Hey guys Even though my colonies have all been short lived due to a mix of my own incompetence and some easily forgiven bugs, I am seeing something in the late game that seems a bit flawed. As it stands at the moment any fairly successful colony quickly starts to deplete some resources quite quickly. For long lived colonies it's seems you will sooner or later reach a point where you simply cannot obtain most resources in any way currently in the public version of the game. For forests the saplings task already resolves this problem, but what are the plans for defeating this problem for other materials like copper / gold? In most playthough's I've had I find maybe 4 copper nodes, and so far I've yet to see a single gold node (which brings up a related observation: Upper class housing is virtually impossible to construct in the current iteration as far as I can see).
As I understand it, mineral nodes on the surface are not intended to be a permanent source of ore - there are supposed to be mines (at the very least, art assets for mine entrances, carts, and tracks already exist) which, presumably, are longer-term sources of metal.
As for your second point I think the devs might neeed to look at distribution. Oftentimes you end up in situations where you're all out of one resource and just can't find any. That sucks. However maybe mines and stuff will fix that, so I'm holding my breath for now
I'm expecting trading will influence this as well when implemented, provided a colony is able to produce a surplus of something...
I wouldn't mind something like a New Game +. Perhaps the Empire recognizes your amazing powers of management and transfers you to a new colony. You can restart the game with a huge boost in prestige, maybe send you do a more difficult region or something. This could either be via a victory condition or initiated by the player - applying for royal recognition or something? Potentially more game modes could be opened up this way in a kind of story mode of progressing difficulty - an "Australian" game where all your colonists are violent or criminal, or a version where you only start with one labourer and a lot of military, for example. Don't Starve implements this somewhat. If you gather the right artifacts on the map and assemble them at the Teleportato, you can go to a new world with your current inventory (and change characters, if you want).
