Ape Apps

Ok, so here's my question:

Since offline colonies are to stay offline, would it be possible to have each of our offline colonies on the same device interact with each other? I mean, would it be possible to have one offline colony annex, gift, or trade with another on the same device? Or could we have one offline colony send an embassy to another offline colony to form alliances on the same device while not needing an internet connection? This would further enrich the offline portion of the game in my opinion and it may not take that much work to set up. This way someone who prefers playing offline isn't limited to an isolated colony that can only import/export stuff, but they can post trades on the offline gbt that will be seen by all other colonies on that same device that he/she opens that have a gbt built. This would also allow for us to have support colonies that can feed resources into the main commonwealth colonies in order to create more advanced colonies a lot quicker. I mean, it's not like it's unfair to other players or anything.

I don't think that it would cause too much headache because it would be offline and there would be no way that these "unofficial comonwealths" would make it onto the server and mess up the economy. It would be just for fun. I say let the player do what they want in offline mode, because it doesn't affect anyone else but that person. Anyway @Basteklein, what are your thoughts on this idea?

Here are some more thoughts of mine regarding this idea:

I still think that it would be much more efficient to include the game as part of mc instead of being it's own game. That way you're not splitting your focus on working on two games, but you are continuing to add more features to mc. I would honestly rather have a space station that can trade with other colonies than a space station that only has other space stations to trade with. The same goes for colonies being able to trade with space stations. Plus, space stations inherently have a lack of certain items that colonies do well at producing, like food, water, oil, metals, and other things that come from planets or asteroids.

The space station would be better and refining and producing high end products, and would be more efficient at making money, but would have to use that money to purchase "supply lines" with other colonies/stations. The supply line would auto-charge money from the the station and auto-ship the resources to the station at regular interval's. I think that any colony or station should be able to make supply lines with any other colony or station. This way the player doesn't spend all of their time buying resources via single transactions. The player loses a certain amount of civics each time they perform a transaction via the supply line, and when they run out of civics, all supply lines stop and the colony/station suffers. This would prevent players from spamming the creation of supply-lines, which would probably reduce server performance, and it would be more realistic since you need administration in other to handle transactions between governments or companies in real life. It also ensures that as you're governmental power grows in the station/colony, your ability to make more lucrative supply lines grows as well, provided you have to money or resources to maintain the supply lines.

The issue with the supply line feature is that there would be instances where only one of the two players doing the supply line are online when it comes time for the next scheduled transaction to take place. This is probably why this feature isn't implemented. But I guess you could do the same thing that you do for when a cw pays for it's sub-colonies' worker costs. Even if the cw is offline, when they get back online, the server sends them a message with all of the worker costs that they owe to their sub-colonies. Something similar could be done with this. Even when one player is offline, the supply line continues until both players are offline, albeit the online player will not receive money or resources from the other player while they are offline. And then when the once offline player comes back online, they are given a message with the amount of transactions that went on, how much money or resources they've recieved, and how much resources or money they owe to the other player. If both players are offline, no transactions occur. This can be a risky endeavor to enter into a supply line with another player, because that player could scam you and other people by remaining offline just to collect your payment or resource supply, and then come online and never pay you what they owe you. To combat that, I would impose a merit system that people can add or remove one point to or from. This would tell other players how trustworthy a player is.

I really hope that these thoughts are helpful in determining what to do with my space station.

bastecklein said:Starting in v0.51.0, colonies in 'offline' mode will not be able to switch back into Online mode. From v0.51.0 onward, a colony is either an Online game or an Offline game from the start, there is no switching back and forth, although you will be able to take an Online colony Offline, you wont be able to undo it.

Would it be possible to key the online/offline mode decisions based on when the Galactic Board of Trade building becomes available. I have found that before that building is added its much better to play in offline mode since the overall benefits are higher in offline mode before and flips the other way after the GBT building is available.

I admit I tend to play all new colonies offline until the building is available then switch over. Of course I tend to keep restarting my colonies as well.

edited to add: Making the game default to online mode when the GBT is built might also work.

Hello guys!

Some players are troubled by their commonwealth leaders not being online for too long to pay them payroll assistance supposed to have.

Maybe it’s time to get this a solution, a solution other than annexation or starting a new colony.

So how will offline auto payroll be?

Commonwealth: Payroll Reservation/ Payroll Bank
Each commonwealth will get a payroll bank, where offline profits are stored into here and commonwealth leader can also manually deposit money into it when online. Once goes into the bank, nobody can take it out.
Once going offline, the bank will automatically pay their members payroll assistances whenever possible, while recieving offline profits.

Offline money productions
Offline money profits (excluding taxes) will only be stored into the payroll bank.
The money production rate offline is determined by the latest production rate when online, at 35% proportion.

I'm looking forward to those trade routes, that's something I've wanted for a while now, being able to create a contract and adjust the frequencies of trades and amounts of items traded. I like that it's also putting starships to use.

A couple ideas that may or may not help:

- with any good trade route, administration is required, so maybe regularly charge civics when each trade happens. And of course, the magnitude of the player's ability to trade could be based off of the consulate or capital building level.

- oil could also be required for humans to constantly fuel the trading ships. For zolarg, antaura could be a possible fuel source. For Reptilians, I'm not sure, but one can get pretty creative with all of the resources that they have access to. Maybe crystalline or uranium could be a fuel source for them.

- automated trading routes would need a contract that is stored on the server that tells the server how often to initiate a trade. These contracts could be view-able by moderators, and the moderators could use them to settle disputes and administer penalties if the contract is violated.

-When one or both people are offline, those trades stack up. This poses a challenge, because if one offline player goes on a 7 day trip, they would owe 7 days worth of trades of resources/money to the other colony when they get back online. It's up to both players to make sure that they have enough resources to last during their inactivity, because as soon as they log in, all of the stacked trades will immediately take the needed resources from the player's reserves and give them their payment from those stacked trades. if one player is online while the other is offline, they would continue to receive the traded goods and pay out the resources that the other player needs. This is how I envision the process working, but you might want to do it differently.

- If a player didn't have enough resources, they would be breaking the contract and they would have to provide an explanation to the player that they are trading with. After a certain amount of time, the offended player could use the forum to request help from a moderator, and the moderator could void/edit the contract, fine the player and use it to cover the offended colony's losses, take away a player's privilege of being able to have auto-trade routes, and finally even banish a colony to be an offline game temporarily, depending on the colony's offenses and how repentant they are. As I've said before, since cheating and stealing are an inevitable part of life, I am fairly sure that that some variant of this feature would need to be added in order to maintain fairness among players.

This idea would change the method of colony organization by maps for region colonies. Default style colonies with just one map would continue to be shown on the map as normal. Note that this idea is solely for premium features and would not impact the free to play aspect of mc.

I imagine a map with planets, not one planet per colony, but one planet that houses many colonies.

ONLINE PLAYERS:

For online colonies, when a player starts a new colony, their choice of planet type will determine what planet they get added to. Each planet would have a square planetary map with procedurally generated oceans, land masses, mountains, and other terrain features that bast would like to add. The terrain features would be spread naturally across the planet. The planet would have a grid that would split the map into sections/regions that would house many colonies per planet. The player would be able to choose a region based on it's position to certain terrain features, and once they choose a region, a new region colony is formed. They will not be able to chose regions occupied by other colonies.

Yes, this means that multiple players would be able to make colonies on the same planet. All region colonies would contribute to the same atmosphere level, but their civics, power, research, antaura, money, and other resources would not be shared with other region colonies on the same planet.

This would pose a challenge for region colonies that would balance the game out and prevent paid gamers from having more of an advantage than free gamers, because they would need to work together in order to ensure that the planet is terraformed. So by working together, players will ensure that all players on a given planet are able to advance through the game. The advantages to this would be that each region colony would be able to set up trade routes with other colonies and regularly ship products to each other without the cost of civics, and would be able to communicate with each other without the communications array.

However, there is one setback that could happen with this idea. What if one of your fellow region colonies on the same planet doesn't play nice, refuses to contribute to the team, goes inactive indefinitely, or decides to isolate themselves from the rest of the regions. what do we do then? This is where the idea of exiling comes into play. All of the region colonies on a planet can vote together to remove a colony from their planet to free up a region for another colony to come in and take over.

However, exiling should take time to do, and the colony in jeopardy would have lot's of time to act and repent before they are exiled. I propose a merit system. Each colony will have a merit score that will go from -250 to 250. Everyone starts with a score of 0. Each day, that colony will be able to go through all of the other colonies on their planet and either add a +1 or a -1 to each colony's score. Since there would probably be about 36 region colonies to a planet, that means that the most that any one colony could ever be demerited in one day would be -35 points per day. That means that it would take a little over a week for that colony to be exiled.

The exiled colony would be moved to an orbiting moon of the same planet, and would still be able to trade freely with the region colonies on the planet, would still keep their terrain, and would still be categorized under tha planet in the galactic map, but would have to build up it's own atmosphere(albeit the amount of atmosphere needed would be decreased as the moon would be smaller.). Each planet can have infinite moons, and they wouldn't show up under the planetary map view, but would be hidden until a player wishes to search through them for an exiled player to trade with..

OFFLINE PLAYERS:

Now for offline players. I imagine a more campaign-like gameplay to keep things interesting for offline paid players.

Upon creating a colony, the player would need to pick a race. Once the race is picked, a solar system would be generated which would contain all of the planet types available to that race. The player must then choose where to establish their first colony in this new-found solar system. They would do this be selecting a planet, selecting a region of that planet to develop as the first colony based on the terrain features of each region, and then proceed to build up their first region. Once their first region is well established, they can proceed to colonize other regions and establish trade routes between each region of the same planet.

All regions of the same planet would share research, civics, and contribute to the planets atmosphere level. However, they will each have their own money and resource supplies, and the player would only be able to operate in one region at a time, and only in one map in that region at a time. So you can see how involved a player would need to be to make sure that their planet prospers.

Eventually, once the regions of the planet have been well established and have declared independence(civics requirement should be raised significantly to require the contribution of all regions on a planet). The player can proceed to colonize other planets. They will need lots of civics to organize the movement and research to develop new technologies, and they will need startships to be produced in order to send colonizers, and of course, with any good space endeavor, lots of money is involved.

Each planet would be able to set up trade routes with other planets, but with a regular cost of civics and money, and a very small but regular cost of starships. The resources of each planet would be able to be produced while on the solar system screen, albeit estimated and not real time. These would be based on the production rates of the entire planet right before the player last exited the planet. The downside to this would be that you wouldn't be able to tell if one of a planet's regions is starving just by looking at the solar system view. That is unless you add a small symbol that appears next to the planet name that would indicate that some parts of the planet are starving.

Through this feature, the player would be able to set up an empire that spans an entire solar system of planets. But if you wanted to take this even further, you could implement the use of multiple solar systems. This would be crazy in-depth. However, I doubt that any player would ever get to that level. It is a long process to develop a single region now, so an entire planet of regions would take ages, and a solar system of planets would take ages of ages to develop, so I wouldn't implement multiple solar systems unless you can come up with a way to let the player auto-generate cities on each map based on the player's needs, and then eventually autogenerating cities in every map of a region based on the player's needs, and then tying both of these to certain techs that would need to be researched. This would help the player to quickly be able to splash some resources at a region and completely develop it in a few minutes time, but only after they've spent lots of time developing their empire to be able to do that.

Just as a reminder, this would all be for premium players that play offline only.

I hope that this idea is understandable and helpful to the developing of my colony.

I agree with colbya. When you are offline, you should be able to gift and trade other offline colonies on the same pc, you dont need a server to do that. In fact, im sure that we could have whole offline commonwealths that can manage all of their offline sub-colonies. This would all happen without any connection at all.

You would have to give each colony an offline charter code through which they can be identfied by other colonies on the same pc. Best would have to create a text document that resolves colony names to their charter codes. This would allow the engine to know what name to display to the player when referencing a certain colony by its charter code.

The My colony engine can be rigged to edit another save file when a gift is sent, but when two colonies are open at the same time, The engine would have to do something different. What I would do is have all running colonies look at a certain folder. When they see a text file in the folder that references them by their offline charter code, they would notify you and give your recieving colony the resources based on the data inside the file. I would encrypt the storage language so people cant open the gift text file and change resource amounts and gift their colonies more than the sending colony actually sent. I would have each running colony check the folder about once every minute. That way, you can get resources from one colony to the other within a minute with both colonies running. Once the gift is accepted, i would have the engine erase that file to prevent multiple instances of one gift.

All in all a totally possible feature to implement

For the past month I have been busy traveling and working on other things, but I am now back ready to return to My Colony. First, over the next few days I am going to push out an Antiquitas update with some new structures from our friend @jova , and then it is on to v0.53.0 of My Colony. There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed in the update, plus some new stuff. Here is the current plan:

• bug fixes
• start adding the Reptilians
• in-game chat for commonwealths
• offline multiplayer
• make it so the galactic emperor only gifts useful resources

Most of these are pretty self explanatory, but I wanted to just touch on the offline multiplayer part. This is multiplayer for games on the same LAN or WiFi connection. It is going to be a little different than the online multiplayer. There is no GBT or commonwealths or anything that requires a central server. What happens is the game searches for other players on your network and will allow you to bring up a list of those who are playing (looks like the diplomacy screen sort of, and kind of works like finding multiplayer games in minecraft PE), and then allows direct resource trading and messaging between these players. There are no real limits in offline multiplayer, since I don't really care if offline players cheat or not.

The offline multiplayer will be supported on all platforms, so if you are on your PC and your grandma is on her iPad or something, you should be able to do resource trades. For people playing in the web browser, it will require additional software to be installed, or you can just use the native client instead.

Eventually I will make it so that offline colonies on the same device can trade resources too, but that wont be in this update.

Anyway, that is what is coming for v0.53.0. Work will probably begin on Monday, with the focus this weekend being on Antiquitas. For you Antiquitas players out there, @jova has supplied me with 10 epic new buildings. The update is also getting the map editor feature and other engine tweaks from the last My Colony update, as well as new bug fixes that were not yet in the last My Colony update.

That's all for now. Stay tuned!

The moment everyone has been waiting for has finally arrived, the release of My Colony v0.50.0 - the fighting 50!

50 is a nice round number, but is the update nice and round as well? Let's take a look at what is new and what has changed:

My Colony v0.50.0 Changelog

New Stuff

• New Structures: Bloodletting Station, Spire of Knowledge, Quantum Sugar Cloner, Uranium Silo
• New Unit: Ancientbug
• New premium content: Orb of Radiance

Changes

• GBT: Added cooldown time between GBT trades, increased transaction civics costs, GBT contracts with lot sizes above your trading capacity no longer appear, You can no longer trade in lot sizes above your gifting capacity, The server can now limit the size and price of your trades.
• Storage Limits added: Aluminum, Uranium, Gold, and Clay now have storage requirements.
• Resource Decay: Resources left sitting outside of storage will now decay.
• Collect All: You can now collect all gifts at once with a single click.
• Message Reporting: There is a new in-game mechanism to report abusive PM's.
• Rebalancing: Antanium Synthesis Lab and Triantanium Refinery now offer a small amount of storage. Money generation from the Investment Bank and Clothing Sweatshop has been reduced.
• Tech Window: Each available tech now shows what new structures is contributes to.
• Online Colonies: Colonies played in online mode now require an internet connection to play.
• Right Click: Mouse users can now quickly move vehicles using the right click button.
• UI Changes: A bunch of small UI improvements carried over from Antiquitas v1.0.0 were added.
• Galactic Emperor Tax: Possibly the last tax the emperor will ever collect!

Additional Notes

I had intended this update to be a big Zolarg content update, but instead was required to spend most of my time making changes to the GBT and it's associated API. As some will know, I've never really been thrilled about having the GBT in the game, and am even less thrilled in having to micromanage it. Ideally people would be able to conduct themselves as adults and treat the GBT system with respect, but I'm afraid that is not what has transpired. The actions of a few bad apples have thus forced my hand to really crack down on the Galactic Board of Trade, and several changes have now been implemented to that effect.

The first issue was involving the actual server API which the game contacts in order to do trade deals on the GBT. I threw the script together quickly to facilitate an in-game trading feature and didn't put any effort into security. This made it easy to exploit. Since the vast majority of players play in offline mode, I never gave it much thought, but over the last week, one of our players with a lot of free time on his hands really took it upon himself to hit the API hard and did a significant amount of damage to the online in-game economy. New security measures have been added, but they are not present in older versions of the game, and the server API cannot be fully patched without cutting off access for older versions of the game. For this reason, in one weeks time, access to online play from any version of My Colony older than v0.50.0 will be disabled. So if you play online, please update as soon as the release is available on your platform.

Here is also a first and only warning on this matter. Every call to the API is now logged and any user taking advantage of any exploit will be permanently banned from the service altogether. All of your colonies will be banned as will any device that you have been logged as having connecting to the service with. I do not care if you paid for premium or not, you can still play the game offline.

Other issues with the GBT involve using it for storage or using it as a means of transporting large amounts of goods from one colony or another. I don't consider this an exploit, but new measures have been put in place to block it from being used in this manner. The purpose of the GBT is to facilitate trades between colonies and nothing more. Using it for other purposes interferes with the pricing structure of the market and has an impact on the in-game economy for any player who plays the game online.

There is a new Galactic Trade Authority bot that monitors all trades on the GBT and logs trades which are considered grossly out of step with the current market realities. There is no auto-banning or "three strikes your out" feature associated with this. Everything is logged and will be reviewed by a human moderator (me). If it is decided that you are taking advantage of the system, your access to the GBT may be blocked.

There was also a new Galactic Emperor tax levied. This is the Emperor's highest tax ever, coming in at 95% of everything over $750m, and 100% of everything over $10b. This was imposed because of the API hacker who auto-purchased every contract on the market, leaving some players with an ungodly amount of money. If you got your money legitimately, then I am sorry, but this is the way it is. You can thank the abusers for the tax.

The good news is that as of this update, the resources of an individual colony can now be edited directly by the server if need be. For that reason, there probably will not have to be anymore global galactic emperor taxes levied. Because of this change though, all colonies in online mode are now required to have a constant internet connection. Really, this should have been a requirement from the start. If you cannot be constantly online, then consider playing the game in offline mode.

There have also been issues with users sending abusive messages through the in-game messaging system, including threats and other forms of harassment. To combat this I have added a new reporting feature which you can see in all new mail messages that arrive. Message reports will be reviewed by a human, and if you are conducting yourself in a manner which I do not feel is right for the game, then you will be banned from the service.

Anyway, like I said before, I really hate having to be a nanny here for the game. I'd much rather spend my time adding new content and features. If you don't like the new changes and don't want to see any more controls added in the future, then please encourage your fellow players to use their heads when playing the game. The API isn't there for my own benefit, I'd just as soon get rid of online play altogether, as it caused more headache than it is worth. The feature exists entirely for the benefit of those who want to play online, but if it can't be handled properly I have no problem taking it away. The vast majority of users play offline and wouldn't even notice if it was removed.

On to better things, you will notice some UI improvements that have been carried over from Antiquitas (which is now available and you should download (and 5 star) from here: http://apps.ape-apps.com/antiquitas/ ). Zolarg also received a few new things, with more coming in the next release. There is a new Ancientbug which is their version of the E.T. Builder, and their first alien structure is the Quantum Sugar Cloner which is a vast improvement over the Sugar Farm and takes up far less room. Insectoids will be getting a lot more alien content in the next few updates.

Also, there are only a couple of resources left now that do not require storage, and that will be soon changing. Keep that in mind and plan your colonies accordingly.

Between now and the end of the year, the updates are going to focus on Zolarg content. Once 2018 hits, the Reptilians will be making their way into My Colony, and the way they operate is going to be a bit different than the other races. They will make the difference between Humans and Zolarg seem insignificant. But until then, enjoy the update as there is still a lot more to come!

Starting in v0.51.0, colonies in 'offline' mode will not be able to switch back into Online mode. From v0.51.0 onward, a colony is either an Online game or an Offline game from the start, there is no switching back and forth, although you will be able to take an Online colony Offline, you wont be able to undo it.

This is because some mechanics are going to be different depending on whether or not you are online, and measures meant to prevent cheating and exploiting are not going to be present in the offline game.

So if you are offline and want to play online, you should switch to online mode presently.

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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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

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


Just kidding, poumm. You're ok!

#mycolony2

Once again it is My Colony update time, and v0.83.0 will be heading out to all platforms within the coming days. This release continues the bug bashing series I have been working on, but also implements a few new features that I hope you find useful. Let's take a look!

The first change I want to go over deals with the behavior of the Bulldozer tool, which I outlined in more detail in this thread, but I think it is important enough to mention again because it could potentially cause somebody to nuke a large part of their colony by accident. In prior versions, when you would click on a blank space of the map, it would automatically deactivate the bulldozer so that you wouldn't accidentally click on something and delete it. I have removed this safety feature. I have also made it so that you can do a double click/drag gesture to do mass bulldozing. Since this can potentially be dangerous, activating the bulldozer now makes your resource readout bar red in color, so that you are more aware that the tool is active. Here is a quick video of how the tool now works.

Back in the first update of the game that included the bulldozer (v0.42.0 in August 2017), you could actually somewhat use it like this, but I nerfed it a bit due to players accidentally bulldozing large parts of their colonies. I am hoping that with the red tinted game, the red border around the screen, and the red resource bar, it will be plainly obvious to all that the bulldozer tool is active.

Next up, I have worked with @Sobeirannovaocc to bake the Coloniae ADU service right into the core code of My Colony, allowing it to be used on all versions of the game. Coloniae is a free online service maintained by Sobeirannovaocc that tracks detailed stats and trend histories for online My Colony players. The ADU service is available to all online colonies, and can be turned on by a new setting added to the Statistics screen of your colony.

Keep in mind that Coloniae is a third party service, not supported by Ape Apps. But I am sure that @Sobeirannovaocc will be more than happy to help you with any questions you may have about it 🙂

The next few changes involve trade. There have been longstanding issues with the GBT, especially for new players/colonies who cannot buy anything because the lot sizes are so big that they either do not show up in their trades, or they are priced totally out of the market. To try to help make the GBT more useful for newer and more established colonies alike, several new changes have been implemented, the first of which is the auto-trader.

Auto Trade is in it's infancy and will be expanded and refined in future updates, as I am able to monitor it's usage and the impact it has on the market, but here is how it works right now. Auto Trading is off by default, and can be enabled or disabled on a per resource basis.

When the Auto Trader is turned on, every few minutes (it's somewhere between 7 and 10 minutes depending on your device speed) your colonial trade representative will take stock of your auto-trade enabled resources. If your warehouses are full, sell orders will automatically be posted on your behalf. Several trades may be made, representing up to 10% of your supply level. But trades will also be made in lot sizes ranging from small to large, so that all levels of players are able to see and access them in the GBT. The sale prices are based on the current GBT market value of the resource. Before posting a new contract, the Auto Trader will also look at the current Offer contracts, and purchase those if they are a good price and fall within 10% of your total resource level. The auto trader will never just train your supply inventories.

Likewise, the Auto Trader will also make trades for you when your supplies are low. If an auto-trader enabled resource falls below 25% storage level, the Auto Trader will check the market for reasonably priced offers, and purchase them. The Auto Trader will not spend more than 2.5% of your total money on a transaction. If no contracts are available within those parameters, a new offer contract will be posted instead.

Obviously the usage of the Auto Trader will largely depend on the number of people who enable it, since there ultimately needs to be two parties for each transaction. I am hoping that once more players begin activating the auto trade feature, the GBT will fill up with actual useful contracts instead of just the insane offers that almost nobody can afford or even has storage for.

I got the auto trading idea after reading this post by @Conco2 related to the in-game GDP calculation. It occurred to me that there are so many late game colonies that are just fully stocked on all resources, and so their factories really aren't producing anything since all storage is full. Because of this, GDP is stagnant since nothing new is being created. I figured it would be helpful to set up a way to automatically export those goods without even having to think about it, since a real life economy also has to have exports in order to grow. Since the GBT was being underutilized anyway, I figured I would give this idea a shot.

To emphasize the importing and exporting aspect of the economy, the game now keeps track internally of the dollar value of your annual trade income and losses. Graphs for these stats will be making their way to the Economy statistics tab soon.

The Auto Trader will need tweaking and will probably have some user customization input options in the future. I just wanted to get the concept out there and see how it actually works, and then go from there.

After implementing the Auto Trader, it occurred to me that the GBT would be loaded with Food, Water, Ore, and other low end resource contracts that nobody needs by the time they build the GBT. To help with this, I added a new feature to the regular, non-GBT trade buildings. Now, any building that allows resource importing will also allow you to purchase GBT contracts that fall within the building's trade capacity level.

For example, the Galactic Freight can now purchase any contracts from the GBT that have a unit size of 1,000 or less. This should actually be really helpful for newer players, as it will allow them to buy needed goods without paying the standard 50% import fee, offering an extreme discount from the normal import prices, while at the same time helping later-game players who are auto-selling contracts using the GBT. The way I see it, it's a win-win for all.

I am hopeful that these new trade related features will help address some of the problems with the GBT and online trading in general. Of course, it could also make things worse. You never know!

The final change I want to highlight was a requested feature for blank region maps. They will no longer create a river on map types that include a river by default.

There were other little changes that you might notice here and there, but this about covers the big things. Let me know what you think and what issues you find. The update should be hitting all platforms with the next few days, so be on the lookout, thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more My Colony!

Minetrain2002 said:Switching an offline colony into online mode now comes with a steep resource penalty

Why did you do that?

Because the mechanics of the offline and online games are not identical. Online mode has steep penalties for resource imports/exports that are not in place while playing offline. It is possible to take advantage of this and make a lot of money or resources in offline mode and then switch to online and sell them on the GBT.

I think it is a fair trade-off. I don't know of many other games that would just let you switch an established offline game to an online one at all.

bastecklein said:The trade commission prices are very high when you play in Online mode to prevent people from buying low on the Galactic Freight and selling high on the GBT. If you play in offline mode, the commissions are something like 2% - 5%.

The Mass Driver/Galactic Freight/Space Elevator/Star Gate buildings are really meant for the offline players. GBT is preferred trade method for online games.

That means admitting the trade funcion is basically broken in this game. In certain worlds like Ice World you need to trade from early on to survive.

OK, so my problems with the way it is currently implemented are that on the 3 colonies I have grown to *having* online trade:

1: Almost immediately after being able to trade, each of them have run into a problem where it says " No contracts are available." This message could be improved with saying "the Trade Representative thinks you're trading too quickly" or publishing the number of trades allowed.

1b: The entire game is setup as: Research stuff and achieve new milestones. So when I reach the trade milestones, I'm immediately punished for accomplishing a new milestone. :(

2: I can only trade in MAX 2,500 increments. Yet with the amount of supply I have accrued by the time I CAN trade, I'm bursting at the seams and especially when it comes to sugar, my colonies are literally being overrun with sugar that I cannot harvest, and the bulldozer tool is too small and too finicky to help without my clicking finger cramping up.

2b: A setting for spreading resources (sugar, wood) could be to allow "wasting". When the warehouse is full, the harvesters continue, but don't add to the stockpile.

3: I love that the LIS Bazaar takes 250 at a time, but the Mass Driver and the Export Cannon at 100 are too small, especially on the Android version where you have to start from the top and scroll down to find the thing you're trying to sell OVER and OVER.

3b: I don't have a good basis for this, but it seems like the price drops at the same rate for the 3 types of exporters, even though the Bazaar is selling 2.5 times as much.

3c: I have noticed that the sales in the Bazaar provides more than the Net Price Listed. In fact, the Bazaar seems to provide the Gross Sales Price + Transaction Fee, or (Net + 2x Transaction Fee.)

@ Bastecklein: Thanks for reading the forums, thanks for responding, thanks for being an active developer. As the name suggests, I like to read, but not frequently write. This is my first post, so there's a lot in here. I've only been playing a few weeks, but the frustration level with trade has already gotten me to have 3 colonies that can't do anything else. AND I don't even have research maxed out.

--Lurker

I decided to put a few things here in this one post, since I don't want to make a bunch of posts on a site that severely hurts my eyes because of how very white it is on a screen at night.

Sending Messages
Currently the game's message system sucks, badly. 120 characters, and it doesn't even show a counter of how many characters you have left, it just fails to send message and you have to type it all out all over again....

We need to be able to send longer messages than this. I don't know if this is just non-premium accounts, but there's no indication that premium users can send longer messages. Messages in this game need to be detailed so we can cooperate better with each other. I'd say, up the non-premium message length to 200 characters, and give premium users a message length of 2000 characters.

I think of myself as the diplomatic type, and I type a lot and in highly detailed messages. I can't do this with a message limit so small even a text message app would be ashamed.

Not to mention, I think messages should go to accounts, rather than colonies. But thats up to you, it would be nice to have colony messages and account messages for users with accounts. So they don't even have to load a colony to see and reply to a message. Perhaps it shows "Colony has 2 messages" when you are about to load some colony. Account messages would be nice because then you can talk to someone regardless of deleting a colony or not to start over.

Trade
Trade right now sucks, and isn't possible really. All you have is the ability to send gifts of 2500 of something max.

I'd like the ability to send actual trade offers, either targeted trade offers to a specific person, or open trade offers that players with a structure of some kind can access by loading a list of available trades.

E.G. I want to send an offer to a specific person, trading 1000 steel to get 200 wood.
Or perhaps I want to send an open offer, trading 1500 steel to get 350 wood.

Perhaps this can be another premium lock area too, where free accounts max at 1 active trade at a time, premium accounts max at 10. Free accounts can trade out a max of 3000 of anything and receive a max of 3000 limiting their trade offers to 3k of anything in and out. Premium accounts getting 250,000.

Aiding other colonies
Wouldn't it be nice if you could gain a bonus from sending aid? When a colony is rioting you can click "send $200 worth of aid", but you don't get anything out of it. Perhaps you should get tax breaks, or happier people, or some such.

It would also be nice to be able to specify how much aid to send, rather than just click a button to send $200 of aid when you got $200,000. Aid packages would be nice too, allowing you to design your own aid packages, so you can click a "send aid package 2" to someone, and you had set aid package 2, to be {$2000, 2000 food, 2000 water, 1000 steel, 1000 ore}. I'd say allow users to specify up to 3 aid package types.

Colony ships could be an aid method too, sending some number of your population over to the other colony. A humanitarian ship full of volunteers who go to the colony you sent it to and work for that person, and either choose to stay, or leave, and they can leave by going to the map edge and appear back in your colony with "name returned to the colony" message instead of "joined colony" messages, either by walking in by map edge or appearing at your landing pads during next arrival.

With the latest Podcast Bast has put out, he has brought up that he wants to create multiplayer regions. Personally, I think this is great. It has been suggested to have multiplayer in my colony for as long as I can remember.

I got excited when he finally announced that it would be coming to regions. However, the way it is I am not sure it really changes the gameplay much - and here is why:

1. Embassies and trading is already rather easy as it is. You find someone you want to trade gifts or embassies with and you trade with them through messages or embassies. The current difference Multiplayer regions have is that you can click on another person's city and trade embassies or gifts. While that is useful, it is something that is already easily done.

2. The resource pool is self contained on a per person basis, meaning each person on the multiplayer region will have their own individual resource pool - besides atmosphere which is shared. I do not really know about you guys, but when I think of multiplayer, I think of cooperative play or competitive play. Competitive play is not really the style of my colony, so things should be more cooperative. Yes, players in the region can very easily send resources to each other via gifts and trading, however how is that any different from a normal region? Why is the resource pool not shared?

3. Lastly, and arguably least important, is space. I realise that it is a region, and there is a lot of space on a region, however if there are a lot of people playing on a multiplayer region it will likely run out of space at some point. Both for the players who want many people on the same map and also the large scale players who can fill half a region on their own. Once this space is filled, there is not much else we can do about it.

If I am missing some fundamental piece of information about how these multiplayer regions will work please tell me, I am really interested in how this is going to develop after over a year or two of the idea of multiplayer thrown around.

Given that, here are some possible changes I would personally like to see in the multiplayer features:

A) I believe that shared resources would be a great addition to regions. It would give a better sense of working together instead of sharing resources - which is already possible and done across the community. I think the only reason shared resources was not the original idea is because after a certain point it becomes very easy to mass produce anything and multiple people on the same map doing that might break the game. Honestly, I do not really see that as a bad thing though, I already produce faster than I can consume and the game simply becomes expansion and collection. Multiple people contributing would progress faster and give an active sense of multiplayer.

Alternatively, this could be an opportunity to tie directly into trade routes that have been talked about for a while now. Players on a multiplayer region could set up automatic trade routes with other players. Eg trade x amount of plastic for y amount of antanium at z rates. This would cost a small amount of resources to run, later an upgraded version with increased rates could consume starships. With this method, one person could be a diamond supplier while another be a charcoal supplier and they complement each other with the auto shipments.

B) This multiplayer region applies to commonwealths and/or federations.

For commonwealths, each dependent will start on your multiplayer region map and grow next to your own. The easier method of establishing communication and gifts by clicking on another person's city from the region menu will streamline things a little more for newcomers who do not really understand how to contact people otherwise. Of course the commonwealth leader will need to be able to remove any dependent's cities in the case of a dependent becoming inactive or obnoxiously placing empty cities everywhere.

As for federations, it would work a little differently in the sense that there would be a separate region selection screen in the federation tab where each member is represented by a tile on the region. Here is where you could create trade routes to and from any given member (using the aforementioned trade route idea in the second paragraph of section A). This idea is not as developed as some others, but it is food for thought on how that may work.

C) Being able to annex more space on the region screen would solve the problem of space and allow for even more players to inhabit a single multiplayer region. As stated before, space would become more of a problem the more players are involved. Say, for instance, a federation wants to start a new multiplayer region with as many members as they could (something I actually want to try), they would rapidly run out of space then everyone would be stuck. If memory serves, when regions first came out I think it was said that if regions ever were to run out of space annexing would be made possible although I'm unsure how well it would work with a region saved online. I am not a developer so I can not really comment on if something can be done.

I think that is it for me. Longer than I expected this to be, but I got my first few thoughts of what multiplayer regions were described to be out. Do let me know what you guys think, how it could be modified, if I missed potentially vital information somewhere. I really want to see where this multiplayer feature can go 🙂

An episode all about trade. v0.83.0 has been released with new changes to how trade works, so Brandon talks about trade and some ideas for the future!

What's that you say, you haven't downloaded My Colony yet? Well what are you waiting for? It's available on every device. Find download links here: https://www.my-colony-com

Try Antiquitas, the Roman themed "sister" game to My Colony: https://apps.ape-apps.com/antiquitas/

Want epic My Colony merchandise? Check out the new My Colony online store: https://teespring.com/stores/my-colony-store

Contact Information:

Attn: Brandon Stecklein
Ape Apps
PO Box 382
Spring Hill, KS 66083
United States of America

H3110 guys!

Speaking of the trade capacity, something that defines how much stuff you can gift to other colonies or trade amounts at GBT, there’s no problem for human colonies but other races.

Since the trade cap highly depends on level of consulate type buildings, poor Zolarg and Alpha Draconian colonies can only do little trades. It’s an inconvenience to players, and also one of the reasons Zolarg and Alpha Draconian colonies aren’t attractive at all.

So here’s my idea, if we can purchage upgrades of trade cap using civics (and money)? This can make larger trade caps accessable to Zolarg and Alpha Draconain colonies. While super-large trade cap upgrades require starships.


Let me know your minds :p

The upcoming My Colony v1.5.0 is making some fairly substantial changes to the way importing/exporting and auto trade works. These changes are something of a conglomeration of different ideas posted about the system in the suggestions forum.

Beginning with the coming update, once you have unlocked the Galactic Board of Trade (or the equivalent building for the other civs), Importing and Exporting resources can then be conducted centrally from the GBT without going to one of the individual import/export buildings. The GBT also unlocks import/export for all resources available on the GBT. Importing and exporting from the GBT gives you the same trade capacity as you would have for buying/selling contracts on the GBT.


When you conduct an import or an export, whether from the GBT or one of the individual buildings, the quantity you bought or sold is now submitted to the server and applied to a "global resource pool." The global resource pool can never run out, so you will always be able to import. However, the pool levels serve to track global trade demand. So (for example) if the global resource pool for a particular resource has run completely dry, this will place upward pressures on the GBT price for these goods, encouraging increased production and sell contracts. The server will also be able to consume GBT contracts in order to restock the global resource pool (contract owner will get paid), if contracts are available.

In addition to this, auto-trade now uses the Import/Export system instead of creating GBT contracts. This means that the prices you get for goods are worse, but it also means that you wont have tons of unsold contracts. The goods you buy and sell on autotrade go through the same global resource pool as regular imports and exports, and will impact prices accordingly.

Of course this change allows you to do things you couldn't before, such as import Ether and Cobalt. I think this is ok though, since it is only allowed once you have the GBT constructed, at which point you could purchase those goods on the market anyway, although this does let you purchase them when none would have otherwise been available. This will however raise the global price of said goods, which should increase production anyway, so I think it will all work out.

This also allows you to sell resources on auto-trade that normally have no demand, such as Food and Water, etc. Again, the prices you get will not be great, but they will be better than the 0 that you would normally get from a returned contract that expired on the GBT.

Regardless, with this new system most of the changes are being done server-side, so they can be tweaked without the need to release a patch to the game, so I think it will all work out. The main idea is to get the auto-trades off of the GBT, which has become flooded with rubbish. The GBT will now be exclusively used for real trades posted by real people.

In online mode you'd still have your commonwealths and trade with other players. In offline it would just be your own colonies on your own computer. I like the idea because I play 99% of my colonies in offline mode. It would be great to be able to trade between my offline colonies.

the offline mode has been added even if it is not offline because we can put the game online when we are in our colony.

what I propose is an extreme offline mode ie in this mode it will be impossible to activate the online connection even when we play our colony.

so this mode would make the game much harder in fact that there will not be GBT or commonwealths

but there will always be the possibility of importing and exporting resources via the mass or galactic freighter and other commercial buildings

So whenever I go to the gbt to see the available contracts, but nothing comes up on any resource, not even the option to post my own. So I was then suggested to switch to offline mode and back, only to find out that nothing happened when I tried to switch to offline mode... (I also just noticed that my charter code has been switched to 0, but I can still see the button that asks if I want to switch to offline mode, but still without anything happening when pressing it)

My Modem was messed up this morning and I discovered even OFFLINE Desktop version needs to be ONLINE in order to enter a OFFLINE colony .
what happens is when the game goes to sync it gets stuck there .
The weird thing is I can start a new colony just fine but if I was to exit the colony i could not reenter it as sync will get stuck .
NOW I have sync TURNED OFF on these new colony's ( looks like it starts on Off .

Also The sing in ( wile desktop version seams not need singed in )
well Anyone know if android or linux needs to be singed in ?

Both these things Need to be able to be Totally disabled The whole idea behind OFFLINE is not needing any connection to wifi what so ever and if you cant reload a started colony then offline becomes useless UNLESS you leave teh colony always running .

It could have been your server that crash this morning sooner or later it will be or this site could go down then how every many 100 k people will not be able to play over NOT being able to sing in and Sync not being disabled when it is not even enabled .

To who ever reads this I implor you want to play the game in the event of a server down or this site down and not being able to sing in please VOTE yes .

Last but not least If I am wrong and there is a way to solve these two problems please add the solution thank you .

I had created an offline reptilian colony with my custom map “volcano beach” (which you can see and download in the custom maps section of the my colony forum) a few months ago. I hadn’t checked on it for 3 or 4 updates and when I tried to access it in the 0.71 version of the game it told me that the file had been corrupted and didn’t let me enter. I then tried to restore the backup file but I found out that there was no backup file for this colony (and I never deleted it or any other file from this colony).

Android, Samsung galaxy a5 phone

Update: after managing to enter it on the windows 0.70 version of the game (which I have now updated to the 0.71 version) I was able to access the colony on the phone, because I have cloud sync on on all of my colonies, both offline and online except for my red planet regions colony which has now been corrupted on my phone (I only have it on the phone) and since, for some reason, there are no backup files for any of the colonies in the my colony file, I will now have to delete this colony.

I hope this only happens to offline colonies and only on the phone, because I don’t want any of my big online colonies to get corrupted on both devices and not be able to get them back.

The trade commission prices are very high when you play in Online mode to prevent people from buying low on the Galactic Freight and selling high on the GBT. If you play in offline mode, the commissions are something like 2% - 5%.

The Mass Driver/Galactic Freight/Space Elevator/Star Gate buildings are really meant for the offline players. GBT is preferred trade method for online games.

H3110 guys!


Space is borderless. There can be infinite possibilities in the space - From aliens to supernatural discoveries. So here I will introduce the idea of mine.
BTW, apart from reading mine, you can read the post also regarding the same stuff by @Ansom - https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=33870 , we both share the same concept.

New Technologies!

• Advanced Astronomy
  Learn about the outside world around your little planet, as well how to explore it.
  A technology that requires Low Gravity Oil Production, Nuclear Physics and Basic Education.
• Outer Galaxy Astronomy
  Learn how to build long range starships that will bring you beyond the borders of the galaxy.
  This tech requires Faster Than Light Travel and Superfuels.
• Superfuels
  Learn how to produce fuels that is sustainable and super strong that allows starships hyperjump to the borders of galaxy in just a few seconds!

UNLOCKING SPACE MISSIONS
Advanced Astronomy is necessary for accessing to the space exploration, which unlocks the Agency of Extraterrestrial Exploration (AEE) (human), Space Command (insectnoids), or Expandition Department (Alpha Dracos). They are highest command centres for all kinds of space missions, and only this kind of buildings can launch a space mission - and unlock the space mission interface.

HIRING ASTRONAUTS
This is the comnon sense - In outer space the surroundings can be dangerous. You might need very skillful and smart mission crews in order to accompaish the missions safely - so here I’ll introduce two buildings - Astronaut Barracks and Astronaut Academy.
The Astronaut Academy will train your colonists to qualify the requirements to be an astronaut.
Qualified colonists can be hired in this special building - Astronaut Barracks. When they are hired here, their status will show Astronaut (idle), which means they are available for space mission.
One Astronaut Barracks hires at most 20 astronauts.

SPACECRAFTS CONSTRUCTION
Because I planned it is available at the early mid stage, there is a need for a spacecraft construction facility other than the late-to-endgame stuff starships - Space Dock.
This is simply a shipyard that does not produce high tech starships, but it can build various early-to-mid-stage cheapy spacecrafts such as Shuttles and Space Probes.
Of course, I have some samples for the spacecrafts.

• Small Classic Shuttle
  A small shuttle capable of performing small scale space missions near the planet.
  Durability : 10
  Crew : 5
  Storage Cap. : 100k
  Fuel : Oil, 500 per 100 km
  Fuel Tank Cap. : 2500
  Mining Power : 1
  Velocity : 3 mins/grid
• Short range scout probe
  A small space probe specialized for scouting the surrounding regions.
  Durability : 6
  Crew : 0
  Fuel : Oil, 50 per 100 km
  Fuel Tank Cap. : 200
  Velocity : 0.5 min/grid
  Exploration time is shortened by 50%.

So what does the stats mean?
Durability means how long it can be used, counted by missions (i.e, single two way trips). Once the usage life has ended, those spacecrafts will require repairs that costs around 30~50% of their building price.
Crews means number of astronauts required to operate the spacecraft.
Storage Cap means how many booties, at most, can the spacecraft bring back.
Fuel shows the fuel type and consumption rate of it over distance.
Fuel tank cap determines how far the spacecraft can travel at most.
Velocity shows how fast the spacecraft can travel over a grid.
Mining power determines the type of resources that the spacecraft can extract.
Creating spacecrafts costs a-lot, so you are suggested to have high production rate of resources, especially microchips, steel and oil in order to launch more space missions.

MISSIONS
Once you have idle team, idle spacecrafts, here you can start the missions!
Missions takes time. During missions using manned spacecrafts, you have to pre-supply the food and water just enough for the entire mission. Astronauts' status also shows Astronaut (on mission), at this status, they will not appear in the colony and consumes nothing. Their happiness and energy remains unchanged until they come back.
After a successful mission or combat retreat, they requires some rest and are not available for missions until they are 100%-prepared (100% energy, >80% health, >40% happiness).
Also, here are types of missions you can perform:

• Exploration
  Always the first mission you perform. This reveals new regions in starmap.
• Harvesting
  Some spacemap grids have asteroid belts, space scrap, planets, e.t.c, that allows you to harvest resources from them. May yield different resources.
• Outpost construction
  If you wish to establish external supply lines for your colony, building outposts on resourceful locations can be a choice. Once a outpost is established the outpost will begin supply your colony with resources, with very minor resource consumption (depends on how far away the outpost is) than sending spacecrafts for one-time harvest, however the astronaut team that establishes the outpost will be gone forever and station at the outpost permanently.
  Outpost don't require any management, but you can upgrade them through the mission just below this.
• Outpost Expansion
  This mission upgrades your outpost to output more resources, but will not have your team gone.
• Combat
  Sometimes you may encounter pirate camps or spacebeast hives on the starmap and your spacecraft may get robbed or even taken down by these hostile things if your route is close to them, giving disturbance on exploration; and outpost supply and trade routes is also debuffed when these routes are too close too. In this case you may send astronauts or combat probes or even a fleet to clean them up. May cause death, death reports will be reported when the team/fleet returned.
• Diplomatic
  Sometimes there are city state planets or space stations in the starmap. You can make friends with them, or bring them under your rule, or destroy it for tons of booties. Improve relations with them can help, because they can offer cheaper trades and they may even supply resources to your colony when they are asked to, everything depends on your prestige and reputation. Diplomatic missions helps you to increase your regional reputation.

ROUTES
Though they aren't part of the missions but missions helps build them up. Supply lines are established by outposts and runs all the time. Trade routes are established by city state planets and space stations (if they accepts your trade, they can cancel your trade route if you are hostile towards them). Spacecrafts also travels faster on these routes by 50%.
If you have a GBT built you'll have a International Trade Route on the starmap. Outposts near it will be benefited and they will generate more money to your colony.
All routes except the international trade lines has to be maintained transport vessels such as unmanned cargo conveys (very cheap and basic one) and galactic freight carriers.

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

I know I'm a bit late to the party ... :P

We talk a lot about the modding aspect that might disappear, of course it's to consider but I think only a small portion of players would have used them. To me the most important issue is game performance. Decentralizing servers had the advantage of taking away much stress out of the client and gave the ability to redistribute some of the computations to the servers, making the client overall more fluid. If we revert to the centralized server, how is performance going to be impacted ?

I also agree with Vince here :

Invincible said:just being able to see everything you made as whole and not through the regional view gives a huge sense of accomplishment and satisfaction

Regions is a workaround to bad performance for huge maps and a workaround shouldn't be a start-off solution for a new game (MC2).

Going decentralized does not necessarily screw trading and cooperation up, from the start I was thinking that server admins who trust each other could mod the game in order to setup unofficial trade routes between servers. Same for the chat (it could even be implemented in the official game, then you input the IP of the server you allow trade with), the two servers then acting as one, and we can setup a large network like that. I'm sure discord servers like NOZ and T1P would be able to do that and create a network of say 5 servers allowing 50 simultaneous players which is a good start considering the MC1 playerbase.

Going centralized does not necessarily mean needing regions otherwise bad performance, as stated by bast here, huge computations are not necessarily needed:

bastecklein said:You know DKMK100 I do like the idea of going back to the "colonizing" roots and feel, and not so much the city management feel as in MC1. I think MC2 will have a slower pace, in some respects, as far as progression goes. And maybe a more realistic feel to it, like what first settling a new world will really be like.

Get rid of the 100+ armies of rovers, 100+ same-type buildings, dozen of stargates "importing" tens of thousands of people a minute and you're left with a game just as enjoyable while being less resource-consuming (right?)


My conclusion is that (feel free to contest that) unless it's possible to guarantee performance changes to the point where the whole game from start to end can be played on an "infinite" map (and not regions) we stick to decentralized, otherwise let's centralize. To me that's what it comes down to, and building on the same map could be done just like multiplayer was (supposed) to happen either way (centr. or decentr.)


Something I must agree to, regardless of the game turning centralized or decentralized:

bastecklein said:trading resources over the GBT instantly really isn't realistic [...]. actually using Star Ships to build trade networks between colonies.[...] Maybe in MC2, Star Ships are the only real way to export/import/trade resources off of your planet. It makes logical sense. You build Star Ships and you can either then trade with Earth for rip-off prices bases on your starship cargo capacity, or you can set up networks with other players.

I like this idea. I don't know if that is what you are referring to but I remember this topic (2.5 years ago wow). Back then I wasn't expecting these changes to go live but they can be relevant now (summed up) :

Sobeirannovaocc said:the [space] station should actually be the starting point of a player. [...] after that you send space ships for every colony you start [...] travel times could be introduced [given the distance on the galactic map] [...] some techs to accelerate the travel time like researching better engines for the ships [...] When you buy on the GBT it can take time to get the resource, depending on the location of the other person's station. When you post a trade on the GBT the ressources are sent to your station. All the resources you buy on the GBT have to transit by your station. This will make players rely more on the commonwealth and the mother colony (bc closer) and rare resources that would only be produced by the zolarg for example will take time to come. [It will also add the need for greater anticipation. Maybe the space staion can be the company's HQ].

I also like the embassies where the other player has a dedicated space to build what they want.

Yes. The game in offline mode is the same as online mode, but you won't have access to trade with other players. In offline mode you can't have sub-colonies.

You guys are seasoned players and know how well to start a colony from scratch. I am speaking from a newbie player perspective and picking the game for the first time and starting out their first colony. I get emotionally attached to my first colony and stuffed it up the first try. Didnt build the GTA equivalent before the alum ran out. Exporting when the game is set to online has depressed prices didnt help. Offline food goes for abt 100-150 online it is 20-30. Importing 250 alum cost abt 6m offline 9 online, artifacts 400k offline 1m online i think. Took me 3 days (no idling) to build loads of black market and hope they give alum to get the trade up. Then realised the generators need artifact and they are exp as well and the returns for the cost and time sunk into it just doesnt seem worth it. I tend to agree the limit is for end game rushing but what is the point if it turns off casual gamers. I am wondering how many players gave up the game when they hit the bottleneck. Player retention is very important to any games.
It is true you can idle the game to build up the reso but that is not the point of the game.
At the risk of the game degenerating into "My Colony - The Quest for Aluminum" , there is nothing warning new players on the importance of it. I am sure most players did it right the second time on their colony. Also, those complaining abt lack of alum are players who do not have a sub account that has stashes of alum ready to b transferred. Yes there should be limitations and the galactic propaganda ads should give alum more often to help this.

pretty sure you can't trade with other players (even yourself on same PC) while offline. It's pretty much a singleplayer game when offline. Offline colonies only have access to import and export for resource exchange.

I've been re-running an entire insectoid colony and just got nanites. Because I'm running an offline economy while at work, I'm unable to sell alien relics, artifacts, and instructions to other players and must do so offline. However the best building for selling offline is the Customs Processing. It only sells at a rate of 1,000 units per sale, so even though I have loads of instructions, artifacts, and relics, I have to spam-sell them until their price per unit drops below other resources, like food. I propose either a building to store and sell starships, since the insectoids will only ever really use 2 in their entire run for their Deluxe Command building, or some other structure that can increase the amount of resources that can be sold. A good compromise is a building that uses starships to transport goods similar to what humans have, so that building the Scheepswerf actually serves a purpose outside of one building's requirements. This building can generate a lot of income or transport resources from other planets (like steel or wool, in case anyone wants to submit buildings to allow insectoids to make use of the Advanced Simulation Theory research, which insectoids can apparently learn for some reason). However its main purpose would be to export/import resources with a cap of...say 1m or 10m. I can imagine the name would be something like...the Unholy Center of Universal Trade. Feel free to reply with other ideas to build onto this concept.

It started with version 0.47, and continued with the upgrade to version 0.48, but each of the following seem to be related. I started with a United Earth base. Suddenly, my colony's landing pads stopped counting up, so that no one could immigrate anymore, so I can only get new colonist through cloning. Also there's no way for me to trade through either the Galactic Freight or Space Elevator, but this could be because I am using the online game and I am able to trade through the Galactic Board of Trade. But no matter if I have the game set as online or offline, I cannot get any tourists whatsoever. The space ports and space elevators never begin counting even though they are fully staffed.