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My Colony 2 v0.36.0 Released

I hope everyone is having a good week! Today I am releasing My Colony 2 v0.36.0 and the update should be hitting all platforms within the coming days. This update cleans up a couple of things, adds a couple of things, and fixed some things. So let's take a look at all of the things...


The My Colony 2 engine now supports a second level of user color customization on buildings, besides the random splashes of settlement color found in some places. Voxel models can now specify a second replace color, allowing the user to fully customize the color of their structures. This is currently enabled on the Bunkbed Shelter, Large Living Quarters and Extra Large Living Quarters, and also the brand new Decorative Tile. The "paint job" can be done by clicking on a structure, and you will see a new color wheel option if the structure supports user defined coloring.


Custom colored structures could be a great way to give your settlement character, define districts, or just liven things up a bit. This release is sort of a test of the feature, and it will be certainly expanded to more buildings in the future. If you are a voxel model creator, you can specify areas of a building that can be custom-colored by using the cyan hex code #00ffff.

More statistics have been added to the building mini-stats popup window, which now shows capacity and utilization graphs for medical, education, entertainment and security, similar to what was available in MC1.


Moving along, the My Colony 2 Online stats window has been updated with a new listing for Settlement rankings, now showing the top 30 online settlements listed by population. I plan on adding more to this soon. You will also (at some point) be able to click on both worlds and settlements to get a detailed breakdown screen of each, and I may end up using this screen for future diplomacy related options.


Ok, now for the potentially controversial update, I have added the ability to instant-purchase any structure using Ape Coins instead of paying with resources. I realize that this is somewhat of a pay-to-win, but the truth is that since MC2 lacks the advertising found in most games, I need a way to generate more revenue for the game, that is just the sad truth of it. Let me explain more about it though.

I think I have set the Ape Coin prices high enough that it should deter just rushing through the game, unless someone really wants to pay a lot. I suspect it only to be used in one-off scenarios when someone really does not want to wait to build something, or at the very beginning of the game when prices are low anyway.

The way it works is that the Ape Coin price is calculated at run time based on the GBT value of all of the resources needed to construct the building, with a minimum price of 10 Ape Coins. Since resource prices scale up a lot on the higher end, a player would have to pay serious money in order to build the later game structures, which is why I do not think this system will be abused much later game, which I believe cuts down on the "pay-to-win" aspect of it.

The reality is that nobody is going to pay $15 to purchase an investment bank, or if they do, they sure aren't going to be using this function to spam a bunch of investment banks. So this price calculation being what it is, I think it will safely protect online stats from pay to win abuse. It also cannot be used to purchase buildings that are above your settlement level.

To build a structure using Ape Coins, you just click on the Ape Coin button instead of the green checkmark button on the new construction bottom bar. There is a confirmation dialog, so you are not going to accidentally spend coins.


One more thing to note, if you purchase a building with Ape Coins and then accidentally place it somewhere where it cannot built, like a blocked space, the building goes into a queue on the server, and you can then build it again without clicking on the Ape Coins option. There is no UI to tell you this yet, but the game will actually let you place the building, even though it says you do not have enough resources.

Finally before moving on to new content, I added structure defensive stats to the Encyclopedia window, which now shows Attack Power, Range and Rate of Fire.


I have not forgotten about the poor encyclopedia, it just has not been on the top of the priorities list.

Ok, let's go to new content now. There are three new techs added this time, Mass Data Management, Colonial Bureaucracy and Extremely Deep Excavation!

Mass Data Management is used for the new Alien Uplink Station upgrade (model by @SPARKY0303 ), while Colonial Bureaucracy gives us the new Department of Advanced Fish Mating Studies (model by @spamdude ), which is basically just a big worthless (but pretty) government jobs farm. The new Museum ( @spamdude ) is a nice entertainment/education combo structure, and the new Decorative Tile is basically a blank slate that you can choose your own color for. Could be used to do pixel art on the grounds of your settlement.

Next up, @therealchromedino provides us with the new Bunker of Last Resort. This is a good structure to place somewhere in the center of your settlement, as it can be used to rebuild in the event that you are on a sever and your settlement gets raided by an enemy army.


The Bunker provides storage for basic building materials, minor housing, utility generation, can construct Builder Bots, has an attack rating slightly better than a pillbox, and an extreme amount of hit points. It is not indestructible, and a tank army would still be able to take it down, but it is a good insurance policy, and every major settlement should have at least one or two of these in the event of an emergency.

The big new structure in this update is the Ultra Deep Drilling Facility by @spamdude and to be honest, I could not afford to build it on the colony I was doing my game testing with, so it is possible that it will need to be tweaked a bit in the next update, just let me know in the comments what you all thing. It is an across the board stat improvement over the current Advanced Drilling Platform, and also provides Crystalline which the original one did not.

Ok so I think that is all of the major stuff in this update. For the next update (v0.37.0) I plan on adding Diamonds as a Lunar World exclusive resource, that will be obtained by excavating. There will also be new units/structures associated with the diamond trade. I think I am also going to have the "Online" version of the Player Mode at least somewhat functional for next update, possibly including the star gate travel between worlds (right now there are only 9 active Star Gates in the MC2 universe). So let me know what issues you find or suggestions you have, thank you to all who contributed artwork for this update, and stay tuned for more to come!

https://www.apewebapps.com/my-colony-2/

#mycolony2
1y
#2
Awesome update, cool features and quality of life improvements. I though really hope there can be performance improvements on certain parts of the game/engine, things of that nature. Now I know I have a mid-low end laptop (core i3 10th gen integrated CPU) laptop, but I've played a few games that are 3D with many objects/buildings that don't generally cause u to start lagging (15-25 fps) mid-game (with lowest settings), so it's important to know the efficiency of how the game runs so it's a performance convenience. I know I stressed this before, but I want to make sure this is done soon so that when there will be more content added, it wouldn't be made impossible to improve performance because of the architecture of the code.

Also, can u add a setting feature (just like in MC1) to turn off "big numbers to letters abrevs"? I like to see the full number with commas :)
Also, the encyclopedia things are a big help, would be appreciated by everyone for more stats!

Anyways, good update, good day.
1y
#3
dope
Boat enjoyer
1y
#4
Cood update!
Best of regards, Wastelander (formerly Architecture), Overlord and Designated Leader of the Earth States.

My Colony





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Ape Apps, LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein
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