For some weeks now, we’ve been seriously considering implementing realistic logistics. We’ve been sharing the progress in our plans. This week, the team agreed on some basics, but we simultaneously discovered the full implications go a lot deeper.
Major New Consideration 1: Realistic Logistics Inside Colonies Or Not?
In last week’s blog, we mainly talked about logistics between colonies, with long paths marked by milestones and shipping routes. I assumed we also wanted realistic transport inside each colony, but Zun suggested that we could skip that. Current logistics could keep applying to “intra-colony-logistics”. This would make the start of the game easier for new players, and would in general just save a lot of hassle and performance. Transport in between colonies seems to be the more interesting challenge anyway.
But… the plans also involve making it easier to set up new colonies. We’re considering focusing the monster threat in one spot, making the rest of the world monster-free. That would make it a lot easier to “expand wide”, to build many colonies that are each relatively spread out (without the need to hide everything behind walls and moats). That contradicts the plan to only have realistic logistics between colonies.
A potential way out could be a wholly different approach to what constitutes a “colony”. Perhaps banners become a lot less important, and you just have Outposts, with smaller ranges than the current maximum banner range. In the “Outpost Range” logistics would be “magical” like they currently are in a colony, but in between Outposts, you’ve got to do realistic transport. This would be a pretty massive overhaul to the gameplay though! We’re very careful about making such big steps.
Major New Consideration 2: Designing New Production (& Consumption) Chains Around Logistics
While designing the “Guilders Plan” mentioned in the previous blogs, I was thinking about realistic societies. Societies where ultimately, most goods are used by individual consumers with relatively unstable, fluctuating needs. These consumers live spread out through the entire country and demand all kinds of different products that are produced in wildly different locations. One month a household orders a washing machine, the next month it needs a bicycle, and another month it buys a new laptop.
Do we want that in Colony Survival? Should the endgame look like a continent filled with many colonies, all relatively equal in size and importance, each one importing and exporting many goods to and from all other colonies? An alternative could be a hierarchy like the one in “The Hunger Games”: one rich and advanced Capitol, supplied by impoverished districts focused on specific industries like textiles and lumber. This would radically simplify the logistics system! Such a situation could do without Guilders and complex automated systems. Items flow from the outposts to the capital. There could be a “backflow” of tools and some other bare necessities, but that would be it.
This is going to be a huge update with consequences for all major systems. Production chains will change, the monster threat will change, the entire goal of the game will shift. There are plenty of good reasons to do so: we’re seeing a lot of opportunity for exciting new gameplay. But dealing with all edge cases, crossing all the t’s and dotting the i’s, is difficult. Scope creep is real. So once again, we’re asking for your input! How important is realistic logistics inside colonies, versus logistics between colonies? Would you prefer a complex network of interdependent colonies which requires automated systems to keep the balance, or do you think a hierarchical model with a capital supplied by outposts results in better gameplay? Let us know in the comments or on Discord!
Bedankt voor het lezen :D