Ape Apps

Here are some of the issues that I've noticed with reptilians while playing them. This is my first time playing them seriously and I've had to start over three times in the past two hours because I encounter major issues with the game. Let me know if I'm just not playing the game right. I use an Iphone xr and I always update to the latest version.

Is it just me, or is immigration supposed to stop on the reptilian's immigration/trading gate once housing is full? The gate will produce colonists as long as you leave it on, housing or not, and it starts when you gain access to water. On my last colony, I had just started out and I was being pummeled with 400+ colonists.

Also, I see no education in sight while playing reptilians. They get so mad and sensitive about education, but there's none there, so any colony that starts with this race is doomed to be forever unhappy.

I also noticed that there are no techs for this race, so I'll chalk it up to the fact that reptilians are still undergoing construction.

Finally, for the most important issue.this is an issue that affects all races, but when we press import or export and the list of resources to export/import is shown, can you make it so that the screen sticks on the last resource you sold or bought so you don't have to scroll down the entire list each time you buy or sell a measely 100 resources? why must it be so tedious? My colony isn't about being tedious, it's about micromanagement. Granted, sometimes it is tedious, and a little bit of tediousness never hurt anyone, but when it get's to the point where you're pressing the same area on the screen over and over again in rapid succession for multiple minutes, that's too much. Pressing two buttons over and over again until your fingers hurt isn't micromanagement, it's idle tapping, something that bast has always said he didn't want to have in the game. If you want to make it so that there are limits and micromanagement involved in exporting/importing on certain buildings, then do it by some other method, not by turning my colony into an idle tapper because you need 10k ore and you can only buy 100 at a time.

Here is a viable solution to the problem above with the exporting/importing:

What if you had the ability to assign each import/export building to an import resource and an export resource. Building multiple of these buildings would allow you to import/export multiple resources at once, but each building would only import/export 100 units(or higher for more advanced buildings) every worker round. After a certain amount of time, the contract will expire and you must renew it in order to start receiving resources again. However, you must pay the transaction costs up front, and if you for some reason need to stop the exports/imports from happening, doing so will cancel the contract, and you'll have to start another contract and repay the transaction fee again. This will allow you to create and micromanage several trade buildings at once, which would still be a challenge because you'd have to keep coming back and checking to see if a contract expired on each building, and you could have the more simpler buildings have shorter contracts, while more advanced buildings get longer contracts, and you could keep count via the worker rounds.

Now for the reptilians basic immigration/trade gate. I feel like it's hard enough to build one of these at the start of the game as is and so it should be able to be assigned to two exports and two imports at once. However, this is a special case only because reptilians need that import/export feature to survive. The humans stargate could also have more assignments as well being that it's pretty expensive. Bast can shape this idea to his liking, but the most important thing to keep in mind in my opinion is that repetition is not the same as micromanagement. Micromanagement requires thought and strategy, repetition only requires hand motion, and is no different than idle tapping.

Let me end by saying that I know that some people aren't going to like this ideas because it means that they can't just spam import/export millions of resource in the end of the game. However, to them I say this: If you can just spam export/import millions of resources in end-game via the stargate or some other means, is that really a challenge? No, it's still the same idle tapping that you have in early-game, except now it's overpowered when it used to be too weak. This feature lacks balance and therefore must be fixed to restore balance to the game. After all, my colony is all about micromanagement, so why not switch this idle tapping method out with a method that actually requires thought and strategy. That way, from early to end game, strategy and at least some measure of micromanagement will be required in exporting/importing.

I do need an improved import/export interface. I would be interested in seeing others discuss ideas on that matter also.

The stargate issue, yeah... The deal is that the Reptilian Star Gate taps into the same Star Gate network as the large Human Star Gate that you can build mid-game, and so it constantly takes immigrants who are fleeing other online colonies through their Star Gates, just like the big Human one. This is why a new Reptilian colony can get flooded with Human colonists who are also illegal immigrants.

The same thing happens in human colonies, but usually with Humans your population is so large by the time you get a Star Gate that you barely notice it. On a fresh Reptilian colony though, it's very noticeable. The system probably needs to be changed in some way.

I always thought the crazy influx of illegal aliens was part of that race play style.

Well i'm glad to see that it's not just me being horrible at playing the game at least. Would be interesting to see how you solve that stargate issue.

To me it looks like you could add an integer variable to the stargate object that equals the total amount of housing space in the map. The server could look for any stargate or reptilian gate that has a number greater than 0 in this value and shove colonists into gates that way, decrementing 1 from the number per colonist. you could have that number updated with each worker round so it would stay up to date. you may get the odd straggler but it may work. It works in my head anyway, but there may be other factors that i'm not aware of governing the stargates.

Or, another way to solve this is to just have the colonists travel right back into the gates immediately after they come in if no housing space is available, but I think the first method might save on resources.

Well I was originally planning to implement crime and jails at the same time I implemented illegal immigration and they were going to go hand in hand, but then I never got around to the crime part :-/

Well, I'm sure you'll get there someday. Crime would be an interesting feature. You could instead use starships to transport criminals from colony to colony and such, and that way the stargates can be left to tourists and immigrants. A prisoner transport center could be in charge of that, and you would have full control over how many prisoners you want to send to another player's colony or another city in your region with the cost of starships. In early game, you could implement a prisoner transport element into all of the import/export buildings so that you can just export the prisoners out in smaller amounts and pay a transport fee. I feel like early-gamers have enough challenge on their hands, so let prisoners be a challenge for later gamers.




Just my take on prisons and crime:
Would be cool if we could have forced labor policies in place for prisoners, that they have to work longer hours and they have to stay within a certain boundary that could be set with prison walls. Colonists wouldn't be allowed into those boundaries either, so you can separate them that way. you could also have separate buildings for a command center(which would employ one warden and have some tourist space), guard-bot garages, prisoner barracks, solitary confinement cells(could provide a small amount of education), a gym and basketball court for entertainment.

I feel like in order to implement crime, it would take a number of things, but could also give colonies a useful way to send help in the form of people to other colonies, which is a huge advantage. Each colonist would have to have another boolean value and an integer value in their statistics. the boolean value would determine if prisoner/criminal or colonist. The integer value would detirmine for how long a colonist will remain a criminal. When a colonist commits a crime, they automatically become a criminal and the seriousness of their crime will depend on how big the integer value is. Every time they go to sleep, the value is reduced by 1. A low IQ colonist is more likely to become a criminal, and once they become a criminal, they'll keep on commiting crimes and adding to their counter until they are caught. Once caught, they can live out their sentence without adding to it.

It will be up to police bots to chase them down and put them in jail, which each police station should have some jail space. Police bots will go for the criminals with the highest counter first and then work their way down. Colonists will stay in jail for 5 cycles of sleep, at which point they get automatically sent to a prisoner transport center and you get notified when that center is near full. Then you can go in and transport the prisoners to another colony in the same commonwealth or another map in your region.

One other thing that could be cool is if you dump your prisoners into a region map or fellow colony that has no prison, they become pardoned and will become colonists again and you can use them to build whatever you want on that map. A real life example of prisoners being dumped into a frontier territory to develop a colony is Australia, where prisoners of the British empire were sent to develop a colony there until they eventually declared independence.

For Draconians, since they get so many human migrants...there should be some buildings and stuff for their human counterparts. As it is, it seems humans are a negative impact on the cities, because they don't get homes or education or anything. So all they do is end up getting mad, which makes having a large city really hard.

The other thing, which I'm sure is because of the humans, is mysterious huge death waves. Government rating is low (humans likely being the cause) and a huge factor in unhappiness is education, but there is no education building. Yet I have 100% health, so I can only think humans are bringing the colony of draconians down.

I think draconians should get housing for humans, like a shelter kind of thing (draconians get a homeless shelter, but it doesn't seem to house humans). Education for humans, because why wouldn't the draconians want to teach their human migrants their own way of being draconian. And there should be entertainment for humans, and maybe a specialized clinic humans can go to if they are sick.

So it seems they do use housing. But education is bad (at least that is why it shows they are unhappy), but I'm not sure why they get such mysterious massive death waves. In comparison, my UE colony has already outpaced the draconian one in much shorter time because there are no death waves that draconians get. Not sure why draconians keep dying, since health is at 100%.

So it seems education is actually more about jobs supposedly than actual education. Is that accurate?. But Draconians don't get very many job buildings, so maybe that is why approval is bad. Haven't figured out the death waves yet

Do you have food or water? Health Buildings? Ample housing?