NextColony is all the buzz right now, especially now that Drug Wars just pulled a bait and switch and pissed off all their players.
What is NextColony?
NextColony is a Steem web-based game about exploring space, discovering planets, and battling other players. At this point, it is only running partial functionality at launch. Battles and guild functionality is not finished and not available at launch.
Everyone seems to start with an Alpha planet unless you bought one of the nine legendary planets.
The game has two main components that you need to upgrade to progress.
Skills
Skills unlock the ability to create buildings and ships but do not actually increase your progress directly in most cases.
Buildings
Upgrading your buildings is how you increase your production and ability to make real progress in the game. Without the matching skill though you are unable to upgrade a building.
Exploration
I was unable to test this as it takes a long time to make progress. Exploration allows you to discover other planets and increase your production significantly. This is purposely designed to be slow and time-consuming to accomplish.
I was unable to do much else than upgrading my production.
Is NextColony any good?
I'm going to come straight out and say no. I foresee a lot of problems with the game due to how it was designed and technical issues if the performance issues are not fixed.
The performance of the game is really bad, the current state is extremely frustrating. It is plagued with connection errors and very slow response time to user interactions. You have to click upgrades multiple times and hit reload (F5) frequently to get a skill or building to start the upgrade progress.
These issues can be fixed with code changes and hardware, and hopefully only a short term problem.
The real problem I see that likely won't be fixed and is a deal breaker and what ultimately turned me off of the game is the upgrade path and lack of depth. This is going to come off harsh, but it really needs to be brought up as it will ultimately turn off most players.
To explore a new planet you need level 13 Shipyard and level 20 explorer skill. This may or may not seem to be a big deal to you, but I estimate this is 2 to 4 months of upgrading for the average user. Until you get to this point, you really can't do anything but upgrade skills and wait for them to finish.
The first requirement of a level 13 shipyard isn't a deal breaker for most people. This will take a while but on its own wouldn't be a deal breaker. It seems quite arbitrary (and undocumented) that you need to get level 13 shipyard to produce an explorer. To reach a level 13 shipyard you need level 13 skill for the shipyard, then do 13 upgrades to your shipyard.
I am currently working on level 6 of the shipyard skill myself, and the resource requirements are starting to climb rapidly but not too outrageous.
Keep in mind you also have to create the building for each level of your skill.
For most players, you will have about 10-20 uranium a day and will be able to do one or two shipyard skill+building upgrades a day if you don't focus on other upgrades.
Most users who don't spend 10-100 Steem to buy a resource chest will be struggling to get level 3 mines up and running at this point and will have little resources to focus on a shipyard. These types of games it is critical to build up your economy first before advancing other buildings.
Where I think the game breaks down is the ship skills, this is when I had a WTF moment. To get an explorer you need level 20 explorer skill.
As you can see, the ship skills are very expensive and time-consuming. You also need a crap ton of levels to just create an explorer. I can't even imagine what is going to be required to go to war.
Let's look at creating an explorer though to discover other planets.
This is the first level of the explorer skill, and for players who don't spend 10-100 Steem to boost their resources will struggle to come up with the resources (especially uranium) to afford this upgrade. Not only does it take 18 Uranium it takes 8.5 hours to complete.
If you don't buy resources you are likely going to spend the better part of a week upgrading your resource production before you can consider upgrading a ship skill. I am not even sure you will be able to work on the shipyard in parallel without massively sacrificing your resource growth during this week.
Level 2 requires 50% more uranium and will likely be as much or more than a typical player can produce in a single day and that's if they are upgrading nothing else. Level 3 will likely follow a similar increase in resources and so on until level 20.
I can't imagine a typical user reaching the ability to explore planets inside of 3 to 4 months. During this time all they can do is click a few buttons a couple of times a day and wait. There is nothing else to do. Unless you commit to buying the limited amount of daily chests to boost your resources you don't stand a chance at competing much less actually doing anything productive.
If level 3 - 20 increases in costs at the same rate, it will take a ridiculous amount of resources and time (months) to get to the point you can even start exploring. What is there to do before that?
Some users have spent over 10,000 Steem to buy one of the nine legendary planets just to get a 100% boost to their uranium supply.
I have heard a lot of good things about this game, but what I see is very disappointing and I can't imagine many people will stick with it through the upgrade grind when there is nothing else to do.
If they reduce the costs they just allow users to go through their content pipe faster and from what I can see there isn't enough depth to support it. It's hard to tell without seeing what battles are like and even what exploring is like. I hear the exploring missions if you do manage to make it through all the upgrades are very slow.
In its current form, I can't see this surviving past the fomo stage without massive changes, that means making the upgrades more reasonable and less arbitrary but without enough depth of content to support it, it may not be possible.