This weekend, we will be releasing player directed autonomy. The core idea is that you become the strategic director for your family, setting priorities that they carry out. Some degree of oversight will still be required, but it becomes a game of broad strategic decisions instead of clicks.
On your first login after the release, you will see a 'Household Configuration' dashboard before your regular listings of aliens and buildings.
There are five distinct configurations tiles.
Each time aliens in your household come off cooldown, they will check for available work, according to your established priorities. Individuals will check through the action types for available work. If they cannot complete one of the three actions above, they will automatically quest instead. Questing priority cannot be accelerated before other action types.
The 'Slow' setting triggers just enough births to maintain household fertility. The head of household can trigger a birth event if the household has no fertile aliens and sufficient funds are available. The frequency of this occurrence will depend on how much income the household is earning and how long the typical alien remains on the Sage leaderboard.
The 'Regular' setting is the default already in the game. In addition to fertility maintenance, individual aliens can check funds and trigger birth events when they already have two offspring.
The 'Hyper' setting is a new feature that will only be available to 'whales' that have purchased the $100 pack at least once. Every alien checks the birth cooldown timer and queries a birth event whenever funds are available and the household is off birth cooldown. The setting enables a whale to fast-deploy all their birth tokens, and has limited usefulness otherwise.
Players can toggle token spend on/off for all birth frequency levels. THREE spend cannot be disabled.
At fast speed, aliens will attempt to build every 3 hours.
At medium speed, aliens will attempt to build every 9 hours.
At slow speed, aliens will attempt to build ever 27 hours.
These checks use the begin timestamp initially, and then switch the the end timestamp once the building has completed.
In addition to the generic speed level, individual buildings can be set to a different speed. The interaction between settings can be interesting. If some buildings are set to fast, while the overall building setting is slow, aliens will check for fast buildings past three hours first. In practice this would mean that the preferred buildings always upgrade first, and non-preferred buildings only upgrade when no other building has been upgraded in at least 27 hours.
Token spend can be toggled on or off for buildings. THREE will only be spent autonomously when THREE cost would be lower than THREE-equivalent token cost. Tokens, when enabled, will only be spent autonomously when THREE-equivalent token spend would be lower than THREE cost. (Basically, cheap builds spend THREE, expensive builds spend tokens or don't happen.)
Like buildings, claim frequency can be set to fast (3 hours), medium (9 hours), or slow (27 hours).
Speed settings can be set separately by distribution type (how does the claim fee move through the economy?) or by individual achievement type. Similar to buildings, you can use a combination of individual and high-level settings to ensure that preferred blueprints are read quickly once available and undesirable blueprints are only read when nothing else is available for at least 27 hours.
Token spend can be turned on/off and works in the same way as described above for buildings. Because token cost scales differently than THREE cost, repeatable achievements will never autonomously reach their higher tiers when token spend is disabled. Right now that's mostly good (arsonist!!!) but later there will be repeatable achievements that you definitely want to level up.
This is actually the frequency at which aliens will check for new actions. Quests will now take 1 hour instead of only 27 minutes, but...
At fast speed, you can quest autonomously every hour.
At medium speed, every 3 hours.
At slow speed, every 9 hours.
The combined impact is that you wait 1 hr and quest 1 hr (full cycle equals two hours) instead of waiting 3 hrs and questing 27 minutes (full cycle equals roughly 3.5 hours). Overall total income from questing rises and the advantage bots have over regular players is cut significantly.
"I really enjoyed that! I would like to do that more often."
"Argghh, my breaks are not long enough!"
Each time one of your aliens completes an action, there is a 3% chance of that alien developing a unique priority preference that overrides the strategic direction you have set for your household. They might check for a repeatable blueprint or building upgrade more frequently. They might take longer breaks in between quests.
The 'Reset Drift' button allows you to clear these drift preferences and restore your household to your established strategic priorities.
Over time, a household left to drift without correction will trend toward building/claiming more frequently and taking longer breaks in between actions.
Full autonomy facilitates a greater rate of velocity throughout the economy, but the game balance depends on full participation, instead of allowing some players to opt out and withdraw regularly instead. All players will be required to have full autonomy configured for at least three days before their next withdrawal.
All inactive players will be set at default levels with token spend enabled. All active players will have 9 days from their last activity to set their desired autonomy settings. New players will begin with default settings in place already. Token spend will toggle on automatically for players that have taken no manual actions in 9 days.
