity to obtain superior military technologies that could help break the stalemate of the war. Scientist teams and more military staff were sent to the site for further secret investigation.
Despite the news being a secret, the information about such ‘discovery’ had reached the ears of LIS, their hackers intercepted the intel. The intel was shared to forces of the Zolarg Empire, in order to figure out what it was.
Zolarg forces seemed to know something - Just a couple of hours later LIS received replies from the Zolarg Empire, about warnings of a common threat from the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy had infiltrated into human civilization - Alpha Draconians. The Zolarg Empire had also sent a similar message to United Earth, and demanded evacuating the investigation site and destroying it as soon as possible.
The United Earth Security Council, at first, did not take the warning seriously, suspecting it was just a deception from both LIS and Zolarg Empire, trying to prevent United Earth from obtaining technologies that could help them win the war. Later events proved them wrong - 2 days later, the site was under attack - not by LIS, not by Zolarg Empire, but those unidentified machines they were supposed investigating. The machines were suddenly animated, hovered into the air, and revealed what they were - war machines, with the emblem of Alpha Draconians. Almost all staff at the site were killed in the matter of minutes, only a group of soldiers managed to escape, and reported their terrible story (with solid evidence recorded) to the Security Council.
Heard of such an event taking place, and reconsidering warnings from the Zolarg Empire, the Security Council decided to have the big issue discussed in the General Assembly, hopefully they could recognise the dangerous situation they were in.
Meanwhile, LIS and Zolarg Empire had also begun their search for Alpha Draconian existence within their occupation zones, and counter-ops against Alpha Draconian influence.
Under a common threat that could not be repelled with the power of a nation, three participant nations of this civil war held a close-door summit on day 178 in an United Earth city Neo Floridas under maximum security measures. On the next day, all leaders of the military came to an agreement - a ceasefire treaty that put a pause on the civil war, and a temporary alliance pact - known as ‘Delta Alliance’ by humans - that would last until the Alpha Draconians were repelled.
Exposures of Alpha Draconian expeditionary forces and the formation of a temporary alliance were quickly reported to Overlord by the covert agents within the United Earth General Assembly. Shocked to know his plan had gone wrong, the Overlord, immediately contacted his supervisors in the Ministry of Expedition. Without any response, the Overlord understood what had happened - His plan had been hijacked by the Inner Circle.
Indeed, the exposure of expeditionary forces in Barracuda Blues was the order of the Inner Circle, through the Ministry of Expedition which was under their control.
The Inner Circle also received reports of their successful sabotage on the Overlord’s plan. With now they knew the Overlord was in trouble, they began spreading the scandals of the Overlord ‘might even be unable to conquer a lesser civilization’, to cut down Overlord’s support from core Reptilian society. Now, with the information of this invasion leaked to both humans and Insectoids, and further pressured by the scandals, the Overlord had only one choice left for the invasion plan - launch the attacks immediately.


Alpha Draconian Invasion
On day 186, the day known as the ‘Invasion Day’, the remaining dormant expeditionary forces of Alpha Draconians inside human territory were activated under the orders of the Overlord himself, launched the Invasion of Humans, beginning from Barracuda Blues where their forces and one of their main portals were exposed.
The Allies were prepared, they had located and destroyed a few hidden Alpha Draconian facilities, and shared any intelligence known about Alpha Draconians. Yet were not on the upper hand. The cutting-edge war machines of Alpha Draconians was not something humans were able to deal with easily, the superior armour strength and stealth capabilities of Alpha Draconian forces had caused some significant loss of Allied forces.
On the other hand, Overlord tried to keep Zolarg Empire forces outside the war theater of human territory as first priority, preventing the Zolarg Empire from assisting humans with their intelligence and troops. Alpha Draconians inserted blockade fleets in neutral zones between the Zolarg Empire and United Earth, as well began rallying troops at Zolarg borders. The Zolarg Empire not just had difficulty helping humans defending against the invasion as their forces in United Earth were encircled, intensified conflicts and battles at Alpha Draconian borders were something they had to put more focus onto.
The invasion broke out from the inside spread like wildfire in human territory as the Zolarg Empire was not able to provide assistance. Just within a week, Alpha Draconian presence was reported in all human territories (in terms of before the civil war broke out). 58% of original human territories were occupied by Alpha Draconians within a week, mainly the areas around the Zolarg fronts.
Humans had no chances of counter strike at this moment, as the Overlord predicted. However, the Overlord had underestimated humanity. Instead of keeping an eye, he ‘confidently’ set the expeditionary to spontaneous mode, promising the core Reptilian society that humans would be brought under Alpha Draconians in no time (in order to retain his supporters).


The Counter Strike
Alpha Draconian domination on the battlefield lasted until United Earth deployed their new superweapon.
United Earth lacked new weapons of instant destruction needed to change the tide of war since the total decommission of the nuclear arsenal right after the establishment of the United Earth General Assembly. Considering reactivating the nuclear arsenal project would cause large discontent from both the General Assembly and the public due to the long term consequence of detonating nuclear weapons, the Security Council, long ago reviewed older military research projects to seek for a powerful weapon with minimal impacts upon use. And when the invasion broke out, they already had a weapon project at almost completion that came into handy - Particle Cannon. The research of this surgical-space-strike (accurate strike instead of mass destruction) weapon was greatly accelerated by the data from Alpha Draconian facility on Barracuda Blues. 14 days after the Invasion Day (day 200), the first Space Strike group had completed construction at United Earth’s capital shipyard on Earth orbit, assigned into and escorted by the only 3 main starship fleets.
Upon the new weapons were ready, Marshal Bradley of the United Earth Security Council authorized the largest military campaign in the war - Operation Zeus, which began from day 205, aimed to retake territories beyond the Zolarg fronts occupied by Alpha Draconians. Mobilizing over 54 land forces divisions, 6 Space Marines divisions, 31 space fighter wings and 2 starship fleets.
The first use of Particle Cannon was used in Battle of Leo-34, showing the impressive firepower to the entire humanity. The Alpha Draconian stronghold on the planet was reduced to scraps in the matter of a few Particle Cannon bombardments of the 3th Starship Fleet.
The particle cannon also shone on other major battles, including the largest starship battle Battle of Kelvin Rings that the superweapon put the end to Alpha Draconian ‘Eradicator’ class battleship (though that was not their strongest warship in service), and Siege of Venet-35 that the weapon critically broke the siege of Alpha Draconian forces on the colony.
Operation Zeus had achieved a massive success within two months. The Operation recovered 21% of original territories, and some post-war statistics estimated that the Operation had also destroyed almost half of the Alpha Draconian expeditionary forces.
LIS had also achieved victories after their deployment of Type-X EMP warheads that effectively paralyses robot-based Alpha Draconian forces and facilities upon detonation. Just within half of a month after the deployment, LIS was able to uproot all Alpha Draconian facilities and portals within their occupation zones and freed up a large amount of troops for offensive operations beyond their territories (to ‘liberate’ more colonies, of course). At the same time, LIS had also completed an counterintelligence research Project Beacon that analyses the activities and signals of Alpha Draconian covert agents and communications (using information provided by Zolarg and harnessing their expert knowledge of cybertechnology), greatly preventing further Alpha Draconian sabotages on Allied forces, and made the hidden movements of Alpha Draconians predictable from that time on.
The human counterattack progress stopped at regions around Barracuda Blues. At this moment Barracuda Blues was one of the last strategic locations for these intruders - where their last functional long range portal was located, the only available reinforcement station for them. However, also the most fortified position of Alpha Draconian intruders - not only the main portal was protected by the state-of-the-art fortress setup, other strongholds around Barracuda Blues formed a complete exterior defense system that was able to stop any starships approaching this critical site.
The counterattack of humans was reported back to the Ministry of Expedition for multiple times, however nobody read the report - The fierce political competition inside the Ministry between Overlord loyalist and Inner Circle had disrupted literally everything, ignited a few days after the blockade on the Zolarg Empire. Military officers and staff were being assassinated or replaced by the two parties very frequently, they had no time and effort to care about any operations of the expeditionary forces but tried to protect themselves or seek extra interest in this internal political rivalry.
As the regular functioning of the Ministry of Expedition came to a halt, the blockade fleet between Zolarg Empire and United Earth was soon out of control, without any coordination the blockade was breached by Zolarg fleets, like the blockade fleet was just a dull asteroid belt. Regaining the supply line to their occupation zones, the Zolarg Empire began sending their fleet and elite force Imperial Templars to the battlefronts in human territory against Alpha Draconians.
Overlord regained information and control of his expedition plan after Overlord loyalists successfully retaken control of the Ministry of Expedition as a series of bloody political events took place. Knowing his miscalculation on humans and he had missed a lot of events during the Ministry was handicapped, the Overlord ordered a regroup of all remaining expeditionary forces at Barracuda Blues, as well as authorising the expeditionary force access to advanced reserves of Alpha Draconian war machines, the Apocalypse Order, to terminate human resistance before it was too late to remedy the situation. An invasion fleet was also ordered to dispatch for securing the invasion plans, either backing the reinforcement up, or in case the last portal falls the fleet could still devastate the remaining human forces and do the occupation.

The Battle of Barracuda Blues - Twilight of the Intruders
All human major forces from both the United Earth and LIS, and later a small number of Zolarg forces from occupation zones, gathered near minor strongholds around Barracuda Blues. Deployments began on day 274, preparing for the last battle to stop Alpha Draconian invasion - which Allied forces had thrown literally everything they had into it, almost all of their major forces and types of weapons.
Alpha Draonians had gathered a majority of the first group of Apocalypse Order from Alpha Draconia arrived at Barracuda Blues, standing by at the site.
The Battle of Barracuda Blues broke out on day 277. The 2nd Vanguard Group led by United Earth Space Marines 1st Division secured a minor portal stronghold on Baston-36, under the support of the United Earth 3th Starship Fleet and Particle Cannons. Hackers from LIS performed a follow-up hacking of the portal control immediately, opening up a route to Barracuda Blues for major forces after 4.5 hours.
Commando platoon headed by the legendary United Earth elite Sarge led the charge into the Barracuda Blues through the portal, securing an area on the east wing of the main portal stronghold. The remaining forces of 2nd Vanguard Group established a forward base for providing support, with Main Battle Command led by Marshal Bradley of United Earth responsible for the main offensive operations following behind.
Other battle groups were told to tie up other minor strongholds to prevent their reinforcements to Barracuda Blues, and if possible, take over the portals in the minor strongholds.
The first attempts of siege, on the same day, had been unsuccessful. The defense of the main fortress complex was far more defended than imagined. The point laser defense system rendered conventional artillery fire useless, the firepower of the newly arrived Apocalypse Order outrunned offensives of the Allied forces, even the Allied forces were supported by 5th Battle Group later which successfully broke into the south wing through the portal of another stronghold. At the end of the day, the offensive operations had been temporarily halted under the order of Marshal Bradley to prevent further losses.
On day 288 Allied forces detected a larger group of Apocalypse Order reinforced Alpha Draconian forces in the fortress. Few hours later, Alpha Draconians began taking offensives targeting the Allied Main Command Group. Facing even stronger enemies than before, main forces of the Main Command Group were tied at their forward base and fell into a badly passive status, until 5th Battle Group received EMP missiles from LIS and sent help to break the enemy offensives.
On day 289, the 3rd Battle Group composed mainly of Zolarg forces entered the battle at the southern forward base, launching subterranean infiltration attacks into the west part of the fortress. Although the infiltration forces experienced heavy casualties as they broke into, however, provided an important internal structure intel of the main stronghold - there was an antenna structure acting as an command node of stronghold defense, which when sabotaged, it could weaken the coordination of, or even paralysing, the stronghold defenses. However, the infiltration forces also reported there was a massive energy flow towards the centre part of the facility, where the main portal was located, presumably sending in core forces, or worse, a destruction device known as ‘Annihilator’ by Zolarg forces which capable of releasing an energy blast that could destroy any non-Alpha Draconian machines and living being within 50 lightyears radius. The enemy reinforcement was predicted to arrive in three or four days.
The reports from the infiltration forces had put the Main Command into an anxious mood, since this meant not much time was left for them - longer the battle goes, worse the situation becomes. The Main Command Group decided to take another offensive the next day, after the United Earth 1st Starship Fleet sent Particle Cannons to provide heavy bombardments.
Still, Alpha Draconians were prepared, they had set up energy barriers to neutralize Particle Cannon fire. With even the superweapon of United Earth proven ineffective on this base, the Main Command Group offensive once again ended up with extra losses.
On the other hand, the portal stronghold connecting the Allied forward base on the south wing was under attack by Alpha Draconian forces from another minor stronghold, the 5th Battle Group and the 3th Battle group had their most convenient supply lines cut and now had to rely supplies from either the 1st Starship Fleet or the Main Command.
During the hardest times having almost no means to break the fortifications of this stronghold, the hackers and engineers controlling the portal in Baston-36 brought a good news in the late night of day 232, they managed to hack into the heavily encrypted internal portal system and obtained a segment of access code that allowed them to teleport at most a commando squad into the stronghold (due to limitations of incomplete access codes), which this chance could be used to sabotage the command node, allow the major forces destroying the fortification when it was disrupted. However, the code was estimated to be expired in approximately 7 hours.
In the same night, but a bit earlier, a small group of Zolarg Imperial Templars joined the Main Command Group, providing limited but valuable replenishment of Allied forces.
With an irreplaceable opportunity to break into this almost invincible fortress, the Main Command immediately reorganized the existing forces, preparing for an all-out attack in the next day - It was either the Alpha Draconians or humanity being defeated, this would be the last assault to terminate their ambitions, once and for all.
4 hours later, a squad with the best commandos from United Earth, LIS and Zolarg was organized for the most dangerous mission, they were teleported to the west block of the stronghold, and later assisted by another Zolarg subterranean assault force from the 3th Battle Group. Meanwhile, all the other Allied forces on Barracuda Blues, advancing towards the stronghold.
The major forces expected the defenses to be disarmed as they reached the enemy defense lines. Yet the infiltration forces had trouble making their way to the command node, encircled by the stronghold guards as the Allied forces entered the alert zones around the stronghold. The main forces could only hold their position, forced to fight with the enemy elite forces, until the commandos finished their task.
After approximately an hour of brutal battles inside and outside the stronghold, the commando squad, finally made their way to the command node, and installed a disruption device onto it.
The defenses of the stronghold were immediately turned down under the effect of the disruption device, including turrets, energy barriers and point laser defense system. The stronghold, now vulnerable to any human and Insectoid weaponry, soon the main defense was destroyed under intensive artillery barrage bombardments. Alpha Draconian forces were also affected by the disruption effects, their combat efficiency was greatly lowered - the coordination errors broke their formation, these steel machines of destruction began ramming into each other. At this moment, Alpha Draconians had lost their overwhelming advantage in this battle, every force defending the fortress were soon eliminated by the Allied forces, leaving the central portal defendless. Allied forces very quickly flooded into the stronghold, reaching their ultimate target of the battle - the main portal, which was seen charging up for receiving new reinforcements - that could make short work on the last human forces if unstopped.
The decisive battle defining the date of humans, ended with a Particle Cannon strike onto the portal, tearing the portal into pieces of scraps. The dawn on Barracuda Blues after the particle beam dissipated, marked the victory of the Allies.
Remaining Alpha Draconian threats in human territory were eliminated within two days after the victory in Battle of Barracuda Blues under the efforts of human forces. For the first time, the entire humanity successfully repelled an massive alien invasion.
The invasion had not ended yet, Alpha Draconian invasion fleet was still advancing towards human territory. It was until Zolarg fleets attacked Alpha Draconian starbases that forced Overlord to draw the entire fleet back for defense and postpone the invasion… infinitely.


Battle of Kaisergrounds - Conclusion Battle to the Human Civil War
The invasion was over, ending with the defeat of Alpha Draconians.
But not everything was over. The Delta Alliance Pact had expired, now United Earth and LIS had to put their focus back onto their civil war… only after they had taken a necessary break from a month of fierce battles.
The Zolarg Empire had most of their forces tired of the battles in human territory, and they needed more forces and officiers to manage their conflicts between them and Alpha Draconians. On day 312, about a month after the end of the invasion, they agreed to withdraw from the Human Civil War, returning all occupied territories to the United Earth and evacuate all their forces after taking some necessary responsibility (mostly repairing damages they had made), as requested by the United Earth General Assembly and agreed by LIS. The civil war was now and finally kept just between humans.
Things had been peaceful (if not considering some minor skirmishes on conflict site planets) until the war was continued with the last major battle broke out on day 351 - the Battle of Kaisergrouds, which both sides hoped to ‘conclude’ the war in this battle (as not much war supplies were left for large scale conflicts), on this strategic stronghold occupied by LIS - To LIS, a foothold for liberating the core economic regions of United Earth in the future. To United Earth, an important barrier to keep LIS away from the most resourceful colonies.
The extremely rare ion fog winters of Kaisergrounds disrupted communication devices and sensors, which however favoured United Earth offensive - their landing forces could sneak onto the planet without triggering the alarms of LIS forces.
It was not clear how the battle had fought due to the unavailability of communications and battlefield monitoring in ion fogs. However, two outcomes were confirmed for sure - First, it might have been a ‘fierce’ battle, in which United Earth recorded 78% losses of troops in the battle while LIS recorded 85% loss of their forces. Either killed or (less likely) lost in fogs. Second, it was the victory of United Earth, after 4 days of battle United Earth 12th Space Marines Regiment managed to take control of the entire planet and sent a shuttle for delivering a battle report.


Aftermath
10 days after the last battle (day 365), the military leaders of two sides met in the Roundtable Summit in the colony of New London.
The Armistice of Hoxton was signed, with the following details:

• Armistice: Military actions must not be taken inside territories of the United Earth and LIS for the upcoming 100 years.
• Border Regulations: Border lines between United Earth and LIS, named Hoxton Line, are maintained. No space vessels should cross the line, both sides have the right to shoot down any vessels that crossed the line, unless the vessel has authorised access.
• Embargo: Trades and shipments to and from LIS are forbidden. United Earth will enforce a blockade fleet along the Hoxton Line.
• Colonization restriction: LIS must not carry out colonization near or along the Hoxton Line.
• Trade Route Protection: Any LIS vessels with armaments equal to or more than corvettes will be regarded as violating United Earth trade routes.
• Violation of any of these regulations will be regarded as breaking the treaty.
• Any forms of independence by LIS will not be recognized and accepted by the United Earth General Assembly.

Though this is an armistice treaty, it had indeed ended the Human Civil War - at least it had ended direct military confrontations, another civil war is just a matter of time.
Eventually nobody achieved total victory in the Human Civil War, however, LIS actually ‘won’ the war. Colonies and cities occupied by LIS are no longer under the control of United Earth bureaucrats, they are freed from any forms of suppression and exploits, at least a better life can be started with ture fairness and autonomy guaranteed by the League.
Yet United Earth has also earned a ‘strategic’ victory, since they successfully defended most major regions, leaving LIS only able to have mostly barren planets of outer territories. The Armistice of Hoxton also allowed them to have limited control on the development of LIS.
The United Earth General Assembly was not satisfied with the outcome of the war - They understood that LIS had achieved their aim in the war. Now, the capabilities of the United Earth military were being questioned nationwide, even managed to repel the Alpha Draconian invasion - It shall be stopped to restore the reputation of the General Assembly. The General Assembly originally wanted to ‘retire’ Marshal Bradley to pacify the doubts of people, but changed their mind after reconsidering his achievements repelling an alien Invasion and read about his big military project to retake territories occupied by LIS, which the plan actually helped people put a larger confidence onto the military than before.
Speaking of the support, a tragedy for the Overlord of Alpha Draconians. The Overlord tried to cover up the failures of his expedition plans, however, the Inner Circle intercepted the intel. The scandal was soon delivered to all members of core Reptilian society, they now lost all confidence in the ‘weak’ Overlord that had completely ruined their national pride. Several days later, the Overlord was assassinated in a coup planned by the Inner Circle.
The seat of ultimate power was empty, but that is not a seat for many. A more intense, almost endless political rivalry took place between the Lords of Inner Circles beginning right after the death of Overlord, leading the entire empire into a state of political instability. Without a stable and powerful leader to rule the vast empire, the corruption in administration of Alpha Draconians is getting ten times more serious than before. Social order also began to collapse, leading to the disparity between the nobles and common civilians, and social unrests.
The instability of Alpha Draconians, and one more defeat for their seemed invincible military, gave confidence to the conspiracists hidden all over the empire. Some puppet regions began attempting to break away from Alpha Draconians. Though not all of them had been successful, more new powers have risen - Especially the New Galactic Empire, thirsted for galactic domination, is slowly overtaking the influence of Alpha Draconians in the shadows.
The Zolarg Empire finally found themselves a powerful ally to support each other against Alpha Draconian influence - Humans’ capability defending themselves against Alpha Draconian forces impressed not only the Insectoids of every hive, the Emperor is also glad to see this. A few months after the end of the Human Civil War, Zolarg Empire signed diplomatic memorandums with both LIS and United Earth, on the basis of cooperation during the invasion, to begin official peaceful interaction between Insectoids and Humans.
Zolarg forces returned from human territory also brought back some human technologies along with them. The inspiring foreign knowledge have stimulated further development of the Zolarg Empire in terms of economy, science, society and military, and indirectly led to an innovative invention of Insectoids - Mind Network.
While the human cities and colonies were rebuilding, humans also obtained interesting information from the remains of Alpha Draconian machines in Barracuda Blues. These cutting-edge machines have some linkage with the ancient aliens, which the scientists and archaeologists figured out these engines are derived from the ancient alien knowledge recorded on the artifacts scattered all around the galaxy. This discovery will bring drastic changes to human history, a new era of future technologies is predictable in the future not so far away.
Understanding they are not alone in the Galaxy, United Earth begin recognizing the importance of galactic diplomacy, in order to protect themselves (from Alpha Draconians that might return someday in a larger war), as well as seeking for new opportunities. they begin establishing contacts between alien civilizations as they colonize new planets, not just the major civilization like the Zolarg Empire, but also more minor ones.


The Milky Way Galaxy had changed a lot - although there had been wars, costing thousands of lives. Does the war worth anything in the end? Nobody will have an ultimate conclusion, what we know is, war, is always changing our history.




THAT IS ALL!
We also hope @bastecklein can leave some comments on the story idea so far.

Hi, I purchased EZ diary premium on my android phone, Then I installed the app on my laptop from the windows store. The windows app is not showing that it is premium and is still showing ads. Do I need to purchase premium on all my devices?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Debuffs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buffs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-------------------------------

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

The app updated and now all my entries are gone. :( Can anyone tell me the extension of the diary files so I can search my computer for where they might be?

Yesterday and this morning I pushed out the v0.55.0 update for My Colony to all platforms, and it should be arriving to your device as the relevant app stores give their stamps of approval. This is a smaller update than normal, but it still has some goodies. I planned on adding more but everyone in our house has been sick for the last week and I couldn't get myself into the mood to do that much work. Still though, check out what's new in v0.55.0!

My Colony v0.55.0 Changelog

New Stuff

• New Structures: First Aid Station, Trash Transporter, Paste Extractor, Square of Arbitration
• New Occupations: Medic, Arbiter
• New Engine Setting: Low-Res Mode
• Windows Native Client gets a 32bit build

Changes

• Reptilians can now build a slightly modified version of the Insectoid Mining Operation (keep in mind it requires some civics to build)
• Further increased the rate of colonist aging
• Increased the rate of IQ growth at entertainment facilities that offer IQ
• 'Show Workers' list on a building now lets you focus on each individual worker with a new 'View' button
• Lowered the trade capacity of the Reptilian Star Gate

Notes

With this release, Reptilians now have the ability to start generating Civics and Ant Paste. I also nerfed the Reptilian Star Gate a bit, as it really made them too powerful too early on. Next update there will be another host of Reptilian structures, and probably a third Reptilian planet, one that starts with no atmosphere. The game has all of these graphics assets for Reptilians with little purple space helmets on, but they are never used because the current planets both start with full atmosphere. This must be addressed!

Moving on, I have released a 32bit build for My Colony native client on Windows 7/8/10, which you can download on the Ape Market website here: https://market.ape-apps.com/my-colony.html . Now, I do not actually have a 32 bit machine myself, so I have not 100% tested it, but it does install fine on a 64bit machine. If you use 32 bit Windows, give it a try and let me know. The two releases on the download page are clearly labeled 32 and 64 bit, so if you do have a 64bit machine, you should use the 64bit build, as it allows more memory to be used by the game than the 32bit version does.

For Human colonies, a new occupation class has been added, the Medic, and all medical facilities have been updated to use the new Medic class. You can now set pay scale rates for the Medic at your Consulate or Capitol.

In further continuance of the quest to increase performance on lower-end devices, My Colony now has a new Low-Res mode option, which you can find in the Engine Settings menu. Low-Res mode will recompile all game textures to 75% of their native size as they are loaded, thus reducing memory usage and speeding up render times. A lot of progress has been made on reducing processing times for the actual simulation aspects of the game, but if you benchmark the game in your browser of choice, you will see that generally 80% or more of it's processing is taken up by rendering the graphics of the game. Low-Res mode should improve this a little more on slower devices, as does the 'Check Render Distance' option which is already available. On really slow devices which are having troubles keeping their FPS up right from the beginning, the game will now automatically switch into Low-Res mode without input from the user.

Finally, I have increased the rate of IQ and age growth among colonists. I want to start making Age and IQ a factor in the game, but I first need to get the game to where those stats are actually fluid with the population, so I will be making tweaks to Age and IQ over the next few updates, so be aware of that.

One last thing, I have been putting together a small My Colony themed game that will probably come out within the week or so. It is essentially my game My Business Empire but with My Colony themed businesses and an added tech-unlocking system. More details will come in a few days, but this is the closest My Colony will ever be to an 'idle' game 🙂

Anyway, that's all for today. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

Today after spending a couple of weeks away from work vacationing for U.S. Independence Day, I am releasing My Colony v0.68.0, which should be rolling out shortly to all platforms.

The primary focus on this update is attempting to address the huge black hole of sorrow and despair that is My Colony for Android. Of all versions of the game, Android has the most technical issues in terms of stability and performance. In fact, My Colony on Android has a force-close rate of almost 7%, which is really very high. Unfortunately, the crash reports coming in look like this:

As you can see, not much to go by at all. Obviously the crashes are happening with the WebView, which is powered by whatever version of Google Chrome the user has installed on their device. Sadly, this is an issue that has been impacting many Android users since at least last June, with an ongoing issue submitted to Google here, which has yet to receive any meaningful resolution. Many think it's due to Google's own AdMob ads, but it is also occurring for Premium users with no ads, so it is hard to tell. It may also be related to memory constraints, since on many devices Android only allows 128mb of RAM per app, regardless of how much RAM the device actually has. Sadly due to the limited crash reports, it is very hard to tell exactly what the problem is.

Due to the high crash rate on Android, Google has essentially blacklisted My Colony on Google Play, reducing downloads from the 3,000 per day range down to the 200 per day range. Since a vast majority of the installs for My Colony come from Google Play, this has made the game financially nonviable, no longer even generating the funds necessary to maintain the server required to support online play.

Because of the gravity of the issue, if My Colony cannot be fixed on Android, I will have to lower it's priority and focus on other apps that can bring in more revenue so that I can actually eat and support my family. The task is made difficult by the lack of information available on what is causing the crashes.

I suspect the primary issue is the game hitting Android imposed RAM limitations. As there are now nearly 400 structures in the game, over 50 units, and many terrain elements, many graphical elements have to be loaded at run time. While the engine already delays loading graphics until they are used, large colonies that have essentially all types of buildings are a larger drain on RAM. Also, large map sizes exponentially require the about of RAM needed for path-finding operations while moving rovers around the map.

There is no good way to clean up these issues on Android without limiting choices available to the user. At some point though, reality needs to set in and a mobile game simply cannot have all of the full features available on a Desktop class game, which is how My Colony is designed. I believe some things on Android will need to be "nerfed" in order to fit in with the power and memory constraints imposed on the platform.

For the reasons mentioned above, the bulk of today's updates are aimed at reducing memory overhead on Android devices. Some of these changes are as follows:

• Video-ad gifts from the Galactic Emperor no longer appear on Android
• On new map creation, Extra Large and Mega maps are no longer available on Android
• If a previous force-close is detected, the game is automatically switched into lo-res mode on next launch, unless the user has previously set the graphics resolution manually.
• Banner ads no longer show up on Android

These changes to Android are only the start, and I will be watching diagnostics data to see if they help or not.

I suspect the most controversial change will be the removal of the Extra Large and Mega map sizes. I do like to give users maximum choice, but the reality is that most users automatically pick the largest available map size every time, despite the in-game warning that performance may be impacted. This leads to slower performance, out-of-RAM crashes, and therefore bad reviews.

The removal of the emperor Video Ads and the Banner Ads on Android was done since there is strong evidence on the Google support group that Google's own ads are causing a lot of these crashes. This was tough to weigh, because the loss of revenue due to the removal of advertising will be significant, although it will probably be less than the loss of Premium Upgrade revenue due to the blacklisting from the crashes. I will just have to wait and see if it makes a difference and if it helps. I need to have some way to pay for the server and also make a profit on the game in order for it to be worth my time, but if the ads are killing the game then there is no point in having them. It is something of a lose-lose situation, since My Colony was designed with an extraordinary amount of free content, largely possible because of the advertising. If the ads are killing the game though, that mix might need to be reevaluated.

So as I said, I will monitor Android and see if I can get the crashes reduced and the game revived. Maybe the above changes will help, or maybe they will do nothing. As I showed, the crash logs really do not show anything meaningful. They also made a change recently where the feedback users can send to Google Play when the app force closes no longer makes it to the developer, so you can't see what people said about what they were doing before the game crashed. That is a little FYI to everyone on Android, don't waste your time adding comments when you submit a force-close report to Google Play, since the developer never sees them anymore.

So anyway, apart from the Android specific changes, Desktop users will see a new 'filter' option at the bottom of the build sidebar.

As you might imagine, this lets you type in the name of a building to do a search, instead of scrolling through everything to find the building you are looking for. And before you ask, know that similar functionality will be coming to mobile editions of the game in a future release.

In addition, Human players get a new alien-tech structure, the Alien Plastic Factory. I saw a suggestion for it in the suggestions forum, and decided to throw it in there real quick.

The Cloning Facility has been added to the Immigration build category. It isn't really an immigration building, but it adds people to the colony, so it was the best fit available.

Finally, several bugs have been patched in this release, including a bug associated with uploading a screenshot to your colony homepage and a gamepad control issue on Amazon Fire TV devices.

So anyway, that is it for today's update. I apologize to the Android users for the ongoing crashing issues. I have been trying to fix them for some time now, but the error reports are extremely unhelpful which has made the issues hard to pin down and correct. I suspect more changes will be coming to Android users over the coming updates, so stay tuned for that. And thanks to everybody for playing the game, hope you enjoy!

A couple of weeks ago, I announced that I was considering discontinuing the Ape Apps Launcher and most of my native desktop applications in favor of directing users towards the Progressive Web App (PWA) edition of my apps and games.

The Ape Apps Launcher was first released in early 2018 using Electron, and was initially created because there were a lot of capabilities required by my apps that I was just not able to deliver through the web browser. In the last 3 1/2 years though, a lot has changed. Both Microsoft and Google have gone all-in on PWA's, and between the two of them, they make PWA's installable, offline capable, with almost the entire native all feature set on nearly every platform. Because of this, it no longer makes sense to put in all of the hours and effort required to maintain the Ape Apps Launcher and the native Desktop host platform, when their entire purpose is now integrated natively into every major platform.

That said, the Launcher does offer a few things not found on my website, and also provides a nice place to access everything Ape Apps from one single desktop application. I do recognize how handy it can be for some people, so going forward I plan to "sort of" keep the launcher going, but with a bit of a twist.

The Ape Apps Launcher itself is going to become a Progressive Web App, which you will be able to install on any device, even mobile. I will still maintain the native download edition of the application, but it will basically be a wrapper for the PWA. This will allow me to continue providing the capabilities of the launcher, but without having to maintain the separate Web App Core codebase for Electron. It also means I will be able to make updates to the Launcher itself without having to upload new binaries whenever I want to publish a change.

Similar to the new PWA launcher, I will also be releasing another PWA called Ape Web Apps TV Mode, which is sort of like the launcher except built with a 10 foot interface and can be controlled entirely using a gamepad. This is designed for computers connected to a TV (like home theater PC's) and gives a console-like interface and access to all of your Ape Apps games and applications. You will even be able to use the Ape Web Apps TV Mode launcher on gaming devices like the Xbox One/Series S/X, which will be getting the new Chromium based Edge soon, along with full PWA capabilities, or on Android TV devices. Below is an early-build screenshot of the TV Mode launcher.


You can think of the TV mode launcher as basically an Ape Apps gaming console that runs as an app within existing devices/consoles, and should give you access to the entire Ape Apps library on any television (you can also just use it on a PC or Phone if you have a bluetooth gamepad connected and prefer the interface).

So that it was is in store for the Launcher. There will not be any more work going in to the current Electron build of the application, as I move all important code directly to my server. If you are currently using the Ape Apps Launcher, it will automatically be upgraded to the new PWA-hosted edition once it is ready, so there is nothing you need to do. And I will make a separate post/announcement when the TV launcher is complete and ready for use.

#apeappslauncher

As I'm sitting here putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.87.0 patch, I realize that there must be something seriously wrong with me, for this is the second update in a row where I have decided to just totally go in and rewrite or change large parts of the game engine. I have to apologize if I am making you all feel like guinea pigs, although I suspect that My Colony players are going to be used to that by now. So what all has changed in v0.87.0? Let's find out!

Firstly, I had introduced a ton of engine changes in the last update, and game error/crash reports started filling my inbox as soon as the release hit the app stores. Luckily the reports were quite helpful and I was able to fix a ton of problems in the code, some of which led me to long-standing issues that I didn't even know existed.

I also isolated several memory leaks in the game that were causing thousands and thousands of arrays to be created and never destroyed, causing the garbage collector to run like mad. I believe a lot of them have now been resolved, so I am hoping that this comes with performance improvements, particularly on lower-RAM devices like smartphones.

I also fixed an issue that had basically made tourists useless.

The City name size on the Regional view has been reduced a bit, and there is now a toggle button in the corner that you can press to turn the city name display off completely.

Of course, the above is all small peas compared to the main thing I added in this version. If you listened to the latest episode of the My Colony Podcast, you already knew what was coming in this release - Multiplayer Regions. While still in it's early state, I think that Multiplayer Regions has the potential to add a ton to the game. The feature works similarly to how regular regions work today, but there are a few key differences, which I will explain below.

Firstly, when you create a new Multiplayer Region, you are not the owner of the overall region, and the regional game file is not stored on your device. The region and all of it's interconnected statistics are stored on the server. In addition, all multiplayer region subcities require cloud sync to be turned on. You also cannot switch a multiplayer region subcity into offline mode. A Multiplayer Region gets its own charter code, which you can initially set to either public or private. Anybody who knows the regional charter code can join.

There are difference in the way the game plays also, beginning with when you first create a new subcity inside of a multiplayer region. When you create a new multiplayer region subcity, if it is your first city in that region, you will be asked to join the charter of another colony. You can pick whatever colony you want, and what race/civilization you are will depend on which mother colony you choose. As you might be able to guess, this means that multiple species can be in the same region.

On a regular region game, the entire region map shares resources and power. This is not the case on a multiplayer region. On multiplayer regions, the entire map shares only atmosphere. Beyond that, cities are grouped into a new organizational unit called Metropolitan Areas. A metro area is a group of cities owned by the same player that are built right next to each other. So if you start a second city on a multiplayer region and you build it right next to your first city, it is automatically added to the same metro area. Metro areas do share the same resources and power grid, so if you are building multiple cities on a multiplayer region map, it will be a good idea to put them next to each other.

On a regular region game, all of your cities continue to produce and consume resources while you are playing, regardless if you are in that region file or not. This is not currently the case on multiplayer regions, but it will probably be in the future. There are actually some general changes that are coming to this feature on all regions soon, and I was going to wait to implement it in multiplayer regions at the same time that I make the changes to single player regions.

Other than those changes, multiplayer regions are currently pretty similar to regular regions. I wanted to get them out there and running so that I can see what issues people have (if any) and see what kind of features players would like to see added, but off the top of my head, I want to make it so that multiple players can share the same metro area/power grid/resources. Also a sort of regional common trade area, perhaps regional governments. I think this can also be tied in with federations somehow.

This is a feature where I am open to all suggestions. Over the next few weeks I am going to be splitting my work between Colony Wars and updating the My Colony website to take advantage of a lot of the features I've added to the game. In the meantime I will be collecting diagnostics and feedback related to Multiplayer Regions (and everything else for that matter). The feature is still in it's infancy, but I think that it has the potential to add a lot to the game!

That's all for today. The update should be hitting all devices throughout the weekend, so be on the lookout, and let me know what issues you find. Enjoy, and stay tuned for more!

EZ Diary sorts by latest entry.
Can I sort it by diary date?
I am adding some entries from 2021, so now the list of entries on the screen is not in date order.

Does anyone know why EZ Diary has basically ceased to exist? Like I open the app and this is what I get every time:
I really liked this app a lot & I'm sad it no longer works.

I have been using EZ Diary for 7 months +/- now and today I can't open it up to add to it. It shows 191 entries and I can't get in to add any more. Can anyone suggest a fix/work around?
Thank you.

This is not where this belongs. It is an EZ item, so this thread likely belongs to the "EZ Diary" forum segment.

The app updated and I no longer have a search function in diary. I also liked the old layout better.

Howdy. I set a password to log in to the Ape Apps app, mainly EZ Diary. A month ago, I wanted to have a password-protected file. I can't unlock it now. Is there a procedure for revoking my password or setting a new password? Incorrect password is answer for my try to open. Thank you

Update: 3/1/2019 v2.6.1: Vast improvements have been made to the SMB1 mode, if it wasn't working for you before, please give it another try.

I am pushing out the v2.6.0 release for Network Browser, which should be hitting all devices within a few days. This release fixes a few bugs, and allows you to re-enable SMB1 support, if the last update's removal of it killed your configuration.

Turning the support back on is done through the new Application Settings dialog which is found in the slideout menu. This is the new centralized location for all application configuration settings. The new SMB1 Mode feature is there for people who lost access to some devices from the last update. v2.5.0 removed support for SMB1 connections as the protocol is outdated and less secure (and not even supported in the latest Windows 10 updates), but some configurations and NAS devices require the protocol, so you can now switch Network Browser back into SMB1 mode. Keep in mind that changing into SMB1 mode will require a full restart of the application.

I thought about allowing the advanced user to configure more of the available JCIFS properties from this settings window, but if nobody would use any of the configuration options I will not waste the time on the effort. If you look at this link, you will see all of the available JCIFS configuration settings that I could theoretically implement into this settings window. If anybody sees anything in there that they think would actually be beneficial to them and their setup, just let me know and I would be happy to add the options into the app. Most settings are going to be for advanced configurations and should not be needed for home setups, but there is always a network guy out there with a crazy configuration at home, or somebody using the app in a school or work environment, so just let me know what you would like to see added here in the comments and I will see what I can do for the next release.

Beyond these options, this update fixes several bugs and completes the migration of the app from the old Apache JCIFS library to the updated jcifs-ng library, which supports SMB2 and partially SMB3. This process was started in the last update but it has now been fully migrated.

Continue letting me know what issues you run into and I will try to get them resolved. Thanks again for using Network Browser!

Let me first start off by saying that I know bast is focused on finishing antiquitas and he probably will not consider another race until he has time to focus solely on my colony.

So here are my ideas for races that could be put in the game. I can only include six because the poll only allows for six possible answers.

1. Automations:
Description: A Utopian sentient robot society whose sole purpose is to terraform worlds into beautiful paradises. They need less care than organic colonists, they have no need for a government since greed, deceit, and violence are not a part of their nature, and they only produce what they need to terraform the planet and survive as they give the rest back to their planet. They prefer to be an isolated society but warmly welcome and care for newcomers from other races.

Difficulty: Very Easy-easy
Production potential: the least out of all races
Main building resource: ore
Terraforming Potential: the most efficient out of all races
Economic potential: very low
Governmental potential: the least out of all races
research potential: average
growth rate: very high
Tourist potential: very high
Food and water production: the most efficient out of all races
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: very little.
Colonist eats: power and small amounts of oil, new colonists are built from ore.
Colonist entertained by: Work, walking around when planet is between 5-15 mil atmosphere, research.
Building method: buildings are built by vehicles, same as humans and insectoids.
optimum atmosphere range: 5-15 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100

2.) Reptilians
Description: A society built on honor for one's neighbor and zealous loyalty to the theocracy. These people are known for their vast uses of crystalline since a viable source of regolith, ore, and gold couldn't be found on their home planet. They synthesize the purest crystalline out of all races. The reptilians need less governing, but they can still build a very strong government unlike the automations. A more advanced race than humans, the reptilians build structures that are more autonomous and require less workers. Their honorbound and zealous disposition often prevents them from asking important questions though, which limits the amount of research they produce, and their technology and society allow them to function very well in all environments, which hinders their motivation to terraform even though they would still prefer to live in a hospitable environment. Because of the reptilians tendency to colonize planets with hostile environments, not many people want to move to reptilian worlds. The reptilians are not know for their capacity for trading and economics as they serve a theocracy, but they do need money to survive and trading is a means to an end for them.


Difficulty: medium-hard
Production potential: very high
Main building resource: crystalline
Terraforming Potential: the least efficient out of all races
Economic potential: average
Governmental potential: the best out of all races
research potential: low
Growth rate: low
Tourist potential: low
Food and water production: average
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: low to moderate.
Colonist eats: food and water
Colonist entertained by: religion, fighting arenas, human-like entertainment
building method: buildings warps are started and left alone to build themselves as the vehicle does other tasks. This slows down build speed though.
optimum atmosphere range: 2.5-30mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100

3.) Jellyfish
Description: The Jellyfish thrive in high atmospheric conditions as they do not live on the ground but build their cities in the sky out of floating structures. The jellyfish survive solely on atmosphere instead of food and water. The jellies pride themselves in their various uses of atmosphere, but this drains the planet of all atmosphere eventually, so it's a race against time to develop the technologies and resources for adding atmosphere back to the planet. On their homeworld, a gas giant, native plants and animals balance the ecosystem by producing atmosphere, but even that isn't enough to support a fast growing civilization. The jellies are creatures of curiosity, which fuels their motivation for research, and their society promotes a balanced governmental authority. They tend to be avid traders and economists and are very welcoming, but their high atmospheric environment is inhospitable to most races, hindering tourism and immigration. Their terraforming methods are very effective, but their needs for atmosphere always put a damper on any terraforming effects. When colonizing a low atmospheric planet, they build bubble-like structures on the ground that rise into the sky as the planet's atmosphere increases. These bubbles need to be attached to one another so that jellies can travel inside of them, because they lack the technology to develop environmental suits to walk outside on those planets. The jellies also use different animals from their homeworld to collect resources and morph into structures.

Difficulty: medium
Production potential: average
Main building resource: atmosphere
Terraforming Potential: high
Economic potential: the best out of all races
Governmental potential: average
research potential: very high
growth rate: very high
Tourist potential: very low
Food and water production: the least efficient out of all races
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: depends on the planet.
Colonist eats: atmosphere
Colonist entertained by: regular entertainment
building method: worker animals are morphed into structures and cannot be helped by other workers, this causes a slower build speed.
optimum atmosphere range: 10-100 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100

4.) Snowmen
Description: A younger race, the snowmen live in smaller tribes and work together to expand their reach. They look like yeti with thick white fur, but don't let them fool you, they are crafty. They thrive in taiga environments where wood and snow abound, but they have difficulty working and moving in warmer environments. They were uplifted and given space travel technology by this LIS, but they were never given the technology to colonize planets that aren't within the 1 mil to 15 mil range. Their tribal form of government makes it hard for them to form a strong government and they aren't recognized as advanced enough to be taken seriously by most space-faring races. Some people even keep them as slaves to do their work. As a result, the snowmen are cynical and inhospitable toward outsiders and have trouble accepting anyone of another race into their society. They devote all of their time to gathering resources and materials for building up the colony because they long to be recognized as an official space-faring race. Their mass production plans require many many jobs though due to their primitive machines and buildings, and this race has average growth, so progress through the game will be slower.

Difficulty: hard-brutal
Production potential: high
Main building resource: wood
Terraforming Potential: average
Economic potential: the least of all the races
Governmental potential: low
research potential: the best out of all races
growth rate: average
Tourist potential: the least out of all races
Food and water production: average
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: high
Colonist eats: food, water
Colonist entertained by: primitive and human-like entertainment
building method: built by workers/vehicles like xolarg and humans build.
optimum atmosphere range: 1-10 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 1-10 mil

4.) Ancients
Description: Those purple buildings that you see in every advanced colony; yeah, they came from these guys. The most advanced race in the game, most ancients see all other races as inferior to them and usually won't trade with other races unless they have to. This god complex makes them too arrogant to see their mistakes or to try to improve their technology and they are more than willing to invite outsiders from primitive races to bask in the glory of their technology. As the most advanced race, they are inherently the best at resource production. Their buildings are more autonomous as well, but the ancients only mate once a year, so they are the slowest growing of all races. Their government is pretty effective due to the use of more advanced technology to enforce laws, but providing entertainment will be harder since these people require more intelligent entertainment that usually costs more. Every ancient would love to live in a paradise, so terraforming is a higher priority, especially since the ancient can only tollerate a 7.5-12.5 mil atmosphere range is required for ancients to survive without protection.

Difficulty: hard-brutal
Production potential: the best of all races
Main building resource: ore
Terraforming Potential: high
Economic potential: low
Governmental potential: high
research potential: low
growth rate: slowest of all races
Tourist potential: average
Food and water production: high
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: low, but slow growth rate means that game progress takes the longest.
Colonist eats: food, water
Colonist entertained by: more intelligent entertainment
building method: buildings warped in like reptilians
Optimum atmosphere range: 7.5-12.5 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100 mil

6.) Tallorians/rock men
Description: As Sulfur-based lifeforms, the tallorians survive and thrive in the hottest places of the galaxy. Their rocky exoskeletons protect them from any envorinment, but they prefer a hotter, higher atmosphere planet like their homeworld. The wildlife and spectacular views on rock men planets attracts attention from tourism and the rock men make a killing off of novelties. The rock men promote a balanced government, terraforming, and research stance and they have a stellar economy, but where they have an abundance of attention and money, they lack in production and growth.They have a somewhat similar technology to humans, but they use less resources as they are not a production focused raced.

Difficulty: medium-hard
Production potential: low
Main building resource: regolith
Terraforming Potential: average
Economic potential: very high
Governmental potential: average
research potential: average
growth rate: low
Tourist potential: Very high
Food and water production: very low
Micromanagement needs at beginning of game: medium
Colonist eats: ore
Colonist entertained by: human-like entertainment,
building method: buildings warped in like reptilians
Optimum atmosphere range: 20-40 mil
Colonizable atmosphere range: 0-100 mil

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


earthlike Planet specific ideas:

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

Waterworld specific ideas:

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

red planet specific ideas:

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

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

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

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

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


Lunar specific ideas:

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

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

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

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

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


Forest Planet ideas:

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

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

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

Asteroid planet ideas:

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

craters: the same concept as the lunar planet.

meteor showers: the same concept as lunar planet

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

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

Abandoned World Ideas:

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

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

Ice planet ideas:

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

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

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

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

desert world:

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

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

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

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

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

Lava planet ideas:

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

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

ideas for all existing planets:

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

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

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

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

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




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

Hello guys!

May I proudly present my fan lore about the history of My Colony Universe!

The calendars and year used would be Earth ones.

Time of the Ancients (??? ~ 1.2 billion years before Alpha Draconians)
Once there was a thriving old civilization ruled over the Milky Way Galaxy, which now they are called the Ancients. Even for the Alpha Draconians, there are limited documents about their history. The following will state the events recorded and decoded so far.

• The Old Holy Galactic Empire (???).
  That was the oldest trace of the Ancients found.
• Galaxian-Titan War (???).
  There were very old literature records about this war. The war between the Holy Empire and the warlike colossus Titan civilization. There are still some rare Titan relics found in the Milky Way, though some historians doubted the reliability of them.
  The war was supposed to put the Titans to extinction.
• The Old Dark Galactic Empire (???).
  Somehow the old Empire turned to the dark side. From this time on, the documents about them are more difficult to find.
• Reptilian Exodus to the Milky Way (~3 billion years ago before Alpha Draconians).
  The first record of Reptilian immigrants into the Milky Way from another galaxy. Some documents from Alpha Draconians stated their ancestors were nomads with only mostly low tech equipment.
• Galaxian-Reptilian Wars (~2.3 billion years ago before Alpha Draconians).
  The continuous immigration of Reptilians caused conflicts between these new migrants and the master of the Galaxy. However, the Reptilians were not expelled from the Milky Way successfully, an armistice was signed after prolonged warfare. Reptilians stopped immigration in exchange for peace.
• Disappearance of the Old Galactic Empire (~1.2 billion years before Alpha Draconians).
  The largest mystery of galactic history - the disappearance of the Ancients. Most existence of the vast Empire vanished just in a… flash, leaving most parts of the Milky Way Galaxy abandoned. Some radioisotopic dating recorded most ether pollutants of abandoned Ancient cities appeared since the event.

Rise of Reptilians (~4.1 ~ 2.8 million years before human history)
The Disappearance of the Ancients gave rise to the Reptilian immigrants, though discovered a bit lately, they began expanding further into the empty Milky Way Galaxy. Later the Reptilian Empire of Alpha Draconians was formed on the foundations of the disappeared Empire.

• The Reptilian Kingdoms (~0.6 million years before Alpha Draconians).
  The Reptilians recognized the disappearance of The Ancients as scout ships were sent after years losing contact with them. Seeing this as an opportunity to expand their borders without anybody to stop them, the nomadic Reptilians soon reorganized themselves as the Reptilian Kingdoms.
• Great Reptilian Expeditions (~0.5 million years before Alpha Draconians ~ 0.3 million years before Alpha Draconians).
  Hundreds of expeditions were conducted by various Lords during the Kingdoms era. They salvaged most remaining technologies of the Ancients, however unable to decode all the data at this moment as their limited knowledge of these high end technologies. Some new Reptilian major cities rose from these ruins.
• The Warring Lords (~0.3 million years before Alpha Draconians ~ 10 years before Alpha Draconians).
  The powerful artifacts of the Ancients impressed the Reptilians - those supposed to bring prosperity to the entire race, however, became the source of ambitions for the Reptilian Lords. Thousand years of wars, were only for scrambling for these powerful gadgets.
• Reptilian Unification War (~10 years before Alpha Draconians).
  Kingdom of Draconis was the weakest kingdom among the Reptilians, until the time of Lord Alphari - influence of Draconis rose to new heights, threatening the strongest Reptilian Lords. Lord Alphari defeated all the Reptilian Lords in a 10-year long war, successfully unifying the entire Reptilian race for the first time since the immigration.
• Birth of the Reptilian Empire - Alpha Draconians (~3.5 million years before human history).
  Lord Alphari established the new unified Empire of the Reptilians, named Alpha Draconians, with the national motto ‘Rising from the Harshest to be the Strongest’. Alphari was the first Overlord of the Empire.
• Successful Decoding of the Ancient Artifacts (~3.5 million years before human history).
  One of another most impactful achievements of Overlord Alphari was, he supported, and later personally participated in the research of Ancient language decoding. With more plentiful resource support than ever, most major elements of the Ancient language were decoded, which allowed the Alpha Draconians to reverse-engineer these technologies, turning the undeveloped Reptilian civilization into one of the most brutal Galactic superpower, inherited with the most powerful technologies.
• Glorious Conquests (~2.8 million years before human history).
  Another greatest conquest of Alpha Draconians took place under the rule of Overlord Ks'khip. This famous Overlord of Destruction put an end to and enslaved thousands of minor civilizations scattered in the Milky Way Galaxy, which one of the civilizations includes Insectoids, providing highly reproductive slaves. This conquest created the foundation of core Alpha Draconian territory.
  Right after such a successful conquest which brought Alpha Draconians to the peak golden age, the Reptilians began referring to themselves as ‘the descendants of the Ancients’.
• Secretive Galactic Domination Doctrine (~2.8 million years before human history).
  This doctrine formulated by the Overlord Ks'krupp, the descendant of Ks'khip, advocated the secretive way ruling the vast territory of the Empire spreading and maintaining influence by utilizing covert agents to control regions with minimal signs, which helps shaping the image of Alpha Draconians as an unreachable deity. Such doctrine impacted the future development of Alpha Draconians.

The Revival of Insectoid Civilization (~20th century of Human timeline)
Insectoids were being enslaved by Alpha Draconians for millions of years. However, an uprising changed the fate of the Insectoids, which led to the revival of the long lost Insectoid civilization, in the form of the Zolarg Empire.

• The Uprising on Draconis 12 (~1920s of Human timeline).
  It was a historical turning point for both Alpha Draconians and Insectoids. The uprising led by the Insectoid Zolarg successfully overwhelmed the colonial government, and purged all the Reptilian existence on the planet. Freed from slavery, these first group of freedom fighters formed Zolarg Empire right on this planet - which the planet was renamed Zolarg Prime, and the uprising leader Zolarg became the first Emperor of the revivaled Insectoid civilization. The uprising also first revealed the corrupted, weakened national strength of the seemingly invincible Alpha Draconians, who were still blinded by their national pride.
• The Insectoid Uprising Movements (1920~1950s of Human timeline).
  Encouraged and inspired by the success of Zolarg's uprising, Insectoid slaves over Alpha Draconians also followed the same path revolting against slavery. Though not all had been successful, the Insectoids successfully took over an unimaginable number of Alpha Draconian colonies and cities. Most of the Insectoids who earned their freedom joined the Zolarg Empire to fight against the enemy of their ancestors.
• The Revival War (1950~1970s of Human timeline).
  Despite the success overcoming the slavery forces of their slave camps, the Insectoids had something more overwhelming to handle - the formidable regular forces of Alpha Draconians, trying to regain control on their slaves. Yet under the united command under Emperor Zolarg, they managed to defeat Alpha Draconian regular forces in this 27 year long war, using the new subterranean guerilla tactics. The war recorded heavy casualties of both sides, however, Alpha Draconians stalled their operations against the Insectoids, which earned extra time for the Zolarg Empire to fortify themselves and settle down some basic administration matters.
• ‘Groot Opwekkingsplan’ (1970~2010s of human timeline).
  This period was also known as the ‘Great Revival Period’, the period when Emperor Zolarg formulated the policies for the early Zolarg Empire, to rebuild, strengthen and revive the Insectoid civilization, to restore the dignity of the Insectoid race. Under the common efforts of the Insectoids, with the help from both knowledge from the ancestors and some basic industrial knowledge from Alpha Draconians, the foundations of the Zolarg Empire were built up. The fast-rising Zolarg Empire became a supernova of galactic power at the end of the Revival Plan.
• Declaration of Insectoid Liberation (~1990s of human timeline).
  Emperor Zolarg made a declaration on behalf of his Empire to Alpha Draconians - the Zolarg Empire, will liberate the remaining brothers and sisters under slavery at all costs. The Declaration established the long term aim of the wars against Alpha Draconians.

Old Earth Era (year --~2051)
The Old Earth Era is the time of human history before United Earth. The Old Earth Era is when humans begin exploring more parts of the galaxy, as well as beginning extensive colonization on new planets.

• The Jameson Formulas (2027).
  The genius scientist Professor ‘Einstein Jr.’ Lob Jameson published a paper about special formulas of space continuum mechanics. These formulas make a breakthrough on long range space traveling technologies.
• First Practical Hyperdrive Engine (2030).
  With the help of Jameson Formulas, the first practical hyperdrive engine in human history was created by the team of Project Next Sun. The innovation was named Jameson Engine.
• Journey of USP Discovery (2031-2033).
  The USP Discovery is a test object for the Jameson Engine. The probe was launched by NASA of the USA in the year 2035. It had successfully taken photos and data recording of stars and planets at locations about a lightyear away, and at last hyperjumped back to Earth after 3 years of missions, with excellent integrity conditions maintained.
• Planetary Decay Theory (2031)
  Ecologists and geologists discovered a strange phenomenon taking place on Earth, the important resources, from the minerals to the oil, began decaying into unrecyclable, unusable forms. It was suspected that this decaying was catalysed by climate change.
  A theory was formulated predicting the depletion of vital resources within years and this must be stopped. However, most people did not believe this theory to be true, until the Global Resource Crisis.
• The Space Colonization Race (2032-2047)
  With long range space travelling became more possible at that time, a new space race was ignited globally - from the global powers to the most underdeveloped countries, from government bodies to independent organisations, they had their own aims. Some seek for wealth and resources, some seek for opportunities and a new start, some seek for knowledge and discovery. It was a milestone for humanity - first attempts for an extensive space colonization in history.
• Global Resource Crisis (2038-2050)
  The worries stated in the Planetary Decay Theory was proven a fact in 2038, beginning with the abnormal depletion of oil fields in Arabia - the black gold turned into black, harmful, indecomposable sludges.
  For the coming years, more vital resources from iron ores to rare earth metals decayed into sand and dust, which greatly impacted the global economy at the foundations. Which eventually caused all space colonization programmes abandoned by Earth in the year 2047.
• Miracle Formula (2050)
  The Project SEED ecologists from colonies discovered the Miracle Formula, which included a method to reverse the process of planetary decay. It was sent to Earth in the year 2050.
• Restoration of Earth (2051)
  Terraforming devices derived from the Miracle Formula successfully restored Earth back to the conditions about 150 years ago within a year, which saved the entire humanity on the Earth.
• The Grand Collapse (2051)
  Although Earth had been saved from a catastrophe, however, the existing governments no longer had any capabilities maintaining the nations, after years hammered by the economic impacts from such a disaster. The world fell into the status of anarchy.

Rebirth of Humanity (2051-2061)
Right after the Grand Collapse which marked the end of the Old Earth Era, humanity on Earth was in massive chaos, while most colonies outside Earth were deserted and had to survive on their own. Until the United Earth reunited humanity.

• United Nations Dissolved (2051)
  Without any valid members at all, and at risk of ‘bankruptcy’, the United Nations officially dissolved, with all its assets sold at the end of the year, to a group of plutocrats who had survived the crisis.
• Formation of United Earth (2052)
  The legacies of the United Nations were reused by these plutocrats, they rebranded the old international governmental body into a new organisation the United Earth, aimed to restore prosperity and order of the Old Earth.
• Earth Reunification War (2054-2055)
  After 2 years of preparation though gathering weapons and manpower from black markets and government fire sales, the global military campaign was launched by United Earth. In the 1.4 year long war, United Earth brought the major cities and regions under their control.
  The rise of United Earth was inevitable to the rest of the world. It had pressured the remaining regions, no matter at war or not, surrendered and accepted annexation at the end of the war.
• Official Establishment of United Earth (2056)
  A month after the end of the Reunification War, the main official governmental structure of United Earth was established - The President taking the leader role of the government, with the General Assembly responsible to the President.
  The General Assembly is the decision making centre of the United Earth, composed of representatives from different administrative regions to show a certain extent of democracy. However, the President still has absolute veto power in the General Assembly, in addition to a series of exclusive powers.
• Restarting of Colonization Programmes (2061)
  With the Earth gradually stabilized and having the economy restored back to early 21th century standards, United Earth announced the recontinuation of space colonization projects abandoned by the Old Earth. This included re-establishing control on the remaining surviving Old Earth era colonies.
  The restarting of colonization was regarded as the dawn of the United Earth era in human history - from that time on, human civilization began to develop and expand faster than ever.

Rise of Humanity (2061-2083)
The New Era referred to the early times of United Earth after the recovery from the Old Earth era disaster. It was another golden age in human history, human civilization beginning to rise quickly in the Milky Way Galaxy. Despite opportunities, there were also new unknown challenges.

• First Reformation of Security Council (2063-2065)
  The national security agency of the United Earth, Security Council, went under a series of reformation from 2063 to 2065, improving and fostering the efficiency of peacekeeping missions on Earth and foreign colonies, as well as established a controversial high pressure security regulation called AEGIS Protocol.
• Formation of Space Marines (2068)
  In order to protect foreign colonies and Earth from potential Alien threats, United Earth Space Marines (UESM) was formed.
  Space Marines gradually replaced Peacekeepers security forces of the United Earth as the official military.
• First Official Contacts with Minor Alien Civilization (2069)
  United Earth colonization fleets discovered an underdeveloped alien civilization on the planet Hakenduz-35. United Earth officially contacted the Hakenduzians, establishing the first diplomatic relations with an alien race.
• Alien Membership System (2071)
  With more and more minor alien civilizations discovered, United Earth saw that as an opportunity of wealth and influence. In order to convince them sharing their resources with United Earth, an Alien Membership System was established, allowing alien member states to enjoy a series of benefits including protection from Space Marines and preferential treatment on trades. In return, the alien member states had to pay yearly membership fees.
• First Starship in Human History (2071)
  The first starship of United Earth, UES Ark, finished construction in 2071, Martian Industries shipyard on Mars orbit. UES Ark was a prototype long range colony ship, built for exploration and colonization of the Icarus System.
• Deimos Events (2072)
  It was a legend of the legendary Space Marines elite squad led by Sarge, a story to save Earth from an evil artificial intelligence - though, with some confidential details which United Earth decided to keep it secret, rumored to be time travel to erase history of a parallel timeline.
• Wormhole Navigation Technology (2075)
  A set of technological advancements in space navigation technology allowed safe traveling of wormholes, which the wormholes act as a great shortcut for expanding into further regions.

Human Civil War (2083-2084)
This was one of the most impactful wars in the Galaxy. Yes, it's name is Human Civil War, however, things were not simple as most thought at that time - it eventually involved the 3 major civilizations of the Galaxy, and also gave birth to the fourth major civilization. The war also impacted the future patterns in the Milky Way Galaxy.

• Secret Independence Society (~2068)
  The Secret Independence Society (SIS) was the predecessor of the League of Independent States. It was established shortly after United Earth began using high pressure policies to tighten control on the colonies. The SIS worked in secret, cooperated with suppressed people and black markets. Their ultimate aim was to bring true freedom to humanity, freeing them from the internally corrupted ‘tyranny’ of United Earth. They are also one of the earliest groups of humans who made contact with another major civilization in the Galaxy (to be specific, Zolarg Empire) far before United Earth even acknowledged their existence.
  Their existence remained very much not known by the United Earth until the outbreak of the Civil War.
• The Alpha Draconian Conspiracy (around a few months before the outbreak of war)
  It had been a tough time for Alpha Draconians since the Insectoid slave uprising events. To restore the national pride of Alpha Draconians and to find resources repairing the badly impacted economy, Overlord Betahan decided to prepare a secret invasion on humans, picking the timing humans were at the blink of civil war.
  At the same time, another conspiracy took place internally - the rivalry between the Overlord and the Lords of Inner Circle.
• Terra Nova Incident (2083)
  The Incident was the fuse of this war. Everything started with Terra Nova boycotting the heavy taxation of United Earth. Unable to bring the situation under control through conventional routines, United Earth decided to take the most violent military action against Terra Nova (which such decision was partly due to Alpha Draconian covert agents secretly intervened the General Assembly, to accelerate the outbreak of war).
  The incident provided an excellent excuse and opportunity for SIS to throw up a nationwide independence war. SIS militias ambushed the Space Marines in Terra Nova, liberated the colony, and officially declared war on United Earth.
  From that time on SIS was officially renamed as the League of Independent States (LIS).
• Zolarg Empire Entry into the War (2083)
  Before the war, LIS secretly signed an alliance pact with the Zolarg Empire a few months ago (for different aims respectively, but both sides were seeking bilateral support).
  LIS called for Zolarg reinforcements under strong countermeasures of the United Earth. The entry of the Zolarg Empire into the Human Civil War had successfully put the United Earth into a war of two fronts, however the overall situation had not improved very much, the war turned into a stalemate afterwards.
• Barracuda Blues Events, and Alpha Draconian Invasion (2084)
  United Earth discovered an Alpha Draconian secret stronghold with an army of war droids (built for invading humans) in the colony Barracuda Blues, mistaken as an abandoned military research facility. United Earth sent scientists to the site in order to obtain unknown technologies that could help them win the war against LIS.
  The discovery at Barracuda Blues was the result of political rivalry in Alpha Draconians, the Inner Circle attempted to sabotage Overlord's invasion plans.
  The true identity of the facility and the ‘mysterious machines’ was not known by humans, until similar Alpha Draconian war machines of similar models popped out from nowhere, attacking human colonies and cities - The beginning of Alpha Draconian Invasion, an unexpected event during the civil war.
• Battles Against Alpha Draconians (2084)
  At the beginning of the Invasion, Alpha Draconians had been successful that they had occupied over half of United Earth territory.
  Under a common threat from afar, the United Earth, LIS and the Zolarg Empire agreed to put a pause on the civil war, and formed a temporary alliance to expel Alpha Draconian intruders. Their joint operations successfully recapture human territory one by one, slowly setting the intruders back.
  Alpha Draconian Invasion ends after the decisive Battle of Barracuda Blues, the last main portal stronghold destroyed by the alliance, all the Alpha Draconian forces in human territory were shortly destroyed.
• Continuation Human Civil War (2084)
  The civil war was not over.
  Despite victories repelling Alpha Draconian invasion, the forces of United Earth, LIS and Zolarg were almost exhausted in fierce battles with Alpha Draconians (especially after the Siege of Barracuda Blues), little resources they had to continue a large scale war.
  While the Zolarg Empire quitted the war by signing a white peace with the United Earth, both LIS and United Earth sought an opportunity to conclude the war in a single battle.
  The Battle of Kaisergrounds was the end point of the Human Civil War, the only but the last battle after the Invasion event. Kaisergrounds was a strategic stronghold which was the important gateway to the core economic regions of United Earth. The battle ended with the United Earth forces regained control of the planet, it had contributed United Earth a strategic victory.

New Galactic Era of the Milky Way Galaxy (From 2084 on)
The Human Civil War and the Alpha Draconian Invasion during the war, had drawn the major civilizations closer. The New Galactic Era was the time things in the Milky Way began developing in galactic scale and perspectives.

• Armistice of Hoxton (2084)
  The Armistice of Hoxton officially ended the Human Civil War, despite it being just an armistice. The armistice defined the United Earth-LIS border in the future, which the border line was known as the Hoxton Line.
  To conclude, nobody had won a total victory in the Human Civil War, however, each side won alternatively - United Earth won a strategic victory which LIS could no longer push deeply into the core territories, while LIS achieved their primary aim of gaining independence.
• Official Establishment of League of Independent States (2084)
  The League of the Independent States was officially established 3 months after the Armistice of Hoxton was in effect. The League promised fairness, autonomy and freedom to the member states as stated in the Declaration of Independence.
  The League of the Independent States had no actual leader in power. Instead, each member state cooperates under the common principles, bearing the common responsibilities protecting people of the League.
  Though the establishment of LIS was officially recognized by their ally Zolarg Empire, the United Earth General Assembly declared they would never accept any rogue states in their ethnic territory.
• The Midnight Coup (~2084)
  With the failure of invasion on humans, the core Reptilian society of Alpha Draconians lost all confidence in Overlord Betahan. Shortly after the end of invasion the Overlord was assassinated by Inner Circle covert agents.
  However, it did not put an end on the political crisis in Alpha Draconians, the coup further made everything worse instead. Every Lord of Inner Circle schemed to reach the throne of ultimate power, however there could only be one supreme ruler in Alpha Draconians. In order to secure the thrones for selves, the Lords fell into a status of internal political war.
  The absence of Overlord, and the internal political instability, catalysed the decay of Alpha Draconian influence in the Galaxy.
• Emerging of New Galactic Empire (2086)
  The decayed Alpha Draconian influence after the Midnight Coup were not able to maintain control on a number of puppet states and territories, they began to break away from the Alpha Draconians.
  This had also given rise to the mysterious organization New Galactic Empire, who then annexed part of the states that broke away from Alpha Draconians. They called themselves the true descendants of the Old Galactic Empire, who carried the ‘inevitable destiny’ reviving the old Imperial glory.
  Though the ambitious organisation lacked strength to compete with any of the galactic powers in the Milky Way at the moment, the powers actually worried the ‘New Empire’ could be a large threat to them in the future, given their capabilities spreading influence at an unprecedented rate.
• Further Discoveries in Barracuda Blues (2086)
  United Earth sent another research team investigating the remains of the Alpha Draconian stronghold and facilities. The team revealed a fact about Alpha Draconian technologies - they were derived from the Ancient technologies recorded on the ancient artifacts.
  The discovery further fostered the research and decoding on the information on the artifacts of the Ancients in United Earth.
• Bradley's Military Reform (2086-2093)
  The new head of the United Earth Security Council, Marshal Bradley (which was the supreme commander throughout the Human Civil War), threw up a massive military reformation in order to suppress the military capabilities of LIS, including expanding the scale of Space Marines and especially the Starfleet (which the number of starships during the Civil War barely met demands on the battlefields), written a new professionalism military doctrine, and supported the development of new generation starships.
• LIS Black Market Trade Union (2088)
  The blockades and embargo on LIS by United Earth had cut down most of the methods for LIS to contact the outside world. In order to survive and maintain development under the difficult conditions, LIS officially established the LIS Black Market Trade Union which facilitates external and domestic trade of their member states.
• Galactic Colonization Race (2102~???)
  Seeking for further power in the Milky Way Galaxy for their own aims, the 4 civilizations of the Galaxy entered the galactic colonization race one by one. Alpha Draconians started the race, who were desperate to restore their ‘superiority’ in the Galaxy despite political instability.
  From the centre of the Galaxy to the Outer Rims, they were all targets of colonization.
• United Earth Ancient Archives (2109)
  The Archives is a department of United Earth which is responsible for regulating research and usage related to Ancient alien technologies. Apart from regulations, they also take part in the research of the ancient technologies. Since the Archives existed United Earth had better progress extracting ancient knowledge with better organisation.
• Chaos in Alpha Draconis and Restoration of Overlord (2112)
  Oligarchists in Alpha Draconis had been dissatisfied with the absence of Overlord for a period of time. With the old culture of Reptilians being harmed, these angry nobles stirred up chaos in the capital city, urging the restoration of Overlord.
  Without any other ways to suppress or pacify them, the Lords of the Inner Circle could only do as what these (lower) nobles asked them to (well, since their own plans were also disrupted due to the chaos).
  The exiled younger brother of the previous Overlord Betahan, Deltahan, was put to the throne. Despite being an Overlord, most actual powers were still in the hands of the Inner Circle, Deltahan was just nothing more than a puppet.
• Zolarg Scholars Journey to United Earth (2113)
  A team of scholars from the Zolarg Empire, led by the Imperial High Scholar Abbe Amber, set off to United Earth for a study trip of human technologies.
  Scholars and scientists of the United Earth and the Zolarg Empire exchanged each other's knowledge and culture. While Zolarg scholars earned a bunch of precious knowledge which could help the technological development of the Zolarg Empire, the trip had also fostered the understanding between the United Earth and the Zolarg Empire, easing the tension since the Human Civil War a bit.
• Insectoid Mind Network Technology (2116)
  A breakthrough in neuroscience research in the Zolarg Empire had led to an innovation - the Insectoid Mind Network, designed to foster understanding of consciousness and thinking, and enhancing advanced, direct communication and coordination of Insectoid society.
• Cyberonic Transcendence (2119)
  A private United Earth research institute Transcendent Technology successfully prototyped Neuro-microchips (NMC), which were compatible with human neuro systems, small in size, but ten times more efficient than average human brains.
  The technology contributed to turning the futuristic cyberonic transcendence reality among humans.

Who knows what the future holds?




Hopefully the timeline looked decent and reasonable for My Colony Universe!
Thanks for reading!

Notes: not all events are 100% accurate.

Network Browser has just been updated to v2.2.0 and packs an exciting new much-requested feature - in-app picture viewing!

Traditionally Network Browser has relied on the standard device picture gallery app to display pictures. This was normally fine, but often left TV users high and dry. It also did not allow for swiping through a folder full of pictured. This has changed, with the new in-app picture viewer. You can swipe through images, save them to your local device, and even set them into slideshow mode.

In slideshow mode, your device will work like one of those digital picture frames, except using pictures from your network. It works on all devices, but should be particularly useful on TV and tablet devices.

Also, when Network Browser detects that you have entered a folder with a bunch of pictures, you will now see this notice:


This allows you to switch directly into digital picture frame mode, without first having to open the photo viewer. So turn your rarely-used tablet into an awesome digital picture frame, or use your TV to show off your picture album from your last vacation!

Network now detects and has new file-icon associations for .nes files, which are Nintendo ROM's (original Nintendo). When you open a folder full of NES Roms, it now looks like this:


The really awesome part is coming soon though, because I am soon adding a built-in NES emulator to Network Browser! Emulation will work with both touch-screen devices and with a gamepad on Android TV. Now if you have a on of NES Roms on the network, you can turn your TV or phone into an NES! If the feature proves popular, I will look into adding more emulation support. NES support should be in the next update.

Further down the line, I am planning on adding bulk-folder uploading from phone to network, which is a frequently requested feature. Also, I am planning on tying Network Browser to online TV and Movie meta-data databases, so that when you browse to a folder full of TV shows or movies, the app will automatically fetch and display the meta data for you, along with movie posters. I might do something similar for music as well.

Anyway, that's all for this update. Enjoy Network Browser, leave your comments/issues/concerns here, and stay tuned for more!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

potions and consumable:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The My Colony Universe Real Time Strategy (RTS) game Colony Wars has just been updated to v0.8.0, which is live now at it's new web domain and should be hitting Android over the coming days. This is the first real update to Colony Wars in about two years, so the game was long overdue. v0.8.0 contains a lot of updates "under the hood" and some quality of life improvements throughout, so let's take a look what is new!


The biggest change "structurally" to the game is one I mentioned in a thread earlier this week, which is that Colony Wars has been migrated off of the Web App Core framework and is now a stand-alone web app hosted at https://wars.my-colony.com/. If you previously had the Colony Wars progressive web app (PWA) installed to your device from the old Ape Web Apps location, you should uninstall it and reinstall the new one from the new URL.

The next change is the revamped title screen, which you can see in the screenshot above. The old title screen was also a component of Web App Core, so after migrating off of the library, I had to re-write the title from scratch. I sort of tried to copy off of the Red Alert 2 title screen (at least in terms of layout), since many of the game concepts are borrowed from RA2 anyway. Eventually, the background image on the title is going to cross fade between different battle scenes.

You will notice on the title screen that there is a new Quick Match button. This was added in response to Play Store feedback that setting up a new game could sometimes be too complicated on mobile devices. Now if you just want to quickly play a match, hop in the game and click on Quick Match. You will instantly be taken to a random map in Skirmish mode against how ever many AI opponents the map supports.


Improvements have been made to the New Game Lobby. You can now finally assign different teams to AI players, and change the color of the AI opponents as well. You can even assign AI players to be on your own team, if you wish. You might also notice a new map available called Crossroads. This was created by @GeneralWadaling , so if you enjoy the map please let him know!

Since we are on the subject of new maps, the Map Editor has also been improved. Namely, all of the functions on the map editor now work. Before, the abilities to import a map or open a saved map were not functioning, but now everything should be working properly (at least on the web app, Android might still have some bugs, but that will be sorted out in 0.9.0).


There was a lot of feedback on both the Play Store and through my email that the game was too difficult to control with touch screen, so several changes have been made to hopefully improve the situation:

• Tapping on a unit twice will now select all units of the same kind in a 6 tile radius
• Units will now automatically attack all in-range defensive turret type structures (pillboxes, SAM sites, etc)
• When units are selected, you can simply tap on an enemy structure to order an attack, instead of having to click on the "move units" button first

In addition, Colony Wars previously had an issue where you could not cancel an in-progress construction. On the desktop, you could hold/cancel a build with a right-click, but this did not work on mobile devices. Now, a small hold/cancel button has been added to the build item on the construction sidebar, that you can tap on to hold or cancel a building that is under construction.


This also works for units. If you have multiple units queued up, you can click on their number in the sidebar to cancel the build.

Another much-requested feature has been added. You can now see the health bar for a structure by clicking on it (or mouse-hovering it, if your device has a mouse). In addition, there is now an option to sell a building, or to quickly set a rally point for new units. You could previously do the rally point with a keyboard shortcut, but now you have access to the option on touch screen too.


Once in the game, you will notice a couple of additional changes. Firstly, all of the interface voice recordings ("construction complete," "low power," "harvester under attack," etc) have been re-recorded. My wife was kind enough to lend her voice for the recordings, so perhaps the sound will be more "soothing" now that it was before!

The AI's "brain" has been ratcheted up a bit in this release, especially as it relates to attacking your base. Previously, an AI would send some tanks into your base, destroy one building, and then just sit there like an idiot. Now the AI will actually go all-in and continue attacking your base until the job is done (or his attack force is destroyed).

Overall in-game performance should be better as well in this release, as the underlying Scroll2d engine has been updated to the latest iteration, which has about two years worth of improvements baked in over the previous release.

Finally, the multiplayer experience should be greatly improved in this release. As with Scroll2d, there are also two years of improvements brought over from my in-house multiplayer library, many of the code improvements coming thanks to the real-time multiplayer nature of My Colony 2. Multiplayer games now feature better performance, and much better handling of error states, such as player disconnects.

So the main focus of this release was to get Colony Wars migrated to its new home and bring about some of the most requested interface improvements. The next update is going to focus on adding new units and structures to the game. United Earth still needs a few things added before it's considered a complete faction, and if you have any suggestions on new structures and units for United Earth, now is the time.

Once the United Earth faction is done, I will focus on adding LIS to the game. Like in My Colony, LIS will have some similarities to United Earth, but with a few different specialized units and structures.

Once LIS is implemented, it will be time to add Zolarg into the game, and maybe the Alpha Draconians too for good measure, I haven't decided on that yet.

Finally, once all factions are done, the focus will switch to implementing the single player campaign, which will play through the story of the Human civil war, and the LIS's break-away from United Earth. I mentioned in a thread the other day that I want to have RA2 style cheesy cutscenes in the game. I might make them using Death 3D, but I also might get myself a greenscreen and an "Admiral Tots" costume. Haven't decided yet...

All the while adding the above mentioned items, I want to add other improvements as well. More options to the Multiplayer/Skirmish lobby, like setting your starting funds, game speed, AI difficulty, and tech level. The game needs Super Weapons too.

So that is it for this update. Expect more frequent Colony Wars updates, and let me know what you want to see added (as well as what issues you find with this release). Thanks for playing, and be sure to bookmark/install Colony Wars from it's new URL at my-colony.com:

https://wars.my-colony.com/

#colonywars

Just in time for the weekend (if you are using the PWA at least), the My Colony 2 v0.23.0 update is now available, bringing a lot of goodies that I hope think you are going to love. So what's new in this release? Let's take a look!


To begin with, continuing work from the last two releases of My Colony 2, more structure voxel models have been separated from the data files, further reducing initial game load times, particularly on mobile devices. This should especially help on lower memory devices, as some were crashing from the sheer size of the overall MC2 data file during initial load.

Next up, as I mentioned in another thread, all My Colony 2 game statistics are now being automatically logged to the Coloniae service that @Sobeirannovaocc is maintaining. The My Colony 2 implementation of Coloniae is still in development, but you can find it at the following URL to track it's progression. Check it out, see if you can find your own world statistics, and be sure to give Sobe your feedback!

https://dev.coloniae.space/

In addition, all new colonies in MC2 are now being automatically added to the mc2global Universe, as outlined in this thread. This will be the default global universe for all new MC2 games, and if you want to join it with your existing colony, simply click on the thread I just posted for instructions.

Next up, commenters in the various app stores have long been requesting that MC2 contain some sort of hints or tutorials such as those found in the original My Colony. So I have started to add helpful dialogs to the game at various points.


More exciting than the tutorials though, are the manner in which they have been implemented. Some time ago, there was a request for some scripting capabilities to be added to MC2 that creators could use for different types of mods. I started implementing it by adding some flag properties to units, structures, worlds, and civs, but then forgot about it, until @Luker124 recently reminded me that they would be helpful for a mod he is planning. As a result, you will now see a new Scripting section in the Game Editor.


I will make a more detailed post on scripting at some point, but it basically works like this. Certain entities (units, structures mainly, but also civs and worlds) can set either a Player Flag or a Global Flag when they are built/come into the game. A Player Flag pertains to the player who triggered the event, and a Global Flag pertains to the entire server. When a flag is triggered, the engine looks through all of the available scripts, and then will run any script that is triggered by the trigger flag.

The engine remembers which players have used which flag, so they can only be triggered once, unless a script gives a "clear flag" command. You can see the currently available script actions in the screenshot above. A script may contain one or more actions, and can call subsequent scripts by setting flags itself.

I plan to use this new flag/script feature to implement something suggested by @GeneralWadaling some months ago, whereby you could discover interesting terrains which would then unlock things. My thinking is that you could discover alien artifacts/tech that would then unlock certain structures that were not available otherwise through the tech tree.

The possibilities are vast though, so it will be interesting to see what modders come up with. The scripting framework is still in its infancy, so try it out and let me know what additions or improvements you would like to see. I foresee eventually being able to make a wide variety of different types of mods with this feature, not even limited to colony builder games.

Next up we come to a new addition that everybody has been asking for since MC2 was first made public, and I am talking about the return of the Bulldozer!


There is now a new toolbar above the build options sidebar. Currently it only has a bulldozer, but that will probably be expanded at some point. As in MC1, the bulldozer mode will turn your interface red so that you do not forget you are in a destructive mode. Unlike MC1, bulldozing a structure will now actually sell it instead of just destroy, so that it is actually more like a quick-sell option than anything else.

Besides just structures, Roads can now finally be removed too, using the bulldozer. This has been one of the top requests for a long time, and now it is a reality. This actually required a pretty substantial rewrite to how roads work, which I outlined in another thread a few weeks ago. But the work is done and the feature is here now. In the coming updates, I plan on also allowing roads to be built pretty much anywhere, not just within the confines of your own settlement, allowing vast highways to be buily across your world!

Moving on, the engine will now enforce structures that have a Settlement Level requirement (currently, only a handful of structures do). You will see this when viewing structure costs on the sidebar. Settlements are leveled up using Civics, and you can level up your settlement by selecting it from the Statistics window.

Now on to new content, as three new Techs have been added in this update: Low Atmospheric Zoology, Advanced Security and Advanced Robotics! Along with the techs, we have two additional resources added to the mix, Cloth and Robots.

Of course, there are new structures here too. The Fish Hatchery is back from MC1, allowing you to breed fish for food. The Outhouse is here, which I think was something of a gag model that GeneralWadaling sent me, but I turned it into an early game sanitation (medical) facility that you can build early on, before you can afford an infirmary. Next we have the Synthetic Textile Lab for creating cloth, and the Robotics Factory for making robots. There is a decorative United Earth Flag that takes on the color of your settlement, and the Storage Yard is a new upgrade to the Raw Materials Depot, allowing you to store way more raw materials than you previously could. Finally, the new War Factory will allow you to build this updates' new military unit, the Main Battle Tank!


All in all, there is a lot here in this update, and I hope you guys like it! So check it out, as it should be hitting all platforms over the coming days, and if you don't want to wait, fire up the web app now at the following URL. Until then, thanks for playing, and have a good weekend!

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

#mycolony2

Greetings!

Around 2 years ago I've created this post which is about the unofficial timeline for the world in My Colony.

Since then, our favorite dev @bastecklein had referenced a lot of things in that post when expanding the actual lore of My Colony, eventually My Colony Universe is officially born which connected various My Colony spin-off games together.

Now I've reviewed my long and old post which isn't really something refined (and somehow grammatically terrible), I've decided to create an revised version of it. While refining and altering some context and contents, there will also be few new major events as new additions.
Another major change is about events during the Old Earth era and the time transitioning to United Earth, which I would like to make them slightly more reasonable, though the progress would still be relatively accelerated compared to reality.

Enjoy!

The unit of time measurement is based on Earth calendar.

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Time of the Ancients
(Uncertain, estimated to be billions of years before Alpha Draconians)

Once upon a time there was an thriving civilization ruled over the Milky Way Galaxy, which now they are called The Ancients. Even in the Royal Libraries of Alpha Draconians, not much documentations of their unimaginably long history has been recovered, but many of them become legends and folklore among various old and elder civilizations across the Milky Way. The following events are what known to the present-day Milky Way.

👇Just click the text with dotted underline to see the entire section.
Time of the Ancients

The Old Holy Galactic Empire
The oldest trace of The Ancients that can be found in present-day.

Some artifacts from this period reflected worship of pure energy entities, which its sophisticated pantheon have shown distant relationship and influence to cultural and religious beliefs of some races of Milky Way.

Titan War
Perhaps the most well-known conflict in the Ancients' period, it took place around the late Holy Galactic Empire period - A legend of two dominant galactic powers battle for their total domination of Milky Way.
The Titanis was the sole opponent of the Old Galactic Empire at that time, it is a collective of races under the rule of Titans, a race of colossal entities. However, unable to surpass Empire in terms of the ability to manipulate raw energy and matter, the Titans end up defeated and extinct after the war.

Various wartime relics form both Empire and Titanis are discovered. However the reliability of several Titan relics (particularly some Titan remains) are doubted by modern historians and scientists (and even some New Galactic Empire scholars) and the debates still goes on today.

Grand Division of Pharan Empire
Phara was the largest ally of Old Galactic Empire and strongest of the minor powers during the Titan War. However, after a chain of internal political events, the Pharan Empire split into divided Dynasties ruled by their respective Grand Houses.

Most ancient Pharan documentations were permanently lost during the event.

Dark Galactic Empire
The period after the Old Galactic Empire crushed their sole rival of the galaxy and achieved galactic dominance.

For some reason, the Old Galactic Empire abandoned their belief of energy entities, instead, near-fanatical dedication exploring ultimate possibilities of dark matter becomes the major feature of this period.

Despite it is the period after the Holy Empire, unfortunately, information of this period is relatively more scarce - The multidimensional complexity of their relics keeps information in them highly difficult to be discovered and extracted.

Reptilian Exodus to the Milky Way
The first records of Reptilian immigrants into the Milky Way from another galaxy was during the Dark Galactic Empire period. From some documents of Alpha Draconians, Reptilian ancestors started as nomads with only mostly low tech equipment when their "primitive" intergalactic transport landed on the Outer Rim Region.

Empire-Reptilian Conflict
While Reptilians tried to make themselves a new home at Outer Rim Region, Old Galactic Empire was unwelcoming towards the continuous immigration of the Reptilians. As a result several conflicts broke out, but none never end up into a major war.

After several head-on confrontations and negotiations, Reptilians signed permanent truce with the Old Galactic Empire and earned their space of survival, however, the Empire barricaded all the remaining immigrants from entering Milky Way, which the fates of these immigrants remained unknown.

Second Pharan Empire
After millenniums of internal conflicts, Pharans barely reunited themselves, the Second Pharan Empire was established and maintained relative cohesion and peace between Grand Houses for the long period afterwards.

Vanishing of The Ancients
One of the largest mysteries in Milky Way history, which the entire population and objects of the Old Galactic Empire, vanished.
There had been many hypothesizes trying to explain the event, the most popular one being The Ancients successfully achieved certain breakthroughs in science and transcended into higher beings unrestricted by physical plane.

Radioisotopic raw ether are discovered at planets that were once Imperial settlements, which seemed to be remains of physical biomass of Ancients, or a by-product of the process causing the entire vanishing.

---

Interbellum, Rise of Reptilians and Draconian Era
(4 million years ~ 2 million years before human history)

After the vanishing of the Ancients, over 80% of the Milky Way became unoccupied and abandoned. This is the period many young races rose to reshape the galactic balance of power, but only the Reptilians became the most successful - From the foundations and physical legacies left by the Ancients, Reptilians thrived as the new superpower of the Galaxy, the Alpha Draconians.

Rise of Reptilians

Early Atlanians and Kingdom of Aqua
Atlanians was an aquatic race that managed to civilize themselves during the Interbellum, and evolved into amphibious creatures that has strong adaptive ability to both dry land and aquatic environments.
Kingdom of Aqua was the first period of Atlanian history they begin space exploration and primitive extraterrestrial colonization.

Reptilian Kingdoms
As the scout ships returned bizarre news that the Ancients had ceased to exist, the Reptilians saw their long waited opportunity expanding towards the Central Vortex. Deeply inspired by the Old Galactic Empire, many Reptilians dreamed of building their own powerful interstellar regime. As a result numerous Reptilian Kingdoms with relatively primitive organization were established, completely replacing their original nomadic society within few decades.

Great Reptilian Expedition
After years of preparation, various Kingdoms launched their expedition to the deeper regions of the Galaxy, returning with generous amount of salvaged bounties from ancient ruins and locations of the abandoned Ancient cities.

Later, Reptilians colonized the Ancient cities as their new settlements.

Bowuland Insectoid Hive Tribes
The earliest form of Bowuland Insectoid (Later Zolarg Insectoids) civilization known. Before the period of Zolarg Empire, Bowuland Insectoid breeds were relatively mild and much less invasive, and achieved developing a society with great self sufficiency and sustainability of food, with knowledge of primitive metallurgy.

With no ideas and ambitions beyond their home Gaia World planet, Insectoids of the period had never entered process of industrialization and space exploration.

Unity Movement of the Atlanians
According to an Atlanian legend, conflicts between Atlanian colony Kingdoms were very common, until inspired by the idea of balance and peaceful coexistence started an peaceful unification movement which led to founding of the present-day Confederation of Atlanian Kingdoms.

Age of the Warring Lords
Reptilians had shown great interest upon the relics and artifacts they salvaged form Ancient sites, and discovered the unimaginable potency they hold. Impressed by the power of ancient technology, it gave rise to Reptilian ambitions of interstellar conquest.
Seek to destroy other potential internal rivals, Reptilians entered a long period of most merciless infighting, just to control the Ancient artifacts they have yet to understand how to use them.

Reptilian Unification War and founding of Alpha Draconians
Kingdom of Draconis had long been one of the weakest kingdom among the Reptilians, until the time of the genius leader Lord Alphari - Draconis strength and influence rose to new heights, on par with the strongest Reptilian Lords. Lord Alphari defeated all other Reptilian Lords just in 10 years, successfully achieved true unification of the entire Reptilian race for the first time in Milky Way Reptilian history since the immigration.
As the unification had completed, Alphari crowned himself as the first Overlord, establishing the Reptilian empire of Alpha Draconians which marked the beginning of Reptilian golden age.
National motto of Alpha Draconians, "Rising from the Harshest to be the Strongest", was also given by Alphari himself, as an reflection to his early life struggles and success.

First Successful Decoding of the Ancient Artifacts
The Ancient Alien research was one of another most impactful achievements and legacies of Overlord Alphari during his reign, for he had greater insight over the usage of alien artifacts. Alpha Draconians was also among the first ones establishing an dedicated and successful institute studying Ancient artifacts and relics, which Overlord Alphari also personally participated in it in addition to providing material and political support.
From the further understanding over these ancient gadgets, Alpha Draconians effectively reverse-engineered Ancient advancements for their own purpose. The absolute technological supremacy of Alpha Draconians gained from Ancient knowledge effectively turned the Reptilian empire into the sole and most brutal galactic superpower of the time.

Reptilian Galactic Conquest
The next and the largest conquest of Reptilians took place during the reign of fourth Overlord Ks'khip, the infamous Scourge of the Galaxy who led the Draconian legions spread destruction across half of the Milky Way galaxy.
Many of the territories conquered by Overlord Ks'khip formed the foundations of core Alpha Draconian regions in Milky Way Galaxy. In addition, the subjugation of various alien races including Bowuland Insectoids which provided Alpha Draconians productive slave laborers for millenniums.

The conquest was an important point of history which Reptilian power and influence reached its peaks, the time when Reptilians began call themselves ‘the descendants of the Ancients’.

Mystic Galactic Domination Doctrine
While Overlord Ks'khip ruled by brutally asserting direct Draconian dominance over half of the Milky Way, his successor Ka'kropp had a completely different idea, advocating a complete different doctrine of ruling the Reptilian empire.
In a more secretive and unsuspecting approach, Alpha Draconians maintain control over conquered territories with minimal public personnel and have most of the actual administration and enforcement done covertly. Through asserting the ideas that Alpha Draconians were unreachable and all-powerful deity beyond their intellect, subjugated objects and vassals would never dare to resist and defect.

Disassembly of Second Pharan Empire
While the Second Pharan Empire remained relatively unchanged and peaceful since its establishment, many aspects of the Empire itself declines day by day. Eventually, the Pharan Empire officially dissolved themselves.

Pharans are permanently divided into hundreds of independent tribes and scattered across the stars, rapidly degenerating into theocratic medieval civilization technologically and culturally.

Reptilian-Atlanian Conflicts
Years since the Great Conquest, Reptilians had several attempts throwing invasion on the aquatic homelands of Atlanian Kingdoms, however heavy local resistance of Atlanians turned most of the attempts thwarted and to no anvil.
At the end of this series of conflicts over the millennium, Alpha Draconians withdrawn their forces from Atlanian territory and never mentioned invading Atlanian planets since after.

---

The Revival of Insectoid Civilization
(Parallel to 19th~20th century of Human timeline)

Ever since the Alpha Draconians subjugated the Bowuland Insectoids, the history of being enslaved for millions of years was the darkest history of Insectoids. However, from countless of torture and survival struggles, Bowland Insectoids had evolved into highly expansive and adaptive breeds of wide variety. Meanwhile, years without significant challenges or greater ambitions had also turned Alpha Draconians internally corrupt and indolent.
Parallel to the 19th to 20th century of mankind, an slave uprising in Alpha Draconains marked another major turning point of Milky Way history.

The Revival of Insectoid Civilization

Draconis-12 Uprising
In the distant slave farm colony of wetland planet Draconis-12, to no Reptilians' expectation, the Alpha Draconian colony was overthrown by a planetary-scale Insectoid slave uprising led by an enlightened Insectoid named Zolarg, all Draconian personnel either purged or missing.

The first group of freed Insectoids renamed the planet to Zolarg Prime after their leader, which became the new home world of the Insectoid civilization. At the same time, the uprising leader Zolarg himself was crowned emperor for life of the people of Zolarg Prime, and Zolarg Empire is established.

Insectoid Uprising Movements
While Alpha Draconians attempted to cover up the incident, words of Draconis-12 uprising spread quickly among the Insectoids of other Draconian slave colonies.
Encouraged and inspired by the Zolarg's success, other Insectoids followed similar path. Though not all had been successful, the series of uprising movements successfully took over large numbers of Alpha Draconian colonies and cities. Most of the Insectoids who earned their freedom joined the Zolarg Empire's cause in the sacred war toppling their ancestral enemy.

Insectoid Revival War
Soon Alpha Draconians took retaliatory actions against the uprising movements, attempting regain control of the slaves by sheer might of regular military forces. In this 27 year long war of attrition, both sides took heavy losses, however, despite technologically superior, Draconian forces never managed to outmatch Zolarg forces in numbers and replenishment rate. Eventually, Draconian forces were forced to withdraw from Zolarg-controlled territory to regroup after local war reserves had been depleted.
The War ended with Zolarg victory. Zolarg Empire earned their needed time and space to redevelop their civilization, while the internal declining of Alpha Draconians were exposed to the galaxy.

‘Groot Opwekkingsplan’
This period was also known as the ‘Great Revival Period’, the period when Emperor Zolarg formulated the policies and plans for early Zolarg Empire focusing on reconstruction, redevelopment and expansion of the Insectoid civilization, with the ultimate goal acquiring capability to confront Alpha Draconians head-on.
Combining sheer workforce volume of Insectoids, rediscovered ancestral knowledge and industrial knowledge acquired form Alpha Draconian machines, Zolarg Empire quickly established their industrial and technological foundations and rose as a supernova of galactic power.

Declaration of Insectoid Liberation
After the ‘Groot Opwekkingsplan closed with stunning success, Emperor Zolarg made a declaration on behalf of Insectoids to Alpha Draconians - the Zolarg Empire, will liberate the remaining brothers and sisters under the unrightful Draconian slavery at all costs.
The Declaration officially established the ultimate objective of the wars against Alpha Draconians.

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The Old Earth Era
(Year -2051)

The Old Earth Era is defined as the period before United Earth in human history. The late Old Earth Era is the time when humans begin exploring the deeper space and other stars, as well as beginning extensive colonization beyond Earth.

The Old Earth Era

Jameson Theories (2027)
The quantum physics scientist Professor Lob E. Jameson published a paper about theories associated with space continuum mechanics which provided basis for future development of long range space travel between systems.

First Practical Fusion Propulsion Engine (2031)
As the first commercial-use fusion reactors achieved success in the late 2020s, it provided valuable experience for developing further uses of nuclear fusion power, including the innovative idea to use it for propulsion. First practical fusion propulsion engine for spacecrafts was built in 2031.

First Probe exiting Solar System (2033)
USP Discovery was the first successful probe that traveled beyond boundaries of Solar System and reached another star system (Alpha Centauri). It's launched from Earth at 2033, returning valuable data of planets of Alpha Centauri system starting from 2037.

Space Colonization Race of Solar System (2032-2047)
With long range space travelling became more possible at the time, it kickstarted a space race at larger scale. It was one historical milestone for humanity - first attempts of an extensive space colonization in history.
Both directly and indirectly, at least 65% nations of the world participated in it. Among the governmental bodies and independent organizations in the race, some seek for wealth and influence, some seek for opportunities and a new start, some seek for knowledge and discovery.
At the peak period of the space race, colony activities could be found around and on mainly Moon and Mars, and to certain extent, Venus and Jupiter.
However, the space race came to complete halt around late 2040s, hampered by instability on Earth caused by Earth Resource Crisis.

Earth Resource Crisis (2039-2057)
Catalyzed by political and commercial rivalries on Earth, the space race had escalated to higher levels within a decade. Various parties increased their bets and investments into their colonization projects, leading to resource consumption increasing to unprecedented levels for the following years. Worries regarding depletion of known resource reserves on Earth arises starting from mid 2039, and became actual problems in the 2040s.
In the meantime, uncontrolled industrial activities of the space race had also accelerated climate change which catastrophically turned Earth much less habitable. The climate impacts were strongly associated to occurrence of famine and abnormal morality in major countries starting from 2043.
At 2047, by the severe shortage of various resources, social instability on Earth reached critical levels.
The crisis seen no sign of alleviation until 2057.

The Grand Collapse (2051)
Severely affected by the Earth Resource Crisis, major governmental bodies on Earth lost their economic and political capability to maintain basic functions on an nation, end up either overthrown by displeased mobs of starving people, or disband themselves under pressure. In a chain reaction, similar events happened to nations all across the globe, which all turned into lands of anarchy and chaos.
This event is often referred as the end point of Old Earth era.

---

The United Earth Era
(2051-Present)

Right after the Grand Collapse, on Earth was the absolute chaos of no law and order where civilization degenerates and anarchy scourges the world. In the meantime, colonies outside Earth were left stranded without contact and support, struggling survive on their own.
However, the end of an old era is also the beginning of an new greater era - This is the era when United Earth rises to power and reunify humanity, and elevating human civilization to the greater levels, to beyond Solar System, to the distant stars.

The United Earth Era

Dissolution of United Nations and Formation of United Earth Movement (UEM) (2051-2052)
Without any existing members at all, and at the edge of ‘bankruptcy’, the United Nations officially dissolved, with most of the assets sold and transferred to a group of political aristocrats and plutocrats. The group absorbed the functions and assets of United Nations, and ambitiously rebranded it into United Earth Movement (UEM) during early 2052, which aimed to unify the entire humanity, and restore prosperity and order of the Old Earth era.

Earth Reunification War (2054-2055)
During the 2 years of preparation, UEM rallied manpower and resources from around the globe through black markets and government fire sales, while gaining stable bases of operations by assisting reestablishment of government on mainly Western Europe and Eastern half of North America.
At mid 2054, UEM officially initiated their military campaign with superior (but still rather limited) reserve of resources, rapidly brought major cities under control in the early months, then the cities were used as staging grounds to drive resistance of warlord and anarchists out of the region, ultimately encircling and destroying them.
Near the end of the 1.4 year long war, UEM controlled over 74% of the world. With no hope to topple a rising power, remaining resistances surrendered to UEM one by one, and generally accepted annexation in the post-war negotiations.

Official Establishment of United Earth (2056)
Few months after the Earth Reunification War, United Earth and its official governmental structure was established. United Earth took the form of a presidential republic, which the governmental body and the executive body is lead by President of United Earth, General Assembly responsible for legislation and directly responsible to the President.
The General Assembly is the decision-making centre of the United Earth, composed of representatives from different administrative regions to show a certain extent of democracy. However, the President still has absolute power to intervene or even alter the decisions of the General Assembly, in addition to a series of exclusive powers.

Earth Recovery Program (2056-2060)
While Earth became relatively stable in political conditions, as Earth Resource Crisis was still an existent and urgent issue, economic, industrial and environmental recovery became absolute priority of newly-established United Earth. In late 2056, United Earth initiated the Earth Recovery Program which involved habitat reclamation, industrial and economic reforms, prospecting new sources of resources, and reestablishing contact and activities with colonies outside Earth (to integrate external resources to assist recovery of Earth).
Under the effective and efficient coordination of resources of United Earth, only one year later, basic recovery had successfully been achieved, effectively alleviating and roughly neutralizing the impacts of Resource Crisis with no excess burden to space colonies and people on Earth.
At 2060, the economy of Earth had achieved recovery and development to beyond mid-21st century standards, the Program concluded in success.
The successful example of Earth Recovery Program also provided early basis of future terraforming research.

Reinitialization of Space Colonization Programmes (2061)
United Earth reinitialized most of the colonization projects from the Old Earth Era starting from 2061, with changed made to enhance efficiency, facilitate administration from United Earth government, and change of objectives.
The Old Earth Era plans were generally rebranded and integrated into "Earth-Sphere Development Programme (ESDP)", aimed to construct a larger socio-economic body in Solar System centering Earth. Under ESDP, Moon was developed into logistics center composed of shipyards and spaceports, while Mars became the new major industrial center. Large space stations were also built to support distant colonies on Venus and moon colonies around Jupiter.
With breakthroughs in interstellar communications technology, United Earth also set their ambitions to colonize stars beyond Solar System. Newer generation of long range space probes were also sent to other distant stars in search for new unhabited planets for colonization and exploit undiscovered resources

First Reformation of Security Council (2063-2065)
The national security agency of the United Earth, Security Council, went under a series of reformation from 2063 to 2065, improving and fostering the efficiency of peacekeeping missions on Earth and foreign colonies.
The reform included controversial establishment of military police force CLEI (Colonial Law Enforcement Initiative, nicknamed "clay") and associated high pressure security regulations over colonies.

Colonization of Alpha Centauri (2064)
The long-range colony carrier UES Ark-3 was launched from Moon shipyard at 2062, reaching Alpha Centauri and established colonies at year 2064, it was the first time in history mankind send people beyond Solar System.

Establishment of Space Marines (2068)
In order to protect foreign colonies and Earth from potential Alien threats, United Earth Space Marines (UESM) was established.
Space Marines gradually replaced Peacekeepers of the United Earth as part of the official military and security forces.

Autonomous Movements of Frontier Region (2068)
For years, colonies of frontier regions presented their concern and discontent towards the heavily bureaucratic system and excessively strict security policies of United Earth, but were never taken notice by authorities on Earth.
The situation turned into several prolonged region-wide protests demanding exclusion from the oppressive policies, after the 7th time Secretary of General Assembly refused to include the issue into agenda of next General Assembly meeting.
Refused to give up interests, United Earth attempted to pacify the discontent colonies by simple tax exemption and reassigning new colony governors, and never tried to lift the policies the colonies asked to remove.
Further angered by the "disrespectful" attitude of United Earth authorities, protests turned into anti-UE movements advocating decentralization of power form Earth. Eventually, United Earth was forced to grant few colonies status of autonomous territory to put the political crisis to end and made promises of reforming administrative and security polices on colonies.
While the movement seemed to achieve the objective to free from oppressive policies, some anti-UE movements foresee United Earth will eventually go back on their policies and unreliable promises, believing only liberation through true independence would free colonies from oppression of Earth supremacists - Which lead to founding of several underground radical anti-UE organizations.

First Official Contacts with Minor Alien Civilization (2069)
An newly established United Earth colony discovered an underdeveloped alien civilization on the planet Haken-35. United Earth officially contacted the Hakenduzians, establishing the first diplomatic relations with an alien race.

Alien Membership System (2071)
Upon discovery of more minor alien civilizations, there were opinions of establishing a proper system to handle alien diplomacy in smooth manner, while United Earth also saw an opportunity of wealth and influence. In order to convince them sharing their resources with United Earth, the Alien Membership System was established, allowing alien member states to enjoy a series of benefits including protection provided by Space Marines and preferential treatment on trades. In return, the alien member states had to pay yearly membership fees to sustain the privilege.

First Shuttlepod MK-I Entered Service (2071)
Martian Industries (MarsCorps) completed the first commercial-use model of the legendary multipurpose line of starships capable of fast long range trips, atmospheric take-off and re-entry - the Shuttlepod, which entered service in 2071.
The various innovative designs of Shuttlepod became standards of next generation starships of the following years.

Deimos Events (2072)
It was a legend of the legendary Space Marines elite squad led by Sarge, a story to save Earth from an evil artificial intelligence - though, with some confidential details which United Earth decided to keep it highly classified, rumored to be time travel to erase history of a parallel timeline.

Discovery of Terra Nova and Terra Nova Colony Rush (2074-2080)
Year 2077, a space probe discovered a planet having more than three times surface area of Earth, which its characteristics are also surprisingly extremely similar to that of Earth. Later the planet was named as Terra Nova to commemorate the remarkable discovery, it was the first earthlike planet discovered in human history.
The value and promising prospects of colonizing this planet were soon taken notice by United Earth authorities and other parties in United Earth. Soon as United Earth had officially begun the preparations for colonizing Terra Nova, largest corporations and major non-governmental entities presented their petition to participate in the project for a of major share of the planet's resources and interests.
As the United Earth authority was unable to balance the interests and requests of various parties, United Earth decided to turn this colonization project into an open competition (which United Earth end up as one of the competitors), which the shares of Terra Nova would only be granted to those who create groundbreaking achievements or shown excellent competitiveness.

Wormhole Navigation Technology (2075)
A set of technological advancements in space navigation technology allowed safe traveling of wormholes, which the wormholes act as a great shortcuts and highways of space travelling.

---

Human Civil War
(2087-2089)

Despite most part of the war were centered on conflict of two forces of humanity, United Earth and League of Independent States, the war had seen involvement of other major civilizations of the Milky Way Galaxy, Zolarg Empire and Alpha Draconians. Having great impacts on the history and future political situation of Milky Way Galaxy, it was considered one of the important historical events that contributed to the beginning of New Galactic Era.

Human Civil War

Independent Terra (2068)
Independent Terra is the foundational ideology adopted by League of Independent States (and its predeceasing entities).
In the years since the Autonomous Movements broke out, explicit forms of independentist ideas were given rise in the frontier regions, some branches were eventually developed into radical ideologies adopted by anti-UE entities, including the most well-known ideology of "Independent Terra", which advocates independence revolution against centralists and Earth supremacists, ultimately liberating mankind by overthrowing United Earth and re-establish a new true liberal government on Earth that respects human rights and treat individual colonies as equals.
As colonists were often considered to be the far lower echelons of society than native residents of Earth, the ideas of Independent Terra were even openly welcomed by some colonies beyond frontier regions that were also dissatisfied with authorities on Earth.
Discovery of Terra Nova, the first earthlike planet discovered by humanity in outer space, in 2074 applied an significant impact on the core ideas of Independent Terra ideology, which led to an ideological split within - Pro-revolutionist which continued the original idea of uproot ruling class on Earth, and Second-Terra-ist (SeT-ist) that suggests rivaling Earth influence by establishing liberal government on Terra Nova.

Independence Coalition (2072)
The potential instability associated to the spread of independentist ideologies during the Autonomous Movement were not left unnoticed by United Earth government. Immediately identifying such ideologies as dangers to governmental and political interests, the Security Council increased CLEI presence in frontier regions and colony sectors with high risk of ideological infiltration, to completely outlaw anti-UE entities.
Soon the anti-UE organizations and Independent Terra supporters found operating campaigns became increasingly difficult under the close watch of CLEI secret police.
In 2072, representatives of anti-UE entities of mainly from the frontier region secretly gathered at Terra Nova, forming the Independence Coalition - the predecessor of League of Independent States, establishing cooperation of running campaigns against UE under the nose of United Earth.

First Contact between humanity and Zolarg Empire (2077)
While the first official contact between United Earth and Zolarg Empire took place at 2080, the actual initial contact took place 3 years earlier (2077), during an encounter in uncharted regions between a black market convoy and a Zolarg prospection ship.
The rumors of the encounter spread quickly in black markets, eventually the piece of intel reached the Independence Coalition. Intrigued, the Coalition concluded with an risky decision - sending a secret diplomatic dispatchment to the Zolarg Ship via the black market vessel, in attempt to establish early relations which could help obtaining crucial support for future military campaign against United Earth.
In 2079, the dispatchment returned with cooperation agreements and an unofficial-and-non-disclosed diplomatic and military cooperation pact from Zolarg Empire, which the Coalition offers human technologies to Zolarg scholars in exchange for material and possible military support of Zolarg expeditionary forces.

The Alpha Draconian Conspiracy and Invasion Plan (~2085)
Since the Insectoid uprising events, Alpha Draconians had been in a difficult situation. The economy over-reliant on expansive and expendable insectoid slave labor had been severely hampered, while the reptilians began questioning the faith and pride of their "all-time invincible" empire.
Taking the Insectoid uprising events as the greatest shame to Alpha Draconians, on Alpha Draconis the dissatisfied reptilian lords and nobles urged Overlord Betah'an taking the responsibility to address the crisis.
To the Lords of Inner Circle (who power, ambitions, cunning and brutality were second to only the Overlord), it was a sign of weakened Overlord. Seeing that as an opportunity to seize the Overlord's power rightfully, the Lords of Inner Circle schemed to remove Overlord Betah'an form the throne.
To Overlord Betah'an, the most effective way silencing his political opponents form the Inner Circle and regaining support from nobles while addressing the crisis at the same time, was to start another conquest. The Overloard carefully selected the most suitable target of conquest - United Earth, which was industrially and economically developed but militarily inferior, non-aware of Alpha Draconians' existance, and possible sowing of internal conflict which allows minimal military efforts to eradicate further resistances.

Terra Nova Incident and Battle of Terra Nova (2087)
Burdened by outrageous taxation set by United Earth over the colonies outside Solar-Sphere region since 2079, Terra Nova was the first colony openly boycotting the tax policies of United Earth, refused to deliver tax payments to General Assembly. General Assembly responded the boycotting by enforcing embargo over Terra Nova, followed by immigration interdiction and military blockade, however all failed with little effect on this almost self-efficient colony.
The Independence Coalition, after years of covered military preparation, saw the incident on Terra Nova provided a narrow but the best opportunity to start what they had planned long ago - a revolutionary war to liberate colonies from tyranny of United Earth. Before the military blockade was enforced, the Coalition sneaked additional military personnel to their branch in Terra Nova.
Heat of the debates over follow-up actions against rebellious acts of Terra Nova lasted for months in General Assembly, politicians arguing the effectiveness of measures used to force Terra Nova giving in, while anti-UE organizations on Terra Nova kept provoking United Earth by rallying local people protesting around governmental administrative facilities. Eventually in 2087, with support of politicians who worried Terra Nova incident would evolve into a copy of of Autonomous Movement in 2068, along with manipulation by Alpha Draconian covert agents - By reason of "open revolt against United Earth", President Ronald Tracy issued order to mobilize Space Marines 35th Regiment for military occupation of and martial law enforcement on Terra Nova, marking the outbreak of Human Civil War.
Main forces of Space Marines occupied the capital city of Terra Nova and dispersed protesters with minimal resistance within 2 hours of operation. However, few minutes after the complete occupation, the main forces were ambushed and encircled by local militia forces led by commander Beuford P. Tots in the city. By element of surprise and home turf advantage of militia forces, the well-equipped Space Marines in the capital city took a heavy casualty rate of 63% and were forced to retreat by escaping to troop ship in planetary orbit.
Other militia forces on Terra Nova driven Space Marine and UE garrisons of military facilities into defeat in the subsequent skirmishes over the week. Gaining control over majority of surface-to-orbit defense weapons on the planet, Terra Nova militias forced complete withdrawal of Space Marines 35th Regiment and blockade fleet from Terra Nova at the end of Battle of Terra Nova.
After the battle, the colonial congress replaced the original colonial government. The congress officially sent an formal declaration of independence to Earth, which declared Terra Nova is no longer a chartered colony of United Earth, the once "second earth" was then renamed "Independent State".

Founding of the League of Independent States (2087)
Following the stunning success in Battle of Terra Nova, Terra Nova became the common symbol of freedom and liberty. The rest member organizations and entities of Independence Coalition, along with colonies of neighboring colony sectors inspired by the incident, followed by overthrowing local colonial government and sever ties with United Earth.
The independent colonies and members of Independence Coalition then officially founded the League of Independent States on Terra Nova.

Terra-to-Earth Campaign (2087-2088)
With support of Beaconburg Fleet and arms supplier BSA from Independent State of Beaconburg (previously Autonomous Colony of Beaconburg), mercenaries recruited from black markets and volunteers from liberated colonies, the newly founded League quickly launched the first military campaign against United Earth - the "Terra-to-Earth Campaign" (In United Earth perspective, "The Defense of Solar System"), targeting core territories of United Earth around Solar System.
Despite United Earth ordered nationwide general mobilization against LIS offensive, the mobilization progresses at sluggish pace. This had left LIS gaining most of the strategic initiative and speed advantage in the early to mid stage of the campaign, the scattered and underprepared United Earth forces were being wiped out by LIS with relative ease.

Zolarg Entry into War (2088)
In late 2087, United Earth completed the strategic defense planning, finished preparations of constructing solid defenses by concentrating majority of military assets in sectors near Solar System.
LIS forces launched the Ragnarok Offensive in early 2088 spearheaded by veteran units form the earlier stages of Terra-to-Earth Campaign, in hope to break the defense lines. However, outmatched by United Earth in terms of superior quantity of troops and supplies, the warfare of attrition eventually blunt the LIS offensive, which LIS forces took significant losses.
Knowing crippled forces stood little chance against possible full strategic counterattack of United Earth, LIS urgently needed to delay United Earth from taking initiative. Shortly after the setback, LIS decided to play their trump card - their secret ally, Zolarg Empire.
Using the missile base (deployed with newly built IWSM which its strike range can reach and cover the entire Solar System) established by LIS and (unexpected) assassination of United Earth President Ronald Tracy as distraction, Zolarg Empire responded to LIS call, sent a full battegroup of Expeditionary Force attacking the other side of United Earth territory, forcing United Earth to fight a war of two fronts.
Despite the two-front strategy did divert pressure from LIS, however, as neither side held major advantage over another, the war turned into a stalemate.

Barracuda Blues Event and Preludes to Alpha Draconian Invasion (2088)
In the heat of Human Civil War, Alpha Draconians sneaked groups of pioneer probes into human territory, constructed portal gates in the unnoticed corners where strongholds were set up for preparations of Overlord's surprise invasion plans.
Lords of Inner Circle had been trying to foil the Overlord's plan from the beginning. By a margin of rare opportunity, one covert operative affiliated to Lords of Inner Circle managed to sabotage the cloak device in secret base on planet Barracuda Blues, exposing the dormant portal and droid battlegroup at the site to United Earth and LIS military.
Upon the discovery of the unknown alien facility on Barracuda Blues, both United Earth and LIS dispatched their own task force trying to seize the alien technology that could change the tide of battle. Violent skirmishes broke out between two sides, contesting control of the facility.
As the news on Barracuda Blues were delivered to Zolarg Expeditionary Force. Familiar with Alpha Draconian cunning strategies, the Insectoids immediately identified the alien facility an Alpha Draconian invasion base. The Zolarg Expeditionary Force then sent their urgent message to LIS ally, warned that such discovery was a curse rather than blessing, and presented worries of this war involved orchestrations of Alpha Draconians, the greater evil they were yet to know.
Already at the edge of dishonoring the reptilian ancestors, the sabotage in invasion base on Barracuda Blues and earlier unexpected entry of Zolarg Empire into the war had left Overlord Betah'an with no choice other than launching a premature invasion.

Battle Against Alpha Draconians (2088-2089)
Caught off guard by surprise, near half of the human forces were obliterated by superior war machines of Alpha Draconians during the initial stage of Alpha Draconian invasion.
With a common enemy, military and political representatives of United Earth, LIS and Zolarg Expeditionary Force met on Earth. Shortly, ceasefire agreements were reached, and an temporary alliance against Alpha Draconian invasion was formed.
The alliance organized several joint operations to strategically delay Alpha Draconian invaders with varying outcome, buying time for LIS and United Earth to replenish losses and regroup respective fighting forces.
In mid 2089, United Earth finished reconstruction of the space armadas, later achieved decisive victories in several space battles against Alpha Draconian warfleets, regaining the space superiority and the tables turned to alliance's favor.
With support from United Earth fleets and exploiting the weakness of long replenishment cycle and inferior quantity of Alpha Draconian forces, alliance forces successfully overwhelmed Alpha Draconian forces, storming major invasion bases. The destruction of the largest but last portal gate stronghold during Battle of Barracuda Blues marked the decisive defeat of Alpha Draconian invaders.

Continuation of Human Civil War (2089)
As Alpha Draconians called their fleets back to home territory and aborted control of droid armies following the defeat at Barracuda Blues, the temporary alliance finished its purpose and was then dismissed, both sides returned to status of conflict.
However, exhausted and tired of war, it was impossible to continue the war at the original massive, interstellar scale, both sides came up with conclusion that the war must be ended by an decisive battle as soon as possible.
Zolarg Empire then exited war by signing a white peace with United Earth weeks after the alliance had been dismissed.
At last, remaining main forces of United Earth and LIS coincidentally met near the strategically important wormhole highway node, over the planet of Kaiserground. After a week of fierce back-and-forth battle on the planet and in the orbit, United Earth gained complete control of the planet, setting LIS forces on a full retreat, concluding the final major battle in Human Civil War.

---

New Galactic Era
(2089-Present)

Following the end Human Civil War, marked a major shift in geopolitical patterns of the Milky Way Galaxy - Division of human civilization, decline of Alpha Draconian dominance, rise of the mysterious New Galactic Empire, various smaller civilizations began playing important roles in maintaining galactic balance......
Increasing importance of galactic-scale affairs in this era had reshaped the Milky Way Galaxy, which once again after billions of millenniums, the Milky Way Galaxy thrives under the interaction between civilizations.

New Galactic Era

Armistice of Hoxton (2089)
The Armistice of Hoxton officially ended the Human Civil War, despite an armistice in nature.
The armistice defined the United Earth-LIS border in the future, which the border line was known as the Hoxton Line.
To conclude, nobody achieved total victory in the Human Civil War, however, each side had their objectives completed respectively - United Earth won a tactical victory which LIS could no longer threaten United Earth territory, while LIS achieved their primary aim of independence and establishing a liberal, decentralized government.

Official establishment of League of Independent States (2089)
The main body of the League of the Independent States, the League Council, was officially established 3 months after the Armistice of Hoxton was in effect. By the Joint Declaration of Independent States based on the core ideas of Independent Terra, The League promised fairness, respect, autonomy and freedom to member states.
The League of the Independent States had no actual leader in power. Instead, each member state cooperates under the common principles and shared pacts, bearing the common responsibilities protecting the free people of the League.
Though the establishment of LIS was officially recognized by their ally Zolarg Empire, the United Earth General Assembly declared they would never accept any form of human regime other than itself, the League being an unlawful existence that would threaten the unity and prosperity of mankind.

The Midnight Coup (2089)
With the total defeat of invasion campaign, the core Reptilian society of Alpha Draconians lost all confidence in Overlord Betah'an. Shortly after the end of invasion the Overlord was assassinated by Inner Circle covert agents.
Following the death of the Overlord, the seat of supreme power of Alpha Draconians was then empty. Yet as every Lords of the Inner Circle wished to claim the ultimate trophy of power, political crises escalated to uncontrolled levels by the internal conflicts of the Inner Circle, which later spread all across the administrative body of Alpha Draconians, rendering all but basic administrations of the reptilian empire non-functional.
Catalyzed by the the absence of Overlord and internal political instability, order in Alpha Draconian society was barely maintained, leading to high crime rates and decreased domestic productivity in the following decades.
As a result, dominance of Alpha Draconians began to decline.

Emergence of New Galactic Empire (2089)
Several weeks after the Midnight Coup which had thrown Alpha Draconians into the tarpit of neverending political infighting, control and dominance over the foreign territories of Alpha Draconians were loosened which allowed several vassals and colony broke away with no immediate consequence.
However, majority of these territories were then annexed by another power, which emerged from the Central Vortex region of the Milky Way Galaxy - The New Galactic Empire.
Calling themselves the true descendants of the Ancients, they claimed themselves bearing the destiny to bring the entire galaxy under their grace, a mission of revival to bring the once lost glory of Old Galactic Empire back to life.
Despite lacking the dominating power to contest other major civilizations, the New Galactic Empire had actively been expanding their sphere of influence, and rumored to have unprecedented capacity harnessing the powers of the universe beyond the Ancient technologies.

Bradley's Military Reform (2089-2094)
The new head of the United Earth Security Council, Bradley the Grand Marshal (which was the supreme commander throughout the Human Civil War), threw up a massive military reformation aimed to maintain superiority over the military capabilities of LIS, including expansion and reorganization of Space Marines, modernization of United Earth space fleets, introducing newer professionalism elements in military while maintaining the traditional expansive nature of United Earth military, and incorporation of newer doctrines derived from recent experiences in Civil War.

League Guild of Black Markets (2090)
As United Earth denied LIS from formal foreign trade outside the League territory by blockades along LIS border, LIS had to resort to black markets to maintain crucial supplies of high-end materials and economic activities, given different post-war difficulties suffered member states.
In 2090, the League Guild of Black Markets was established under the League Trade Authority to coordinate external trade beyond United Earth blockade, and management of domestic black market networks.

Restoration of Overlord (2110)
Tired of political turmoils and displeased with absence of powerful supreme ruler, traditionalist nobles on Alpha Draconis collectively put pressure on the Inner Circle for restoration of Overlord, or risk denounced and outlawed by defiling the ancestors.
Fearing the wrath of ancestors, the Inner Circle reluctantly brought Delta'an the exiled brother of Betah'an back to Alpha Draconis, crowning Delta'an the next Overlord.
Despite an Overlord, Delta'an was merely a puppet of the Inner Circle, however, did brought relative stability to disorganized Alpha Draconian society at the time.

Zolarg Scholars Journey to United Earth (2113)
A team of scholars from the Zolarg Empire, led by the Imperial High Scholar Abbamber, set off to United Earth for friendly diplomatic and scientific mission.
Scholars and scientists of the United Earth and the Zolarg Empire exchanged each other's technological advances and cultural knowledge. While Zolarg scholars earned precious knowledge which could help the technological development of the Zolarg Empire, the trip had also ceased the tensions since the Human Civil War between Zolarg and United Earth.

Insectoid Mind Network Technology (2116)
A breakthrough in neuroscience research in the Zolarg Empire had led to an innovation - the Insectoid Mind Network, designed to foster understanding of consciousness and thinking mechanisms, and enhancing advanced, direct communication and coordination within Insectoid society.

Cyberonic Transcendence (2119)
A private United Earth research institute Transcendent Technology successfully prototyped Neuro-microchips (NMC), which were compatible with human neuro systems, small in size, but ten times more efficient than average human brains.
Such inventions initiated a new technological revolution in human civilization in artificial augmentations, impacting all aspects of life.

---

Who knows what the future holds?





Note that these are just my own interpretations over the events, it is not official reference, but hopefully enhance your understanding over the My Colony Universe, and had fun reading it.

Thank you for reading!

Hello commanders.

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



WARNING : EXTREMELY LONG POST



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

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

Gameplay Suggestions

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

Units

• United Earth
  
  • Commonwealth Infantry (T1)
    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    
    Bomber craft.
  • Gunner UAV (T3)
    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    
    Anti-vehicle infantry.
  • Hacker (T2)
    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    
    Equivalent of UE harvesters.
  • Scorch Tank (T2)
    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Devastator Hovertank (T2)
    

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

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

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

    
    Heavy warmech.
  • Judge Gunship (T1)
    

    A nimble, light jet propelled gunship carrying proton launchers.

    
    Gunship aircraft.
  • Eliminator Saucer (T3)
    

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    
    Ranged melee ship.
  • Bumblebee Squad (T2)
    

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

    
    The only Insectoid airforce unit.

Buildings

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

If anybody was looking for a massive My Colony 2 update this month, I've got you covered! v0.34.0 is dropping now on the Web and the Ape Apps Launcher and is packed with goodies that you will not want to miss, so let's take a look at what is new!


The first change you might notice is that the title screen has been reworked, matching the layout from the title screen of Terra Nova 4X. This is a fairly minor change at the moment, but as MC2 had been using the generic Web App Core title screen, I was limited on what I could potentially add to it in the future, so now I will be able to make some changes and improvements going forward.

I also did quite a bit of work on Player Mode in this update, which had been completely borked until now. There is now a new HUD/UI for the mode, complete with health bar, radar, current location stats and more!


There remains a ton of work to be done on Player Mode. Right now there are still glitches and the controls are a bit wonky, but it is functional if you want to give it a test. My Colony 2 is eventually going to contain an entire sub-game based on Player Mode, but for now it's still fun to just walk around your colony and check things out.

There are new options on the Statistics screen for server operators in this release, and the first one is actually quite important.


You can now toggle your server's Private/Public status on the World statistics, which was a long requested feature. You can also toggle on/off the My Colony Online feature (which gives access to online trading through the GBT, among other things). However, and this is important, worlds created before MC2 v0.29.0 will all be in offline mode until activated on the World screen! This is because the MC Online flag in the save file was ignored until this update, and it defaulted to Offline before v0.29.0. Now that the flag is no longer ignored, worlds with the old default will be set to offline.

So the first time you load up your world in v0.34.0 (or higher), you must go into the Statistics screen and turn My Colony Online back on, if you want to use the GBT. You do not have to worry about losing resources or anything like switching between online/offline in the original My Colony. MC2 takes care of this by blocking all connections from modded games.

In addition to the above, server managers can now set the maximum number of online connections allowed in their game. You could previously set this using a chat text command, but now it's just a lot easier to do it from the UI.


Moving on, I have tried to make some interface changes to make My Colony 2 easier to play on mobile devices. The 3D nature of the game makes placing structures more difficult than it was on the original version of My Colony, but I think some changes in this update will help.


Firstly (as seen above), the ground grid lines are now turned on by default on touchscreen devices, allowing you to more easily see where you are placing structures. If you do not like this setting, it can be turned on/off in the Engine Settings menu under the Interface section, but on touch I think it makes a significant different in making the game more playable.

Next, I have tried to make it so that, no matter what orientation you have the camera rotated, placing a new structure will always originate from the top-left tile corner of the tiles to be occupied. On a touch screen there is no "hover" like with mouse input, so it's hard to tell where the building is going to be placed, and a lot of times with the camera rotated, you would have no idea where the building was going to show up once you tapped the screen, so now it should be fairly consistent no matter how you are rotated or zoomed. This was actually more difficult to implement then it might seem, since what tile constitutes the top-left corner is sort of subjective, especially depending on how far the camera is rotated in one way or another. At what angle is the cutoff where top-left becomes top-right, etc? Anyway, after hours of fiddling with the angle cutoffs, I think I have it to where it "feels" good, but you can play with it on mobile and let me know.

Moving right along, I have expanded the building stats that appear when you click on a structure's stats icon. You can now view the production/consumption ratings of Money, Civics and Research. There is still more expansion to be done on building stats, but this change alone makes a pretty big difference, IMO.


Now let's move on to new content, as there is a lot in this update. This release includes 22 new structures, two new techs to unlock, and one new unit. Among the new content in this release are 3D model contributions from @rahtdrgn @therealchromedino @GeneralWadaling and @spamdude so please be sure to show them appreciation for their great works!

Since there are so many new structures, I am just going to list them all out, and then comment on a few of them afterwards. A lot of the structures in this release are of the "Advanced" variety, needed upgrades to existing buildings.

• Advanced Robotics Factory
• Ether Reactor (art by rahtdrgn)
• Ancient Alien Gold Synthesis Lab (art by therealchromedino)
• Star Gate
• Advanced Microchip Factory (art by GeneralWadaling)
• Advanced Plastic Factory
• Underground Drop Room (art by spamdude)
• Spice Drilling Operation (art by therealchromedino)
• Advanced Spice Silo (art by therealchromedino)
• Quantum Spice Silo (art by therealchromedino)
• Quantum Oil Tank (art by therealchromedino)
• Advanced Regolith Synthesis Lab (art by spamdude)
• Quantum Offshore Drill
• Advanced Vocational Training Center
• Spice Den
• Galactic Trade Authority Office
• Ether Crystal Reactor
• Plaza Mosaic Tile
• Investment Bank
• Advanced Helium 3 Extractor
• Black and White Checkered Pavement
• Street Sign

First I want to discuss the new Interdimensional Transportation tech which unlocks the new Star Gate, because this is going to tie in big with a Player Mode feature in the future.


Basically, the Star Gates are going to allow characters in Player Mode to seamlessly travel between worlds/servers. Ultimately, the area around your Star Gate will be the first thing a player sees when they enter your world from that perspective, so you may want to include things like informational signs about your world, and you may want to leave some space to build specific Player Mode related structures that will be available in the future. You may also wish to have at least one security turret nearby, as you never know what is going to be coming through the Star Gate. The Star Gates will also allow fast travel of players/colonists/units between distant settlements both on and off world.

The Star Gates are going to be a critical component of the Player Mode. I wanted to get them in the game sooner rather than later, because the My Colony Online database is keeping track of every star gate in the "universe," and I need to get that database built up before I can enable the fast travel and other features.

Moving along, an old favorite from the original My Colony has returned, as the Bank can now be upgraded to the Investment Bank!


You can start bringing in some pretty good money for your settlement with the Investment Bank, but it's not actually the best money maker in this release. That honor goes to the new Spice Den!


The Spice Den is a brick structure repurposed from an old food production model that GeneralWadaling had made a couple of years ago, and as long as you are able to keep it running with Spice, you will make some nice profits, as the rich and famous in your settlement will pay top dollar to get their Spice fix in a safe and discrete way. Obviously if you are not on the Spice World you will need to procure your Spice from the GBT, so you might want to stock up whenever it becomes available, as I suspect this is not the only Spice related structure we will be seeing added to non-Spice worlds.

Note that the Spice Den is the first structure in the game that actually has a negative Security rating, so you may need to offset that with an extra security headquarters.

Now, you have heard of the noble Extraterrestrial Builder, but what about his equally noble cousin, the Extraterrestrial Sea Rover?


The old offshore drill got a Quantum Offshore Drill upgrade in this release, so it needed a new boat to build it. Not only is this new version of the offshore drill faster, but it also brings up Alien Artifacts! This was badly needed I think, since artifacts are fairly rare on the desert world, and you just can't dig much at all on the water world, so these new Quantum Offshore Drills will come in handy.

Speaking of badly needed, you can now easily generate Helium 3 on any world with the new Advanced Helium 3 Extractor. You will need Regolith to operate it, but that shouldn't be a problem once you construct the new Advanced Regolith Synthesis Lab.

So what happens when you want to conduct big trades on the GBT but you don't want to build hundreds of Trading Depots? That's where the new Galactic Trade Authority Office comes into play!


This is another decent money making structure, but it also greatly increases your gift/trade capacity (I forgot the number, but it's big).

A lot of the buildings that needed upgrades got them in this release. We now have the Advanced Robotics Factory, the Advanced Microchip Factory, the Advanced Plastic Factory, Advanced Vocational Training Center, and the Underground Drop Room (upgrade to the Storage Yard), just to name a few.


In addition, the Spice World now has the new Spice Drilling Operation, which is basically an Ore Fracking Operation for Spice. There are also the new Advanced and Quantum Spice Silos for superior Spice storage.

There is also the Quantum Oil Tank upgrade, for storing larger amounts of Oil.

Finally, all of these new structures will require a great deal of power. That is where the brand new Ether Crystal Reactor comes into play!


You will need a continuous source of both Ether and Crystalline to run this thing, so you may need to watch the GBT for deals. If you can afford it though, the Ether Crystal Reactor will provide you with a 55,000 power rating, far eclipsing the current Integrated Nuclear Reactor.

At the end of the day, there was a ton of work put into this update, so I hope you all enjoy it! There is a lot more excitement for My Colony 2 on the horizon. My goal is to have, by the end of this year, full gamepad/tv support, full VR support, music, sounds, a Steam release, and to have enough content and features to overtake the playability of the original My Colony. So stay tuned for more large updates like this one, because this size of release is going to be the norm, not the exception!

Thank you again for playing My Colony 2 and remember, build up your parameter defenses, because @poumm is out there, lol!


Just kidding, poumm. You're ok!

#mycolony2

Today I am posting a major update to Network Browser. v3.0.0 represents a total rewrite of the app, and so a lof of things have changed in this release. Let's go over it.


First, why the complete rewrite? Network Browser was originally released back in 2013, and in the past 11 years, a lot of things have changed with Android, especially as it relates to filesystem permissions, which Network Browser deals in heavily. When Network Browser was first released, Android was a pretty open system and it was relatively simple to work with and manage files and folders on an Android device. In the years since though, Android has become far more locked down, and I have had to bend and twist the way Network Browser worked in order to conform to the changes, to the point where the underlying code had become a complete mess.

In addition to changes in the way the filesystem is accessed, there has also been a tendency for Android to make major changes to it's UI framework every few years, depreciating layouts and replacing them with others. For a single developer, it is often a hassle to constantly refactor an app like Network Browser every few years.

So instead of constantly trying to bolt new code onto old, I have just decided to rewrite the entire thing from scratch, a project I have been meaning to do for a while now but kept putting it off due to the scope of it. But now it's finally done and it should make updating and improving Network Browser much faster and simpler going forward.

Of course, long time users will notice many changes, so let's go over what has happened.

First, you will notice once you update that your saved network configurations are lost. This I am sorry for, but it was necessary fallout. I plan during the next update or so to add a function to save/export/share network configuration settings so that you can easily distribute them to multiple devices. Config settings are now also synced to your Ape Apps Account if you are signed in, so they should (in theory) automatically transfer between your devices when you are signed in.

Network Browser now also sports a new tabbed interface, allowing you to browse and work with different connections at once. You can also now quickly navigate up to any location in your current remote path, as there is a new Path Bar with each subdirectory in the tree being selectable.

In the previous release, you could either download or upload a folder from/to the network (I forgot which one it supported) but not both. Network browser now allows you to both Download or Upload an entire folder from/to the remote network. In addition, both downloads and uploads are now handled by Android's modern worker system, and long running network transfer operations should persist even after you shut down the app.

For Network Browser TV users, the user interface has also been overhauled, and there have been significant improvements to the Dark app theme.


Speaking of themes, you can now set Network Browser to use either Light, Dark, or system default theme modes. In addition, you can now customize the overall accent color that the app uses.

I have also abandoned my efforts to develop and maintain the built-in custom video player for Network Browser. The app now just uses the default no-frills Android media player widget and will support whatever codes your device OEM supports. Maintaining my own custom player was just so far out of the scope of the project, especially when there are many far better media player options out there on the market.

If you need better video playback capabilities, there are plenty of good and free third-party media players available that Network Browser can stream your content to. I suggest using MX Player, as it seems to work great on both phone and TV devices. VLC also works fine on phones and tablets, however the TV version has issues with Network Browser, and I would suggest staying away from it on TV.

Being such a large update, I am sure there are issues and bugs that I have missed, so please feel free to let me know in this thread, because I am certain there will need to be a big v3.1.0 bug fix patch after so significant a rewrite. Also let me know of any new features or changes you would like to see added. The app should be much easier to update and maintain now!

Thanks for using Network Browser.

Edit 2024.08.26
I have made additional changes/fixes and released patch v3.1.0. Scroll down a bit in this thread to see those release notes.

#networkbrowser

Today I am publishing the v1.15.0 patch for the original My Colony, which should be hitting all platforms over the coming week (except the Windows Store, more on that in a second). This update addresses a few bugs which have cropped up over the prior months, as well as updates the Scroll2d engine and all native platform wrappers to their latest releases.

There was an issue where online regions were not saving correctly when first started. I think this was the issue that @colbya was reporting a couple of weeks ago, although I'm not 100% sure. Either way, several issues have been fixed in this department regardless.

The menu icons have been migrated over to a different icon font, since the other icons were not rendering properly on some Android and Windows devices. This hopefully fixes the issue.

I have made some UI changes to better support devices that have a camera notch or rounded corners. I don't know if I am completely satisfied with the result, so there may be more tweaking on this front over the coming updates.

I may (or may not) have pinpointed the NaN% issue in the statistics window. At least it was fixed on the colony I tested it on, we will see what happens.

Finally, some important information for users of the Windows Store edition of My Colony. The legacy Edge rendering engine that powers the current Windows Store app has been depreciated by Microsoft, and I need to move the app over to the new Chromium Edge rendering engine. Sadly, the two app containers are not completely compatable, and so the update will cause all users to lose all saved data. It is therefore important for all Windows Store users to backup their game files before updating.

To make this less painful, I have removed the current app from sale and will hold off on posting the update to Windows for several weeks, to minimize the amount of people who will be impacted by this. In the meantime, those who purchased My Colony through the Windows Store are encouraged to use the Progressive Web App instead (PWA) until the migration is complete (the new version will be based on the PWA anyway). If you signed into the Windows app with your Ape Apps Account, the purchase will be synced to your account anyway, so you will still have premium.

Players who use the Cloud Sync feature should be unaffected.

My Colony PWA: https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony/

#mycolony