Different Settlements, Common Goal

Nate's been playing Against the Storm, a colony game where you build out a colony until it meets some goal, then you set it aside and move on to the next one which is in a tougher biome. You build as many of these as you can before the big "hundred year storm" or whatever comes through and wipes them out and you start over. If you build enough, you can get some kind of buff that like, gives you more time before the next storm so that you can build further and get the next buff.

Or something like that, you should ask him.

Neither of us are a fan of wiping out your work on our particular game, but this did get us thinking about a multi-colony setup.

So you're coming into a hostile world/planet, and your ultimate goal is to fix the planet and make it livable. That seems like a pretty good definition for a "run," or what you'd call a playthrough. We tossed around the idea of making multiple "runs" per planet, each happening on a different part of the planet, and having a planet be more like what a player-profile was in Wildermyth (lots of different campaigns, but single legacy & elemental unlocks, etc). That brought up the question of how these "runs" would interact with each other. Nate proposed "maybe quite a bit" and I wasn't sure about it at first, since it sounded like it might get complicated and you might end up with the callous dirtbag NPC problem.

But! I'm coming around to the idea that the game pushes you toward multiple specialized settlements. It means you get to go through the fun setup stages of a colony multiple times, and hopefully each time it feels different because you're e.g. setting up a mining outpost in one biome, setting up your fiber-farm/ranch in another. Maybe you can pick a couple colonists to start the new settlement when you're ready. Rimworld had a fun DLC thing like that where you were prompted to start a new colony after you hit a certain "wealth" mark, but you got to pick only 5 colonists to bring with you. We loved that part! (It meant that our best guy got to bring his kids and leave behind his cranky bullying mother-in-law! Joke was on us though, she showed up again later and we had to grudgingly take her in.)

So anyway, you end up with these multiple outposts and villages and whatnot, and maybe you're not actually connecting them with roads or tunnels, but there can be some limited trade between them. You'd want to put limitations on this so that you don't end up with the sugar-daddy colony making your later efforts trivial. But MAYBE, in order to fix whatever you need to fix on the hostile surface, you're going to have to start building stuff up there. And because it's so hostile, you're not going to be able to get the food and suits and tools and materials that you need to do whatever high-level stuff you're doing late game. SO, you're relying more and more on all the people and colonies you've built up to this point.

Ideally, everybody's helping each other (farming village is feeding mining village, mining village is sending back better metal farming tools etc), and in the back of their minds, they've all got this "save the planet" motivation.

IN FACT, and this is the part that we cackled at when we thought of it, maybe colonists have a state not only for how comfortable they are, but how much they feel like they're contributing to the good of the world. You know that part in a colony or building game where you're like, "Okay, I've got the basics figured out. I could just coast indefinitely at this point. Why wouldn't I, actually?..." I hate that point, I'm so bad at getting past it and sometimes just quit. So what if, when you hit that point, your little characters had a literal conversation with each other where they were like, "Don't you ever feel like you want to be part of something bigger than yourself?"

Dang, game. I DO feel that sometimes.

And then I don't know how hand-holdy we'd have to be to get the player to specialize their settlements in a way that actually moved them through the game. Hopefully you'd see the high-level tech you wanted, see the components required, and figure out that hey, those guys over in Irontown could definitely help with this. We like the idea of one of the early/midgame goals being some kind of scanner that gives you hints about where good places are for different kinds of settlements. Then you have an idea of what's possible and what you'd want to try and build next.

This is all still super woobly, but we like the idea of a.) encouraging multiple colonies that hopefully feel different because they're trying to accomplish different things in necessarily different biomes, and b.) everybody wanting to help each other and accomplish big goals that they couldn't do on their own.