Managing Your Colony. Dealing with Mood, Loyalty and Crime

Balancing your colony and dealing with mood, loyalty, and crime can be a little tricky. Colony mood affects colony loyalty which in turn drives crime. If crime gets out of control you will start getting penalties in resource production and eventually colonists will leave. Obviously you don't want this. Luckily it is not hard to do once you know how, just a little time consuming.

**What a faction is and what they mean by colony balance.**

 Colonists are divided into two main factions. They are Allocation (ordinary colonists / non working) and working which is subdivided into breeding, mining, farming, and police. Colony balance is how many are in each faction. The optimum balance is about a 50/50 split, so the same number of adult colonists working/in the hostels vs just sitting in Allocation. It is important to note that it is not always an exact 50/50 split and you do have some leeway. That leeway is based somewhat off of how many colonists you have, the more colonists you have the more of a buffer you have and the more colonists you have to move around. Thankfully children do not count towards the balance anymore.

**How you actually go about balancing your colony.**

Balancing your colony is basically keeping the same number of workers/colonists in hostels vs the number of free colonists or the ones in Allocation. There is a fairly useful statistics tab in city hall that allows you to look at the numbers of the different areas all at once. It was a lot harder to do this before that was added. You still have to add them up to get total working faction and subtract babies from allocation or non working faction to get your numbers. Still, it is a lot easier than going around to the different hostels.

To see where you are at, look at the top of the screen where all the other information about your colony is. To figure out what you need to do, start move colonists around. You can put them into the breeding hostel or marketplace if you have room, till you have the colony mood change. If it is positive, add more colonists till it starts dropping your mood. It will change dramatically once you go over the limit, when you do just put that colonist back into Allocation and things should return to normal.

If adding colonists to hostels gives you a negative mood change, remove colonists from the hostels till the mood improves. What I do is move them either in or out of the breeding hostel till I get the maximum amount of mood. You hit maximum when the next colonist you add or subtract tanks your mood. The crime rate will skyrocket if things are too out of balance for any length of time.

The maximum colony mood without festivals is 25%. That is the highest I have seen in any case. You do not have to keep your colony at 25% mood. It can be stable at 0%, you just need to keep an eye on colony loyalty to make sure it does not go too low. It is also important to note, that 25% is not always the highest you can get by moving/shuffling colonists around. Sometimes it will be 16 or 19% then slowly rise back up to 25%. Where it gets "fun" is that the mood and colony loyalty like to randomly fluctuate a bit. So sometimes you will need to get the highest colony mood to keep your loyalty from dropping and crime rate from increasing.

**Festivals and the police.**

Festivals will give you a temporary boost in colony mood. There is also a mini game for the longer festival you can play. You do not really need the festivals, but they can help you return your colony to normal faster. Since the festivals only give you something like 14% boost at best, keeping a good colony balance is the best way to keep your colony in good shape.

The police do not do much. They repress a certain amount of crime based on their intelligence stat. The higher the level your police have, the more crime they can suppress and the more they cost in upkeep. Police are somewhat useful if your colony becomes unbalanced for any number of reasons as they will prevent the crime rate from rising as rapidly as it would otherwise. Your colony will become unbalanced if you play the game at all. Which is why you want all the police officer slots filled with colonists with halfway decent intelligence stats.

-Volorn