Ape Apps

As I'm sitting here putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.87.0 patch, I realize that there must be something seriously wrong with me, for this is the second update in a row where I have decided to just totally go in and rewrite or change large parts of the game engine. I have to apologize if I am making you all feel like guinea pigs, although I suspect that My Colony players are going to be used to that by now. So what all has changed in v0.87.0? Let's find out!

I am finally putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.86.0 patch, which should be hitting all devices within a few days. I had planned for this to be a huge exciting content update, but then once I started working on it, I began running into one problem after the other and it ended up taking way longer to complete than I had anticipated. As a result, there are a lot of engine changes in this update but no content additions, so from the outside it may look like I've spent the last two weeks doing nothing. Rest assured though, there are some improvements to the game in this release, so let's take a look!

I am just putting the finishing touches on the My Colony v0.85.0 patch, which should be going out to all platforms over the weekend. v0.85.0 is the "dark update" and you are about to find out why! Let's take a look.

To begin with, I have thought for some time now that there is a disconnect in the theme of the game between the overall UI and the Statistics and other popup menus, since everything has a dark theme except for the menus. So I have decided to make some changes, and all of the in-game popup screens are now in dark mode.

In addition, the "window" border and mouse-over highlight colors for the new dark mode menus will take the color of your colony theme color. So if you choose Blue for your colony color, the border and highlight color for everything will be in blue. I have also changed the UI font. It's not too much different, but I think this font renders better on lower resolution devices.

Next, I added a new Reptilian structure called the Petroboiler, which converts Ether into Oil. Upon playing Reptilians on the Abandoned World for a while, I determined they needed a better way to get Oil, so the Petroboiler fulfills that purpose.

Speaking of Ether, it is now live and available to trade on the GBT. To accommodate this, Ether storage has been added to the Quantum Warehouse, Gravitational Compression Warehouse, and the Unholy Pit of Stuff.

Finally, Humans get a brand new structure this update called the Advanced Cloning Facility, and believe me, this building can crank out colonists like rabbits.

The Advanced Cloning Facility runs off of Ether and requires Ether for construction, so you will not see it in your construction menu until you purchase an Ether contract from the GBT. You can find the building in the construction sidebar right next to the old Cloning Facility, or you can also do an upgrade on an existing facility.

Those are the major changes for this release. There are a few little things and fixes that aren't worth typing about but they should make the game better nonetheless. As always, thank you for playing My Colony, and stay tuned for more to come!

I am currently putting the finishing touches on My Colony v0.84.0, which should be shipping out to all platforms over the next few days. Here is what to expect!

Firstly, as with every update, I went through and cleaned out all of the reported bugs through the syntax error and crash log databases. The good news is, these errors are becoming fewer and fewer with each update, so I believe that over the last few months the game has gotten a good deal more stable overall.

A just happened to find a mistake in the code while I was cleaning stuff up related to saving unlocked techs for region games... I am praying that this finally puts a nail in this issue that people have been reporting since regions initially came out. Let me know!

Since adding the auto-trading feature to the GBT, some of the resources like Food and Water have been totally flooded with contracts, in many cases causing performance issues when rendering the contracts in the GBT. To address this, whenever a resource has more than 100 contracts available (some have way more than 100 now), the GBT automatically filters some of them out for you. For instance, contracts that you either cannot afford or that are such a bad deal will be hidden, as to not clog your GBT with worthless deals. This only impacts resources that have more than 100 live contracts available.

I still have to make some user-configurable changes to auto-trading, and this will be coming in the future. So far I am pleased with the auto-trade feature, and I think it is particularly helpful for newer users, so I do plan on improving and expanding upon it, I just didn't get to it for this update.

Next up are a couple of minor balancing tweaks. First of all, I have reduced the time it takes for the Landing Pad to bring in new colonists. One of the most commonly occurring complaints in the app store comments from new users is about how long it takes to get new colonists. With this new update, the Landing Pad should now be about twice as fast as it was before. I have also sped up the Cloning Facility a bit as well.

Next up, users can now add a description or notes to a regional subcity, in order to better keep things organized. The note input section can be found on the statistics screen within a subcity, and if you attach a note or description to a city, it will now show up on the mouse-over popup that shows up on the main region view, under the population readout, like this:

Next, I have made a couple changes to some of the maps. The Forest World map now includes a river, and also has some Mega Trees growing on it. This actually makes the map just a bit easier, as there is now a constant supply of water on the map.

The biggest change though, is for the Abandoned World map. The Abandoned World now has sort of a pinkish hue to it and has a river made out of the newest Resource to be added to the game: Ether.

Ether is a new resource that can only be found on new Abandoned World maps, and will never be able to be produced synthetically on any other map. The substance is a byproduct of the nuclear disaster that destroyed the Abandoned World civilization many eons ago. It is mostly harmless now, but can be reconstituted into Uranium by the Reptilians using their new Ether Processor facility. For health, entertainment, and tourism, Reptilians now also have a new Ether Baths building at their disposal. Ether can be harvested by Reptilians using their new Ether Extractor drone.

Over the coming updates, Ether usage will be expanded to all civs, but it will only be harvestable from the Abandoned World map. I also need to add more Reptilian structures to make getting an Abandoned World city up and running a bit easier, since it is currently a long and slow undertaking. That will all be coming soon. Ether will be available on the GBT next update. For technical reasons, I can't put it on there yet, since most clients do not have the Ether resource in their game yet.

Ether is the first in a series of new upcoming resources that are going to be locked to a specific planet type, and will not be able to be generated synthetically. I mentioned this in the last episode of the My Colony Podcast, but I realized that if I am going to eventually implement starship trade routes, there actually has to be a purpose and reason to use trade, and I think resources that you can only get on certain planets will help. Although, the GBT might negate the use of trade routes also, so I might instead think of an entirely different purpose of starships. Another idea I had was using starships to add an additional Asteroid landmass to your colony, sort of like the way regional subcities work now, you could also have separate off-planet asteroids or moons that your are mining, and you use starships to transfer resources back and forth. We will see what I come up with. Suggestions are welcome.

So that is it for today's update. Even though I decided to add a bit of content this time, I don't want to give the impression that I am giving up on the crusade against bugs, so keep letting me know what you find. That said, I do think that a lot of progress has been made and I feel more comfortable about adding new structures and units to the game now. So next update will probably expand on Ether, especially for other civs, and I also want to add a series of keyboard shortcuts to the game that were mentioned in this thread, so that might be in next update as well.

Anyway, as always, thanks for playing My Colony, and stay tuned for a whole lot more!

Once again it is My Colony update time, and v0.83.0 will be heading out to all platforms within the coming days. This release continues the bug bashing series I have been working on, but also implements a few new features that I hope you find useful. Let's take a look!

The first change I want to go over deals with the behavior of the Bulldozer tool, which I outlined in more detail in this thread, but I think it is important enough to mention again because it could potentially cause somebody to nuke a large part of their colony by accident. In prior versions, when you would click on a blank space of the map, it would automatically deactivate the bulldozer so that you wouldn't accidentally click on something and delete it. I have removed this safety feature. I have also made it so that you can do a double click/drag gesture to do mass bulldozing. Since this can potentially be dangerous, activating the bulldozer now makes your resource readout bar red in color, so that you are more aware that the tool is active. Here is a quick video of how the tool now works.

Back in the first update of the game that included the bulldozer (v0.42.0 in August 2017), you could actually somewhat use it like this, but I nerfed it a bit due to players accidentally bulldozing large parts of their colonies. I am hoping that with the red tinted game, the red border around the screen, and the red resource bar, it will be plainly obvious to all that the bulldozer tool is active.

Next up, I have worked with @Sobeirannovaocc to bake the Coloniae ADU service right into the core code of My Colony, allowing it to be used on all versions of the game. Coloniae is a free online service maintained by Sobeirannovaocc that tracks detailed stats and trend histories for online My Colony players. The ADU service is available to all online colonies, and can be turned on by a new setting added to the Statistics screen of your colony.

Keep in mind that Coloniae is a third party service, not supported by Ape Apps. But I am sure that @Sobeirannovaocc will be more than happy to help you with any questions you may have about it 🙂

The next few changes involve trade. There have been longstanding issues with the GBT, especially for new players/colonies who cannot buy anything because the lot sizes are so big that they either do not show up in their trades, or they are priced totally out of the market. To try to help make the GBT more useful for newer and more established colonies alike, several new changes have been implemented, the first of which is the auto-trader.

Auto Trade is in it's infancy and will be expanded and refined in future updates, as I am able to monitor it's usage and the impact it has on the market, but here is how it works right now. Auto Trading is off by default, and can be enabled or disabled on a per resource basis.

When the Auto Trader is turned on, every few minutes (it's somewhere between 7 and 10 minutes depending on your device speed) your colonial trade representative will take stock of your auto-trade enabled resources. If your warehouses are full, sell orders will automatically be posted on your behalf. Several trades may be made, representing up to 10% of your supply level. But trades will also be made in lot sizes ranging from small to large, so that all levels of players are able to see and access them in the GBT. The sale prices are based on the current GBT market value of the resource. Before posting a new contract, the Auto Trader will also look at the current Offer contracts, and purchase those if they are a good price and fall within 10% of your total resource level. The auto trader will never just train your supply inventories.

Likewise, the Auto Trader will also make trades for you when your supplies are low. If an auto-trader enabled resource falls below 25% storage level, the Auto Trader will check the market for reasonably priced offers, and purchase them. The Auto Trader will not spend more than 2.5% of your total money on a transaction. If no contracts are available within those parameters, a new offer contract will be posted instead.

Obviously the usage of the Auto Trader will largely depend on the number of people who enable it, since there ultimately needs to be two parties for each transaction. I am hoping that once more players begin activating the auto trade feature, the GBT will fill up with actual useful contracts instead of just the insane offers that almost nobody can afford or even has storage for.

I got the auto trading idea after reading this post by @Conco2 related to the in-game GDP calculation. It occurred to me that there are so many late game colonies that are just fully stocked on all resources, and so their factories really aren't producing anything since all storage is full. Because of this, GDP is stagnant since nothing new is being created. I figured it would be helpful to set up a way to automatically export those goods without even having to think about it, since a real life economy also has to have exports in order to grow. Since the GBT was being underutilized anyway, I figured I would give this idea a shot.

To emphasize the importing and exporting aspect of the economy, the game now keeps track internally of the dollar value of your annual trade income and losses. Graphs for these stats will be making their way to the Economy statistics tab soon.

The Auto Trader will need tweaking and will probably have some user customization input options in the future. I just wanted to get the concept out there and see how it actually works, and then go from there.

After implementing the Auto Trader, it occurred to me that the GBT would be loaded with Food, Water, Ore, and other low end resource contracts that nobody needs by the time they build the GBT. To help with this, I added a new feature to the regular, non-GBT trade buildings. Now, any building that allows resource importing will also allow you to purchase GBT contracts that fall within the building's trade capacity level.

For example, the Galactic Freight can now purchase any contracts from the GBT that have a unit size of 1,000 or less. This should actually be really helpful for newer players, as it will allow them to buy needed goods without paying the standard 50% import fee, offering an extreme discount from the normal import prices, while at the same time helping later-game players who are auto-selling contracts using the GBT. The way I see it, it's a win-win for all.

I am hopeful that these new trade related features will help address some of the problems with the GBT and online trading in general. Of course, it could also make things worse. You never know!

The final change I want to highlight was a requested feature for blank region maps. They will no longer create a river on map types that include a river by default.

There were other little changes that you might notice here and there, but this about covers the big things. Let me know what you think and what issues you find. The update should be hitting all platforms with the next few days, so be on the lookout, thanks for playing, and stay tuned for more My Colony!