Search - medical
H3110 guys!
Sometimes when we are ill it is unavoidable to take some medicines to get some relief on some sicknesses.
So in the game My Colony...
‘Wait a minute, where’re my pills?’
Yeah... sounds like medicine does not exist here.
So why I am having this idea?
Firstly, I would like to give some more challenges for colony health that all ordinary clinics and medical facilities need medical supplies.
As well, got inspired by my recent sickness... (well just some headaches)
So here are the details!
Suggestions for Existing Buildings
I would suggest about, except the first aid stations, all clinics requires smarter people to operate, and that would be at least IQ 90.
New Technologies!
New Resources!
New Buildings!
Ideas and feedbacks please (^ω^)
Sometimes when we are ill it is unavoidable to take some medicines to get some relief on some sicknesses.
So in the game My Colony...
‘Wait a minute, where’re my pills?’
Yeah... sounds like medicine does not exist here.
So why I am having this idea?
Firstly, I would like to give some more challenges for colony health that all ordinary clinics and medical facilities need medical supplies.
As well, got inspired by my recent sickness... (well just some headaches)
So here are the details!
Suggestions for Existing Buildings
I would suggest about, except the first aid stations, all clinics requires smarter people to operate, and that would be at least IQ 90.
New Technologies!
- Beginner Medicine
Learn how to cure the basic diseases in the simpliest and cheapest way, without the need to learn or research many things. - Public Sanitation Theory
Learn about how to cure and prevent diseases in a larger scale, especially when your population grows.
New Resources!
- Medical Supplies
No clinic are able to provide service when they don’t have those medicine and tools they will need. Keep your clinics well supplies with it.
Remarks: First aid station, healing pods and regeneration chamber requires no medical supplies, in order to keep them as the cheapest mean for dealing diseases.
New Buildings!
- Medicine Synthesis Lab
A small basic facility for synthesizing medical supplies required to operate the clinics. Requires food and ore to synthesize medical supplies. - Pharma Factory
Synthesize a large amount of medical supplies from oil and ore. - Adv. Pharma Factory
Use plastic, oil, and ore to synthesize more medical supplies for the entire colony. - Pharmacy
Selling extra medical supplies for money.
Ideas and feedbacks please (^ω^)
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.
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.
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!
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!
bastecklein said:I don't plan on adjusting the ratios, I plan on adding bigger medical facilities and schools.
The ratio is good for most of the housing. Only 2 house can be problematic, and only one house can generate big problem (Fantasy Land). For all other housing the ratio should't generate problem using the already present building in game.
If you change the Fantasy land, or adding an upgrade with some medical/edu/entr slot, like the Arcology? Like a "Revenge of Fantasy Land Arcology", 20k pop, 4k inside worker, 16k normal worker, 600 medical slot, 3500 edu, 2500 entertainment? People will need to build some utility, without the need to use half of the map for education, entertainment and medical care..
ps. and the other race? because insect and draconian don't have much to offer..
bastecklein said:You know it just dawned on me guys, I don't think it's the payroll that is killing your colonists, it is probably the lack of medical facilities, since the birth/death calculations also happen on the same time interval as payroll. Make sure you have enough medical facilities in your colony.
Hi, Bast. Made new colony of LIS at abbandoned world. For ~400 colonists i had 49 first aid stations. Food, water and money are in excess. Prior to every payday - colonists went off all work places (stats i.e. 0/0/10), and after "time to pay your workers" the counter of colonists in resources string became 0. all vanished. this happens independently of paying. just when the window appear. autopay didn't solve the problem
i also noted, that at the time when colonists go out of their work running header at the bottom says that "there is an ongoing health crysis in %cityname%. will %username% do something..."
now for 912 colonists, i have 46 medical clinics. however the situation hasn't changes. in statistics the numbers are 14 births, 163 deaths, and 24225 immigration. autopay didn't solve the problem. stats of concerns show NaN% and diagramm ~30% respectively for uneducated, depressed and health. Despite education, entertainment and medical buildings are built within 3-5 tiles of houses. health stat show 0%...
i didn't notice this at my bigger colonies, despite lesser amount of medical buildings and their distance from buildings.
MC version 1.0 for win 10 x64 downloaded from ape-market
Ape Apps Launcher on Windows 10, My Colony v74-75
My population is 127,719. I have 19,551 entertainment slots, 315 of which are being used.
I also have 33,712 medical slots (1,074 large medical clincs, 79 advanced medical research centers, and 6 medical clinics.)
My health is at 79% and dropping, but my colonists are always complaijing about depression which I've been led to believe is alleviated by using entertainment.
I have everyone on a light workload so they have plenty of time to do these things. What else do I need to do to make these idiots go to the doctor?
My population is 127,719. I have 19,551 entertainment slots, 315 of which are being used.
I also have 33,712 medical slots (1,074 large medical clincs, 79 advanced medical research centers, and 6 medical clinics.)
My health is at 79% and dropping, but my colonists are always complaijing about depression which I've been led to believe is alleviated by using entertainment.
I have everyone on a light workload so they have plenty of time to do these things. What else do I need to do to make these idiots go to the doctor?
@bastecklein
I have done some test (chrome, web version), at every payday the game will calculate the life expectancy, if is 0, all pop will be gone without trace.
With 16 First Aid Station: life expectancy 213
With 16 Medical clinic: life expectancy 219-225-219
With 16 Large medical clinic:life expectancy 253
With 16 Integrated Medical clinic: life expectancy 266-263-262(x3)
Plus one Sm. Hospital: life expectancy 258
Plus other 2 Sm. Hospital: life expectancy 259 (and 192k pop)
In most of the case the pop won't appear in the Total Deaths, now i have 26k deaths, even if i "kill" over two hundred thousand colonists.
around 80k pop, at payday back to 1-2k (16 medical clinic=96 heal slot=1920 pop heal, right?), and will add 19k at the total deaths.
an other round, 100k pop killed, only 20k added in the total death (total 65k)
an other round, 135k pop, only 19k remain, 60k added in the total death (tot 125k)
But.. i have notice, every n-time the game check the house and jobs value, filling the high grade first and even leaving some building without any worker. Several players reports attest this behavior just before the payday, and healthcare without worker =deathwave.
I have done some test (chrome, web version), at every payday the game will calculate the life expectancy, if is 0, all pop will be gone without trace.
With 16 First Aid Station: life expectancy 213
With 16 Medical clinic: life expectancy 219-225-219
With 16 Large medical clinic:life expectancy 253
With 16 Integrated Medical clinic: life expectancy 266-263-262(x3)
Plus one Sm. Hospital: life expectancy 258
Plus other 2 Sm. Hospital: life expectancy 259 (and 192k pop)
In most of the case the pop won't appear in the Total Deaths, now i have 26k deaths, even if i "kill" over two hundred thousand colonists.
around 80k pop, at payday back to 1-2k (16 medical clinic=96 heal slot=1920 pop heal, right?), and will add 19k at the total deaths.
an other round, 100k pop killed, only 20k added in the total death (total 65k)
an other round, 135k pop, only 19k remain, 60k added in the total death (tot 125k)
Conclusion
Without healthcare i don't have death wave, only populations collapse without any trace (life expectancy: 0), with some health care building i have a positive life expectancy, and i have 1/3-1/4 death with trace, the rest without trace. After a total cover i don't have any more death.But.. i have notice, every n-time the game check the house and jobs value, filling the high grade first and even leaving some building without any worker. Several players reports attest this behavior just before the payday, and healthcare without worker =deathwave.
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 0
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 0
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 0
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 0
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 213
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 213
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 219
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 225
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 219
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 253
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 266
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 263
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 262
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 262
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 262
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 262
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 262
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 261
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 253
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 254
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 255
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 256
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 257
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 258
script.js:48949 life expectancy: 259
I have created a new colony as of v1.1 and all seemed fine. I build slightly more clinics than I normally would before the medical update (they were never filled over 10% even when starvation occured) and it seemed fine. Suddenly my health dropped to 27% out of nowhere and it just keeps fluctuating in the graph, but the statistics say it is still 27%. Over the 6 hours I already have this problem I kept building more medical facilities, but it just won't improve the health. At this point of time I have 4% of my population working at medical facilities with space for 10% of my population. The medical coverage of my colony is at >99% and there is still no improvement.
PS: 1/4 of my colony are babies because my colonists keep f*cking like rabbits. Pls halp.
PS: 1/4 of my colony are babies because my colonists keep f*cking like rabbits. Pls halp.
In 13th year of the colony, I have (according to ADU, save file reported as corrupted) 2,345 colonists total, including 1,237 students (minors) and 854 workers. No one retired, no one homeless. What bothers me is that the health bar of the colony is at 10 % and no matter how many Large Medical Clinic is in the colony (currently 10) it does not move up. LMC's are next to residential buildings and are fully staffed as far as I know. So medical coverage is at ca. 25,6 %. Also, no residential building shows any problem with medical coverage. I wonder whether babies are counted with med's calculation and if so can they properly use medical facilities?
Oh boy! Today I am publishing the v0.19.0 patch for My Colony 2 which should be hitting all platforms over the coming days. This is by far the biggest update to My Colony 2 yet, featuring significant changes both under and... above(?) the hood. Given the scope of the changes, I would expect some issues to crop up, so please file those bug reports here in the forum. In the mean time, lets take a look at what's new in this release!
The first and biggest change to the game is the addition of the new Mod Shop, which you can access from the title screen if you are a Premium user and signed in using an Ape Apps Account. You can consider the Mod Shop to be very beta at this point, and there is still a lot of work to do. I do not yet have auto updating working for mods, and I still need to build out detailed Mod pages that let you leave feedback to the Mod developer. I also suspect that Total Conversion type mods might not work as planned from the Mod Shop yet, but the basic framework is now there and operational at least.
Mods can now be activated and deactivated from the Play Game menu. If you download a mod from the Mod Shop and want to add it to your game, click on the Settings gear icon next to your saved game, and select "Manage Mods" to add and remove mods to your file. If the Manage Mods option does not show up, then play your save, save it, and try again, because the option will not show for older saves that are not using the latest file format.
The next update is going to involve cleaning up, improving and fixing things wrong with the Mod Shop, so please let me know about all Mod Shop related issues that you discover, because I really think that the Mod Shop has the potential to be a great game changer for My Colony 2 going forward, unlocking access to way more content than could ever be added to the game by a single developer.
On the subject of mods, this update includes a complete and total rewrite to the way in which mods are saved and loaded, and there is a strong potential that Modded games created before v0.19.0 may now be broken, so if that is the case for you, then I apologize. Sadly, the massive changes were necessary though. I suspect that Total Conversion mods might currently be broken, although I have not verified that as of yet.
There is a big change that Mod authors need to be aware of in this update as well. If you mod makes changes to the Metadata object in the game, there is a new Game Identifier field. Saved game files are now associated to this identifier, and unless your mod is a Total Conversion mod, it's Meta object should have the same Game Identifier id as the base My Colony 2 game. Otherwise, save files using your Mod will no longer show up in the saved game list. So if you have a mod that makes changes to the Meta object, and it's not a Total Conversion, make sure it uses the same Game Identifier as the base game ( which is: a999fe76-ff1c-5935-e365-755089ba8982 ). Likewise, if you are making a Total Conversion mod, your mod should NOT use the base game identifier.
This update also introduces a significant rewrite to the way games are saved and loaded. It turns out, that if you were signed in using an Ape Apps Account, almost all of your saved games have been synced to the Ape Apps Cloud since the first release of My Colony 2. You may therefore see a bunch of old saves in your game listing the first time you load up v0.19.0 that you might not have known still existed. You should now be able to delete those old saves, and they will also be removed from the cloud. The game was actually loading all of this old saved data each time it opened, so if you delete old games that are no longer being used, your My Colony 2 startup times should be greatly improved.
Moving on, the internal game server has also undergone a massive overhaul, removing all web browser specific functions and logic from the code. This was done so that I could create a command line based dedicated server application, which had previously not been possible since some of the code in the game server itself could only be run in a web browser context. This change will not be very noticeable to the end user, but was a pretty big effort on my part, and will enable the creation of a separate dedicated server application, which will allow 24/7 cloud based My Colony 2 servers in the (hopefully not too distant) future.
Next up, units in the game can now be scaled. Modders will see the new scaling option in the Unit editor. This change also applies to colonists, which are now scaled to a more realistic size for the first time ever in My Colony history! And speaking of colonists, worlds that theoretically have a breathable atmosphere will now be able to use My Tokens characters as colonists models, which can now be seen on the Water World and the Desert World, giving a nice variety to the game.
And speaking of Colonists, you can now take control of them and walk around your settlement! Click on a colonist to enter the new Player mode, to get up close and personal to your base. There isn't much to this feature yet, but in my opinion it comes with huge potential, especially for modders to create totally different types of games on the back of the My Colony 2 engine. Try it out, let me know what you think, and throw out some suggestions of ways this cool new mode can be expanded!
You may notice that the graphics in My Colony 2 are a bit "cleaner" than they were prior to v0.19.0. I didn't even realize it until working on this update, but the anti-aliasing engine was completely broken in Scroll3d. Anyway, it works now and you should be able to notice a subtle difference in the visuals of the game.
I have started to add more detailed building-level statistics to the game. Now when you select a building, there is a stats button that you can click on to expand additional information about the structure, including items like workers and production levels. More will be coming to this expanded interface in the future.
Speaking of statistics, both the World and Settlement level statistics screen have been updated. And there are now settlement level penalties for not having enough Food, Medical, Entertainment, Security, and Education. Settlements now also have a separate "Overall Health" stat, not to be confused with the Medical stat. The Medical tells you what your settlement's medical coverage is, but the Overall Health also takes into effect things like food/water shortages, homelessness, etc. When the overall health gets to low, people will now start to die, so make sure to stay on top of that. You also now have an approval rating for each settlement, which is derived from all statistical factors.
Staying on the topic of statistics, the GDP calculation has now been fixed, as it was previously borked and often showing negative numbers. If you have an already existing colony, it will take a few cycles for your GDP to fix itself, as the game does not go back in time and fix the historical numbers that were calculated using the old, broken calculation.
Moving on, Gifting has now been added to the game! Gifting is done from settlement to settlement, and your gift capacity is determined by the number of Trading Depots you have in your settlement. To gift, make sure your camera is in a settlement that you want to gift from. Then open statistics, and choose the settlement you wish to gift to. After that, the process is fairly straightforward. This should be a big help to multiplayer games.
I have begun expanding the Encyclopedia to include information on Units and Game Contributors. There isn't much there on those sections yet, although I did add an in-game way to send a donation of Ape Coins to the various game contributors who have helped make My Colony 2 what it is today, if you wish to say "thank you" for their efforts.
Some of the existing structures have been modified in this release. The Greenhouse Park will now slowly generate trace amounts of Wood, making Wood available to all map types now. The Warehouse storage capacities have been expanded. The Expansion Barge can no longer be built at the Watercraft Station (there is a new larger water construction yard now for the barge). The Internet Relay Booth now generates a small amount of Research, giving a research head start before players are able to build the Small Research Lab. The output of the Ore Fraking Operation and the Gold Synthesis lab have been increased. The existing Landing Field has been replaced by the smaller Landing Pad, using updated models provided by @GeneralWadaling . I think there were more changes too, but I don't recall them all at the moment.
There are some new Ancient ruins to be found on the Abandoned World, which you will see if you scroll around the map, remnants of a time when the Ancients once controlled the galaxy. There are even some "H Blocks" inspired from the ruins of Pumapunku!
Let's move on to the new content added to the game. Model contributors for this release (besides myself, of course) I believe include @GeneralWadaling , @DoYouHaveAnyOats , and @spamdude . If there are others and I forgot to mention you, then I'm sorry! It's not personal! 😳
Firstly, the new technologies of Advanced Chemical Synthesis, Low Gravity Oil Production, and Advanced Charcoal Production have been added to the game. With these additions bring two new resources into the fold, which are Oil and Plastic (as you might have guessed).
Many of the new structures in this update directly benefit the Water World, although all planet types are benefited to some degree. The new Micro Nursery allows you to get more Trees early game, before you are able to move off of your initial island. That is complimented by the Gold Extractor, which is a slow but easy way to get Gold in the game early on, which was also traditionally difficult on the Water World. Once you advance, there is a new Tree Farm for producing trees at a faster rate, without needing to continually expand and harvest. The new Construction Quay is a larger off-shore ship yard for building larger sea craft, and the new Small Offshore Drill will allow you to extract different minerals, including Oil, from the bottom of the sea. On the Military side of things, there is a new Patrol Boat which is basically like a water based version of the current Infantry unit.
The Landing Field has been moved further down the tech tree, and is replaced by the smaller early game Landing Pad. There is a new Wood Grower for generating more wood, an Oil Tank for storing Oil, and a Synthetic Oil Lab for creating Oil out of Food. Once you have Oil, you can convert it into Plastic using the new Plastic Factory. You can also get a small amount of Plastic from the new Recycling Center.
I think that is all of the new content, although I might have missed something. Looking forward though, now that we have Oil and Plastic in the game, it might be time to introduce Robotics in to the mix, and start going down that branch of the tech tree, so stay tuned for all of that.
At the end of the day, there were so many under the hood changes to this update, that something is bound to be broken. Please be on the lookout and let me know what issues you find. I have been working on this update for the better part of two months, so it is entire possible that I started working on a mechanic weeks ago, and forgot to finish it up. All in all though, I think this is a fair update to the game, and I hope you guys like it!
My Colony 2 v0.19.0 is available now on the Web, Launcher, and Windows Store, and will hopefully be hitting Google Play and the App Store within the next few days, depending on app store review times (even Android requires review now too). So stay tuned for that, let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more in the weeks and months ahead!
https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/
#mycolony2
The first and biggest change to the game is the addition of the new Mod Shop, which you can access from the title screen if you are a Premium user and signed in using an Ape Apps Account. You can consider the Mod Shop to be very beta at this point, and there is still a lot of work to do. I do not yet have auto updating working for mods, and I still need to build out detailed Mod pages that let you leave feedback to the Mod developer. I also suspect that Total Conversion type mods might not work as planned from the Mod Shop yet, but the basic framework is now there and operational at least.
Mods can now be activated and deactivated from the Play Game menu. If you download a mod from the Mod Shop and want to add it to your game, click on the Settings gear icon next to your saved game, and select "Manage Mods" to add and remove mods to your file. If the Manage Mods option does not show up, then play your save, save it, and try again, because the option will not show for older saves that are not using the latest file format.
The next update is going to involve cleaning up, improving and fixing things wrong with the Mod Shop, so please let me know about all Mod Shop related issues that you discover, because I really think that the Mod Shop has the potential to be a great game changer for My Colony 2 going forward, unlocking access to way more content than could ever be added to the game by a single developer.
On the subject of mods, this update includes a complete and total rewrite to the way in which mods are saved and loaded, and there is a strong potential that Modded games created before v0.19.0 may now be broken, so if that is the case for you, then I apologize. Sadly, the massive changes were necessary though. I suspect that Total Conversion mods might currently be broken, although I have not verified that as of yet.
There is a big change that Mod authors need to be aware of in this update as well. If you mod makes changes to the Metadata object in the game, there is a new Game Identifier field. Saved game files are now associated to this identifier, and unless your mod is a Total Conversion mod, it's Meta object should have the same Game Identifier id as the base My Colony 2 game. Otherwise, save files using your Mod will no longer show up in the saved game list. So if you have a mod that makes changes to the Meta object, and it's not a Total Conversion, make sure it uses the same Game Identifier as the base game ( which is: a999fe76-ff1c-5935-e365-755089ba8982 ). Likewise, if you are making a Total Conversion mod, your mod should NOT use the base game identifier.
This update also introduces a significant rewrite to the way games are saved and loaded. It turns out, that if you were signed in using an Ape Apps Account, almost all of your saved games have been synced to the Ape Apps Cloud since the first release of My Colony 2. You may therefore see a bunch of old saves in your game listing the first time you load up v0.19.0 that you might not have known still existed. You should now be able to delete those old saves, and they will also be removed from the cloud. The game was actually loading all of this old saved data each time it opened, so if you delete old games that are no longer being used, your My Colony 2 startup times should be greatly improved.
Moving on, the internal game server has also undergone a massive overhaul, removing all web browser specific functions and logic from the code. This was done so that I could create a command line based dedicated server application, which had previously not been possible since some of the code in the game server itself could only be run in a web browser context. This change will not be very noticeable to the end user, but was a pretty big effort on my part, and will enable the creation of a separate dedicated server application, which will allow 24/7 cloud based My Colony 2 servers in the (hopefully not too distant) future.
Next up, units in the game can now be scaled. Modders will see the new scaling option in the Unit editor. This change also applies to colonists, which are now scaled to a more realistic size for the first time ever in My Colony history! And speaking of colonists, worlds that theoretically have a breathable atmosphere will now be able to use My Tokens characters as colonists models, which can now be seen on the Water World and the Desert World, giving a nice variety to the game.
And speaking of Colonists, you can now take control of them and walk around your settlement! Click on a colonist to enter the new Player mode, to get up close and personal to your base. There isn't much to this feature yet, but in my opinion it comes with huge potential, especially for modders to create totally different types of games on the back of the My Colony 2 engine. Try it out, let me know what you think, and throw out some suggestions of ways this cool new mode can be expanded!
You may notice that the graphics in My Colony 2 are a bit "cleaner" than they were prior to v0.19.0. I didn't even realize it until working on this update, but the anti-aliasing engine was completely broken in Scroll3d. Anyway, it works now and you should be able to notice a subtle difference in the visuals of the game.
I have started to add more detailed building-level statistics to the game. Now when you select a building, there is a stats button that you can click on to expand additional information about the structure, including items like workers and production levels. More will be coming to this expanded interface in the future.
Speaking of statistics, both the World and Settlement level statistics screen have been updated. And there are now settlement level penalties for not having enough Food, Medical, Entertainment, Security, and Education. Settlements now also have a separate "Overall Health" stat, not to be confused with the Medical stat. The Medical tells you what your settlement's medical coverage is, but the Overall Health also takes into effect things like food/water shortages, homelessness, etc. When the overall health gets to low, people will now start to die, so make sure to stay on top of that. You also now have an approval rating for each settlement, which is derived from all statistical factors.
Staying on the topic of statistics, the GDP calculation has now been fixed, as it was previously borked and often showing negative numbers. If you have an already existing colony, it will take a few cycles for your GDP to fix itself, as the game does not go back in time and fix the historical numbers that were calculated using the old, broken calculation.
Moving on, Gifting has now been added to the game! Gifting is done from settlement to settlement, and your gift capacity is determined by the number of Trading Depots you have in your settlement. To gift, make sure your camera is in a settlement that you want to gift from. Then open statistics, and choose the settlement you wish to gift to. After that, the process is fairly straightforward. This should be a big help to multiplayer games.
I have begun expanding the Encyclopedia to include information on Units and Game Contributors. There isn't much there on those sections yet, although I did add an in-game way to send a donation of Ape Coins to the various game contributors who have helped make My Colony 2 what it is today, if you wish to say "thank you" for their efforts.
Some of the existing structures have been modified in this release. The Greenhouse Park will now slowly generate trace amounts of Wood, making Wood available to all map types now. The Warehouse storage capacities have been expanded. The Expansion Barge can no longer be built at the Watercraft Station (there is a new larger water construction yard now for the barge). The Internet Relay Booth now generates a small amount of Research, giving a research head start before players are able to build the Small Research Lab. The output of the Ore Fraking Operation and the Gold Synthesis lab have been increased. The existing Landing Field has been replaced by the smaller Landing Pad, using updated models provided by @GeneralWadaling . I think there were more changes too, but I don't recall them all at the moment.
There are some new Ancient ruins to be found on the Abandoned World, which you will see if you scroll around the map, remnants of a time when the Ancients once controlled the galaxy. There are even some "H Blocks" inspired from the ruins of Pumapunku!
Let's move on to the new content added to the game. Model contributors for this release (besides myself, of course) I believe include @GeneralWadaling , @DoYouHaveAnyOats , and @spamdude . If there are others and I forgot to mention you, then I'm sorry! It's not personal! 😳
Firstly, the new technologies of Advanced Chemical Synthesis, Low Gravity Oil Production, and Advanced Charcoal Production have been added to the game. With these additions bring two new resources into the fold, which are Oil and Plastic (as you might have guessed).
Many of the new structures in this update directly benefit the Water World, although all planet types are benefited to some degree. The new Micro Nursery allows you to get more Trees early game, before you are able to move off of your initial island. That is complimented by the Gold Extractor, which is a slow but easy way to get Gold in the game early on, which was also traditionally difficult on the Water World. Once you advance, there is a new Tree Farm for producing trees at a faster rate, without needing to continually expand and harvest. The new Construction Quay is a larger off-shore ship yard for building larger sea craft, and the new Small Offshore Drill will allow you to extract different minerals, including Oil, from the bottom of the sea. On the Military side of things, there is a new Patrol Boat which is basically like a water based version of the current Infantry unit.
The Landing Field has been moved further down the tech tree, and is replaced by the smaller early game Landing Pad. There is a new Wood Grower for generating more wood, an Oil Tank for storing Oil, and a Synthetic Oil Lab for creating Oil out of Food. Once you have Oil, you can convert it into Plastic using the new Plastic Factory. You can also get a small amount of Plastic from the new Recycling Center.
I think that is all of the new content, although I might have missed something. Looking forward though, now that we have Oil and Plastic in the game, it might be time to introduce Robotics in to the mix, and start going down that branch of the tech tree, so stay tuned for all of that.
At the end of the day, there were so many under the hood changes to this update, that something is bound to be broken. Please be on the lookout and let me know what issues you find. I have been working on this update for the better part of two months, so it is entire possible that I started working on a mechanic weeks ago, and forgot to finish it up. All in all though, I think this is a fair update to the game, and I hope you guys like it!
My Colony 2 v0.19.0 is available now on the Web, Launcher, and Windows Store, and will hopefully be hitting Google Play and the App Store within the next few days, depending on app store review times (even Android requires review now too). So stay tuned for that, let me know what you think, and stay tuned for more in the weeks and months ahead!
https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/
#mycolony2
I am finding the advanced medical research centre not having any medical services at all. Health is becoming an issue on mine. Its the same with each medical facility and even the arcology is missing this.
I am finding fatigue is always a problem, despite using the fire drill protocol on them. Could you add subway stations or a mini stargate they can use to transport around?
Speaking of the stargate, I've noticed that you can't sell plastic here. Is this a mistake or on purpose?
Sometimes when I load the game, all the resources are in free fall. As an example, an ultra deep excavation site with 60 people employed will have none actually working.
Viewing the workers, all 60 will have 100% energy. Pressing on the view workers button again puts them all back to work.
I'm not sure if anyone else has this specific problem
I am finding fatigue is always a problem, despite using the fire drill protocol on them. Could you add subway stations or a mini stargate they can use to transport around?
Speaking of the stargate, I've noticed that you can't sell plastic here. Is this a mistake or on purpose?
Sometimes when I load the game, all the resources are in free fall. As an example, an ultra deep excavation site with 60 people employed will have none actually working.
Viewing the workers, all 60 will have 100% energy. Pressing on the view workers button again puts them all back to work.
I'm not sure if anyone else has this specific problem
am finding the advanced medical research centre not having any medical services at all. Health is becoming an issue on mine. Its the same with each medical facility and even the arcology is missing this.
How far away from the jobs and housing is the hospitals? Usually you want to keep things within 21 squares from housing and jobs I am finding fatigue is always a problem, despite using the fire drill protocol on them. Could you add subway stations or a mini stargate they can use to transport around?
Again how far do they have to walk? If it's more than 21 squares they get tired of then mad and then do nothing but strike.
Speaking of the stargate, I've noticed that you can't sell plastic here. Is this a mistake or on purpose?
Yes that is by design if you have unlocked the galactic trade you can get it there tho.
Sometimes when I load the game, all the resources are in free fall. As an example, an ultra deep excavation site with 60 people employed will have none actually working.
Viewing the workers, all 60 will have 100% energy. Pressing on the view workers button again puts them all back to work.
Viewing the workers, all 60 will have 100% energy. Pressing on the view workers button again puts them all back to work.
This depends on what you mean.
If you are talking about actual resources dropping it could be because of the employees being to tired to work or them being on strike. It could also be because of the resources syncing with the server and adjusting you to the last know amounts the server recorded.
But if it's just the workers it's a known visual bug.
I'm not sure if anyone else has this specific problem
There have been some reports of similar issues, bast is chipping away at figuring out what the problem is. So.. for just one Arcology (16k), we will need:
Seems.. excessive
- 5% Medical = 800 slot = 8 Adv Medical Research
- 20% edu = 3200 slot= 11 Transcendent Academy
- 15% Entertainment = 2400 slot = 3 medium stadium (2,4), or 48 Colonimulation Hup
Seems.. excessive
Ok so last night/early this morning while I was lying in bed thinking of My Colony updates instead of sleeping (common dev problem), I decided to change my thinking a bit on what percentage of medical/entertainment/school will be needed.
What I am going to now I think, is replace the current colonist model with an internal age-distribution model, and add birth-rate into the game. I will base the birth rate on health and average income.
So educational requirements will be based mostly on the number of people under 20 years old in the colony, and secondarily on unemployed people. Health requirements will be higher for children and the elderly. Entertainment requirements higher for young/middle aged. At some point I will make each building able to target specific age groups, but that is a lot of game file editing that I do not want to do at this moment.
So I think this can make early game issues largely irrelevant. If your first two colonists are 25-30 years old, they will not need medical and education, so the lander will not have to provide. You can build an internet relay booth pretty much right away for entertainment, and I think that their happiness not being 100% for the first few minutes of the game is not really detrimental.
This will make the game more realistic, and also require a colony to take care of kids and elderly who are not able to work. The unemployment figure will have to be recalculated to only include people aged 20-70.
What I am going to now I think, is replace the current colonist model with an internal age-distribution model, and add birth-rate into the game. I will base the birth rate on health and average income.
So educational requirements will be based mostly on the number of people under 20 years old in the colony, and secondarily on unemployed people. Health requirements will be higher for children and the elderly. Entertainment requirements higher for young/middle aged. At some point I will make each building able to target specific age groups, but that is a lot of game file editing that I do not want to do at this moment.
So I think this can make early game issues largely irrelevant. If your first two colonists are 25-30 years old, they will not need medical and education, so the lander will not have to provide. You can build an internet relay booth pretty much right away for entertainment, and I think that their happiness not being 100% for the first few minutes of the game is not really detrimental.
This will make the game more realistic, and also require a colony to take care of kids and elderly who are not able to work. The unemployment figure will have to be recalculated to only include people aged 20-70.
I generally save posts in the Updates section of the forum for My Colony release notes, but the upcoming update (which I will hopefully be releasing before this weekend) introduces some major changes to the game engine which people should be aware of, particularly those with large single-city (non-region) maps.
Firstly, I had originally said that the main update to v1.0.0 was going to consist of online leaderboards and that sort of stuff. Once I started coding on it though, one small engine tweak here and there ended up leading to another, then another, then another, and before I knew it I had rewritten significant parts of the underlying game engine. At this point, I have used up so much of my time on engine updates that trying to implement the leaderboard stuff would push the update back until mid-January, since I am going to be traveling soon for the Holidays and will not have any time to work on My Colony.
The core of the engine changes will be explained in detail in the release notes, but I wanted everybody to be aware of several issues that will effect players, particularly those with large colonies.
Age
My Colony always kept track of colonists' age internally, but because of the way the game simulated colonists prior to v1.0.0, almost every single colonist was stuck in the 18-35 year old age range. Starting with My Colony v1.0.0, a new Birth/Death model has been added to the game, where colonists will now age properly, have children, and eventually die. Life expectancy is based on a variety of factors (mostly medical access).
Colonists can give birth when they are between 16 and 40 years old. For a new colony this is fine, but consider an existing colony, particularly a large one with several hundred thousand colonists or more. You will be starting out with a huge group of colonists in birthing range, so you will experience something of a baby-boom right at the beginning. However, these colonists will begin aging, and will eventually all retire and ultimately die at the same time. New births will also quickly taper off once the initial group of colonists moves out of the starting range.
For brand new colonies, I do not expect this to be much of an issue, as populations will start out small and the distribution will be more evenly spread out. But for the existing colony, there might be some issues associated with the Demographic Cliff that your colony might find itself falling off of (Perhaps My Colony is a preview for Japan/Europe).
Now ultimately, I do not believe that this will be as big of an issue as it seems, at least not the death part. Pretty much all large colonies already have the ability to scale up population quickly if needed, using Cloning Vats, Star Gates, and the like. New immigrants and new clones all show up to the colony in the 18-35 age range, so I do believe that any massive loss or mishap can be quickly corrected with little effort. If you know how to grow a colony into the 6-figure population range, you probably already know how to get new colonists fast.
A bit more complicated is the retirement part of the equation, however this also may not be as bad as it seems. With other changes to this update, productivity output is (in most cases) significantly higher than it was before, and a large non-working population can pretty easily be sustained by a smaller working population, particularly in late-game which is where most people will be who are impacted by the demographics issue. You just need to have more housing now than you would of had to before non-working minors and retired people were a part of the mix, but I think that this is a reasonable and realistic feature for a game such as this.
Amenities
The other large factor coming in this update is the increased need for amenities, like Education, Medical, and Entertainment. Before, these things were more of an afterthought, and you really didn't need them to keep your colonists happy. Now they are an important part of the game. You will need to have sufficient Education, Medical, and Entertainment facilities within range of your housing in order to keep your colonists happy and healthy.
Work Range
Simply put, after v1.0.0, colonists will not travel more than 50 tiles distance from their home to get to work. There isn't a lot more to say on this, but you might need to look at the layout of your city and make sure things are in the right place to account for this change.
Why the Changes?
Although I will go over this in great detail in the full patch notes, I believe that after the initial shock of the changes, most players will think this update is a major step forward. I can tell you from the testing I have done so far on colonies of all types and sizes, I have found overall game performance to be improved across the board, for pretty much every colony type and scenario. Running a 200x200 map with almost 300k colonists and virtually no lag is a fairly enjoyable experience.
The new engine updates are also going to lead to a couple of features that have been long sought after by the My Colony community - Mass Transit and Crime.
The changes also offer a significant reduction to game save file sizes, which should reduce the occurrence of save file corruptions (which are usually caused by failed cloud-sync).
Again, I will go over everything in more detail in the patch notes, but please be aware of what is coming!
Firstly, I had originally said that the main update to v1.0.0 was going to consist of online leaderboards and that sort of stuff. Once I started coding on it though, one small engine tweak here and there ended up leading to another, then another, then another, and before I knew it I had rewritten significant parts of the underlying game engine. At this point, I have used up so much of my time on engine updates that trying to implement the leaderboard stuff would push the update back until mid-January, since I am going to be traveling soon for the Holidays and will not have any time to work on My Colony.
The core of the engine changes will be explained in detail in the release notes, but I wanted everybody to be aware of several issues that will effect players, particularly those with large colonies.
Age
My Colony always kept track of colonists' age internally, but because of the way the game simulated colonists prior to v1.0.0, almost every single colonist was stuck in the 18-35 year old age range. Starting with My Colony v1.0.0, a new Birth/Death model has been added to the game, where colonists will now age properly, have children, and eventually die. Life expectancy is based on a variety of factors (mostly medical access).
Colonists can give birth when they are between 16 and 40 years old. For a new colony this is fine, but consider an existing colony, particularly a large one with several hundred thousand colonists or more. You will be starting out with a huge group of colonists in birthing range, so you will experience something of a baby-boom right at the beginning. However, these colonists will begin aging, and will eventually all retire and ultimately die at the same time. New births will also quickly taper off once the initial group of colonists moves out of the starting range.
For brand new colonies, I do not expect this to be much of an issue, as populations will start out small and the distribution will be more evenly spread out. But for the existing colony, there might be some issues associated with the Demographic Cliff that your colony might find itself falling off of (Perhaps My Colony is a preview for Japan/Europe).
Now ultimately, I do not believe that this will be as big of an issue as it seems, at least not the death part. Pretty much all large colonies already have the ability to scale up population quickly if needed, using Cloning Vats, Star Gates, and the like. New immigrants and new clones all show up to the colony in the 18-35 age range, so I do believe that any massive loss or mishap can be quickly corrected with little effort. If you know how to grow a colony into the 6-figure population range, you probably already know how to get new colonists fast.
A bit more complicated is the retirement part of the equation, however this also may not be as bad as it seems. With other changes to this update, productivity output is (in most cases) significantly higher than it was before, and a large non-working population can pretty easily be sustained by a smaller working population, particularly in late-game which is where most people will be who are impacted by the demographics issue. You just need to have more housing now than you would of had to before non-working minors and retired people were a part of the mix, but I think that this is a reasonable and realistic feature for a game such as this.
Amenities
The other large factor coming in this update is the increased need for amenities, like Education, Medical, and Entertainment. Before, these things were more of an afterthought, and you really didn't need them to keep your colonists happy. Now they are an important part of the game. You will need to have sufficient Education, Medical, and Entertainment facilities within range of your housing in order to keep your colonists happy and healthy.
Work Range
Simply put, after v1.0.0, colonists will not travel more than 50 tiles distance from their home to get to work. There isn't a lot more to say on this, but you might need to look at the layout of your city and make sure things are in the right place to account for this change.
Why the Changes?
Although I will go over this in great detail in the full patch notes, I believe that after the initial shock of the changes, most players will think this update is a major step forward. I can tell you from the testing I have done so far on colonies of all types and sizes, I have found overall game performance to be improved across the board, for pretty much every colony type and scenario. Running a 200x200 map with almost 300k colonists and virtually no lag is a fairly enjoyable experience.
The new engine updates are also going to lead to a couple of features that have been long sought after by the My Colony community - Mass Transit and Crime.
The changes also offer a significant reduction to game save file sizes, which should reduce the occurrence of save file corruptions (which are usually caused by failed cloud-sync).
Again, I will go over everything in more detail in the patch notes, but please be aware of what is coming!
@Ansom After looking at the code, the Hospital is not showing up blue because there are no patients in it. This is a little "bug" to save on CPU performance so that the engine does not have to look up the game def for each building while rendering the overlay. I think nobody is in the hospital because all of the houses are so small that their "needed medical" rating averages out to 0, and since the whole colony is rated at needing no medical, it is just giving you a 50%.
I am making changes to this so it should get better, but I have reduced the importance of medical on populations under 250 in order to make it not so brutal for new cities.
I am making changes to this so it should get better, but I have reduced the importance of medical on populations under 250 in order to make it not so brutal for new cities.
I have just put the finishing touches on Antiquitas v1.26.0, and the update should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. This is a major update which rolls up all features and bug fixes from the My Colony engine contained in MC patches v0.96.0, v0.97.0, v0.98.0, v0.99.0, v1.0.0, v1.1.0, and v1.2.0. Now, if you've followed My Colony, you know that there have been some major changes contained in those releases, and they are now hitting Antiquitas, so let's go over everything that's new!
The popular unit grouping feature is now available in Antiquitas! Now when you select a group of similar units, you can "stack" them into one single unit, combining their abilities into one. This provides much faster build times, and also improves game performance.
Certain buildings can now be moved. If a building does not also function as a resource drop-off point for your harvesting servants, you can now click on the 'move' button to place it in a different location. This comes in handy if you accidentally built something in the wrong place, or you just want to rearrange things as your city grows.
On the Gallia map (the only map that contains a river), rivers in Region games are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of generated at the individual map level. This gives a greater since of continuity for Regional players, and it just looks nicer. You can have the game automatically generate the rivers, or you can supply your own template from an image file.
Also in Regions, you can now move servants between region maps. To do this, simply walk a servant unit to the edge of a map, and he will move over to the adjacent map. You can also now click on the border area around a region city and the game will ask you if you want to switch to that city, letting you move between regional areas without first having to back out to the region overview screen.
The largest change comes in the way that the simulation is handled behind the scenes. As with My Colony, Antiquitas now runs on a statistical based system, rather than trying to simulate the lives of each individual citizen. This change greatly improves the performance of the game, but does come with some changes you need to be aware of.
Each residential building in the game now has internal rating statistics that you will need to maximize in order to run an efficient city.
You can see a detailed explanation on how this works in this post, but essentially you will need to make sure that each residential structure has adequate Medical, Educational, and Entertainment access, in order to keep your citizens happy and productive.
In order to help with these changes, several structures in the game have been buffed in this update. The Medical and Education ratings of the Taberna Medica, House of the Sun-Nu, and Druid Healer Hut have been increased. The Education ratings of the Grammaticus, Scholae Magister, Scholae Rethor, House of the Scribe, School of the Scribes, Druid Healer Hut, Druid Ring, and Druid Assembly have all been increased. Finally, the Shrine of Jupiter, Shrine of Bastet, and Bard Stand now offer a minor medical rating boost. With these changes, most existing cities, if well designed, should not have to make many changes in order to "just work" with the latest update.
You will now have to deal with the birth, death, and aging of your population. There is a new Age Distribution chart in the statistics window to let you see how old your citizens are.
You will now need to provide additional housing for minors and retired citizens, who are not a part of the labor force.
In order to help you manage these changes and micro-manage your city production and output, there are two new slider options added to the stats screen for individual buildings, the Production Priority and Employment Capacity sliders.
Using these new sliders, you can prioritize buildings, making them fill up with workers before other structures. You can also put a cap on the amount of workers each building has, so that a building that requires a large number of workers does not suck up all of your available workforce. Using these sliders, you can tweak your city's industrial output to your liking.
There were a ton of engine changes in this update, but I am hoping that the transition is smooth. These changes have been in My Colony for a little while now, and I think a majority of the kinks have now been worked out. So that's all for today, I hope you enjoy the update, and stay tuned for more improvements to come!
The popular unit grouping feature is now available in Antiquitas! Now when you select a group of similar units, you can "stack" them into one single unit, combining their abilities into one. This provides much faster build times, and also improves game performance.
Certain buildings can now be moved. If a building does not also function as a resource drop-off point for your harvesting servants, you can now click on the 'move' button to place it in a different location. This comes in handy if you accidentally built something in the wrong place, or you just want to rearrange things as your city grows.
On the Gallia map (the only map that contains a river), rivers in Region games are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of generated at the individual map level. This gives a greater since of continuity for Regional players, and it just looks nicer. You can have the game automatically generate the rivers, or you can supply your own template from an image file.
Also in Regions, you can now move servants between region maps. To do this, simply walk a servant unit to the edge of a map, and he will move over to the adjacent map. You can also now click on the border area around a region city and the game will ask you if you want to switch to that city, letting you move between regional areas without first having to back out to the region overview screen.
The largest change comes in the way that the simulation is handled behind the scenes. As with My Colony, Antiquitas now runs on a statistical based system, rather than trying to simulate the lives of each individual citizen. This change greatly improves the performance of the game, but does come with some changes you need to be aware of.
Each residential building in the game now has internal rating statistics that you will need to maximize in order to run an efficient city.
You can see a detailed explanation on how this works in this post, but essentially you will need to make sure that each residential structure has adequate Medical, Educational, and Entertainment access, in order to keep your citizens happy and productive.
In order to help with these changes, several structures in the game have been buffed in this update. The Medical and Education ratings of the Taberna Medica, House of the Sun-Nu, and Druid Healer Hut have been increased. The Education ratings of the Grammaticus, Scholae Magister, Scholae Rethor, House of the Scribe, School of the Scribes, Druid Healer Hut, Druid Ring, and Druid Assembly have all been increased. Finally, the Shrine of Jupiter, Shrine of Bastet, and Bard Stand now offer a minor medical rating boost. With these changes, most existing cities, if well designed, should not have to make many changes in order to "just work" with the latest update.
You will now have to deal with the birth, death, and aging of your population. There is a new Age Distribution chart in the statistics window to let you see how old your citizens are.
You will now need to provide additional housing for minors and retired citizens, who are not a part of the labor force.
In order to help you manage these changes and micro-manage your city production and output, there are two new slider options added to the stats screen for individual buildings, the Production Priority and Employment Capacity sliders.
Using these new sliders, you can prioritize buildings, making them fill up with workers before other structures. You can also put a cap on the amount of workers each building has, so that a building that requires a large number of workers does not suck up all of your available workforce. Using these sliders, you can tweak your city's industrial output to your liking.
There were a ton of engine changes in this update, but I am hoping that the transition is smooth. These changes have been in My Colony for a little while now, and I think a majority of the kinks have now been worked out. So that's all for today, I hope you enjoy the update, and stay tuned for more improvements to come!
Hello guys.
It may be a good idea to bring your colony some more challenges, as well as opportunities with random events, though it is not the first time this idea has been suggested.
So here I would like to share my ideas.
In the game you'll encounter a random event periodically, like 4-in-game-monthes interval you'll receive a pop-up.
Usually the event will bring you immediate effects, or a long term effect that lasts no longer than 4-in-game-monthes.
To secure development of the early colonies some events requires specific building(s) or atmosphere level, trash, planet type to trigger. And some events can be prevented by specific buildings.
Some of the events will require your decision, in this case you can choose the outcome of the event.
Here are some of my ideas.
More event ideas might be added soon!
It may be a good idea to bring your colony some more challenges, as well as opportunities with random events, though it is not the first time this idea has been suggested.
So here I would like to share my ideas.
In the game you'll encounter a random event periodically, like 4-in-game-monthes interval you'll receive a pop-up.
Usually the event will bring you immediate effects, or a long term effect that lasts no longer than 4-in-game-monthes.
To secure development of the early colonies some events requires specific building(s) or atmosphere level, trash, planet type to trigger. And some events can be prevented by specific buildings.
Some of the events will require your decision, in this case you can choose the outcome of the event.
Here are some of my ideas.
- Food spoilage
Some problem occurred in our food storages, causing [loss] units of our food are spoiled.
The loss is equal to 20% of food you have.
Prevented by:
- Quantum Food Storage
- Subterranean Food Storage
- Gravitational Compression Warehouse
- Quantum Supply Pile
- Unholy Pit of Stuff
- Unholy Tower of Stuff
- Advanced Materials Silo
- Near-Infinite Materials Silo
- Storm
A storm have just struck our colony. Our buildings are damaged.
All buildings' condition -10%.
Triggered by:
- Planet atmosphere ≥ 1000000
- Plague Outbreak
A massive outbreak in our colony has caused [deaths] colonists died and [sicks] colonists gravely ill. Expect a increase of workloads on medical facilities.
Death rate is 1% of all colonists you have and sick rate is the rest of 15% colonists you have. Rounded down.
Medical demands increases by 30% for 2-in-game-monthes.
Prevented by:
- Advanced Medical Research Center
- Ant Paste Rejuvenation Clinic
- Bloodletting Station
- Enlightment
A enlightment movement has boosted our science output!
Science output doubled for 2-in-game-monthes. - Innovation
A smart engineer in our colony have created innovations which the concepts can inspire our own scientists or we can sell the patent for profit.
Which way you would like to make use of the patent?
Instantly provides a sum of money (based on number of techs you have) or a sum of research (that worthes 50% cost of the most expensive tech researchable at the moment.)
More event ideas might be added soon!
(All is for Human races only)(United Earth & League of Independent States)
First things first, I apologize for there being any grammar mistakes, am doing this from my phone, and I also don’t like to be too formal because I don’t really see a point of it.
Do I need to get rid of Trash and limit the amount of Atmosphere I have?
Atmosphere and Trash have absolutely no negative effects to your colony(as of right now), in fact it’s best to get as much of these two resources as you can. Reason for that being that Trash can eventually be used to make Plastic (Small Recycler) and eventually Plastic and Aluminum as well! (Medium Recycler)Also, if you really wanna boost your the amount of Atmosphere you have, the incinerator ( 2x2 building) produces a TON of atmosphere at the expense of burning away a lot of trash. Atmosphere can be used eventually to create a lot of water which is really useful in some colonies. The Ant Paste Synthesizer consumes trash as well to make Ant Paste.
(Do note, Atmosphere and Trash may effect gameplay negatively in a future update, however as of right now it does not)
(I personally currently have 42.8 Billion atmosphere, and 12.6 Billion Trash)
Aluminum! If you have this resource in your world DO NOT use all of it! Save as much aluminum as you possibly can because one it goes away, there’s not another way of making more until you get Alien Tech or you unlock the Medium Recycling Center! Aluminum can also be pricy at times aswell, but with that being said it is also an option to purchase it from the trade market, and also the Uranium Enrichment Facility allows you to purchase some Aluminum in amounts of 100.
Uranium Enrichment Facility? This building requires Uranium and Aluminum in order to function. It takes in 1 Uranium and produces 2. Meaning every time the bar is filled you will receive 1 Uranium.
Best way to get Civics? The most efficient way of generating high amounts of civics for United Earth is the Imperial Propaganda Office, while the Investment Bank generates more, the IPO is more space, and cost (the second clue for the challenge is a building not looked highly upon for it produces a resource only useful for the government and pubs) efficient considering the IB requires 4 tiles, 5k workers, and a couple thousand resources as well as $2.5M.
Best way of generating Research? The most efficient way of generating resource is without a doubt the Center for Artificial Learning. It generates about 1100 Research a second at max worker capacity.
What is the Department of Fish Mating Studies & is it Worth it? The DFMS is and was designed to simply be a building to send extra colonists to work without damaging your production lines. It simply just generates Research in amounts of 1 extremely fast while using Money, Rum, and Software. It can hold 5,500 workers, and it is a 3x3 sized building. It isn’t worth it if you have to worry about the resources required to build it, it is simply a job filler.
What is Tourism? Tourism is a quick way of earning passive income without the need of consuming a lot of resources. While you do not get resources produced by it you do get money. The amount of Tourists you can support can be found to the right of your Population number and it has the symbol of a colonist wearing a blue shirt, a red hat, and is looking through binoculars. Tourists will come in from the Space Port, and to increase your Tourism capacity, simply build more tourist buildings.
How do I get rid of Depression in my colony? In order to cure the depression within your colony simply build more entertainment buildings.
How do i cure Fatigue? Fatigue is caused by your colonists having to take too long of a trip in order to get to and from work, entertainment, education, and medical buildings. It is best to keep all of these buildings at an absolute max of 50 tiles, and a preferred max of 25 tiles. This means the path the colonists would have to walk, not a direct route through buildings. (like pac-man)
What is Ether and where can I get it? Ether is a resource primarily obtained by the Draconian and Zolarg race, however recently League of Independent States have been granted the ability to obtain it as well. When i say obtain i mean actually produce it from a source. The source can be found on Abandoned Planet and is found by Ether River tiles that have an infinite amount of Ether. This is obtained by building the Worker/Vehicle that can get get the Ether. Ether is used for human races for only two buildings currently, those being the Advanced Cloning Facility, and the Ether Tree Farms. Both buildings are the best for what they both do. (Immigration & Wood)
Is it useful to always Group Up my rovers? In most cases yes, however do not group them up if they are harvesting resources because it will slow down the rate at which you get said resources. If the rover is strictly for building, then yes group it up. Also, group if you are experiencing high amounts of lag.
Also, it is best to place a Resource Depot next to the resource you are harvesting (at most one tile away). This way the rovers do not have to take trips back and fourth and can constantly pick up and drop off immediately.
Why is Mobile so errr poor quality in some ways?
Well when it comes to this, and it’s from my experience considering I am a mobile player only and I do not actually own a computer. (am using an Iphone 8+) You have to consider the processing power of mobile phones, I mean, think of trying to calculate hundreds of buildings, manage the population, manage new buildings being built, the trees growing over time, the GDP of your colony, and more all at once. While many say this game is poorly optimized for mobile, it honestly is really optimized. While yes it may fry your phone and murder your battery, the fact that it’s possible to run something of this size at all from something in your pocket is insane.
If your colony is lagging horribly it’s best to group up your rovers, limit the number of buildings being built as low as you can, zoom in away from the majority of your buildings, and turn your settings down. With that being said, if you play in a Region you shouldn’t worry too much about lag however if your a single city colony, if you start experiencing lag even though everything i just listed is being done, then unfortunately there’s not much you can do.
What are Starships?Starships are another Endgame resource that does not currently really have a use other than for selling it for high amounts of money, I sell about 150k at a time and make a good $10-15 billion. Also, don’t sell it as a contract in the Trade Market unless you are doing it as a way of storage, nobody ever really buys them. If you want to make money, I would sell directly.
What is the Regional Bussing Authority? This is a recently added mass transit feauture that is useful simply for Regions only, it allows you to place one of these down in a Regional City that just has Housing & Colonists only, and place one down in an adjacent (right next to) Regional city that just has Jobs, and the colonists will then come from one city to another to work. It does not allow colonists to move from one city to another and stay there, they will only work. From what i have seen, 1 bussing authority transfers 400 colonists to an adjacent city. And as far as i know it is stackable. However in my personal opinion, it is better to just build the Housing and Jobs in the same city.
Is there a way to stop babies from being born? Unfortunately there is currently no way from stopping babies from being born within your colony, however there is an policy option granted by building the Hall of Congress that allows you to deport children from your colony.
How long does it take for them to grow up? If i am correct, and note i have not confirmed this nor has anyone else confirmed this for me. But it takes 15 minutes for a month to pass by in the game. The aging system is actually based on in game time so they will grow up based upon time, so it might take a good day or so for one generation of kids to grow up and begin working.
What are Embassies and are they worth it? Embassies are basically like a friend system, they allow you to build a building that allows a quick way to gift resources and send messages together regardless of if they are talking in global chat or not. Also, if you are human for example, and you get an embassy from a zolarg/draconian race. you will then also get zolarg/draconian colonists as well. and vice versa if your another race. The cross-race system has no benefits or downfalls, it is simply just a for looks or for bragging rights type of thing.
Is the arcologies worth it? if you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it even after i describe what they are then they are not, also note, the black/normal arcology consumes less resources than the Fantasy Arcology and has 500 medical slots, 2k education slots, 500 tourist slots, and 10k housing population capacity. However the downfall is it has 7k worker capacity. With the new addition of the sliders allowing you to make it so no one will work in it, it has become more useful if you need more education/medical/entertainment, however the Fantasy Arcology houses 16k people with no jobs or anything else, however it does use resources like Toys, Rum, and Cloth.
Is there any way to passively generate Clay without the need of constantly building Clay Mines? Yes! if you build the Ultra Deep Dig site (built by drones) then you will get more alien artifacts as well as some clay over time!
Lastly, I just want people to understand this. This game is not something that will be perfect, I mean, it can, and it already basically is. But of course there will always be bugs and issues. That’s just apart of expanding a game. Not to mention that this game isn’t on some million dollar budget, it is made by one, amazing person, someone who makes hundreds of different games, all free to play! Bast is only human, so please do cut him some slack on some things okay...? Yes there are some issues with My Colony, some big, some small. But we gotta take it one step at a time and we gotta help bast, not bombard him with a million problems at once and expect him to fix it all in that moment.
Bast is the only developer I know. He is the only person I know that actually gets this involved with the community and actually reads all the forum posts and provides feedback. Like I personally could never! The amount of time, and patience that would be required to have something of this scale and keep it in tip top shape to ensure thousands of people are happy at once? Like that’s honestly insane, yet bast somehow manages to do it flawlessly. So @bastecklein, I would like to say thank you.Thank you for giving us something that brings us all together, and something that we can all enjoy. To the part of the community that has been here with us and has supported, guided, and provided helpful feedback. Thank you.
I hope this answers some questions you may have!
If you have any other questions, please comment below and I will do my best to answer!
Posted 11-30-2020 (30th of November)
Update Version: 1.10.0
First things first, I apologize for there being any grammar mistakes, am doing this from my phone, and I also don’t like to be too formal because I don’t really see a point of it.
Do I need to get rid of Trash and limit the amount of Atmosphere I have?
Atmosphere and Trash have absolutely no negative effects to your colony(as of right now), in fact it’s best to get as much of these two resources as you can. Reason for that being that Trash can eventually be used to make Plastic (Small Recycler) and eventually Plastic and Aluminum as well! (Medium Recycler)Also, if you really wanna boost your the amount of Atmosphere you have, the incinerator ( 2x2 building) produces a TON of atmosphere at the expense of burning away a lot of trash. Atmosphere can be used eventually to create a lot of water which is really useful in some colonies. The Ant Paste Synthesizer consumes trash as well to make Ant Paste.
(Do note, Atmosphere and Trash may effect gameplay negatively in a future update, however as of right now it does not)
(I personally currently have 42.8 Billion atmosphere, and 12.6 Billion Trash)
Aluminum! If you have this resource in your world DO NOT use all of it! Save as much aluminum as you possibly can because one it goes away, there’s not another way of making more until you get Alien Tech or you unlock the Medium Recycling Center! Aluminum can also be pricy at times aswell, but with that being said it is also an option to purchase it from the trade market, and also the Uranium Enrichment Facility allows you to purchase some Aluminum in amounts of 100.
Uranium Enrichment Facility? This building requires Uranium and Aluminum in order to function. It takes in 1 Uranium and produces 2. Meaning every time the bar is filled you will receive 1 Uranium.
Best way to get Civics? The most efficient way of generating high amounts of civics for United Earth is the Imperial Propaganda Office, while the Investment Bank generates more, the IPO is more space, and cost (the second clue for the challenge is a building not looked highly upon for it produces a resource only useful for the government and pubs) efficient considering the IB requires 4 tiles, 5k workers, and a couple thousand resources as well as $2.5M.
Best way of generating Research? The most efficient way of generating resource is without a doubt the Center for Artificial Learning. It generates about 1100 Research a second at max worker capacity.
What is the Department of Fish Mating Studies & is it Worth it? The DFMS is and was designed to simply be a building to send extra colonists to work without damaging your production lines. It simply just generates Research in amounts of 1 extremely fast while using Money, Rum, and Software. It can hold 5,500 workers, and it is a 3x3 sized building. It isn’t worth it if you have to worry about the resources required to build it, it is simply a job filler.
What is Tourism? Tourism is a quick way of earning passive income without the need of consuming a lot of resources. While you do not get resources produced by it you do get money. The amount of Tourists you can support can be found to the right of your Population number and it has the symbol of a colonist wearing a blue shirt, a red hat, and is looking through binoculars. Tourists will come in from the Space Port, and to increase your Tourism capacity, simply build more tourist buildings.
How do I get rid of Depression in my colony? In order to cure the depression within your colony simply build more entertainment buildings.
How do i cure Fatigue? Fatigue is caused by your colonists having to take too long of a trip in order to get to and from work, entertainment, education, and medical buildings. It is best to keep all of these buildings at an absolute max of 50 tiles, and a preferred max of 25 tiles. This means the path the colonists would have to walk, not a direct route through buildings. (like pac-man)
What is Ether and where can I get it? Ether is a resource primarily obtained by the Draconian and Zolarg race, however recently League of Independent States have been granted the ability to obtain it as well. When i say obtain i mean actually produce it from a source. The source can be found on Abandoned Planet and is found by Ether River tiles that have an infinite amount of Ether. This is obtained by building the Worker/Vehicle that can get get the Ether. Ether is used for human races for only two buildings currently, those being the Advanced Cloning Facility, and the Ether Tree Farms. Both buildings are the best for what they both do. (Immigration & Wood)
Is it useful to always Group Up my rovers? In most cases yes, however do not group them up if they are harvesting resources because it will slow down the rate at which you get said resources. If the rover is strictly for building, then yes group it up. Also, group if you are experiencing high amounts of lag.
Also, it is best to place a Resource Depot next to the resource you are harvesting (at most one tile away). This way the rovers do not have to take trips back and fourth and can constantly pick up and drop off immediately.
Why is Mobile so errr poor quality in some ways?
Well when it comes to this, and it’s from my experience considering I am a mobile player only and I do not actually own a computer. (am using an Iphone 8+) You have to consider the processing power of mobile phones, I mean, think of trying to calculate hundreds of buildings, manage the population, manage new buildings being built, the trees growing over time, the GDP of your colony, and more all at once. While many say this game is poorly optimized for mobile, it honestly is really optimized. While yes it may fry your phone and murder your battery, the fact that it’s possible to run something of this size at all from something in your pocket is insane.
If your colony is lagging horribly it’s best to group up your rovers, limit the number of buildings being built as low as you can, zoom in away from the majority of your buildings, and turn your settings down. With that being said, if you play in a Region you shouldn’t worry too much about lag however if your a single city colony, if you start experiencing lag even though everything i just listed is being done, then unfortunately there’s not much you can do.
What are Starships?Starships are another Endgame resource that does not currently really have a use other than for selling it for high amounts of money, I sell about 150k at a time and make a good $10-15 billion. Also, don’t sell it as a contract in the Trade Market unless you are doing it as a way of storage, nobody ever really buys them. If you want to make money, I would sell directly.
What is the Regional Bussing Authority? This is a recently added mass transit feauture that is useful simply for Regions only, it allows you to place one of these down in a Regional City that just has Housing & Colonists only, and place one down in an adjacent (right next to) Regional city that just has Jobs, and the colonists will then come from one city to another to work. It does not allow colonists to move from one city to another and stay there, they will only work. From what i have seen, 1 bussing authority transfers 400 colonists to an adjacent city. And as far as i know it is stackable. However in my personal opinion, it is better to just build the Housing and Jobs in the same city.
Is there a way to stop babies from being born? Unfortunately there is currently no way from stopping babies from being born within your colony, however there is an policy option granted by building the Hall of Congress that allows you to deport children from your colony.
How long does it take for them to grow up? If i am correct, and note i have not confirmed this nor has anyone else confirmed this for me. But it takes 15 minutes for a month to pass by in the game. The aging system is actually based on in game time so they will grow up based upon time, so it might take a good day or so for one generation of kids to grow up and begin working.
What are Embassies and are they worth it? Embassies are basically like a friend system, they allow you to build a building that allows a quick way to gift resources and send messages together regardless of if they are talking in global chat or not. Also, if you are human for example, and you get an embassy from a zolarg/draconian race. you will then also get zolarg/draconian colonists as well. and vice versa if your another race. The cross-race system has no benefits or downfalls, it is simply just a for looks or for bragging rights type of thing.
Is the arcologies worth it? if you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it even after i describe what they are then they are not, also note, the black/normal arcology consumes less resources than the Fantasy Arcology and has 500 medical slots, 2k education slots, 500 tourist slots, and 10k housing population capacity. However the downfall is it has 7k worker capacity. With the new addition of the sliders allowing you to make it so no one will work in it, it has become more useful if you need more education/medical/entertainment, however the Fantasy Arcology houses 16k people with no jobs or anything else, however it does use resources like Toys, Rum, and Cloth.
Is there any way to passively generate Clay without the need of constantly building Clay Mines? Yes! if you build the Ultra Deep Dig site (built by drones) then you will get more alien artifacts as well as some clay over time!
Lastly, I just want people to understand this. This game is not something that will be perfect, I mean, it can, and it already basically is. But of course there will always be bugs and issues. That’s just apart of expanding a game. Not to mention that this game isn’t on some million dollar budget, it is made by one, amazing person, someone who makes hundreds of different games, all free to play! Bast is only human, so please do cut him some slack on some things okay...? Yes there are some issues with My Colony, some big, some small. But we gotta take it one step at a time and we gotta help bast, not bombard him with a million problems at once and expect him to fix it all in that moment.
Bast is the only developer I know. He is the only person I know that actually gets this involved with the community and actually reads all the forum posts and provides feedback. Like I personally could never! The amount of time, and patience that would be required to have something of this scale and keep it in tip top shape to ensure thousands of people are happy at once? Like that’s honestly insane, yet bast somehow manages to do it flawlessly. So @bastecklein, I would like to say thank you.Thank you for giving us something that brings us all together, and something that we can all enjoy. To the part of the community that has been here with us and has supported, guided, and provided helpful feedback. Thank you.
I hope this answers some questions you may have!
If you have any other questions, please comment below and I will do my best to answer!
Posted 11-30-2020 (30th of November)
Update Version: 1.10.0
At various times during My Colony 1 development, users suggested just making Education, Entertainment, and Medical work similar to utilities. You basically just need a certain amount in a city to keep everyone happy. Instead, I implemented a little more in-depth system where the above types of structures needed to be within a certain distance from housing in order for everything to work properly.
I am wondering how people think this should work in MC2? I am leaning more towards just having everything work similar to a utility, on a per-settlement basis. This would cut down on processing time, and then players would not have to spend a lot of though micromanaging these buildings.
I guess it all just depends on how much value players place on that aspect of the simulation. From what I have gathered over time, is that most players didn't even like the Education, Entertainment, and Medical managing in MC1. If that is the case, I would just as soon "dumb it down" a bit for MC2, in that the concepts would still be there, but would simply be calculated on a larger per-settlement basis. This would mean that the mechanics are still in MC2, but you don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about how many tiles away from your houses each type of structure is, and instead just have to make sure the settlement as a whole has enough entertainment available for the size of the population.
I am wondering how people think this should work in MC2? I am leaning more towards just having everything work similar to a utility, on a per-settlement basis. This would cut down on processing time, and then players would not have to spend a lot of though micromanaging these buildings.
I guess it all just depends on how much value players place on that aspect of the simulation. From what I have gathered over time, is that most players didn't even like the Education, Entertainment, and Medical managing in MC1. If that is the case, I would just as soon "dumb it down" a bit for MC2, in that the concepts would still be there, but would simply be calculated on a larger per-settlement basis. This would mean that the mechanics are still in MC2, but you don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about how many tiles away from your houses each type of structure is, and instead just have to make sure the settlement as a whole has enough entertainment available for the size of the population.
Advanced Medical Research Center.[/u]
Tile= 2x2
Raise colony health by 10%
Generate: +20 research
Guests/patients: 100
Need to operate
Power: -200
Workers: 100
Cost:
Money= -10000
Microchip= -10000
Civics= -5000
Alluminium= -2500
Gold= -10000
Steel= -15000
Ore= -50000
Uranium= -1000
Plastic= -2500
Tile= 2x2
Raise colony health by 10%
Generate: +20 research
Guests/patients: 100
Need to operate
Power: -200
Workers: 100
Cost:
Money= -10000
Microchip= -10000
Civics= -5000
Alluminium= -2500
Gold= -10000
Steel= -15000
Ore= -50000
Uranium= -1000
Plastic= -2500
When I try to flip the advanced medical center, the game has a short freeze and the building hasn't flipped. but it is still selected, even if I click on another building.
Android, 0.44.0
Android, 0.44.0
I have been wondering about this for a while now. Other than colonists, are tourists also admitted to medical clinics? I noticed that there is a statistic about "Tourist Death"
So here are some ideas for new jobs buildings
New Stats:
Crimes stats. Sometimes when your people are desperate they will try to steal from you. (The police station prevents this!)
New Jobs:
Police Officer: A police officer for police HQ and police stations!
Civil Officer: Works in government buildings not. Different from politicians and diplomats tho
Medical Officer or Docter: Works in more advanced medical facilities.
Journalist: Works on publishing fake news to keep the people of your colony happy. Works in The Times building and the propaganda HQ. Can travel to colonies that have an embassy with you via embassy. They are virtually tourists when in another colony. If the journalist is killed when in another colony. The offender must pay 100k refusing is not an option. If refused (Maybe the PVP bast was suggesting!?)
Retired Volunteer: Works in propaganda HQ
Buildings
Police Station: A building to monitor your people and catch illegal immigrants
Immigration Customs Allows star ports space elevators and so to allow more people in at a time! Only one can be built at a time
Police HeadQuarters: Upgraded Version of police station. Only one can be made at a time! Keeps track of you people and produces a heap of civics
Deportation Office: When illegal immigrants or caught. Or if you want to deport a citizen here's the place!
Immigrant Camp: When you have too many immigrants they go the immigrant camp until there is space for them to become a citizen of your glorious colony
The Times building: Can name the building/newspaper The [Insert Name] Times!: A new building to keep your people informed on matters that don't exist! Boosts morale and keeps people happy! Also provides entertainment
The Propaganda HQ: Keeps all you people informed on the happenings in the universe boosts moral provides entertainment and makes money. Employs people in retirement and takes their money. Taking them out of retirement and conscripting them (Only one can be built at a time)
Airport: Tourists will come from it as well as new immigrants. Not as fast as the Stargate. It also allows emigration and uses a really small amount of spaceships. Produces a ton of money due to people paying to use your planes. Maybe cheap imports...
Gas Station: For refueling cars/buses. Provides lots of oil storage and uses a small amount of oil. Cars and buses can be parked there
Car Dealership: You can buy cars and buses using this. Produces wheels.
Bus station: Small and can be placed anywhere. It shows the bus the route it should be taking. People get on buses at the bus station if it makes they transit more convenient. Also helps with tourism
Train station: Uses oil and provides transportation. This is the only part of the rail which is aboveground. Connects to the subway system! It is the main hub of your train network. Produces money. Only one can be built at a time.
Subway Station: Parts of your railway line that connect to the above ground. (Only the exits of the station can be seen!) It helps your colonists get to their jobs more efficiently thus reducing fatigue. Provides entertainment. Part of your railway network uses oil and helps tourism. Produces money
Parking Lot: Provides parking for your colonist's cars. Pretty big. Because rovers are big.
Huge Parking complex. A thin building which is mostly underground and provides huge amounts of parking for your colonist's cars. Produces atmosphere.
New Rovers:
Bus: Transports large amounts of people to work. Uses oil but keeps your colonies fatigue down!
Car: 4 man transport to work or school. Reduces fatigue but has carbon emissions!
Silly Ideas:
Illegal Immigrant torture booth: Torture you illegal immigrants to the happiness of all! (Except the recipient)
I hope you like my ideas I also hope they will be implemented in game! Please vote :D
Note: I will keep adding things that I think would be awesome to be implemented in game! If this gets enough attention the ideas might be implemented so guys comment and share your ideas :)
Disclaimer: I did not think of this all on my own. I borrowed some of this from other people on the website who I would like to thank! I compiled them to make a petition of awesome stuff that I think a lot of people would love to see in game
New Stats:
Crimes stats. Sometimes when your people are desperate they will try to steal from you. (The police station prevents this!)
New Jobs:
Police Officer: A police officer for police HQ and police stations!
Civil Officer: Works in government buildings not. Different from politicians and diplomats tho
Medical Officer or Docter: Works in more advanced medical facilities.
Journalist: Works on publishing fake news to keep the people of your colony happy. Works in The Times building and the propaganda HQ. Can travel to colonies that have an embassy with you via embassy. They are virtually tourists when in another colony. If the journalist is killed when in another colony. The offender must pay 100k refusing is not an option. If refused (Maybe the PVP bast was suggesting!?)
Retired Volunteer: Works in propaganda HQ
Buildings
Police Station: A building to monitor your people and catch illegal immigrants
Immigration Customs Allows star ports space elevators and so to allow more people in at a time! Only one can be built at a time
Police HeadQuarters: Upgraded Version of police station. Only one can be made at a time! Keeps track of you people and produces a heap of civics
Deportation Office: When illegal immigrants or caught. Or if you want to deport a citizen here's the place!
Immigrant Camp: When you have too many immigrants they go the immigrant camp until there is space for them to become a citizen of your glorious colony
The Times building: Can name the building/newspaper The [Insert Name] Times!: A new building to keep your people informed on matters that don't exist! Boosts morale and keeps people happy! Also provides entertainment
The Propaganda HQ: Keeps all you people informed on the happenings in the universe boosts moral provides entertainment and makes money. Employs people in retirement and takes their money. Taking them out of retirement and conscripting them (Only one can be built at a time)
Airport: Tourists will come from it as well as new immigrants. Not as fast as the Stargate. It also allows emigration and uses a really small amount of spaceships. Produces a ton of money due to people paying to use your planes. Maybe cheap imports...
Gas Station: For refueling cars/buses. Provides lots of oil storage and uses a small amount of oil. Cars and buses can be parked there
Car Dealership: You can buy cars and buses using this. Produces wheels.
Bus station: Small and can be placed anywhere. It shows the bus the route it should be taking. People get on buses at the bus station if it makes they transit more convenient. Also helps with tourism
Train station: Uses oil and provides transportation. This is the only part of the rail which is aboveground. Connects to the subway system! It is the main hub of your train network. Produces money. Only one can be built at a time.
Subway Station: Parts of your railway line that connect to the above ground. (Only the exits of the station can be seen!) It helps your colonists get to their jobs more efficiently thus reducing fatigue. Provides entertainment. Part of your railway network uses oil and helps tourism. Produces money
Parking Lot: Provides parking for your colonist's cars. Pretty big. Because rovers are big.
Huge Parking complex. A thin building which is mostly underground and provides huge amounts of parking for your colonist's cars. Produces atmosphere.
New Rovers:
Bus: Transports large amounts of people to work. Uses oil but keeps your colonies fatigue down!
Car: 4 man transport to work or school. Reduces fatigue but has carbon emissions!
Silly Ideas:
Illegal Immigrant torture booth: Torture you illegal immigrants to the happiness of all! (Except the recipient)
I hope you like my ideas I also hope they will be implemented in game! Please vote :D
Note: I will keep adding things that I think would be awesome to be implemented in game! If this gets enough attention the ideas might be implemented so guys comment and share your ideas :)
Disclaimer: I did not think of this all on my own. I borrowed some of this from other people on the website who I would like to thank! I compiled them to make a petition of awesome stuff that I think a lot of people would love to see in game
Hello guys!
When you open the employment part of economy overlay from stats, you may see there’s something saids Retired Population.
Something just flashed in my brain.
‘Wait a minute, do we have anything done for those retired?’
Obviously... Not much we can do. What we can do is only giving them living wage, medical services, and entertainment.
In real world aging population is a big probelm, not just because losing working force. Because you have to spent more on them than on the younger, energetic people.
To simulate the problem in My Colony, I am presenting some of the ideas concerning it:
New Elderly Care Civic Service
Similar to Entertainment, Education and Medical Servces, this kind of services serves the retired people. At the ‘Working Hours’ of the elderlies they will just stay in elderly care facilities. Their activity status will show Retiring. It is compulsory, otherwise these angry amd bored old people will wreck the windows of your office with their walking sticks.
New Happiness Factor Retirement Affairs
As said before Elderly Care Services are demanded by the retired population. Besides, there are some factors that also affects it, such as Retirement Age Policy and Standard Retirement Savings.
New Policies
These retirement affairs are available once government level reached 2; i.e, you have an level 2 consulate built. The policies include Retirement Age and more.
When you open the employment part of economy overlay from stats, you may see there’s something saids Retired Population.
Something just flashed in my brain.
‘Wait a minute, do we have anything done for those retired?’
Obviously... Not much we can do. What we can do is only giving them living wage, medical services, and entertainment.
In real world aging population is a big probelm, not just because losing working force. Because you have to spent more on them than on the younger, energetic people.
To simulate the problem in My Colony, I am presenting some of the ideas concerning it:
New Elderly Care Civic Service
Similar to Entertainment, Education and Medical Servces, this kind of services serves the retired people. At the ‘Working Hours’ of the elderlies they will just stay in elderly care facilities. Their activity status will show Retiring. It is compulsory, otherwise these angry amd bored old people will wreck the windows of your office with their walking sticks.
New Happiness Factor Retirement Affairs
As said before Elderly Care Services are demanded by the retired population. Besides, there are some factors that also affects it, such as Retirement Age Policy and Standard Retirement Savings.
New Policies
These retirement affairs are available once government level reached 2; i.e, you have an level 2 consulate built. The policies include Retirement Age and more.
Ansom said:two thoughts, maybe three
Since in many colony the space is.. already structured, i will prefer building (maybe one for normal people, and an other for rich, like the difference in housing) with the residence slot, so the player can place the house without problem.
But i love the idea to make diurnal structure (only entertainment slot), maybe some semiresidential (entertainment slot + residential slot), and of course only residential. The last two building should have medical inside, 1-2 for semiresidential (not sure if is the right term, but in italian is semi residenziale), 1 every 10 residents in the residential.
This structure type should have a "school" slot.
ps. structure like this, in the real world, are like "big home", and since will be nice to have nice locking building, bastecklein could use the facilities already present in Antiquitas.. :D
@Ansom
😁I appreciate you have very good idea for mega habitats (that also works in my idea), but...
(•ω•)💧
We’re talkin’ about retirements 👴
Old people and stuff
Well anyway, you have inspired me something about an all-in-one-retirement-heaven for these retired people, that would save lots of space for lots of residence while providing medical, entertainment and elderly care services.
You know the bug that some people get and some don't, where You will click on a building and the stats will be all messed up, and one minute it will work, and then suddenly It will have 0 entertainment, 0 Education, 0 Medical, etc? And then your colony falls into disarray because there is no entertainment, no schools, no medical at all, and your approval tanks and people quit working, and all you can do is reload the game to fix it again for a little while?
Well I have finally figured out how to reproduce it on demand, and am 99% sure it is now fixed in v0.98.0, currently in-development on the web.
If you have been experiencing this issue with your colonies, please test out v0.98.0 in your browser and let me know before I finalize this build.
Dear Bast,
I am one of the players affected by this entertainment & health bug. After test running the game in the 0.9.8 browser version for 2 days with about 4-5 hrs session each day, I can inform you that :
a. The entertainment and medical colonist slot in buildings never randomly disappears anymore.
b. Total entertainment slots in Statistics page now properly shows the correct number, no more random fluctuations, and neither does it show negative numbers anymore.
c. Colonists seem to be properly using available entertainment and medical building slots properly now.
d. However from time to time (not just upon starting the game) , seems like the colonists will all rush to fill all available entertainment buildings for 15-30 minutes or so, but then levels off to only a couple slots used. So this is an example of the chronology in my city :
-> Start game : all entertainment slots filled, leaving 1-2 spots empty (3.2k+ entertainment in a 500k pop colony).
-> After 15-30 mins : all emptied out, only 0-2 slots used occasionally.
-> After 15-30 mins : all entertainment slots filled again, leaving 1-2 spots empty
-> After 15-30 mins : all emptied out again, only 0-2 slots used occasionally.
Is this intended behavior?
That is my observation for now.
If I may suggest, it is maybe better to change the title of the thread 😛, so more affected will be interested to post their experience after the fix.
I am one of the players affected by this entertainment & health bug. After test running the game in the 0.9.8 browser version for 2 days with about 4-5 hrs session each day, I can inform you that :
a. The entertainment and medical colonist slot in buildings never randomly disappears anymore.
b. Total entertainment slots in Statistics page now properly shows the correct number, no more random fluctuations, and neither does it show negative numbers anymore.
c. Colonists seem to be properly using available entertainment and medical building slots properly now.
d. However from time to time (not just upon starting the game) , seems like the colonists will all rush to fill all available entertainment buildings for 15-30 minutes or so, but then levels off to only a couple slots used. So this is an example of the chronology in my city :
-> Start game : all entertainment slots filled, leaving 1-2 spots empty (3.2k+ entertainment in a 500k pop colony).
-> After 15-30 mins : all emptied out, only 0-2 slots used occasionally.
-> After 15-30 mins : all entertainment slots filled again, leaving 1-2 spots empty
-> After 15-30 mins : all emptied out again, only 0-2 slots used occasionally.
Is this intended behavior?
That is my observation for now.
If I may suggest, it is maybe better to change the title of the thread 😛, so more affected will be interested to post their experience after the fix.
@Westy266 I mentioned this in chat the other day, but I am currently in the middle of doing something similar to what you have suggested, but also way different, but I do think it will improve performance quite a bit and also solve a lot of the issues with the game (or it might just introduce a ton of new issues).
What I am currently in the middle of doing for v1.0.0, which is a major rewrite, is that Entertainment, Education, Medical, and Work are no longer going to be handled at the individual colonist level, but instead at the "house" level. This is going to be sort of how Sim City simulates these things. Each residential building is going to be rated by it's distance to available medical, educational, and entertainment facilities, and you will have to have facilities in range to each housing unit in order to have a high "rating," which will ultimately be used to determine a land value/citizen happiness level.
Likewise for worksites, they are going to operate based on how many qualified residents live in range to the building, and will be running full time based on that stat, no more on shift/off shift stuff to worry about, or waiting for workers to show up.
The bad part is that this will remove pretty much all colonist-level micromanaging from the game, as everything is going to be largely stats based now. So you will not be able to select a building and see which actual people work there, or see what actual guests are at an entertainment facility or school. The only meaningful stat for the actual colonist is going to be where their house is, most else will be simulated and based on the "house" level.
Anyway, it's a big change and I suspect some will not like it initially, but I think long-term it's the way to go. It will make it a lot easier to implement Crime, which I want to do in the next few updates, since I can base it on the educational/land value rating of an area. It will also make it easy to implement Mass Transit, which is something a lot of people want, since I will only have to base the usage stats on "areas" of the map instead of each individual colonists' pathfinding requirements.
What I am currently in the middle of doing for v1.0.0, which is a major rewrite, is that Entertainment, Education, Medical, and Work are no longer going to be handled at the individual colonist level, but instead at the "house" level. This is going to be sort of how Sim City simulates these things. Each residential building is going to be rated by it's distance to available medical, educational, and entertainment facilities, and you will have to have facilities in range to each housing unit in order to have a high "rating," which will ultimately be used to determine a land value/citizen happiness level.
Likewise for worksites, they are going to operate based on how many qualified residents live in range to the building, and will be running full time based on that stat, no more on shift/off shift stuff to worry about, or waiting for workers to show up.
The bad part is that this will remove pretty much all colonist-level micromanaging from the game, as everything is going to be largely stats based now. So you will not be able to select a building and see which actual people work there, or see what actual guests are at an entertainment facility or school. The only meaningful stat for the actual colonist is going to be where their house is, most else will be simulated and based on the "house" level.
Anyway, it's a big change and I suspect some will not like it initially, but I think long-term it's the way to go. It will make it a lot easier to implement Crime, which I want to do in the next few updates, since I can base it on the educational/land value rating of an area. It will also make it easy to implement Mass Transit, which is something a lot of people want, since I will only have to base the usage stats on "areas" of the map instead of each individual colonists' pathfinding requirements.
I don't plan on adjusting the ratios, I plan on adding bigger medical facilities and schools.
bastecklein said:I don't plan on adjusting the ratios, I plan on adding bigger medical facilities and schools.what about bigger entertainment and housing?
My initial thoughts about the changes to approval rating regarding health, education and entertainment was to treat a bit like the utilities. So for education you could associate points based on the number of people in your colony that are young or old (what you decided to do).
Also you can have trash and atmosphere have an effect on colonists health. So the way they'd both work would be similar to the way taxes work. For atmosphere you could split it up into 0 - 250k, 250k - 1mil, 1mil - 5mil, 5mil - 15mil and 15mil+. Each category has a certain number of points associated to them which then effects all colonists. So the larger the atmosphere of the colony the more medical facilities are needed for the colony. This could also be applied to trash in a similar way.
Sorry if I'm repeating myself but you could also have the similar effect on the rest of the approval rating factors where they each provide points based on several factors. So education can have points relating to the iQ needed for that job so then the districts you have come up with can then have different needs for the colonists.
I think this would behave in a similar way to what you are currently developing. It would just have a fairly easy way to quantify how much entertainment etc. is needed for the colonists.
Once again I'm sorry if this is me repeating myself but I was just thinking you might like to implement this idea in someway, @bastecklein
Also you can have trash and atmosphere have an effect on colonists health. So the way they'd both work would be similar to the way taxes work. For atmosphere you could split it up into 0 - 250k, 250k - 1mil, 1mil - 5mil, 5mil - 15mil and 15mil+. Each category has a certain number of points associated to them which then effects all colonists. So the larger the atmosphere of the colony the more medical facilities are needed for the colony. This could also be applied to trash in a similar way.
Sorry if I'm repeating myself but you could also have the similar effect on the rest of the approval rating factors where they each provide points based on several factors. So education can have points relating to the iQ needed for that job so then the districts you have come up with can then have different needs for the colonists.
I think this would behave in a similar way to what you are currently developing. It would just have a fairly easy way to quantify how much entertainment etc. is needed for the colonists.
Once again I'm sorry if this is me repeating myself but I was just thinking you might like to implement this idea in someway, @bastecklein
You know it just dawned on me guys, I don't think it's the payroll that is killing your colonists, it is probably the lack of medical facilities, since the birth/death calculations also happen on the same time interval as payroll. Make sure you have enough medical facilities in your colony.
On my test colony, in the city build for population test:
- Without health-care active: i lose only 50% of the pop, the death seems are corrected added in the total death.
- I have activated 16 integrated medical clinics. House are randomly pickup colonist, the house close to the clinics are empty, only one Fantasy land is green, the other 88 are red/empty.
- With 16 int medical clinics i have lose +-50% of the pop.
- After i have spam Small hospital all other the place, all house are green.
- Every 26-27s the game will update the house/worker stats.