Forums

Hi there! First post on here. Put ~10 hours into Aven Colony and I am impressed. Wonderful graphics, pretty storyline, all that jazz. A few minor issues, but none too large. It seems like Content Expansion is an additional focus, so here's a few ideas drawing from Tropico 4 and Sim City 3000. 

TROPICO 4 IDEAS:

Internal Faction Systems: Inside the colony, certain citizens might be communists. They might come to your colony to build an ideal world. Others are refugees from war-torn countries seeking safety. Still others are all for the alien money. Maybe a few people are even Puritans who want a morally-perfect society with temperance (looking at you, shady Amber Joy). At X population levels, they might appoint leaders who will make demands, like "boost trade exports to XXX or else we riot."

External Faction Systems: someone paid to ship you to the colony. They might have an opinion on what you're doing. Destroying all of mother nature down there with strip-mining? That's nice. That only violates 5,000 regulations. 

Wealth Differences: There's the rich people (maybe your college-educated, maybe your military) that you pay. You usually put them in the best housing to keep them happy. Best entertainment, best everything - unless you're communist. That leads to neighborhoods where one's a virtual gated community with police stations everywhere and one's a horrible shantytown. Perhaps we can build walls in Aven Colony to make neighborhoods? And perhaps flight transportation per someone else's suggestion on here. You don't want to walk in the BAD part of town, after all....

Crazy & Silly Characters: they're in Tropico, but not really applicable in this setting/atmosphere.

Service Interaction: you can see how many citizens are using the cantina, the hospital, and so forth. You see their faces and can hover over the faces with your mouse to see the name and click their face for their profile.

Coups, Violence, and Dictatorial Things: There's referendums in this game, so dictators are out (probably?) but coups and violence could happen. Assassinate your enemies. Arrest your enemies. Maybe just banish them. Who knows? 

An "El Presidente": a place where you live, and you can see yourself walking around. This was a new feature in Tropico 4, but gave you a starting point. 

AND NOW FOR SIM CITY 3000!

Zoning: Zoning was major. Instead of building buildings yourself, you'd zone the vast majority of land as residential, commercial, or industrial. The citizens would build businesses and homes there themselves. In Aven Colony, this might be where you can include all the craftsmen who who make the goods sold in the shopping malls; if their work isn't colony-necessary, they can make it themselves, right? Zoning would GREATLY help the problem of "tons of empty space between my gazillion construction drone sites" issue we see. Zoning "natural alien wildlife" preserves, "civilian industrial production" areas, and "commercial investment enterprise" areas might work wonders.

Advisors. At this point, not 100% needed. But it could be useful.

Automatically-resolivng issues: if roads broke in Sim City, the transportation department fixed it. You didn't have to replace every single tunnel hit by a lightning storm yourself.

Wealth: Wealth comes up here again.

World Modification & Randomization: in Sim City, before you started the city, you could edit the map topography in God Mode. You'd flatten certain areas, make oceans, do all sorts of things. A tool to enable map editing might be an easy way out of making tons of custom maps.

Budgets: mnaging the budget was a nightmare. Here, we don't really have a budget except in Nanites. But perhaps the bar might demand food as well as a restaurant? Or have electricity act more as currency demands - maybe the hospital can only be open 2 hours per day. 

Not neccessary.

The concepts of Tropico and Sim City differ in most aspects to the concept of Aven Colony. I don't think most of your suggestions should be implemented (Fractions, Charachters, Zoning [please, no, just no], etc.).

Besides this some more statistics could be usefull. But I think the overlays and the current displayed statistics are good enough to build the colony.

I really like the idea of a map editor but I think it would be hard to achieve. I don't know how the meshes for the terrain work in this project but I think it is difficult to create a good map editor.

@llama, thinking about this after I posted it and seeing your comment, you seem right! It was brainstorming, but I think I've determined what this game could use that other titles (see the two above) have.

A sense of incompletion. Not of the game itself - but of your city/colony/island. There's always something that's not quite right, not quite 100%, that you could fix if you just had the money. In Aven Colony, you hit that sense of "everything is right in the world and everything is running smoothly" after a few hours on a colony. In the other titles, you almost never hit that point - there's always something you'd still like to do, but don't yet have the resources to achieve. 

Posted by: MarkJerue

 

@llama, thinking about this after I posted it and seeing your comment, you seem right! It was brainstorming, but I think I've determined what this game could use that other titles (see the two above) have.

 

A sense of incompletion. Not of the game itself - but of your city/colony/island. There's always something that's not quite right, not quite 100%, that you could fix if you just had the money. In Aven Colony, you hit that sense of "everything is right in the world and everything is running smoothly" after a few hours on a colony. In the other titles, you almost never hit that point - there's always something you'd still like to do, but don't yet have the resources to achieve. 

   

Oh, don't you worry  ...  that will change 😉

<evil grin>

To reply to the OP:

A ton of suggestions here, but many of them are straight-up looking at features that already exist in competing games.

We did extensive due diligence on competing games when designing Aven Colony, and most of these are things we did consider but decided not to do.

We're also super leery of things that would add complexity without adding fun; I feel that Aven Colony is already complex enough overall and want to make sure that any new features we add fit seamlessly with the existing experience without adding too much complexity.

Having said that, I'll reply to a couple of the things you pointed out:

• Automatically replacing roads: the Drone Auto-Repair policy will be upgraded soon to automatically replace destroyed tunnels.  There will also be a lightning tower that protects you from lightning strikes.
• Presidential palace / colony HQ: we've long considered adding this but we're frankly having a difficult time making it a priority when we have so many other structures we want to add that would add more gameplay.

Wow, I didn't expect the maker of the game himself to respond!! Thanks so much for reading!! 😀 I'm glad to see it's been considered! - Mark 

Oh, you bet, Mark!  A lot of good ideas in here.

Stay tuned -- I think you'll see some really exciting things come online during the beta 🙂