Make Faction Colonies behave more like Colonies, more interactions

[Pushover]

Right now, colonies are effectively trade ships that don't move. Every so often (seems to be about once a season), they get an new inventory, reset their silver, etc. Anything they had before is gone, just like encountering another trade ship. This doesn't really make sense for a long term colony. Colonies should act in ways similar to what the player does, which is sell what they can produce, and purchase what they cannot.
Some general, fairly easy rules:
All colonies in forests sell Wood.
All colonies in Mountains sell stone blocks appropriate to their terrain.
All colonies with a short/no growing season buy food, all colonies with year-round growing sell food.
All colonies sell Leathers/Furs based on the native animals.
Colonies with hot summers will purchase Dusters and Cowboy Hats for a slightly better price, colonies with cold winters will purchase Parkas and Tuques for a slightly better price.

Colonies can also have a few goods that they continually produce. Maybe one colony produces Smokeleaf, Flake, Go-Juice, Beef, Milk, and Artwork, and another colony produces Weapons, Armor, Clothing, Medicine, and Neutroamine. These goods you could buy (and sell) for cheaper than the usual price (10-20% discount buying, 10-20% less silver selling). Some goods would be 'in demand' and carry a 10-20% markup for your selling purposes.

This would make it so travelling to the right colony would provide you with good trade deals for yourself. Currently, you are not much better off just waiting for a trade ship, or calling a caravan to you. As a result, there is very little value in forming a caravan to travel more than tiny distances.


One other suggestion for colonies would be to add events requesting some goods. Maybe one colony, 40 tiles away, experienced a blight at a bad time, and is willing to make a one time 3000 silver payment for 100 meals, if you can deliver them within a season. Or maybe they have had a plague outbreak, and need medical supplies, and are willing to trade Plasteel and Components for medicine. Fulfilling the request would grant a boost with standing with the faction, and/or maybe a mapwide mood boost to your colonists (+5, we helped others in need).

[RolanDecoy]

I like this one, feels a lot more like the X-Universe and it makes sense; Get an actual economy going where colonies in one area / biome have a natural deficit in a given amount of resources, and other colonies have other deficits; Motivate trade and interaction. That would of course also mean that not every colony sells wood (or at least tiny amounts), depending on the biome, temperatures, etc.

It should also be reasonably simple to implement. Just recalculate the stockpiles of each colony every 5 ~ 15, maybe once a season, 5 colonies a day (just to name an arbitrary number), spread it out so it's doesn't affect gameplay that much.

I agree, there is currently little to no incentive to form caravans, even if you're playing a game for the long run (more than 3 years or so) or decide to settle, which means it just seems a missed opportunity or underdeveloped mechanic in its current state.

Maybe one could buy information from passing caravans to get a sense of the prices of nearby settlements.

[Pushover]

A few more ideas for (colony independent) reasons to travel:

Mechanoids set up a psychic drone area nearby, if left unchecked, the number of tiles and intensity of the drone increase.

An AI controlled ship lands, unloading new colonists if you make the journey to the ship. It is not taking on new passengers. Perhaps the AI needs components or uranium in exchange.

A huge herd of muffalo is migrating, you can try to catch up to them and hunt them, but this may anger the tribals (not to mention muffalo revenge)

A colony has uncovered some ancient ruins, you can come over and explore the ruins, which has art, gold, and other rare stuff, but the area is infested with bugs. Raiders also are taking an unhealthy interest in the area.

[Barazen]

I like all these ideas so far, how would you make them play nice with the storytellers though?

[RolanDecoy]

Escalation. The story teller already has the ability to create global events (solar eclipse, solar flares, etc) and local events (raid, caravan / visitor arriving, etc). So what they would need is the ability to create regional event; Events that happen in say chunks of say 7 or 8 world tiles (or an arbitrary size of the developers choosing), and the ability to point to a specific world tile what is the cause of a long-term event.

Then it's a matter of spreading by detail; The more resolution you need, the more time your invest in generating or otherwise handling a situation. So on a local scale (the world tile your settlement is in) things would run real-time. In a regional scale, you'd only update once a minute or so, and on a global scale you'd update once every 5 or 10 minutes. You spread the computational time you need to do whatever it is you need to do and because you're using a timer for that the storyteller can decide whether or not the regional event (say a hive) spawns a local event and if so what that event will be (a raid by manhunting insects for instance).

From what I understand the storytellers have a fixed interval to check whether or not they want to act (roll of the dice), and if so, how they want to act (tech level, amount of settlers, equipment and block checks and what not to determine difficulty or whatever). All this would require is saying that every so many acts should include a check if there is a regional event already in place, and if not do we want to create one? And If there is, do we want the local event to be related? If not generate a normal one. If so, create a new one based on the parameters of the regional event, with all the difficulty checks and some such you'd do with a normal event.

Essentially, you make them play nice by basing them on and building them around the storyteller.

I dunno, I'm just thinking out loud now (damn you, now you've gotten me all excited) ;-)

[Keychan]

I love the approach Tynan is going with caravans and with this update I know that it will be fleshed out even more.  With your suggestions above with the faction's colony location, needs, and productions I think there should be colony types too.  Like how we choose to play our colonies, other factions have their own lifestyles. For example:

A colony's type should reflect their bases layouts, products even more, and their raiding behavior (if you were to anger/raid them)

Warring (Some pirates could be these) - This colony is all about battles, wars, and conflict.  Whether it's for raiding or defending purposes, this colony has quality weapons and armor available or spoils of war for sale.  Only faction that may be enemies with others.  This type of colony also may pay for more for food/weapons(if you see a shortage)/medicine.  Also very dangerous to pick a fight with.

Farming - Abundance in food and massive farms (appropriate to location).  Would pay more for medicine (always better than healroot), weapons, and armor.  Won't have the strongest offensive capabilities, but their defense may be tough. (Maybe farm animals fight alongside the farmers?)

Trading - This colony is usually well supplied with goods, but they always have an eye out for good quality art/weapons/furniture.  Don't expect too many fighters, but know that they will be really well equipped. Raids = 1-7 respectively (Power Armor + Personal shield + platsteel longsword for example)

Scavenging (pirates will usually be these) - Poor colonies that would love to buy from you, with whatever junk they found you willing to pay for.  They usually have garbage for sale, but will occasionally sell ancient artifacts they find for a cheap price.  Will pay more for about anything but art and furniture, but will have very low silver to pay with.  Expect regular pirate fighting strength, usually bad, but random.

[Barazen]

(Thats what i'm here for hehe)

I like it these ideas though, hopefully tynan gets to see it before it gets buried haha

Keychan, i see where your going with that but it doesn't strike me as quite right... the idea is solid but seems off somehow... i cant quite place it, maybe if you could give an example of how each settlement in a faction would play together? Like, would a farm settlement from the buffalos call their military settlement dor a counter raid or protection?

[RolanDecoy]

this colony has quality weapons and armor available or spoils of war for sale.  Only faction that may be enemies with others.

Actually, I think you're confusing factions with colonies there.

I do kind of like the idea of only some settlements (colonies) being allowed to engage a battle, but defending really depends on who is in a settlement and is willing and able to defend it. In the game, as it stands, anybody can help defend, but it's often not the best idea to send just anybody to attack a target settlement. Your main scientist for example may very well have a passive stance (forgot the name of the emotional stat) and refuse to carry any arms, but can still construct a trap, turret or barrier, or assist in the defense in some other manner (carrying casualties to the infirmary for instance).

[Pushover]

I like all these ideas so far, how would you make them play nice with the storytellers though?

For many of them, you could ignore the event and it goes away, like how thrumbos can be ignored. Others do not need to be an immediate threat, but need to be answered when your colony finds the time. Fills a similar position to toxic fallout, where it's a bad event that requires a response, but the response can wait a little while.

[RolanDecoy]

That addresses an attack in and by itself, but how would you handle the overall 'politics' on the global scale?

[Pushover]

That addresses an attack in and by itself, but how would you handle the overall 'politics' on the global scale?

What do you mean? You might get a boost in rep with a faction if you help them out, or lose influence if you say you will help, but fail to deliver on goods. You may get a boost for defeating a pile of Mechanoids that were causing a psychic drone. You might lose rep from tribals for hunting too many muffalo.

As for what reputation does beyond the current system, I'll leave that up in the air.

[RolanDecoy]

As for what reputation does beyond the current system, I'll leave that up in the air.

Exactly, and at the moment there is no current system (as far as I know). There is a global system, that is based on factions, but there is not interaction between settlements. There is no sense that the player(s settlement) is part of a larger world that has it's own dynamics regardless of what the player may decide to do.

That's what I meant with 'feels a lot more like the X-Universe', wherein each sector has a certain expertise, be it mining or farming or construction of space ships or production of weapons, etc aside from each sector belonging to one race or another and the political / military frictions between them.

And all these sectors trade with eachother, regardless or because of the players action. Right now we only see the 'because', and we're hoping for a 'regardless', so you have a world economy to participate in, and factions gaining and losing territory in a struggle for power and resources. In every game from that series you could play for hours and sense the economy breathing, and participate in it through trade or production or disrupting supply lines, etc. And again, this was 1994...(or some such, couldave been 1996).

[Pushover]

I view it as your faction is a newly arrived faction (crashlanded), so you only have the 1 settlement. The other colonies have already been here a while, and have aligned into a few leagues. I'd love to see more different factions based around regions, like you say (so to the south, you have area controlled by 2 different warring tribes, to your east you have pirates, and to your north and west, you have outlander colonies, for example. However, I view that as a separate system from making individual colonies act more like colonies. There's a massive design space around making a more 'alive' world, but I view world-local events and making colonies behave closer to colonies as the lowest hanging fruit to making the world feel more 'alive'. Adding global conflict will take dev time and processing time, (unless you can think of a computationally simple system) and will not affect decision-making or gameplay much, IMO (if you have ideas for this, feel free to suggest them!).

I view each colony like a Greek city-state. They are independent from each other, but also friendly with each other, and pass news and goods between themselves. That said, if you help a colony, I view it as you helping the faction as a whole. After all, the mayor of that town would probably report back that your faction was quite helpful.

[RolanDecoy]

(if you have ideas for this, feel free to suggest them!)

I already have using a tried and proven method in use for over 20 years... read previous responses...

[NeverPire]

One other suggestion for colonies would be to add events requesting some goods. Maybe one colony, 40 tiles away, experienced a blight at a bad time, and is willing to make a one time 3000 silver payment for 100 meals, if you can deliver them within a season. Or maybe they have had a plague outbreak, and need medical supplies, and are willing to trade Plasteel and Components for medicine. Fulfilling the request would grant a boost with standing with the faction, and/or maybe a mapwide mood boost to your colonists (+5, we helped others in need).

I propose for this suggestion to don't use a event windows but to create a red light or something similar on the communication consol to simulate a call from the colony in need.