Abandoned Colony

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defaultuser
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Abandoned Colony

#1 Post by defaultuser »

Does this special actually do anything?

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labgnome
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#2 Post by labgnome »

defaultuser wrote: Wed Aug 26, 2020 2:58 am Does this special actually do anything?
Yes, but actually no.
It gives extra infrastructure.
All of my contributions should be considered released under creative commons attribution share-alike license, CC-BY-SA 3.0 for use in, by and with the Free Orion project.

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LienRag
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#3 Post by LienRag »

And it isn't well explained anywhere in-game alas...
I only understood it months later when reading the discussion on Infrastructure in this forum.

defaultuser
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#4 Post by defaultuser »

Back in the day, this special used to increase the habitability of the planet. If it didn't actually do anything, I would have suggested that it either be shelved or something be done with it, like decrease the turns to build a colony or something.

tabbydan
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#5 Post by tabbydan »

I'd recommend that at some point work is done on either the documentation or coding behind Abandoned Colony.

Obviously not a high priority problem, so maybe the easiest fix is to comment out this feature (leave the code in place but never call it) until it obviously does something.

As a player, I can't actually tell if this item actually does anything. New players probably get excited by it, but if the bonus actually has any impact it is so small that it seems to not be doing anything.

In general, I'd say planetary bonuses/specials need rework (again not highly pressing bugs, and probably most of them can be fixed just with better documentation):

1) it is completely unclear how said bonuses stack (or not). I assume that (I'm probably using the wrong names so bear with me) a caretaker fruit, a probiotic soup, etc stack (empire-wide for organics if set to growth focus), however this not spelled out. But what if you have more than one of the same type of special? I typically set worlds with specials to growth focus, but if the second one of the same type "doesn't count" I should do something else.

2) there are planetary bonus/specials for organic, robotic, and lithic organisms. It feels like an oversight that there aren't any for photosynthetic/self-sustaining organisms

defaultuser
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#6 Post by defaultuser »

As I alluded to above, an in-game explanation that might work is that the colony takes less time and RP to build, as they can use the existing structure. So maybe cut the build from outpost requirement by 1/5 or something. I don't think that would be overbalanced.

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Oberlus
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#7 Post by Oberlus »

tabbydan wrote: Sat Dec 05, 2020 7:58 pm 1) it is completely unclear how said bonuses stack (or not). I assume that (I'm probably using the wrong names so bear with me) a caretaker fruit, a probiotic soup, etc stack (empire-wide for organics if set to growth focus), however this not spelled out. But what if you have more than one of the same type of special? I typically set worlds with specials to growth focus, but if the second one of the same type "doesn't count" I should do something else.

2) there are planetary bonus/specials for organic, robotic, and lithic organisms. It feels like an oversight that there aren't any for photosynthetic/self-sustaining organisms
Growth specials do not stack with the same growth special (i.e. one Caretaker's Fruit is enough for the whole empire, but you will want also one Probiotic Soup, etc.). Making it clear in the documentation would be great.

Self-sustaining do not have growth specials but have an innate bonus. Same for Phototrophic that get bonus/malus depending on star brightness. This allows for different gameplays.

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Oberlus
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#8 Post by Oberlus »

defaultuser wrote: Sat Dec 05, 2020 8:14 pm As I alluded to above, an in-game explanation that might work is that the colony takes less time and RP to build, as they can use the existing structure. So maybe cut the build from outpost requirement by 1/5 or something. I don't think that would be overbalanced.
+1

tabbydan
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Re: Abandoned Colony

#9 Post by tabbydan »

Cutting the upgrade time from outpost to colony is a good idea. I'd recommend more like 1/2 rather than 1/5 as 20% might not be easily visible to a player whereas 50% is more than twice that and is easily visible.

The only issue with that is you might want to have the same bonus to colony ship and the easiest way to implement that would be if you send a colony ship to a planet with an abandoned colony you get half of the production points (that went into the colony ship) back in your queue after you put the colony ship there (and have that in the documentation). Half the pp back in the queue would not be noticeable if you a number of planets already and have a large pp number.

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