Ape Apps

My Colony v0.97.0
Premium purchased.
Platform: iPhone 7 Plus - OS 12.4.1
Render Colonists: OFF
Low Res Mode: ON
Multithreaded Pathfinding: Have tried on and off. No difference.
There are a few other syncing and saving options I've toggled on and off, but with no change in the issue described below.

Since I've had limited internet access this summer, I've been building offline regional colonies. I'm doing this post with information from memory as trying to get into the two bigger regions I've developed has become a nightmare, as described below.

Colony: Regional, with 8 regional cities (the other regional colony I think has 9). Approximately 52,000 colonists. The last time I was in the colony I tried to find a listing of how many buildings were across all the cities, but I could not find the statistics for such things.

The issue is getting INTO the colony.

When I start the game and choose this particular regional colony, it takes a long time for the region to load. When I say a long time, I mean 2 1/2 hours or more. It will remain in the loading and syncing data screens spinning and spinning.

If I go outside the app to answer a phone call, text, or check another app, then the app will crash and I have to start all over again. So, to start my region I have resorted to setting it to start loading before I go to bed, and if I'm lucky, it will have loaded by the time I wake up.

But then comes another issue:
Region finally loads and I'm in the regional overview. The moment I go into one of the regional cities there will be another app crash. If I'm lucky, the regional city will try to load, error out, and I will be thrown back to the regional overview. If I'm unlucky then the app crashes and I have to start the entire process all over again.

Once I get into a regional city I do not experience any game lag. I can then hop between regional cities just fine once I get past the loading cycles described above.

I can then play, build and increase populations just fine, until...

...once I get into the game and play, if I'm outside the game for around an hour the game reloads and then I'm into the loading cycle above, trying to get back into the region. When I'm at work it's impossible to log into the iPhone and go into the game to make sure it stays active and doesn't shut down at least once an hour (yes, I know this is a function of the iPhone to save resources, but just describes what a time-suck it is just to keep the game GOING even once I'm finally into a region).

Trying to get into a region and STAY in the region is a huge issue that has made me not play now in a month. I just don't have the time. Not to mention I don't want, need, or like the frustration.

The one good thing is that you seem to have fixed the regional city corruption problem I had before. So, none of these crashes have corrupted any cities or regions.

This issue has persisted for about 4 months (at least, that's how long I've had big region colonies). If I remember correctly, the huge loading time issue starts becoming a big problem once over around 4-5 regional cities. I do not recall if it related to population size on the two regional colonies. I'll try to keep that mind as I work on new colonies to see where the loading slowdown occurs.

I'm about to start a new colony (I'm thinking a medium regular colony and not a region. Although I LOVE regions because I can organize classifications of resources and buildings) because I enjoy the game, but it would really be nice to continue development on the region I've spent so much time developing.

Have had another regional city corruption. But, this time it wasn't corrupted after a hanging save (although hanging saves are still happening).

Steps:

In one regional city.
Choose to move to the regional map.
See the game save the current city.
Successfully arrive at the regional map.
Tried to go back into the same regional city.
City is corrupted and won't allow me in.

As a side note, when starting this new region, whenever I could successfully get in and out of the three regional cities I would go back to the main screen and then do an export save into the folder of my iPhone. I had hoped that if I did this that I could then reload a saved export file and recover all the cities of the region, losing only the very latest upgrades of the last session played.

But, that did not happen. After the regional city corruption I went to "Game Data" and then "Restore a Game File". Choose the regional colony and loaded it into the game.

However, the same regional city was still corrupted. Even though I had tested it before doing the "Backup Game File".

Question is, when I came out of the regional city to find it corrupted, did that automatic save somehow to the same place on my iphone, thereby replacing the good file with the file with a corrupted city?

I tried using "Restore a Recovery File" but apparently the "Backup Game File" option does not create a .mcb file. At least, I could not find a .mcb file anywhere on my iPhone.

This is so frustrating. Basically two days of regional city building down the tubes.

I have created an online region with a housing district and a working district. I placed multiple Regional Bussing Authority buildings in both regions, supplied the buildings with wheels and colonists, and am now trying to get the unemployed colonists from the housing district to commute to the working district. However, there are no colonists working in the working district (other than the colonists working in the regional bussing buildings) and no change to the number of unemployed colonists in the housing district. The cities are touching each other, there are 13,000+ unemployed colonists in the housing district and approx. 1,000 unfilled jobs in the working district. What am I doing wrong??

Today I am putting the finishing touches on and releasing the v1.21.0 update to the original My Colony! Since interest in the original My Colony remains high, I am putting it back on the front burner, and we will discuss that more in a bit. Until then, let's take a look at what is new!


First off, and as every Ancient Astronaut Theorist knows, the Ancients were experts at brick making, and now their secrets have finally been unlocked with the introduction of the new Ancient Alien Brick Factory! A couple of these should easily take care of most or all of your colony's brick needs.

There have been requests to beef up the transportation capabilities between regional cities, so there is now a new upgrade to the Regional Bussing Authority called the Deluxe Bussing Authority! There is nothing earth-shattering here, but it does have a vastly higher bussing capacity than the current structure, which should come as a big help for many Regional players.

The last update introduced a new tech called Advanced Simulation Theory, and this update brings a long-awaited upgrade to the I.T. Studio Complex called the Simulated Software Studio! Here, virtual people, created by software, are in turn used to produce even more software. It seems unholy, but one building full of these sims can output about as much software as 50 buildings full of human workers. The A.I. is taking over!

Next up, a new late game technology has been added called Simulated Fabrication. Basically magic, this tech allows simulated people to create real things. How does it work? Who cares? Because it unlocks the shiny new Simulated Nanite Factory!


Here we have Nanite production on steroids. I don't know what the math is, but one of these things is roughly equivalent to 600 regular Nanite Factories, so it's a big deal. It might seem OP right now, but you can assume that some larger scale Nanite consumption is coming in the not-too-distant future...

There have been a couple of minor changes as well, based on user feedback. The Bulldozer behavior has been changed. Now instead of destroying buildings, it sells them, so it's basically a quick-sell toggle. Additionally, I have made all Encyclopedia entries alphabetically sorted so it's easier to actually find things.

I know there have been a lot more suggestions/requests lately, so if I did not get to yours yet then don't worry. I am reviving My Colony back to full-time production, so it will be updated a whole lot more in the weeks and months ahead (along side My Colony 2 and Colony Wars, but more on those later 🤐).

This brings me to the future of My Colony. Based on comments here, the in-game feedback and on the app stores, it's clear that people want me to continue working on and expanding the original My Colony. I am fine with doing so, but there is also the reality that it is an almost seven(!) year old game, and since it's not really a pay-to-win type In App Purchase festival, it's big income generating days have largely come and gone. So to be worth my time to keep pouring time into the original My Colony at the expense of other projects, I need to find a way to be able to make it generate a return.

So I was considering ways to do this that would not be annoying or disruptive. There are a lot of new ad formats available on mobile now, but I really didn't want to flood My Colony with annoying pop ups like every other mobile game. Then just this morning, a friend of mine told me he had spent some money buying collectors items in the game World of Tanks, and it gave me an idea for My Colony.

What if, on occasion, I made available "special edition" or limited time only releases of certain buildings, such as holiday themed variants of current buildings, that people who wanted them could buy with Ape Coins? So for instance, there could be the "Halloween 2022 Themed Investment Bank" (or anything really) that you could only buy during a two or three week period, then it's gone for good (gone for sale, if you buy it then you always have it on your account).

So anyway, people who like to collect things could get all these extra buildings. Even tough they wouldn't necessarily provide a leg up on the game, they would let you make your colony look a lot cooler, and also satisfy the collection itch. Most importantly, it would help support the continued development of this "oldy but goldy" game.

That is all just an idea though, I have not decided one way or another. I might just add that to MC2 instead.

Anyway, there is a lot more to come, not just for MC1, but for the entire My Colony Universe. I plan to get another MC2 update in this month, and I've got some really cool things headed to Colony Wars, such as Super Weapons. So stay tuned, because there is a lot of exciting My Colony goodness headed your way!

I believe that Player Mode will need some easier ways to get around a vast settlement, so I made the Regional Bussing Authority to make Player Mode travel easier for future ventures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Why is Mobile so errr poor quality in some ways?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope this answers some questions you may have!

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

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

Update Version: 1.10.0

Platform: Apple iPhone 7 Plus
My Colony Version: Build 0.73.0

Started a new offline colony with the new October 4th build to see if it was still an issue. And it is.

I've had this same problem over the last several versions. Basically, saves are hanging and then corrupting the game file. I've lost so many colonies to this, so many that the game isn't all that fun anymore.

NOTE: I've had this happen before with regular maps, but I didn't save any of the specific information from the splash screens. So, the below are details on what is happening with the new Regions feature in Offline Mode.

Steps:

Start new Regional colony. Have game engine save options set to "Rarely."

Start a new Region City on the Region map. Play in the new region city. Regularly manually save. Save works fine and does not hang.

The "Rarely" auto save comes. Save hangs and will not complete, no matter how long I allow My Colony to remain open.

Close My Colony manually by going to the iphone desktop, then 'sliding' it closed.

Try to open colony. Regional colony map showing all the regional cities opens fine.

Try to get back into the Region city that I was working in when the autosave hung up.

Splash page says:
Syncing Data (sometimes it sits at this stage for quite some time)
Decompressing Data
Restoring Data

And then it defaults back to the Regional map. I can do this over and over, and the region city will not open. I cannot get back into it, yet the game is showing the production of supplies coming from that city just fine.

Even worse, one by one the region cities on my map are succumbing to this. On the main colony I'm currently playing I have 2 regions I can't get into, including the area I've designated for a bunch of government buildings that took a lot of resources to build and upgrade. One Region Colony I just deleted in frustration because all the regions were falling like dominoes.

I also tried:

Setting engine settings to never save. However, I've found that the game still tries to save itself once in a while, and yes, the above corruption happens. I just had this happen with a Regional city of a brand new colony that was started just this morning. So, out of the 3 regional cities I started, one of them is already corrupted and I cannot get into.

Just for kicks I set the engine settings to save "often." it worked for a few hours, and then wham. Corrupted region cities.

This is beyond frustrating. Why play if the cities just become corrupted? It's literally a waste of time to play.

Please fix! I really enjoy this game.

Xanadu said:Have had another regional city corruption. But, this time it wasn't corrupted after a hanging save (although hanging saves are still happening).

Steps:

In one regional city.
Choose to move to the regional map.
See the game save the current city.
Successfully arrive at the regional map.
Tried to go back into the same regional city.
City is corrupted and won't allow me in.

I just had the same situation. My main city in my zolarg region has saved when going back to the region screen, but then I could not go back in.
I tried to reload the region, then to reload the whole game, but the main city is still blocked.
The second city on that region remains accessible.

I have a backup of my files from a few days ago, but I don't know which file contains the said city, since they get a numeric name...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greetings all! I have been busy the last few weeks with family, Thanksgiving, and getting my catalog of old apps updated for the Holiday season, but now I have returned to "active duty" and have begun work on the long awaited My Colony v1.0.0 update!

This update is going to be significant, and I expect a lot of potential bugs and craziness on the Web client, so please be aware of that.

I will be posting updates in the forum as I add new things so you all know what is coming, but the first new feature I started working on today is Regional level terrain generation, with support for templates.

I will explain, and please note that the feature is not done yet and some things remain broken, particularly with the automatic terrain generation.

Starting in v1.0, when you create a new Region, if it is of the type that has a River tile, you will be asked if you want to use automatic terrain generation, or import a template. If you choose Automatic, the game will generate rivers as normal, but on a regional scale, so that the rivers in one city actually line up to the next. This is still broken at the moment, so be patient.

The (in my opinion) cooler part, is the template option, and this is mostly working right now, although there is still some glitches to be found. That said, you can now import a 250x250px black and white image to use as a template for your regional water system. Here is a test template I created:


When you load this template into the game, it treats the white areas as land, and the black as water (or lava/ether/etc). So when you start filling out your regional cities, you get something like this:


It's not working perfectly yet, but you get the idea. I still need to get it so that you can see the rivers BEFORE you actually start one of the sub cities, but that is a work in progress.

So yeah, the first item on the agenda is the new Regional waterway system and templating. Once I am done with that, I will let you all know here in the forum what the next item on the agenda is!

And just be aware, the development cycle on v1.0.0 is going to be a lot slower than normal because I plan on packing this one with goodies, so stay tuned for more!

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

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

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

Game Data

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

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

Regions

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


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


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


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

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


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

Simulation Changes

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Colonist Lifecycle

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


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

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

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

Random Changes and Improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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


There is now a new Medical build category.

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

The Brood Training Center now provides some education.

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

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

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

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

Added slight Education boost to the Live Autopsy Slab.

New Content

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

What's Next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

From your post how it's way more detailed in the city view when you go into your individual cities. Take that menu and bring it out. When I'm in the region view I'd really like to see the totals like you do in city views. That way I know if my region as a whole is producing more or consuming more of this.

Hopefully that makes sense? Not sure if I scrambled that up.

Basically want the detailed numbers in the city view bring it out to regions.
Give us a total so we know if all of our owned cities in a region are producing/consuming.
So you're in Region 1.
You have cities A, B, & C.

Regional resource view of ONLY your owned cities not others in the Region 1:
City A- -1000 aluminum, -500 food
city B +2000 aluminum, -500 food
City C +1000 gold, +1500 food

Regional total-
+1k aluminum
+1k gold
+500 food
Instead of having to to click into each city keeping mental note of what their consuming for food then going over to my Farm city and making sure I'm producing ample supply.

I would just look at my regional chart and see much more quickly, ah okay my regional is +500 food so obviously all my cities are good on food.

Was sitting there in Church today and during the sermon I was thinking of the code for My Colony, and I had an idea to add another gameplay mode of Multiplayer Regions. In my mind, it would be a slightly larger map than the current region file, and all of the high-level region data would be stored on the server, including the little thumbnail images that represent the individual city files. However, you could invite your friends to join your region, and they could pick a plot on the map and start building their own cities.

Instead of shared resources across the region like on current region maps, only atmosphere would be shared, although there would be a new regional warehouse type building where players can manually store resources that are shared across the region.

Also, instead of the whole region being one big city, it would be broken up into 'areas', like metropolitan areas, where each one of those would have a charter code/online presence as opposed to the region as a whole.

For example, if you start a city on the region at coordinate 20:20 (x:y), and you own no other cities touching that city, it would be chartered as a new colony on the server. If you then started another city right next to it as 20:21, it would be "linked" to the first city and they would become a metropolitan area with shared resources. However, if your friend started a new city in that region across the map at location 8:10 or something, then that would trigger the formation of a new "area" with a new charter code and its own resource pool.

My thought for this was that regions are so big anyway, the likelihood of a player filling one by himself is not very high. However a group of players could probably do it.

Anyway, that is kind of an idea I had, it's nothing solid right now, but I have (at least in theory) worked out a lot of the code needed and issues in my head, lol. I mainly wanted to throw this here and see if there is any feedback on it, to see if it is a feature anybody would actually be interested in, before spending time to implement it. I actually think that compared to a lot of things, it would be a pretty easy one to implement, since a lot of the work on Regions is already completed, it would be a similar experience except there are other parts on the map that are being filled out by other people. The only main difference to the player is the joint atmosphere, and the addition of the joint regional warehouse. You wouldn't really be able to load up other players' maps and play them, you would just see them on the main regional overview.

Let me know what you think of the concept, and if it is worth exploring further!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just wanted to let you know that the update before this fixed a lot of the saving and corruption issues I'd been struggling with for months and months. Yay!

This new update seems to take a lot longer to start up than previously. Getting into a region, or a regional city can sometimes take 5 to 10 minutes to open. Sometimes trying to get into a regional city will throw me back to the regional overview, but thank goodness this has not resulted in a corrupted city like it did two versions before.

Despite the long loading time, it's fun to play My Colony again. Thank you for fixing so many of the saving and city file corruption issues.

Hey dear reader, as of 1.0.0 the river spawning for regions got changed so that adjacent cities actually fit together, which is great!
BUT(T🙂)! As I have seen it seems that the river spawning used for the regional map is the same as for the way smaller single city maps. That creates gigantic pieces on the regional map that are completly covered in Water/Lava/Ether and are completly useless as building space. Sure, the Lander creates a small batch of land when claiming a piece of the river, but that is not really helpful as it is barely enough to build a basic infrastructure.

TL;DR Change river spawning for regional maps by making it finer to not create Reverse-Pangea.🤐

I don't know exactly, but never 2,8 mio. And it keeps going up, without building or doing anything. How can i watch taxes?

It says "Regional Keulen_2". If i enter the city, it also says "Regional Keulen_2"

Even though i deleted this city (in region), the outflow of money still keeps going.



2. the money and atmo bug is in an online game "_DasKeulenLand_" with 150k pop
the other ones are offline because i though there were less bugs.

2.b No no auto trader because i havent build the GBT in this region and its an offline region

3. they reduce for example 60k. i turned them off because i was at 15mio atmo.
After 5mins i saw my atmo is still sinking, so goto statistics and it had an outflow of 84k. next time i was in, it had about 107k.

4.a yea i still have 600 uranium, so they are working well

4b sorry yea that 20 outflow is ok.
but i have income 12uranium (Regional Keulen_1.0) but there is no enrichment or anything what produces there.

I have 2 enrichment in "Keulen_2.0", but it dont shows the income in statistics and i'm not getting them.

Thanks for answering that fast :)

There is a structure called regional bussing authority. You have to build one of this one both cityes and colonist should beb able to move from one another

Could make it in the beginning based on distance i.e 50 people withen 50 blocks can use X, then add a building like the regional bussing station that would let say 200 people access any entertainment, education ect regardless of distance.

so im running a region with a dedicated housing city and a dedicated work zone(one for now), amd i am using the regional bussing authority, to shuttle folks to and from, and in my housing city it says there are 1652 remote workers, but in my working city there is only 154 workers. not sure what to do
send h

found a fix for it... two years later, build a regional bussing authority in the region you clicked the "gain independence" and it will be fixed, worked for me 1 hour ago

This is the first version of my document for what I would like to see three months from now. I know that more can possibly be done, but I thought that this could be a good start to show.

Let me know if any of you have other ideas that you would like to see in the next three months.

Also, when new stuff comes up, I will edit or make a new post based on the changes necessary.

Document Text in case it doesn't download:


My Colony 2: Three Months From Now


Alien Decorations:

I believe we could have a pyramid monument dedicated to the Ancient Aliens

I would like to see some Alien Light Posts for my settlements

Personally, I would like to see Alien roads in this installment of My Colony, I was thinking an Alien Aluminum and Alien Brick variants can work for this

Alien Brick can also be used for a Wall as well, and the Artifacts could add a strength buff as well

The Alien Obelisk would be another Alien Decoration that could add some character


Player Mode:

A Regional Bussing Authority would make moving around in Player Mode a lot better

A Player House would be a good spawn location to base future mechanics of respawning on, but it can work for a home point to teleport to for the near future

A Player Bank Account will lay down the foundation for the uses of Money in Player Mode


Spice Themed Buildings:

A Spice Bar should be a way to convert Spice and Rum into Money to allow Spice Worlds to have a form of Entertainment and Money generation to match the theme

A Spice Clinic would be a good theme to keep in canon about what Spice is

Spice Dessert Shop would use Spice and Sugar to generate Money and provides a bit of Entertainment as well.

An Integrated Spice Drilling Operation could also be a new addition in order to keep up with increased demand for Spice


Resources:

Pottery would be a good start to future industries in My Colony 2, especially whenever it could get expanded into potential Commonware uses, but a single Pottery Works can be good for now

A better passive Crystalline maker should be on Ice Worlds because there isn't enough of a Just Be First advantage for Ice Worlds in my opinion

Spam's Fabrication Lodge to make Alien Relics would be something good for the future uses of Relics that will benefit our settlements as well

I have also had this problem. I have been careful not to leave a city in regions before the construction costs disappear on the stats page just to make sure they don't linger, therefore the problem isn't related to construction. I also have regional consumption on resources that no building in the game consumes, such as bricks.



This means that we can rule out structure consumption as well. The only other method of resource loss that I know of is decay from resources over their cap. I also gifted over my cap before I had built the proper storage and now when I have built my storage my resources are still draining.

There may be something else at work here though, as all resources are not draining at the same rate. Maybe it's multiplied by how many cities you visited, I don't know. All I do know, is that there is a strange decay happening over regional that doesn't apply to all resources the same way, even amongst those being effected by it.

I hope this can be fixed pronto, because drains like these would render small colonies unplayable simply because they can't outpace the decay.

Good news everyone, tonight I will be pushing out the long awaited v0.77.0 release of My Colony! This is actually a pretty big update, and truth be told there is a lot more I wanted to get added in there, but I ran up against a time limit since the Apple App Store will not be accepting any new app submissions after tonight due to the holiday, so I had to push it out now. There is still a ton of new stuff and changes in this update though, so let's dive in.

First, want to mention some engine changes, since several key components of the game have been totally reworked. The code for the simulated or "virtual" colonists has been completely redone. Because of the change, some extra large colonies might experience intermittent delays every minute or so that will look like short freezes. After a few hours of play, this should sort out as things in your game file are rebalanced. Normal sized colonies should notice any impact.

The path finding has been totally overhauled, again. Because of a new map class which I will discuss in a bit, I needed to rewrite the pathfinding to work with different types of passable terrain. I do not see any serious bugs with the new system, but of course let me know if I am wrong.

Several changes and updates have been made to Regions. The main region map has been updated and will now group connected cities into "metropolitan areas." Hovering over a city will now show what it's top resource outputs are. Capitol cities will have a Star on them. And when you start a new Region game, you can either pick a normal resource distribution, or have a completely blank map. Now if you look at your Resource stats in the Statistics screen while on the Region overview map, you will get pie charts showing which cities are producing what share of the resources. And now when you are inside of a city, instead of seeing "Regional" as a resource input/output source, you will see "Regional (City Name)", so you know which city is providing or consuming the resources.

Next up, infrastructure repair costs have been dramatically lowered. The price also scales down with the size of a building, so you will not see a giant building like the Hall of Congress drain your entire treasury on repair costs. Large buildings also decay at a slower rate than before.

I had a list of about 40 or so hard crashes that were reported through the various app marketplaces which have been corrected, as well as all Javascript based crashes that were reported through the analytics console.

Alpha Draconians have gained access to the Abandoned World map. The stats on many buildings have been slightly tweaked to balance gameplay and also to allow each Civilization to use the new Water World map.

Which leads to the next new item, the brand new Water World map.

I have wanted to implement this map for a long time, but I knew it would require a rewrite of the pathfinding code and I was not looking forward to it. But now the work is done and we have Water World! I wanted Water World to be available to all civilizations, and making that happen required a handful of changes to existing building stats, as well as a bunch of new buildings to support the new map across different tech trees. Here is the new content added that is related directly to Water World:

• Resource: Fish
• Terrains: Salt Water, Palm Trees 1 & 2
• Units: Enslaved Worker Drone, Enslaved Fisherbug, Fisherbot, Fisherbug, Used Ore Miner
• Structures: Small Wooden Bridge, Steel Bridge, Aluminum Bridge, Gold Bridge, Electromagnetic Bridge, Gold Reducer, Sand Path, Fisherbot's Hut

The map should be fully playable across all civs and in both single and region play. The difficulty will depend on your Civ, with Humans being the easiest and Draconians being the hardest.

Next up, both Insectoids and Reptilians now have Starship building capabilities. I am going to be adding Trade Routes soon, and so I needed to get all civs up to Starships in order for it to work. Draconians also got a new Level 3 capitol which is probably the tallest building in the game by far, the Chamber of Kings:

Next on the list, the GBT will now let you know what the minimum and maximum accepted trades by the server are, that way you do not submit a high or low trade and get the "Strike" message from the server.

There was a complete rewrite of the in-game Encyclopedia and the printable Owners Manual. Both are now found inside of the main Statistics screen:

The Owners Manual is now a lot more complete and can be viewed in-game, exported as a file, or printed. The printout is about 200 pages long though. The Encyclopedia is way more detailed than before and everything is hyperlinked together. It is now actually a useful tool for beginners. The Video Tutorials are now watchable in-game. I removed the link to the reference Google Docs spreadsheet as it has not been updated in over a year and the encyclopedia basically renders it useless anyway.

There is probably more that I forgot to mention, but I need to hurry and post this so I can start getting the update pushed out to all platforms before tonight. Hope you enjoy, let me know what issues you find, and stay tuned for more!

I am currently putting the finishing touches on My Colony v0.84.0, which should be shipping out to all platforms over the next few days. Here is what to expect!

Firstly, as with every update, I went through and cleaned out all of the reported bugs through the syntax error and crash log databases. The good news is, these errors are becoming fewer and fewer with each update, so I believe that over the last few months the game has gotten a good deal more stable overall.

A just happened to find a mistake in the code while I was cleaning stuff up related to saving unlocked techs for region games... I am praying that this finally puts a nail in this issue that people have been reporting since regions initially came out. Let me know!

Since adding the auto-trading feature to the GBT, some of the resources like Food and Water have been totally flooded with contracts, in many cases causing performance issues when rendering the contracts in the GBT. To address this, whenever a resource has more than 100 contracts available (some have way more than 100 now), the GBT automatically filters some of them out for you. For instance, contracts that you either cannot afford or that are such a bad deal will be hidden, as to not clog your GBT with worthless deals. This only impacts resources that have more than 100 live contracts available.

I still have to make some user-configurable changes to auto-trading, and this will be coming in the future. So far I am pleased with the auto-trade feature, and I think it is particularly helpful for newer users, so I do plan on improving and expanding upon it, I just didn't get to it for this update.

Next up are a couple of minor balancing tweaks. First of all, I have reduced the time it takes for the Landing Pad to bring in new colonists. One of the most commonly occurring complaints in the app store comments from new users is about how long it takes to get new colonists. With this new update, the Landing Pad should now be about twice as fast as it was before. I have also sped up the Cloning Facility a bit as well.

Next up, users can now add a description or notes to a regional subcity, in order to better keep things organized. The note input section can be found on the statistics screen within a subcity, and if you attach a note or description to a city, it will now show up on the mouse-over popup that shows up on the main region view, under the population readout, like this:

Next, I have made a couple changes to some of the maps. The Forest World map now includes a river, and also has some Mega Trees growing on it. This actually makes the map just a bit easier, as there is now a constant supply of water on the map.

The biggest change though, is for the Abandoned World map. The Abandoned World now has sort of a pinkish hue to it and has a river made out of the newest Resource to be added to the game: Ether.

Ether is a new resource that can only be found on new Abandoned World maps, and will never be able to be produced synthetically on any other map. The substance is a byproduct of the nuclear disaster that destroyed the Abandoned World civilization many eons ago. It is mostly harmless now, but can be reconstituted into Uranium by the Reptilians using their new Ether Processor facility. For health, entertainment, and tourism, Reptilians now also have a new Ether Baths building at their disposal. Ether can be harvested by Reptilians using their new Ether Extractor drone.

Over the coming updates, Ether usage will be expanded to all civs, but it will only be harvestable from the Abandoned World map. I also need to add more Reptilian structures to make getting an Abandoned World city up and running a bit easier, since it is currently a long and slow undertaking. That will all be coming soon. Ether will be available on the GBT next update. For technical reasons, I can't put it on there yet, since most clients do not have the Ether resource in their game yet.

Ether is the first in a series of new upcoming resources that are going to be locked to a specific planet type, and will not be able to be generated synthetically. I mentioned this in the last episode of the My Colony Podcast, but I realized that if I am going to eventually implement starship trade routes, there actually has to be a purpose and reason to use trade, and I think resources that you can only get on certain planets will help. Although, the GBT might negate the use of trade routes also, so I might instead think of an entirely different purpose of starships. Another idea I had was using starships to add an additional Asteroid landmass to your colony, sort of like the way regional subcities work now, you could also have separate off-planet asteroids or moons that your are mining, and you use starships to transfer resources back and forth. We will see what I come up with. Suggestions are welcome.

So that is it for today's update. Even though I decided to add a bit of content this time, I don't want to give the impression that I am giving up on the crusade against bugs, so keep letting me know what you find. That said, I do think that a lot of progress has been made and I feel more comfortable about adding new structures and units to the game now. So next update will probably expand on Ether, especially for other civs, and I also want to add a series of keyboard shortcuts to the game that were mentioned in this thread, so that might be in next update as well.

Anyway, as always, thanks for playing My Colony, and stay tuned for a whole lot more!

Good evening to everybody! I was at a conference earlier this week and I didn't have a ton of time to work on My Colony, but there was a laundry list of bugs which needed to be addressed, so I wanted to get an update out tonight before I head out of town for another meeting this weekend. And while this update may be small in scale, it is none the less big at heart. So what's new with v0.88.0? Let's take a look!

Firstly, the bug fixes. Most of the bugs in this release were related to either Entertainment or Multiplayer Regions. Entertainment had a whole bunch of small issues, including one where a colonist visiting an entertainment facility would immediately be drained of the entire contents of their wallet! Good for your treasury, but not so good for your citizens.

In addition to the bug fixes, there is a new Guests readout chart on the Building Statistics screen (when you click on a building and then click on the graph icon). You can now see how much seating is available, and get a list of all of the colonists who are currently patronizing your business.

Another minor addition is at the top of the building statistics screen, where I have added a quick link to the in-game Encyclopedia article for that particular building. Also, I have added a "Fire All Workers" button to each building, in case you want to clear out a specific structure for whatever reason.

In this update, I have also more clearly defined the Poverty Line, which is now set at around 5% of the retirement savings cutoff, and you can see the stat on the Economy section of the main Stats window.

The Poverty stat has always been in the game, but previously you had no way of knowing what the level was, so that if people were complaining about Poverty, you did not know what exact adjustments to make. Now you know the amount of savings that they need in order to stop complaining about poverty.

I have slightly changed the rate that Entertainment structures provide happiness. It has been sped up from it's previous level, since I felt like colonists were spending way to many hours at the bar.

Next up is a handful of changes in fixes related to Regions. In particular Multiplayer Regions, but regular Regions are also impacted at some level.

Firstly, you can now properly delete one of your Multiplayer Region maps.

Next, on the main Region Overview map for a Multiplayer Region, there is a new menu option added to the main slide-out menu to view and share your regional charter code.

The next change applies to both regular and multiplayer Regions. Now when you are inside of a regional subcity, there is a new "Policy" option on the slide out menu that opens up the Government Policies window (like Fire Drill and money shower). This applies to cities that may not have a consulate or capitol, but are connected to another city that does. Now they have access to the policy menu as well.

Next up for Multiplayer Regions, cities by different players can now share in the same technology and resource pool. In the last update notes, I described how multiplayer regions are split up into "Metro Areas" that share technology and resources, while the overall planet as a whole shared Atmosphere. Metro Areas were previously made of adjacent cities from the same player, but now you have the option to make your metro area public on the general statistics window.

If your metro area is open, when another player starts a new city adjacent to your metro area, they will become a member of that area also, sharing in the same resources, power and technology. As you can see on the screenshot above, you can now also change the name of your metro area. The first player to create a city in a metro area is the "Owner" of that area, but being the owner only gives you the ability to change the name right now. I might expand this at some point, perhaps with some sort of voting rights for each member city.

When a metro area has multiple people online at once, resources are synced between the colonies every minute or so. I could not make them update in real time, because it just took too much bandwidth on the server. So every minute or so you may see your resource levels jump or shrink a bit. I realize that this may cause annoyances at the early stages of a city, for instance if somebody uses up all of the power or food early on, but it should not be too much of an issue on larger colonies.

Unlike resources though, when you unlock a new technology, it is immediately unlocked on all online colonies in the metro area.

I am sure that there will be some tweaking needing to be done on this, but I know with my work and your feedback, we will get it running smooth over the coming updates 🙂

Finally, I added a new building for Zolarg in this update, the Subterranean Sugar Farm.

When I was fixing a bug related to starting a non-human colony on a multiplayer region, I realized that it was basically impossible to get food as Zolarg on the Red Planet and probably other maps as well. So this new structure is a small bug mound where sugarcane is slowly grown underground. The process is slower than regular sugar harvesting and requires a constant inflow of water, but it does allow you to play Zolarg on more map types.

So anyway, there are probably more changes in this update, but I did half of it last weekend before I left town and I don't remember everything I changed, so you can let everybody know if you find something I forgot to write about. Next week I plan to work on Colony Wars and My Land, and if there are no major bugs in this My Colony release, I will be porting the engine changes over to Antiquitas as well, so be on the lookout for all of that. Then it will be back to My Colony again, so keep the feedback, suggestions and bug reports coming. And as always, thank you for playing My Colony!

Yes I play both pc through steam and on phone.

I don't think you and I are on the same page,

I see that too with both devices. Leave your city, go into the regional view. Now you cannot see the totals for each city right?

I'd like for a menu when you go into the regional view, it has the has the totals of all the cities and lists them there. That way you dont have to click individual cities to see your stats

I have just put the finishing touches on Antiquitas v1.26.0, and the update should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. This is a major update which rolls up all features and bug fixes from the My Colony engine contained in MC patches v0.96.0, v0.97.0, v0.98.0, v0.99.0, v1.0.0, v1.1.0, and v1.2.0. Now, if you've followed My Colony, you know that there have been some major changes contained in those releases, and they are now hitting Antiquitas, so let's go over everything that's new!

The popular unit grouping feature is now available in Antiquitas! Now when you select a group of similar units, you can "stack" them into one single unit, combining their abilities into one. This provides much faster build times, and also improves game performance.


Certain buildings can now be moved. If a building does not also function as a resource drop-off point for your harvesting servants, you can now click on the 'move' button to place it in a different location. This comes in handy if you accidentally built something in the wrong place, or you just want to rearrange things as your city grows.


On the Gallia map (the only map that contains a river), rivers in Region games are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of generated at the individual map level. This gives a greater since of continuity for Regional players, and it just looks nicer. You can have the game automatically generate the rivers, or you can supply your own template from an image file.

Also in Regions, you can now move servants between region maps. To do this, simply walk a servant unit to the edge of a map, and he will move over to the adjacent map. You can also now click on the border area around a region city and the game will ask you if you want to switch to that city, letting you move between regional areas without first having to back out to the region overview screen.


The largest change comes in the way that the simulation is handled behind the scenes. As with My Colony, Antiquitas now runs on a statistical based system, rather than trying to simulate the lives of each individual citizen. This change greatly improves the performance of the game, but does come with some changes you need to be aware of.

Each residential building in the game now has internal rating statistics that you will need to maximize in order to run an efficient city.


You can see a detailed explanation on how this works in this post, but essentially you will need to make sure that each residential structure has adequate Medical, Educational, and Entertainment access, in order to keep your citizens happy and productive.

In order to help with these changes, several structures in the game have been buffed in this update. The Medical and Education ratings of the Taberna Medica, House of the Sun-Nu, and Druid Healer Hut have been increased. The Education ratings of the Grammaticus, Scholae Magister, Scholae Rethor, House of the Scribe, School of the Scribes, Druid Healer Hut, Druid Ring, and Druid Assembly have all been increased. Finally, the Shrine of Jupiter, Shrine of Bastet, and Bard Stand now offer a minor medical rating boost. With these changes, most existing cities, if well designed, should not have to make many changes in order to "just work" with the latest update.

You will now have to deal with the birth, death, and aging of your population. There is a new Age Distribution chart in the statistics window to let you see how old your citizens are.


You will now need to provide additional housing for minors and retired citizens, who are not a part of the labor force.

In order to help you manage these changes and micro-manage your city production and output, there are two new slider options added to the stats screen for individual buildings, the Production Priority and Employment Capacity sliders.


Using these new sliders, you can prioritize buildings, making them fill up with workers before other structures. You can also put a cap on the amount of workers each building has, so that a building that requires a large number of workers does not suck up all of your available workforce. Using these sliders, you can tweak your city's industrial output to your liking.

There were a ton of engine changes in this update, but I am hoping that the transition is smooth. These changes have been in My Colony for a little while now, and I think a majority of the kinks have now been worked out. So that's all for today, I hope you enjoy the update, and stay tuned for more improvements to come!

Real fast, i don;t think this is repeatable and I don't know how I got to this.

I play a single player online mars region. I just got done finishing my first research map of Center for artificial learning buildings as well as a map of adv robot inc buildings. However, no matter what I do in terms of robot production, it is matched with an equal amount of consumption yet it still drains my storage like no other as it shows on both regional and both city resource statistics.

I tried deactivating the research buildings, and went as far as deleting all of them off the map. However it still drains and on regional stats page it still says my research map is still consuming it all even when there are no buildings. I wonder if it is a save file bug or something. its been going on for a couple days now with no correction.

I must also say that the file had some issues with not saving properly and had often times went corrupt leading me to revert to past saves. I'm not sure what to do but I cant progress without buying billions of money worth of robots every time i need to build more of something.

tldr: game thinks there are research buildings that consumes robots, but there are none. results in constant over consumption.

Win10 not browser. version 1.3.0

Hello everyone! Today I will be publishing My Colony v1.7.0 to all platforms. This is a somewhat minor(ish) update, but includes some bug fixes that needed to go out sooner rather than later as they were impacting one of my servers somewhat substantially and causing issues not only for My Colony, but other games as well. There are some changes here and there that you will notice though, so let's take a peek at what's new in this release!

Firstly, I have completely removed the option for synchronous path finding, and now all path finding operations take place in the off-thread asynchronous routine. For whatever reason, the synchronous pathfinding was causing rovers and colonists to jump around the map and walk in strange directions, and I didn't want to waste a bunch of time figuring out. I decided that since most of the problems with the off-thread pathfinder have already been solved long ago and it has been the default setting for months, I would just make it official and remove the synchronous pathfinder from the game completely. I don't expect and negative issues from this, but if you find something then let me know!

Colonists will start protesting again in this update if your approval gets low enough. The mechanics and levels are similar to what they were before, except now the protests start more gradually and a little earlier on. You will notice the protestors outside of your capitol building if you have colonist rendering enabled.

Similar to the transit bus that was added in v1.5, there are now two new decorative units that you will see driving around your colony, the Ambulance and the Squad Car. These come from the hospitals and security stations, respectively. As of now their movements are random like the bus, but I thought it would be neat eventually to have at least the squad cars primarily drive around high-crime areas, as sort of a quick way to see where problems are without digging into stats. I also thought it would be neat to have the squad cars arrive at protests, and maybe have some building damage and fires caused by the protests, but I need to make a fire department before I can do any of that...

Insectoids now get to join their human and reptilian "friends" in the cross-regional mass transit game with their new Subterranean Transit Node. It works just like the bus station for Humans and it allows Insectoids to live and work in different regional cities.

Multiplayer regions have been completely dead in the game, and they should now be working again to a level that they were before. I think I might work on a complete upgrade and overhaul of the Multiplayer Region feature over the coming updates, so if you have big ideas and suggestions for this feature, then now is probably the time, because they are probably going to be next on the agenda.

Finally, I introduced two new share URI formats that the My Colony client can read and launch from. You can now easily share your charter code by creating a link like this: web+mycolony://join_sjlK2GZ9 (where sjlK2GZ9 is your charter), or a multiplayer region like this: web+mycolony://joinmp_u9rRFvyR (again, where u9rRFvyR is the charter). When someone clicks the link, the My Colony app should start and launch right into the join charter flow. Haven't tested it completely yet, but I'm pretty sure it works...

Anyway, that's all for today. Updates will be going out within the next few days here so be on the lookout, thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!

I would really like to see regional map support for custom maps, maybe having each subsection be a copy of the custom map, or have randomly generated resources based on attributes of the map, or placed objects! In my opinion this would be a great feature, and I hope that it gets added in to the game.

@bastecklein do you think this is feasible?

over about a thousand hours of gameplay over various versions without letting it run overnight, i have come to find many small balancing issues and small features i wish were in the game. for example. i believe that you should be able to adjust the production priority and employment capacity of a set building map wide at once, instead of having to manually do it one by one. when populating a map you need to have cloning facilities with high priority and on a regional map it can get very tedious setting all the sliders over and over.

Another feature is the ability to transfer colonists from one City in regional to another permanently. For example, if you had a city dedicated to gold synthesis labs, and then you upgraded them, you wouldn't have enough jobs for your colonists as the upgraded building has less job spaces. There are many other reasons as to why this would be beneficial, and i believe it would also be beneficial for an easier way to transport vehicles between cities too, such as just being able to right click on a city, select a rover type or colonists, and then an amount, and relocate them.

high teir building bots need to be able to build lower teir buildings, and with a speed bonus too, so that less bots can be on one map at a time, and to incentivise building more late game bots.

there should probably be storage dedicated to gold ore steel and such together which is a lot better than the raw mats depot and is unlocked later on

there kinda needs to be a consistently functional way to remove atmosphere early game

there should be a way to get wood a lot faster, as the amount of land needed to sustain one tile of charcoal burner is a lot

please make it so that if you have y mass drivers (1 mass driver allows exports of 100) that you can export Yx100 at once

a lot of storages should probably be buffed like uranium storage, i even use nuclear reactors instead of uranium storages at this point

ill try to think of more things but fir now this is all that came to mind

also yes i will spare you from my most common request

interesting, hm so no regional stats are currently saying research is being consumed from somewhere? And it might be a little annoying to have to do, but i can always recommend staying 30 mins or so in each regional city that once consumed research.

I noticed recently that the regional inflow/outflow is not always correct, and I'll give an example.

Here is my total inflows, as you can see somewhere in the 3k range.

And my total outflows, only around 300.
So, from this information, you would think that the trend for total amount of resources would be a straight line graph, going up 3000 every cycle, minus the total outflows. Reminder: I have not sold ships nor bought them.
This is the graph that the game generates and what I've seen. I've made more than 3 ship places, but I'm still either bleeding ships or flatlining. This dosen't make sense. The math is not adding up.