Ape Apps

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.

Workforce Rating

How we can work on this value? i have create a new city for other test on the population aging, and all Research Converter (only them, the other building are normal, all value 100% green) have a poor Workforce Rating (red/orange). Even with 16k workforce without a job, all converter have only 10-20 worker.

Both house have all the utility close, the converter aren't to far away (i think):

Land value and production layer:

I have noticed:

• Distance isn't a issue, if the building is cover from at least 2 houses. The system will check everything every 30s (+-), we can have empty building because all worker are already used in other building, in particular when an house will fill jobs in other house "area".. in this case we will have house area 1 with empty building, and house area 2 with people without jobs..
• colonists won't use the better education available.
• colonists don't use the closest utility first.. like the jobs example, House A with plenty of utility, will use utility build for House B, and House B won't have utility with free slots in range.
• The workforce Rating to me seems to show only the % worker inside. Won't change the workers used (low rating=no worker), but will change if the number of workers change.

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 ?

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 .

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:

• 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.

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.

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!

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:

• 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
Then satisfaction level of an aspect is defined based on the percentage value of the satisfaction rate.

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:
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:
remarks: It's rough value without considering other factors and hence it may not be balanced.


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!

Prepare for a wall of text, throwing this to see what sticks, what doesn't.
As usual, the cost, speed, and other stats of suggested things can be and are up to the developer.

Bold names are whole Ideas, with underlined Names being each part of that idea if it has more than one.

More Reptilian Probes
The Reptilians, I feel, should eventually just move from slave labor to a mechanized workforce.
As a result, I'd like to suggest more types of Probes.

Ore Probe
Alt Name(s): Ore Mining Probe
Description: Those pesky Eruption Ores are no longer out of reach!

Purpose: To mine Ore deposits, main point of this though is that the Probe can move over obsidian and lava to get at ore deposits in the direct middle of lava planet eruptions.

Obsidian Probe
Alt Names(s): Obsidian Cutting Probe (Name is as such due to how Obsidian is irl "mined" and it's with cutting/scalpel and piercing tools).
Description: Clear lava fields of Obsidian with ease!

Purpose: To mine Obsidian deposits, like the Ore Probe, it's mainly more for going where bugs cannot.

Diabolic Probe
Alt Names(s): Crystalline Probe, Crystal Cutting Probe (I imagine Crystalline to be glass-like, only a bit tougher, but still capable of fracturing into shards and pointy edges.)
Description: Your bugs are doing a passable job. now do an amazing job of mining Crystalline.

Purpose: Again, mainly suggested for the hovering, but also this Probe will have a far higher carry capacity, to help accommodate for the fact that crystalline on lava planets eventually just gets out of control, or to help fill your storage even faster, depending on whatever PoV fits the reptilians best.

Aluminum Probe
Description: Harvest Aluminum in places Bugs can't go!

Purpose: Hovers, lets you harvest Aluminum after eruptions.

Gold Probe
Description: Collect that shiny, shiny gold in places too hazardous for Bugs.

Purpose: Hovers, can Harvest gold in lava fields.

Have a Probe for just basically every deposit a reptilian could ever need one for. I alos mention hovering, because it what Probes look like they do, even if they're probly more just flying. Probes can't do insectoid operations, however.

Faster Probes
Probes, IMO are too slow. I feel it should have the advantage of Pavement speed boosts, only all the time, since they fly. I'd like their main purpose to be an almost total replacement of your workforce for more efficient and better units. But in this process, they'd lose all bonuses for paths, save for...

Gravity-Controlled Lanes
I'd also like a special type of path that only works with probes and other Hover/Flying units, but doubles their speed, or something close to it, and infact works as an obstacle for anything that can't fly or hover, by reducing speed by just as much, with a max decrease in speed resulting in a total of 0.2 units of speed. but that's more just for consideration than a real wishlist item.
For visuals, it'd look like a purple tile with a blue glow coming off it. For stats, I figure it'd take like 50 power a piece, and would give off alot of light too. Or not.

Macrocondenser
Purpose: Literally just a 2x2 version of the Microcondenser, only far more powerful for water production, for those colonies that might one day just be building microcondensers like they're nothing.

Gold/Aluminum Grow Bed
Description: With the power of overpowered Science, placing ore, water, crystalline, and gold, somehow creates... more gold, but also aluminum!
Purpose: A combo of a gold Grower and an Aluminum Grower, but now it's either 2x2, or 3x3.

Water Pools resist Eruptions

I don't mean it'll STOP them, but it makes it less likely that an eruption happens within 8 tiles but only in locations where there's 3 tiles of water all around one tile of water.
If an eruption cannot happen because Water Pools are all blocking it from happening, the Eruption happens where the least water pools are located, the blocking effect is ignored.

Water Pools and Lava will constantly clash if directly next to one another and both are filled enough to visibly touch, reducing lava count, but also eventually destroying water pools to create obsidian.

Lava Repulsion Matrix
Description: After spending so long on such a hostile environment, robotics-enhanced and enslaved insectoids have finally created something to repel lava!

Purpose: Literally does what it says, repels lava, forcing it away rather quickly, but costing stupid amounts of energy, and it's 3x3, but has excessive range.
Or, dev, you can imagine it's a "build One" type of deal with less power usage. Sort of like a Capitol in a United Earth Colony, only it's not the government building.
Works on eruptions as well, preventing them within a smaller range.
Very Expensive though compared to everything else, and requires a large workforce, I'm thinking, someplace in the 1K-10K range of Workers.

Hell, it could be 5x5 and probly still be worth it imo, it'd be like a Wonder, takes ridiculous amounts of stuff to make, but gives you really good benefits.

Incomplete Artificial Planet
Difficulty: A Literal Nightmare.
Description: You know nothing of Difficulty.

Resources: Steel Mounds, Aluminum Piles, Circuit Cases.
Obstacles: Pits, 0 Starting Atmosphere, and a constant reduction of Atmosphere of 1 Billion/Million per second, Very little starting resources on even Abundant settings.

Factions: Only Reptilians, OR, a purely mechanical new faction later down the road (if that'll ever happen.) I'm thinking... some kind of race that salvages other tech and canonically feared by all, even the Reptilians, due to how they literally cannibalize technology and only live in ship graveyards, or remnants of gigantic space husks of abandoned super-projects.
This faction, in my mind, would be sorta like raggedy metal robot zombies, like maybe destroyed or malfunctioning robots possessed by souls of various other factions? Could even be a horrifying remnant of the "Aliens" faction referenced by alot of United Earth and LIS buildings.
The starting unit would probably fly, with all early and even mid-game buildings looking sort of crappy and disheveled, with the motto "It just works" behind all art design, until the late-game structures which look pristine and VERY chunky/tough.

Rundown: This planet can only gain deposits from meteors landing at purely random locations, with no real discrimination when it comes to map edges, meaning corners aren't safe, unlike in Lava Planets.
Everytime a Meteor lands, it creates pit randomly, but where it doesn't, it creates various metal-based deposits and purely at random. Sometimes none is created, and alot of Pit tiles are placed instead.
A Pit is a useless tile that represents that there's literally nothing there but darkness and space. it can be replaced, but the tile to do so is very expensive.

However, wreckages could also crash into the map, creating either absurd amounts of material of only durable goods and nothing raw beyond Oil, but having a massive range to the affected area, if anything, make it so it's always blobby-in shape for spawned material piles.

Pits would spawn like massive rivers to begin with.

The Size of the map as it currently is, will increase the likelihood of meteors or wreckages smacking into the map area. Reason I don't say wreckages wouldn't make pits, is because something like the framework for a planet to give it it's gravity, a ship or even station wreck crashing into it, would stick into said framework, since said framework has to be MILES in depth.
But the Pits spawn semi-frequently, but become way more common as you increase past say... a Small map size. Pits will spawn even MORE excessively if you expand the map border.

If it was possible, I'd have an ability for the base tile type to be changed, as if making a path, but without actually blocking building upon it. Purpose of this would be to make it so that you can repair the framework, complete the artificial planet, and then just create a death planet or something, I dunno, while more complete tile types would result in both faster movement speed, building ontop of them, AND resistance to pits forming to replace said tiles.

Forgot to mention, this planet will occasionally be hit by Asteroids, which will create Lava, that after a while, create pits, unless Water pools, at that point do as I suggest, and create obsidian at the expense of sacrificing lava tiles. Asteroids will create stupid large holes of pits, but they are VERY rare, with all sorts of materials forming a wall around said holes.

Strategy: The whole map would be about placing structures at random and scattered all over, while hoarding stupid amounts of resources as all kinds crash about, with really no real sort of safe areas coming along until far in the tech tree.

Purpose: For the Ultimate Difficulty. The place would look like the framework for a low-class artificial planet left to collect dust in space, but has since drifted to the very tips of the galaxy, or even universe, which is why Pits are a solid black color.
It's to test if someone can truly move on their toes and adapt to any situation. And to also make the stubborn and masochistic suffer. >:D

Note: If this does get added to a secret list of "Things I'd love to add" then I promise, I will contribute to most if not all of the art assets, you just worry about the actual operation of the thing. :3

Upgrade Menu
A button in the bottom left of the screen, always there, but not always filled via the menu that comes up if you click on it.

It's a scroll menu, with a bar ofcourse, and it only displays in each item the [Original Building] with an arrow next to it pointing to the [Upgraded Building] and a Button next to that for Upgrade One, with the resources indicated near or on/under said button, black text being that it's all good, you can upgrade fully, and easily, and red text indicating that you can't upgrade it fully
One more button next to that, the same thing, but for Upgrade All.

Purpose of this is to allow players a way of easily viewing upgrades they have tech-access to. This includes buildings they have no resources for.

You can start the upgrade building process even with not enough resources, but a dialog could warn you that it's a bad idea if the building is crucial and you can live without it until construction is done.

Allow construction of a building without the needed resources
I never got why I can't do this tbh, I can queue up more than I can build, if I have the resources to build only one of say... vehicles, workers, or buildings.

Multiple Levels for Reptilian Government Building
I forgot the name, Sorry ^^;

Uses for Lava
This isn't even an idea to only pertain to Reptilians, I feel any that have access to the Lava World relate to this.
I think beyond waiting for it to cool into obsidian, you could use it in the late-game to collect as a resource and convert it into other resources you can't get in a Lava World, but with a ratio of at least or at most 1,000:1 of Lava into any resource not mined on Lava Planets.

Lock Obsidiobugs behind Lava World Start tech
You can't get Lava in an Ice or Desert World.

Lava Worlds can't change Atmosphere
It's not possible to reduce it visually below 500 Million, since you don't need alot of condensers, at least not atm, but with eruptions going off basically all the time, this would make sense. This way, you also don't need to balance consumption of atmosphere of Lava Worlds for new buildings, although you'd have to take Desert worlds into consideration, unless Lava Worlds got their own specialized, more unhinged condensers past the Microcondenser if that is ever a thing.

Replace Landing Pod with Surface Habitat Vessel with Human factions on inhospitable worlds. If Humans will ever get that kind of treatment to be allowed onto Ice and Lava Worlds, this is maybe how you could do it.

That's all the ideas I can both remember, and think of at the moment. Enjoying the game even still, not been too active on here, mainly due to being a tiny bit busy/distracted.

Another day, another big new change for the upcoming My Colony v1.0.0. Prior to this update, with the rare exception of a few retired colonists, you didn't have to worry much about how old your population was. That's about to change. Starting in v1.0.0, your colonists can now make babies, and babies can't get jobs. So you will now have some unproductive mouths to feed!


The Stats window now gives you a breakdown of your current population by age group. By default, Colonists will not work until they are 18 years old, however there is going to be a new "child labor" policy you can implement to force younger kids into the workforce, at the expense of some approval from the population. I might also add a similar "work until you die" policy, where you force the elderly to work instead of retire.

Speaking of retirement, it is now based on age rather than money. By default, colonists will be leaving the workforce at age 65.

Childbirth actually changes the equation of the game a bit, as it is not impacted by your Immigration policy, and does not care about how many available houses you have. This means that at some point, you aren't even going to have to worry about immigration in order to grow your population, as the natural birth rate will take care of it. However, it takes those newborn workers until the age of 18 to enter the workforce. You also need to make sure your housing can keep up with the births. It's a lot to consider!

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.

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 .

Education - tested Colonist fail to use schools No matter which type put in
Rating- Can no longer be maintained ( Yea I know BUT you never have a problem .
well Instead of just Idling that massive or even normal size colony try making a new one or just delete ten to 100 buildings and rebuild them .
windows platform versions of both game are no longer usable ( ongoing over a month .Cant or don't care to fix it ?Take windows version off line .
This will effect how people view the game .

The Biggest issue is the programmer seams to just program then upload without any or very little testing so when a update goes on line . And not just the live in development version there can be and have been massive game issues that could have been solved Before the update was relised . This is the second time when a version has not worked for over a month .
wile he can and does solve bugs it seams to be random and some bugs just linger so much that they are in game from versions .25 on up .

Overall I can not bring my self to keep the game at a 4 star rating and honestly there is NO reason this game cant have a 5 star rating its a great concept .

All of the above applys to Antiquitas Right now the issues are minim for that game but the programmer has a habit of using my colony updates as the base to update that game and thus the same game issues are being transferred to that game .

To Bast I really enjoy both games and these games are the first I have bought in almost ten years .
I really hope you reach the next lv of programming wile It great that you enjoy the programming it is the players who make it possible to do this from home and its a shame that all it would take is a little Before you upload a update testing to avoid some of the issues the players have had .

I know this criticism is unwanted Heck who does want it . And I have been impressed with the skills shown which are way beyond mine ( which is why I wont even try to make a apk game )

over all game performance Chrome exultant minim bugs game speed fast .
But facts are facts The game has a requirement that effects rating that effects game play in a big way and the Requirement can NOT be met and going by the past and ongoing Colonists failing to use health services and just protesting to death the education requirement effecting ratings is something that will make the game to hard to manage .

I see little likely hood this problem will be solved as Again colonist have failed to use health services from when they were put in many many versions back .
You can still have 20 sick and not one bed being used and the 20 will let them self die before using a bed .
Check your deaths on a large older colony and see how many have died in you 100 % ratings colony .

Unless these things are solved The game may very well die But it can be solved so its all in what the programmer decides if its worth his work .
As for my self Ill still play but now view the game as middle ground at best between the worst clickers and the best strategic games .

Hopfully some day this will change again the game was worth a 4 star even with the bugs and maybe it will be again .

H3110 guys!

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.

This is a small idea:

I think that for solar panels, if each planet had another variable called solar rating, that variable could dictate how well solar panels work on that planet, excluding the day and night cycle(as batteries aren't a thing) .

For example, if a planet has a rating of 5, it has the same solar rating as earth. Any lower and solar panels would produce less power, any more and solar panels would produce more. So if you put solar panels on ice planet, you'll get next to nothing, as the score would probably be a 1 or 2, and the same goes for lava planet which is also dark. However, if bast were to implement my blast furnace or dyson sphere maps, the rating would be 10 and solar panels would produce max power, since the blast furnace map is basically mercury, which is blasted by light, and dyson spheres have no atmosphere to obstruct their access to light.

Hello guys! And @Bastecklein!

A re-visitation post of my idea about indoor connection of buildings, today I want to refine that a bit - and wish can have some fresh new discussion.

What's my idea about indoor connection of buildings?
The concept is providing a passage for colonists to move around so they won't have to put on space suit at all times to move between buildings, breathing oxygen freely. Probably providing some buffs such as better colonist morale/satisfaction, and slight production boost to buildings. (Or even enhanced commute rating?)
There will be some extra classification to buildings - Outdoor Structures and Indoor Structures.
Outdoor Structures like drill pads and most buildings that would dispatch rovers (e.g. Ore refinery will send rovers to collect ores from mines), as the name tells, works in outdoor conditions and never need a indoor connection to keep them functional. However, they also don't benefit from indoor connection bonuses, and some of them may need an independent or extended oxygen supply system.
Indoor Structures, on the other hand, are facilities that works in indoor conditions. Most of them can still work without indoor connections (except Strictly Airtight Structures such as colony clinic), but won't be able to operate at full efficiency until attached to an indoor passage. Without indoor passages, their oxygen supply system must rely on pipeline connection; and won't use pipelines to supply oxygen if connected to indoor networks - remember to ensure the indoor network is filled with oxygen, otherwise the building won't work due to depleted indoor oxygen!

Oxygen?
Speaking of oxygen supplies, the indoor connection would also be 'connected' with oxygen supply mechanisms. To ensure sufficient supply of oxygen, each indoor network requires at least one indoor ventilation plant connected to pipelines to oxygen supplies. Each indoor ventilation plant supports a number of buildings within the same system; and each building has their own rating of ventilation demands.
For example, each adv hydroponic facility has ventilation draw rating of 3 while a barracks has 2, and a basic ventilation plant has a ventilation pump rating of 15. If you have 2 basic ventilation plants in the same indoor network, you can have combinations like, 6 farms + 6 barracks, 3 farms and 10 barracks... as long as the ventilation plant can support oxygen supplies of the structures within the network.
Like in MC1, ventilation (of a indoor network) is a supply utility. If the ventilation plants cannot support all structures, newly constructed structures in the network will not operate.
Each ventilation plant consumes oxygen at a constant rate.

Breaching
Damaged indoor passages can cause breaching of the indoor network, this will be very dangerous as the oxygen will leak, and some unwanted hazards of external environment such as diseases and toxic air may contaminate your indoor network, you'll find big problems dealing with a large sum of infected colonists or sick people.

Hopefully you'll like the idea! What do you think about it? Feedbacks and suggestions? Please leave them in the comments!

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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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

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

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


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

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


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

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

it depends, i like fantasy land arcology more as it offer workforce for the job i created. Arcology alone provide on 3k workforce, fantasy has 16k

I totally get that because it has now started working in reverse. If a building is producing, especially highly staffed buildings, "show workers" resets the workforce of that building to 0...

its mutating. Kill it with fire!!!

The6atekeeper said:I totally get that because it has now started working in reverse. If a building is producing, especially highly staffed buildings, "show workers" resets the workforce of that building to 0...

its mutating. Kill it with fire!!!

This has been happening to me forever and has probably accumulatively lost me colonies of about 1m people. I just never click the show workers button and its normally fine. Also that ever since this has been a problem my colonists savings are incapable of straying away from $50, even if i stimulus package.

Hi I got quite a related issue with my workforce...

Trough all updates since, I don't know - 1,5 years ago, my workers start to leave their jobs and get a job at the new building. It doesn't matter how far away from their home it is, how happy they are or something else i can control as player..... I guess you can imagine that this is the point where my Colony starts getting busted ;)

So perhaps the problem lies within the behaviour of the colonists searching for a job and changing it without any purpose?
Other reason could be that the colonists don't stop searching for a job when they already have one and always try to change their lives?
Would be far easier without such odd behaviour ;)

Adding: and the same odd behavior at Antiquitas - though not that bad .

Commonly it starts with buildings needing more than 50 Workers.

(Playing on PC, Win 7 Pro 64 bit)

Every time you start the game alest on Chrome version it ask you to rate it .( Alot of games do this )
Thing is it is asking for a rating even if you rated it already .
Now to be honest it would not bug me as much as it does but in order to get it off the screen I have to click ( NO WAY LOSER ) .

First even if I did not like the game that does not make you a loser . Alot of work goes into games and I for one think people deserve respect for the effort if nothing else .
Second its bad enough there are rude people who just enjoy being well rude but I am not one of them .
Now if you want it you want it and I will still play but in no way shape form or matter does your rating thing apply to the way I am .
By having to click that It makes me feel like I am the loser .
Consider this post a Disclaimer ( TO any who think bast ((((IS NOT ))))a loser add a comment lets show him how we really think .
BTW your game rating thingy well I have seen other games who's programmers did the same thing and I really don't understand with all the real losers who just rate to be rude and hateful why a programmer would add it in like that .
Thank you .

NOZ GAME 3, Laziest Colony

For this, the third installment of NOZ Games. You must have the laziest colony known to man, (have the lowest fatigue rating of any other competitor) - Ends on the 11th, Jan

Of course there isn't actually an accurate rating for; healthcare, fatigue, poverty, etc. So we'll have to go off the citizen CONCERNS chart. (There are clever ways to decrease this rating, see if you can figure out how)

1st Place will receive 6 million aluminium + 6 million uranium
2nd Place will receive 3 million aluminium + 3 million uranium
3rd Place will receive 1 million aluminium + 1 million uranium

Some rules:
-->Creative Mode is NOT allowed,
-->You must have atleast 1k colonists to qualify,

See you at NOZ!

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.

so much for that nice photo that shows 22 k colonists i added just another 1000 and the whole thing cam apart .
rating droped like a rock up and down rollercoster .
the new education has made it darn hard to add more colonists and keep the rating up i must have wasted 50 million coins on it only to have it drop right back down .

now remember at 22,000 I had 100% and it stayed that way for days once i added the next 1500 colonists well i am letting them die off again as it is costing way to much tring to raise the rating .
dont know if the game is even playable ( as in EXPANDING a colony ) any longer .
sure older stable colonys would be fine as LONG as the player does not change much of any thing .
but let them even delete a few buildings and try moving the works to new buildings and see what happens .
I dont think the programmer plays much any more or mod plays much any more both seam unaware of game play and even the fact that windows desk top version no longer can be used .( a ongoing issue ) over a month now .
Or the answer from the mod is always Hey it works great on my system .
yea and it usually works great on chrome as well guess what there are other versions then chrome and linux .

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.

My aproval rating is always under 90% and decays slow another problem is about the emigration always say NAME OF CITIZEN has die but he dont die he just gone to other planet and the reason of my low rating is the education i build a lot of homeless shelters because it raises the IQ but only to 85 and still my rating is under 90% and decays and the last problem: Is normal to have a lot of emigration because i have a lot in my world.
Extra info : i have humans and reptilians in my world

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

@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?

Hello Bast!

Yet another set of suggestions for My Empire! :D

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

Hopefully these will make good addition for the game!

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!

Colony Wars has just been updated to v0.9.0, and the update should be hitting all devices very shortly. This update brings some new units, a new structure, a new map and a host of interface improvements, so let's take a look at what is new!


To start with, I made some minor tweaks to existing content. The armor rating for the Amphibious Transport has been increased a bit. The money generating speed or the Ore Fracking Operation has been increased. Building an Engineer no longer requires a Research Lab first.

Moving on, two new engine improvements have been implemented in this release, Primary Building Selection and Building Repair! Now when you have multiple unit production structures, the barracks for example, you can now set which one will be your primary, which means all new units will come out of the primary building. Additionally, you can now finally repair your buildings that have been damaged. Both of these features are represented by new icons on the Structure Options box that appears when you select a building.

Some UI tweaks have been made. Now when you mouse over a structure, it will become semi-transparent, so that you can see units behind it. Also, mousing over a unit will put an outline around it, so you can also better see units behind structures. It will also increase the render order of the unit to put it above the structure.

Moving on, I created a new map for this release called Beyond a Path, inspired by the Red Alert map, a Path Beyond. This is an 8 player map featuring both land and sea combat, and it's a lot of fun!

A new structure is introduced in this update, the Gold Synthesis Lab. This later game structure will allow you to continue generating funds, even after all ore deposits on the map have been depleted.


Three new units were added in this update. The first is the Field Medic. This helpful unit can be embedded into your infantry force and will automatically heal nearby infantry units during battle.

And speaking of infantry forces, the new A.P.C. (armored personnel carrier) is a land based transport that can carry up to five infantry units safely into a combat zone. It has the highest armor rating of any land unit and is equipped with a light machine gun for minor defense, but it is probably best to escort an APC with some tank units.


And finally, the big boy of the release. Previously, naval combat was not overly interesting, with the lowly Patrol Boat not being much of a force. This changes now with the introduction of the Cruiser! As of now, the Cruiser is the most powerful unit in the game, with the firepower of about 2.5 medium tanks and more than double the firing range, with a high armor rating to go along with it. If your opponent is able to sneak up on you with a fleet of Cruisers and you are not properly defended, then you might as well just kiss your base goodbye.


So that about wraps up todays Colony Wars update. As I mentioned before, I am now putting Colony Wars development on top priority, so expect frequent updates. Let me know on the forum what updates/features/new units you would like to see, and stay tuned for more!

https://wars.my-colony.com/

#colonywars

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:

{

    "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!