Wanderlust update thoughts and suggestions

[itsthat1dude]

I'm not sure what I'm more excited about, the research UI or the caravan feature. They are both awesome features I've been wanting for a while. Altogether, the new update is wonderful.

With that said, I'm not following the logic behind Tynans' comments (in the Wanderlust youtube video) about the complexity and balance of having multiple colonies. Trust me, I love the game, and I appreciate the love the developers are putting into their project. However, isn't it the role of the developers to create the tools, and it's up to the player to decide what is and isn't "too complex?"

I understand that the goal has always been to recover from crash-landing and escape the planet to return to your home colony. But what if that's not what I want to do anymore? With these new features you have given the players the tools to actually have a completely "open world" experience - something most developers only claim to provide. Now, a player could create a trading network between multiple factions, they could make a kingdom with small outposts in different biomes (i.e. a farming outpost in a grasslands or a mining outpost in the mountains), we could make our own faction that takes over an entire territory, or the player could decide to expand and destroy all who oppose them on their journey to become emperor of this new world. This is all possible now with these new caravan/colony features!

Suggestions:

• Allow the player to up the amount of owned colonies until they decide they cannot manage more (or their PC resources run out).
• Democracy - When attacking a faction outpost, the player is given options. Such as No Democracy (jump straight to attacking) and Demands: the outpost either turnover resources or join your colony. The size, reputation, and combat skills of your faction determine the success rate of your demands. If the outpost is the Command Post (randomly designated), the player has an additional option to demand that the (entire) faction joins your faction. If they decline and the outpost is destroyed, a new faction outpost will take up the role of Command Post
• Command Center research tech:
  
  
  
  • Command Station - Designates a colony as the Command (primary) Post. This allows the player to review resources, colonist statuses, and Focus designation for all connected Outposts
  • Outpost Relay - Connects and Outpost to the Command Station network
  • *Focus - Designates the primary focus (objective) of a connected outpost. The Focus of the outpost becomes the only jobs performed by colonists while the player is not loaded into that outpost. If the Focus requires tools/workbenches they must be available in the outpost, else the colonists will be tagged as idle until the tools are provided. Since this would be handled on the backend and not actually rendered in to save resources, the Focus production is based on tier of tools provided, overall skill of the colonists, and ratio of working/hauling/idle colonists in the outpost. These focuses are configurable by the player using the same system the player designates the jobs a colonist performs.
  
  
  *Example default Focus: Farming
  
  
  
  • Must having farming plots/hydroponics and a designated storage
  • Colonists will concentrate only on farming while the player is not loaded into the outpost
  • Colonists without Farming skill will be considered as cleaning/hauling (if they have the skill)
  • Colonists will eat and rest as needed to maintain health
  • If the player loads into the outpost, colonists will resume their designated jobs assigned by the player
  
  
  What are your thoughts about the new update and this post?

[zandadoum]

1) already in the game. Go to options and set colonies from 1-5

If you're humanly capable to micromanage infestation+Sapper raid+evil ship on several colonies at once (happened to me, randy random max. diff. ) then you are a god and shouldn't be playing video games but curing cancer.

And if your PC can handle more than 5 fully grown colonies at once, you should donate it to the Berkeley university so they could calculate all their SETI data in 1 second.

[itsthat1dude]

I understand that the option is available through 5 colonies, I suggested unlimited.

I agree, it would be difficult to micromanage every colony, this is why I suggested the research for Command Post, Outpost, and Focus in order to focus on the outpost rather than each colonist in each outpost. Again, as I said, it would be handled in the backend and not rendered. Essentially you would monitor resources (generated over time based on stats) on a data sheet - unless you load into that colony. This would free up computer resources since the colony itself wouldn't be rendered unless you select and load into the outpost.

[cainiao]

But then there will be tons of problems like how should the data sheet get abstracted and what will happen when you out zoom in a lot of times, where are those newly priduced resources going to be etc. You make it sounds like an easy task to implement such idea where in reality it is very difficult to do.

[Mekhet]

Personally i´m not really interested in this multiple colony stuff because i like playing the same colony for long periods of time. I stopped playing most of the colonies due to the massive performance issues eg when 200 mech maggots spawn on the other side of the map and the game freezes for like 5 minutes before the creeps stutter towards my base with like 1 frame per 10 seconds. Same goes for the overall performance (thank you 2 million line <pawndata>), so if the general way to store information has not been overhauled i suppose the multiple colony thingy to me only shortens the time before the game is unplayable. In context of the aforementioned issue i´d rather not have Tynan adding depth to the multiple colony system.

But to address the focus idea: What would keep me from racing to the minimum necessary state to enable the colony for farming focus mode, grab a survivor and a crypto, move a tile away, set my focus there and watch my farming colony fill my storage with ressources - without any danger of being sick/overrun/going berserk. Okay that example may be a little extreme, let´s say it this way: what would keep players from outsourcing any farming / research task (how to handle mining ore anyway?) to colonies that are never endangered? Because if i´m informed correctly events can only occur on the active colony.

[aper]

I just want to be able to to choose a different map size every time a settle a new colony

so I could have a nice spacious map for my main colony, and small compact maps for my military or mining outposts

[taha]

Personally i´m not really interested in this multiple colony stuff because i like playing the same colony for long periods of time. I stopped playing most of the colonies due to the massive performance issues eg when 200 mech maggots spawn on the other side of the map and the game freezes for like 5 minutes before the creeps stutter towards my base with like 1 frame per 10 seconds. Same goes for the overall performance (thank you 2 million line <pawndata>), so if the general way to store information has not been overhauled i suppose the multiple colony thingy to me only shortens the time before the game is unplayable. In context of the aforementioned issue i´d rather not have Tynan adding depth to the multiple colony system.

Thank you!
Finally another person rising the same concerns.

That's why I have to play only on Ice Sheet (no wildlife and trees => less load on computer), and limit my colonies at 12-16 people. That's why I always play on small maps and never use traps.