Age of Wonders: Planetfall – Dev Diary #18: Colony Development Part II

[LennartGS]

Hi there, welcome to this week’s Planetfall Journal! In this follow up to Colony Development Part I, we’ll be looking at Colonists, Growth, Happiness, Food and the Colony Defenses.

Some of this content is quite detailed - we wrote this journal along with entries for the Imperial Archives - and note that some of these features are for experienced players. You don't need to micro manage colonists or to deal with food sharing in a more causal game. But if you want to, there is a new layer of economic gameplay waiting for you.

It is a bit of a text-heavy journal; for the people expecting a DVAR Journal I added a small teaser at the end!

Colonists

A growing, happy population is essential for re-colonizing the worlds of the Star Union, as population drives the economic performance and the sector expansion of your colonies. Population units are called Colonists, and range from 1 from the smallest outposts to about 20-25 for the largest metropolises.

Income from colonies is divided into two types. “Flat income” originates from buildings and resource nodes and does not scale with the number of Colonists. The second type, “Per Colonist Income” is determined by the number of Colonists assigned to a particular Resource type. By turning on manual Colonist Management, players can fine tune their colony’s output and adjust to sudden shifts in demand.

A Colony’s population count is visualized next to the Colony’s name on the world map, Colonist allocation per resource is accessed from the Colonist Management Tab in the Colony Interface.

Colonist Growth

A growing population of colonists increases economic output and allows colonies to Annex more Sectors. The Colony Size and Sector Limit is directly determined by the number of Colonists.

A colony’s food income drives growth. Food is collected each turn, when the total amount of food collected reaches the colonist acquisition threshold a new colonist is created. The colonist acquisition threshold is gradually raised as the colony gains more colonists.

Popups have breakdowns explaining the mechanics behind growth.
A new colonist arrives in 1 turn, but a riot will break out in 9 turns if no action is taken.​

The total number of Resource Slots in a colony determines the natural growth limit. By Annexing additional Sector and producing Buildings you can increase the number of Resource Slots. If by special circumstance a colony has more colonists then resource slots, the remaining colonists will become idle. Ide Colonists cost upkeep, but do not generate any income.

Colonists have an upkeep cost of both Happiness and Food, so care must be taken not to grown a colony too fast, as that can lead to Rioters and Starvation.

Colonists have an upkeep cost of 2 Food and 1 Happiness. If the food income of the colony drops below 0 in the colonist growth pool, a colonist will starve and be removed from the colony.


Food

Food is a per colony Resources and drives Colonist Growth upkeep, which in turn leads to Colony Expansion and higher economic income. Food is also required for colonist upkeep.

Food can be shared between colonies through Food Sharing.


Food Sharing

Food Sharing allows players to distribute Food between their colonies to support colonies with low food income. This way players can help fledgling colonies grow faster, or prevent starvation at colonies that have come under attack.

Food sharing is managed individually per colony, via the income tab in the colony interface. Here a player can set whether they want the colony to take food or share food and to what degree.

Food sharing is set to Prevent Deficit by default, meaning the colony will take food until it’s food income is 0, and will not give away food. If all colonies are set to Prevent Deficit, no Food sharing will occur.

Food Sharing Popup​

Colonist Expansion

To exploit the environment around your Colony Center, you need to Annex sectors as Provinces. Annexing a sector will attach it to a Colony. The number of Sectors a Colony can administer is dependent on the number of Colonists.

Colonists Sector Limit Colony Name

1-5 2 Outpost
6-10 3 Town
11-15 4 City
16+ 5 Metropolis

Sectors can only be annexed by a colony if they are within two sectors of the Colony Center,

as well as being adjacent to another sector of that same colony. Once attached to a colony, the economic potential of a sector can be harnessed.

Colony Happiness

Happiness indicates how content the population of a particular colony is with their life. Positive happiness can lead to economic boosts, while negative happiness can lead to riots.

The happiness income of a Colony is added to a happiness pool at the end of each turn. When the happiness pool reaches the Happiness Event threshold a happiness event occurs.

In case of negative happiness income, the income is subtracted from the happiness pool instead. With enough negative income subtracted from the happiness pool, an Unhappiness Event will occur. Once either a happiness or unhappiness event has occurred, the happiness pool will be set to 0.

Happiness thresholds grow together with the number of Colonists in a colony. The more colonists a colony has, the harder it is for happiness events to occur, and the easier it is for unhappiness events to occur.

# colonists Base Threshold (positive / negative)

3 30 / -30
10 50 / -20
14 70 / -10



Colonist Management

Colonists are automatically managed by default. The manager will even out colonists over the resource channels (pending slot availability) and will prevent both Food and Happiness deficits.

Auto Colonist Manager - Sufficient for most situations​

Using the Colonists Tab in the Colony Interface, experienced players can fine-tune their colony’s output and adjust to sudden shifts in demand. The player has two options to influence Colonist Management. In Automatic Mode, players can set a focus on individual resources. The colony will prioritize these resources, but will keep avoiding deficits. A resource can also be deprioritized, meaning their resource slots will be the last to fill. Colonists will be equally distributed over resource slots with the same focus.

Colonists can be manually assigned by turning the auto-system off. This gives full control over where colonists are placed via arrows per resource, which can add or subtract colonists from resource slots.

Full Manual Mode for the micro-managers​

Happiness and Riots

Happy colonies will gain economic boosts from their colonists as a reward. On the other side, colonies with negative Happiness will upset their colonists, resulting in riots.

Happiness events boost the income of a randomly picked Resource (energy, food, production or research) by a base value of 300% for a single turn.

Unhappiness events can occur when happiness drops too low in a colony. Unhappiness events lead to Rioters.

Through Unhappiness Events and hostile Operations, some colonists can become Rioters. Rioters remain in their assigned resource slot, but do not produce any upkeep, and cannot be moved.

Continued negative happiness income will increase the amount of Rioters. You can curb Riots by swinging happiness back to a positive value. For every 20 accumulated happiness one rioter will removed. Another is imposing Martial Law, which will also remove Colonists over time at the cost of economic penalties.

A good leader doesn’t allow his Colonies to turn out like this (sorry just showing off some new skeleton props, its Halloween after all)​

Colony Defenses

In addition to regular armies, colonies can defended by a number of colony upgrades.

Colony Militia Defenses

Colony Militia spawns units that only appear during battles when the Colony Center itself, or the bases of its province bases are attacked. This means that all colonies have a basic defense force and are protected from small raiding parties. Colony Militia Units can’t be moved freely on the map and are replenished at the next world map turn. Colony Militia can be upgraded to spawn more and higher tier units.

(renamed from Garrison to avoid confusion with regular armies stationed in the colony)

Turret Defenses

Turrets are Colony Defense upgrades unique to each race that automatically fire at the start of each Combat Round. Unlike the Colony Militia, Turrets only appear in the Colony Center spread at four locations on the citadel wall.

• Vanguard Repeater Turret: Kinetic, Heavy Impact.
• Dvar Bombard: Explosive, Heavy Impact, 1 Hex AoE, Single Shot.
• Kir’ko Hive Guard Turret: Biochemical, Repeating, Melts armor,
• Syndicate Suppressor Tower: Psionic Damage, Broken Mind, Armor Bypass. Repeating.
• Assembly Arc Coil: Arc Damage, Jump Targeter (jumps twice between 2 hexes), Static Charge
• Amazon Laser Turret: Laser, Repeating, Shield Overheat

The Dvar Bombard Turret
​

There's a lot more colonies like all the upgrades and colony ops, but this is it this week!

 

[Nefarious_Nyx]

Hi guys! Glad you all liked the dev diary, I'll try and tackle the most prominent questions I came across and see if I can shed some light on things!

I'm kinda hoping the colonist system gets expanded in the future (like an expansion) so colonists doing the same job for X turns become specialists (better at the given job but lose the bonus if moved) or a chance for any new colonist to become a Talent (a bit of a SMAC reference) which simply produced more regardless of job, stuff like that.

We have been looking into specialized colonists and colonists types, but the added complexity to our already complex economy was not worth the development time at the point of consideration. We have not ruled it out for in the future though!

Really happy about defenses. Have wanted destructible turrets (and maybe other defensive structures) to spice up sieges for a long time. I guess "repeating" just means it gets 1 shot per ap?

Correct! With a repeating attack we mean it fires once per AP the unit has, assault rifles and such are a classic example of a repeating attack in Planetfall.

Quick question- if I'm understanding this right, every additional colonist requires more food?

Correct, each new colonist has what we call a 'colonist acquisition threshold' of Food that is needed to get that colonist, this expands on a logistics growth model, meaning it grows exponentially up until a certain point until it starts to decay again.

Happiness events seem a little bland. Have you thought about adding some interesting ones in there? Random Cosmite would be an easy one. With all the new colony structure building going on, perhaps they could give you a free unit built as well (since it looks like you are less likely to be building units when you get the 3x production event). Maybe rarely you could get a random mod created by an eccentric inventor or a new sector feature could be created/upgraded?

Probably an idea for an expansion, but how about Colonies coming up with their own quests. They would request something and if you provide it within X turns you get a lump happiness (and maybe influence) reward. AoW3 has a weird situation where you couldn't get any more race happiness boosts if you had annexed all the cities of that race, because only external cities would give quests.

We have looked into both of these; making Happiness events more interesting and Quests originating from your own colony. We have designs and systems in place for both of these but we are running out of development time, it looks like these will have to wait for a possible future dlc or expansion (no promises though!).

"Another is imposing Martial Law, which will also remove Colonists over time at the cost of economic penalties." Should that say Rioters instead of Colonists? Or does it actually just kill the Colonists that are rioting. That seems like a huge economic penalty.

Martial Law will have a (minorish) chance to kill a colonist when it converts a rioter back to a regular colonists, we call this 'deadly riots'. Martial Law is a serious button to press, and it comes with penalties, but it will help the player in times of strife to deal with rioters and to stabilize their colony. Mostly they will just convert rioters back into regular colonists however, this is subject to balance as all things, and we'll be looking to you all for feedback during beta!

Finally: Do we have control over the turrets?

The turrets are not player controlled, they have an AI targeting system and they will fire at the start of your turn as defender, so they do their thing, then you can mop up whatever they weakened afterwards!

Doesn't production also overflow if you have nothing queued and just count as bonus towards what you select next?

Correct, Production now overflows into your next construction project, even if you have nothing queued, whatever new thing you place in the queue has production overflow applied to it. Research cannot be queued but works in a similar way, where the research overflow is just applied to the next skill you select. If you wait one turn however, that overflow will be wasted!

Consider this - cities are not allowed to exist in adjacent sectors. Only empty sectors can support a city. City spam is discouraged by forcing a minimum distance between cities (I fear even more so than in AoW2) + having fewer places when you are able/allowed to settle. It may not make much sense lore-wise (sectors are pretty arbitrary), but that is how it is.

Also settling near independents can make them angry.

The world map is built around clusters of valuable sectors, inter spaced with (at least economical) dead zones. We are aiming to have most of the city founding and territory gameplay to revolve around more valuable areas of the world map. Between the 'cannot found adjacent to other colonies' and 'settling next to NPC's makes them angry with you' you will find that, using the new sector system, places for colony founding are more rare, and more valuable. While spamming cities is certainly a thing that can be done still, it will be much more limited in Planetfall (unless playing a 12-player sized map with 2 players of course!)

I hope I managed to shed some light on things, any other questions let me know!

 

[Nefarious_Nyx]

But that still doesn't quite answer whether or not having more cities will always be better than having 2-3 "megacities". So is it possible to focus on 2-3 cities that you develop (tall) and still compete with someone that went out and snagged lets say ~7 cities (wide) at the mentioned spots but will therefore not be able to fully develop them within any reasonable amount of time?
From what we've seen and heard I'm inclined to say probably tall might be doable, especially since some upgrades seem to give percentual increase of resource(s)?
Beside that it's very cool that playing wide now really seems to spread your defenses thin.
I'm very much looking forward to this game! And thank you very much for your post above @Neb_

You're very welcome! As for the Tall versus wide debate, that is always a very tricky balance to achieve. There are definite benefits to building tall over wide in regards to economy as you mentioned, but via for example food sharing, a highly upgraded food supplying colony could boost early development colonies very easily. Multiple production queues is definitely very valuable, but the amount of income you need for higher tier units mean you will be at a military disadvantage going wide around the mid to late game. As with anything, the balance will most likely lie somewhere in the middle, but with possible early game rushes when going wide a possible strategy. It is hard to know exactly where the meta will land with the current balance, which is why we need all of you to play the crap out of the beta when its live and let us know!

Thanks @Fenraellis .

Does this mean 4 possible locations, but one Turret, or 4 turrets no matter what?

And are those turrets unlocked at the same time, or is each one something that occupies the build queue for a while?

Are all the turrets the same?

Can they be upgraded?

Will there be other types of city defence, e.g. mobility reducers, deployable obstacles etc?

Currently you build a single colony structure, that gives you the four turrets whenever you are engaged in tactical combat on your colony center, you don't have to build them individually. Each race gets their own version of a defence turret (race of the city, not the player!) We have plans to develop the city defense systems further, including defensive support structures etc, but for now that is not on the priority list.

The defences are interesting, and colonist come to your defence i think i read, thats also awesome. Hoping we can litter outside our walls with landmines and other various traps or maybe barbed fences? Inflicting bleed to organics while they are moving through. Also be qlso interesting if some turrets could work as a defensive, like random heals or buffs. I also had an idea where you spawn a handful of EMU's ,emergency mechanised units, a bunch of non combatant robots that just auto run around repairing crap.

All great ideas! We were also concepting a lot of very cool, racially themed unique defenses but we unfortunately have to be pragmatic in this stage of development, we are definitely looking into these kinds of mechanics for future content though!

If you lose starving colonist could you also lose sector? For example if you have 6 colonist and 3 sectors but you lose one colonist will you lose sector too?

Your sector limit cannot degrade at this time, though as always this is subject to change. This means that once you unlock the ability to grab a new sector, nothing can take that away from the colony again, even if it loses all of its colonists and turns into a ghost town!

You guys are keeping up the trend of reminding me of all these great designs which proved to be either impractical after much testing or simply too development time heavy for the payoff right now as we are pushing towards finishing the game. Rest assured that we will drag all of this back up when we are looking at expansion and DLC content, we want just as much as you guys to have all these niche and minor features that would enrich the game!

o7

 

[Nefarious_Nyx]

If your colonist count drops to 0, are there any side effects beyond losing the extra producing capacity of the missing colonists?

To clarify, if the sector limit can't degrade, can we still add sectors to it if the limit hasn't been reached. In the example of having 6 colonists and dropping to 3, if the settlement only had 2 annexed sectors before the famine, we could annex a third, even while the population is set to 3?

Correct, if you have enough colonists to raise the sector limit of a colony from 2 to 3 sectors, you will always be able to annex 3 sectors to that colony, even if you end up losing all your colonists in that colony. We had a more complicated system here before, including under-population etc, which might make a return before release, but for now this is the way it is!

Is that a salute, or are you hanging upside and don't have a left eye? o7o

It was meant as a salute! but now I'm not sure anymore...