Ape Apps

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--Lurker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contact Information:

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

H3110 guys!

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

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

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


Let me know your minds :p

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

A couple ideas that may or may not help:

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

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

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

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

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

H3110 guys!


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

New Technologies!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

I also agree with Vince here :

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Since v0.43.0 it seems I can neither sell nor request anything on the GBT. I'm able to post offers or request and the resource/money is taken out of my inventory, but the trade does not show up. I remember being able to see my own trades on the GBT in the past, although not being able to trade with myself. The trades are not there now.
I posted some really good trades and nobody seems to buy/sell, or I'm simply not receiving the resource/money after someone made the trade - I don't know. Before realizing something was wrong I had already posted trades worth of billions. It was mildy infuriating.
I have to add that I'm not quite sure if it's a bug or not because I can't check myself - I have only one colony. So I submitted a trade selling 100 gold for $ 123456789 per 100. I'd be grateful if anyone could check if the trade is there or not.

GBT remake

How I would make a trade system:

1.You can only request items/resources. This is to force the player to create trades with good prices.
2.There is a trade AI. This AI always requests as much as you have. The price of the AI is orientated at the price player pay. To make it hard to manipulate and to stabilize prices, it would increase by one of a trade sells that costs more then it, and it would decrease by one if a trade sells this is below it. All AI prices will start at 10% of what a good price is.
3. whenever you request, your maximum price for that you request is limited by the highest priced deal that is on the market at the moment. You can only increase the price of the offer by 10-20%, but you can always request for lower prices.

Edit: When you have the max prices offer, you can't make a new one.
4. A limited amount of offers open/cancel offer button. To prevent ppl from spamming, you shouldn't be allowed to have more then 25 request open. But when you request, you have to pay 10% of the money you give for transport costs. Not civic anymore.
5. Only the 10 best priced offers are displayed, but there should be a button to show them all
6. You should see a graph that shows how the price behaved in the last 7 days or so.
7. another AI suggestion: if ppl are selling much stuff to the AI, the price will drop too.

Hi All,

I have noticed a bug that very occasionally happens.

For context i basically only trade using the default trade price per 100 (ie whatever is there when i open the window) i just vary the amount to sell.

So occasionally the trade will be rejected as price gouging because the emperor wont accept a price per unit above x and my price was >x. (and this apparently marks me as being bad).

The issue i see is that as i used the default supplied values this should never occur, as the default should never be higher/lower than whats been accepted.

I realise the limits need to exist (and im ok with that) but you shouldn't be punished by using the default trade price.

Thanks
DEAP.

PS Love the game!

First off, agreed that this website is eye piercing at night, there really needs to be a darker colour scheme that you can possibly choose in settings.

Sending messages is pretty bad I have to agree. 120 characters is not much and usually ends with splitting up your message into several mails where it could have been said in just the one. However I don't believe the solution is lengthening the character limit. I would like to see a building added to the game where you can open chatrooms with people you know the charter code of, similar to your commonwealth chat option. That would made communicating much easier if you just have a building with a bunch of names of colonies you know the charter code to and when you click it there's your conversation. Extending the character limit to 200 wouldn't hurt either, but could just be used for smaller messages. If the chatroom building isn't added (which I don't think it would be, at least for a while) the character limit does need to be changed and its not terribly difficult to change the value.
Also, while having your mail come directly to your account instead of your colonies could be a good idea if done correctly. For instance the mail would have to say which colony it was meant for or you wouldn't know the context of the mail. But the main problem I see with this is that you only go online when you enter your colony, if you are just on the main screen you aren't really online.
Just FYI premium users have no additional benefits regarding the messages, Vac.

About your trade section, you gain access to larger trading sizes later. The largest comes from the hall of congress which gives you the ability to trade 500 million of anything (but the hall of congress is the most expensive building in the game). Your trading resources directly with other places is already a feature, it is called the Galactic Board of Trade (GBT). However the GBT only trades resources for money, it could be interesting to trade any resource for another amount of resource. But that sounds very hard to actually set up because everything would be in different units. It's just easier to convert everything to the same units, aka money. You can sell something, get the money for it and use that money to buy other resources on the market. Not that hard to do.

With your aid idea, you can already do that. If some base is starving and they tell you about it you can send food to them. It's not going to kill you to help out, although most of the time you only see colonies with problems in your own commonwealth. Sending population would speed up the game, the game is already a good speed if you know what you are doing. I feel like being able to send people would kind of break the game. The first thing I would do is make a new base, send a bunch of resources from my main base and then have another base filled with landing pads so it can effectively send infinite people and your new base would never need to wait for anything. Breaks the pace of the game. The colonists you would send have no reason to leave that colony off the edge of their map, there's nothing but that base on that planet.

What I, personally, would like to see is multiple people inhabiting the same planet, which could be either cooperation in building the same colony or two individual colonies in separate places but can interact. You can open trade routes between you and the other colonies, grow your colony large enough to eventually meet with them. I know bast doesn't want any sort of war, so we will only get peaceful options with our fellow planet colonists. Anyways, just a thought.

Join the Trade Federation Commonwealth

---

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

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

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

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

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

ONLINE PLAYERS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

OFFLINE PLAYERS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have heard a lot lately about the GBT and auto trade, so here are a few ideas.
1. The GBT is filled up with huge 100mil or 500 contracts, making it impossible to get what you want
What you could do is make a filter for contracts so you can see certain sized contracts. Also, with auto trade, I would maybe like a way to edit how much I trade and when I trade it, so I am not losing productivity to it only trading 1/10 of my storage, very slowly. Also, when you buy through auto-trade, I would like to adjust that too to where you can set it to what you want.

2. Another thing is that I feel that the insectoids' new structure (Unholy hall of Ancients) is a bit overpowered. Like the other civilizations, I feel that maybe the insectoids should have multiple structures, so maybe the Hall of Ancients only produces money, civics, and research, while there is another building that maybe consumes something like money and research to produce relics, instructions, and artifacts. Also, maybe the insectoids get a structure like the Draconians' Center for Ancient Extraction. To add on, possibly that structure and the Center for Ancient Extraction could both store starships, as they would use them and the Draconians one costs starships to build. It would help them be on the same level as the human civs when it comes to producing, consuming, and storing starships.

Hello Bast!

Yet another set of suggestions for My Empire! :D

• Happiness
  This will put actual challenge to manage cities.
  Each city will have their own happiness rating, the rating will affect the production and development efficiency of the city.
  If overall happiness rating in the city is a surplus, the city will function at full capacity. If that is a negative value, your city production and growth is nerfed by 50%. At -10 value, the city will break away from your Empire, becoming a Rogue State.
  Happiness is affected by the following factors:
  
  • Luxury resource access in the city
    If the city territory covers a tile with a luxury resource, that tile will provide +3 happiness to that city. Some resources requires specific tile improvement for the city to access to.
  • Distance from imperial capital
    The capital city of your empire is indicated by a palace. For every 5-tile radius the influence from palace reduces by 1. Maximum value from palace is +5. Minimum value is 0.
    Some ideologies will affect how this works.
  • Ideology
    The ideology will affect how much happiness are produced in a city. Ideology will be explained later.
  • Population
    Every 2 population reduces 1 happiness.
  • City
    At normal conditions, every city starts with 5 happiness.
  • Buildings
    Some buildings can add extra happiness to the city.
    
    • Arena is available after Construction research. +2 happiness.
    • Amphitheatre is available after Literature research. +2 happiness.
    • Stadium is available after Electricity (?) research. +3 happiness.
  • Occupied status
    Occupied city has reduced happiness value, happiness production reduced by 20%. A courthouse can neutralise this status, but will always get destroyed if another empire occupies the city.
• Ideology
  The ideology do make some changes to your empire, each comes with its own advantage and disadvantage.
  
  • Despotism
    Default ideology, available from the beginning. The ruler is called Emperor/Empress.
    
    • Happiness production 50%.
    • Garrisoned cities +2 happiness.
  • Anarchy
    This is a status when you are changing your ideology. It will last a couple of turns. The ruler is called Leader.
    
    • Happiness production 60%.
    • Garrisoned cities +2 happiness.
    • All cities will produce nothing.
  • Theocracy (?)
    That's my original idea, which is largely affected by culture buildings. Available after mysticism. The ruler is called Pope.
    
    • Happiness production 50%.
    • Each temple and cathedral +10% happiness production of the city.
    • 1 gold maintenance per military unit.
    • Halfed science production.
  • Monarchy
    The ruler is called the King/Queen.
    
    • Happiness production 75%.
    • Garrisoned cities +2 happiness.
    • 1 gold maintenance per military unit.
  • Republicanism
    The ruler is called the President.
    
    • Happiness production 90%.
    • Trade production +1 from roads.
    • 1 gold maintenance per military unit.
    • -20% combat penality outside friendly territory.
  • Democracy
    The ruler is called the President.
    
    • Happiness production 100%.
    • +20% Science production.
    • 1 gold maintenance per military unit.
    • -20% combat penality outside friendly territory.
  • Communism
    The ruler is called the Premier.
    
    • Happiness production 75%.
    • Influence of palace will not decline over distance but the happiness influence is reduced to +3.
    • +1 productivity per city.
    • 1 gold maintenance per military unit.
  • Militarism (?)
    Another original idea. Available after Conscription. The ruler is called the General.
    
    • Happiness production 60%.
    • Garrisoned cities +2 happiness.
    • +20% combat bonus in enemy territory.
    • 1 gold maintenance per military unit.
• Resources
  Resources can add extra value to tiles.
  
  • Grains
    +1 food. Available on grassland and desert.
  • Stone
    +1 productivity. Available on mountains.
  • Iron
    +2 productivity. Available on mountains. Strategic resource. Requires mine to access.
  • Deer
    +1 food. Available in forests and on tundra.
  • Gold
    +2 trade. Available on mountains. Luxury resource. Requires mine to access.
  • Fur
    +1 trade. Available in forests. Luxury resource.
  • Oil
    +2 productivity. Available on tundra and in waters. Strategic resource.
  • Fish
    +1 food. Available on waters.
  • Whale
    +2 trade. Available on waters. Luxury resource.
  • Coal
    +2 productivity. Available on mountains and tundra. Strategic resource. Requires mine to access.
  • Horses
    +1 productivity. Available on grassland, desert and tundra.
  • Uranium
    +2 productivity. Available on mountains. Strategic resource. Requires mine to be accessed.
  • Rare Plants
    +1 trade. Available on grassland and tundra. Luxury resource.
  Horseman requires horses.
  Legion requires iron.
  Knight requires horses.
  Frigate requires iron.
  Ironclad requires coal.
  Tank requires oil.
  (Artillery requires oil?)
  Battleship requires oil.
  Nuke requires uranium.

Hopefully these will make good addition for the game!

Ok going off of some of the above thoughts, consider this. What if MC2 does not need to have all of the planned customization and everybody is playing the same game on the same server? The modding does sound awesome of course, but it does somewhat break the ability to have a global server. Additionally, all of the customization may just turn this game into something it's not, if that makes sense.

@Invincible said he is still in favor of the infinite map sizes, and so am I. Now an infinite map size does not necessarily have to be a multiplayer server. For instance, MC2 could simply do away with the Region concept and make all maps (planets) infinite in size (or at least, super large), and you would never run out of building space, and your entire civilization is still right there on one screen.

Now obviously with an infinite map, it would be easy to get "lost." I think there will need to be a way to "bookmark" locations on the map that you can easily snap back to.

@Luker124 hints at ways to change up trade, possibly requiring embassies or other ideas, and as @Ansom correctly points out, the economy in MC1 is a bit out of whack. That all said, I have been considering that the game is still fun to have a global connection, and I think the in-game chat does add a lot to it. However, some things need to change.

For example, if MC2 goes global instead of decentralized, I am not sure that chat-based resource gifting should even be a part of the game. It's not realistic at all. However, trading resources over the GBT instantly really isn't realistic either. Here are some possible solutions I have.

• A year or so ago, I brought up the idea of actually using Star Ships to build trade networks between colonies. I never implemented this, because with gifting and GBT it would be largely pointless. Maybe in MC2, Star Ships are the only real way to export/import/trade resources off of your planet. It makes logical sense. You build Star Ships and you can either then trade with Earth for rip-off prices bases on your starship cargo capacity, or you can set up networks with other players.
• I do not think that the GBT as it is really makes sense, however the concept is enjoyed by a lot of players who like the trading aspect of the game. Maybe this could be a compromise. Remember a few months ago when I was thinking that, instead of being a part of a government (UE/LIS/etc) you are a corporation trying to profit with a space colony? Perhaps that is the concept, and there is a global stock exchange in the game, where you can issue shares in your "company" to raise revenues, people can trade your stock, and you can issue cash dividends to your "shareholders" when your colony if profitable? There would need to be an in-game way to pull up all of the stats on a colony so traders know if they are a good buy or not, but it could serve as both a way to make money, and a side game that still has the trading aspects of the GBT. And it doesn't jack with resource prices. Of course, I could see the need for a resource based commodities market, but perhaps it would have a requirement that you need to load all of the goods onto a starship first, but I would also be fine with no resource based trading market.
• I had a thought for Embassies that still sort of keeps the "multiple players in one server" thing, but in a much reduced role. For Embassies in MC2, what if you grant another player a "patch" of land, like a 10x10 square or something, and they can build whatever they want there as their embassy, or maybe out of a certain sub-selection of decorative structures. So each embassy area would be unique, and when you establish an embassy in a new city, you get to design it how you want, make it look pretty, and depending on what buildings you put on it would decide what kind of capabilities the embassy had? This is just an initial thought, something to flesh out more later.
• Buildings that just generate resources out of nothing probably shouldn't exist in MC2.
• The modding is fancy, but it might really not be that necessary and might be more of a hassle than it is worth. Realistically I do not know how many people would actually take advantage of it, and it would eliminate that colony's ability to play online. Well I could go either way on this really.

Anyway, think about what I wrote and let me know your thoughts. MC2 is still in it's infancy so we can still throw ideas around and see what sticks. Possibly if you take MC1, tweak it with the ideas above, make it 3d, etc, that would be a pretty good new game too. On the other hand, I do like the idea of the decentralized servers and complete customization, but perhaps that is an idea for another game that isn't called My Colony 2?

Here are some of my ideas for in game settlements.

Tariffs: if you sell your resources to another settlement, you will have to pay a tax to the settlement.

Trade deals: if 2 settlements want to trade freely, establish a pipeline, or work together on anything related to economics they have to sign trade deals. Trade deals can only be signed between settlements that have embassies.

Federations: settlements can also join together to create a federation (like the us), which will make laws/set trade policies that apply to all settlements. Federations will be lead by a president, who is elected by the settlements. The president is supposed to work for the settlements that elected him, but he can choose to be corrupt. In game this would probably be a setting that the player chooses from a pop up menu. There would be 3 leadership options, democratic, slightly corrupt, and rich moneybag. If the president chooses an option you dont like, you can impeach him with a majority vote.

Today I am putting the finishing touches on My Colony v1.23.0, the Dark Matter Update (Part 1), and it should be hitting all platforms throughout the weekend. This update also adds a new Challenges mode, so let's take a look at what is new!


This update adds the first components of the new Dark Matter tech tree which was designed by @Electrogamer1943 and introduces the new Dark Matter resource and the Dark Matter Infrastructure technology.

Along with the new tech and resource we have four new structures in this update, the Dark Base Alpha, Dark Base Beta, Dark Dimensional Portal and the Dark Matter Reactor Arc. Please note that Dark Matter is not currently live on the Galactic Board of Trade, for technical reasons that will have to come during the next update.

There are several more structures coming in the Dark Matter line, which I simply did not get to in time for the update, so there will be a Dark Matter Update Part 2 update coming in the not-too-distant future. Please give feedback and comments to @Electrogamer1943 and be sure to thank her for providing all of us with some fresh new content for My Colony 1!

The next big addition in this release is the new Challenges feature, available to Online games, which you can find in the Statistics window.


Challenges are a new late-game way for big colonies and federations to compete against each other for glory (and trophies), and there can (and will) be multiple challenges running simultaneously. Challenges also provide a purpose and a use for the millions and millions in resources that people have just sitting there in storage doing nothing. The idea is to give players something else to do after they have already unlocked everything and reached end-game.

The system is fairly simple. A challenge will be posted which will run for X number of days and be worth X number of trophies as a reward. Players can contribute resources to a challenge on behalf of either their Colony or their Federation (if they are in a Federation). When the time is up, trophies will be awarded to both the Colony and the Federation who contributed the most to the challenge. You will be able to see a listing in-game of both colonies and federations ranked by the number of trophies they have earned.

I will be posting new challenges on a regular basis, and they will range from only a few days to several months, so check the Challenges screen often to make sure you don't miss out. Challenges give a good opportunity to use up some of the mass amounts of resources people have, and should also help people's GDP, as resources sitting in storage do not contribute to GDP, and having full storage shuts down your GDP production. There is one challenge up right now, but I will be adding several more after the update goes live to all platforms, so keep watching the challenges screen, and try to win some trophies!

Now for some changes to gameplay. I have raised the Import and Export (non-GBT) fees to 99.9% each, and in the next update I will probably remove the Import and Export resource features entirely from online games. Importing and Exporting makes it too easy to exploit the Galactic Board of Trade, and so it will be going away. Keep in mind this is for online games only. My inbox will be open for all incoming hate mail related to this change...

Speaking of trade, I have revamped the code for the Auto Trade feature, which was basically disabled up until now. Feel free to test the Auto Trade for different resources and let me know how the changes work and if they need tweaked some more.

Finally, there were a lot of bug fixed in this update, regarding both building rendering and performance while building with a lot of drones. If you are still having issues in those areas, please let me know!

So that is all for this update. The next update will be Dark Matter Part 2 as I mentioned before. In the meantime, I will be adding more Challenges and also more Collectable Structures on a weekly basis, so be sure to check both of those screens in-game so you don't miss anything, and stay tuned for more!

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

#mycolony

Build v0.43.0

Platform; Windows 10 PC

Galactic trade center used to issue Ore trades that required scientific notation for the monetary value, specifically 1,000,000 ore at 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 per 100 units.

The resource and Civics were deducted and the trade was not published.

This is the second time I have experienced a sufficiently large monetary terms trade deduct the resources but fail to post the trade.

Hugs and Kisses

Tigris Fold

Add a tab to the Galactic Board of Trade's Trade interface that says "Trade History" and will have two columns; one for the history of items you have purchased, and one for the history of items you have sold. It would include the item, quantity purchased/sold, total price paid, and price per 100.

This would help with selling items so I don't have to keep recalculating how much to sell stuff for.

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

Due to recent abuse of the GBT, the evil Galactic Emperor has just hired a new henchman Imperial Trade Representative to oversee all trading conducted on the GBT. The Trade Representative is monitoring all trades and will reject any offers posted that fall too far outside of the current market average price. He is also rejecting all trades posted in lots larger than 50,000 units, as the Galactic Freight company is unable to transport goods in such large quantities. Trade violations will be tracked per colony, and colonies with an excessive number of violations within a given period will be banned from the GBT altogether.

It saddens the evil emperor to have to take time out of his busy golf schedule to impose controls on the GBT. Even though he is evil to the core, he prefers a free market approach, but too much abuse has forced his hand, and it seems that an online economy requires a stable and (sadly) regulated market.

I’m not sure of the member you are referring to, but if we knew for sure then he/she would be banned from the FFF as using exploits is against our policy.

Anyways, some of us at the FFF had a meeting to talk about ways that would reduce some of the ongoing GBT issues.

1. Players should not be allowed to go over their current storage limits. This can currently be done by placing a request for resources or by receiving a gift, resulting in a player able to hold millions of something with only 50k of storage. Making it where excess resources from gifts or GBT requests simply filled the current storage and the excess disappears prevent a player from being able to stockpile billions of a resource without the proper capacity.

2. Tying into the issue above, there are certain resources that currently have no storage limit. These include Ore, Gold, Aluminum, and Uranium to name a few. There’s no reason that I can see for any player to need a nearly infinite amount of a resource. Using the warehouse or another storage building to limit this would make more sense.

3. The amount you post for trade cannot exceed your current storage capacity. Meaning you cannot have multiple contracts that add up to 100k of a resource for sale on the GBT if you only have 80k storage space. This would already be minimized if #1 was implemented and holding more than your current storage was not allowed anyways.

4. The storage limit for a certain resource is reduced by the amount of that resource you have listed on the GBT. Once the contract sells, the storage space returns to normal. This way if the contract is not sold and the resources are returned to the player, it does not exceed the storage capacity. Or anything in excess of the storage capacity vanished upon the return of those resource.

5. Possibly tie the GBT to your consulate or capital level, so that only players that are within +/- 1 level of your consulate or capital level can see your trades and vice versa. Allow the max trade amount to increase with these levels as well, so that smaller levels only trade with smaller levels and larger trades stay with the larger levels.

I’m not sure what your current plans are but hopefully these will give you some more ideas on possible solutions to address the issues of players using GBT exploits for personal gain.

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

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

My Colony v0.50.0 Changelog

New Stuff

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

Changes

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

Additional Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You trade because you are better at making something than someone else and so they exchange you the goods they are better at making. That's called comparative advantage (https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-economics/chapter/introduction-to-international-trade/)

Trading goods for other goods is called bartering (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter) but that's not really practical since it'll be really hard to create a GBT where you request 1000 Plastic in exchange for 1000 Al or 1000 uranium etc, it'll be too messy.

Since bartering is so messy we have this great thing called currency that we use to exchange goods. You sell your excess resources to generate income so that you can in turn use that income to reinvest into resources you're lacking or to finance building something that requires cash outright or pay for stuff (tax, kickback to CW etc).

That is why you trade (http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Global_economics/Why_do_countries_trade.html). The reason the GBT was fucked was because there was a flaw in the game and someone exploited it not because I want to trade for profit.

I vote lawless trade with no limits. I think the trade advisor in game telling people when it's a bad deal is good enough. You did your job. If I don't care about getting ripped off so I can get the supplies now its my business. You at least warned me. We need to stop dealing with trade and get back to what's important. A better aluminum generator!

any reason why my workers just decide to stop working? i have 50 million food storage and i have had my workers just decide to stop making food and everybody dies..

is there some documentation on what motivates the workers, how to achieve maximum productivity, etc? this game is fun but its frustrating as shit in that everything is a shot in the dark

more clarification on what contributes to your approval rating and what effect your approval rating has on productivity and all the math behind it would be extremely helpful, particularly on pay, fire drills, etc.

while i'm at it there needs to be a bot reset button and a get your ass to work button. as it is now you need to start a new project to compel stationary bots to do work on pending projects (except in rare cases where they randomly decide to start on their own).

also multi select on objects to destroy many at once is mandatory. this bulldozing one at a time x10,000 is for the birds. i built like a thousand solar towers and had to kill them one by one because i replaced them all with one diamond crystal reactor.. or at least give me a 4x4 and 8x8 bulldozer?

there are bugs in the native client that no matter if your pending object fits or not it states "location blocked" across the entire screen

population heatmaps and homeless heat maps would be cool so we know where to build houses/jobs and help the unemployed/sick/homeless. this could probably be written into the engine and controlled from that menu like colonists, animations, fps cap, etc.

also global board of trade went from the heart of the entire economic infrastructure of the game to a mini-mart with bite sized fun snacks. the bug the hacker dude (thanks dude lol) used was fixed with price controls and api cooloff time. so restore real lot sizes pls. being able to filter by size would be cool too so whales and tadpoles can shop at the same place and find what they need without scrolling through 10,000 lots of 100ea. i stored quite a bit of stuff bouncing it off the board of trade like free two day storage. that got 'fixed' with decay, but it seems arbitrary to cap productivity and economic throughput when the board of trade served a useful purpose in this regard.

also a lot of people made out like bandits when the gbt went whacky, and their resources are dwindling due to decay and limited by storage, but the ability to do big deals for big money would be nice. everything is dirt cheap now because of this windfall, but eventually we will find equilibrium between supply and demand and prices will return to normal, so if it int broke, please don't fix it. punishing users because they were lucky enough to be online when it happened almost made me quit this game. being able to sell millions of food water ore etc was useful to generate a little extra income but im not gonna do it for 50 grand or 5 million. its a time waster and chump change. it needs to be worthwhile for somebody who already has 100 billion dollars to play too. i have 500 million+ storage on my map.

a private area on the gbt would be cool to where colonies could trade directly with each other

more interaction with other colonies would be cool, as would the ability to attack them/raid/etc. weapons, defenses could be like resources, it wouldn't take much and would massively boost interaction between colonies.

what is the effect of deactivating a building? do the workers go somewhere else? do they stay there but no longer produce output or consume resources?

why is it that I can go see and visit other colonies in my commonwealth but not others? what makes it visible?

what is the most you can annex your land without blowing it up? un-annex would be nice..

whats the "score" in this game? gdp? # of people? is there a leaderboard?

Kind of a messy list but hey there it is

is this is any kind of open source type deal I would love to help. most of my experience is windows web programming but I love this game.

oh also i think i know of another bug that can be used to multiply resources endlessly. i wont say anything about it here but if you are interested let me know and ill shoot you a private email.

I've recently been banned from trade after not paying taxes and the trade embargo has lasted too long so I think there should be some way of making this not last as long. Maybe by having the option to pay a fine to instantly remove the trade ban and introduce the relationship with the commonwealth as another stat to maintain with rewards/punishments for having a good/bad relationship level. Also maybe a building which periodically sends a small amount of resources to the commonwealth for increasing relations.

I have started putting together an early concept for a new game I have been thinking about for a few years now called My Starship, which is loosely modeled on an old Android game I used to play called Star Traders RPG. In My Starship, you captain a ship and must make money by conducting favorable trades between colonies and by going on missions for the various planetary governments. The game map, planets, missions, and interplanetary relations are all procedurally generated, and no two playthroughs will ever be the same. You can find up to date download links at the following address, or try the game on the Ape Apps Launcher.

http://apps.ape-apps.com/my-starship/

The game is currently in a very early beta state, and as of yet, there is still not much to do. The purpose of this thread is to take comments and suggestions of things to add to the game. I will also keep this post updated with my current plans/to-do/progress list. I want to say up front though, that there are no plans to tie My Starship in to the My Colony server. I have decided that this would be better off as a stand-alone game.

The purpose of this early beta is to get feedback and suggestions on where to take the game, and also to guage interest so I can know how much time to put into development. The beta will be available for testing on Web, Android, Desktop, and Windows 10 at first, with an iOS release coming once the game is further along.

Current Build: v0.15.0

Current To-Do List (in no particular order):

• Save game progress.
• Choose your own starting civilization and ship, captain name, ship color, etc.
• Interaction with other ships, including trade, missions, battle, piracy, capture, etc.
• Captain skills progression, stats, leveling up, etc.
• Planet stardocks with ship upgrades, buy/sell new ships, ship repairs, etc.
• Resource harvesting on empty planets.
• Distress call when ship out of fuel, or:
• Escape pod when ship out of fuel or loses a battle.
• Attack, bombard, or blockade a planet.
• Capture, take control of a planet and it's industrial output.
• Hire starship crew, manage crew relations, keep them happy, prevent mutiny.
• Factories on planets which produce additional resources. Planets AI automatically upgrade themselves, conduct their own trades with passing ships.
• Military ships controlled by the main factions which patrol their own space, protect their colonies, respond to distress calls.
• Gamepad + Android TV/Amazon Fire TV/Xbox One support
• Local (LAN/Wifi) Multiplayer

So here you can see my basic idea, what I am/will be working on, and the general direction I see for this concept as of right now. Everything is subject to change based on player feedback. I am basically working on this game because it is something that I personally want to play. The purpose of releasing the concept is to see whether or not others want to play something like this as well, which will determine how much time and effort I want to put into the idea. This is similar to the approach I used when creating My Colony, and as a whole, I think that it turned out alright.

So anyway, this thread is the place for all things My Starship related, as of right now. I will be embedding a link to the thread from within the game, and will be keeping the top post updated as I make progress and updates to the game. If the idea gains any users or traction, I will upgrade it to it's own forum section, but it is really not necessary at the moment. I plan on working on the game every week or so, or whenever I have time. That will increase or decrease based on the reception (or lack thereof) of the concept. Enjoy!


Changelog

20210418 - v0.15.0
Added some Chinese translations
Updated menu icons to conform to ADL
Addressed "Cargo is Full" bug
Added Harvest Resources to the planet popup window on uninhabited planets

20200922 - v0.14.0
AI fuel tankers now have a chance to just get more fuel
Player is now warned if cargo is full while harvesting
Added Aluminum requirement to the Uranium Enrichment Facility
Started migrating ship stats screen format into a My Colony-like general stats window
New Resources Added:
- Spice
- Oil
- Plastic
Added Factory:
- Plastic Factory

20200508 - v0.13.0
You can no longer buy/steal goods above your cargo hold space
New Upgrades Added:
- Shield Module Mk2
- Torpedo Tubes
New Ships Added:
- Strut MkVI
- Torpedojager
- Draconian Destroyer
New Resource Added:
- Aluminum

20191118 - v0.12.0
Planets in comm range will show a fuel icon now if they have available fuel for sale
Added a 'Quick Refuel' option to planet options box
Expanded information on the Ship Stats screen
Ships can now travel at diagonal angles

20191010 - v0.11.0
Added Combat!
- You can attack anyship you come across
- Each attack turn you can Fight, try to Run, or attempt to Board
- Boarding let's you take their resources
Added Captain game object, each ship now represented by a Captain
Captains are pulled from roaming tokens from My Tokens
Player automatically assigned to their account default Token
Ships for sale at dock are now sorted by price
Docks now offer starship repair services
Planets now show civilization, contracts, and dock indicators
Civilization capitol now shows an indicator
When zoomed out, Map shows current ship marker and lines between civs
The Planet Stats popup now finally works
Added a pending contract display to the main hud

20190826 - v0.10.0
Planets with a Dock and enough money/parts will now construct new starships
Planets will commission new starships under their flag
You can now buy new starships from the Docks of a planet that has starship inventory
You can now only see other ships that are in your radar range
You can now harvest natural resources from uninhabited planets
- the AI ships will also do this
Ships out of fuel (including yours) will now send out a distress signal within their communications range
AI fuel tankers and government ships will now respond to distress calls
AI ships will now trade with each other
Added back button handling (for devices with a back button)
New ship classes:
- Galactic Freight Hauler
- Galactic Freight Heavy
- Space Jumper
New upgrade modules:
- Shield Module
- Laser Cannons
- Small Hangar Bay
- Guest Pod
- Improved Radar
- Transceiver Upgrade
Added Factories:
- Uranium Enrichment Facility
- Gold Synthesis Lab
- Ore Fraking Operation

20190301 - v0.9.0
Minor bug fix release

20180925 - v0.8.0
Planets will now build Ports when they have the resources
AI ships now conduct expanded business with planets
Fuel Tankers now purchase significantly more fuel from planets
Ships can now purchase upgrades from star ports
First upgrades are:
- Hyperdrive Upgrade
- Cargo Pods
- Hull Plating

20180825 - v0.7.0
Last saved game now appears on title screen
Added Factories, which planets will automatically construct when they meet certain conditions
First factories are:
- Ore Refinery
- Microchip Factory
- Rum Distillery
- Starship Parts Factory
Added Resource:
- Starship Parts

20180611 - v0.6.0
Games can now be saved/loaded
User now prompted to name ship at new game
Civilization governments now start with their own ship fleets
Changes to AI ship movement, destination selection
Government ships will not do quests, but will conduct trades between other government planets
Independent traders will now trade in other goods besides fuel, if the price is good
Added Ship Classes:
- Light Fighter
- Patrouilleschip
- Draconian Patrol
New Missions:
- Compromising Position
- No Laughing Matter
- Emergency Treatment

20180512 - v0.5.0
Implemented Gamepad control support
You can now interact with planets that are within 1 tile by clicking/tapping on them
Added new Ship Stats screen
You can now rename your ship
You can now change ship color
AI ships are now assigned a random ship color
Different ship classes can now start with specific resource overrides
Added Ship Classes:
- Klein Vrachtschip
- Draconian Cutter
- Uranium Tanker
New Missions:
- Conspiracy
- Proof of Loyalty
- Death Celebration
- Body Part Delivery
- Trojan Horse Attack
- Making Amends

20180507 - v0.4.0
Bug fixes
Engine now supports "Linked" missions
Contract timeout fails now work
Added 'Pending Contracts' option to main menu
Added Missions:
- Starvation
- Poisonous Revenge
- Wedding Delivery
Added Ship Classes:
- Delta Runner

20180503 - v0.3.0
Added Ship Contact screen when coming in contact with another ship
Can now conduct ship to ship trades
Global resource prices now slowly and randomly fluctuate over time
Raised the number of independent traders in the galaxy
Game ticks now keep happening when ship runs out of fuel
New planet type: Water World

20180430 - v0.2.0
Resource icon now shows up on trade menus
Changed the Fuel/Cargo readout bars on larger screens
Starting AI merchant ships are now picked from a random ship class
Added Settings button to the top UI bar
Added Resources:
- Ore
- Gold
- Steel
- Microchip
Added Ship Class:
- Draconian Sloop
- Ruimteschip
Added Mission:
- Rum Party

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!