Greetings, Commanders.

In Fragile Allegiance, not every threat came from a rival corporation. Your own colonists would steal from you, go on strike, or run off with a ship, and a virus outbreak could empty a colony. Over the last weeks I reworked these events, along with accidents like radiation leaks and ruptured pipelines, into incidents that you actually have to respond to.

The Idea

I want running a colony to be about more than ore and power. There are people living there. They get unhappy, some of them turn to crime, and accidents happen. The buildings that deal with this, like Security Centres and Medical Centres, should be worth the space they take, and how you treat your colonists should come back to you later.

When something does go wrong, I want you to have a real choice with a cost attached, and not just a message saying you lost something. The right answer shouldn't always be obvious either. Paying usually costs more but is safer, the free options are riskier, and sometimes the best call is to just let it happen.

Incidents Are Decisions

When something goes wrong in one of your colonies now, the game pauses and shows a popup with a few options. The first option is always to let it happen. The others cost money, need a certain building, or carry some risk.

For example, if someone steals credits from a colony you can accept the loss, pay for a security sweep (which needs a Security Centre) and hope to catch the thief, or seal the colony down for a few days. A sealed colony gets angrier, and the lockdown can turn into a firefight. If a worker strike breaks out, you can let them strike, raise wages, or send in security.

If you can't afford an option or are missing the building it needs, the popup tells you exactly what's missing, in red. Some responses don't resolve right away either. You might fund an investigation and only hear back a few days later.

I should also say that not every option is as safe as it sounds. Some of the cheap choices have a hidden chance of going wrong. I'm not going to say which ones.

The Criminal Underworld

Unrest has always been the thing that drives crime in a colony. The remake uses the same unrest levels as the original. A mildly unhappy colony gets strikes and theft. A very unhappy one gets deserters, stolen missiles and stolen ships, and at the top you start losing blueprints.

What's new is that every colony now has a hidden number of criminals. It grows with unrest and population, and the criminals push unrest further up on their own. So a colony that gets out of hand tends to get worse unless you do something about it. The only thing that reduces their number is a Security Centre with officers in it, and even then a few are always left over. You never see the count directly. You only see what they do.

Security officers can also uncover a plot before it happens. If they do, you get a PLOT UNCOVERED popup and can order arrests. If the arrests work, unrest goes down. If they fail, the theft still happens and some of your officers don't come back. A Security Centre without staff will never find anything, so it's worth keeping it staffed.

Stolen Ships

Only idle ships sitting in a colony can be stolen. If a theft succeeds, you'll see the ship take off and fly out of the colony at high speed, and then it's gone. There's no explosion. It just disappears.

Four Kinds of Virus

Virus outbreaks now come in four strains. Two of them are fairly mild and two are deadly. The worst one, Necrotic Plague, can't be cured at all.

A Medical Centre gives you two ways to respond. You can import medical supplies, which is expensive but always cures a curable strain. Or you can order a quarantine, which is free but might fail. If it fails you take the full death toll and a lot of unrest. With a deadly strain, even a successful quarantine means sealing off part of the colony with people still inside.

Outbreaks never kill the whole colony, though. The death toll is capped at 90% of the population, so a plague hurts a lot but always leaves survivors. Most outbreaks are random, but the virus missile isn't. If someone hits you with one, it always starts a deadly strain.

Meteors

Meteor showers don't have a popup. Instead you get a warning 30 to 50 days in advance, shown as a countdown on the HUD, and it turns red a week before impact. That warning is your preparation time.

When the shower arrives, real rocks fall on the colony and mostly hit buildings. Your PDC turrets will try to shoot them down, so a colony with good point defense comes out of it much better than one without.

The Federal Transport

The Federal transport visits every year. It arrives on June 1st and leaves on July 10th, with a warning on June 20th that it's leaving soon. While it's docked you can click it to trade.

And the AI?

At the moment, AI colonies don't run unrest or crime at all, and they don't get random events. Incidents only happen to you. It's something I'll probably revisit later.

What's Next

Most of this is in place, but the numbers still need a lot of tuning. Next I want to play longer games and see how often these incidents actually show up, and whether they feel fair. As usual, the roadmap has the rest.

Signing out,

  • Jari