What is the significance of the main colony? Do I care about population, jobs, etc.?

The top of the screen shows information about the non-company colony, listing things like it's population, whether oxygen and food are too expensive, and how many jobs there are. Do these things matter at all to me as a player? I've had games where the colony is pretty much choked out of existence. Is this having any effect? Is it in my best interest to keep food and oxygen prices low? Am I supposed to care about the jobs number? And just what is the jobs number?

I ask mainly because the information is placed so prominently, at the top center of the screen, so I'm assuming the status of that colony is somehow important to me as one of the players running a trading colony on Mars.

-Tom

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Soren_Johnson

Join Date 04/2008

+29

Hi Tom!

The colony is the primary force (besides the players themselves) which puts demands on the market. A colony with a hug population will consume a lot of life support, for example. Each of the job modules (you can see what they are by mousing over them) also have their own sets of demands. You can get a sense for the demand fomorn the colony by watching the resource bubbles which pop over the colony - each one represents one purchase.

The UI for all this is basically debug-level, so I'm not surprised that it's not clear what is going on. It's a recent addition, and we are still experimenting with it. The one tangible effect it has on gameplay is that you can fails levels in the campaign mode because the colony drops to zero population, so you don't want to let the prices of life support get too out of hand.

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Cool, I hoped it was something like that! And I see now the tooltip for the modules as they upgrade. Very nifty.

I had thought the economy was a closed system among the players, but I'm glad to know the actual colony is also a factor. I got the idea of what it was pretty quickly, but I assumed it was just a visual representation. Although I did notice all the little miniblimps coming and going, and that didn't seem merely cosmetic.

I hope you'll be able to bring its effects to the forefront more with future builds, as well as give us some way to affect it, or at least make it clear how our actions affect it. And I'm glad to hear you're playing with it in the campaign missions. Mars would be a pretty lonely place if it was just us companies up here trying to make a buck.

-Tom

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