Hi guys! Glad you all liked the dev diary, I'll try and tackle the most prominent questions I came across and see if I can shed some light on things!
I'm kinda hoping the colonist system gets expanded in the future (like an expansion) so colonists doing the same job for X turns become specialists (better at the given job but lose the bonus if moved) or a chance for any new colonist to become a Talent (a bit of a SMAC reference) which simply produced more regardless of job, stuff like that.
We have been looking into specialized colonists and colonists types, but the added complexity to our already complex economy was not worth the development time at the point of consideration. We have not ruled it out for in the future though!
Really happy about defenses. Have wanted destructible turrets (and maybe other defensive structures) to spice up sieges for a long time. I guess "repeating" just means it gets 1 shot per ap?
Correct! With a repeating attack we mean it fires once per AP the unit has, assault rifles and such are a classic example of a repeating attack in Planetfall.
Quick question- if I'm understanding this right, every additional colonist requires more food?
Correct, each new colonist has what we call a 'colonist acquisition threshold' of Food that is needed to get that colonist, this expands on a logistics growth model, meaning it grows exponentially up until a certain point until it starts to decay again.
Happiness events seem a little bland. Have you thought about adding some interesting ones in there? Random Cosmite would be an easy one. With all the new colony structure building going on, perhaps they could give you a free unit built as well (since it looks like you are less likely to be building units when you get the 3x production event). Maybe rarely you could get a random mod created by an eccentric inventor or a new sector feature could be created/upgraded?
Probably an idea for an expansion, but how about Colonies coming up with their own quests. They would request something and if you provide it within X turns you get a lump happiness (and maybe influence) reward. AoW3 has a weird situation where you couldn't get any more race happiness boosts if you had annexed all the cities of that race, because only external cities would give quests.
We have looked into both of these; making Happiness events more interesting and Quests originating from your own colony. We have designs and systems in place for both of these but we are running out of development time, it looks like these will have to wait for a possible future dlc or expansion (no promises though!).
"Another is imposing Martial Law, which will also remove Colonists over time at the cost of economic penalties." Should that say Rioters instead of Colonists? Or does it actually just kill the Colonists that are rioting. That seems like a huge economic penalty.
Martial Law will have a (minorish) chance to kill a colonist when it converts a rioter back to a regular colonists, we call this 'deadly riots'. Martial Law is a serious button to press, and it comes with penalties, but it will help the player in times of strife to deal with rioters and to stabilize their colony. Mostly they will just convert rioters back into regular colonists however, this is subject to balance as all things, and we'll be looking to you all for feedback during beta!
Finally: Do we have control over the turrets?
The turrets are not player controlled, they have an AI targeting system and they will fire at the start of your turn as defender, so they do their thing, then you can mop up whatever they weakened afterwards!
Doesn't production also overflow if you have nothing queued and just count as bonus towards what you select next?
Correct, Production now overflows into your next construction project, even if you have nothing queued, whatever new thing you place in the queue has production overflow applied to it. Research cannot be queued but works in a similar way, where the research overflow is just applied to the next skill you select. If you wait one turn however, that overflow will be wasted!
Consider this - cities are not allowed to exist in adjacent sectors. Only empty sectors can support a city. City spam is discouraged by forcing a minimum distance between cities (I fear even more so than in AoW2) + having fewer places when you are able/allowed to settle. It may not make much sense lore-wise (sectors are pretty arbitrary), but that is how it is.
Also settling near independents can make them angry.
The world map is built around clusters of valuable sectors, inter spaced with (at least economical) dead zones. We are aiming to have most of the city founding and territory gameplay to revolve around more valuable areas of the world map. Between the 'cannot found adjacent to other colonies' and 'settling next to NPC's makes them angry with you' you will find that, using the new sector system, places for colony founding are more rare, and more valuable. While spamming cities is certainly a thing that can be done still, it will be much more limited in Planetfall (unless playing a 12-player sized map with 2 players of course!)
I hope I managed to shed some light on things, any other questions let me know!
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