City Builder / Colony Manager General Discussion Thread

I’ve been playing The Colonists and liking it quite a bit. It has been smooth sailing with gold medals up until now (mission 7), but I haven’t played any military ones yet. Mission 7 is a doozy. I’ve been trying to pay closer attention to my efficiency and delivery times and I don’t know if it sent me down a rabbit hole that causes more problems than it’s worth.

I was looking at my late deliveries and noticing that sometimes a resource was being sent across the map to a different island instead of using a more local one. Sometimes this sets off a chain reaction of delaying things. To prevent it I had to start using whitelists to restrict where resource producers will send to and whitelists to say where receivers will accept it from. I probably could have just made sure I was over producing and storing extra resources in a stockpile so there would always be a close supply.

In any case, I kinda messed up this mission and am just forcing my way through it. Other than these supply issues on this one mission it has been a joy to play. It’s just the right amount of plotting roads and balancing resource production. Definitely a good buy for me.

I was gifted this and I wanted to say thank you again :) It’s extremely well done from what I’ve seen and the preview screenshots don’t do it justice.

I have a dumb question. I don’t quite understand why I need to use paths instead of roads sometimes (outside of when you can’t make the road match up). Is there another reason you want to limit the number of roads you have? or have primarily paths everywhere except one major road to connect them to?

Paths connect buildings to the roads, basically. If a resource consuming building is connected to a resource producing building by a path, it can collect the resource directly. Sometimes you want to keep a clump of buildings connected only with paths so that they don’t clog up the transport on the road network. The archeytpal example is four residences, a well and a farm, which is a self-sufficient energy production cell.

So this game is pretty neat. Hooray!

So also, managing whitelists is such an incredible pain in the ass it must be the “not-recommended” way of managing supply chains.

Wait, paths basically create local preferences? So like, Idiot’s House will look for Dumbass’s Well and Moron’s Farm if they’re on the same “path subnet” and only look to the wider road network if they can’t find it there?

It takes so little to make the road network clog up.

Pretty much. If you have producer A connect by path to consumer B, and they are both also connected to storage C by road, if B needs what A has, it will go A->B rather than A->C->B. Can be used for energy hubs, feeding wood, stone, etc. directly to processing and the like.

The little hub Ginger_Yellow described be all connect by paths, and then have a route out to a road so the energy cells can be sent to where they’re needed. Food, water, etc. would never hit the main line.

I really do need to get back to this. I think I left on scenario 8. Didn’t try any of the conflict maps.

You know, I knew that but it didn’t really register how big an effect it can have. My future cities thank you.

I wrote a guide on how to debug slowdowns.

Cool!

Ooh, it runs on Linux. Wishlisted.

A game worth writing a guide for is a game worth playing! Wishlisted! Thanks!

I was disappointed that his was the ONLY guide there. It was a good guide though!

I’ll be writing a few more guides once I complete the game. I do this for games I really like so when I play them again down the road I can have a jump start from all my wisdom the first time I played it.

While @Tman is doing fine work, this is also pretty helpful.

-Tom

Thank you! I stumbled upon that at one point and then couldn’t find it again.

I can see that some of the negative reviews brings up the exact point you wrote to address.

Anyone playing Industries of Titan? I see on the Epic Game Store they just released Update #2 in EA.

So I completed campaign 11 on the Colonists. I don’t think I’m up for the last several battle missions. They are pretty tedious (up until now) and not sure there is any drastic change for the last few missions unless anyone can convince me otherwise.

For the record, battles are fairly easy to win. You just spam forestry + lumberjacks, get to L2 as fast as you can and upgrade arrows from there on out. You need to have tons of logs to take over / repair watchtowers that you capture.

On the last campaign #11, I did get 26 on the leaderboard - on my 2nd playthrough, so my best showing to date. It does get really tedious in watching all your ports / roads for jams and clearing them out quickly.

Epic sale is on now, and this is robc’s fault:

  • Colonists
  • Anno 1800

0 voters

Only buying one, which to buy?

You know how I voted :-)

Now, I liked messing around with Anno 1800 when UPlay had it’s free trial of it’s game pass thing. I played a bunch of the campaign and maybe played some random map (don’t recall). I’m just not a huge fan of the formula. It’s a little too…clean? They both share the same basic principles. Harvest a resource, turn it into something better through some production building and use it to keep people fed / happy / build something. They both have higher tier citizens that require another resource (Anno’s is a bit more involved).

Anno maybe makes the player make efficient use of space, but with the teleporting goods through warehouses it doesn’t require the player to make efficient transportation of that resource and that makes it a bit too simple / uninteresting. That’s not to say Anno is always easy. It can be a bear to squeeze something in or have enough space to produce the resource on the island with all your houses on it. It’s just a problem I find a bit more tedious and less interesting to solve - start bulldozing, moving production to another island, ship the resource over, etc…

Anno is gorgeous to look at though, especially those fields of wheat. There are probably more things to build and maybe things to fiddle with. I find the AI personalities annoying, along with the campaign story, but playing vs the AI can make the game more interesting. I think The Colonists may have an AI opponent but I’m not sure.

It’s also possible that one may tire of The Colonists before Anno. I tend not to play this genre into the ground so it’s not a big issue for me.

I am still thinking about why I don’t consider both games to be in the same boat. Maybe it comes down to the kind of core decisions that are to make.

The campaign in Anno has alyways been a lengthy and tedious tutorial. I would add.

That’s because that really isn’t what Anno is about. It’s a grand scale city builder about effectively spending and organizing resources (time and land are important here) and balancing the citizen classes along it.
In The Colonists I’d ask myself how to setup a flawlessly working supply chain network whereas in Anno it’s never a question of how to get stuff from A to B.
In Anno I’d ask myself stuff like… when to expand/seek new land, which islands to take, in what order, what role can they play, how to deal with missing seeds, will I be playing aggressively of friendly, whom to befriend, what funds will I need, etc. That’s a kind of a grand scale city builder and with it come different questions and a focus on different decisions to make.