This AI behaviour would be merely eccentric if it didn’t cause major performance issues with the game.

For the case of too many science ships, the effect seems subtle – just a small, evenly-spread slow-down of the game. Probably not worth worrying about generally, though if you happen to notice an AI empire spamming science ships, it may be worth addressing.

For the case of too many construction ships, the effect is much more pronounced. Every AI construction ship triggers an expensive script periodically, and all aligned together in time, which can result in noticeable hangs every seven in-game days if there’s many of them.

And “too many” is a surprisingly small number – as few as ten can cause five-second-long hangs every seven in-game days, in my experience. I suspect their detrimental effect is superlinear to their number (because the AI having only a couple seems to incur no noticeable overhead). It’s likely also contingent on some other factor, that I have not yet identified, as the hangs only manifest themselves in some games.

I’m very thankful to Confident_Chance_770 for pinning the periodic hangs down to this cause.

Confirming the too-many-construction-ships diagnosis

Since this can be caused by a mere few construction ships – as little as four or five, which is not otherwise remarkable – one way to confirm this is the issue is to profile the game’s script execution:

1. Pause the game (e.g. hit the spacebar). Ideally a day or so before the next hang day, and clear of the first day of the in-game month.
2. Hit the backtick (`) key (top-left on most keyboard layouts, above tab and left of 1) to bring up the game’s debugger / cheat console.
3. Type “script_profiler” and hit return.
4. Unpause the game (e.g. close the console by hitting the backtick key again, then hit the spacebar).
5. Let the game run until one of the hang days is encountered. Note that the game will run slower than normal while profiling is enabled, especially on the hang days.
6. Pause the game.
7. Open the console again.
8. Type “script_profiler” again and hit return. This concludes the profiling and dumps the results to two files.
9. Open the summary results from ~/Documents/Paradox Interactive/Stellaris/logs/script_profiling_summary.log.
10. Check if “planet_possible.find_planet” is the topmost item and listed as consuming significant amounts of CPU time (e.g. 5s, for a single hang day). If it is, you’re likely experiencing the construction ship bug.
    
    If it’s not, it’s possible it’s still the same bug, but possibly not. You could try the usual diagnostic routine – e.g. websearch for the symptoms and top script names from the profile, contact the author of any suspicious or newly-added plug-ins you’re using, contact Paradox Interactive, etc.

Remedying the bugs

If you determine that it likely is the construction / science ship spam bug, you can rectify it via these steps:

1. Save your game. Just in case something goes wrong with this process.
2. Pause the game. This is very important – if you don’t, the AI is likely to complete screw with your empire while you’re away (during steps 4 through 6).
3. Open the console.
4. Type “play N” where N is an integer starting at one. Not all integers are used – just keep incrementing until you get a correct result, which is that it switches your control to one of the AI empires.
5. Close the console.
6. Check the civilian ships list to see if there are absurd numbers of science ships, or more than a couple of construction ships. If there are, kill them. Usually when this bug occurs most of the ships are together in one system, so you can accelerate this process by finding those big group(s) of construction & science ships, drag-selecting them within the system view, then hitting the Delete key (and return to confirm decommissioning). It’s pretty safe to just delete all the AI empire’s construction & science ships, since the AI can cheaply and quickly build new ones if they actually want them (in my experience they often don’t, at least not promptly, suggesting the ships were unnecessary to begin with).
   
   If there are not, go back to step 4 and try subsequent integers, to check other AI empires.
7. Once you’ve found and destroyed the offending ships, type “play 0” into the console to restore control to your own empire.
8. Unpause the game and continue playing – hopefully now without the noticeable hangs every seven in-game days.

Repeat as necessary when the problem recurs (and perhaps focus your in-game efforts on wiping out the offending AIs, as a more permanent solution).

I was a bit hesitant to try this game at first, based on the screenshots & videos. I was basically looking for The Settlers, of which I have many fond memories (from II & VII mostly). The Colonists, in comparison, looked a bit dinky, but I ultimately decided to take a chance, and I’m glad I did.

Gameplay

It’s generally a slow-paced game. It’s designed to be. Much of the experience is simply watching the robots go about their tasks, and appreciating the efficiency of your well-designed and well-oiled machine (or suffering the congested roads resulting from poor planning and choices).

You can boost the game speed manyfold if you wish, and if you play maps that include competing AI colonies there can a degree of time-sensitivity – build too slowly or carelessly and the AI might out-develop you and conquer your territory. Even so, this is not a twitch game – it rewards careful planning and paced development.

Surprisingly I play it at regular speed much of the time, despite the option to go faster. In every other Settlers-like I’ve ever played, I’ve always run them at the maximum possible speed. I think that speaks to how pleasant it is just watching all the little robots go about their business – no need to rush.

Each individual game can last anywhere from tens of minutes to tens of hours, depending on your preference. You can play aggressive competitive maps where you rapidly expand to conquer your enemies, always with that single clear objective in mind. Or you can play against the clock, trying to achieve a certain milestone(s) as fast a possible – e.g. accumulating a certain amount of gold, or completing construction of a monument. Or, you can just play with whatever agenda & pace you want, treating the game as your sandbox.

There’s also a variety of map sizes available, with which to further adjust your desired game length. Though the larger maps can be significantly more taxing on your computer, so although I typically like to play the largest maps, I found the experience better with smaller ones.

The “day to day” gameplay is very much in the style of The Settlers. Build first-level resource gatherers, then first-level manufacturers to turn those resources into more advanced resources, and repeat several times over in order to obtain the most advanced resources. There are several dozen different resource types, which can seem overwhelming at first but the progressive gameplay – centred on a tech tree divided into multiple levels that have to be slowly researched & unlocked – makes it much more approachable than you might expect, even for a complete beginner. After a few games the vast number of resource types, and their complex relationship graph, isn’t nearly as intimidating.

There’s significant fan-in as you go up the resource tree – producing the more advanced resources typically requires a vast network of dependent manufacturers & gatherers. And that’s where the core of the gameplay challenge emerges – logistics.

If you have a sleepy starter colony, with merely some basic resource gatherers and homes, then pretty much anything works so far as road & building placement. But as you build up, you run into the limitations of a two-dimensional space – you might need ten different fundamental resources feeding in, via successive layers of manufacturing, to one advanced building. Your roads – though upgradable – have finite throughput. Plan poorly and your distribution network will grind to a halt as bottlenecks form and poor overloaded roadbots fall hopelessly behind in their duties.

The game provides deep details of & controls over distribution – you can micro-manage which resources may travel where and by what routes. I generally found this less enjoyable than other aspects of the game, even though it’s nominally the heart of it – and certainly some folks may be as happy as a pig in the mud with the dizzying range of controls available. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much these micro-management controls can do to compensate for a poorly designed network, so you can’t avoid the need for thoughtful, large-scale design. I tended to utilise them only as a plan B, when the map truly required it or to compensate for poor choices on my part.

Missions & Maps

The game has a campaign that seems short on first impression, at not much more than a dozen missions (maps), but that actually represents many dozens of hours of game play. The missions are pretty varied and each endeavours to introduce something new. And once you complete them, you can move on to the map of the month or a plethora of player-created maps.

Pleasingly, after the first few tutorial missions it gives you the freedom to bounce around the missions partially out of order, and you can choose to ignore the combat ones entirely, or play the combat ones exclusively, or any mix of both. I enjoy both styles for their respective merits, but I like that it accommodates a range of player preferences.

AI

The AI is not particularly challenging, although it can surprise you sometimes – I haven’t won every game I’ve played.

Unfortunately the AI is one part of the game that tends to be quite buggy. It’s improved a bit over the years as the game has been patched and evolved, but it’s never really been fixed. It’s all too common for the AI to just peter out mid-game, mysteriously halting its development and entering a state of stagnation. It’s then quite trivial to roll all over the AI – often it won’t even make a serious effort to defend itself or repair damage you cause.

Even when the AI is nominally working, it’s sometimes too easy to cripple it – conquer just the right part of its territory, disrupting its manufacturing network in a serious way, and it’s often incapable of working around the issue. Not because of fundamental constraints of the map, but because it simply makes poor choices in placement, and typically won’t delete buildings & roads in order to unblock itself.

On the – sadly somewhat rare – occasions when the AI does work properly, it’s quite fun to play against. Getting to a stage where you can actually exchange cannonballs with the AI can lead to some fun and challenging gameplay.

Technically you don’t have to play against competing AI colonies at all if you don’t want. However, I found it to be my preference – racing against the clock for arbitrary achievements, or playing in an open-ended sandbox, didn’t appeal so much to me. So these AI bugs might be a major detraction for you, or might be irrelevant, depending on your gameplay preference.

Visuals & Performance

The game looks much better in person – and in motion – than the videos & screenshots suggest. The art style is deliberately simplistic, but once you build a colony of any non-trivial size there’s plenty to see & enjoy. The animations are lovingly crafted, with each of the numerous bot types having its own moves and flair.

Don’t mistake the art style with being amateur. It’s well-refined. It’s also functional – the simplistic geometry produces distinctive building and bot appearances which make them easy to identify at a glance, and the colour scheme likewise serves double-duty as aesthetically pleasing and functional.

The music and sound-effects have a matching aesthetic, and the net effect can be very zen-like.

At first, when you have just your colony ship, the game appears very empty. But as you build up your colony, detail fills in – inevitably what looked like a spartan blank canvas of a map turns into a bustling town, full of activity.

On a 10-core iMac Pro with Vega64 GPU, The Colonists sort of runs at native (5k) resolution. It tends to bog down a bit – frame rates dropping into the teens – with large maps or large colonies. This is largely independent of other graphical settings. I typically played it at quarter resolution (2880×1440) to avoid this (and to enable me to turn all other graphics settings to their maximums without having to worry). That gave me 20+ FPS most of the time. That might not sound like much, but you don’t need high frame rates – this is not an action game.

Bugs

In earlier versions of the game, on older versions of macOS, I experienced significant bugs relating to the GPU – major rendering errors, and complete, hard lock-ups of my computer.

The game uses Metal by default, Apple’s proprietary 3D library. Metal has long been buggy – this is not The Colonists fault. I often experience hard locks-up with many programs that utilise Metal (or similarly OpenCL).

The game’s author very graciously spent a lot of time working with me to debug these issues. Unfortunately there’s nothing he or I can do about Apple’s buggy GPU drivers, so for a long time the only workaround we could come up with was to switch the game to using OpenGL. That addressed all the rendering issues, eliminated the crashes, and boosted the game’s frame rate substantially.

Unfortunately, I don’t know that there’s an OpenGL option anymore – and it was never officially supported by the author, it’s merely a checkbox option that Unity provided which the author was able to utilise trivially but without “warranty”.

The author

The Colonists is literally a one man production. Richard Wallis created the whole thing. It’s been a work of many years. It’s an impressive accomplishment.

I want to reiterate how impressed I’ve been with Richard, as he worked very patiently with me to narrow down the rendering & freezing issues, and to generally address bug reports. His customer support has been fantastic.

Should you buy it?

Yes.

For so many reasons. It’s a relatively rare, almost unique game style (especially on the Mac since Ubisoft retroactively pulled modern The Settlers games from the platform). It’s produced by essentially one person as a labour-of-love indie game. It’s beautiful and soothing and satisfying.

It has some bugs – and suffers significantly from Apple’s bugs in Metal and macOS more generally – but if you can just stomach those a little bit, you can probably look past them and enjoy what this game offers.

It’s available on a wide array of platforms – macOS, Linux, Windows, PS4 & PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch. (the website also suggests there’s an Android version, but I can’t find it in the Google Play Store) For Mac, you can grab it through Steam or GOG, for $25 USD.

Notably there’s also a Discord server for the game, which is moderately active with players and frequented by the game’s author. Provided you can put up with the dumpster fire that is the Discord app.

On maximum settings – 2560×1440 Ultra with 8x MSAA – both machines average about 20 FPS in the built-in graphics benchmark.  And the AI benchmark yields similarly indistinguishable results, with average turn times of about 23 seconds.

With VSync off there’s maybe a very small increase in frame rate – closer to 24 FPS, than 20 FPS, but it’s visually indistinguishable to me.

And that’s despite the iMac Pro having, in addition to the beefier CPU & GPU, use of its very fast built-in flash storage, vs a regular SATA SSD on the 2014 Retina iMac.  Load times were noticeably faster, but only in the 10-25% range perhaps – nice, but not impressive all things considered.

In actual gameplay, I did feel like the iMac Pro offered a smoother experience overall – maybe not higher average frame rates, but fewer stutters or skips.  Hard to say, though, if that’s a real effect or just a misimpression.

So, definitely don’t buy an iMac Pro for playing Civilization VI – any iMac from the past four years will be just as good, sadly.  Whatever Civilization VI is bottlenecked on, it’s clearly not the CPU throughtput, GPU anything, storage anything, or memory anything.  Which I guess just leaves CPU single-threaded performance. 😞

As best I can tell it’s fatally buggy, because it lets the AI essentially cheat, and you can’t turn that misfeature off.

But in its defense it kind of sets expectations right from the beginning. My very first game failed as described above, though it was at least because my empire was weak and I’d made some actual mistakes. There’s no manual or tutorial, just the in-game tips which are sparse, terse, and simply don’t cover a lot of essential elements of gameplay. So my first abrupt loss was unsurprising – unfortunately, trial and error is the name of the game here.

Subsequent games went no better, however.

I eventually found that there’s a config option when starting a new game, for how many AIs start way ahead of you. Ah, that sounds like the problem. Unfortunately even when set to zero, at least one AI still does this. And it’s not just a little ahead – they seem to start completely advanced in tech tree and with effectively infinite resources. And the most infuriating of all is that they can lurk for hours of gameplay before actually deciding to annihilate you on a whim. I’d appreciate if they just wipe me out straight away and save me all that wasted time.

For example, in my most recent game I had taken control of nearly a third of the galaxy, beating out half a dozen other AIs, and was shown by the game as equal or greater in strength than all the AIs I’d contacted. And then an AI from the other side of the galaxy declared war on me without any warning – I didn’t even know they existed – and wiped me out in literally about sixty seconds. They cleared out all my space stations, all my defenses, killed my main battle fleet in literally a single shot, and made short work of taking over all my planets with hundreds of invading armies that individually were more powerful than an entire planet’s defences. They had multiple battle fleets that were each more than a hundred times more powerful than my entire armada.

So that sucks. I went back through my saves to try to find a branch point where I could retry from, but came to the sad conclusion that there’s no possible way to beat that AI – at best I can hope it simply doesn’t decide to kill me. But they always do, eventually.

And it’s depressingly insightful what happens next, which is to say, nothing… the game just keeps going, with you unable to do anything at all – all your planets are conquered, all your shipyards long gone, all your ships at best hiding in dark corners of the galaxy. And yet the game just keeps trudging along, revealing the truth: it’s not for you. You were just a transient.

For the sake of argument, though, let’s hypothesise that they soon fix this crippling bug. In that case, the game is… meh. There’s a lot of time spent waiting for something to happen. Particularly at the beginning, when your empire is small and you’re completely growth & resource constrained, it’s 90% just waiting for the real game to develop. The ‘Fastest’ game speed option isn’t nearly fast enough.

It shares a lot with Cities: Skylines, in that respect. A pretty, intricately detailed game that invites you in alluringly, but turns out to be fundamentally repetitive, and missing the actual gameplay part. Not to mention the fun that traditionally accompanies games.

One more point, because it’s something I always look and hope for particularly in strategy games like this – deep diplomacy. Unfortunately, in Stellaris the ‘diplomacy’ aspects are pointless. Aside from the options available being rudimentary and very difficult to manage – good GUIs for diplomacy have been well established by many other games, so it’s a mystery why they couldn’t follow suit – it’s moot in any case though, as AIs will never, ever give you anything without you giving them way more in return. Most AIs won’t even deal with you. And there’s also crippling bugs in the diplomacy code too, such as the fun one where you finally find a deal the AI might accept, that’s not totally, ubsurdly unfair, and you offer it, and then the game enacts all the things you promised to give to the AI and not one single thing they were required to contribute.

Suffice to say Stellaris is a pretty big waste of money, and more importantly, time.

In many respects it feels heavily ‘inspired’ by Endless Space. Endless Space can be unforgiving to beginners, and has a few minor bugs & GUI flaws, but it’s actually winnable if you give it some time and develop some skill, and can be enjoyable to play if you invest some time to learn it. So just go play that instead, and save yourself money & irritation.