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 17 - Day 274

Not many major coding changes this weekend so far. I've mostly been killing some more bugs and adding a few minor features I'd neglected previously like sending a report when your upgrade your ship and also adding it to the ship log.

I did finally figure out how I'm going to make Ship Morale have some meaning in the game. I don't want to take away someone's ship just because morale has finally hit rock bottom, but as the ship's morale heads downwards it will affect the crew's efficiency so tasks will take longer. It will probably be in brackets instead of just using the morale as a percentage multiplier. So once the (1 - 100) morale goes below say, 75, things will start taking longer. Maybe a 10% slow down at that point. Once it hits zero you can probably look at things taking double the normal amount of time. 

Morale will still have a major effect on combat, and you probably don't want to try Jumping to a new star system with a ship whose morale is in the gutter. It's not good to be sloppy when entering jump space.

Granting Shore Leave at a colony or space station will improve morale tremendously on a ship, although it will be a 12 hour or so action and cost the ship money, most of which will go to the colony owner, depending on the level of the Entertainment district at the colony. Just letting the crew blow off some steam at a mining outpost with no Entertainment district will help some, but some of the larger colonies will have higher level amenities that will top that morale quickly.

Year 17 - Day 249

The sentient population of colonies is now increasing weekly based on the fecundity rating of the species. Currently I only have two types of "species" in the game: Human Colonists and Indentured Humans for the more evil players. There will be more to come.

Human colonists have a fecundity rating of 1, while their indentured brethren are rated at 1.2 for now. This is not to make an advantage for unscrupulous colony owners, but will probably cause them to have to jump through more hoops to keep the unwilling workers happier and under control.

Currently a colony checks each population group at exactly one week intervals to see what the fecundity rate is for that group of species and whether they should grow or shrink. The rate can be affected by morale, overcrowding (which also affects morale), and even certain items that have been made available to the population.

By way of explanation for this last feature, each colony governor will be able to Assign certain items as being given to the colony population at large. Each item can have different effects on different species. So an aphrodisiac for Human colonists may raise their fecundity rating, but may lower the morale of another alien species group at the colony, so can have both good and bad consequences.

I'm excited to be moving into the time where morale of a colony population will start to have a real effect in the game. I'm looking forward to creating new items and tech for these purposes. 

Year 12 - Day 188

I took a break for the last week or so due to the holidays and a small amount of coding burnout, but I got back into it tonight.

First up I was trying to kill a bug where all the new ships I was creating was starting with Morale set to 0, when it should have been 10.  At first I thought it was a problem with my SQL insert, but I checked everything and an almost duplicate default value for Ship Class was working fine, so I tried not using the default value on the insert and it still came up 0.  After over an hour, I finally started thinking "oh, it must be a bug with MySQL", which is almost always NOT the case, but after a while you start getting desperate for answers.  I finally figured out it was because I wasn't initializing the time for when morale was last checked for the new ship, so the game though morale for the new ship hadn't been checked since Jan 1, 1970, which caused it to go to zero instantly.  Bleh.

After that I started giving some love to the Shipyard functionality when a ship is landed at a colony.  I've got it cleaned up a good bit, and now I just need to make it use resources, which will likely be Starship Structural Units.  Initially I'm going to set it to New Ship Class * 100 Structural Units, so to go from 0.1 to 0.2 it will take 20 units.  These units will either have to be in the ship's cargo hold, or in the colonies warehouse if your ship is at a colony you own.  I'll post a screenshot soon.

Spaghetti Anyone?

Blarg.  I started looking into the code I've written over the last few years to display my star systems and it's just plain nasty.  I'm such a hack when it comes to coding.  Heh.  I've started ripping it all out and I'm replacing almost all of it.  At least it's more fun to work on this than to enter more db rows about planet tiles.

I have made a few decisions about how I'm going to use the Morale rating on ships and colonies.  It will act more like an efficiency rating for the most part.  So it will start at 100% and will affect things like how much He3 you scoop at gas giants, or anything else where an efficient, happy crew would be able to do things more effectively.  If morale reaches 0, the ship will mutiny and disappear.  This is how I'll handle accounts that stop playing.  The ships will disappear, but the crew will eventually show up at a colony and can be hired by another player.

The main way to raise morale will be to grant shore leave at a colony.  This is another way to make sure ships have to come back in from the wild every once and a while.  When you grant shore leave, you also have to spend money for the crew salaries, and part of that money will go back to the colony owner.  There will be a type of Entertainment complex that can be constructed at colonies, and the better that complex is the more Morale will be raised for a ship and the colony owner will collect more of the income.

Ship Morale

Well, I couldn't sleep, so I went ahead and finished implementing Ship Morale decay. Ships should lose 0.1 Morale every 86400 seconds now. For now it will just go down to 0.0 and have no further effect, but implementing the Mutiny/Derelict code is going to be a fairly involved process so I'm going to table it for now. I will slowly add some effects of having medium or low morale in the next few weeks as I touch other things, like affecting the time it takes to complete actions or how much He3 you harvest from Gas Giants.

I'll also be adding the Shore Leave ship action at colonies. The basic action will just give a large boost to your ship's Morale level. When it's finished it will cost the ship owner stellars to grant Shore Leave. The higher rank your crew members are, the more it will cost, which will simulate the higher pay that higher ranks get. The colony you grant the Shore Leave at will receive some percentage of this cost, depending on the level of their Entertainment colony module. So a 2.5 level Entertainment module will mean that the colony will get 25% of what is spent by ships on Shore Leave, and a higher level module will give a higher morale boost.

Weekend Update

The good news is I'm over my blah feelings from a few days ago. I just needed some time vegetating on the couch and some extra sleep and a few games of Axis and Allies : War at Sea with my son to clear my head.

No major updates in the last few days, but I have been working on a lot of small stuff that will eventually lead to some major changes.

One thing I did add this weekend was a new position to the ship's crew called Specialist. This position will be used to check for skills like Mining that will allow for better Gas Giant Scooping or Comet Harvesting. My vision for now is that most skills can only be raised during "field work" on board a ship, so if you want your mining outpost or colony to have a better mining administrator he's going to need to get some experience out in space first.

I also started getting the framework ready to implement Morale for ships and colonies. Morale on ships will decrease at a steady rate, likely 0.1 per 24 hours, but there are other things that can affect it in more drastic ways like a Misjump or being involved in combat. Ships will need to visit colonies and issue the Shore Leave command to raise morale. Ships with lower morale will face penalties in using the skills of their personnel, and ships with very low morale may face mutiny. This will basically be a way of removing unplayed ships from the game without the GM having to intervene. I'll probably have it so that 0.1 class ships that go to 0 morale just disappear from the game so there won't be too many of them clogging things up.