Last week, we explained how we could add happiness to the game. I'm pretty sure we didn't have a single negative response! The idea seems to be pretty popular, and we're pretty sure we're going to add it in 0.7.0.
We've been thinking about the full consequences of adding happiness, and we ran into some inevitable mathematical problems. It's pretty difficult to explain, but I believe it's pretty interesting, and we'd like to explain why we make certain choices.
The first concept you need to understand is "required colonists". To stay alive, you need food, ammo, and guards. If you lack one of these three, your colony will inevitably collapse. Let's say roughly 1 in 7 colonists needs to be a guard, 1 in 7 colonists will need to produce food, and 1 in 7 colonists needs to produce ammo. This results in the next graph:
The dark green line is the total "required colonists" to stay alive. The black line is the total amount of colonists. The space in between them represents the amount of colonists that can be dedicated to non-essential tasks, like research, producing large amounts of cosmetic blocks and digging giant holes.
For colonies with less than 100 colonists, these colonists might not be essential to keep the colony alive in the next 24 hours, but they are essential for research and to gather resources for a basic fort. From 100 to 300~500 colonists, most people still manage to find purposeful work for their colonists. But larger colonies often have a surplus of 'useless' colonists. We often see entire skyscrapers full of farmers while the colony already has a 150K food surplus. It's where the game becomes less challenging and more repetitive.
We've been thinking of how to prevent this for a long time, but we didn't want to add arbitrary requirements. It's very frustrating if your colony collapses because arbitrary item '25C' isn't present.
The happiness idea as explained last week fixes the issue above, but if implemented exactly as described, it'll inevitably destroy itself. Here's the math:
- every new colonist adds +1 to global unhappiness
- this can only be countered by providing every colonist with new happiness items
- as your colony expands, the total amount of required happiness items grows both because every new colonist needs those items, but also because every colonist needs more items as the colony grows and unhappiness increases
Here's the problem visualized in a graph:
The green line in the graph represents the 3 out of every 7 colonists that are required for food and defense. As your colony grows, you'll need to add a happiness item like tea to counter the unhappiness generated by new colonists. Let's say, as a hypothetical number, that 1 out of every 7 colonists needs to produce tea now. Not a problem, you've still got 3 per 7 colonists left to do other tasks. But keep adding required happiness jobs, like colonists who produce coffee and chocolate, and you'll reach a hard limit. If 7 out of 7 colonists are required to work to merely sustain the colony, there's no room for growth and creativity. And it's of course impossible to require 8 out of every 7 colonists to do essential work, but that's where last week's proposal inevitably leads.
The graph above compares the total amount of "required colonists" to sustain your colony, and as you can see, it quickly surpasses the total amount of colonists in your colony. Which means the game becomes impossible.
Instead of requiring 1 out of every 7 colonists to produce, we could make it so that 1 colonists can produce enough tea for 20 or even 50 colonists. But this would mean that happiness is a barely relevant mechanic at the start of the game, and it wouldn't fundamentally solve the problem. It would just occur later in the game. We're thinking of a 3-tier solution.
Tier 0
These are the standard jobs, without upgrades. They produce too little to keep up with the many demands of a large colony.
Tier 1
Tier 1 will be productivity improvements. They'll be done by the scientist. In the past, we were opposed to productivity improvements, because larger colonies had an excess of colonists anyway. In 0.7.0, they'll be fundamental to your Colony's Survival. You'll have to improve the productivity of certain jobs to prevent the red line from crossing the black line in the graph above. For example, the output of flax farmers could be increased from 100% to 200% (or more!) in multiple steps, so you'll need less colonists to produce clothing. The same improvements can be applied to others who gather and process resources.
Tier 2
While Tier 1 is focused on optimizing existing jobs, Tier 2 adds new jobs. We don't want these jobs to completely replace older jobs, but they'll dramatically optimize a part of the production line. Let's use clothing as an example again. Currently, the tailor turns both flax into linen, and multiple pieces of linen into clothing. We could add a new job where a colonist uses a machine to quickly turn a significant amount of flax into a significant amount of linen. Your tailors will still be required to turn linen into clothing, but they can now completely focus on this complex task, while simpler tasks have been outsourced to colonists with machines.
1893 weaving machine, source
We'll try to apply the same principle to more jobs. The Tier 2 jobs might require electricity, to differentiate them from other jobs and to reward players for setting up an electricity network.
Tier 3
Ultimately, with the solutions above, we will still hit a limit where the colony can't produce enough happiness to fuel growth. And we know there's a lot of people who just want to recruit as many colonist as possible, even when they've run out of content. That's why we'll certainly add some kind of "infinite research", that for example improves the happiness produced by happiness items by 2% every time the research is completed. It'll cost a lot, to keep large colonies occupied :)
So, this is how we want to keep the game challenging for colonies with ~250+ colonists. You'll have to explore the world and utilize new inventions to balance happiness and productivity. We'd love to know what you think about it!
How to mail
We've been thinking for a while now that we should set up some sort of mail system. We'd like people to be able to subscribe to five kinds of updates:
- A mail every time we release a Friday Blog
- A mail every time we release a smaller update like 0.6.3
- A mail every time we release a larger update like 0.7.0
- A mail once we leave Early Access
- A mail every time the game is on sale
I can imagine there are a lot of people who don't read every Friday Blog, but who would want to be notified when there's an update. The system above would be very useful for them.
There are a lot of services online where you can set up a system to mail large amounts of people. Nearly all of them seem to be meant for people who want to spam as many people as possible with fancy newsletters, and they become very expensive once you've got a lot of subscribers. There are cheaper alternatives, but they require you to set up your own cloud server, which seems a bit like overkill. We're now thinking that an RSS system might be ideal, but our ears are open to other solutions :)
Our biome suddenly turned tropical
We live in the north of the Netherlands. That's less than 200 km/125 miles south of Scandinavia. When it's 25°C / 77°F here, it's considered to be pretty hot. It's seldom much warmer than that, so we don't have air conditioning.
The prediction for today is 36°C / 97°F. That's very close to the highest temperature ever recorded in the Netherlands. For some reason, it's hotter here than anywhere else in Europe. It's chilly in Spain, Italy and Greece, compared to the Netherlands. It has been pretty hot here for weeks now, and they're predicting it'll stay like this for another couple of weeks. We're not sure why the weather gods are displeased with this country!
Despite this, we've continued to work to the best of our ability. We've made good progress on the "behind the scenes" systems that are required to make multiple colonies function. The Progress Meter from previous blogs is pretty outdated, now that we've decided to change our plans for 0.7.0. We'll make a new Progress Meter for next week's Friday Blog!
Bedankt voor het lezen!