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My bunch of MC1 EoL update ideas

10mo
#1
Hello everyone!
Since bast is now focusing on My Colony 2, the development of MC1 has slowed down, which is very much understandable - all games eventually get a sequel or just fizzle out in popularity. I don't mean that bast ignores the community of MC1 - he is just focused on the development of the sequel, which is completely fine.
But, over the last year or so, I was thinking about several changes that would take a while to implement to MC1 but could benefit the longevity of the game (or even games like Antiquitas, because some of these changes will probably apply to the engine itself). This is by no means a final request or demand from me, I'd be happy if any of these changes were introduced, and I'll still support the game if no changes will be made, because it's still a damn fun game after all these years.
These ideas are big changes that will probably take quite a while to implement, but could be very beneficial to making the Scroll2D engine games live practically forever. Please treat this post as more of a crazy idea dump more than an actual solid suggestion, as some of these ideas will probably not make sense to implement on a development time basis.
I'd also love to see feedback and potential cues on how these ideas can be simplified.
Anyways, here be thou ideas.

1. Advanced modding support
My Colony 2 was revolutionary in the terms of modding. For the first time we as a community could add our own buildings and resources, and later even events and technologies, which is awesome and definitely contributes to the overall ingenuity of the game.
In My Colony 1, there are also modding options, however these are limited to maps and texture packs. It's still better than nothing at all, but could be greatly improved.
My idea extends the modding system in a way that allows players to add their own buildings, resources, technologies, units, worlds, and even things like civilizations and custom building GUIs. This will probably require a lot of changes to the engine but can be implemented at least partially, benefiting the overall replayability of the game. These mods will probably have issues with charters and online games, so these could be limited to offline only, but will still be a very fun addition to the game, allowing the players to create their own after-end-of-life DLCs and such.

2. Bigger cities
This is a very straight-forward idea that I've heard from a bunch of other players in the community. This idea regards the sizes of the cities in region worlds. These are currently Small 51x51 (1x1 region tile) cities and Medium 101x101 (2x2 region tile) cities. This is okay, but it could probably be easily expanded to Big 151x151 (3x3 region tile) cities and Huge (4x4 region tile) cities. One problem to consider would be cloud disk space, however I'd assume that 9 Small cities would take up the same if not more space than 1 Big city.

3. Annexable regions
This is another idea I've seen other players talk about. While it is true that there is a lot of space on the region worlds already, some people are making absolutely huge bases and slowly outgrowing the region size.
Annexing regions would add the possibility to have several additional similarly sized regions under your command.
This could be implemented in several ways - either by adding several layers of regions, with a map of regions, and regions full of cities, or adding a submenu simply listing owned regions, and perhaps regions having green outlines that allows you to switch the one you're currently viewing, similar to region cities.
An obvious issue would be cloud disk space since now My Colony worlds would be essentially infinite, but there could be a limit of regions set or even a premium system where an Ape Apps Gold user has an increased limit of regions.

4. Multi-species colonies
The concept of multi-species colonies has always been very interesting to me and I've been pretty confused why it's not in the game. This would allow colonies to have several kinds of colonists - humans could live alongside bugs and aliens. This would also allow creating buildings previously exclusive to another race. I don't know if this conflicts with bast's vision for the game, but this could be locked behind an end-game technology to make the game way more interesting.

5. Expeditions
This would be a simple way of extracting resources that is an expansion of the WMD system (but this time more peaceful). This would include a special upgradeable building that would be an expedition agency, which would send colonists on a type of planet that the player can choose and establish a settlement to extract resources.
Now this settlement can either be completely simulated with resources just flowing in or essentially be a second temporary colony that the player can actually use just like their primary. Of course the latter would need a lot more coding to be done and is actually possible to a degree already with the use of charters. But one way that could be done more efficiently is to limit the number of colonial colonies to something like 3 at a time and limiting the map size to for example 50x50. However, this would be treated as an independent map, so the resources would be able to respawn.

So that's it. As I said, these would probably take some time to implement but they could really expand the game and make it way more replayable. Unless bast wants us all to migrate to MC2. I'll hold a grudge in that case. Cheers!
Have a fantastic day!
~cakedon (formerly itsLiseczeq)
10mo
#2
Ad. 5 - If the expedition colonies would actually be tiny temporary colonies, there could be a limit of resources added that only allowed the player to bring back a certain amount of resources. This could scale with the level of the expedition agency building. Additionally, a colony age limit could be added (for example, 3 years) after which the expeditioners would be forced to come back. There could also be an option to bring certain rovers with you.
Have a fantastic day!
~cakedon (formerly itsLiseczeq)
6mo
#3
I really like the idea of expeditions. I might work on some sprites for it.
The Spice must flow.
1mo
#4
I would love the ability to annex in Regions.
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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