Hi all,

the past few weeks were focused mostly on finalizations and visuals so there's not many new things to show. But a handful of features are still probably worth mentioning.


One of the problems of existing wonder system is that you can always build all wonders you unlocked. In some sense this prevented the wonders to become economically powerful, otherwise your wonders could overshadow your workshops productivity. With a few more wonders added the game could easily become centered on them and not on workshops.

To address this, as of 0.9 Wonders will undergo a complete redesign of their ability powers. Some will be affected more than others, but generally wonders will be thoroughly buffed to get economical significance. That huge economic buff has however three drawbacks.

First drawback is that wonders will now use workshop slots. So building a wonder will force you to decide which workshop you will not build (or demolish).

Second drawback is that wonders will be unlocked with technology, so you can no longer build Eiffel tower in neolithic era.

The Third drawback is that Wonders can be Destroyed by Crises and cannot be rebuilt. Some crises may later even specialize on destruction of wonders.

As a result Wonders will now be able to fine-tune your build when you specialize your economy. So this opens a way to introducing more Wonders to the game with more significant economical powers.


The existing Stonehenge Lotus gaining ability is relatively fool-proof. You build it and by using its mechanism you simply gain Lotuses right away.

In the new version, you will have to keep the Stonehenge intact until ascension to gain it's lotus value. Also the lotus value itself will be increased through it's Ceremony ability which will have it's own problems and risks attached.

There will be a few similar wonders (each for different era), that allow Lotus gain through their Ceremony ability. The trick is that as was mentioned above, each wonder takes up a workshop slot. So having four Ceremonial wonders may yield you a great reward in ascension, but it may slow down your progress significantly if you have no way to compensate the workshop loss.



Fortresses Shield ability was designed to be simple. Block a single attack. However as the game grew bigger and difficulty had to scale up, it forced the introduction of Unblockable attacks. This did not feel right to introduce this early.

So to allow more flexibility in balancing difficulty, shield ability on forts will now have a percentage chance of success. Instead of increasing instances of shields with Fort upgrade, Forts will improve their block chance.

Since this drastically lowers the usefulness of forts, some collateral rebalancing will have to occur. Forts will be made cheaper (0.9 already makes it easier to increase the cap) and some tougher Crises most likely will be nerfed (era bosses for instance)



The current 0.9 version is relatively close to being publicly playable. At the minimum though it needs 2 weeks work to finalise all gaps and fix all known bugs. After that unless there are some new problems I would release the 0.9 into the experimental branch.

It will contain all the map stuff we talked about so far. If possible I will add some of the planned Tier 2 features throughout the beta. But the plan of that bit is still vague.


Besides testing and balancing, the only remaining major feature to finish is the Diplomacy redesign with the use of Dilemma cards. This redesign will affect Tribal Villages and other Civilizations (added in 0.9) and the way you acquire Trade Routes and other boosts. The mechanism of dilemmas will stay the same, but the card effects will be more impactful (especially towards the Map).

This all for today,

See you next time,

Ondrej

Hello,

In this update I will continue where we left in the previous month. So in case you missed the last update, be sure to check it out here.

Having a solid foundation for Map grid and the ability to choose your starting location, the next step was to introduce Starting Civilization traits.


Civilization traits let you configure your civilization every time you start. They work in similar manner as your equipped Heroes, but you can only change them at the start of each run. Then you're stuck with your selection until you ascend.

Same as with Heroes, there is a limited number of Civilization Traits slots. In the beginning you will have access to a limited selection of traits and as you progress you will unlock more and more. Each time you start you can chose the best traits that fit the starting location.


The first and foremost trait to be picked is the Class of your civilization. You can always only select one Class trait. The class trait changes the looks of your buildings as well as some core economical and play-style features. In the 0.9 there will be total of 3 Class traits (more will come later). I'll share the details of each as soon as it is possible. But here are two early drafts:

An early draft of a highland Civilization Class


Another early draft of an arid Civilization Class

Each class will significantly affect your economy. Some classes will push you towards a specialization (similar to Hero factions). There will also be a generalist class which will provide the same play experience as the current version.

The rest of the traits will further specialize your economy and play style. You can increase your focus on for example expansion (speeding up quests, increasing army size), gold production, research, trade, diplomacy and other areas.

Civ Traits will get unlocked from Ascension tree and some more advanced traits will only be accessible in later Tier 2 and 3.



A few missing details were added since the last update and overall I think the map is now playable. Majority of work was done on the Adjacency bonus system.

Adjacency Bonuses are indicated by silver/gold hex medals indicating 2 or 6 compatible adjacent tiles. See below for how adjacency is determinedAs explained in the previous update, adjacency system will cause your tiles to produce more if they're setup in a specific pattern. The rules are relatively simple:

If at least two other compatible tiles are adjacent, tile will double its productivity.

If the tile is surrounded by 6 compatible tiles around it, it will gain a second more powerful bonus.

As a base rule all tiles of the same type are 'compatible'. So for instance placing three Farmland tiles next to each other will grant 2 compatible adjacency points to each - gaining the first bonus (double productivity). At the same time a Forest will not be compatible with a Farmland so placing them next to each other will not make your land more efficient. The motivation is to build in 'clusters'.


Adjacency setup illustrated.To make things more flexible, Villages & fortresses are compatible with all other types of tiles (except themselves). This means that a Farmland adjacent to two villages will get the same bonus as if surrounded by two Farmlands. This applies the other way around as well - a village surrounded by 6 non-village tiles will receive double production as well as a special bonus (added Workers).

Having a new Map Tile economy allowed me offloading some of the functionality previously held by Workshops onto the Tiles themselves.

One example is Unit caps granted by Barracks and Granary. Instead the Barracks will now grant a Cap Multiplier, while granary does what granary should - increase food storage.

One of the core changes in this version will be increase in Food storage size. With active Granary, you get a ton of food space. Enough to last a long drought.

As consequence Food can now be used for two things:
1) Paying for Quests and Festivals
2) Paying for Units which are over capacity (thereby introducing an over-capacity unit concept)
3) As a buffer to prevent overpopulation.

Additionally it will make more use of food generating traits and thus more crises and debuffs can now affect food production. Starvation will as a consequence have a more important (interesting) role in the future economy.


One of the annoying features reported by players is the need for constant hero swapping for different construction materials.

To solve this partially I have changed the primary trait bonus on heroes to all three construction materials at the same time. So now Economy heroes simply boost % of Wood Stone and Metal always. Non-primary hero traits however still can specialize you in one material or another.

Another part of this solution will be slight rebalance of resource generation between workshops, map tiles and trade. What this means is that you will have to adjust production economy based on the geography of your current game.
For instance not having access to hill tiles will limit your stone and metal production so you will need to obtain it by trade and/or boosting your workshops(or play as a civilization class which does not need as much stone/metal)

Third part of solution is allowing Hero Builds. You will now be able to have multiple equipped sets of heroes and swap between them.

Three hero equips will be enabled, allowing to swap by hotkey/button. Also I have added a search functionality (layout and style are still just in mock-up phase)As mentioned last time - I have got a few new ideas of mechanics for Tier 2,3 and 4. Additionally I finally thought up a reasonable way to add two additional technological eras that could work well with the new Tier 2 and 3. Part of this will also be two new Lotus types and a sort of progression of corruption and nemesis system.

The unfortunate part of this is they will be rather difficult to build with a plenty of artwork and functional features. I did my best to estimate the work needed on this new stuff and it seems to be somewhere between 4 to 12 weeks time. For this reason I decided to move the Tier work further down the Q1 2025 potentially moving the Early access as well. So apologies for the change in plans.

Feel free to check out the new updated Roadmap here[docs.google.com].

In the next four weeks my plan is to wrap up all stuff from this and previous update. There's is a lot of artwork to be done, balancing configuring and testing. Part of this is also a massive rework of all the World Wonders and the system in which they are built. I also plan to finally fix the Unit progression (along with Stun) and also redesign fort Shield ability.

This is all from today's update.

Have a nice day,

Ondrej