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.
The screenshot graphics look a bit garbled. Is it better in play?
Is that Autonauts?
He is playing :
oh dammit! That looks interestiiiiing! arrggh!
Gameplay is crystal clear and really well done. Are you thinking that end of game summary screen I posted looks garbled or did you see gameplay elsewhere?
On their steam page I went through their screenshots and it just looked like the graphics would be hard to get used to if they presented exactly as seen.
Ah well now I went and looked and I can see how that may look fuzzy but I can tell you that I’m really super impressed with how the game presents information at a wide variety of zooms and I’m routinely going between super zoomed in when I’m trying to place something just right and then zooming out and panning around to check on how things are going.
It’s a very whimsical game. The campaign is ingeniously structured to get more difficult and alternates between solo play and against other robots. I just finished #7 and there are 14 missions. As you increase in the campaigns, they get longer and longer as they get larger areas, more techs, etc. I feel I’ve been pretty focused and steam tells me I’ve been playing for 46 hours and by the campaign numbers, I’m half way.
The solo play maps are no pressure except for the gold/silver/bronze medals you get at the end depending upon how fast you complete the map. The first few maps I got silver but wasn’t too worried as I know I’m just learning the game and am looking foward to going back once I’m done to see how much faster I can go.
The battle maps are against 1 other robot colony so far. There may be campaign maps with > 1 but so far that’s all I’ve seen. Battle doesn’t work like in other games where you create troops and attack. Rather, you have these watchtowers that cover your area and their influence defines your boundary - so expansion is required in the beginning until your borders meet up. The AI is pretty aggressive and your early growth will define how long this game goes on. To do battle, you have to upgrade your towers and arm them with arrows, and then cannonballs, although I haven’t had to do cannonballs yet so I’m imagining that is in later campaigns.
This game is really more about routing and setting up efficient paths to/from all your producers/consumers. Deleting / reorganizing is pretty painless other than the resource hit for rebuilding, and for at least Campaign 7, required.
Ok, so I’m playing campaign 8 (what a breath of fresh air to #7 which was so many islands / shipping routes) and I saw this view which really tells you how the game communicates information. Here is a screenshot:
I love these little icons. They tell you so much - two buildings in process (hammer with partial shading indicating how far along they are) and if buildings are in need of a resource that hasn’t been identified yet, the resource is shown (you can see logs on some / stone on others) and one building where I have priority set (it gets everything it requests before others do).
And I love how clearly it shows everything. Really nice. The camera tilt is adjustable via middle mouse button so you can be more tops down or at an angle like I prefer.
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!
