Year 20 - Day 142

Sorry for the dearth of updates recently. I've been a little busy with other things but I have managed to do some coding almost every day recently. The vast majority of the recent work has been on colonies and colony management. The biggest deal was implementing colony morale and having it affect things like the amount of manhours available to run the complexes. If your people aren't happy, they don't work as much, so you may not have enough labor to go around.

I've also been shifting some screens around and trying to consolidate them to provide more useful information about the colony to the player, as can be seen in the following screenshot.

Right now Morale modifiers are only being affected by certain complexes and the Management skill of the Governor of the colony. As you can see, each level of Mining, Factory, or Processing complex will reduce morale. Eventually I will also add a negative multiplier for having more than one type of these complexes. So if you have Factories and Processors, you will have a penalty. This is to encourage colonies to specialize and not try to do everything at the same colony.

Eventually there will be "Effects" that can also alter colony morale, such as giving them certain items or if certain events take place. So if you give them a Euphoria drug then it may give you a week of +5 morale, as long as you've given them enough for the population.

I've also started buying more artwork from a talented artist I hooked up with in Argentina. I'm not ready to show it off yet, but I think it's really going to make the colonies look good once he's done.

Year 20 - Day 116

I've been working on a lot of stuff recently and still making good progress. What I've actually been working on has been all over the place, but the last day or so has mostly been concentrated on colonies.

I decided to rename Colony Modules to Colony Complexes to better differentiate them from Ship Modules. That was more involved than I thought and along the way I've finally gotten around to implementing some things that haven't been there yet.

In the screenshot you see a colony that has two Manufacturing Complexes. One is level 5 and the other is Level 2, so this colony would be able to produce 7 things at once. Unfortunately, this colony does not have enough colonists to produce enough manhours, so the second complex is operating at a much lower efficiency. So each one is building the same item, but the second one will take much longer to do so.

Available manhours at colony will be a fairly complicated affair, and will depend on what complexes have been built, where the colony was built, morale boosting items given to the colonists, and even what type of colonists are present. It should present an interesting challenge to colony governors.