Ape Apps

Malak, how'd you make that picture, is it an html table?


also, sorry to be an internet jerk, (honestly i really am a real person who doesn't like to be a jerk) BUT.....

this pattern doesn't actually increase efficiency. I don't understand your calculations, but I think you may have made a mistake somewhere. To calculate the efficiency of a repeating pattern (this is called a packing problem) you need to take the smallest repeatable unit of the pattern and divide the filled space by the total space. that will give you the ratio of empty space to filled space.



on the original rows pattern, your efficiency is 1 road for 2 solar panels, so thats 2 out of 3, or 66.66%. on your new pattern, your smallest repeatable cell is 3 solar panels for 2 blank spaces (1 road, one completely blank) which gives you an efficiency of 3 out of 5, also known as 60.00%.

You could say that the whole 5x4 block (in green) is the repeating cell, but that still gives you an efficiency of 12 out of 20 which is still 60.00% rows are 6% more efficient than the pattern in your first post.

One idea I had was to try a Hilbert curve. this is a 'curve' designed to cover a plane using a repeating pattern of straight lines. its not designed to be efficient, and turns out, it doesnt increase efficiency over rows either. I'm not saying there's not a more efficient way to do it, but we haven't found it in this thread so far.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v99dsVBE4xQ

ITER in real life is a fusion power experiment, so maybe in the game it can go after the crystal power. submit a graphic concept, I might be able to help you with it.

nonobosss: Thanks, I guess it's too late...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZfRaWAtBVg

;)

Bast, thanks for explaining that more clearly, I think that's all the explanation you 'owe' any of us! Sorry I misunderstood the one-time tax as being a new money cap, I thought the guys complaining about not being able to repair their infrastructure were saying they were no longer capable of raising their funds high enough to pay it. You might still want to consider adding an 'end' to the game at some point in the future, like Minecraft or Soda Dungeon.

bastecklein said:...The decay rate is about 50k per minute...

I guess the *rate* was more harsh for me 'cause I only had like 60-100k aluminum that I lost.... but since my overall loss was a lot less than some in this thread I guess not.



Some of these complaints have me a bit concerned for the late-game, now that there's the 10b money cap. Personally, I'm nowhere near that point in the game yet, but when I do eventually get there, I'd like to see what I can do with the colony I've worked so hard on other than just let it stagnate and start another.

I play a game called Soda Dungeon. In that game, there's a 1.5b cap on gold, if you earn more than that at any particular time in the game, the excess money is automatically used to purchase "essence", a currency used to buy upgrades. Those upgrades enable you to go further into the infinite, linear, dungeon, thus earning more gold and essence, and eventually unlock "caps" which can be used to buy a second tier of upgrades that kind of change the fundamental assumptions of the earlier levels of the game. when you unlock the higher tier upgrades (long, long after defeating the final boss) there's even a narrator character who jokes about people who are just obsessed with achieving higher and higher numbers (alot of the blow-back you're getting on this is from the 'higher-numbers' crowd, I think). The treadmill of the standard game essentially powers a second, much slower treadmill, which powers a third even slower treadmill. Progress is still possible, but it matters less than the other goals you could be perusing at that point.

maybe you could try something like that for My Colony. after a player gets to the end of what you (bast) would think would be the end of a colony, maybe they get the option to unlock funky upgrades that will change the way they play the game. Maybe they have to go back and rearrange their building placements to make them more aesthetically pleasing (granting efficiency bonuses), or their colony can then create sister/daughter colonies that are only visible to that colony.

My point is, bast, that if you've decided to change the game from being infinite to having this fundamental cap on money, then the best solutions would be (imo) to either give a colony thats reached that point some type of "ending" or to change the goal of the game so that it can continue in a meaningful, lateral direction at that point.

Bast, the decay is pretty harsh, could we give that a 60-minute half-life or something to give us time to build storage?

Also, possible glitch: my elders mounds aren't making civics anymore, they're not even listed under the civics tab.

And most importantly, sorry for all the 'Debbie Downers', this is a great game and I really like seeing what you come up with to make it better every update!

bastecklein said:...the game could support shorelines with an infinite number of ground/water type combinations.

A system like that would be the best implementation of this idea. It would be great if the system could handle transitions between terrain types as well. If you notice in the concept, there's a straight line where the martian soil touches the sand. That tile would need to have 3 different textures masked onto it, and its easy to imagine needing 4 (or more).

I was kind of surprised nobody answered 'no' to the poll, isn't this a bit of a paradigm shift for the game? ...at least aesthetically if not game-play-wise?

Someone mentioned game-generated rivers and bays, I'd love to see random terrain play a more important role in where/why we place our buildings in our colonies. I had another idea for Age of Empires II-esque cliffs that could be added into the game as well. That is a direction I would love to see this game go into, does anybody disagree?

Notice how the cliffs just kind of end before they get to the gates? Wall-tiles like these cliffs could be added to My Colony just like the shorelines I drew up.

This is an update on the shorelines idea that I posted a few days ago. A couple people suggested adding a poll, so here we go!

I've added some "opposite corners" water tiles, and I've made them all transparent.

Shoreline tiles are decorative tiles intended to surround water pool tiles so you can make natural-looking water features.

Like the water pool, they cost 60 water, and are size 1x1.

A couple of additional ideas about this: they could be upgrades from standard water tiles, and/or the game might automatically place the correct one for the situation (which would reduce the number of different tiles listed on the build menu)

size: 1x1
cost: 60 water

These decorative tiles are intended to surround water pools, and cost the same amount. What I've posted here is somewhat unfinished as a proof of concept. I got the idea when I saw the sand tiles and wanted to make a beach.

Bast, if you like this idea, I can crop and make all the individual files for each tile type, and transparent versions that can go on top of any terrain type.

I recreated my own versions of the animated water pool, martian dirt, and sand for this concept, if you post the original files, I can make "the shores" match up exactly with those.

Yeah, I like that idea! I haven't played LIS very much but that would make sense that maybe they didnt have access to higher tech for longer, so they have to extend a lower level of technology for longer before upgrading to nuclear etc.

Like time, I have also thought about doing a "solar farm" where all the mirrors focus sunlight onto a central tower, I think those would look really cool in this game, but like you said, its a niche in the power grid that doesnt really need to be filled... unless it were part of LIS or some other faction

Thank you for pointing that out, it probably wouldn't fit in that role then. (I had thought of this and started on it before incinerators were introduced). Maybe there could be another use/place for this?

What do you think of the art? I could really use some constructive criticism.

This is intended as a more expensive alternative to the incinerator, that doesn't produce atmosphere.

size 2x2
workers: 5
ore cost: 6000
steel cost: 4000
cold cost: 7000
micro chip cost: 100
generates: 500 power

I'm not an artist, please let me know what you think.

maybe the size-sort thing could be addressed by a customizable "favorites" section in the build menu

I'm not 100% sold on the sort by size idea, but I like the others. (Just my opinion) Maybe multi-purpose buildings could have colored stripes if they are both housing and entertainment.

Part of the appeal of this game (to me) is that you have to figure out what buildings are available when- either on your own, or you can read it in the encyclopedia, like minecraft. So, like minecraft, I think an achievement screen would be helpful because then you get some idea to the types of major goals you could be thinking about, without being told expressly what you need to do to get there.

Someone already mentioned the option to turn off and on the rss you want to see.

One of the strengths of this game is that it has so many resources, so you want to avoid making them a pain to see. I think there should be a screen, or drop-down, or slide-out that shows all the resources with their current numbers, this will be the main rss display. Each rss has an eyeball icon next to it that controls if its on the quick-view bar that we currently have.

there could also be an option for a stock-ticker style quick-view.

Maybe rather than scrolling all the resources constantly, it just flashes changes every few seconds, so you can monitor how things are going without having to have all the information displayed on the screen at once.

you can also burn trash to make power, right? For new colonies that is ideal because you want more atmosphere anyway.

I was thinking that keeping trash on one planet would be like your environmental legacy on that planet. If you burn it to make power, eventually your atmosphere will hit 15,000,000 and you'll have a problem if you dont have enough alien water condensers to turn the excess O2 into water.

I like the zolarg solution better than the trade solution. It makes sense to me because in real life there's no financial incentive to ship trash off-world.... unless there's an alien species out there who happens to love it.

maybe the zolarg have a giant cargo bug that lands and takes on all the human's trash, but the humans have to build it a bug landing pad. Once you build one of those, you can ship trash to zolarg colonies only.

That got it, thanks jova

Apparently I don't know how to attach pictures? I attached .png previews along with the .svg actuals, nothing is showing in my post except this code at the end:

*[*img=/uploads/pictures/2167.svg]/viewpage.php?p=2167[/img]
*[*img=/uploads/pictures/2168.svg]/viewpage.php?p=2168[/img]
*[*img=/uploads/pictures/2169.svg]/viewpage.php?p=2169[/img]
*[*img=/uploads/pictures/2178.png]/viewpage.php?p=2178[/img]
*[*img=/uploads/pictures/2180.png]/viewpage.php?p=2180[/img]
*[*img=/uploads/pictures/2181.png]/viewpage.php?p=2181[/img]

This idea is to make power an indirectly tradable item with the introduction of a new resource: electric cells. An electric cell factory creates the cell resource at the cost of a lot of power and a small amount of other resources. A “generator” building converts the cells into the same amount of power that went into making them, allowing advanced colonies to sell excess power to smaller ones.

This could also be used to bring the idea of time into the game economy in a more concrete way: one electric cell takes 10,000 power and one hour to charge (plus a small amount of resources to ‘build’ the cell itself). The generator building then consumes one power cell per hour, and generates 10,000 power.

Personally, I like the idea of having a resource that will be limited to very small numbers. You might sit down to play My Colony, and see that you have only 2 electric cells left. You think “I want to play for a couple hours, so I’ll need to buy 3 more”.

Originally, I was thinking of this as a mid-game stepping stone between nuclear power plants and alien power towers, but the numbers could be adjusted to make it more late-game. The introduction of trash and incinerators kind of overlaps this idea a bit, so maybe one power cell holds 100,000 power per hour, or even 1,000,000 power per hour.

I’d like to hear your feedback on the idea itself and the art. I've wanted to submit this idea for a while, but I'm not an artist, so I've been working on the art off and on for over a month (I live in Houston, so Hurricane Harvey added a lot of time). I'd like to hear back from you regarding the color choices, detail level and the use of gradients. I avoided using gradients, but there were a couple spots where I thought it was necessary to show the shape I was going for.

Electric Cell


Electric Cell Factory


Size 4x4
workers 80
cost ore 10,000
cost water 20,000
cost steel 50,000
cost gold 35,000
cost al 4,000
cost uranium 1,000
cost microchips 12,000
produces: electric power cells, 1 per hour
uses 1,000 steel per hour
uses 100 al per hour
uses 90 pottery per hour
uses 20 micro chips per hour

Electric Cell Power-Plant


size:4x3
Workers:5
cost ore: 5,000
cost water: 4,000
cost steel: 10,000
cost gold:1,000
cost al: 150
cost microchips: 50
produces 10,000 power per hour
uses 1 electric cell per hour