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My Colony v0.97.0 Released

I am now putting the finishing touches on My Colony v0.97.0, and it should be hitting all platforms over the coming days! Originally I had planned on making this a big Water World update, and there is some new Water World stuff in here, but as usual, plans tend to change once I start getting into the update. But asides from the new content (there are 10 new structures in this release), there are some nice interface tweaks in this update that I think (hope) you will enjoy. So let's take a look at what is new!

Firstly, there were a couple of bugs in the game that in some cases prevented players from starting a colony under another charter code. This should be fixed now, but if you have any issues creating colonies under a charter, let me know.

Next, I have added a new feature that has been long requested by some players, which I think a lot of people are going to like - bot stacking! So now if you select a bunch of units of the same type, there is a new stack bot button that you can click that will combine all of the units into a single "stacked" or grouped unit.


This stacked unit will move and act as a single bot, but will have the build and harvest power of all of the combined bots.


You can unstack the units in the same manner. There are several benefits of stacking vs having a bunch of individual bots, one of the biggest being performance. Particularly on larger maps and on mobile, one of the biggest performance issues of the game is the path finding engine, which takes more and more memory the larger and more complicated the map. With bot stacking, the engine only needs to solve routes for a single unit instead of an entire group, reducing memory consumption and processing time significantly.

Another somewhat related feature is custom build amounts for units. With this update, if you right-click (or long press on mobile) on a bot in the sidebar build menu (it does not work on the popup build menu), a dialog will come up and let you type in the number of bots you wish to build. Be careful though - if you put in more than you can afford, you cannot undo the building order.

I have made a handful of balance tweaks to existing content. I reduced the wood cost of the Paste Pontoon and lowered the research cost of the insectoid Wood Harvesting tech, since both of these things are needed earlier on for the Water World. The Gravitational Compression Warehouse has gained Oil storage. Storage levels on the Unholy Pit of Stuff have increased to 100k, and the building is now slightly more expensive. Power output of the Unholy Power Spire is now 800.

Now on to new content. The primary goal on this update was to fix Zolarg and Reptilians for the Water World, since the removal of Fresh Water in the previous update had made playing as those civilizations problematic.

To fix this for Zolarg, they now have the Aqua Ring and the Aqua Scrubber, structures for harvesting and distilling Salt Water into fresh Water.

Zolarg also gained the new Seabeet Farm for producing Sugar on the ocean, and the Aquamound, a small single family home that you can build on the water.

There is also new Zolarg content that is unrelated to the Water World. Insectoids gain Clay and Charcoal production through the early(ish) stage structures Clay Pit and Smoldering Pit. There are also new Alien Tech upgrades for the Supply Pile and the Food Fortification facility, in the form of the Quantum Supply Pile and the Quantum Food Fortification buildings. Finally, Zolarg get a new more powerful power generation plant, the Petroplant, which is their version of the human's Oil Plant, except it produces more power, while using more Oil and generating a lot more Atmosphere.

I didn't add a bunch for the Reptilians as I was mostly focusing on Zolarg for this release, but they do have the new Microdistiller, which is built on Sea Water and creates fresh drinking Water.

With these changes, all civilizations should be playable on Water World again.

Probably the next update will be another Zolarg content update, since they are in need of some love. They are going to gain the ability to produce more resources and start getting more later game content to utilize those new resources. Probably another upgraded capitol too, with higher trading caps.

So that is all for this update! I hope you guys like it, and stay tuned for more because there is a lot more My Colony to come!
4y
#2
Love your work Bast! Bot stacking should be amazing for mobile. Can't wait to try it out.
4y
#3
I cant seem to right click in the broswer (Using Chrome), it gives me the wrong setting,

IDEA!! - would it be possible to link the its to region maps, so we could move the built robots from one to another, and maybe if this was not possible through just linking,
Maybe we could get a building where we could upload them to a intergalactic car park, and as long as we have a car park, we can upload and unload our bots to use. that way it could make it easier, it could maybe use the coding like the resources, so for every bot we upload, it adds to a certain list shown elsewhere
4y
#4
@Celestile try to do a hard-reload on your browser, maybe you have some older code cached, since the right-click was one of the last things I added to this update.

I will think of some method for bot-transfers.
Owner of Ape Apps, LLC
4y
#5
This is by far the best update to the game for a while. The improvements with regards to bots are excellent.
Thank you Bast. Keep up the good work.
4y
#6
Dear Bast,

Really excited about this update, especially with the enormous gameplay improvement provided by bot stacking and build queue features. Also for the smaller features such as Oil grav storage, and the start of a big improvement for Zolarg gameplay, thank you.

I have a couple inputs with regards to the Zolarg additions, and if it is too late to be considered for this update, would you please consider this as an input for one of the future updates?

1. Storage
The Quantum Supply Pile and Unholy Pit of Stuff can already store many of the resources that Zolargs can't use and can't produce (for now at least) such as Plastics, Robot, Steel, Triantanium, Bricks, Pottery, Wool, Toy, Regolith, Ether, etc.

On the other hand, there are 3 resources that Zolargs actually use, that can not be stored in both Pits and have to depend on buildings with very limited storage :
- Oil. Biggest storage is the Petropit with 3000 capacity.
- Software. Biggest storage is the 2 IT buildings with just 500 capacity.
- Charcoal, new resource usable by the Zolarg. Biggest storage is the Mound with 2500 capacity, which will even lose its charcoal capacity when upgraded.

Would you consider adding the storage capacity for them to the Unholy Pit of Stuff? As for adding them to Quantum Supply Pile as well, I defer to your consideration.


2. Power
Based on the build costs of Unholy Power Spire vs. Petroplant, I assume that you intended for Petroplant to be the next progression after Unholy Power Spire. However, Unholy Power Spire takes 1x1 square and produces 800 power each, while Petroplant takes 2x2 square and produces 1750 power each. As such, 4x Unholy Power Spire is slightly cheaper to build than 1x Petroplant, produces quite more power, while taking the same amount of space.

As such, unless you have further plans for Petroplant down the road (maybe upgrades, etc), I reckon that most Zolarg players will still depend on Unholy Power Spire for their power generation, and uses a few Petroplant temporarily just for the atmosphere generation until desired atmosphere level is reached. If you do have a plan for Petroplant later on, please ignore this section of my post.

As closing, I want to thank you again for the awesome bot stacking feature.
4y
#7
Ok, after some test: this update is a game changer

The stacking bot it works even better than I had imagined, the lag almost completely disappeared, we can even merge several group at the same time, grouping don't require bot movement. Pretty much.. perfect

The custom build amounts for units is the cherry on the cake (work perfectly on pc and Apps Launcher 1.3)

Thanks for the update, and to listen to the players. :D
4y
#8
Thank you @Ansom

@MizarAlcor about the Petroplant. It is not meant to be an upgrade to the Unholy Power Spire, more of a side-grade. Upgraded power will come later. This has a benefit to non-independent colonies who cannot unlock the Mysticism tech that is required for the Unholy Power Spire.
Owner of Ape Apps, LLC
4y
#9
The stacking is actually a big step marching towards smoothness, thanks @bastecklein!

Speakin’ of insectnoid power hope this thread helps :p
https://www.ape-apps.com/viewpage.php?p=33475

Wait a minute, ideas for improvements are adopted :D
You can help by EXPANDING IT.
4y
#10
Dear Bast,

Thank you for the explanation on the reasoning for Zolarg's power building tweaks. It makes sense now.

And I confirm it seems like the bot stacking is working well and has reduced some part of the lag which comes from drone building and pathing operations. Thank you.
My Colony





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Ape Apps, LLC is an independent software development company founded in 2010 by Brandon Stecklein. Over the years, Ape Apps has published over 400 apps and games across various platforms. You can get in touch with Brandon on Twitter or by leaving a post on his wall @bastecklein
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