Before we move on to the subject of the dev diary, let me remind you that we are currently looking for Beta testers, so if you’d like to have early access to the game and help us with providing feedback, you’re more than welcome! You can join here.
And now, on to the dev diary!
This time we’ll look into the resources and construction system, and have a passing look at how colonies work.
Resources
The game has 4 main resources related to construction. These are Food, Metals, Organics and Rares.
Food is obviously required to feed your colonists, without it there won’t be any growth and given enough turns it could even lead you losing laborers, severely affecting the Colony and potentially its ability to construct projects.
Metals, Organics and Rares are classified as Materials in the game. They are used in the construction of starships, installations and troops. They can also be employed in terraforming or even converted into credits or research, thanks to special projects available from the start.
The availability of each resource depends on the planet the Colony was settled on and any Peculiarities it might have. The main factor here is the class of the Planet, as well as things like size and gravity rating which might greatly affect its potential for construction. For example, Swamp planets are rich in Organics but lack Rares and Metals, however one with a large enough size and normal gravity can still be used to construct efficiently if materials are mined from other planets.
Mining is the process from which you extract the Materials for construction. For this you need to assign laborers as Miners, which use any installations on the Colony and tech/trait effects you might have to multiply the amount extracted. However, any resources extracted from outside of your home star system has to be freighted across your civilization, so you’re going to need Freighters for this.
Colonies
Through the use of Colonizer class starships you can create Colonies on different worlds. They host your people and thus expand your reach across the galaxy. The population of a Colony is classified in 5 different professions. These are: Farmer, Miner, Worker, Trader and Scientist.
As their name suggests, Farmers produce Food and Miners materials. Workers are used to generate Construction and thus build colony projects. Traders can increase the colony’s credit income by generating commerce on top of the existing tax revenue. Finally Scientists produce Research which is used to discover technologies. As explained previously, all these base values depend on the planet and can be increased by constructing installations on the Colony and researching new technologies.
Finally, Food and Materials are shared between all colonies and they required for their growth and construction of projects; a priority must then be set to decide which of them fulfils its needs. The player must do this through the Colonies screen, where he or she can set the order in which they receive resources from the pool.
Construction
Construction is generated by your Workers and used to advance and complete any current project being built in the colony. As all other resources, it can be improved through colony installations and technologies researched. Any project being built requires materials, which depending on the availability of them on the Colony will determine the Materials Efficiency the project has.
This percentage effectively affects the number of turns a project will take to complete. For instance, if you generate 5 Construction per turn in the Colony and you have a colony project with an industrial cost of 20 and 50% materials efficiency, the project will take 6 turns to be completed. If you had more resources and/or prioritized that Colony, with a 100% materials efficiency that very same project would take instead 4 turns.
Finally there is Pollution to take into consideration. The higher your Construction output is, the more of it you will lose thanks to pollution. You can however build installations and research technologies to mitigate this effect. Materials efficiency is not affected by it, so it can often be a better alternative to get more resources for a project than adding more workers to the project.
We will be back next week for new dev diary with a thorough look at the research system. Stay tuned!