Ape Apps

Hello guys!

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

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

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

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

Hopefully @bastecklein can have a look.

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

Win7 desktop v0.47
Not sure if it is a bug but I have 4237/4237 population. Statistics shows 4244/4269 jobs filled. Population shows 0 illegal immigrants. It seems I have excess people roaming around when I hit max 4237. For example once a residential complex is built (+26), it gets filled up immediately before the cloning and landing pad can bring in people. However the population is still 4237/4263 meaning any new immigrants is basically wandering once they reach but they get attached to any vacant job meaning they take up space and dont work. Is this a result of unsanctioned immigrants mentioned in tourist space port?
Edit Forgot to mention the job diff btw population was larger than 100 but time of posting this there were a few deaths and the numbers reduced.
Edit 2 Pop now 4315. Job filled 4394. I have a lot of workers attached to building but when viewed it in building shows unemployed and you cannot reassign them away. Also noticed the unemployed workers has similar names. I tried to execute the duplicates and seem to readjust itself

Earth based once i realized traveling between city's is in the game for earth as well as any others i decided to try it out .
so using a new region get chips and bus teck then made a city with 3800 colonists and Only 480 jobs and bus stations in 5 places one in middle and 4 on each map edge then made a second city right next to it .
put in a few bus stops then 10 advanced steel plants and all bus stops filled with 2 colonists each and 3 steel plants filled for a total of 24 colonists coming in from the other city and nothing seams to change that number .

when i noticed in one of my high colonys there were 3 or 400 k colonists and quite alot of buildings got filled on that map But strange thing was I did not have extra colonists .
anyway It does work some what but looks like it will take a wile to make it work fully .
Oddly i just built 5 more bus station in a row and they filled wile only 3 steel plants filled I could probly make the whole city of bus stations that have employment but ovesly it would need to work for regular buildings that well

@bastecklein
ok im loving regions but ive been noticing some problems as of late that seem to be getting worse with time and then others that i thought got fixed already.

The system for school is really, really broken. They get stuck in the schools and don't seem to leave. Whats stranger is when i poke around i notice that a colonist who has been registered to one of the school buildings for a while at some point leaves their housing by the school and starts wandering around until they die, never actually leaving the school to find a job or at the very least a house.
Its really apparent the school system is broken when you have a bunch of the Center for Artificial Learning buildings on a map. it seems that they cant go into housing because they aren't smart enough? Im not sure what the order of School, housing, entertainment, hospital is but maybe switching them around might help? Something like;
1) Look at available jobs, if job needs IQ find school
2) Find school, cool found school
3) Find housing within a certain distance from school
4) Get smart
5) Repeat step one
6) if job found, find close housing, found housing?, recheck if job is still there
7) if not enough IQ start from step one
Then sprinkle in the health and entertainment? Just a thought but there is definitely something going on with the education system right now.

i know it has been reported before but when using the Fire drill it has the chance to really mess up a colony. I have used it a few times recently and discovered that my colonists find a house and then find a job on the other side of the map. It really leaves me scratching my head, why not pick a closer job and find closer housing?

also the website that you can view your stats on is not reporting/recording the data for regions
https://www.my-colony.com/colonies/mPu9lnWT/
The GDP isn't registering at all.
The amount per capital is also blank.
It's also not showing the colonies linked with the commonwealth.

also the population isn't registering right but when i was working with the maker of coloniae.space this popped up when we were trying to figure out why the population was off.

so i'm thinking that's why its wrong on the site too?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some biomes I hope to see in my colony 2
(These biomes aren't exclusive to 1 type of planet planet, some will only appear in planets that already have an atmosphere, while others will only appear in water worlds)

Desert: a hot barren landscape, if it weren't for the vast amounts of oil found here, colonists wouldn't even look at it.

Volcanic biome: this biome is filled with active volcanoes and lava rivers. The ground is made of volcanic rock and is very hot. Anyone who works here will need to wear a special suit to prevent them from burning/suffocating due to the heat and toxic gases released by their surroundings. Colonists only enter this biome to mine obsidian and extracct geothermal energy.

Sea: all the terrain is covered in water, you won't be living here at all. The sea is only used to ship goods and produce fish.

Grasslands: open grassy fields with fertile soil, a great place to raise cattle and grow corn.

Canyon: this is a rare biome, but if you find it thats good because it will attract tourists (just like the real grand canyon).

Forest: this biome is filled with trees and rivers, its a great place to get wood and water.

Tropical rain forest: like a normal forest except much wetter, and the ground underneath it is laced with gold (fun fact, gold mining is one of the reasons why people cut down trees in the amazon).

Mountain biome: this biome consists of multiple mountains next to each other with differing elevations. The only reason you would want to live here is because the mountains are filled with coal ( coal companies level entire mountains to get coal).

Chemical biome: this biome is filled with a mutagen that was dumped by the ancients years ago, making the ground poisonous to all life. This biome is very very rare to find. If you do find it however your in luck, because the mutagen the ancients dumped can be extracted and used for genetic experiments.

Cave: caves are cold and dark, you will need a light source to enter them. Caves are rich uranium, which can be used to generate electricity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose: Hovers, lets you harvest Aluminum after eruptions.

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

Purpose: Hovers, can Harvest gold in lava fields.

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

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

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

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

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

Water Pools resist Eruptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pits would spawn like massive rivers to begin with.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The intention here to create the office tower were to create massive load of job being offered. Fantasy land Arcology created too much residents and i dont have much job to offer.

I can control the office tower to be deactivated after firedrill, to make sure all other jobs were filled up before colonies start to work in office tower.

Beside it was nice to have different skyscraper to decorate my colony.

Suggestive stats:

Create 10000 job.

Consume:
- power
- lot of wood (paper)
- microchips (PC)

Generate
- money
- lot of trash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So my original idea was to abolish the entire system of workers not going to work. The main idea was as follows: "as long as there is a job in a X by X radius around the housing, the colonist will take a job even if health no basic requirements are met. This is a bit of a spin on the idea of workers/no workers, but I think it should be deeper. If you havent met basic needs, your colonies jobs will be filled with 'inefficient' workers. The workers will completely fill the entire work force, and wont get anything done. It's kinda like the strikes of older versions (pre 1.0) but less heavy on the individual and more on the colony in general." This needs polish, but I like the end part. The idea of strikes is a fun and challenging part of the game. Besides, what could go wrong? ^_^

I'm not seeing the hospital issue but I've been seeing the precise same thing as the OP happen since .44, on Win10 Native Client, and I started a brand new colony on .47 as I thought maybe something was corrupted in my old 65K population colony. Less than 6K population, and my buildings are all starting to show this bug. I can't seem to attach screen shots in this forum, but the original post describes the issue I'm seeing precisely.

I'll add another detail that I just noticed. Several times now when I've clicked on the worker details, I've seen workers reportedly working at another building. For instance, I click on an Advanced Ore Refinery that isn't producing any steel. I see 6/6 workers. I click to see who the workers are (maybe they are protesting?). I have 1 unemployed, 1 sleeping and 1 working at my Microchip factory. I clicked a microchip factory showing 26/26 and see only 4 of the same-named person all unemployed. I close out, click the factory again and it says 4/26 workers. I click to check details, and there are 26 people listed, many of them repeats, all unemployed.

My approval rating is 83%, health 95%, and I haven't found anyone protesting (but I don't see how to get that list since we went to the new statistics interface, so there could be mass protests, I guess). I have colonist rendering turned off, and went with a permanent daytime setting. I'm on a mega-sized asteroid map with normal resource levels.

I have plenty of resources across the board. Lots of ore for the refineries, all pieces needed for microchips, etc. It is all production buildings seeing this though. Hydroponics labs, hatcheries, oil refineries, etc.

As I've tried to dig in, I noticed that for awhile, I had more jobs filled than I had population. I tried to remedy that with more landing pads and cloning facilities, and while I now have a population that properly corresponds to the 3% unemployment statistics shows, there is still an almost total lack of production going on.

This is an LIS colony. I will start a new Zolarg colony and see if I encounter similar behavior if I can get the time. The patience to get a Zolarg colony to a fun level is more than I am probably going to have today, though :-(.

Right now, this makes the game basically unplayable. If there is something I can try or info I can provide tell me what it is and I'll do it as I can.

Thanks!

EDIT: I closed out of the game and re-opened it, and left it running for a little while. It looks like most of my production has restarted, but now I'm seeing that I have a population of 6346 and 0% unemployment with a number of jobs filled at 6408. I've got 0 Illegal Immigrants, so I'm not sure how I've got more jobs filled than citizens, since I didn't think they could take out 2 jobs simultaneously.

maybe it just took awile for the game to get straight I added more jobs and steel plants and labs - 300 more jobs all together .
and every thing filled like it should .
Game still seams off odd way it filled the new jobs but no matter i guess the jobs did fill .
( just left a few steel buildings compleatly empty filled them last and they were steel plants which normaly will fill first lol

Today I am putting the final touches on My Colony v1.5.0 which should be going out to all platforms soon. This release is more of a quality of life and engine improvement update, which are generally my least favorite to work on because they take forever to get done and at the end it doesn't look like you've really accomplished anything. This is as opposed to a content update where I just spend a day drawing 10 new buildings and then everybody thinks I made a huge update!

Still though, there was important work needing to be done to the My Colony engine, and it received quite a bit. I have been promising Mass Transit for a while now, and I started working on it for this release, although it ended up being just a little more complicated than it was when I was mapping it out in my head. I have implemented a small part of it in this update to see how it works in the wild, and if it doesn't screw everything up it will be greatly expanded in the updates ahead. Don't worry, if it does screw something up, from my testing, the screw up will be in the favor of the player, but I will talk about Mass Transit more a bit later. First let's take a look at what's been added since the last release!

First of all, @Sobeirannovaocc a while ago had provided me with an initial batch of Chinese language translations for the game that I have finally added in, which I believe were worked on by @GeneralWadaling and perhaps others (maybe one of them will elaborate in the comments who all provided the work), and I know a lot of people are going to be grateful to have these new translations in the game. So a big thank you to everybody who worked on the Chinese translations for this release!

If you play on a desktop class device using a mouse, the Display Mode popup has been replaced by a smaller context menu, which I felt was more appropriate on a desktop device.


Likewise, right-clicking on an option in the build sidebar now gives you a new "Bookmark" option, which allows you to add your favorite buildings to a new Bookmarks list, which will appear as an option in your build categories dropdown. This way you can create your own custom list of buildings that you like best. Bookmarks are saved on a per-city basis.


I know there is an issue , recently reiterated to me by @Electrogamer1943 , where iPhones can not bring up the long-press context menus in the game, due to their 3D Force Touch gesture. I put in a little code that might mitigate the issue, but at the time of this writing I did not have an iPhone on hand to test it out yet, so I give it a 50/50 chance of being fixed. If it's not, I will just have to switch to a double-tap style gesture for iPhones.

Moving right along. Ever since Regions were created, there has been an issue where people can not back up Region save files, since behind the scenes a Region is broken out into multiple save files, and the existing backup utility would only export the regional overview map, making it impossible to backup a region on most devices. This issue has now been addressed, and I have now added two new ways to backup your game files in this update.

The first new method is in the Game Statistics screen, down in the Game Data tab. You will see a new "Backup Copy" option at the bottom which will export a backup of your save file to your computer or device. If you are in a region, you must do this from the Region Overview map. Once you have your backup, you can re-import it into the game from the Game Data menu on the title screen.

Now if you are playing on a tablet or desktop, there is another new interface for managing your game data. When you click on Load Colony at the title screen, you will be presented with the new Load Colony window.


From this window, you can manage all of your saved files, see detailed information about each, conduct backups and delete old games. You also have hyperlink access to your colony's websites on both my-colony.com and on Coloniae. Keep in mind that the extended information for your save files will not show up until you have opened them at least once using v1.5.0 or newer.

Next up, the Auto Trade feature has been completely reworked in this release, and is no longer directly tied to the Galactic Board of Trade. Auto Trade now conducts resource Imports and Exports, at the prices you would normally get from buildings like the Galactic Freight or the Star Gate. While on the surface this does make it a worse deal as the Import/Export features come with massive fees and penalties, for many resources it will actually be better for the player, as a large percentage of the Auto Trade contracts on the GBT had previously gone unsold.

This will also go a long way towards cleaning up the GBT, since it has become so loaded with Auto Trade contracts set in unusual quantities, that it was difficult to find anything real.

Switching Auto Trade to the Import/Export facility did bring another change though, in the form of Global Resource Pools on the My Colony server. This facility is largely invisible to the player, but does have an impact on the overall resource price. Whenever a resource is exported in the game, the quantity is added to the Global Resource Pool on the server. Likewise, an import reduces the quantity of the global pool. The server watches the levels of these new global pools and uses that information to calculate the demand of various resources, and can make pricing adjustments accordingly. The server also has the ability to purchase contracts on the GBT if a resource pool is empty, although to prevent gaming of the system it will not purchase any contracts that are not priced in a range that the server sees as reasonable.

The new trading system might potentially have a large impact on the GBT and on pricing in general (hopefully a positive impact) so I will be monitoring it over the coming days/weeks to see what tweaks are needed. This new system can largely be tweaked from the server, so any fix should be able to be implemented without requiring a game update.

To go along with this change, the Import/Export feature has been added directly to the GBT, and as long as you have a GBT building you can now import and export resources at maximum quantity from one centralized location.


Now let's talk a bit more about Mass Transit. The ultimate goal is to have transit capabilities within a city and across a region. For this update, I have started with the Regional transit first, as it has the larger implication to the game engine and requires the most work.

For this first release of the feature, Human colonies get a new structure called the Regional Busing Authority, which is unlocked with the new Public Transportation technology. As of this update, you can build this structure on a non-region game, but it won't really do anything. On a region game though, each bus stop adds to your city's regional transit capacity (in this case, each stop adds 250). This capacity allows your citizens to travel between neighboring cities on the regional map for work. So if you have a transit capacity of 250 in your city, it means that 250 citizens can work in a different city, and also 250 citizens can work in your city from a neighboring city. Note that it is 250 both ways in separate pools, so the total citizens moving back and forth can be 500.

When the game decided what jobs are going to be filled, they all go to local residents first, the same as it has always worked. However, when jobs are left unfilled, for whatever reason, the game looks at which neighboring cities have unemployed workers available. If unemployed workers are available, the jobs will fill up from those available workers, up to the point that your transit capacity is used up, provided there are bus stops in range of your worksites. Likewise, if you have unemployed workers, they will look at the jobs available in neighboring cities and fill them up to the point that your outgoing transit capacity is used up, provided there are bus stops in range of their houses.

Right now the bus stop range is super high, so I think one bus stop pretty much covers any small or medium sized map, which is all you have in a region. I don't expect it to stay like that though, so bus stops should ideally be placed throughout the city.

The Economy tab on the Game Statistics window will give you some idea of what is going on with your mass transit. Under the number of total unemployed, you will now see a Remote Workers stat, which tells you how many of your people are working in neighboring cities. Likewise, in the pie graph below, the number of filled jobs is now broken down into Local Workers and Foreign Commuters, telling you how many of your jobs are being filled by workers from neighboring cities.


There is still a lot of work to be done on the Mass Transit, but it actually has pretty big implications for the way Region games are played, as it is now possible to separate out your housing from your industry. It still needs to be refined, and I need to add the ability for colonists to actually migrate from one city to the next, and that is coming soon.

To go along with Mass Transit, I have added the capability for buildings to add non-player Decorative Units to the game. You can see this when you build a bus stop, you will now see small bus rovers driving around your town.


These units do not actually do anything, they just serve to make your city look more alive. I plan on adding other kinds of decorative units soon, such as police cars and ambulances.

So that about wraps it up for this release. The next update will continue to build out the Mass Transit, bringing it to other races and making it work within a city itself. Beyond that, I also need to do a complete overhaul of Multiplayer Regions, which are barely functional at the moment. This is the next item on the list after I finish Mass Transit.

Thank you all for playing the game, keep the suggestions coming, and let me know what issues you find in this release!

So they are currently listed as unemployed while they are a student, but that will be changing in a future update. Once they graduate they will try to find a job like normal, the only difference being is that there will now be more jobs available for them to choose from. If there are no high tech jobs, they can still work somewhere else. You can have a stereotypical college grad working at the Pub.

If they still have no jobs available they will try to find higher education. If they cannot find it, they will just be a regular unemployed person. But basically, if they graduate from High School and there is a high school teacher job available, they will fill that job before moving on to college. They only move on to more education if they need it to get a job.

bastecklein said:So they are currently listed as unemployed while they are a student, but that will be changing in a future update. Once they graduate they will try to find a job like normal, the only difference being is that there will now be more jobs available for them to choose from. If there are no high tech jobs, they can still work somewhere else. You can have a stereotypical college grad working at the Pub.

If they still have no jobs available they will try to find higher education. If they cannot find it, they will just be a regular unemployed person. But basically, if they graduate from High School and there is a high school teacher job available, they will fill that job before moving on to college. They only move on to more education if they need it to get a job.

Maybe you misunderstood, will they fill in the high school teacher before being, say, a scientist? Also, will unemployed people seek education, or do I have to finagle my way around firing people and re hiring them after they find education, in order to raise colony average IQ because I'm a completionist?

There is nothing in the code that would make them pick a teacher job before a scientist job. Usually they will pick the job closest to their house, or if they are homeless they pick a job closest to their present location.

Unemployed people are supposed to seek out education. That is how it will work when everything is ironed out.

bastecklein said:There is nothing in the code that would make them pick a teacher job before a scientist job. Usually they will pick the job closest to their house, or if they are homeless they pick a job closest to their present location.

Unemployed people are supposed to seek out education. That is how it will work when everything is ironed out.

Alright then, thank you for your responses and the help, all that has been said answers just about all the questions I have I think, at least so far. :)

I have not done the logging in and out, mostly because if I leave it unattended for long periods it means I am away from the computer, so have not tried that. I know that colonists won't jump into jobs asap, but the issue at that time was that I had just as many jobs as I had housing for colonists, and my colonists were full. Their housing was also literally right next to the empty jobs for them to take.

I am nowhere near getting the stargate or space elevator that say that they can potentially let in more people, so that is not the issue.

And I have done a fire drill and let it go for an hour (I had more than enough supplies to go longer), but even after an hour, maybe a quarter of my buildings were even functioning, and barely at that. The empty jobs isn't a serious issue for me, I habitually overproduce everything, so a few glitchy job positions is really nothing crippling. It is just annoying because colonists start complaining about walking 30 squares to a job when they have a job available literally 1 square away from home.

If you deactivate a building with workers, those jobs become unavailable and the total number of jobs available drops by the number of workers for that building. I'm noticing quite a few workers remaining in those deactivated buildings, and assume they will remain there until they find another job. This means they are not unemployed and thus are counted towards the number of jobs filled. The result is having more jobs filled than jobs available, or a negative unemployment number. I'm willing to bet you have workers lounging around in deactivated buildings collecting an easy paycheck to do nothing

i am experiencing the same thing on a larger scale. i dont have screenshots right now bc im posting quickly between work at my job but...basically what you have going on is the same for me but mine is amplified. i hav about 7k colonists and it always "says" i have like 200 jobs not filled and yet there is unemployment lol. i believe that the economy page is a bit broken atm. and i never did a fire drill thank god (last time i did my colonists broke). i belive that a workaround (for me anyways) has been to just build slowly for now. see if a building fills with workers. if it has workers missing=population too low. and then add housing accordingly. but remember it takes a minute or two for colonists to even get there if wandering. beck may be reworking the economy page of statistics. sometimes its hard to tell what hes working on.
but honestly this could be him working to make it seem more realistic and sporadic? because in america there are jobs not filled :) and still a large chunk of unemployment lol. im curious what the creator himself would say to this. can we expect more chaotic colonist behavior? or rather finite information with employment and such being very clear?
html 5 version on a windows pc.

I got one for ya.

I currently have a colony sitting pretty at 1977/1977 colonists/housing

I also had 1977/1977 jobs available/filled

I built 8 Lumber Yards a good bit away from the rest of the colony (Aesthetic choice, they're by my tree farms), and I have not built any housing for them yet, as I like to do the math and match up jobs to houses so I keep people employed and happy in homes.

Almost the instant the Lumber Yards are done, three of them are fully staffed and three more have 1-2 workers each. Okay, I figured some people decided to be manly and work at the LY instead of something else, and after a quick look several buildings are now short workers.

BUT!

When I went to look at my Economy tab and available jobs, it showed that I had 1984/2041 jobs filled. I still have 1977/1977 colonists/housing....And of course mid typing this, the numbers revert back to 1977/2041...Is there a way to keep colonists happy and stay in the jobs that they pick up that are like 5 blocks away from their homes instead of going to one 20+ blocks away?


This is on the PC in a Chrome window.

I would appreciate a 1-10 scale to prioritize which jobs get filled first, for example, if I want my cloning facilities to be filled up first I can click on a building and set all of that type of building with a priority of 10.

UMM Ansom is this a Building game or a lesson in Quantum physics . LOL
Distance is totaly a issue for the very first time .
But dont take my word build a new city then place say 100 Advanced steel plants which will = 600 jobs
in rows from the middle of a medium map down to the edge .
then place 25 - 26 colonists housing units = 650 colonists and let them fill and once filled check the farthests steel plants and they will be empty .
all this can be done in less then a hour so its not about any of the housing stats .
The only factor is distance . even OVER FILLING say to 900 colonists will still show some buildings ramine half full .
They just refuse to walk that far .
mae the excat same lay out EXCEPT place housing along the steel plat rows so they are close every job gets filled at 600 colonists .
Honestly I wsh bast had ADDED transport BEFOR finely making distance matter it really defeats the point of the 16,000 colonists home as its difficultly to keep all jobs within 15 tiles

I have this problem as well. Sometimes I think it's caused by having not enough housing near the work buildings. I will sometimes move housing nearer to jobs that are vacant, wait a minute for the housing to get populated, and then shortly thereafter the jobs get filled. Not 100% certain that decreases the job vacancies in your stats, but it does get empty jobs filled.

I'm not sure why you're hiring people by hand as the first thing a colonist does when arriving at your colony is to pick a job. You can set job preference by salaries. Higher paying jobs get filled first.

0.44.0 Chrome
Can no longer change a employ's job by hand . NEW colony .
At the start of a colony I usually place employ's so food plants get filled first and fast .
Click building- click employ's -click one -click change job -click on building that has open jobs and nothing .
Only thing I can do is dismiss the pop up box .

I also have tried changing pay for workers in the past. I've noticed the same thing before where workers seem to refuse to fill up certain buildings (Microchip factories and digsites most notably for me), despite every job being paid the same amount. I even set some higher than others, and those jobs still don't get filled out.

Normal Arcology gives 10k pop, of which 7k get a job and 3k become unemployed unless you have open jobs somewhere. But in the scenario you have all jobs filled and you build 1 arco. you get 10k pop extra. 7k are employed within the arco itself and 3k gets unemployed and wander the world waiting for a job position to open.
On a sidenote, colonists dont seem to like the arco´s much. Usually it affects happiness.

Fantasyland Arco gives 16k pop and nothing else. Just the largest form of housing.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Investment bank don't use up enough job, merely 500 jobs. 1 fantasy arcology alone create 16k houses.

The need here is to create jobs for big colonies. 1 office tower take 10k jobs, instead of having us building 20 banks which take up land space.

If these were made available in early game, office tower can help regulate the unemployment. Just deactivate n firedrill, enable after everyone settle down.

I am not good in art, probably need the communities to help on that part.

I dont know if the below are sensible, i just whack.
Suggestive stats:

Medium office
Build resource:
40k money
10k steel (building structure)
10k ore (building structure)
10k plastic (building structure)
10k brick (building structure)
5k wood (building structure)
5k pottery (office deco)
4k cloth (office carpet)
10k microchip (office PC and laptop)
30k civic
Create 5000 job

Consume: (not sure how to define the unit consume)
- 1000 power
- 10 wood per minute (paper)
- 10 civic per minute (work ethic?)

Generate
- 100 money per minute
- 1000 trash per minute (paper shredding)

Office tower
Build resource:
250k money
400k steel (building structure)
400k ore (building structure)
300k plastic (building structure)
200k brick (building structure)
100k wood (building structure)
80k pottery (office deco)
80k cloth (office carpet)
500k microchip (office PC and laptop)
300k civic
Create 36000 job <--encouraging point to build

Consume:
- 10000 power
- 100 wood per minute (paper)
- 100 civic per minute (work ethic?)

Generate
- 1000 money per minute
- 10000 trash per minute (paper shredding) <--discouraging point to build

ah, so you'll want to make sure that the type of occupation (botanist, scientist, politician to name a few) that people working in the arcology have get's paid more. Colonists will fill up the jobs that pay the most first, and then whoever comes after them get the scraps left behind. So if you want to fill up food and water processing plants first, make botanists have a higher salary than all other jobs. I'm not sure what type of occupation an arcology job is, maybe blue collar, but find out and make that job the highest paying job and any newcomers will fill up the arcologies instead of going elsewhere. make sure to let the arcology fill up before creating another arcology though, because some people might cross between the arcologies to go to work if you don't.

Actually, there is one more downside if the occupation is blue collar. most production plants are blue collar, like steel, gold, regolith, etc. So make sure that you don't have any empty jobs in those before immigrating people into an arcology, or those people may go elsewhere to work for a steel plant instead of the arcology, even if blue collar makes the most money.

I have a suggestion for My Colony such as a possible sollution to reduce "commute length" or the consequences othere of. As your colony gets bigger and you like to have buildings such as residential with other residential type buildings such as I. The length in between housing and the buildings providing jobs for your population continues to expand. To combat excessive commute lengths(which I assume has to do with fatigue) a present a possible taxi station building. This building would allow you to build taxies. Taxies reduce commute length by a 4:1 ratio allowing possible citizen transport that helps reduce possible fatigue. How I imagine it working is a Taxi station builds a taxi and for every taxi a job is provided to the station. Thus workers must come to the station of course to work the taxis and the working taxis seek out citizens walking their commute length to drive them to their destination. As the taxis do this the taxi station produces coin as 1 job is already provided as a default job count even without taxis. This could also pave a way for a new "Transportation" catagory even possibly adding resource transports(including or excluding Resource Harvesters) allowing another great factor to the game increasing its enjoyability. I thank you for your time and possible consideration of this Idea.😀

Hi I got quite a related issue with my workforce...

Trough all updates since, I don't know - 1,5 years ago, my workers start to leave their jobs and get a job at the new building. It doesn't matter how far away from their home it is, how happy they are or something else i can control as player..... I guess you can imagine that this is the point where my Colony starts getting busted ;)

So perhaps the problem lies within the behaviour of the colonists searching for a job and changing it without any purpose?
Other reason could be that the colonists don't stop searching for a job when they already have one and always try to change their lives?
Would be far easier without such odd behaviour ;)

Adding: and the same odd behavior at Antiquitas - though not that bad .

Commonly it starts with buildings needing more than 50 Workers.

(Playing on PC, Win 7 Pro 64 bit)