This is the perfect time for suggestions, right? Right? I was thinking the other day about city-builders, and it occurred to me that, as a genre, they tend to share the problem of inevitable complacency. After a certain point, the game stops being about building and starts being about reacting to random occurrences in the world, simply because the city's run out of needs and/or space. Maybe I'm just myopic, but I can't see a way for the simulation to end other than a steady state, be that ruins infested with fishpeople or a self-sustaining metropolis. So, perhaps in a future expansion pack, could we transition from being a colony to managing the establishment of colonies of our own? Perhaps we could build the expeditions like buildings, out of discrete modules that provide distinct functionality in the form of increased survival odds or modifiers to their future growth curve or something. Perhaps we could build those modules IN a building that is controllably emptied when we'd like to send more citizens out to build new cities. Barrels of salted dodo drumsticks and portable cranes and ambiguous crates and so forth. Then the colony just becomes another off-screen entity with which we can interact, albeit one with presumably predictable needs. As a logical extension of that, maybe we could build expeditions we'd proceed to accompany, like a sort of steampunk SimAnt where the house is Y'ha-nthlei. Also like a kind of New Game Plus, since it's functionally restarting on unbroken dirt, just with better supplies and maybe in a weirder location. Anyway, just had an idea and wanted to blather about it and see how nuts it sounds.
This is kind of sounds like anno 2070 and how it allows you to take improvements or building materials to a new map.
Tying in with that statement, what exactly are the "meta-game" rewards for a given successful colony? I realize success is a very relative term in Clockwork Empires, but what if someone actually did construct a heliograph, export rare cures, and generally bring Order to the Province before everything came crashing down?
Well... no... even if you make a complete mess of things as the beauracrat, you don't really get blamed, just shuffled around to (mis)manage a new colony. That's the impression I got.
In dwarf fortress success is measured by how long you colony survives before you decide to open up the fun cave into hell. I once read that someone survived longer then the parent nation that spawned his original 7 dwarfs. He had a single dwarf left and the last migrant was some 20+ years before. It is stories like this that make me want no end goal. Sandbox games like that let us write how the game is going to end. Now that being said I would like to have achievements for things like how long our colonies survive and such. Possibly a scoreboard were we can compare ourselves to other players.
And then it get hacked and you can compare with absurd scores. But for an offline highscore, i'm in. I like highscores
Colonies can't launch colonies. I can see circumstances where this could be really cool, but it would be placed so far down the priority list that we'd probably never get to it. We want players to start a new settlement, build it up, have a good time, then either die horribly or want to try something else, and make another one.
I'm not sure about building the 'settler unit' from within the colony but I would be interested in a meta game where the only resources available for starting later colonies are those provided by earlier ones. Especially if it came along with random 'fun' events that altered the available resources from already established colonies. "Because of an outbreak of poets, your mining colony is now entirely populated by fish people. So I'm afraid your soldiers for your next venture will just have to make due with these sharpened sticks instead of muskets. Oh and the former citizens turned fish people are headed that way. Should be interesting times."
I think the existing idea for a prestige system is much neater and more sensible. Please one faction, your future colonies start with cucumber sandwhiches and tea, please another, they start with beer and sausages. That was the impression I got for how the existing meta game is intended to work.
So let me get this straight. There's an overview map (meta game) where you can see your colony on the grand scale of things. What is the purpose of this? To see how far your colony stretches? Where you plop your colony down, is there a way to expand the land?
The idea is that, (once we have developed other elements of the game enough that it's time to flesh that feature out) you'll be able to pick different areas to settle in, thus changing what resources you have access to, what threats are nearby, what sort of terrain is around, etc. At the moment, however, there's only one 'choice' since we're trying to focus on implementing features and balancing the core gameplay. The "Metagame" and "Biomes" sections of our development progress page have more details: http://clockworkempires.com/development.html
