Search - unemployment approval rating
All planets should be choose-able by all nation types. Each type would present, certain bonuses or challenges to a race of course. For example, humans would enjoy the earth like planets and the sugarland planets. Populations there would be more happy and relaxed. While lava worlds would make no one happy, affecting each civilization negatively at its own rate.
Technologies specific to a world type would be auto unlocked within a grouped thing based on the planet a civilization is on. E.G. Humans would be able to adapt to all planets, especially the league. Using geothermal generators on lava worlds while having sugar factories on sugar worlds, using wood on earth like planets.
Exporting planet specific resources to another world that doesn't have those resources should allow certain structures as well. Such as taking wood from an Earth Like, and sending it to an Ice World, would allow wood structures once the atmosphere reaches a specific point.
-----------------------------------
Earth Like: Beginner
10% improved approval ratings across all species.
100% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Ore
Red Planet: Easy
15% improved approval ratings for Draconians.
80% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Ore
Lunar: Medium
5% improved approval ratings for: Humans
75% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Regolith
Max of low atmosphere. (no ability to go helmetless)
Forest World: Hard
15% improved approval ratings for: Humans
100% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Ore
Asteroid: Hard
No improvement on approval ratings.
50% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Regolith
No night time.
No atmosphere.
Abandoned World: Hard
10% improved approval ratings for: Zolarg
5% imprved approval ratings for: Humans, Draconians
75% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Ore
Repairs costs doubled.
Ice World: Brutal
5% reduced approval ratings for: Humans.
15% reduced approval ratings for: Zolarg
5% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Regolith/Crystal/Ice
Repair costs doubled.
Immigration speed 75% reduced.
Rare Resource: Crystal
Always Night
Sugarland: Medium
15% improved approval ratings for: Zolarg
5% reduced approval ratings for: Humans (too many ants!)
80% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Ore
Lava World: Death
20% reduced approval ratings for all species
125% solar panel efficiency (closer to star)
Default Ore: Regolith
Repair costs tripled.
Immigration speed 90% reduced.
Rare Resource: Obsidian
Special Tech: Geothermal Power
Tech Removal: No water obtaining (trade only)
Desert World: Medium
15% improved approval ratings for: Draconian
10% reduced approval ratings for: Humans, Zolarg
105% solar panel efficiency (clearer atmo and closer to star)
Default Ore: Regolith
Tech Hindered: Water obtaining is reduced in efficiency by 80%
-----------------------------------
Now when I say modify approval ratings, these ratings start out higher or lower by that much, and every action that changes approval ratings is amplified by that amount.
Solar power will be different based on distance to the star, if you're on one planet with bad solar efficiency, obviously it would be better to build something else instead.
On hot planets, its either harder to get water, or impossible. Requiring trade to get it. If lava world, colony would start out with additional water supplies to get them through the research that would get them the ability to trade and import water. Or rather, a colony would only start on this planet, if they have another colony that promised to send them aid.
Planets that default to Regolith, will need to process Regolith into Ore based on that species regolith to ore conversion ratio (mentioned in another topic of mine).
Planets with rare resources are hard, but have a valuable resource that can be exported or used for special features.
Certain choices, are just too small, with gravity making it impossible to sustain an atmosphere. One possible fix, is to add end game research on these planets that allows an expensive dome to be built around the planet through a single structure called a Dome Controller that takes far longer than anything else in the game to build and would allow an atmosphere within these environments.
Technologies specific to a world type would be auto unlocked within a grouped thing based on the planet a civilization is on. E.G. Humans would be able to adapt to all planets, especially the league. Using geothermal generators on lava worlds while having sugar factories on sugar worlds, using wood on earth like planets.
Exporting planet specific resources to another world that doesn't have those resources should allow certain structures as well. Such as taking wood from an Earth Like, and sending it to an Ice World, would allow wood structures once the atmosphere reaches a specific point.
-----------------------------------
Earth Like: Beginner
10% improved approval ratings across all species.
100% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Ore
Red Planet: Easy
15% improved approval ratings for Draconians.
80% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Ore
Lunar: Medium
5% improved approval ratings for: Humans
75% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Regolith
Max of low atmosphere. (no ability to go helmetless)
Forest World: Hard
15% improved approval ratings for: Humans
100% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Ore
Asteroid: Hard
No improvement on approval ratings.
50% solar panel efficiency.
Default Ore: Regolith
No night time.
No atmosphere.
Abandoned World: Hard
10% improved approval ratings for: Zolarg
5% imprved approval ratings for: Humans, Draconians
75% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Ore
Repairs costs doubled.
Ice World: Brutal
5% reduced approval ratings for: Humans.
15% reduced approval ratings for: Zolarg
5% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Regolith/Crystal/Ice
Repair costs doubled.
Immigration speed 75% reduced.
Rare Resource: Crystal
Always Night
Sugarland: Medium
15% improved approval ratings for: Zolarg
5% reduced approval ratings for: Humans (too many ants!)
80% solar panel efficiency
Default Ore: Ore
Lava World: Death
20% reduced approval ratings for all species
125% solar panel efficiency (closer to star)
Default Ore: Regolith
Repair costs tripled.
Immigration speed 90% reduced.
Rare Resource: Obsidian
Special Tech: Geothermal Power
Tech Removal: No water obtaining (trade only)
Desert World: Medium
15% improved approval ratings for: Draconian
10% reduced approval ratings for: Humans, Zolarg
105% solar panel efficiency (clearer atmo and closer to star)
Default Ore: Regolith
Tech Hindered: Water obtaining is reduced in efficiency by 80%
-----------------------------------
Now when I say modify approval ratings, these ratings start out higher or lower by that much, and every action that changes approval ratings is amplified by that amount.
Solar power will be different based on distance to the star, if you're on one planet with bad solar efficiency, obviously it would be better to build something else instead.
On hot planets, its either harder to get water, or impossible. Requiring trade to get it. If lava world, colony would start out with additional water supplies to get them through the research that would get them the ability to trade and import water. Or rather, a colony would only start on this planet, if they have another colony that promised to send them aid.
Planets that default to Regolith, will need to process Regolith into Ore based on that species regolith to ore conversion ratio (mentioned in another topic of mine).
Planets with rare resources are hard, but have a valuable resource that can be exported or used for special features.
Certain choices, are just too small, with gravity making it impossible to sustain an atmosphere. One possible fix, is to add end game research on these planets that allows an expensive dome to be built around the planet through a single structure called a Dome Controller that takes far longer than anything else in the game to build and would allow an atmosphere within these environments.
Here is a basic/quick rundown of the new approval rating system coming in v1.0.0 of My Colony. More will be explained in the eventual patch notes.
Overall approval rating is basically a sum of all of the land value ratings of all buildings in the game, +/- global approval impacting factors that come from policy settings or (eventually) atmosphere/trash levels.
There are several impacts that approval rating has on the game. Firstly, when colonists are choosing houses, the game sorts all houses in order of land value from best to worst, and the best houses fill up first. So colonists will only live in the lower-values areas if nothing else is available.
Secondly, once overall approval gets below 30%, a certain percentage of the population will be rioting, with that percentage going up, the further down approval goes. The % of people who are rioting will not be working, so that will impact your production. So basically, if your overall approval is above 30%, there will not be a direct impact on production, other than the fact that houses with low land value may not be occupied, and so nearby factories may not have enough workers.
Individual structure value is determined different for residential vs commercial type buildings, and by a combination of both for buildings that serve as both.
All buildings value is dependent on building condition, accessibility (whether or not it can be accessed by the pathfinder), and safety (crime level, which will be coming in a future update).
On top of those factors, a residential building is rated by average distance to worksite (commute), medical coverage, education coverage, and entertainment coverage, average salary of the workers vs global average.
Commercial buildings are also rated by availability of customers.
So all of the above factors combine to give the building an overall land value, and all of those values combine for the overall colony approval rating.
Overall approval rating is basically a sum of all of the land value ratings of all buildings in the game, +/- global approval impacting factors that come from policy settings or (eventually) atmosphere/trash levels.
There are several impacts that approval rating has on the game. Firstly, when colonists are choosing houses, the game sorts all houses in order of land value from best to worst, and the best houses fill up first. So colonists will only live in the lower-values areas if nothing else is available.
Secondly, once overall approval gets below 30%, a certain percentage of the population will be rioting, with that percentage going up, the further down approval goes. The % of people who are rioting will not be working, so that will impact your production. So basically, if your overall approval is above 30%, there will not be a direct impact on production, other than the fact that houses with low land value may not be occupied, and so nearby factories may not have enough workers.
Individual structure value is determined different for residential vs commercial type buildings, and by a combination of both for buildings that serve as both.
All buildings value is dependent on building condition, accessibility (whether or not it can be accessed by the pathfinder), and safety (crime level, which will be coming in a future update).
On top of those factors, a residential building is rated by average distance to worksite (commute), medical coverage, education coverage, and entertainment coverage, average salary of the workers vs global average.
Commercial buildings are also rated by availability of customers.
So all of the above factors combine to give the building an overall land value, and all of those values combine for the overall colony approval rating.
Its something that is impossible to keep up on later in the game. So when you have 10-20 colonists, it is easy ti try to micromanage their moods. With 200,000 people though, I look at it this way. I have already made the game easy to the point where you can have a 99% approval rating in a city with a quarter of a million people. In real life, communist dictators don't even get 99% "approval" rating, but this is what players tend to want.
When I implemented the approval stuff, I had originally intended to have it be a big factor in the colony, and maybe even let the player choose a government style where the people could vote on policies based on the approval. It quickly became clear that most players prefer to be able to micromanage their approval to near 100% and tend to get upset when they have any issues with the populace at all, so I scrapped all of that.
At this point the approval rating is largely meaningless. There will always be a hand full of protesters in a large colony though, which is sort of a relic of the approval system I had planned, and if your colony is in really bad shape the situation can get out of hand. But I think at this point the engine only allows a couple of hundred protesters max, which is essentially meaningless in a colony of tens of thousands.
When I implemented the approval stuff, I had originally intended to have it be a big factor in the colony, and maybe even let the player choose a government style where the people could vote on policies based on the approval. It quickly became clear that most players prefer to be able to micromanage their approval to near 100% and tend to get upset when they have any issues with the populace at all, so I scrapped all of that.
At this point the approval rating is largely meaningless. There will always be a hand full of protesters in a large colony though, which is sort of a relic of the approval system I had planned, and if your colony is in really bad shape the situation can get out of hand. But I think at this point the engine only allows a couple of hundred protesters max, which is essentially meaningless in a colony of tens of thousands.
Hello again!
Looking back into the commercial and entertainment buildings in MC1, most of them are pretty much optional, since they can be simply replaced by buildings that can churn out billions of money and entertains large masses of people respectively.
As a result, you get pretty plain colonies dominated by very few variety of buildings at the end. This can be a boring sight, to both player themselves and the colonists.
Hence today, I'm presenting my rough idea of start considering colonist quality of life in terms of variety.
By that, I do not mean introducing more classes of "service demands". To keep things relatively simple, and not to complicate the gameplay, the diversity elements has nothing to do and do not share the same mechanics with the 4 existing service satisfaction rating (entertainment, education, health and security), hence not a factor of administrative approval ratings of a settlement, and no coverage mechanics is considered - the diversity elements applies settlement-wide directly.
Now into the details - First, what is a QoL element?
All people of a society have different wants and needs, even a person's demands or wishes can span across multiple aspects of life. What makes a society successful is not just valued by its capability utilizing resources, but also how its people benefits from the fruits of their hard and honest work.
Each QoL element represents an aspect that caters higher needs and improves quality of life of colonists. Below are all the ideas in my mind:
Next, how do QoL elements works?
Every building yields scores of the life quality aspects they are relevant to, for the settlement they are located. Every colonist also generates demands of every element in their home settlement by 1 point each.
The satisfaction rate of one aspect is calculated by
Each element will provide Happiness bonuses based on the satisfaction level, which will be explained in the coming section.
Then what do QoL element affects?
QoL elements affects happiness score of a settlement.
Before explaining the QoL elements' actual effects I'll first explain my idea of Colonist Happiness.
Colonist Happiness is a quantitative value which is affected by administrative approval ratings and QoL satisfaction.
My proposed formula:
Approval rating is a direct multiplier to all other elements - the changes in approval rating can greatly affect the result happiness score.
To prevent protests and riots, the result happiness score should be maintained above 100.
Every QoL element with at least Poorly Satisfied adds happiness score.
Taxation policies - higher the tax rate, the more happiness is negatively affected. It is a plain negative value factor.
Harsh policies like rationing, martial law and overwork policy applies lower-than-100% multiplier to happiness rating, so use these policies sparingly.
By satisfaction level, a QoL element yields the following happiness score:
How would the QoL diversity (and happiness) mechanics helps with the gameplay? Most important of all, it encourages players to construct buildings (particularly decorations) and resources (that are without large demand and just sitting in stockpiles) normally won't be used. Of course, the new demands arise from QoL needs for raising happiness rating may also give rise to some building ideas. Ultimately this helps with expanding diversity, which can make colonies flying with colors instead of only few buildings.
On the other hand, the QoL elements can pave way as an element for tourism, which the QoL factors or happiness ratings can be attractiveness factor that defines your tourism revenue - a possible way to make tourism more powerful to be a considerable source of income again compared to that in MC1.
This concludes my ideas this time. Hopefully you'll find something useful in my ideas!
Looking back into the commercial and entertainment buildings in MC1, most of them are pretty much optional, since they can be simply replaced by buildings that can churn out billions of money and entertains large masses of people respectively.
As a result, you get pretty plain colonies dominated by very few variety of buildings at the end. This can be a boring sight, to both player themselves and the colonists.
Hence today, I'm presenting my rough idea of start considering colonist quality of life in terms of variety.
By that, I do not mean introducing more classes of "service demands". To keep things relatively simple, and not to complicate the gameplay, the diversity elements has nothing to do and do not share the same mechanics with the 4 existing service satisfaction rating (entertainment, education, health and security), hence not a factor of administrative approval ratings of a settlement, and no coverage mechanics is considered - the diversity elements applies settlement-wide directly.
Now into the details - First, what is a QoL element?
All people of a society have different wants and needs, even a person's demands or wishes can span across multiple aspects of life. What makes a society successful is not just valued by its capability utilizing resources, but also how its people benefits from the fruits of their hard and honest work.
Each QoL element represents an aspect that caters higher needs and improves quality of life of colonists. Below are all the ideas in my mind:
- Homeland Contact
Some colonists are more comfortable when keep in touch with things they are familiar with, like older social network and family of distant homelands they come from. Some communication infrastructures can satisfy such needs, and if possible, establish interstellar mail and delivery services greatly helps.
Certain Earth-themed decorations also provides minor improvements of this aspect. - Social
What makes a comfortable and forward-going society is a society that people keep socialized and connected that they can support each other. A place large enough for gatherings is just what you need to begin. - Relaxation
At times colonists not only need to rest their body, but their strained minds as well. They need a place to clam down and pacify themselves. Having parks and meditation space are the most effective, but many non-vigorous recreational activities such as exercises and grabbing a booze will do the trick as well.
Certain decorations also provides minor improvements of this aspect. - Dinning
Ever getting enough of plain standard rations that your tongue simply rejects it? Then it's time to improve your meals with higher standard cuisines! - Environmental Comfort
Simply plain steel plates and concretes everywhere can be depressing. What about some refurnishing to make the colony more beautiful and appealing?
All decorative buildings improve environmental comfort. - Housing Comfort
Home sweet home!
More advanced housing, particularly those more luxurious, or with high level of automation that smart systems are installed, provides higher housing comfort. - Games
From excitement from competitive events to alternative experiences form simulations, they all can diversify a colonist's life experience and provide happiness from achievement. - Luxuries
The highest standards of life imaginable or even beyond imagination. - Commodities Access
A good flow of commodities, goods and services in local market can effectively take care the smaller demands of colonists. - Information
Questions, confusions and lack of options troubles people. Not all directly have the answers, but one can always provide them the ways to find a solution - letting the information flow.
All education buildings provides some information flow. However, a powerful public media infrastructure provides the largest flow of information that can satisfy the colonists' curiosity. - Spiritual Support
Beliefs, faith, religion or even simple psychologist services caters spiritual needs of colonists, which at desperate times, can keep them from depression of dangerous levels.
Next, how do QoL elements works?
Every building yields scores of the life quality aspects they are relevant to, for the settlement they are located. Every colonist also generates demands of every element in their home settlement by 1 point each.
The satisfaction rate of one aspect is calculated by
[ Score yielded by all relevant buildings in the settlement / Number of colonists in the settlement ] * 100%
Then satisfaction level of an aspect is defined based on the percentage value of the satisfaction rate.For rate below 50%, it is considered Unsatisfied.
For rate >= 50%, it is considered Poorly Satisfied.
For rate >= 70%, it is considered Moderately Satisfied.
For rate >= 85%, it is considered Well-Satisfied.
For rate >= 50%, it is considered Poorly Satisfied.
For rate >= 70%, it is considered Moderately Satisfied.
For rate >= 85%, it is considered Well-Satisfied.
Each element will provide Happiness bonuses based on the satisfaction level, which will be explained in the coming section.
Then what do QoL element affects?
QoL elements affects happiness score of a settlement.
Before explaining the QoL elements' actual effects I'll first explain my idea of Colonist Happiness.
Colonist Happiness is a quantitative value which is affected by administrative approval ratings and QoL satisfaction.
My proposed formula:
[ 100 + Happiness score from all QoL level ratings - Plain negative Happiness score factors ] * Approval rate percentage * Harsh policy multiplier
All settlements begins with base happiness score of 100.Approval rating is a direct multiplier to all other elements - the changes in approval rating can greatly affect the result happiness score.
To prevent protests and riots, the result happiness score should be maintained above 100.
Every QoL element with at least Poorly Satisfied adds happiness score.
Taxation policies - higher the tax rate, the more happiness is negatively affected. It is a plain negative value factor.
Harsh policies like rationing, martial law and overwork policy applies lower-than-100% multiplier to happiness rating, so use these policies sparingly.
By satisfaction level, a QoL element yields the following happiness score:
Unsatisfied - Yields no score.
Poorly Satisfied - +5 happiness score.
Moderately Satisfied - +10 happiness score.
Well-Satisfied - +20 happiness score.
remarks: It's rough value without considering other factors and hence it may not be balanced.Poorly Satisfied - +5 happiness score.
Moderately Satisfied - +10 happiness score.
Well-Satisfied - +20 happiness score.
How would the QoL diversity (and happiness) mechanics helps with the gameplay? Most important of all, it encourages players to construct buildings (particularly decorations) and resources (that are without large demand and just sitting in stockpiles) normally won't be used. Of course, the new demands arise from QoL needs for raising happiness rating may also give rise to some building ideas. Ultimately this helps with expanding diversity, which can make colonies flying with colors instead of only few buildings.
On the other hand, the QoL elements can pave way as an element for tourism, which the QoL factors or happiness ratings can be attractiveness factor that defines your tourism revenue - a possible way to make tourism more powerful to be a considerable source of income again compared to that in MC1.
This concludes my ideas this time. Hopefully you'll find something useful in my ideas!
I had my colony at 120k once, but got hit with a strange bug that had me with 7k unemployment no matter what I did with it, it wouldnt go away. I reverted back to an old save where i had just 109k and no unemployment issues. Brought it back to 120k and the issue came back. Got back to the old save again and decided to just let everyone die and start over with new population. A few days I got it back at 124k no problems with unemployment at all, always more jobs than population. Today for unknown reasons suddenly i got unemployment without building anything. Small at first, only a few hundred. I saw health dropping so I decided to build some hospitals and parks. Build some homes to fill the gap between population and total jobs. Suddenly the unemployment went to 1200 then, to 300, 1200 again, 400 back and forth like that. Suddenly it was 8k. I decided to a firedrill and it dropped to 1200 and now its just back and forth between 1200 and 3k. Approval rating is 100%.
Any ideas on what might be the cause of this?
I play on the chrome webbrowser version 0.61.0
Any ideas on what might be the cause of this?
I play on the chrome webbrowser version 0.61.0
Can someone please explain just how this works? Homelessness is, well... homelessness - self explanatory. Poverty being the essential food and water, health is dependant on if hospitals are available to the colonists and if your atmosphere is over 15m. Unemployment again is self explanatory and fatigue is something you get if your workers have to walk more than 20 tiles from their housing. Depression I guess relates to either how much money you pay your colonists or colonist deaths or both.
With that in mind, I have no homelessness, poverty, depression, health problems and fatigue shouldn't be a problem based on my layouts for walking distances due to my arcologies. So why is it that my approval ratings INSTANTLY goes from 100% to 60% every hour or two, which causes colonists to leave jobs, which causes more unemployment. Granted the unemployment is very small, but it is consistently dropping from very high percentages to very low percentages on a whim and I can't tell why. Trash is low as well.
I just don't know what I'm doing wrong, what I'm supposed to do to fix this and keep it more consistent. So based on my description of my understanding of approval ratings, would you say that is accurate? Am I missing some fundamental function of the game and that's why the approval rating cuts in half almost instantly? I'm asking you guys this because I just don't know anymore, my last base was ruined because of this. All arcology buildings so entertainment isn't a problem, all the workers don't need to walk far either. So What gives? Why did that colony suddenly decide that each other were more tasty than the food they were supposed to be producing?
With that in mind, I have no homelessness, poverty, depression, health problems and fatigue shouldn't be a problem based on my layouts for walking distances due to my arcologies. So why is it that my approval ratings INSTANTLY goes from 100% to 60% every hour or two, which causes colonists to leave jobs, which causes more unemployment. Granted the unemployment is very small, but it is consistently dropping from very high percentages to very low percentages on a whim and I can't tell why. Trash is low as well.
I just don't know what I'm doing wrong, what I'm supposed to do to fix this and keep it more consistent. So based on my description of my understanding of approval ratings, would you say that is accurate? Am I missing some fundamental function of the game and that's why the approval rating cuts in half almost instantly? I'm asking you guys this because I just don't know anymore, my last base was ruined because of this. All arcology buildings so entertainment isn't a problem, all the workers don't need to walk far either. So What gives? Why did that colony suddenly decide that each other were more tasty than the food they were supposed to be producing?
Concerning your pie chart:
Depends on your approval rating:
If your approval rating is high (98 -100%) the concerns don't really matter (there's always somebody angry)
If your approval rating is low, it shows you what problems to adress to get your approval rating up again.
Depends on your approval rating:
If your approval rating is high (98 -100%) the concerns don't really matter (there's always somebody angry)
If your approval rating is low, it shows you what problems to adress to get your approval rating up again.
H3110 guys!
Here are my few ideas regarding governance.
Here are my few ideas regarding governance.
- Promotion Campaign
Slightly increase happiness and approval rating by less than 10% instantly, consuming civics and money. Cooldown 30min. - Extra Rations
Distribute a double-ration immediately to all colonists to increase approval rating instantly. Cooldown 1hr. - Public Forums
Run public forums for extra civic outputs (30% of colony production) but continuously consumes money and wood (for making papers). - Colonial Festival
Launch a colonial public festival event that consumes rum, food, water, money, civics and potteries to greatly bring your colonist happiness and increase approval rating significantly. The cost is proportional to number of colonists. - Protest Sweep
Get all people protesting back to work or their home. Costs civics and some approval rating drop. - Tourism Taxations
Make every tourist visiting your colony yield more money. However high tax may decrease tourism. The higher tourism prestige you have, higher taxation you can set.
The list of complete changes coming to My Colony v1.0.0 just keeps growing. So far Regional map generation and Power/Bandwidth utility grids have been completely rewritten, and now I am adding another major change to the list. Currently in testing, the way the engine handles colonists is now also being completely rewritten, as it applies to their jobs, entertainment, housing, education, and medical. Basically, the entire colonist simulation engine is being rewritten, which, along with the other changes already mentioned, is making v1.0.0, at least under the hood, almost a completely different game....
Before discussing the new changes in detail, I should explain how/why the existing system came to be. Colonists were first introduced to the game in v0.3.0 (July 30, 2016) at a time when the biggest housing unit was the actual Lander that you started out in. The game was designed as the Colonist being one of the central features of the simulation. Each colonist had a name, a job, his own stats, and went about his life in the colony. He had an energy level, a happiness level, a day/night sleep cycle, and so on. The intention was for each colonist to be a unique entity with it's own relationships, feelings, etc, sort of like in the Sims.
As time went on and the game grew though, it started morphing into more of a city-builder type game VS an individual colonist simulator. So as more (and bigger) buildings and features got added to the game, the original system based on the individual colonist was simply expanded and adapted in order to keep pace. Eventually the game got to where colonies with populations in the hundreds of thousands and even millions were possible, but the core colonist simulation engine remained as it always had been.
Simulating that many individual colonists brought along major performance and memory issues, especially on mobile. I tried to work around it by implementing a "virtual avatar" system, whereby after a certain population, the game just extrapolated out statistics based on a virtual avatar, where by one "real" colonist would represent 5,000 or more "virtual" colonists. This worked OK for performance, but it always caused strange statistical problems for things like Entertainment, Schooling, Medical, and Work. For example, if one colonist would get sick or unhappy for some reason, all 5,000 of the "virtual" colonists he represented would also take on his sickness/anger, which would lead to situations where 500 virtual colonists are not working.
For the last few years, each update is a constant battle against the old colonist system, with performance issues and complaints about certain stats not lining up as expected. Game functions like Entertainment/Medical,Education barely work in a consistent manner. Moreover, the colonist day/night cycle, which I thought was somewhat neat/unique/realistic to the game, was often confusing for new players who couldn't understand why nobody was at work in their buildings.
Anyway, I think it's long been time for a change, so with v1.0.0 I am stripping out pretty much all colonist-level individuality and data, and moving to a pure statistical model, more in line with a traditional city-simulator type game. After this update, the colonists you see walking around are pretty much for show only, and will no longer have their own individual stats. You will not be able to click on a colonist to see his name, where he lives, what is job is, etc. You will not be able to assign a colonist to a specific job. The individual colonist no longer matters.
So that's the sad part. It's sort of sad because I liked all that stuff about the game, but the reality is that those kinds of things are for a different type of game that My Colony no longer represents, and keeping them in the game has only caused performance issues and forced strange workarounds in the code.
So let's discuss the new system that is currently being tested. Starting with My Colony v1.0.0, all colony stats, including productivity, health, happiness, IQ, etc, are based on (roughly) on the overall land value/approval rating of the specific areas of your colony. It sounds more confusing, but I will explain more.
Housing structures are now the basic unit responsible for generating statistics in the game, taking place of the individual colonist. Housing structures now have internal statistics based on the availability of Schools, Entertainment, and Medical facilities in their proximity. While not yet implemented, there are also internal stats for Crime, which I plan on adding (along with Police Stations/Prisons) in v1.0.1 or v1.0.2.
While these numbers might be tweaked before the final release, you basically need enough Medical to accommodate 5% of your population, enough Schools for 20% of the population, and enough Entertainment for 15% of the population. These facilities must also be within range of the housing units. Medical facilities need to be within a 50 tile radius, schools 35 tile, and entertainment 25 tile. So basically, on a small sized map, an entertainment facility in the center of the map can theoretically service the entire map.
For work, job sites have to be within a 50 tile range of available housing. Jobs are prioritized by distance to house, IQ requirements, and pay. IQ level is impacted by the School rating of the housing unit. Each housing unit keeps track of the average travel distance it's residents must take to get to work, which impacts it's land value/approval rating.
The approval/land value rating of a structure is based on how fully it's needs are met in those categories, with Crime soon to be added as well. When colonists look for new places to live, they will place priority on high value dwellings first, and only reluctantly fill in the slums if necessary. When crime is implemented, criminals will originate from slum areas of town, so the more low-value areas your colony has, the more crime will be generated. Crime in turn will further lower the value of the area.
With this new system, the colonist day/night cycle is gone. As long as approval/land value conditions are good, buildings will be operating at full capacity at all times, so there is no more sitting there waiting for workers to come back on duty.
Some people will not like this new system as the change is large and will probably render many existing city layouts ineffective. You now have to think about the macro-conditions of each area of your city, making sure that there is sufficient medical, education, and entertainment for all residential areas. Since these stats were largely underutilized before, most existing cities will probably have shortages right off the bat. I plan on introducing new education and medical facilities as I get further along on the v1.0.0 update, as they will probably be needed.
There are some positives that come along with this change. Firstly, save file size and memory usage is greatly reduced, as the game no longer keeps a reference table of all workers/buildings. The game no longer conducts the expensive job/medical/school/entertainment search routines for individual colonists, which involved expensive operations of sorting all in-game structures by distance from each colonist, and then weeding through destination candidates one by one.
I estimate that most colonies will see improved performance with this change, particularly on the high end. In addition, this new system will allow me to implement probably the most requested feature of the last 3 years - mass transit, which I tentatively plan on introducing in v1.0.3 with either a new subway or monorail system (depending on what I want to draw). Since the engine no longer has to figure out paths for each individual worker, it now only needs to make sure that a mass-transit system is fully connected to itself, and then figure out a building's distance to the overall transit network, making it's implementation much, much simpler and less performance intensive than trying to resolve mass transit paths for each individual colonist.
So I've written a book here, but the reason for the long write up is because this is probably absolutely the single largest engine change to the game since it first came out, and it represents a complete rewrite of one of the core mechanics of the game. I am trying to design it in a way that will not feel overly different to long-time players and will not be overly disruptive to existing games, but with a change on this scale, you know some people will be impacted.
If you have issues/observations with the new system, you can post them in this thread. I will be working on this particular part of the game for a few more days here. Be advised, that if you open a colony on v1.0.0 from this point on, the engine changes are sufficiently large that re-opening your game in a pre-v1.0.0 client may cause issues, as v1.0.0 deletes a lot of depreciated properties from in-game objects.
Before discussing the new changes in detail, I should explain how/why the existing system came to be. Colonists were first introduced to the game in v0.3.0 (July 30, 2016) at a time when the biggest housing unit was the actual Lander that you started out in. The game was designed as the Colonist being one of the central features of the simulation. Each colonist had a name, a job, his own stats, and went about his life in the colony. He had an energy level, a happiness level, a day/night sleep cycle, and so on. The intention was for each colonist to be a unique entity with it's own relationships, feelings, etc, sort of like in the Sims.
As time went on and the game grew though, it started morphing into more of a city-builder type game VS an individual colonist simulator. So as more (and bigger) buildings and features got added to the game, the original system based on the individual colonist was simply expanded and adapted in order to keep pace. Eventually the game got to where colonies with populations in the hundreds of thousands and even millions were possible, but the core colonist simulation engine remained as it always had been.
Simulating that many individual colonists brought along major performance and memory issues, especially on mobile. I tried to work around it by implementing a "virtual avatar" system, whereby after a certain population, the game just extrapolated out statistics based on a virtual avatar, where by one "real" colonist would represent 5,000 or more "virtual" colonists. This worked OK for performance, but it always caused strange statistical problems for things like Entertainment, Schooling, Medical, and Work. For example, if one colonist would get sick or unhappy for some reason, all 5,000 of the "virtual" colonists he represented would also take on his sickness/anger, which would lead to situations where 500 virtual colonists are not working.
For the last few years, each update is a constant battle against the old colonist system, with performance issues and complaints about certain stats not lining up as expected. Game functions like Entertainment/Medical,Education barely work in a consistent manner. Moreover, the colonist day/night cycle, which I thought was somewhat neat/unique/realistic to the game, was often confusing for new players who couldn't understand why nobody was at work in their buildings.
Anyway, I think it's long been time for a change, so with v1.0.0 I am stripping out pretty much all colonist-level individuality and data, and moving to a pure statistical model, more in line with a traditional city-simulator type game. After this update, the colonists you see walking around are pretty much for show only, and will no longer have their own individual stats. You will not be able to click on a colonist to see his name, where he lives, what is job is, etc. You will not be able to assign a colonist to a specific job. The individual colonist no longer matters.
So that's the sad part. It's sort of sad because I liked all that stuff about the game, but the reality is that those kinds of things are for a different type of game that My Colony no longer represents, and keeping them in the game has only caused performance issues and forced strange workarounds in the code.
So let's discuss the new system that is currently being tested. Starting with My Colony v1.0.0, all colony stats, including productivity, health, happiness, IQ, etc, are based on (roughly) on the overall land value/approval rating of the specific areas of your colony. It sounds more confusing, but I will explain more.
Housing structures are now the basic unit responsible for generating statistics in the game, taking place of the individual colonist. Housing structures now have internal statistics based on the availability of Schools, Entertainment, and Medical facilities in their proximity. While not yet implemented, there are also internal stats for Crime, which I plan on adding (along with Police Stations/Prisons) in v1.0.1 or v1.0.2.
While these numbers might be tweaked before the final release, you basically need enough Medical to accommodate 5% of your population, enough Schools for 20% of the population, and enough Entertainment for 15% of the population. These facilities must also be within range of the housing units. Medical facilities need to be within a 50 tile radius, schools 35 tile, and entertainment 25 tile. So basically, on a small sized map, an entertainment facility in the center of the map can theoretically service the entire map.
For work, job sites have to be within a 50 tile range of available housing. Jobs are prioritized by distance to house, IQ requirements, and pay. IQ level is impacted by the School rating of the housing unit. Each housing unit keeps track of the average travel distance it's residents must take to get to work, which impacts it's land value/approval rating.
The approval/land value rating of a structure is based on how fully it's needs are met in those categories, with Crime soon to be added as well. When colonists look for new places to live, they will place priority on high value dwellings first, and only reluctantly fill in the slums if necessary. When crime is implemented, criminals will originate from slum areas of town, so the more low-value areas your colony has, the more crime will be generated. Crime in turn will further lower the value of the area.
With this new system, the colonist day/night cycle is gone. As long as approval/land value conditions are good, buildings will be operating at full capacity at all times, so there is no more sitting there waiting for workers to come back on duty.
Some people will not like this new system as the change is large and will probably render many existing city layouts ineffective. You now have to think about the macro-conditions of each area of your city, making sure that there is sufficient medical, education, and entertainment for all residential areas. Since these stats were largely underutilized before, most existing cities will probably have shortages right off the bat. I plan on introducing new education and medical facilities as I get further along on the v1.0.0 update, as they will probably be needed.
There are some positives that come along with this change. Firstly, save file size and memory usage is greatly reduced, as the game no longer keeps a reference table of all workers/buildings. The game no longer conducts the expensive job/medical/school/entertainment search routines for individual colonists, which involved expensive operations of sorting all in-game structures by distance from each colonist, and then weeding through destination candidates one by one.
I estimate that most colonies will see improved performance with this change, particularly on the high end. In addition, this new system will allow me to implement probably the most requested feature of the last 3 years - mass transit, which I tentatively plan on introducing in v1.0.3 with either a new subway or monorail system (depending on what I want to draw). Since the engine no longer has to figure out paths for each individual worker, it now only needs to make sure that a mass-transit system is fully connected to itself, and then figure out a building's distance to the overall transit network, making it's implementation much, much simpler and less performance intensive than trying to resolve mass transit paths for each individual colonist.
So I've written a book here, but the reason for the long write up is because this is probably absolutely the single largest engine change to the game since it first came out, and it represents a complete rewrite of one of the core mechanics of the game. I am trying to design it in a way that will not feel overly different to long-time players and will not be overly disruptive to existing games, but with a change on this scale, you know some people will be impacted.
If you have issues/observations with the new system, you can post them in this thread. I will be working on this particular part of the game for a few more days here. Be advised, that if you open a colony on v1.0.0 from this point on, the engine changes are sufficiently large that re-opening your game in a pre-v1.0.0 client may cause issues, as v1.0.0 deletes a lot of depreciated properties from in-game objects.
H3110 guys!
So back into my really big series of ideas, this time I am going to rework my previous version of SECURITY & CRIMES and get attached onto the Grand Space Series.
Firstly, explain how this new utility works -
Like power and bandwidth utility, this security utility is also essential to keep your colony working smoothly. It also has supply and demand, however different from power and bandwidth utilities, buildings will not shut down when you don't meet the demand, instead there is a negative effect, called 'crime outbreak'.
And advanced security will require a new resource - WEAPONS.
Demands comes from:
The security providers depends on:
When your demand exceeds supply, some of your resources degenerates slowly:
Here are security points providers:
Security Policies:
So back into my really big series of ideas, this time I am going to rework my previous version of SECURITY & CRIMES and get attached onto the Grand Space Series.
Firstly, explain how this new utility works -
Like power and bandwidth utility, this security utility is also essential to keep your colony working smoothly. It also has supply and demand, however different from power and bandwidth utilities, buildings will not shut down when you don't meet the demand, instead there is a negative effect, called 'crime outbreak'.
And advanced security will require a new resource - WEAPONS.
Demands comes from:
- Every single population, one demand for a colonist.
- Illegal migrant history. One demand per case.
- Tourism buildings and tourists, while tourists security demand works like colonists, some tourism buildings such as space ports and casinos requires extra security.
- Buildings involved the luxuries, such as gold, diamond and paintings.
- Banks, where classic robberies will take place when your colony is not well-secured.
- Random events (also the main reason that I think this requires rework), such as pirate attacks and crime surges and protests and so on.
The security providers depends on:
- Security staff employed, 3 per guard (not necessarily on duty, which is different from my original version).
- Security buildings, it varies.
- Government level, which depends on level of colsulate/capitol/hall of congress/colonial assembly/command post/high command. At level 0, 150 security points (for Insectnoids it’ll be 200, each mound will also generate extra 100) are provided to secure your early development, and more security points are produced when you have a higher government level.
When your demand exceeds supply, some of your resources degenerates slowly:
- Exceeds less than 15
Food and water slightly degenerates. Money degenerates gradually. - Exceeds 15
Money degenerates much faster.
Approval rating has significant drop. - Exceeds 50
Money, food and water begins to degenerate even faster. Gold begins to degenerate slowly. - Exceeds 85
Gold degeneration is also faster.
Diamond and painting begins to degenerate. Increased illegal immigration will pressure you to improve security.
Approval rating greatly drops. - Exceeds 120
All other resources begin to degenerate slowly. - Exceeds 250
Total chaos, your approval rating instantly drops to 0.
All resource degenerates quickly.
Here are security points providers:
- Guard Post
A basic human security watchtower which provides 3 guard job and 15 security. - Patrol Brigade
A 2×2 structure that generates a few more security than a Guard Post (25), but hires more guards (12) to keep your colony safe. - Police Quarters
An upgraded version of Patrol Brigade, which hires more guards (40) and also produces more security on its own (120). Utilizes bandwidth. - Armory
In United Earth weapon distribution is controlled by the General Assembly. If you need weapons to maintain advanced security needs, you have to import them through this Armory. Also, it slowly consumes (a relatively lesser amount of) money to buy the weapons. - Weapon Workshop
As counter-measures to the embargo imposed by United Earth, LIS build weapons by themselves, not just for national military purpose, but also colony security and defense. Uses microchips and steel to make weapons. - National Police Quarters
A further upgraded version of Police Quarters that produces 350 security on its own and hires 80 guards. It consumes weapon to operate. - The Hexagon
Ultimate security structure, one per colony only, for maintaining colony security. (well the concept is from the world famous national security office of USA, The Pentagon.) - Barracks
Insectnoid basic security structure to maintaining colonial order. Does not generate security on its own but hires 25 guards. - Watcher Mound
A small security tower that hires 10 guards and generates 35 security on its own. - Guild of Guardians
Upgraded from the Barracks, this Insectnoid police brigade provides 100 security and hires 25 guards. - Loyalty Guardians
A even better Guild of Guardians that provides 350 security and hires 50 guards. - High Hive of Justice
Ultimate security hub for Insectnoids. - I.C.U. Unit
A very basic overwatching station that monitors the behavior of colonists in an Alpha Draconian colony, and also stationed with guard drones. - B.E.H.O.L.D.E.R.
An AI-operated Alpha Draconian security agency that spies on every activity on each colonist.
Security Policies:
- Curfew
Implement a curfew policy to rise your colony security by 25, however this may cause unhappiness. - Crime-sweeping Ops
Consume civics (and 10% of happiness) to temporarily (and instantly) increase security rating by 50. - Brute Force Suppression
Consume lots of civics and some weapons to launch a one-time security policy that rises your security by 150 and stops any protests temporarily, but some colonists might get hurt or even death. Only an option when security rating is -80. Also cause 50% loss of happiness. - Outsourced Security
Hiring foreign security guards at the cost of $500/min to rise your colony security by 50.
I hope everybody is having a good week! Today after several weeks of work, I am putting the finishing touches on My Colony v1.0.0 which will be heading out to all platforms over the coming days, just in time for the holidays! There is not a lot of new content in this update, and pretty much nothing that I had originally planned to add to it is here, but that is ok! What you get instead is almost a total re-write of the underlying simulation engine, which I think will improve performance on most devices, greatly reduce save-file sizes (and save corruption instances), and greatly expand the possibilities for new features in the coming updates. With all of that said, let's take a look at what has changed. This will probably be a longer write-up than most, so sit tight!
First of all, I really wish I had more time to work on this update, as I do not consider it to be complete by any stretch of the means. Sadly though, because of the time of year I had to push the update now, otherwise I would not be able to release until sometime in January. For one reason, I have a lot of family stuff coming up for the holidays. Also, the various app stores do not process submissions during this time of year (so that their employees can have some holiday time off), particularly iPhone, so I have to get the update in now before the release window closes. So I want to apologize to everybody for the lack of new content and incomplete nature of this update, given what I had promised previously. I hope you are not too mad at me, especially since it has been about a month since the last update! I did put a ton of hours into this one though, and I think (hope!) in the long run the game will end up being a lot better for it.
Since these patch notes are longer than normal, I will split them up into sections.
Game Data
First I want to talk about some game file changes. Since the format of the game has evolved a bit since the first release of My Colony in 2016, there have been a lot of properties and settings added over the months and years that are no longer applicable today. I have done a little bit of cleanup and reorganizing of the game data in this release, and if you have an older, larger colony, the first time you open it in v1.0.0 it might take a little longer to load as this cleanup procedure takes place on your game data, possible up to a minute or more. This is normal. Afterwards, the disk size of your game data should be a lot smaller, which should be great for all versions of the game, as save file corruptions are sometimes a problem on various platforms. It should also make cloud sync a whole lot faster and more reliable. I believe it will also help with issues where web browsers like Chrome delete My Colony saves to keep the game under the browser's storage quota. Just for an example, the save file for my main colony which has around 270k population is now only about 600kb, which is a massive reduction from before.
I am working on a way to export an entire region game (and all of it's sub colonies) into one single backup file. I had meant to have this feature ready to go for this update, but simply ran out of time. Be aware that it is coming soon though. The new file size reduction is one of the reasons why I am able to implement this feature properly!
Regions
There is a large change to how Regions are generated now, when playing on a map type that features a river terrain, such as Earthlike, Abandoned World, and Lava World. The River formations are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of on a map-by-map basis, giving the entire region a more continuous look and feel. So now when you start a new region on one of these map types, it will have to generate the river template, which may take a minute on slower devices. It is a one-time thing though, so I think the time trade-off is worth it.
In addition to automatic region generation, you can now also include a template file that the game will use to create your region. The template parser works best when using a 250x250 black and white image, but it will accept any image file you have. For example, consider the following template file:
When applied to a Lava World region, will create the following regional map:
These new region generating and templating features can make for some very interesting regional maps!
Once you are inside of a region map, you will notice some additional changes. There is now a 1 tile green border surrounding regional cities. If you mouse-over this border, you will see the name of the adjacent city in the region and if you click on it, it will ask you if you want to switch over to that city, without having to back out to the overall regional map first.
In addition, you can now order a rover or other unit to drive onto that green border area, and the unit will be transferred to the adjacent city. Players have wanted this feature since regions first came out, and it basically works just as you would expect it to.
Simulation Changes
This is where the changes start getting big, but I have tried to implement them in a way that will hopefully be unnoticeable to most players. For v1.0.0, I have rewritten the core simulation engine from scratch, moving it from an individual colonist based simulation, to more of a macro simulation using buildings as the core point of focus for the game. This change was mainly done for performance and scale. When I had originally created the game, I did not really expect colonies with more than a few hundred colonists at most. My original inspiration for the colonist part of the game was a title I found on Steam called Spacebase DF-9, which sadly got abandoned by it's creators. But in that vain, each colonist had it's own stats, it's own bank account, it's own mood, name, health, happiness level, job, house etc. With a few hundred colonists, this works out pretty good. With 100,000 or even 1,000,000, this becomes a CPU and memory nightmare.
Over the years I have done various tweaks and hacks to try to get around this design issue, but it's never worked out perfectly. At the end of the day, there was no way to get around the fact that the way that the game was originally envisioned and designed was simply no longer compatible with the way that the game had eventually turned out. My Colony has become, at it's core, a city simulator game based in outer space. It does feature things that you will not find in a traditional city simulator game, but at the end of the day, this is what it has basically morphed in to. So I have made changes to the game to better reflect this reality.
The individual colonist, as he has existed in prior versions of the game, no longer exists. He has been replaced by statistics. The game now operates on a system based on the residential structure and it's proximity to available amenities, such as entertainment, medical, educational, and work. This is now reflected by clicking on a building and looking at it's stats screen.
Where a colonist decided to live is based on the overall value rating of the residential property. Where a colonist decides to work is based on the location of the job site in relation to occupied residential buildings. Therefore, maintaining full productive capacity requires balancing all of the desirability factors for your residential buildings and keeping your job sites in range to those buildings.
It may sound complicated, but it's really not. In general, a colony that was well designed and balanced before this update should still work without too many issues. I have tried to design this in a way that would be as minimally disruptive to existing colonies as possible.
The largest potential issue people will see is in regards to medical care. Simply put, before medical care was barely required, and now it is absolutely required. If your colony lacks medical facilities, people will die. If you start seeing people die every month for no reason, make sure that you have enough medical clinics!
This new simulation engine has changed the way approval rating is calculated. It is now a function of the overall value of every residential structure, weighted by the number of colonists living in that structure. Overall colony approval rating will impact production in this way: if overall approval falls below 30%, you will start to see riots, which will in turn decrease the number of people who go to work. To make the transition to v1.0.0 easier, I have disabled rioting for this release, to give players time to balance their colonies. It will be activated in v1.1.0 though, so you should not ignore it.
In a way, it is sad to make this change, as I've always liked having the ability to select a colonist and see where they live, how happy the are, give them money, etc. These options are now gone from the game, along with certain policy items that were related to individual colonists. That said, the change has reduced the memory consumption of the game significantly, and will also allow the game to grow in ways never before possible, so I think that overall it will be a good thing, and I hope people are not too disappointed by it!
Colonist Lifecycle
Colonists now age properly in this update, and they will also have babies. You now need to balance your colony in a way that can support children and elderly, who are unable to work. Before you could just have a 1:1 ratio of population to jobs, now you cannot. A new section has been added to the population stat screen that lets you see the current age distribution of your colonists.
Colonists will work between the ages of 16 and 70 and they will have kids between the ages of 16 and 40. After the age of 50, they have a chance to die of natural causes, and that chance is higher or lower based on the health rating of your colony.
This has been the hardest part of the game to balance in this update, and will probably take several updates to get it right. You do not want the birth rate to be too high at the beginning of the game, because it is hard to take care of babies when you are just starting out. However, you do not want it to be too low later on, because you need enough new workers to support the aging population.
As I said, this will probably take some time to get right. It will be a bit more difficult for large existing colonies, because before this update, almost all colonists were aged between 20-35 years old. If you have a large existing population, all of these people will probably be retiring around the same time. To ease these issues, I have added new deportation policies to the game, with the options to deport all elderly and children.
Random Changes and Improvements
The Stats screen now has two new sections, Utilities and Game Data, both of which were going to be a lot cooler than they are now, but I ran out of time. Keep an eye on these, because they will be getting better in the future.
On the main construction sidebar, you can now right-click on a building to quick-jump to the encyclopedia article for that structure. In addition, mouse-hovering over a building now shows a bit more information, such as the entertainment/medical/educational capacities of the structure.
For vehicle construction buildings like the Small Vehicle Factory, you can now mouse-over them when they have multiple units queues up to see exactly which types of units are currently in the queue.
On regional maps, the day/night cycle is now synchronized across the entire region. Before now, one city could be daytime, and the city right next to it could be night.
Tourism has been revamped, much in the way the rest of the simulation has. You will now probably make a lot more money on tourism than you had previously.
The Overview statistics window now displays the total number of real-life hours you have played the game (since v0.91.0, as it was not tracked before then), as well as the amount of game-time that your colony has been around.
There is now a new Medical build category.
When a colony under embargo starts paying taxes again, they now regain their "motherland relations" at a faster rate.
The Brood Training Center now provides some education.
Increased the number of students for the Transcendent Academy, Mound of Scholars, and Internet Relay Booth.
Increased medical capacity of the Bloodletting Station, Healing Pods, and First Aid Station.
Increased the guest capacity of the Large Park, Paste Treatment Spa, Torture Booth, Live Autopsy Slab, Suppertime Arena, and Internet Relay Booth.
Added slight Entertainment and Education boost to the Real News Station.
Added slight Education boost to the Live Autopsy Slab.
New Content
New Unit: Ether Rover
New Structures: Ether Storage, Integrated Medical Clinic, Small Hospital, University, Ant Paste Rejuvenation Clinic
What's Next?
There is still much to be done. I would have preferred to just work on this update for three months and add everything I want to it, but I did want to give everybody something to play over the holidays. My immediate plan for My Colony v1.1.0 is to add the #1 most requested feature since the game originally came out, Mass Transit. I already have the entire system mapped out in my head and I think it's going to work well, and will function within a single city and even across region. This means you will also be able to have houses in one region map where people work in the adjacent region map. So this is what will be coming in v1.1.0, unless there are major issues with this update, in which case it will be v1.2.0.
After that, I want to implement crime and security, which will be the focus of the next update. Crime is already factored into the land value rating of all buildings, so a lot of the work is already done. I just need to do the work to finish it off. If I had more time, Mass Transit and Crime would have been done in this release, since I have already started implementing both "under the hood."
Finally, I promised online competition and leaderboards for this update, and I just didn't get to them. I have not forgotten about it though, but I am pushing it out until after Mass Transit and Crime, as I have already sort of started on Mass Transit and Crime, and I think people will probably get more out of those two features anyway. So I am tentatively scheduling the online competition update for v1.3 or v1.4.
Beyond those, that is all I have planned in the near future for major gameplay changing updates. After that it will be back to the regular bug-fix and content update grinds. I do still need to flesh out the other civs a bit more. At some point I want to add AI controlled factions, as I want to add a new map type that is already inhabited by a primitive species and you will either have to coexist with them or exterminate them. But that is a little bit further down the line.
So that's all for v1.0.0. It should be hitting all devices over the coming days, so be on the lookout. Let me know in the forum what issues and requests you have. There are literally a ton of engine changes to this update and so I do expect problems, but with your help I will get them all ironed out over the coming updates.
This happens to be the 100th major update to My Colony, and I want to thank everybody who has been with me over the years, helping me create this amazing game that we all love! I never could have imagined when I first started on it in 2016 what it would have eventually morphed into. A lot of the greatness in the game comes directly from suggestions I have gotten from you guys, so thank you to everybody who has supported the game over the years, and stay tuned for a lot more to come in the future!
First of all, I really wish I had more time to work on this update, as I do not consider it to be complete by any stretch of the means. Sadly though, because of the time of year I had to push the update now, otherwise I would not be able to release until sometime in January. For one reason, I have a lot of family stuff coming up for the holidays. Also, the various app stores do not process submissions during this time of year (so that their employees can have some holiday time off), particularly iPhone, so I have to get the update in now before the release window closes. So I want to apologize to everybody for the lack of new content and incomplete nature of this update, given what I had promised previously. I hope you are not too mad at me, especially since it has been about a month since the last update! I did put a ton of hours into this one though, and I think (hope!) in the long run the game will end up being a lot better for it.
Since these patch notes are longer than normal, I will split them up into sections.
Game Data
First I want to talk about some game file changes. Since the format of the game has evolved a bit since the first release of My Colony in 2016, there have been a lot of properties and settings added over the months and years that are no longer applicable today. I have done a little bit of cleanup and reorganizing of the game data in this release, and if you have an older, larger colony, the first time you open it in v1.0.0 it might take a little longer to load as this cleanup procedure takes place on your game data, possible up to a minute or more. This is normal. Afterwards, the disk size of your game data should be a lot smaller, which should be great for all versions of the game, as save file corruptions are sometimes a problem on various platforms. It should also make cloud sync a whole lot faster and more reliable. I believe it will also help with issues where web browsers like Chrome delete My Colony saves to keep the game under the browser's storage quota. Just for an example, the save file for my main colony which has around 270k population is now only about 600kb, which is a massive reduction from before.
I am working on a way to export an entire region game (and all of it's sub colonies) into one single backup file. I had meant to have this feature ready to go for this update, but simply ran out of time. Be aware that it is coming soon though. The new file size reduction is one of the reasons why I am able to implement this feature properly!
Regions
There is a large change to how Regions are generated now, when playing on a map type that features a river terrain, such as Earthlike, Abandoned World, and Lava World. The River formations are now generated on a region-wide basis, instead of on a map-by-map basis, giving the entire region a more continuous look and feel. So now when you start a new region on one of these map types, it will have to generate the river template, which may take a minute on slower devices. It is a one-time thing though, so I think the time trade-off is worth it.
In addition to automatic region generation, you can now also include a template file that the game will use to create your region. The template parser works best when using a 250x250 black and white image, but it will accept any image file you have. For example, consider the following template file:
When applied to a Lava World region, will create the following regional map:
These new region generating and templating features can make for some very interesting regional maps!
Once you are inside of a region map, you will notice some additional changes. There is now a 1 tile green border surrounding regional cities. If you mouse-over this border, you will see the name of the adjacent city in the region and if you click on it, it will ask you if you want to switch over to that city, without having to back out to the overall regional map first.
In addition, you can now order a rover or other unit to drive onto that green border area, and the unit will be transferred to the adjacent city. Players have wanted this feature since regions first came out, and it basically works just as you would expect it to.
Simulation Changes
This is where the changes start getting big, but I have tried to implement them in a way that will hopefully be unnoticeable to most players. For v1.0.0, I have rewritten the core simulation engine from scratch, moving it from an individual colonist based simulation, to more of a macro simulation using buildings as the core point of focus for the game. This change was mainly done for performance and scale. When I had originally created the game, I did not really expect colonies with more than a few hundred colonists at most. My original inspiration for the colonist part of the game was a title I found on Steam called Spacebase DF-9, which sadly got abandoned by it's creators. But in that vain, each colonist had it's own stats, it's own bank account, it's own mood, name, health, happiness level, job, house etc. With a few hundred colonists, this works out pretty good. With 100,000 or even 1,000,000, this becomes a CPU and memory nightmare.
Over the years I have done various tweaks and hacks to try to get around this design issue, but it's never worked out perfectly. At the end of the day, there was no way to get around the fact that the way that the game was originally envisioned and designed was simply no longer compatible with the way that the game had eventually turned out. My Colony has become, at it's core, a city simulator game based in outer space. It does feature things that you will not find in a traditional city simulator game, but at the end of the day, this is what it has basically morphed in to. So I have made changes to the game to better reflect this reality.
The individual colonist, as he has existed in prior versions of the game, no longer exists. He has been replaced by statistics. The game now operates on a system based on the residential structure and it's proximity to available amenities, such as entertainment, medical, educational, and work. This is now reflected by clicking on a building and looking at it's stats screen.
Where a colonist decided to live is based on the overall value rating of the residential property. Where a colonist decides to work is based on the location of the job site in relation to occupied residential buildings. Therefore, maintaining full productive capacity requires balancing all of the desirability factors for your residential buildings and keeping your job sites in range to those buildings.
It may sound complicated, but it's really not. In general, a colony that was well designed and balanced before this update should still work without too many issues. I have tried to design this in a way that would be as minimally disruptive to existing colonies as possible.
The largest potential issue people will see is in regards to medical care. Simply put, before medical care was barely required, and now it is absolutely required. If your colony lacks medical facilities, people will die. If you start seeing people die every month for no reason, make sure that you have enough medical clinics!
This new simulation engine has changed the way approval rating is calculated. It is now a function of the overall value of every residential structure, weighted by the number of colonists living in that structure. Overall colony approval rating will impact production in this way: if overall approval falls below 30%, you will start to see riots, which will in turn decrease the number of people who go to work. To make the transition to v1.0.0 easier, I have disabled rioting for this release, to give players time to balance their colonies. It will be activated in v1.1.0 though, so you should not ignore it.
In a way, it is sad to make this change, as I've always liked having the ability to select a colonist and see where they live, how happy the are, give them money, etc. These options are now gone from the game, along with certain policy items that were related to individual colonists. That said, the change has reduced the memory consumption of the game significantly, and will also allow the game to grow in ways never before possible, so I think that overall it will be a good thing, and I hope people are not too disappointed by it!
Colonist Lifecycle
Colonists now age properly in this update, and they will also have babies. You now need to balance your colony in a way that can support children and elderly, who are unable to work. Before you could just have a 1:1 ratio of population to jobs, now you cannot. A new section has been added to the population stat screen that lets you see the current age distribution of your colonists.
Colonists will work between the ages of 16 and 70 and they will have kids between the ages of 16 and 40. After the age of 50, they have a chance to die of natural causes, and that chance is higher or lower based on the health rating of your colony.
This has been the hardest part of the game to balance in this update, and will probably take several updates to get it right. You do not want the birth rate to be too high at the beginning of the game, because it is hard to take care of babies when you are just starting out. However, you do not want it to be too low later on, because you need enough new workers to support the aging population.
As I said, this will probably take some time to get right. It will be a bit more difficult for large existing colonies, because before this update, almost all colonists were aged between 20-35 years old. If you have a large existing population, all of these people will probably be retiring around the same time. To ease these issues, I have added new deportation policies to the game, with the options to deport all elderly and children.
Random Changes and Improvements
The Stats screen now has two new sections, Utilities and Game Data, both of which were going to be a lot cooler than they are now, but I ran out of time. Keep an eye on these, because they will be getting better in the future.
On the main construction sidebar, you can now right-click on a building to quick-jump to the encyclopedia article for that structure. In addition, mouse-hovering over a building now shows a bit more information, such as the entertainment/medical/educational capacities of the structure.
For vehicle construction buildings like the Small Vehicle Factory, you can now mouse-over them when they have multiple units queues up to see exactly which types of units are currently in the queue.
On regional maps, the day/night cycle is now synchronized across the entire region. Before now, one city could be daytime, and the city right next to it could be night.
Tourism has been revamped, much in the way the rest of the simulation has. You will now probably make a lot more money on tourism than you had previously.
The Overview statistics window now displays the total number of real-life hours you have played the game (since v0.91.0, as it was not tracked before then), as well as the amount of game-time that your colony has been around.
There is now a new Medical build category.
When a colony under embargo starts paying taxes again, they now regain their "motherland relations" at a faster rate.
The Brood Training Center now provides some education.
Increased the number of students for the Transcendent Academy, Mound of Scholars, and Internet Relay Booth.
Increased medical capacity of the Bloodletting Station, Healing Pods, and First Aid Station.
Increased the guest capacity of the Large Park, Paste Treatment Spa, Torture Booth, Live Autopsy Slab, Suppertime Arena, and Internet Relay Booth.
Added slight Entertainment and Education boost to the Real News Station.
Added slight Education boost to the Live Autopsy Slab.
New Content
New Unit: Ether Rover
New Structures: Ether Storage, Integrated Medical Clinic, Small Hospital, University, Ant Paste Rejuvenation Clinic
What's Next?
There is still much to be done. I would have preferred to just work on this update for three months and add everything I want to it, but I did want to give everybody something to play over the holidays. My immediate plan for My Colony v1.1.0 is to add the #1 most requested feature since the game originally came out, Mass Transit. I already have the entire system mapped out in my head and I think it's going to work well, and will function within a single city and even across region. This means you will also be able to have houses in one region map where people work in the adjacent region map. So this is what will be coming in v1.1.0, unless there are major issues with this update, in which case it will be v1.2.0.
After that, I want to implement crime and security, which will be the focus of the next update. Crime is already factored into the land value rating of all buildings, so a lot of the work is already done. I just need to do the work to finish it off. If I had more time, Mass Transit and Crime would have been done in this release, since I have already started implementing both "under the hood."
Finally, I promised online competition and leaderboards for this update, and I just didn't get to them. I have not forgotten about it though, but I am pushing it out until after Mass Transit and Crime, as I have already sort of started on Mass Transit and Crime, and I think people will probably get more out of those two features anyway. So I am tentatively scheduling the online competition update for v1.3 or v1.4.
Beyond those, that is all I have planned in the near future for major gameplay changing updates. After that it will be back to the regular bug-fix and content update grinds. I do still need to flesh out the other civs a bit more. At some point I want to add AI controlled factions, as I want to add a new map type that is already inhabited by a primitive species and you will either have to coexist with them or exterminate them. But that is a little bit further down the line.
So that's all for v1.0.0. It should be hitting all devices over the coming days, so be on the lookout. Let me know in the forum what issues and requests you have. There are literally a ton of engine changes to this update and so I do expect problems, but with your help I will get them all ironed out over the coming updates.
This happens to be the 100th major update to My Colony, and I want to thank everybody who has been with me over the years, helping me create this amazing game that we all love! I never could have imagined when I first started on it in 2016 what it would have eventually morphed into. A lot of the greatness in the game comes directly from suggestions I have gotten from you guys, so thank you to everybody who has supported the game over the years, and stay tuned for a lot more to come in the future!
Today I am happy to announce the release of My Colony 2 v0.45.0! This update continues to clean up some of the fallout related to the conversion to a statistics based simulation model, and adds a couple of new things along the way. Let's take a look!
Let's discuss fixes first. I think that I have finally isolated and corrected the issue where settlement utilities would be completely messed up when loading up a game save, but it may require one load/save/quit/load cycle to fix. Please let me know if you are still having this issue though.
Moving on, buildings now require workers again in order to operate. For the last few updates, worker shortages were no problem at all, but now you will actually have enough people to man your factories and shops.
Also, settlement approval rating was not being properly calculated before this update. It should now be working again like it used to.
Moving right along, there was a bug where disabling player building colors was not having any impact on the game. This should be working again.
Now on to game changes. If you are playing in a larger sized viewport (bigger than 1280x720), the overall game UI has been changed slightly.
Game UI elements have been "detached" from the sides of the viewport and are now floating a bit, with a new black border around everything. I think it looks a bit nicer, but you can let me know if you disagree. I have also increased the padding around all popup windows, which I also think looks a bit nicer than before.
In addition, I have changed most of the icons in the popup windows from ionic icon set based .svg icons to the icon font used by most Ape Apps applications, which should load a bit faster than the old icons did. I am probably going to change all the icons on the title screen soon too.
In the encyclopedia, the Units section has been expanded a bit, and I have also started adding the Research section. Still a lot of work to do on the encyclopedia, but we are making some progress!
The video section in Engine Settings now has a new slider to adjust the game rendering video resolution.
I am hoping this can help performance a bit, especially on the mobile side of things. There are lower end smart phones and laptops out there that barely have a GPU, but include super high resolution displays. With this new slider, you should be able to scale the output resolution down considerably. If it ends up making a big impact, I might have the resolution lowered by default on some mobile devices.
Next up, Ape Chat comes to My Colony 2! The in-game chat in the original My Colony has long been powered by the Ape Chat system, and now My Colony 2 has been migrated over as well. If you are using the stand alone Ape Chat client, you can join the in-game My Colony 2 channel #mc2.
The channel does not have its own custom icon yet, but that will be coming soon (I actually need to do an Ape Chat client update first). One of the benefits of running the in-game chat off of the Ape Chat service, is that you can subscribe to the channel and get notifications when people are talking and playing in the game, allowing you to jump into the game when activity is going on. You can also help people with their questions without even having the game open.
I will be watching the #mc2 channel to make sure things don't get out of hand. There may come a point where moderators are needed for the chat room (I might also need some new mods for mc1 chat), so keep that in mind if you are interested in helping in that regard, and if/when the time comes for moderators, I will reach out to people who have expressed an interest in the position.
Continuing on. If you look in the settlement stats window, you will notice a couple of new things. First, unemployment rate now shows up, so you can keep track of how many of your people do not have work. Unemployment can be caused by not enough jobs, but is also impacted by health, education and other ratings, and will weigh down on your overall approval rating.
Next, there is a new placeholder status bar for Faith. In the building editor, there is also a stat for structure faith rating. This is a new mechanic that will be coming soon, but at the core of it, there will be an opportunity to add faith related structures to the game, statues, temples, shrines, churches, etc. This will be sort of another stat like entertainment, but I also want a mechanic to where players can create a religion. They can then send missionaries to other settlements, or even to other worlds via the star gate system. There will then be global stats on which religions are spreading and to which planets/settlements. I think it can be a cool mechanic, so if you are interested in helping design this new feature, post some ideas!
Let's turn to some new content next. There is a new planet type (pictured in the first screenshot to this post) called Dusk World provided by @therealchromedino and it's awesome! This world provides a new resource called Duskshrooms, as well as a new rover and the Small Thermal Plant and Duskshroom Market structures. If you were looking into starting a new world, now might be a great time!
For Lunar maps, @RekEm1999 has provided a new upgraded Diamond Drilling Operation for advanced diamond extraction.
For expanding out the Alien Tech line a bit, I have added the Alien Power Tower, the Quantum Warehouse, and the new Quantum Housing Pod, a (very) high density housing upgrade to the base Bunkbed Shelter.
There are a few other new structures curtesy of @therealchromedino in this release. The Small and Advanced Blood Banks are new medical structures, the Cartel Prison is a new security structure, and the Transcendent Solar Tower is an epic new solar tower for those with Transcendent tech that can best the output of the Small Nuclear Reactor.
So that is about it for this update. There are still a lot of things that need fixing, and a big one is the combat system, which may be the focus of next update. Until then though, thanks to all contributors, thank you all for playing the game, and stay tuned for more!
https://mycolony2.com
#mycolony2
Let's discuss fixes first. I think that I have finally isolated and corrected the issue where settlement utilities would be completely messed up when loading up a game save, but it may require one load/save/quit/load cycle to fix. Please let me know if you are still having this issue though.
Moving on, buildings now require workers again in order to operate. For the last few updates, worker shortages were no problem at all, but now you will actually have enough people to man your factories and shops.
Also, settlement approval rating was not being properly calculated before this update. It should now be working again like it used to.
Moving right along, there was a bug where disabling player building colors was not having any impact on the game. This should be working again.
Now on to game changes. If you are playing in a larger sized viewport (bigger than 1280x720), the overall game UI has been changed slightly.
Game UI elements have been "detached" from the sides of the viewport and are now floating a bit, with a new black border around everything. I think it looks a bit nicer, but you can let me know if you disagree. I have also increased the padding around all popup windows, which I also think looks a bit nicer than before.
In addition, I have changed most of the icons in the popup windows from ionic icon set based .svg icons to the icon font used by most Ape Apps applications, which should load a bit faster than the old icons did. I am probably going to change all the icons on the title screen soon too.
In the encyclopedia, the Units section has been expanded a bit, and I have also started adding the Research section. Still a lot of work to do on the encyclopedia, but we are making some progress!
The video section in Engine Settings now has a new slider to adjust the game rendering video resolution.
I am hoping this can help performance a bit, especially on the mobile side of things. There are lower end smart phones and laptops out there that barely have a GPU, but include super high resolution displays. With this new slider, you should be able to scale the output resolution down considerably. If it ends up making a big impact, I might have the resolution lowered by default on some mobile devices.
Next up, Ape Chat comes to My Colony 2! The in-game chat in the original My Colony has long been powered by the Ape Chat system, and now My Colony 2 has been migrated over as well. If you are using the stand alone Ape Chat client, you can join the in-game My Colony 2 channel #mc2.
The channel does not have its own custom icon yet, but that will be coming soon (I actually need to do an Ape Chat client update first). One of the benefits of running the in-game chat off of the Ape Chat service, is that you can subscribe to the channel and get notifications when people are talking and playing in the game, allowing you to jump into the game when activity is going on. You can also help people with their questions without even having the game open.
I will be watching the #mc2 channel to make sure things don't get out of hand. There may come a point where moderators are needed for the chat room (I might also need some new mods for mc1 chat), so keep that in mind if you are interested in helping in that regard, and if/when the time comes for moderators, I will reach out to people who have expressed an interest in the position.
Continuing on. If you look in the settlement stats window, you will notice a couple of new things. First, unemployment rate now shows up, so you can keep track of how many of your people do not have work. Unemployment can be caused by not enough jobs, but is also impacted by health, education and other ratings, and will weigh down on your overall approval rating.
Next, there is a new placeholder status bar for Faith. In the building editor, there is also a stat for structure faith rating. This is a new mechanic that will be coming soon, but at the core of it, there will be an opportunity to add faith related structures to the game, statues, temples, shrines, churches, etc. This will be sort of another stat like entertainment, but I also want a mechanic to where players can create a religion. They can then send missionaries to other settlements, or even to other worlds via the star gate system. There will then be global stats on which religions are spreading and to which planets/settlements. I think it can be a cool mechanic, so if you are interested in helping design this new feature, post some ideas!
Let's turn to some new content next. There is a new planet type (pictured in the first screenshot to this post) called Dusk World provided by @therealchromedino and it's awesome! This world provides a new resource called Duskshrooms, as well as a new rover and the Small Thermal Plant and Duskshroom Market structures. If you were looking into starting a new world, now might be a great time!
For Lunar maps, @RekEm1999 has provided a new upgraded Diamond Drilling Operation for advanced diamond extraction.
For expanding out the Alien Tech line a bit, I have added the Alien Power Tower, the Quantum Warehouse, and the new Quantum Housing Pod, a (very) high density housing upgrade to the base Bunkbed Shelter.
There are a few other new structures curtesy of @therealchromedino in this release. The Small and Advanced Blood Banks are new medical structures, the Cartel Prison is a new security structure, and the Transcendent Solar Tower is an epic new solar tower for those with Transcendent tech that can best the output of the Small Nuclear Reactor.
So that is about it for this update. There are still a lot of things that need fixing, and a big one is the combat system, which may be the focus of next update. Until then though, thanks to all contributors, thank you all for playing the game, and stay tuned for more!
https://mycolony2.com
#mycolony2
Beginning the My Colony 2 v0.29.0, the game adds a new news ticker to the bottom of the screen, similar to the one found in My Colony 1.
The difference from this news ticker though is that it supports custom news feeds from third party news servers, and the server owner can set up multiple news feed sources that it's players can utilize by setting them up in the Statistics window. This can be a fun way for an MC2 server to differentiate itself from the rest,add some fun for it's players, or even just offer news items in different languages.
Setting up a custom news server is not necessarily a beginner task, but it is not overly difficult either.
You can setup your news server however you like, it just needs to be able to accept a JSON object from the My Colony 2 client as post input, and to print out a JSON object as a result. You should also set the access-control-allow-origin: * header, so that the client can access your script no matter which platform it is running on, and probably the access-control-allow-headers: Content-Type header.
This post will be updated as the spec evolves and more features are added, and can also be used for questions, and feature requests.
Primary Call
When a My Colony 2 server first boots up, it will query it's news servers with the following post data:
Update 20231103: Added the un field to the extras object (example above updated). This is the username of the individual player who is requesting the news feed, not of the server owner.
Update 20230302: As of MC2 v0.33.0, the game client now also transmits the host operating system, world id (sid) and game identifier (gid) when requesting news feed data. The above code has been updated to reflect the change.
This request for network information expects a JSON formatted response, containing the following items:
taglines is a string array which can contain one or more "taglines," or random headlines that the news ticker will play when there is not much going on. An example could be something like: You are watching MNN - The most trusted name in news.
healthcrisis is a string array containing responses that will play when a settlement is having a low health crisis. It includes two properties that will be auto-populated by the engine. ex: There is an ongoing health crisis in #settlementname! Will #ownername do anything about it?
techunlock is a string array containing news items for when a player unlocks a new technology. ex: #name has unlocked #tech
highunemp is a string array containing items for when a settlement is experiencing high unemployment. ex: #settlementname workers struggle to make ends meet as unemployment soars, #ownername's failed leadership to blame?
ollargestsettlement is a string array for when the global MC2 server announces what the current largest settlement in the entire My Colony 2 online galaxy is. ex: With a population of #population, #settlementname on #worldname is the largest city in the galaxy!
starvation is a string array containing announcements that a settlement on the world is facing starvation, ex: #ownername goes into hiding as #settlementname residents resort to cannibalism!
lowapproval is a string array containing news articles about a settlement owner's low approval ratings, ex: Time for #ownername to go? #settlementname residents are fed up with current leadership.
lowsecurity is a string array containing news items about the low security rating in a settlement, ex: #ownername plays the fiddle while crime wave spreads through #settlementname!
lowentertainment is a string array containing items related to a low entertainment/morale rating in a settlement, ex: #settlementname residents blame #ownername as local colonist literally dies of boredom.
loweducation is a string array of news items related to a low education rating in a colony, ex: Brain dead in #settlementname? Residents demand education but #ownername fails to deliver.
contractsales is a string array for announcements that are made when a player on the server sells a contract through the Galactic Board of Trade, ex: #name sells #count contracts on the Galactic Board of Trade worth $#total.
The News Ticker is an exciting new feature for MC2, and the current feature set in this initial rollout is only the beginning. In the coming updates, the news ticker will also support positive news stories (most of the current ones are negative), as well as an option to query for stories that are unrelated to anything particular in the game, even stories that present a full news article when clicked on.
So let me know what questions/suggestions you have, and feel free to try to roll out your own news server, it really souldn't be too difficult!
The difference from this news ticker though is that it supports custom news feeds from third party news servers, and the server owner can set up multiple news feed sources that it's players can utilize by setting them up in the Statistics window. This can be a fun way for an MC2 server to differentiate itself from the rest,add some fun for it's players, or even just offer news items in different languages.
Setting up a custom news server is not necessarily a beginner task, but it is not overly difficult either.
You can setup your news server however you like, it just needs to be able to accept a JSON object from the My Colony 2 client as post input, and to print out a JSON object as a result. You should also set the access-control-allow-origin: * header, so that the client can access your script no matter which platform it is running on, and probably the access-control-allow-headers: Content-Type header.
This post will be updated as the spec evolves and more features are added, and can also be used for questions, and feature requests.
Primary Call
When a My Colony 2 server first boots up, it will query it's news servers with the following post data:
{
"req": "networkinfo",
"extras": {
"hostOS": "os string",
"sid": "guid string for server",
"gid": "guid string for game/mod",
"un": "ape apps account username for player (string)"
}
}
Update 20231103: Added the un field to the extras object (example above updated). This is the username of the individual player who is requesting the news feed, not of the server owner.
Update 20230302: As of MC2 v0.33.0, the game client now also transmits the host operating system, world id (sid) and game identifier (gid) when requesting news feed data. The above code has been updated to reflect the change.
This request for network information expects a JSON formatted response, containing the following items:
{
"networkName": "My News Network",
"networkNameShort": "MNN",
"logoBackground": "#00ff00",
"logoText": "#000000",
"logoStroke": "#0000ff",
"taglines": [],
"responses": {
"healthcrisis": [],
"techunlock": [],
"highunemp": [],
"ollargestsettlement": [],
"starvation": [],
"lowapproval": [],
"lowsecurity": [],
"lowentertainment": [],
"loweducation": [],
"contractsales": []
}
}
taglines is a string array which can contain one or more "taglines," or random headlines that the news ticker will play when there is not much going on. An example could be something like: You are watching MNN - The most trusted name in news.
healthcrisis is a string array containing responses that will play when a settlement is having a low health crisis. It includes two properties that will be auto-populated by the engine. ex: There is an ongoing health crisis in #settlementname! Will #ownername do anything about it?
techunlock is a string array containing news items for when a player unlocks a new technology. ex: #name has unlocked #tech
highunemp is a string array containing items for when a settlement is experiencing high unemployment. ex: #settlementname workers struggle to make ends meet as unemployment soars, #ownername's failed leadership to blame?
ollargestsettlement is a string array for when the global MC2 server announces what the current largest settlement in the entire My Colony 2 online galaxy is. ex: With a population of #population, #settlementname on #worldname is the largest city in the galaxy!
starvation is a string array containing announcements that a settlement on the world is facing starvation, ex: #ownername goes into hiding as #settlementname residents resort to cannibalism!
lowapproval is a string array containing news articles about a settlement owner's low approval ratings, ex: Time for #ownername to go? #settlementname residents are fed up with current leadership.
lowsecurity is a string array containing news items about the low security rating in a settlement, ex: #ownername plays the fiddle while crime wave spreads through #settlementname!
lowentertainment is a string array containing items related to a low entertainment/morale rating in a settlement, ex: #settlementname residents blame #ownername as local colonist literally dies of boredom.
loweducation is a string array of news items related to a low education rating in a colony, ex: Brain dead in #settlementname? Residents demand education but #ownername fails to deliver.
contractsales is a string array for announcements that are made when a player on the server sells a contract through the Galactic Board of Trade, ex: #name sells #count contracts on the Galactic Board of Trade worth $#total.
The News Ticker is an exciting new feature for MC2, and the current feature set in this initial rollout is only the beginning. In the coming updates, the news ticker will also support positive news stories (most of the current ones are negative), as well as an option to query for stories that are unrelated to anything particular in the game, even stories that present a full news article when clicked on.
So let me know what questions/suggestions you have, and feel free to try to roll out your own news server, it really souldn't be too difficult!
Read the message underneath the chart. "These are the top factors contributing to colonist unhappiness. For example, it is not saying that 1% of your population have depression, rather 1% of your citizens WHO ARE MAD are upset because of depression". Just because the chart says there is a small homelessness problem doesn't mean that there is a homelessness problem currently. It just people people who are mad are mad about that, which can be a handful of people. If you wanted you can think of it as a few people holding a grudge that there has been brief homelessness in the past for people just entering the colony.
Now if your approval rating is very low that chart becomes very useful because you can clearly see which problems are most likely to be causing the low approval rating. I do agree that there should be a statistic that tells you exactly how many people are mad, but i just assume that from the approval rating. 98% means 2% do not approve, so 2% contribute to the chart etc.
Also, that fatigue is very high, fatigue is generated not because they have to work but because their working space is more than 20 squares away from their accommodation. Now if their accommodation is less than 20 spaces away and fatigue is still a problem, they are likely choosing working positions further away and you need to fire drill. Make sure you have large food storage while you do this so they don't run out while there is no one producing food. I find that if you wait for current jobs next to accommodation to be filled you don't get any fatigue. I have had 1% fatigue almost the whole game like this.
Now if your approval rating is very low that chart becomes very useful because you can clearly see which problems are most likely to be causing the low approval rating. I do agree that there should be a statistic that tells you exactly how many people are mad, but i just assume that from the approval rating. 98% means 2% do not approve, so 2% contribute to the chart etc.
Also, that fatigue is very high, fatigue is generated not because they have to work but because their working space is more than 20 squares away from their accommodation. Now if their accommodation is less than 20 spaces away and fatigue is still a problem, they are likely choosing working positions further away and you need to fire drill. Make sure you have large food storage while you do this so they don't run out while there is no one producing food. I find that if you wait for current jobs next to accommodation to be filled you don't get any fatigue. I have had 1% fatigue almost the whole game like this.
For a week I have had a 100% approval rating and everything was going great. Theeennn.
My approval rating took a dip. I'm concerned because this has never happened before!
My health is sitting at 100%, Also I have Lots of schools and parks and greendomes. I have a population of 11,000. And enough housing
My approval rating took a dip. I'm concerned because this has never happened before!
My health is sitting at 100%, Also I have Lots of schools and parks and greendomes. I have a population of 11,000. And enough housing
@bastecklein
With regards to the way you implement the health, entertainment and the work distance for the colonist how will you be able to give a detailed description to how its done?
Currently I don't think anyone has any idea the correct ratios of entertainment to keep the colonists happy whilst also maximising production.
I had a chat with sobe and generalwadaling a while ago about how you could do this and it would act like the utilities. You could implement this on the area basis and for all of the factors effecting approval rating.
So for the education of colonists you'd have the different jobs requiring different iQ and the schools providing different iQ points.
For example the research converters require 100 workers and currently requiring 150 iQ. Each iQ requirement could require a certain amount of education points and the schools could provide a certain number of points as well. So say the 150 iQ job requires 7 points each this would make a research converter require 700 iQ points for the workers. To balance this out the transcendent academy could provide 500,000 points which can support approximately 700 converters.
You could apply a similar system to each of the categories that effect approval rating but to get a good approval rating you'd need an excess in all areas. If there isn't enough points for a specific factor then you can choose the largest quantity of people that would not be served by the lack of points in that area.
Let me know what you think!
I can do a thorough separate post going through my idea if you'd prefer me to do that?
With regards to the way you implement the health, entertainment and the work distance for the colonist how will you be able to give a detailed description to how its done?
Currently I don't think anyone has any idea the correct ratios of entertainment to keep the colonists happy whilst also maximising production.
I had a chat with sobe and generalwadaling a while ago about how you could do this and it would act like the utilities. You could implement this on the area basis and for all of the factors effecting approval rating.
So for the education of colonists you'd have the different jobs requiring different iQ and the schools providing different iQ points.
For example the research converters require 100 workers and currently requiring 150 iQ. Each iQ requirement could require a certain amount of education points and the schools could provide a certain number of points as well. So say the 150 iQ job requires 7 points each this would make a research converter require 700 iQ points for the workers. To balance this out the transcendent academy could provide 500,000 points which can support approximately 700 converters.
You could apply a similar system to each of the categories that effect approval rating but to get a good approval rating you'd need an excess in all areas. If there isn't enough points for a specific factor then you can choose the largest quantity of people that would not be served by the lack of points in that area.
Let me know what you think!
I can do a thorough separate post going through my idea if you'd prefer me to do that?
My ideas about how player vs player war could be implemented into MyC2.
How War Is Declared:
After reaching a certain settlement level (2 or 3) the Department of War Building is unlocked, This allows the settlement to declare war on other settlements, ally with other settlements, and issue demands. Now to declare war a settlement must first send a demands list, this can include materials, money, and unclaiming territory, the next time the opposing territory comes online they are shown the notice, they must comply or reject (this is non binding), if the opposing territory rejects or complies and does not actually follow through then the issuing settlement can declare war (This can only happen after the issued settlement has replied to the demands) This allows the issuing settlement to enter troops into enemy territory. *
*This needs to be worked out, primarily if the opposing settlement is offline.*
How war is fought:
War is primarily a game of economic strength, it is won by the opposing party ceding. The main goal of war is to occupy buildings, this is done by troops doing damage to these buildings (all except a few buildings cannot actually be destroyed**, after war the occupied buildings are unaffected). Each building would have its own value for how much damage it can take before occupation, this is similar to the decay aspect in MyC1. Buildings can be repaired mid battle by using primarily money. When a building is occupied it is functionally nearly identical*** to a building that has been turned off (red on/off button), factories do not produce items, utilities do not produce those utilities, research stations do not produce research, places that produce rovers/troops cannot. This is an attempt to starve out the city and cause the owner to agree to terms. Troops would target other troops first, then it up to attacking settlement to direct them to what buildings. Troops would also be similar to buildings, having a set amount of damage that they can take, however they disappear when defeated.
**Examples of buildings that can actually be destroyed are walls, and bridges, this is to future break down cities ability to continue to function**
***Major examples include Storage which would slowly decay materials that they cannot hold. and Housing which would stop that amount of people from working (if an occupied house holds 4 people, those 4 people would not hold a job, {depending on how the MyC2 engine assigns jobs to workers, this could be cut})***
From an offensive perspective:
Your goal is the quickly occupy key areas of interest and get the enemy to cede. Being constantly at war/being in a war for a long reduces your approval rating and can cause workers to stop going to work. For every troop/unit lost your rating drops slightly, for every troop/unit gained your rating increases slightly.
From a defensive perspective:
Once war is declared on you, you can enter the attacker's territory, you also have the advantage of being able to reoccupy buildings. From a defensive players' perspective, you want to drain the enemy of enough resources that they themselves leave. Buying time is important to reduce public morale.
Aftermath:
Once a side has conceded they can vote to end the war, assuming both sides agree to end the war, the winning side can issue demands, failure to comply can start this all over again. Materials, unclaimed land, money, and units can be given.
Various Other Ideas:
-Make units cost people (these units could be sold for those people back)
-Add buildings to improve approval ratings (propaganda)
-Make units do less damage depending on approval ratings.
Ending Notes:
Obviously, this would need a lot more work but this is (in my mind) an appropriate baseline. GeneralWad has some very cool models that could be perfect for this kind of thing. This would add another layer of player and player interaction. I really do want feedback on this, suggestions, or anything that yall think about this. Thank You!
How War Is Declared:
After reaching a certain settlement level (2 or 3) the Department of War Building is unlocked, This allows the settlement to declare war on other settlements, ally with other settlements, and issue demands. Now to declare war a settlement must first send a demands list, this can include materials, money, and unclaiming territory, the next time the opposing territory comes online they are shown the notice, they must comply or reject (this is non binding), if the opposing territory rejects or complies and does not actually follow through then the issuing settlement can declare war (This can only happen after the issued settlement has replied to the demands) This allows the issuing settlement to enter troops into enemy territory. *
*This needs to be worked out, primarily if the opposing settlement is offline.*
How war is fought:
War is primarily a game of economic strength, it is won by the opposing party ceding. The main goal of war is to occupy buildings, this is done by troops doing damage to these buildings (all except a few buildings cannot actually be destroyed**, after war the occupied buildings are unaffected). Each building would have its own value for how much damage it can take before occupation, this is similar to the decay aspect in MyC1. Buildings can be repaired mid battle by using primarily money. When a building is occupied it is functionally nearly identical*** to a building that has been turned off (red on/off button), factories do not produce items, utilities do not produce those utilities, research stations do not produce research, places that produce rovers/troops cannot. This is an attempt to starve out the city and cause the owner to agree to terms. Troops would target other troops first, then it up to attacking settlement to direct them to what buildings. Troops would also be similar to buildings, having a set amount of damage that they can take, however they disappear when defeated.
**Examples of buildings that can actually be destroyed are walls, and bridges, this is to future break down cities ability to continue to function**
***Major examples include Storage which would slowly decay materials that they cannot hold. and Housing which would stop that amount of people from working (if an occupied house holds 4 people, those 4 people would not hold a job, {depending on how the MyC2 engine assigns jobs to workers, this could be cut})***
From an offensive perspective:
Your goal is the quickly occupy key areas of interest and get the enemy to cede. Being constantly at war/being in a war for a long reduces your approval rating and can cause workers to stop going to work. For every troop/unit lost your rating drops slightly, for every troop/unit gained your rating increases slightly.
From a defensive perspective:
Once war is declared on you, you can enter the attacker's territory, you also have the advantage of being able to reoccupy buildings. From a defensive players' perspective, you want to drain the enemy of enough resources that they themselves leave. Buying time is important to reduce public morale.
Aftermath:
Once a side has conceded they can vote to end the war, assuming both sides agree to end the war, the winning side can issue demands, failure to comply can start this all over again. Materials, unclaimed land, money, and units can be given.
Various Other Ideas:
-Make units cost people (these units could be sold for those people back)
-Add buildings to improve approval ratings (propaganda)
-Make units do less damage depending on approval ratings.
Ending Notes:
Obviously, this would need a lot more work but this is (in my mind) an appropriate baseline. GeneralWad has some very cool models that could be perfect for this kind of thing. This would add another layer of player and player interaction. I really do want feedback on this, suggestions, or anything that yall think about this. Thank You!
Version 0.60.0 chrome ---- ( ALL platforms ) Well I now know what how and why And even can tell you what to change in your programming to solve one of the most talked about game problems people get .
So Ill post the rating photo and tell you why it is happing take some time to understand what I am saying .
Ok so my latest colony gets around 65 k or so have them on LIGHT work load !<<< ( this is important )
And every thing is running nice and smoothly rating staying rock steady at 100 %
around 65 k I added another 15 k jobs - colonist at the same time decided that ((( Light work load just was not producing well enough so switched to REGULAR work load .
That's when rating starts acting strange if you look closely at the photo it starts going down to 98 and back to 100 over and over . THAT IS THE TIMES when colonist get fatigued and go rest . then when rested are once again totally happy .
Now that in its self is NOT the issue . What happens next is the game starts getting all the colonists in the same work rhythm ( this is old news and I use to forced them all to work and rest at the same time ) so now the game its self ends up causing all the colonists to work and rest at the same time .
Thing is what happens next is now all the colonists get tired at once and ratings start drooping farther then they all go back to work and ratings rise BUT not back to 100 % each time they get tired the ratings drop more and each time they go back to work the rating go less high .
Now the feed back loop has started and it ends with the colonist all mad and protesting and a dead colony .
The SOLUTION !!!!!!! Change how LOW the colonists energy GETS before they go off work . now they go off work around 30 % energy change that to 45 % THEN most important Speed up the whole cycle slightly . Excample - NOW they go to work and stay-- say 15 mints before getting tired and going home change it so it takes say 10 mints .
((( IMPORTANT this will not work UNLESS you change When the colonist go off because of energy LVS That Is the biggest thing that is causing the problem .
So Ill post the rating photo and tell you why it is happing take some time to understand what I am saying .
Ok so my latest colony gets around 65 k or so have them on LIGHT work load !<<< ( this is important )
And every thing is running nice and smoothly rating staying rock steady at 100 %
around 65 k I added another 15 k jobs - colonist at the same time decided that ((( Light work load just was not producing well enough so switched to REGULAR work load .
That's when rating starts acting strange if you look closely at the photo it starts going down to 98 and back to 100 over and over . THAT IS THE TIMES when colonist get fatigued and go rest . then when rested are once again totally happy .
Now that in its self is NOT the issue . What happens next is the game starts getting all the colonists in the same work rhythm ( this is old news and I use to forced them all to work and rest at the same time ) so now the game its self ends up causing all the colonists to work and rest at the same time .
Thing is what happens next is now all the colonists get tired at once and ratings start drooping farther then they all go back to work and ratings rise BUT not back to 100 % each time they get tired the ratings drop more and each time they go back to work the rating go less high .
Now the feed back loop has started and it ends with the colonist all mad and protesting and a dead colony .
The SOLUTION !!!!!!! Change how LOW the colonists energy GETS before they go off work . now they go off work around 30 % energy change that to 45 % THEN most important Speed up the whole cycle slightly . Excample - NOW they go to work and stay-- say 15 mints before getting tired and going home change it so it takes say 10 mints .
((( IMPORTANT this will not work UNLESS you change When the colonist go off because of energy LVS That Is the biggest thing that is causing the problem .
Dear Bast,
Can you describe in more details, what are all the variables and interactions that contribute to the calculation of the "Workforce Rating" of a building?
The reason is that the following issue keeps happening to my colony, since 1.0.0 until now. Other endgame players also confirmed the occurrence of such issue in their colonies :
Basically a select few of the production and service buildings (i.e. anything other than housing units) in my colony will always experience either no worker (Red color when viewed through Production Capacity heatmap), or partial workers (Orange/Yellow/Light Green colors when viewed through Production Capacity heatmap, depending on how partially full they are).
- The number of buildings affected is not huge, maybe under 100 buildings in any given time, in my single map of a few thousand buildings of various types. But there will always be affected ones.
- It affects a variety of building types : res converters, investment banks, IT studios, food sweatshops, even universities.
- Which buildings are affected vary every few seconds, moving around different parts of the map.
- Distance to housing does not seem to be a factor, as buildings very close to housing units can be affected, while buildings furthest away from nearest housing are not always affected.
- Medical coverage heatmap shows all green coverage, Average Health stat is at 100%, all housings' "Medical Access" bars are always full.
- Education coverage heatmap shows all green coverage, Average IQ at 200, all housings' "Education Access" bars are always full.
- Entertainment coverage heatmap shows all green coverage, all housings' "Entertainment Access" bars are always full.
- Approval rating is at 95% (nothing I do can nudge it to 100%, even adding an excess of the 3 services), and approval pie chart shows NaN%.
- This has been happening since 1.0.0 until now.
As such, I conclude that neither workplace distance nor lack of the 3 services cause some of the Workforce Rating in buildings to not be a full green one (and thus full 100% staffed). I would like to understand this interaction before we add another variable (Crime) later on.
Thank you beforehand.
Can you describe in more details, what are all the variables and interactions that contribute to the calculation of the "Workforce Rating" of a building?
The reason is that the following issue keeps happening to my colony, since 1.0.0 until now. Other endgame players also confirmed the occurrence of such issue in their colonies :
Basically a select few of the production and service buildings (i.e. anything other than housing units) in my colony will always experience either no worker (Red color when viewed through Production Capacity heatmap), or partial workers (Orange/Yellow/Light Green colors when viewed through Production Capacity heatmap, depending on how partially full they are).
- The number of buildings affected is not huge, maybe under 100 buildings in any given time, in my single map of a few thousand buildings of various types. But there will always be affected ones.
- It affects a variety of building types : res converters, investment banks, IT studios, food sweatshops, even universities.
- Which buildings are affected vary every few seconds, moving around different parts of the map.
- Distance to housing does not seem to be a factor, as buildings very close to housing units can be affected, while buildings furthest away from nearest housing are not always affected.
- Medical coverage heatmap shows all green coverage, Average Health stat is at 100%, all housings' "Medical Access" bars are always full.
- Education coverage heatmap shows all green coverage, Average IQ at 200, all housings' "Education Access" bars are always full.
- Entertainment coverage heatmap shows all green coverage, all housings' "Entertainment Access" bars are always full.
- Approval rating is at 95% (nothing I do can nudge it to 100%, even adding an excess of the 3 services), and approval pie chart shows NaN%.
- This has been happening since 1.0.0 until now.
As such, I conclude that neither workplace distance nor lack of the 3 services cause some of the Workforce Rating in buildings to not be a full green one (and thus full 100% staffed). I would like to understand this interaction before we add another variable (Crime) later on.
Thank you beforehand.
Game has finely gotten hard lol Figuring out the game Mechanics has been taking up tons of my time .
So here is what I know BUT for all you mega colonys please add what works for you .
One using even normal work load once the colony is over 5 k colonists can start causing rating drops
as the game its self makes all the colonists work sleep cycle the same the colonists all start getting tired at once thus get mad thus rating drops then they get rested and rating goes up but not back to what it was it drops father each time . So as soon as you can switch to light work loads .
Even normal work load will eventually totally mess up rating on a new colony .
Two much over 650 averge savings colonists start retiring and once againg rating take a huge hit as 3 to 6 k colonist in a 180 k colony will up and stop working .
Well now here is ware ratings get weird .
So taxing them down to 75 $ average they go back to work wile at the same time ratings tank And when I say take a BIG fat zero .
But hey so far its working and so far health has only dropped to 96 %mean wile they are all working like beavers .
Normally at this point I let them all die but seeing that 180 k would take all day to refill any way I am letting it run and see if the colony recovers on its own ( alest I am making tons of resources .
rating are now back up to a wopping 7 % lol
anyway how do you people with hug colonys avoid these issues ? sooner or later your colonists get rich and quite working so how do you prevent all this ?
So here is what I know BUT for all you mega colonys please add what works for you .
One using even normal work load once the colony is over 5 k colonists can start causing rating drops
as the game its self makes all the colonists work sleep cycle the same the colonists all start getting tired at once thus get mad thus rating drops then they get rested and rating goes up but not back to what it was it drops father each time . So as soon as you can switch to light work loads .
Even normal work load will eventually totally mess up rating on a new colony .
Two much over 650 averge savings colonists start retiring and once againg rating take a huge hit as 3 to 6 k colonist in a 180 k colony will up and stop working .
Well now here is ware ratings get weird .
So taxing them down to 75 $ average they go back to work wile at the same time ratings tank And when I say take a BIG fat zero .
But hey so far its working and so far health has only dropped to 96 %mean wile they are all working like beavers .
Normally at this point I let them all die but seeing that 180 k would take all day to refill any way I am letting it run and see if the colony recovers on its own ( alest I am making tons of resources .
rating are now back up to a wopping 7 % lol
anyway how do you people with hug colonys avoid these issues ? sooner or later your colonists get rich and quite working so how do you prevent all this ?
I have just completed work on My Colony v0.72.0, which should be going out to all platforms over the next few days. This release contains a whole slew of general bug fixes, both region and non-region related, as well as a few new structures and a new change to unemployment.
Firstly, I think that I may have finally solved the long-standing "my rovers wont move" bug, which people have been complaining about for a year or so. Now that I have written this, there may well be 10 comments below proving that I have not solved it, but I am pretty sure that at least it is a lot better now than it was before. The issue is that some time ago, I added code so that the engine would save commonly used paths and re-use them again instead of going through the pathfinder every time, which saved a lot of cpu usage. Somehow though, I forgot to clear out those saved paths whenever new structures or terrain features were added to the map. So if a path was ever created, and then later on, a building got placed somewhere along the path, the game would go back and try to find a new path, but the engine kept giving out the old retained path over and over again. The retained path would eventually be killed if it failed enough times, but this was creating a constant loop where sometimes rovers would just sit there trying the same path over and over again, or if a ton of rovers were moving at once, they would completely lag out the game while they each tried to resolve the same broken path over and over.
So anyway, there is a better than zero chance that this issue is fixed now, but please (and I am sure you will) let me know if I am mistaken.
Next on the list, I have implemented a change in employment reporting. Before, if a colonist did not have a high enough IQ to take a job, they would become a student. If there were no schools available, they would just keep looking for an education until they could find one. This had a couple of effects. One, it could create lag on large colonies where colonists kept looking for schools over and over. Additionally, it created higher rates of unemployment while there will still jobs available. Players would wonder why colonists are not filling jobs when there are so many workers available, when the actual reason is that many of the colonists were too dumb to work in the jobs that were unfilled.
To address these issues, several changes were made. Now if a colonist cannot find a job, they will look for school once. If they can't find it they will either a) go to the bar and drink their woes away (find entertainment instead), or b) lose faith in your government and become a protester. Later on when they have become sufficiently happy again, or tired of protesting, they will retry their search for a job or school.
Next, the way unemployment is calculated has been changed. Before, unemployment was simply the number of colonists minus the number of filled jobs. Pretty simple. The issue was that since the simulated colonists (new colonists created after your population passes 2000) found jobs and lived their lives based on statistics from the non-simulated colonists, the unemployment rate in some cases would be artificially high as it was counting students and retired colonists as workers, and so simulated colonists were not finding jobs since their employment rate was coded to match the rate of the non-simulated population. Now, students and retired workers are no longer counted among the unemployed. These stats are now reflected on the statistics screen.
In addition, the unhappiness stats now account for colonists who cannot find an education. These stats were previously not accounted for, skewing the other statistics higher than they normally would have been.
In the coming updates, I want to add new colonist births, and also accelerate the rate of aging among the population. I then plan to include nonage and dotage into the population, where colonists will not work under the age of 16 or over the age of 70, or some other arbitrary numbers. Perhaps these numbers can be set in a new social policy.
For players of the desktop Native Client, all script errors should now be written to a .log file saved in the ~/Documents/My Colony folder on the device. Key word should.
Finally, the Reptilians got three new structures in this release. They finally have an embassy to establish diplomatic missions, the Foreign Outpost. In terms of regular structures, they get the Potters Den, which is a small housing unit which also creates pottery. Also they get a public housing structure, the Homeless Shelter, which also provides a mediocre education to those who live there.
One last word about the Android crashes before I wrap up here. From the stats I have gathered, it appears that over 90% of the crashes happen in offline games vs online games. I am wondering if this is related to the game scanning WiFi for nearby players to trade resources with. I have added some potential fixes related to the TCP/IP networking, but whether or not that have an impact remains to be seen.
That's all for today's update. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!
Firstly, I think that I may have finally solved the long-standing "my rovers wont move" bug, which people have been complaining about for a year or so. Now that I have written this, there may well be 10 comments below proving that I have not solved it, but I am pretty sure that at least it is a lot better now than it was before. The issue is that some time ago, I added code so that the engine would save commonly used paths and re-use them again instead of going through the pathfinder every time, which saved a lot of cpu usage. Somehow though, I forgot to clear out those saved paths whenever new structures or terrain features were added to the map. So if a path was ever created, and then later on, a building got placed somewhere along the path, the game would go back and try to find a new path, but the engine kept giving out the old retained path over and over again. The retained path would eventually be killed if it failed enough times, but this was creating a constant loop where sometimes rovers would just sit there trying the same path over and over again, or if a ton of rovers were moving at once, they would completely lag out the game while they each tried to resolve the same broken path over and over.
So anyway, there is a better than zero chance that this issue is fixed now, but please (and I am sure you will) let me know if I am mistaken.
Next on the list, I have implemented a change in employment reporting. Before, if a colonist did not have a high enough IQ to take a job, they would become a student. If there were no schools available, they would just keep looking for an education until they could find one. This had a couple of effects. One, it could create lag on large colonies where colonists kept looking for schools over and over. Additionally, it created higher rates of unemployment while there will still jobs available. Players would wonder why colonists are not filling jobs when there are so many workers available, when the actual reason is that many of the colonists were too dumb to work in the jobs that were unfilled.
To address these issues, several changes were made. Now if a colonist cannot find a job, they will look for school once. If they can't find it they will either a) go to the bar and drink their woes away (find entertainment instead), or b) lose faith in your government and become a protester. Later on when they have become sufficiently happy again, or tired of protesting, they will retry their search for a job or school.
Next, the way unemployment is calculated has been changed. Before, unemployment was simply the number of colonists minus the number of filled jobs. Pretty simple. The issue was that since the simulated colonists (new colonists created after your population passes 2000) found jobs and lived their lives based on statistics from the non-simulated colonists, the unemployment rate in some cases would be artificially high as it was counting students and retired colonists as workers, and so simulated colonists were not finding jobs since their employment rate was coded to match the rate of the non-simulated population. Now, students and retired workers are no longer counted among the unemployed. These stats are now reflected on the statistics screen.
In addition, the unhappiness stats now account for colonists who cannot find an education. These stats were previously not accounted for, skewing the other statistics higher than they normally would have been.
In the coming updates, I want to add new colonist births, and also accelerate the rate of aging among the population. I then plan to include nonage and dotage into the population, where colonists will not work under the age of 16 or over the age of 70, or some other arbitrary numbers. Perhaps these numbers can be set in a new social policy.
For players of the desktop Native Client, all script errors should now be written to a .log file saved in the ~/Documents/My Colony folder on the device. Key word should.
Finally, the Reptilians got three new structures in this release. They finally have an embassy to establish diplomatic missions, the Foreign Outpost. In terms of regular structures, they get the Potters Den, which is a small housing unit which also creates pottery. Also they get a public housing structure, the Homeless Shelter, which also provides a mediocre education to those who live there.
One last word about the Android crashes before I wrap up here. From the stats I have gathered, it appears that over 90% of the crashes happen in offline games vs online games. I am wondering if this is related to the game scanning WiFi for nearby players to trade resources with. I have added some potential fixes related to the TCP/IP networking, but whether or not that have an impact remains to be seen.
That's all for today's update. Thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more!
I'm not seeing the hospital issue but I've been seeing the precise same thing as the OP happen since .44, on Win10 Native Client, and I started a brand new colony on .47 as I thought maybe something was corrupted in my old 65K population colony. Less than 6K population, and my buildings are all starting to show this bug. I can't seem to attach screen shots in this forum, but the original post describes the issue I'm seeing precisely.
I'll add another detail that I just noticed. Several times now when I've clicked on the worker details, I've seen workers reportedly working at another building. For instance, I click on an Advanced Ore Refinery that isn't producing any steel. I see 6/6 workers. I click to see who the workers are (maybe they are protesting?). I have 1 unemployed, 1 sleeping and 1 working at my Microchip factory. I clicked a microchip factory showing 26/26 and see only 4 of the same-named person all unemployed. I close out, click the factory again and it says 4/26 workers. I click to check details, and there are 26 people listed, many of them repeats, all unemployed.
My approval rating is 83%, health 95%, and I haven't found anyone protesting (but I don't see how to get that list since we went to the new statistics interface, so there could be mass protests, I guess). I have colonist rendering turned off, and went with a permanent daytime setting. I'm on a mega-sized asteroid map with normal resource levels.
I have plenty of resources across the board. Lots of ore for the refineries, all pieces needed for microchips, etc. It is all production buildings seeing this though. Hydroponics labs, hatcheries, oil refineries, etc.
As I've tried to dig in, I noticed that for awhile, I had more jobs filled than I had population. I tried to remedy that with more landing pads and cloning facilities, and while I now have a population that properly corresponds to the 3% unemployment statistics shows, there is still an almost total lack of production going on.
This is an LIS colony. I will start a new Zolarg colony and see if I encounter similar behavior if I can get the time. The patience to get a Zolarg colony to a fun level is more than I am probably going to have today, though :-(.
Right now, this makes the game basically unplayable. If there is something I can try or info I can provide tell me what it is and I'll do it as I can.
Thanks!
EDIT: I closed out of the game and re-opened it, and left it running for a little while. It looks like most of my production has restarted, but now I'm seeing that I have a population of 6346 and 0% unemployment with a number of jobs filled at 6408. I've got 0 Illegal Immigrants, so I'm not sure how I've got more jobs filled than citizens, since I didn't think they could take out 2 jobs simultaneously.
I'll add another detail that I just noticed. Several times now when I've clicked on the worker details, I've seen workers reportedly working at another building. For instance, I click on an Advanced Ore Refinery that isn't producing any steel. I see 6/6 workers. I click to see who the workers are (maybe they are protesting?). I have 1 unemployed, 1 sleeping and 1 working at my Microchip factory. I clicked a microchip factory showing 26/26 and see only 4 of the same-named person all unemployed. I close out, click the factory again and it says 4/26 workers. I click to check details, and there are 26 people listed, many of them repeats, all unemployed.
My approval rating is 83%, health 95%, and I haven't found anyone protesting (but I don't see how to get that list since we went to the new statistics interface, so there could be mass protests, I guess). I have colonist rendering turned off, and went with a permanent daytime setting. I'm on a mega-sized asteroid map with normal resource levels.
I have plenty of resources across the board. Lots of ore for the refineries, all pieces needed for microchips, etc. It is all production buildings seeing this though. Hydroponics labs, hatcheries, oil refineries, etc.
As I've tried to dig in, I noticed that for awhile, I had more jobs filled than I had population. I tried to remedy that with more landing pads and cloning facilities, and while I now have a population that properly corresponds to the 3% unemployment statistics shows, there is still an almost total lack of production going on.
This is an LIS colony. I will start a new Zolarg colony and see if I encounter similar behavior if I can get the time. The patience to get a Zolarg colony to a fun level is more than I am probably going to have today, though :-(.
Right now, this makes the game basically unplayable. If there is something I can try or info I can provide tell me what it is and I'll do it as I can.
Thanks!
EDIT: I closed out of the game and re-opened it, and left it running for a little while. It looks like most of my production has restarted, but now I'm seeing that I have a population of 6346 and 0% unemployment with a number of jobs filled at 6408. I've got 0 Illegal Immigrants, so I'm not sure how I've got more jobs filled than citizens, since I didn't think they could take out 2 jobs simultaneously.
Hey, I've recently run into a problem regarding unemployment. I can leave my colony to sit and generate resources while I do things and when I come back my unemployment suddenly goes from 0% to anywhere below 45%. My approval rating never goes below 98% and I never have much trash around.
Why are people suddenly quitting their jobs then going back to them after half an hour? One of these times its going to cut my food supply and then bye bye colony.
That's just one instance of this happening. It's been a repeat occurrence for the last few weeks. I hope somebody can tell me what's going on, or at least point me in the right direction.
Why are people suddenly quitting their jobs then going back to them after half an hour? One of these times its going to cut my food supply and then bye bye colony.
That's just one instance of this happening. It's been a repeat occurrence for the last few weeks. I hope somebody can tell me what's going on, or at least point me in the right direction.
First off, the new way the bots move and build almost completely fixed the crashes. Beforehand whenever the turbo drones moved the game would slow down to a crawl and/or crash even when I specifically look away so the game doesn't have to render it. Now I can look at the bots work and move, delete what they are moving towards and build another so they have to path again and it still won't crash the game. I actively tried to crash the game for about an hour and failed to do so, hell of an update on that front.
In the midst of my testing while trying to crash the game I ended up with extra colonists than I had housing and the game slowed to a crawl, but never crashed. I did a recording using the dev tool and apparently all the processing was going into finding a school for these extra people.
After I found this out I deported the homeless extra people I had that were probably the bulk of people unemployed and likely trying to find a school and the game instantaneously stopped lagging completely.
I then went to test regions mode out for another few hours. Each game had a problem with employing colonists. Before this update there was a problem that nobody beyond a certain number (eg 50) would employ no matter how many extra colonists you had. This update colonists would remain at a particular number of employment until you immigrated more people, only then would any more people employ. I couldn't seem to get the unemployment ratio below 25% no matter what I did though, causing problems with approval rating due to unemployment.
Also note that when I tried this out in a creative mode, 100% of colonists employed. Bear in mind it was creative mode so I was using stargates to immigrate and just employing into investment banks to rapidly test the employment ratio so the problem could be either with the early game buildings or with normal gameplay.
Also, if the game crashes while on a regions game all resources and research is reverted to what they would be if you first started a city. However saving and quitting, then returning does not do this.
If the resource and research losing crash bug could be fixed, the lag generated by unemployed people trying to find a school frantically and the unemployment bug could be fixed in this update or the next then that would be absolutely amazing. This update is not finished yet, but the bot movement is a huge improvement and I look forward to seeing what's coming.
In the midst of my testing while trying to crash the game I ended up with extra colonists than I had housing and the game slowed to a crawl, but never crashed. I did a recording using the dev tool and apparently all the processing was going into finding a school for these extra people.
After I found this out I deported the homeless extra people I had that were probably the bulk of people unemployed and likely trying to find a school and the game instantaneously stopped lagging completely.
I then went to test regions mode out for another few hours. Each game had a problem with employing colonists. Before this update there was a problem that nobody beyond a certain number (eg 50) would employ no matter how many extra colonists you had. This update colonists would remain at a particular number of employment until you immigrated more people, only then would any more people employ. I couldn't seem to get the unemployment ratio below 25% no matter what I did though, causing problems with approval rating due to unemployment.
Also note that when I tried this out in a creative mode, 100% of colonists employed. Bear in mind it was creative mode so I was using stargates to immigrate and just employing into investment banks to rapidly test the employment ratio so the problem could be either with the early game buildings or with normal gameplay.
Also, if the game crashes while on a regions game all resources and research is reverted to what they would be if you first started a city. However saving and quitting, then returning does not do this.
If the resource and research losing crash bug could be fixed, the lag generated by unemployed people trying to find a school frantically and the unemployment bug could be fixed in this update or the next then that would be absolutely amazing. This update is not finished yet, but the bot movement is a huge improvement and I look forward to seeing what's coming.
If you had an approval drop, and looking at your unemployment, I believe you would have had faced one, leading cause being uneducated. Due to the low approval, most of your colonists would have started protesting and their protests go on unless they are cleared/showered with money or they die. If your health has dropped, it was due to the protestors' dropping health.
Now to solve, first get your unemployment down to zero and drop few coins on your colonists. 300 coins per colonists usually brings back approval to 100 but after the .77 update, it seems to not be functioning in the same manner but it still helps.
Build tons of hipster bars and medical centre near the site of protests and see if it helps
Now to solve, first get your unemployment down to zero and drop few coins on your colonists. 300 coins per colonists usually brings back approval to 100 but after the .77 update, it seems to not be functioning in the same manner but it still helps.
Build tons of hipster bars and medical centre near the site of protests and see if it helps
BTW ONE granted fix !!!!!! first get ride of clone plants if you have them .
use only landing pads and star gated and space elevator for incoming colonists .
Now say you can hold 127 k colonists .
at 120 k DISABLE all pads except 3 or 4 disable star gate disable space elv disable glatice freight if you have it leaving ONLY 3 or 4 landing pads active .
You still are 7 k colonists short they will now be reduced to a trickly incoming The thing is THAT Trickly keep ratings and unemployment from being a problem as the new ones reduce the mad issues ( Also rating stay at a ROCK steady 99 % .
That was what finly worked all the way for me ( PS even if teh colony has alreday been messed up it still works Just add 2000 jobs and create the trickly in ( about 30 colonists a hour more or less ) incoming . watch how fast rating and unemployment disapire
use only landing pads and star gated and space elevator for incoming colonists .
Now say you can hold 127 k colonists .
at 120 k DISABLE all pads except 3 or 4 disable star gate disable space elv disable glatice freight if you have it leaving ONLY 3 or 4 landing pads active .
You still are 7 k colonists short they will now be reduced to a trickly incoming The thing is THAT Trickly keep ratings and unemployment from being a problem as the new ones reduce the mad issues ( Also rating stay at a ROCK steady 99 % .
That was what finly worked all the way for me ( PS even if teh colony has alreday been messed up it still works Just add 2000 jobs and create the trickly in ( about 30 colonists a hour more or less ) incoming . watch how fast rating and unemployment disapire
Recently I've just been working on moving things around into more efficient locations and growing my population. I noticed that the stats page was blatantly wrong in some areas, like the unemployed section, and out of the blue i find my approval rating instantly had dropped from 100% to 90% as I finally noticed there had been 3 fire drills I hadn't issued.
I don't know how or why people keep leaving their homes and then taking up jobs halfway across the map and going back to the same house, making my fatigue absolutely ridiculous but this is definitely something to look into. I hadn't set off a fire drill, had not disabled anything, they just left on their own accord while I was at 100% approval, no homelessness and unemployment. Also, even though the unemployment seems to go down, if I select a building and view its workers a lot of them are empty despite the mass of people around.
I just don't understand what is happening or why. This is the fourth time this hour alone its done this.
I don't know how or why people keep leaving their homes and then taking up jobs halfway across the map and going back to the same house, making my fatigue absolutely ridiculous but this is definitely something to look into. I hadn't set off a fire drill, had not disabled anything, they just left on their own accord while I was at 100% approval, no homelessness and unemployment. Also, even though the unemployment seems to go down, if I select a building and view its workers a lot of them are empty despite the mass of people around.
I just don't understand what is happening or why. This is the fourth time this hour alone its done this.
yea thing is colonists who are in school are being counted as unemployed EVEN when your stats show 0 unemployed this brings down rating .
If the rating falls much below 85 % it will just keep falling as more and more colonists get made and protest less and less are working creating a feed back loop .
The trick is get it OVER 85 % so hope you have coins lol . see pay them a stim package 200 at a pop this brings it back to over 90 % at the same time be sure you have lots of entertainment or the big park and pyramid .
Or just lots of other stuff .
Then set your work load to light and wate check once a hour when it falls to 85 % give them another 200 coins in a few hours it will stablis around 87 - 95 % .
the colonists in school have really made it twice as hard keeping the rating up but i have managed to get mine staying at 87 % slowly rising .
If the rating falls much below 85 % it will just keep falling as more and more colonists get made and protest less and less are working creating a feed back loop .
The trick is get it OVER 85 % so hope you have coins lol . see pay them a stim package 200 at a pop this brings it back to over 90 % at the same time be sure you have lots of entertainment or the big park and pyramid .
Or just lots of other stuff .
Then set your work load to light and wate check once a hour when it falls to 85 % give them another 200 coins in a few hours it will stablis around 87 - 95 % .
the colonists in school have really made it twice as hard keeping the rating up but i have managed to get mine staying at 87 % slowly rising .
Today My Colony v0.54.0 (v0.54.1 on Android) is being pushed out to all platforms and should arrive on your device shortly. This was originally intended to be a big Reptilian update but there were several engine changes that took precedent this time. Details below!
My Colony v0.54.x Changelog
New Stuff
The new Reptilian content is generally geared towards making the Lava World map playable. I had a lot more planned for this update, but I wanted to get it released in a timely manner, so it will have to wait until next time. Barring any major engine changes or glitches, v0.55.0 will have a lot more Reptilian stuff.
On to the engine changes. Since the last few updates, the #1 reason for crashes and getting stuck on the loading screen on mobile (especially on Android) was the game running out of memory. The reason for this is that when I designed the game originally and there were only 8 different structures to build, it made sense to load all of the assets at the beginning when you first entered the game. Today though, there are over 320 different structures and almost 50 vehicles, and many structures can now be flipped which adds extra graphics assets which need to be loaded. Because of this, you have probably noticed that the game was taking longer and longer to start up at the beginning, and sometimes it never started up at all. This was due to the game using up all of it's allotted memory from the operating system. The issue was particularly bad on Android, where the memory cap is far less generous than on Desktop computers, even on newer devices that ship with 4 gigs of RAM.
To get around this, My Colony will now only load graphics assets, on demand and as-needed. There are likely still some bugs to be worked out related to this, so let me know what you find. You might notice buildings or ground tiles not appearing right away. Generally they will show up in a second or two. Zooming in and out can also make them appear quicker some times. It might be a small annoyance, but I think the tradeoff will be worth it. Particularly on smaller colonies, the memory reductions can be quite significant.
Another new reduction in this release has to do with save file sizes. I have started compressing some of the building related save data more efficiently, which should reduce the file sizes on some saves. Your mileage will vary depending on the layout of your colony, but on my main colony, my file size was reduced by a little over 10% (compressed). I didn't do a before/after on a non-compressed colony, but it is probably similar.
Moving along, there have been significant changes to the Firedrill system, as well as the way in which 'simulated' colonists find and fill jobs. Generally, the amount of time it takes for your colony to settle back down after a fire drill has been sped up significantly. Also, simulated colonists now find and fill jobs significantly quicker than before. I realized that I forgot to apply the same improvements to the speed in which they find housing, but that will probably be in the next update.
These changes were in part to address a lot of the complaints people have about unemployment and jobs being filled. The old method had simulated colonists fill jobs based on the general unemployment rate of the colony at large, so if you had massive unemployment, they would find jobs slower, and if you had low unemployment, they would find jobs faster. In my mind, this offered a more realistic simulation, as it doesn't make sense (in 'real life') to be able to just call a fire drill and suddenly an economy is back to normal. Judging by the forums though, I think most people perceived this part of the simulation as a bug, so it has been removed. Simulated colonists will now fill jobs at their earliest convenience.
What has not changed though is the colonists' daily cycle. In general, a healthy colonist will have his day divided into 3 parts: work, sleep, time off. So if your colonists are 100% employed, which is unrealistic but somewhat common in this game, then you should at most expect 33% to be on-duty at any given time. I know that many people perceive this aspect of the game as a bug also, but to me, changing this would make the game sooooo easy, even easier than it already is.
Next up, the engine now supports adding a bit of color to certain in-game structures. This is mainly necessary for the upcoming Colony Wars game, and an example can be seen in the screenshot below:
The flags on the building now take up the color that was set in the Overview tab on the statistics screen. I might expand this more to other structures, but it was primarily put in for the benefit of Colony Wars. I also noticed that it is not working right on iOS yet, so I still need to figure that part out.
Finally, there has been a suggestion in the index for lighted roads. I made some engine changes and added one in there as a test, but I want to see how it impacts performance before expanding it further. To be determined.
So anyway, that is it for today's release. Much more on the way, so stay tuned!
My Colony v0.54.x Changelog
New Stuff
- New structures: National Flag, Torture Booth, Drone Pad, Gold Grower, Aluminum Grower
- New Unit: Uranium Extractor
- New ad-free Structure: Pavement Lit
- Memory and File Size Reductions
- Firedrill/Employment Changes
- Opening existing online games now requires an Ape Apps Account
- Added engine support for variable color units and structures
The new Reptilian content is generally geared towards making the Lava World map playable. I had a lot more planned for this update, but I wanted to get it released in a timely manner, so it will have to wait until next time. Barring any major engine changes or glitches, v0.55.0 will have a lot more Reptilian stuff.
On to the engine changes. Since the last few updates, the #1 reason for crashes and getting stuck on the loading screen on mobile (especially on Android) was the game running out of memory. The reason for this is that when I designed the game originally and there were only 8 different structures to build, it made sense to load all of the assets at the beginning when you first entered the game. Today though, there are over 320 different structures and almost 50 vehicles, and many structures can now be flipped which adds extra graphics assets which need to be loaded. Because of this, you have probably noticed that the game was taking longer and longer to start up at the beginning, and sometimes it never started up at all. This was due to the game using up all of it's allotted memory from the operating system. The issue was particularly bad on Android, where the memory cap is far less generous than on Desktop computers, even on newer devices that ship with 4 gigs of RAM.
To get around this, My Colony will now only load graphics assets, on demand and as-needed. There are likely still some bugs to be worked out related to this, so let me know what you find. You might notice buildings or ground tiles not appearing right away. Generally they will show up in a second or two. Zooming in and out can also make them appear quicker some times. It might be a small annoyance, but I think the tradeoff will be worth it. Particularly on smaller colonies, the memory reductions can be quite significant.
Another new reduction in this release has to do with save file sizes. I have started compressing some of the building related save data more efficiently, which should reduce the file sizes on some saves. Your mileage will vary depending on the layout of your colony, but on my main colony, my file size was reduced by a little over 10% (compressed). I didn't do a before/after on a non-compressed colony, but it is probably similar.
Moving along, there have been significant changes to the Firedrill system, as well as the way in which 'simulated' colonists find and fill jobs. Generally, the amount of time it takes for your colony to settle back down after a fire drill has been sped up significantly. Also, simulated colonists now find and fill jobs significantly quicker than before. I realized that I forgot to apply the same improvements to the speed in which they find housing, but that will probably be in the next update.
These changes were in part to address a lot of the complaints people have about unemployment and jobs being filled. The old method had simulated colonists fill jobs based on the general unemployment rate of the colony at large, so if you had massive unemployment, they would find jobs slower, and if you had low unemployment, they would find jobs faster. In my mind, this offered a more realistic simulation, as it doesn't make sense (in 'real life') to be able to just call a fire drill and suddenly an economy is back to normal. Judging by the forums though, I think most people perceived this part of the simulation as a bug, so it has been removed. Simulated colonists will now fill jobs at their earliest convenience.
What has not changed though is the colonists' daily cycle. In general, a healthy colonist will have his day divided into 3 parts: work, sleep, time off. So if your colonists are 100% employed, which is unrealistic but somewhat common in this game, then you should at most expect 33% to be on-duty at any given time. I know that many people perceive this aspect of the game as a bug also, but to me, changing this would make the game sooooo easy, even easier than it already is.
Next up, the engine now supports adding a bit of color to certain in-game structures. This is mainly necessary for the upcoming Colony Wars game, and an example can be seen in the screenshot below:
The flags on the building now take up the color that was set in the Overview tab on the statistics screen. I might expand this more to other structures, but it was primarily put in for the benefit of Colony Wars. I also noticed that it is not working right on iOS yet, so I still need to figure that part out.
Finally, there has been a suggestion in the index for lighted roads. I made some engine changes and added one in there as a test, but I want to see how it impacts performance before expanding it further. To be determined.
So anyway, that is it for today's release. Much more on the way, so stay tuned!
So today I am pushing out a new My Colony release, v0.74.0. This is mainly a bug fix and stability release, as I didn't add any new Reptilian buildings this time around. v0.74.0 is also the build that will be going out to Steam at the beginning of November, so those who have been waiting for the Steam release should add it to their wishlist using the following link, to help give the game a good boost out the door:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/964130/My_Colony/
That said, there are some new goodies on board with this update that some of you should appreciate. Let's take a look at what has changed with v0.74.0!
First, I did a bit of tweaking with the IQ/Education stuff. For starters, several of the buildings that required ultra-high IQ's have been slightly dialed back a bit. In addition, there is now a change that jobs will actually hire workers who are not quite smart enough to work there, sort of like in real life. These workers are placed in a new "on the job training" mode, where they still help production, just a bit slightly less than a normal worker. However, their IQ slowly increases while at work, as their company takes on the responsibility of their education. To a lesser extent, all regular employees get a slight IQ boost at work now too, as it is assumed that people pick up a bit of knowledge while they work.
Next up, there is a brand new engine setting that I know a lot of people will appreciate. You can now turn off (or on) the popup notifications that are active during online play (xxx is online, starvation in xxx, etc). I already reduced the occurrence of these in the prior update, but now if you want, you can just turn them off altogether.
Another fix that people will be happy about, is that Region games now properly report GDP and unemployment figures to the My Colony server. The GDP figures are the sum of all GDP's in the region, while the unemployment figure is the average unemployment across all region cities (weighted by the population of each city).
Next up, if you've ever wondered how much money a colonist needs before they retire, now you can find out. In the Economic Statistics screen, there is a new Retirement Savings Cutoff statistic. Any colonist whose savings go above this level will likely enter into retirement and stop working until either a) they die, or b) they fall back under the cutoff.
The savings cutoff changes pretty often based on global market prices. For those wondering how that price is derived, it is essentially the current average GBT price of a set amount of Food, Water, Rum, Cloth, and Toys. Everything a colonist needs to enjoy their golden years.
Also in this update, I have increased the rate at which unhappy colonists will utilize entertainment facilities. Before, it was not uncommon to have entertainment go 90%+ unused, but now if your colonists need it, they will be more likely than before to utilize it.
At last, I have made some changes to the save game code, in hopes to reduce the occurrence of corrupted game files. I don't know why some people experience this a lot more than others, but I added some additional stat logging to try to pin down exactly how and why it is happening, and I have also added some changes that might make it better too, but we will see if they worked over the coming days.
So that is it for today's update. There will be an extended delay between the next update as My Colony works its way through the Steam approval process. After that, things will be back to normal again. Until then, enjoy the update, let me know what issues you find, and thank you for playing My Colony!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/964130/My_Colony/
That said, there are some new goodies on board with this update that some of you should appreciate. Let's take a look at what has changed with v0.74.0!
First, I did a bit of tweaking with the IQ/Education stuff. For starters, several of the buildings that required ultra-high IQ's have been slightly dialed back a bit. In addition, there is now a change that jobs will actually hire workers who are not quite smart enough to work there, sort of like in real life. These workers are placed in a new "on the job training" mode, where they still help production, just a bit slightly less than a normal worker. However, their IQ slowly increases while at work, as their company takes on the responsibility of their education. To a lesser extent, all regular employees get a slight IQ boost at work now too, as it is assumed that people pick up a bit of knowledge while they work.
Next up, there is a brand new engine setting that I know a lot of people will appreciate. You can now turn off (or on) the popup notifications that are active during online play (xxx is online, starvation in xxx, etc). I already reduced the occurrence of these in the prior update, but now if you want, you can just turn them off altogether.
Another fix that people will be happy about, is that Region games now properly report GDP and unemployment figures to the My Colony server. The GDP figures are the sum of all GDP's in the region, while the unemployment figure is the average unemployment across all region cities (weighted by the population of each city).
Next up, if you've ever wondered how much money a colonist needs before they retire, now you can find out. In the Economic Statistics screen, there is a new Retirement Savings Cutoff statistic. Any colonist whose savings go above this level will likely enter into retirement and stop working until either a) they die, or b) they fall back under the cutoff.
The savings cutoff changes pretty often based on global market prices. For those wondering how that price is derived, it is essentially the current average GBT price of a set amount of Food, Water, Rum, Cloth, and Toys. Everything a colonist needs to enjoy their golden years.
Also in this update, I have increased the rate at which unhappy colonists will utilize entertainment facilities. Before, it was not uncommon to have entertainment go 90%+ unused, but now if your colonists need it, they will be more likely than before to utilize it.
At last, I have made some changes to the save game code, in hopes to reduce the occurrence of corrupted game files. I don't know why some people experience this a lot more than others, but I added some additional stat logging to try to pin down exactly how and why it is happening, and I have also added some changes that might make it better too, but we will see if they worked over the coming days.
So that is it for today's update. There will be an extended delay between the next update as My Colony works its way through the Steam approval process. After that, things will be back to normal again. Until then, enjoy the update, let me know what issues you find, and thank you for playing My Colony!
My food and water are 50m, my atmosphere is between 10-15m. I have no homelessness, all of the accommodation is arcologies so health and entertainment isn't a problem. I have no depression or fatigue. 3% of unemployment is a lot of people still, but because the approval rating is fluctuating so much its causing the unemployment.
I know this is an old thread but this is still happening for me. I haven't played since August 2017 and back then everything was OK. Now it happend to my main colony, too bad, and since I got more than 3000 colonists in my other colony it started to happen again ! Tried everything. I always have :
24% unemployment.
88% filled jobs.
99% approval rating.
0% homeless rate.
around 10% on duty workers on all buildings.
Workers are not far from their homes.
The "funny" thing is that not a lot of colonists are using the entertainment facilities (195/3159 out of 23000 population) and the schools seems to always be full...don't know if it's normal ...
This game is awesome, please fix it ! I can provide the mcb or mcz files or any other info.
Tried to run on web on 0.60.0, the bug remains...
24% unemployment.
88% filled jobs.
99% approval rating.
0% homeless rate.
around 10% on duty workers on all buildings.
Workers are not far from their homes.
The "funny" thing is that not a lot of colonists are using the entertainment facilities (195/3159 out of 23000 population) and the schools seems to always be full...don't know if it's normal ...
This game is awesome, please fix it ! I can provide the mcb or mcz files or any other info.
Tried to run on web on 0.60.0, the bug remains...
1. Check your stats to see where you are loosing your money
2. What is your approval rating? If it's above 90-95% then there is no need to worry about the stats showing homelessness/poverty/fatigue. However if the approval is falling, then you'll need to pay attention to them
3. IQ doesn't bring any change mostly. It might have so happened that you have made more jobs, which don't require any IQ. Imo, just neglect IQ completely, unless you see the uneducation looming up in approval
4. What is the reason for people to protest? You can always gift them some coins to Raise the happiness, but we usually use it only with fire drill or for resetting the stats.
2. What is your approval rating? If it's above 90-95% then there is no need to worry about the stats showing homelessness/poverty/fatigue. However if the approval is falling, then you'll need to pay attention to them
3. IQ doesn't bring any change mostly. It might have so happened that you have made more jobs, which don't require any IQ. Imo, just neglect IQ completely, unless you see the uneducation looming up in approval
4. What is the reason for people to protest? You can always gift them some coins to Raise the happiness, but we usually use it only with fire drill or for resetting the stats.
The upcoming v1.22.0 release of My Colony is going to be introducing a significant change to the economics of My Colony, and some players may need to adjust their strategies in order to compensate.
The lowly workers of the My Colony Universe have decided that enough is enough, and they have been treated poorly by their overlords for far too long. They have been forces to scrape by on poverty wages, while their colonial masters have stashed away trillions and trillions of the generic Money currency, and now they want their piece of the pie.
Before now, colonists did not really care what or how much they were paid, they just dutifully did their jobs without complaint. Soon, failing to pay your colonists what they feel is an appropriate wage will result in a significant hit to your approval rating and a decline in production output. If left unchecked for too long, workers may even go on strike!
Here is how the new system works. Before, the poverty level was calculated, but being in poverty did not actually impact the game in any way. Now, workers in poverty will end up resorting to crime in order to make ends meet. This will lower your production output and land values across the board. So at the very least, you will want to make sure to keep wages above the poverty line, to avoid sending your colony into a criminal death spiral.
After poverty though, colonists will now start to become aware of their station in the social hierarchy. In particular, colonists will compare their annual salaries to the GDP per capita of the overall colony. If your colony is raking in record GDP and profits and your colonists are getting paid scraps, they will become angry, impacting your overall approval. However, if the situation persists and wages are significantly below GDP per capita, there will be a chance for workers to go on strike.
Strikes will happen based on occupation. For instance, the "Scientists Union" may choose to go on strike, effectively shutting down all structures that employ scientists. This can quickly destroy an economy, so you want to try to avoid a strike at all costs.
Anyway, the new wage/approval system is but one of many exciting new features coming to My Colony v1.22.0, so stay tuned for more updates!
The lowly workers of the My Colony Universe have decided that enough is enough, and they have been treated poorly by their overlords for far too long. They have been forces to scrape by on poverty wages, while their colonial masters have stashed away trillions and trillions of the generic Money currency, and now they want their piece of the pie.
Before now, colonists did not really care what or how much they were paid, they just dutifully did their jobs without complaint. Soon, failing to pay your colonists what they feel is an appropriate wage will result in a significant hit to your approval rating and a decline in production output. If left unchecked for too long, workers may even go on strike!
Here is how the new system works. Before, the poverty level was calculated, but being in poverty did not actually impact the game in any way. Now, workers in poverty will end up resorting to crime in order to make ends meet. This will lower your production output and land values across the board. So at the very least, you will want to make sure to keep wages above the poverty line, to avoid sending your colony into a criminal death spiral.
After poverty though, colonists will now start to become aware of their station in the social hierarchy. In particular, colonists will compare their annual salaries to the GDP per capita of the overall colony. If your colony is raking in record GDP and profits and your colonists are getting paid scraps, they will become angry, impacting your overall approval. However, if the situation persists and wages are significantly below GDP per capita, there will be a chance for workers to go on strike.
Strikes will happen based on occupation. For instance, the "Scientists Union" may choose to go on strike, effectively shutting down all structures that employ scientists. This can quickly destroy an economy, so you want to try to avoid a strike at all costs.
Anyway, the new wage/approval system is but one of many exciting new features coming to My Colony v1.22.0, so stay tuned for more updates!
You only need to address colonist's concerns if your approval rating is below 100%.
If your population is, for example, 10,000 and your approval rating is 90% then you have 1,000 disgruntled citizens. Of the 1,000 disgruntled citizens 730 of them would be complaining about homelessness in that case.
If your population is, for example, 10,000 and your approval rating is 90% then you have 1,000 disgruntled citizens. Of the 1,000 disgruntled citizens 730 of them would be complaining about homelessness in that case.