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Colony Population  

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LadyAquanine735
Trusted Member
Joined: 8 months  ago
Posts: 99
19/11/2016 7:14 am  

I'd first like to say how happy I am the Forum is back up.  Second, I find it good that I can finally bring up some subjects that have been bugging me about the game.  I know it's in Beta, so obviously this is not the finished product.  Last month I e-mailed this site with questions about the game, but here will probably be a better place to discuss the issues.  I'll write down what I wrote in the e-mail about colony population:

Are the colonists eventually going to start families and have children?  That's a common theme I've seen in several city-building games, especially Sierra's games, such as Zeus, Poseidon, Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, and Lionhead Studio's Black and White 2 and Black and White 2: Battle of the Gods.  I mean, you can't expect hundreds of adult humans to settle on a planet permanently and never have kids.  It makes no sense, and eventually the people would die out.  It's one thing to gain new colonists by having people still up in the ship come down to join those living on the planet's surface.  That most certainly grows the population in the short-term.  However, in some of my games, I was down on the planet for 12-13 years, which is more than enough time to start up families and have children.  You could even control the population this way, like having the Research Center develop birth control pills, and hand them out when you want a temporary lull on colonists having kids for a while.  I think for this you would have to have little virtual children moving about in the colony too, in addition to schools, daycare centers, and eventually a college for when the kids grow up.  No need for visible teens or babies.

I would like to hear everyone else's thoughts on this too.  Surely this subject has crossed the minds of other testers and game developers.


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pHobia
Active Member
Joined: 8 months  ago
Posts: 7
29/11/2016 7:37 am  

I would love to have generations involved including education, childcare, and politics. Having differing population rates as well as a more sophisticated immigration/emigration system would be great to have. With this you could have a better trade system to bring in more income as populations come and go.


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LZIM
 LZIM
Eminent Member
Joined: 7 months  ago
Posts: 38
13/01/2017 12:26 pm  

My only response to this, besides that is a good idea, is that it seems like the developers behind the game are going for an 90's style where anything we see is only a token representation of the what's happening. You're supposed to be focused on the development of the colony and can pretty much ignore each colonist. Which begs the question why they retained the list of colonists with names and all that. might as well remove it and just have them be little ants like the horrifically awful recent SimCity.

Which is sad because each peasant in Black and White was a person and might as well have had a name and a personality you could remember and each birth and death was important because for better or worse you made it happen. And even the peds in Cities in Motion where you're managing many thousands of them feels more alive.


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Paul Tozour
Reputable Member
Joined: 1 year  ago
Posts: 270
14/01/2017 12:43 am  

Are the colonists eventually going to start families and have children?  

We originally had this, but cut it in favor of focusing our development efforts on features that add more value.

Having said that, anything is possible in the long run -- we may add this post-launch if we can justify it.


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Paul Tozour
Reputable Member
Joined: 1 year  ago
Posts: 270
14/01/2017 12:49 am  

it seems like the developers behind the game are going for an 90's style where anything we see is only a token representation of the what's happening

Not sure what you mean by a "90's style" aesthetic.

First, keep in mind that the game is in beta.  More features are in the works that we haven't revealed yet.

Second, the focus in our game is on building, upgrading, and repairing buildings, as well as social policies, manufacturing, and research.  We explicitly decided to de-emphasize the micromanagement of individual colonists as it conflicts with those design goals and doesn't scale well to a huge colony.  The goal with colonists is to show the information you need and give you the tools you need to manage them -- NOT to try to micro-manage every colonist or toss in lots of additional per-colonist information for the sake of realism.


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