Rules & How to Play


Colony Administration


Posting

Each player has a thread in the new forum, where they make their administration posts, and supply any fluff they wish to share. These threads will also be where we post the colony's end-of-turn reports and notify the player of significant events of that turn. There is also a General thread, which is where we post global announcements, and also contains any forum-based OOC (out-of-character) chat concerning the game. A player is not allowed to post in another player's colony thread unless they have a good reason to i.e. issuing a diplomatic missive or relaying radio communications.

The game world advances in time every Sunday evening. Each player has between then and Friday at 8pm to make one administration post in their thread, in which they describe the general focuses of the colony's efforts, such as towards a particular construction or engineering project, some kind of scientific or research endeavour, or the like. Whilst each player is not restricted to only having one focus at once, focussing on too many things at once will achieve no net benefit.

You do not need to specify everything your colony does - we will assume that it expands its food and water production facilities to cover its population's needs, its infrastructure to provide adequate power most of the time, and constructs appropriate vehicles and additional facilities for whatever the colony is working on at the time - unless an event prevents this, demanding particular attention on part of the player. Any particularly novel idea or solution to a problem, or the completion of a large project specifically to fulfil your colony's needs, will place you in good standing in that area (usually in the form of a plus) and diminish the likelihood of running into later problems concerning it.

We will provide a summary of the outcomes of your administration post when the world advances. For instance, any large-scale projects will have a description of their relative progress (no turns-until-complete counter, though), and indications of aspects of your colony that have improved or worsened as a result of your decisions.

Each player is permitted to provide as much fluff on their colony as they wish, and can describe any aspect of it in as much or as little detail as they choose. Alongside your first administration post to describe the first steps of your new society, you are strongly encouraged to provide a bit of general information about your colony, in line with the questions asked in About Your Colony.

In summary, the turn order goes:

  1. Players make an administration post, before 8pm on Friday.
  2. Players post as much fluff as they like.
  3. Friday evening arrives; we start updating the world.
  4. We issue administration outcome posts and notify players of events. Player-specific events will be posted in their colony's thread - anything that affects multiple will be posted in the General thread.
  5. Buffer time to allow any post modifications or late posts.
  6. Sunday evening arrives; world update complete, new turn begins.

Absences

As we aim to make sure all our updates are done by Sunday evening, we in turn request that people are good at keeping up with their posts. Hopefully, one post per week is not too much. If you are unable to gain access to a computer for any length of time that will impede your ability to post, that's fine; give us an indication via PM of the rough length of your absence and what you'd like your colony to do, and we will put it in maintenance mode, whereby we will run your colony according to your directives until your return. If you issue no directives, we will attempt to run the colony the same way you do. Unless specified, expect no major project undertakings whilst in maintenance mode.

We will operate a three-strikes process for failure to meet posting deadlines. We will be lenient with accepting posts up until we actually update the world (i.e. Sunday) but we will not accept any maintenance posts in hindsight after this. This works as follows:

  1. Strike #1: Your colony carries on as it was at the time of the last administration post you made.
  2. Strike #2: Your colony starts descending into chaos. Your lack of vigilance begins to lead your colony to ruin.
  3. Strike #3: Your colony is removed from the game, either through revolt or natural disaster.

These strikes are not permanent for the entire game, and will reset upon making an administration post. We don't want it to come down to the third strike, so if you feel like you cannot continue with the game, please let us know so we can make arrangements to suit.