City Builder / Colony Manager General Discussion Thread

Speaking of city builders that don’t push you as a player, Before We Leave was mentioned above. I’m in the mood for a new city builder so I gave it a try. It’s a pretty solid meh. I got bored while expanding on the second planet. I don’t completely mind the lack of a strong push as long as there are at least some interesting systems or meat of some sort. I can play Cities Skylines despite the lack of challenges (aside from traffic management) because you are building cool cities. The simplistic hex grid and fixed ratio nature of Before We Leave isn’t offering me much to drive my desire to keep playing.

People in town of 10 people starting from huts and shit: “Man, I’m so fucking happy to eat these berries and twigs!”

100 years later, in the town now consisting of houses and whatnot: “Man, I’m so fucking happy to eat these berries and twigs!”

If ever there were a game that absolutely nailed the aesthetic while being designed by someone who spent all their time nailing the aesthetic, Banished certainly is it.

Heh. That’s a great description. I mean, goddamn I want to play a game that looks like Banished…but isn’t Banished.

I’m having a good time with The Colonists. I picked it up during this steam sale for 30% off. The campaign is good. I just finished the first “battle” portion of the campaign.

Layout is very picky and choosing how to arrange buildings to minimize traffic is very crucial. The developers give you many many buttons and knobs to adjust and I’m just getting used to many of those.

My first thought when playing it though was the “incentive” that these robots have to commandeer a ship and head for the stars is kind of refuted since they manufacture every new robot onsite. Where is their free will? Where is their yearning for the stars, eh?

They wanted to start over as humans. One could say they successfully mimicking their role model by just producing and consuming stuff : )

I am impressed to see the dev is still improving/updating the game.

btw. Tom did a video about The Colonists some time ago.

Started this last night and liked it too so far (although it let me put myself in a pretty bad bind in the second scenario… Don’t upgrade too soon because you can’t go back without a cost!)

I find the theming odd but charming at the moment. Robots who can self-replicate, but built with wood and live in huts? They just sort of wave their hands at it, but it made me imagine a game that takes it just an ounce more seriously: Humanity built robots that appreciate the aesthetics of simplicity and coziness and traditional living, but they wanted them to work all the time and live in sleek corridors and boxy buildings. So the robots left to pursue coziness.

I agree! I got caught in the same predicament and solved it by building a 2nd workshop and now I build 2 workshops every time. It allows me to go faster.

I think what you’re alluding to is that upgrading has so many prerequisites - when going to level 2, you need apples and a cider press so I’ve learned not to even start until I have both of those operational and producing cider.

I’m in the middle of scenario 5 where you upgrade to level 3, and it’s much more involved. I need wheat, flour, bread, paper and binding so you can imagine my level 3 workshop has been idle for some time while I try to get all these other things up & running. The good news is I still have a level 2 workshop running since I run with 2 all the time.

Layout space is very tight right now and I haven’t even begun to build any of the level 3 buildings.

It is kind of charming to play - there is a bit of tension when you do your first battle and learn how important and crucial the placement of watchtowers are.

They really are doing a bang up job in continuing to support it.

I really enjoyed my time with The Colonists. I’ve been meaning to jump back in to see the changes.

And need meat and water to survive in those huts.

I need to get back to this someday. I forget which scenario I was on, but I got deep into the weeds of trying to get the land leveled in a way that would accommodate my plan and drifted off after several restarts.

I’d also like an alternative to watchtowers. They harsh my aesthetic.

Well put. And that’s a message/an idea I think is in the game.

On mission 5, I thought I knew all the prerequisites for Level 3, but man did it jamsackle me with all the cascading needs / research areas.

I still did OK I think, but I think with a replay I could knock a few more months off this

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This is neat! Only on the second mission which is still pretty tutorial, but I am setting me up some production chains, let me tell you what.

I’ve started to have a lot of issues where buildings are idle, with all the resources they need but nothing is happening; lumberjacks who are idle because they are missing power and there is a house nearby with energy that isn’t doing anything because “export is full” so it thinks that nothing needs it.

I can exit / restart and it helps sometimes. In one case, I had a shipbuilder who had all the planks but wouldn’t apply any - even with quit / restart. I had to resort to a previous save, and it didn’t happen again.

Anyone else having these issues?

I had my city nearly lock up, and noticed the road bots carrying a good in one direction, then picking up another of the same good and carrying it back in the other direction–which seems like an error. Not sure if it really was broken, though, or if I just had bad supply chains…

Yes that happens a lot, particularly with storage areas so I’ve been using the whitelist on storage areas to direct them to where I want them - I like to use small storage areas as a pre-stage for building something. So you can start to build something - put it on pause, then set the rules for the storage area only to deliver to that building.

BTW - on my bug reporting, the developer responded and is asking for files so that’s positve!

Looking into the colonists I read the reviews on Steam and one of the negative reviews mentioned this specific factor – that they had robots traveling to a different island to get supplies that were in a warehouse right next to where they were needed. So I think this seems like a long-standing issue. Hopefully the dev will be able to quash this bug because aside from that (maybe even in spite of that) the game seems pretty well received.

It’s not an error so much as a function of game logic that can be quite counterintuitive. When a building looks for a good it needs, if it can find one, it orders it and locks in the delivery. Even if something closer becomes available in the meantime, the initially ordered item will be prioritised and the closer one ignored. If you want to avoid outcomes like this, you need to be quite strict about the blacklist/whitelist rules and as tman says use lots of intermediate storage facilities.

Getting better. This game rocks.