The Arch Temple by Saphrax, again
When we recently tested Colony Survival we were shocked to discover two things:
- It’s possible to get pretty much to the endgame with only 100-150 colonists, while we want to encourage players to build colonies with at least 800-1000 colonists
- Different parts of the tech tree have wildly different ingredients and prerequisites: there isn’t really a big major production chain that can be improved and expanded from the start of the game to the end
As talked about before, we want to change this dramatically. It’s a major overhaul so we’re still thinking and debating about the details. One thing we keep mentioning again and again in our discussions is “exponential”.
You’ve probably noticed that your expansion accelerates as you keep playing the game. Going from 0 to 50 colonists takes longer than going from 300 to 350 colonists. This is one source of exponential progress.
But we also want to introduce industrial tech that speeds up your production, and we want to add the “Repeating Scientist” who can boost the efficiency of certain jobs over and over again. This means that you’ll be able to dramatically expand your production.
That leads to a pretty difficult problem. We need to find a useful, consistent goal for these enormous capabilities. Something that is relevant both before and after the industrial revolution. Here are a couple of the things we’re thinking about:
Textiles
Textiles were a key industry during the industrial revolution. They were obviously important before that period though, and still highly useful today. Currently, making a piece of cloth in Colony Survival goes very quickly, and it has only limited usefulness. We want to make the initial cost of a piece of cloth a lot higher (but with the ability to improve your production) while requiring more of it in your production chains.
Steel precision parts
Humans have used metals in general and iron in specific for a very long time. Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon that in real life is hard to produce on a large scale - it also took until the industrial revolution until that was possible, although it was invented a lot earlier. We want to make the process of developing steel in Colony Survival more difficult and expensive as well. Large amounts of it will be necessary to develop industrial machines.
Another part of the metalworking problem is making precision parts. Think of the complex machinery in clocks and guns. This is something else that we can make more expensive in the beginning, but with the possibility to scale it up dramatically with tools like the lathe.
Data
The production and sharing of data is something that has been growing on an exponential scale for a very long time now. Just look at this graph of the production of printed books a couple of centuries ago:
But that’s not a trend that is “over”, we’re still in the middle of rapid exponential progress. Here’s a graph of the current growth in digital data:
We hope we’re able to combine these trends into a satisfying long term gameplay loop in Colony Survival. Instead of jumping from one disjointed part of the tech tree to another with completely different requirements, and completing all useful science with only 120 colonists, we want to make it so that there’s a satisfying path of continuously expanding production - producing lots of textiles for lots of colonists who use many hundreds of complex, expensive machines that assist in the production of more of these machines and in the production of lots of data, which can be used to improve the colony as a whole. We hope this sounds as good to you as it does to us!
At the moment, these are still plans, not things we're currently working on. We're still busy improving the interface. Here are two work-in-progress screenshots of changed menus:
Bedankt voor het lezen :D