Messages

Oh God COD/CS is overflowing into my colony sim noooooo

"Magic, Fire Ball"
Bro your in a wrong game lets be really here
it's not a Fantasy game it's a sci-fi colony sim like you said.


If you want fire ball HAVE A FLAME THROWER !!

I believe what he meant was that the game is already set up to be similar to fantasy RPGs; he's not saying he wants magic fireballs in this game, he's saying that this game already has molotovs and grenades, which are like this game's own version of magic fireballs in fantasy RPGs. He's saying that the sci-fi weapons and skills we already know and love are analogous to fantasy tropes, and that means that this game is already on-track to become a sci-fi RPG.

I don't know if I explained it any better than he did, but no, he doesn't want fireballs

Another thing I'd like to see in the long-term is variable planet types. Who says your ship has to dump you onto a nice habitable planet with lots of food?

Possible settings:



• A snow planet where seeking shelter from the elements is an absolute priority, and exploration is dangerous until you research cold-weather gear. Finding a geothermal vent - underground, obviously - would feel like you struck gold! Maintaining solar equipment becomes a high priority, and while there aren't any lightning storms, meteor showers might be just as damaging! Fire obviously isn't as big of a problem in a place like this, but food is! That research into hydroponics is looking better all the time here!
  


• A planet with high volcanic and tectonic activity. Geothermal vents are plentiful, but building into a mountain is far more dangerous than any group of raiders, since a sudden tremor might cause the roof to collapse on you. Building outside is the safer option, but still poses risks, unless you research earthquake-proofing. Tremors aren't your only concern, either; rock formations larger than 9x9 tiles are possible magma vents which might rarely fire flaming projectiles in random directions, igniting vegetation and possibly setting fire to your colony, making research into advanced firefighting (or maybe an automatic fire-retardant system...not sprinklers, since it'd fry all your conduits/lamps/batteries/etc, but maybe like a CO2 system which would keep your place from burning down, but cause damage to any colonists trapped in the room which has now been deprived of oxygen).
  


• A planet with a toxic atmosphere. Again, seeking immediate shelter is an absolute priority (though, maybe you land here with basic space suits on which will let you breathe for a few days). In this case, you'll need to build oxygen scrubbers to keep your colony in clean air (maybe offer research to cut the energy usage in half), and planning the layout of your colony becomes an important detail - you need to create "airlock" rooms to keep the bad air out, and you may want to double-up on exterior walls since raider attacks come with a whole new danger (flooding your base with toxic air!). This is an extremely hostile environment, and while fire isn't a big problem (no oxygen for it to burn), there are still lightning strikes and meteor showers that can cause significant damage to anything outside (maybe this helps make the case for some lightning rods!). Geothermal vents are scattered around, but they are dangerous to claim and difficult to maintain, unless you build your base around them - the catch is that you'll only find them out in the open. This planet has very little activity going on underground, and while the surrounding hillsides are rich in useful ore, they offer little in the way of potential power supplies. On this planet, you'll find tons of ore, which will make building your base easier, and lead to great profits with traders, but you'll have to work for it, because until you seal up the opening you made in that hill and install an air scrubber to keep your mine breathable, you're working under some pretty dangerous conditions.
  


A system with multiple planet types might also open up an option for exploring and inhabiting multiple worlds. Perhaps you were eventually able to construct a new ship after you colonized the original Crashville, and sent a small group off to discover a new place. Thing is, the ship is pretty much a one-way trip (limited fuel to make room for more supplies, maybe?), so those guys are basically in the same boat you were in at the beginning of your game, and now you can manage multiple colonies on multiple worlds (you'd need to develop a new "galaxy map" interface for this to switch between them) and you could get updates on random events happening on one world while you're busy building on another.

Players who can't handle that level of management can stick with one or two colonies, and players who think they have what it takes to populate the galaxy can try to build as many colonies as they can handle. You could even set up trading links between the colonies by researching and building small, automated ships that shuttle between the colonies; that colony with endless supplies of ore will do a lot of good to the other colonies, and that colony on the lush world with tons of food will benefit the ice and toxic worlds, etc.

This could add a great deal of depth to the game

Better descriptions or reasons for "capturing" random wanderers for recruitment would be nice. As it is, the only real option is to "arrest" them, which makes me feel like a bad guy. Like, why am I "arresting" him? What'd he do, other than wander into my line of sight? I feel like The Mayor from Walking Dead - I'm kidnapping people and then brainwashing them into staying with me, forcing them to work for me and, if need be, to kill and die for me. That feels dirty.

Maybe instead of just "Arrest" there could be another option - "Invite". Has basically the same effect, but you'd need an open "colonist" bed instead of a "prisoner" bed. It could be based on a character's social skill (or possibly even the pleasantness of the unclaimed bedroom?); and maybe the wanderer is extremely likely to agree if he's unarmed, out of food and low on health - suddenly someone comes by and says "hey, we'll fix you up and give you a place to live if you'll come join our little colony", and he's all "hell yes, I'm dying out here". But maybe he feels like he's in okay shape, and your guy isn't very social, and he passes and continues on his way.

Then you have options (the golden word!): Try again, maybe with another character with higher social. Let him go. Or, you know...be the bad guy and arrest him for "trespassing"

Seems easy enough to implement - all the parts are already there, you just need to make some slight modifications to the system.

WhackyRavenLand - you basically asked for an RPG.
It's different genre.
Please, focus on a core of being colony sim instead of drifting away.

I know this was from forever ago, but I only just started playing this and joined the forums. Why can't it be both?

Seriously, I actually really like the idea of it being a combined colony sim+RPG (or, rather, a colony sim with RPG elements). What better way to help a player become more attached to their colonists than to allow even a small amount of customization? It doesn't have to be anything drastic or super-in-depth. Some basic inventory management to give them one item appropriate for their main duties (hoe for gardening, repair kit for maintenance, med kit for doctors) and one weapon (pistol for defense, rifle or shotgun if they're guards/soldiers) wouldn't be terribly out of line for a game like this, and some colony-wide perks could make things more fun, too.

Something like Age of Empires did where you spend resources to research better armor, faster resource gathering, stronger walls, etc. Even some basic individual perks would be neat; they already get better at doing certain jobs the more they do them (you can track this in each of their "Character" screens), so have a few "people" perks in the game that kick in when a colonist reaches a certain level in a certain skill. Reached level 10 in mining? 15% faster! Reached level 15? Chance to drop double the amount of metal if this person mines it!

Something like this could add a great deal of depth to the game, and give players a reason to assign specific jobs to specific people in their colony, and would help give each of the colonists more of a unique feel.

This post is much longer than it needs to be, but I believe in being thorough about my problem descriptions, and I like to provide solid justification for in-depth changes What I'm proposing is a pretty tall order with some significant work involved, but when your game is so heavily based on combat, I think it's necessary. You can look at a lot of games for inspiration (you mentioned JA2 - you might also take a look at Fallout: Tactics).


I'd like to see some basic scaling added to the damage system. Currently, it seems like a weapon has a damage stat (like, say, a pistol does 10 damage per successful hit), and no matter what the person using that weapon is aiming at, it does that amount of damage every time it hits.

This is problematic from both a gameplay and realism/immersion standpoint. The example I'll use is Raiders VS Turrets. Now, I don't know if it's intentional or if it's even going to stay this way, but the current art direction makes auto-turrets look HUGE; like, compared to the colonists, a turret is the size of a small sedan. Which is fine, until you encounter one or two Raiders armed with pistols.

Here's a very common scenario I ran across in my game - on one side of the map is a common spot for the game to spawn in Raiders. This spot sort of funnels the Raiders toward one exposed side of my compound where they immediately make a beeline to the walls and the door there. Using their AI to my advantage, I set up two turrets on either side of the door, surrounded by double-walls of sandbags. I removed almost all of the rock rubble from the area, except for a few that were well within the turrets' range, inviting the Raiders to take cover in carefully-chosen spots which provided my turrets otherwise unobstructed views at the Raiders. Sometimes I would set blasting charges near these spots, but that becomes a decision about how close to the rocks do I set the charges? Too close and I'll destroy the rocks, too far away and I won't kill the Raider. Also, the charges cost resources, and they're a one-use item which may not outright kill the Raider, so they may be a complete waste, and if they destroy the rocks, they cause me problems and...well, you can see why I'd prefer to let the turrets deal with Raiders whenever possible, right?

So here's the problem - more than once, a single Raider with a pistol kills both turrets, and the resulting explosion takes out the door they're supposed to be guarding, causes a short in the wall conduit and possibly destroys other things within the compound, starts fires, injures colonists...all from a single guy with a pea-shooter. Wait, what? A single guy marches across what should be a killing field, destroys two car-sized machine gun turrets, blows a hole in a metal wall and causes untold damage and destruction...with a pistol? In this scenario, the rocks behind which the Raiders would take cover were a good 10-15 tiles away from the turrets, which means these Raiders with pistols are engaging my turrets from as far as 18 tiles away. Assuming a single tile is roughly 2 meters squared, these guys, while under withering machine gun fire, are destroying my turrets from nearly 40 meters away with a pistol, and often take little to no damage themselves while doing it. From a realism and immersion standpoint, I'm not buying it. From a gameplay standpoint, I'm frustrated.

There needs to be some basic scaling to damage, based on weapon type, distance to target and, most importantly, what the target is. Simply put, a single guy with a handgun should not be capable of killing my gigantic metal machine gun turret from such a long distance before my turret can turn him into Swiss cheese...especially two turrets.

So, finally on to my solution!

• Base damage from small-arms weapons like pistols, shotguns and rifles needs to be variable. I.e., Pistols do 1-10 base damage. Shotguns do 5-15 base damage. Lee-Enfield Rifles do 10-20 base damage. Etc.
• Base damage to the target needs to be affected by other variables.
  
  
  
  • What is the target made of? Is it a squishy meat-sack person? Is it a big solid metal turret? Is it a metal wall? Is it an easily-punctured sandbag? Is it a fragile solar generator? Is it a volatile battery? Stronger materials/more solid construction = less damage taken.
  • How far away is the shooter from the target? Longer distance = less damage taken and a better chance to strike cover rather than the target (in the case of pistols and shotguns).
  • Is the shooter actually skilled with weapons? Just because he's a Raider doesn't mean he's a good shot - farming oafs shouldn't be as deadly as, say, an assassin.
• Weapons need more realistic effective ranges, with both accuracy and damage affected by how far away the shooter is to their target. Pistols in real life have a max effective range of between 30-50 meters, and that's pushing it, and very subjective based on barrel length (accuracy), caliber (accuracy/range) and shooter ability (accuracy/range). The stopping power (damage) of rounds at those ranges drastically decreases as well; I've actually seen 9mm bullets bounce right off of plywood targets (landing on the tarp I had laid out in the grass) and seen plastic targets on handgun ranges actually "catch" bullets rather than the bullets passing through them like they're supposed to. Small-caliber handguns are NOT powerful - certainly not enough to cause significant damage to something like a giant metal machine gun turret from 40 meters away. Shotguns scale even worse, unless significant modifications are made like adding longer barrels, chokes and using high-grain slugs, and even then you're pretty limited - a slug is just a giant, heavy ball of metal, and doesn't travel very far before losing most of its energy.

If I were scaling the above scenario, pistols wouldn't do more than 1-2 damage per successful hit to the turret from those ranges, and shotguns probably wouldn't do more than 5. If they want to engage me from that far away, they need to be packing more than pea-shooters

I'm in complete agreement with all of this. Perhaps a new area (under "Orders" similar to "Home Area") called "Patrol Area" where you can designate an area as important (along with a new column in the "Overview" called "Patrol") so that those people you select as patrolling guards will make occasional rounds to those areas (or hang out in those areas in shifts) to provide a quick reaction force for when raiders decide to try to set your generators on fire or something.