For the last few months I've been dipping in and out of the game
My Colony. I started off playing on my phone using the default map size, but I created a sub-colony on my PC with the largest map. Larger maps are much easier, for example you don't have to work out what to sacrifice in order to cram in new buildings, but would almost definitely grind to a halt on my phone. The colony is much smoother on my new Pixel XL (as my Nexus 5X has recently died), but I'm seriously considering abandoning my original colony. I've already gifted the billions from my main colony to my sub colony, partly because my 5X died in a manner that meant I almost lost my save game (and I didn't have an external backup of the save game at the time).
In case anyone's wondering how I made my billions on this game, it's not through cheating. I suspect there are many ways to cheat (and the developer did try to introduce some code to prevent that, which ended up killing off a few legitimate players so it's now toned down), but I made my money through the trade system. For a brief period of around 24 hours the developer made the mistake of linking the import/export price to that of the Galactic Board of Trade (where players can trade resources with each other). By itself, that's not a bad idea (and it's how it currently works), but he linked it to the price of the last sale. That meant you could sell a resource for $1 per 100 to make the import price $1 and then you could import loads of the resource for a cheap price. Then you went to the GBT and sold it for as many 9s as you can type into the box. Then you could go into the GBT and buy your item to set the import/export price really high. Then you export all the resources you had just bought (or created in-game) for the new export price with many 9s. Repeat this action a few times and you end up with a lot of cheap resources and in my case about $300 billion in a matter of minutes. At that point I decided I'd abused it enough, so I stopped. The developer tweaked the algorithm to prevent the widespread abuse and it's a much fairer system now. Unfortunately it's now based on the average price, and as the game gets more successful and more people gain and sell resources the average price for every item is likely to reach $1 at some point. Key resources such as food are sold for as little as $2. It's reached the point where some buildings just aren't worth building when you can buy their resources through trade.
I used my newfound wealth to grow quickly and make myself quite profitable, and since then I've been quite generous with the sub colonies that ask me for resources, and I will sometimes send large amounts of money to new players (the ones that stay for longer than 24 hours and actually grow their colony). How long I'll continue to play this game depends on how much it improves over time. It's very much a rolling beta (although it's very stable on Chrome), but it seems like the developer is more interested in creating alternative planets and races to add to the diversity. I've already built my colony, and the map's large enough that I can rely on existing resources for running the colony in a sustainable way (e.g. water acquired through the
ancient alien condenser that doesn't require any workers in order to produce power from the
hydrogen reactors to power the
medium atmosphere generators in a nice loop that should mean I don't run out of power or water (I do occasionally need to keep an eye on the atmosphere to make sure it doesn't go too far up and down).
I've not filled my map but the CPU power is already too much for it to run at full speed. I've literally maxed out a core (as Chrome, like every other browser, doesn't do multithreaded JavaScript very well). It's potentially not even worth building new buildings to gather money, as it'd slow the game down further so I'm no better off. The map size probably only really works if I want to build an entire map of sheep farms or shopping malls for tourists, but then I'd end up flooding the BGT with wool or waiting a very long time for tourism to be worth doing (I tried it on my main colony to try and move away from creating unnecessary resources, but it doesn't seem very good as I don't get enough tourists). Despite this, I'm still playing, and hoping it becomes more enjoyable again.
