Ape Apps

Oh my message wasn't asking to change the percentages. It was more to ask for denser education, health and entertainment buildings as currently you'd have a lot more of the map used to support the colonists than normal.

Another thing to mention with regards to this, is to have the lander have some slots for health etc. as usually by the time people have access to all the building types they have a fairly large population.

I noticed two other things:

• Poverty Line: the salary need to reworked a little bit, since the population now will utilize for the first time all entertainment building :D
• On my current city, the approval rating (37%, on the good day) is "strange", i have only Depression (53%) and Poverty (47%), the other are 0%. But the population have some money (Average and median Colonist savings are 272, and 186 poverty line), and all house are green for everything.

Ok so last night/early this morning while I was lying in bed thinking of My Colony updates instead of sleeping (common dev problem), I decided to change my thinking a bit on what percentage of medical/entertainment/school will be needed.

What I am going to now I think, is replace the current colonist model with an internal age-distribution model, and add birth-rate into the game. I will base the birth rate on health and average income.

So educational requirements will be based mostly on the number of people under 20 years old in the colony, and secondarily on unemployed people. Health requirements will be higher for children and the elderly. Entertainment requirements higher for young/middle aged. At some point I will make each building able to target specific age groups, but that is a lot of game file editing that I do not want to do at this moment.

So I think this can make early game issues largely irrelevant. If your first two colonists are 25-30 years old, they will not need medical and education, so the lander will not have to provide. You can build an internet relay booth pretty much right away for entertainment, and I think that their happiness not being 100% for the first few minutes of the game is not really detrimental.

This will make the game more realistic, and also require a colony to take care of kids and elderly who are not able to work. The unemployment figure will have to be recalculated to only include people aged 20-70.

@Ansom right now in the beta colonists are not getting paid at all and most approval related items are not even being checked, so I would not put any stock into approval rating on the beta right now.

Roger, i will ignore the approval for the moment.

My initial thoughts about the changes to approval rating regarding health, education and entertainment was to treat a bit like the utilities. So for education you could associate points based on the number of people in your colony that are young or old (what you decided to do).

Also you can have trash and atmosphere have an effect on colonists health. So the way they'd both work would be similar to the way taxes work. For atmosphere you could split it up into 0 - 250k, 250k - 1mil, 1mil - 5mil, 5mil - 15mil and 15mil+. Each category has a certain number of points associated to them which then effects all colonists. So the larger the atmosphere of the colony the more medical facilities are needed for the colony. This could also be applied to trash in a similar way.

Sorry if I'm repeating myself but you could also have the similar effect on the rest of the approval rating factors where they each provide points based on several factors. So education can have points relating to the iQ needed for that job so then the districts you have come up with can then have different needs for the colonists.

I think this would behave in a similar way to what you are currently developing. It would just have a fairly easy way to quantify how much entertainment etc. is needed for the colonists.

Once again I'm sorry if this is me repeating myself but I was just thinking you might like to implement this idea in someway, @bastecklein

@bastecklein Great update this will help the performance I can see it now running my 200K city smoothly!! But I do have to say that Mass Transit show be released alongside this as it will break most cities since most colonists won't want to travel 100 tiles to a Job in a megacity or end-game city. Since this will likely happen Mass Transit is the only fix other than tearing up the whole city (which isn't an option for things like Starship maps). Love that you decided to overhaul the colonist don't get me wrong it just seems like Mass Transit would be an absolute necessity as soon as this comes out.

SIDENOTE: maybe in like 1.1.0 you could add multi-planet colonization make it cost 1Mil-Starships to start. And when you first send the expedition you can send resources with it that you have to use to build and to transfer resources back and forth you have to build a starport(or a new building) on both colonies. But I will cost starships to do so.

So basically things started out like Rimworld or Oxygen not included, where the player has to worry about the individual colonists' needs and traits and keep them alive. In those games, getting new survivors takes a long time, always come one at a time, or often come as a reward for some quest or challenge. The player has to fight through every step in progression to keep their colonists alive(especially in oxygen not included, that game is a Masochist's dream.).

But honestly, I like MC as a city game. There are just certain games that naturally do well as a group survival type game and others that have more potential to be a city builder, and MC is one of the later. That doesn't mean I don't enjoy the former, those games are still very fun(and sometimes mentally abusive). I like the idea of "simcity" on the moon, or on mars, with different races. and MC honestly gives the best experience of that out of all other city builders I've played, and I've played surviving mars and Anno(The problem with those is that they are too restrictive on where you should build things, whereas Simcity and MC are more sandbox type.). I still think MC could do with some more environmental decorations as the flat terrain can get a little plain after a while, but the new regional generation is a big step up in my opinion.

Hey Bast, I think this is going to be a really good update!

Depending on how far you can go with save file size reduction, you could have direct cloud save on your server, instead of local save on the player's computer.

Most online games work like that. No more game files, no more corrupted data, no possible alteration, and the possibility to easily switch between different devices! You the dev would also be able to see users' files if needed to debug smth.

I'll think about it @Sobeirannovaocc

I don't really want to remove local saves completely. If I die next week and can no longer maintain the server, I'd still like people to be able to play the game locally!