EXODE focuses on being an immersive experience, and bringing you a space epic adventure. But the truth is that it is also a management game.
While management options are for now restricted to inspecting characters and sending an Investigation Team... there is more, much more to come!
It begins on your planet
You are on your new planet.
You landed with a specific amount of food, water and energy.
This planet has dangerous seasons, your ship has damage and aliens are still after you.
Ok.
Life is colorful after all.
But at least you have food and water right?
I mean, you won't see your characters die of hunger?
Well, about that...
Choose the player you want to be!
Let's take a random citizen named Dan.
Dan escaped from Station Aramea on your ship.
I can assure you Dan is not dying of hunger right now.
There are many things to know about Dan, but it's quite possible you - the master of this colony - are not interested in all that.
Some players will be interested in knowing everything about Dan, including his love life. Others may only want to know:
- If Dan is alive?
- If Dan still has two hands and two legs?
- If the answer is YES to all of above, then all is okay, nothing to report.
The interesting thing about EXODE, is that despite a complexity in its system, it can be played intuitively and with the degree of information you want.
But even if you can take decisions intuitively, we also want the rest of the management to be fun. We want it to be realistic enough and detailed. So if you want more information, we are here to deliver. This is what these Feature Diaries are also about!
Knowledge is Power!
You know information is important, but how do you get it?
When you connect to your game session, you will see the information you control.
Statistics are part of what you control.
For instance, you always see your accurate food storage.
So if "some food disappeared", that information will be known.
Was it some alien wildlife that helped itself with a nice dinner?
Or is Dan the guilty person?
This part, you will not know.
"Increasing the information you control" is a decision you can take.
This involves several decisions actually.
Some characters can "investigate other characters".
This is just one of the orders you can give on a colony.
Some characters are named "administrators" because you assigned them that role (not because they have it on their title!). So that guy should be a good one:
... but maybe the famous Norah will be indicated as good for it too:
Administrators are naturally able to detect events (or to fail at detecting them). So they increase the amount of information under your control.
Events they detect are added to their daily report.
Other characters are "assistants", and you can click on them and order them a new colony report.
You can give these orders if they mention it on their card, but there is also a collection of other management decisions you can take even on any character. We'll review some of them below.
Decisions you will be able to take
You can manage Teams:
- You can set up Teams. A Team has a leader and some members. You will click on "create team" and basically assign a leader and a bunch of people.
- A character can be part of several Teams. For instance you can have an administration team, several research teams, an Away Team, and so on, and Dan may be part of several of these.
- When you give an order, you can give it to a specific Character, or to a Team. If you give it to a Character, that character will be "busy" for some time. If you give it to a Team, all characters in the Team who are not currently busy will receive that order.
- If a character is busy, you can still give orders and it will be added to queue.
You can give Orders:
Orders are something temporary: they are given, they have a timer, then they are executed and completed.
And the character then gets to the next order in the queue.
At any time, a character can also "pause" execution and do something else that the character decided. Things such as sleeping, taking a break, or harrassing that neighbor.
You can give Assignments:
Assignments are permanent. Until an assignment is removed, usually by you, it will stay.
There are simple assignments you can give to characters, such as:
| Assignment | Description |
|---|---|
| Assign a Team | Teams, mentioned above, are permanent assignments. |
| Assign a Colony Role | The character will add that role to his/her active roles. A character can have several roles but any additional role above 1 reduces proficiency. |
| Assign a Habitation | The character will now sleep and take his/her breaks in that building. The more 'space' and 'amenities' in the habitation (and the less other people in it), the better usually for Happiness and events. |
| Assign a Work Location | Work locations can be found automatically by characters by picking the available location where this work can be executed. But you can also assign them manually if you want. Also, for Colony Guards, the work location is actually the place they will guard, otherwise they just patrol randomly. Or it can be a place with no building, if it is the place you want them stationed at. |
And other assignments to buildings and locations on your colony:
| Assignment | Description |
|---|---|
| Assign Usage Type | You can designate a building as: Habitation (where people live and sleep) Cantina (where people eat) Leisure (where people enjoy activities) Generic Storage (where you can store everything) Special Storage (pick one between: food, water, energy, vehicles, prefabs, weapons, etc), Workshop (where citizens can produce things) Lab Space (where citizens can make research) Office (where citizens can work on other tasks, such as administration) Security (such as a bunker or watch tower) ... to name a few! |
| Assign Usage Rule | You can designate a building to be reserved to some citizens only. For instance, a food storage giving only access to your Colony Cook. Or a Weapon Storage only accessible to your Colony Guards. Normally it's the Colony Guards who help enforce such rules but they need to be around for this to work! |
| Assign as Leader Office | In our current alpha model, something we want to test is to make your 'Origin' as "not invisible". You must actually select a location where 'you' will be located. This can be also the place you want to guard at all times. There can be a 'game over' for your colony if a hostile citizen decides to eliminate you and succeeds in this. |
You are the Law!
Other things you can decide is to set up Doctrines.
These are meant as "a collection of requirements" you define for your colony.
One is the Food Reservation Doctrine:
you can decide that food can be eaten freely, or that food is reserved to the cook.
One is the Food Rationing Doctrine:
you can decide to make half rations, full rations, or double rations.
One is the Time Sync Doctrine:
you can decide when characters should sleep and work (supposedly that's whenever they don't sleep!) and align it to your available time in the day.
There will be other doctrines added from time to time, but these are the first simple ones we would like to test.
Another thing is Colony Modes.
You can switch your colony to another colony mode, such as activating a "Rest Mode", where characters don't work and try to recover from wounds and exhaustion the best way until you decide to end it.
The Daily Life of a Perfect Citizen!
When you connect to your game session we will see what happened.
Every day, Dan wakes up, and follows his job, and eats two times a day. He eats at a Cantina if one is there, otherwise in his Habitation. Dan also takes a number of breaks, actually whenever his Stamina drops a bit too much, and recovers only a few Stamina during his break.
If several characters are at the same time somewhere, for instance if they eat at the same time or take break at the same time, or work or sleep at the same place, there are chances for social events to trigger.
Some characters want social events to keep or increase Morale, some would rather avoid that.
When you land, you don't have habitation, you don't have anything.
Every character has the Ship wreck as habitation and workplace.
This can be useful for some time while you deploy your prefabs or find your first planetary materials. A tutorial (once done!) will guide you on all that. At some point you will need to design your first emergency buildings, and start filling your colony place and use assignments.
Remember all this data may change at any time during alpha, and even receive some adjustments during beta!
When can we test all this?
Our next update is still the Planetary Landscape Update.
We have been a bit late on that deployment but it's still the next one coming!
It will host all our next interface and we still aim for it this week, now that Faction Power, our last update, is requiring less fixes.
After that one we are either merging Away Teams Step 2 into production, or this colonization loop.
It's then at least for next week. But now, you know a lot more about it!
More information about EXODE can also be found on our Discord, or multiple posts such as this one about our epic characters, or this trailer made by a fan, or this review or this one . A summary of latest posts and events is also here.
Also running a witness node:
And we can't believe we are at around position 100.
You can help if you think we deserve more game witnesses and EXODE is one you like!
Thank you pilots, see you soon in eXode!
It is starting to get real, I can see the game approaching!😁
🤠
Very exciting news!
!PIZZA
Can't wait!
omg I'm lost... and much excite! ;)
!PIZZA
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Good presentation of colony management. The depth that is available for the player is very good. This enables those that really want to dig into live and times of their crew. From what is presented a player will be able to create a crew mix that should be able to work well together.
Also, the other fun part is that some crew members will not be so willing to co-operate. Like this guy...
One would want to keep a close eye on that until you know what kind of danger they pose. Or you might come to check out your colony to find him as the sole survivor.
The administrators I had not considered to be put on a crew. With this update, it should be easier to create a compatible crew complement with a slice of administration included.
Thanks for the Update!!!