This week, weve added more items, jobs and science to our internal dev build. Apart from that, weve also added the fundamentals of a pretty radical overhaul to gameplay: in 0.9.0, the monster threat will be mostly connected to your scientific/technological progress!

In all previous versions, the monster threat was solely connected to the amount of colonists you had recruited. Of course, this is a strong incentive to minimize the amount of colonists. In 0.9.0, we deliberately want to encourage rapid and sustained colony growth. To achieve this, increases in monster threat level will be mostly connected to scientific unlocks. There will be a number of key milestones like ushering in the bronze age or the iron age. In the science menu, these milestones display how much monster threat they add. In the top-right corner of the UI, the currently accumulated monster threat level is shown.

Weve been testing this system this week, and are happy with the results! It encourages a different style of gameplay. Instead of doing small improvements to your defenses every couple of nights, youre now really preparing for a big event. Another benefit is that it allows us to determine the pace better. In previous versions, inefficient players were punished pretty harshly. They needed more colonists, which attracted more monsters, which required more defenses and guards and ammo. Vice versa, very efficient players could reach the endgame with a pretty small number of colonists.

In 0.9.0, we can easily finetune the threat. If we want to add an end game milestone that attracts extreme numbers of monsters, requiring extensive defensive preparations, we can do so. Things like that werent possible before, and were looking forward to using these new abilities to their fullest amount.

[h3]The Previous Blog[/h3]

In last weeks blog, we wrote that we were starting from the ground up and totally reworking the tech tree, items and jobs. That resulted in some very concerned comments - youve already been working on this game for 4+ years and now youre going to start over?!

As soon as I read these comments, I realized that I hadnt properly explained the situation. Its not very intuitive. Technically, Colony Survival is a complex mixture of homemade systems and predefined standards. Its not always obvious how much effort it costs to change something. Its like replacing the same spelling error youve made 150 times in a 300 page text. That takes forever when youre dealing with handwritten notes, but it happens with the press of a button in the case of a digital text.

In some aspects, Colony Survival is a lot easier to change, adjust and improve than people think. In other aspects, changes are a lot harder to pull off. Our systems have been designed in a way that allows us (and modders!) to easily change things like crafting recipes (per job) and the tech tree. The main difficulty there is not weeks or months of difficult programming, but having a good idea for improved gameplay.

Those are the kind of things that are getting reworked from the ground up now. It should result in an entirely new and improved gameplay experience, but the development cost is relatively minimal. Most technical systems are working fine and were leaving them intact. A lot of old items and jobs are coming back in 0.9.0 as well - often with a twist. Problems like cooked fish not being a meal anymore will be fixed. We understand the concerns, but nobody has to worry that were pointlessly redoing all the systems in the game :)

Bedankt voor het lezen!

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