A simple pass through the building graph annotating each node with the action costs of the products required as inputs on each building. Oh dear. Oh dear this is bad. Action ranges for drains run between 3 for a Granary and 15 for a Shipyard or even 22 for a Train Station. Not good at all. The top end should probably be no higher than 15. It wouldn’t hurt for the lowest drain to bump up a step either.

I added a secondary red graph to the technology graph which maps the inputs to the buildings within the various technologies. As the clear linear layering of the technology tiers was lost in the new display form I also coloured the nodes for each tier. The results are quite interesting and surprisingly close to what I’d expected. I’m specifically pleased that the tree orientation and node weighting has coarsely ordered the technologies and buildings into the order the players will generally want to build/research them, at the same time calling out the clearly ambiguous sections with nodes at similar heights. Nice.

Nando, I suspect unwittingly, persuaded me last night to lose the Tier 0 buildings. Losing them gives the game a faster start, possibly trimming around 30 mostly irrelevant minutes off the play time. A fair trade.

A similar colouring exercise on the building graph groups produced:

Quite a few changes here:

• About as close as I’m going to get to a final building set at this early date. There are 52 of them, which has a pleasing familiarity to it given the vacuity I’m building this game on.
• Added a key.
• Buildings continue to be coloured for their primary terrain constraint. Currently everything is bound to a single terrain. I’d like to make a few bivalent later, eg paddocks, but there’s no rush
• Buildings are shadow coloured per their primary resource cost for construction.
• Technologies are coloured for their primary resource cost for research.
• The above two mean that the building and tech cost graph edges have been removed. This makes the graph much cleaner and more readable.
• Dark edges mark the tech graph. Light edges mark the building input/output graph.
• I’ve not marked money inputs or how many of an input are required or output.
• Technology tiers are marked and grouped. The intention is that when a City State researches something in a new/higher technology tier, that ALL buildings in the City State at tier-2 will be instantly removed from the board, including any product markers on them. (It is possible that I’ll change this to build a building instead of research, but that’s a fairly small change). It is left as an exercise for the reader to see the rather severe problem that this tier-2 destruction poses for a budding City States as well as the matching implications for game strategy and timing for players.

I’ve tweaked the below posts to display smaller images while providing links to the original hi-res images.

A few have accused me of developing a 4X/Civilisation Game. I haven’t discouraged them as in some ways I clearly am, however I’ve also made clear that my focus has been on commerce and investment. What is amusing, and I didn’t realise this until very recently, is the degree to which this design is coming to represent my own views on world history and cultural conquest. For instance there’s no war in Colonial Zoo. There’s also no territorial exploration. War and exploration are staples of standard 4X games but they have no real place in Colonial Zoo and I don’t intend change that. I don’t consider war or exploration to be particularly significant drivers of history and cultural development. No, the simple urge to grow and survive as expressed through commerce is the centre of my view of history, and that is being reflected in Colonial Zoo.

An early stab at the building graph overlaid on the technology graph:

Cleaned up, using groups for technology nodes and heavy solid lines for the tech tree, dashed lines for products_needed_to_build and solid lines for inputs_to-produce:

There’s still much to do. I’m also thinking about dropping out a whole technology level – feels like there are too many acts in the play.

Aaron up at Endgame Oakland rather graciously requested a playtest copy of ‘Ohana Proa. This last Wednesday I dropped off a copy of the map. He already had rules and player aids printed. The store stocks all the other bits needed. I’m greatly looking forward to his reports: the Endgame players are perceptive, aggressive, and demanding.

First version of the technology tree:

Second pass:

Greatly simplified third pass:

This last version feels to be of about the sight size and complexity for Colonial Zoo.

The first version above was drawn with KDissert, a neat enough mind-mapping tool. However for this use it has the problem that it can’t represent loops. The loops in the above image were made by stacking nodes. Bad.

The second two graphs were made with yED, a spiffy Java-based graph editor.

Someone has created a BGG entry for ‘Ohana Proa. I suspect it was created by one of yesterday’s playtesters.

The dollar auction model mentioned below is attractive but may not be enough. I’m also concerned that the early stages of the game will be relatively uninteresting as the player’s only opportunity is to invest in/build their starting cities, and given the action point bonus of operating in multiple cities, their unfailing interest will be in linking the city states as rapidly as possible with transports.

A new proposal for initial setup:

1. Setup map
2. In random order have players place city markers on the board, one per player. There may be spacing limitations.
3. In that same order conduct a standard auction for turn order. as each player passes/drops they take the lowest available turn order slot.
4. In the new turn order have players select their starting cities.
5. Give each city cash proportional to the square of the turn order bid of the player in the inverse position in the turn order. Thus the first player’s city gets cash equal to the square of the last player’s final bid, the second player’s city the square of the second to last player’s bid etc.
6. The players may then invest this money in buildings and actions freely, producing products and transports, and having the city consume/place/etc them until the money is exhausted.
7. Start the actual game.

The square may be too high a proportion. It may also be necessary to force the last/low bidder’s payment to $0 in order to prevent excessive bid inflation: All players bid high in order to flood the setup with early cash. It isn’t clear that this would be a problem however.