The Colony

[Earendel]

The idea of this mod is to add a planetside colony that grows organically. The role of the player is to build a factory as normal, except that there are additional requirements set by the colony which the player should also attend to.

The player is referred to as the 'Engineer'.

If the Engineer does not adequately protect the colonists and keep them satisfied then the Engineer will be retired / decommissioned (game over).

The colony buildings would be a mix of residential buildings and services.

Colony buildings will spawn civilian units (friendly humanoid biters) which do little more than get in the way. They have some insignificant combat ability but basically to you have to protect them.
If colonists or colony buildings are destroyed you lose colony satisfaction.

If the colony grows you gain satisfaction.

The colony will grow on its own, destroying other buildings if required to make room. You can avoid this by placing buildings before there is the need for them. Having to build around the colony is part of the challenge.

The colony will periodically give you quests to secure the site for a new remote settlement. You will have to eliminate any hostile threats near the coordinates before a new colony building tries to spawn there. You will then have to help defend the new settlement.

The colony will have resource demands specified as quotas. The quotas will be proportional to your base's historical production capacity. The types of items required will vary from time to time, swinging from higher to lower tier items, occasionally being strongly biased towards copper, iron, or oil-heavy items or other things designed to disrupt the normal resource balance of a base. Meeting the quote increases colony satisfaction, falling behind decreases it.

Additional colony-specific items would be added such as food, furniture, luxury items, and other things you might expect in a colony management game.

Service buildings would come in a few styles. Some are essentially an assembly machine where you can feed in resources to not lose colony satisfaction. Some are like beacons that just require power and increase satisfaction in a radius.

Some civilian buildings will generate items such as exotic goods or passengers of a certain type. Passengers for example would be of a certain type (blue, yellow, etc). You should try to deliver blue passengers to blue residential areas (which are usually in a different settlement than the one that generated them), however, each residential area ends up with a capacity. The idea is that you end up with a train network taking passengers to various residential stations until there is a place to unload passengers of that type.

More specific quests would be triggered later, such as launch a rocket within X hours, then launch Y rockets in X hours, kill Y enemy bases in X hours, etc.

There will be a number of difficulty settings that changes the colony growth rate, quota sizes, rocket launch time frames, etc.



Anyone have any more ideas to add to the mix?
Anyone interested in helping build this mod?
I don't have enough time right now to lead a project of this size but I can work on sections and can probably do all of the artwork.

[Adil]

Quite a game within game it is.
It will take not as much of coding as of the time spent on thinking it all trough, designing.
There was also the lifepod mod, it is somewhat relevant here. I've ended up disabling that one as it wasn't fitting well balance-wise with the other mods. So, yes, a lot of forethought will be needed.

[Jalleo]

Is this sort of in the same regard as Offworld Trading Company in terms of the colony aspect idea because that would be a interesting way to have it.

[Earendel]

That lifepods mod looks really interesting.

I was thinking somewhere between that, Offworld Trading Company, and Aven Colony.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I like the idea that the natives may be intelligent beings. In too many works of fiction, only the humanoids are intelligent. I want to see more intelligent non-humanoid animals, more like real life. I think we can all agree that biters, leopards, and many other intelligent creatures are people too.

[Earendel]

I like the idea that the natives may be intelligent beings. In too many works of fiction, only the humanoids are intelligent. I want to see more intelligent non-humanoid animals, more like real life. I think we can all agree that biters, leopards, and many other intelligent creatures are people too.

I agree.

A mod with brain bugs like starship troopers would be great, they could organise other biters. It's quite a different concept to The Colony though.

[thereaverofdarkness]

I wasn't even thinking that. That's a cool idea as well, but I was picturing the biters are just people who are very different from humans. Perhaps where we are industrialists, they are ecologists. The player could either clash with them and use industry to defeat them, or partner with them and learn how to build and gain things without harming the environment. Of course industry is far more powerful than ecology, but ecology makes far fewer enemies and is much more sustainable.

But the biters aren't interested in massive scale production. Their goals don't align with your goals. You might be able to be completely friendly with them, but at the cost of likely never building a spaceship and leaving the planet. On the other hand, if you strain your relationship with them, it may become difficult to repair it. This could add an element of gameplay to explore, perhaps even giving the player access to fear and control mechanics they can use to try and convince biters to leave them alone. Of course the ol' turret defense is always a simple option for the less explorative player.



Your idea of assisting a colony paints a different picture, however. You would be collaborating with them, assumingly for mutual gain. Maybe the biters aren't ecologists, but have their own special interests? The player could explore this and choose whether to agree or disagree with them, possibly being able to find common ground and use it to player advantage.

[Earendel]

Well this is taking the thread off on a tangent but at least it's an interesting one.

You could have a set of different factions that behave somewhat like the current biters in peaceful mode. By default you're neutral with all of them, but that will change once you start building stuff.
The factions could be things like: Biter, humans, robots, etc.
Based on what you build, different factions will become hostile because they have different values. If you go eco-heavy then you could be allied with biters against robots. There would probably need to be mods that let you make a base 'the biter way' with organic structures and stuff.

[thereaverofdarkness]

That's a pretty cool idea! I like it!


I think I'm seeing two ways this can go:

Path 1
Ecology: ally with ecology faction, gain ecology units
Industry: ally with industry faction, gain industry units


Path 2
Ecology: less work done, less enemies made
Industry: more work done, more enemies made


Perhaps also both paths could be explored at once. Maybe ecology faction units are fundamentally weaker, however they are the more formidable opponent. If you side with them, the main advantage is not being on their bad side, but if you side against them you'll be stronger as long as you can survive.