The latest version of the demo is out now. It comes with a new scenario, and a new disaster! In this devlog I'll be detailing the changes to the game, plus the facepalm-inducing bugs that I fixed and lots of other small improvements.


As covered in the previous update, Critias Empire now has "scenarios". Each scenario has its own rules and balance, including different resources and buildings, all wrapped up in a bit of story. The maps are still procedurally (randomly) generated for now. I want to see how people find them before thinking about whether to support scenarios with pre-made maps.

Originally I was thinking scenarios would be a relatively easy way to keep adding fresh content into the game, as well as compartmentalise new features or ideas around game balance. However, it's taken a lot more effort than I anticipated to create just the two scenarios in this update, one of which is just a re-packaging of what was already in the game. I have a few ideas for more scenarios but if those also prove to take a lot of time to create, I'll switch focus back to adding features and systems.


The new Bronze Seas scenario also comes with a new disaster. You can probably guess what it is from the blog title, but I'll leave the details of how it works as a surprise. I am though encouraged that it was relatively easy to implement.

I'm keen to get more feedback on how the disaster feels, as well as the Bronze Seas scenario balance, so please let me know in comments or find me on social media / discord if you have opinions. This will help me fine tune the disaster balance and also help with determining what disasters to add in the future.


Right from when the demo first launched, players have been reporting strange behaviour and playing on weird map configurations. In the results from the bug reporting button I kept seeing screenshots of maps with tiny slithers of land, and sea, all forest and mountain and bonus resources on every single tile. Completely wrong compared to what should be being generated.

I decided to add in some extra fields/data to the bug reporting to help me find this and other issues. One of those extras was a date stamp. Since I knew people (and by extension, the local time settings on their operating systems) in the USA use a strange month-day-year format for their dates, I'd have to format every date to be in a neutral, non-regional-specific format, before sending the bug report data.

Doing this, it dawned on me that there are some other regional quirks, like some countries use a dot for a decimal place marker, and others a comma. That's when I realised what was going wrong with the map generation. Most of the balance data in Critias Empire is just whole numbers, but there are a lot of decimal points in the balance data for map generation. Turns out, when reading in the balance data from file, the decimal points in that data were being interpreted differently based on what language/location settings the player had. For example, 1.5 was sometimes being turned into 1 and a half, and sometimes into 1 thousand 5 hundred.

I'm kinda proud that my code is so robust it can handle ridiculously large numbers without straight up crashing (too often). But I even had this same type of problem occur on a previous game I worked on earlier in my career. So I feel especially stupid for not thinking about it earlier.

In any case, the bug is now fixed, and everyone can enjoy the maps as they're supposed to be. (Note: I actually patched this fix in in Build 45 around the start of June. But you will need to start a new game for the fix to work. It does not fix existing maps/playthroughs sadly).


One piece of feedback I keep getting is that there's no way to destroy a building (land use) except by hoping it gets destroyed in a disaster. Way back years ago, I gave players the ability to destroy buildings and recover a portion of the build cost. I found during early playtesting, often players would simply tear down their empire the turn before a disaster, hold everything in resource stockpiles that are unaffected by disasters, and then rebuild as they saw fit afterwards.

It was quite a smart strategy but removed the jeopardy of disasters in exchange for the player doing a lot of repetitious clicking. That wasn't a fun dynamic, so I removed the ability for players to destroy buildings.

However with the new Bronze Seas scenario, my QA tester at one point got stuck through no fault of his own due to being unable to destroy certain buildings. So I thought it would be a good time to re-open the issue.

Critias Empire now has an ability where you can "Abandon" a building. It stops producing and consuming, and also frees up workers, which can be handy especially in some tight squeezes immediately after a disaster. Abandoned buildings will decay over a number of turns until they are so dilapidated they are considered destroyed and removed from the map. This can anger the Gods in the process. Decaying buildings can however be repaired and reoccupied by paying a percent of their original build cost.

It's not an especially elegant solution, but it introduces some risk vs reward to the decision and hopefully won't be as obviously exploitable as what came before.


Last month, I burned out and became incredibly stressed trying to hit a succession of Steam festivals in a row. Around the end of May, I decided to withdraw Critias Empire from the June Steam NextFest, along with my other game, Palm Paradise Garden. Since then I've been much more relaxed and frankly healthier, mostly by actively avoiding optimising my work time. The demo will still remain online and available however, and my plan to keep updating it long term hasn't changed.

The next month will be a bit disjointed as I'll be visiting my family in the UK as well as pitching for a publisher and funding at develop conference in Brighton. However, I plan to get back to regular monthly updates on Critias Empire, so expect to hear from me again around the start of August.

Before all that, Critias Empire is in the "Made in Germany" steam festival! I moved to Berlin in spring 2017, so about 95% of Critias Empire's development has been here in good ol' Deutschland. I will eventually translate the game into German, but unfortunately not in time for this festival.

Development wise, having teased the Decisions system a few months back, I'm hoping to finally get down to implementing it. Doubtless there'll be lots of bugs to fix and balance tweaks to do from the new update, so I anticipate that'll take up most of my time on Critias Empire in the next few weeks.

Beyond that, Festivals and Predictions features are hovering near the top of the to-do list. However, the latter ties into the reworking of disasters I need to do, so may need to wait till I have a few weeks clear of other tasks.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, (especially on Bronze Seas balance and the new disaster) you can always contact me or leave a comment!

Thank you once again for all the feedback on the demo. It's answered a lot of questions I had in my own head about what works and doesn't in the game. As well your feedback and bug reports have assisted in finding and crushing a host of bugs. Also in helping shaping my thinking about the direction of the game. In this update I'll be going into exactly what has been happening and the next steps on the Critias Empire road.


I finally got around to improving the survey / exploration feature. Adding in search hints means no survey ever leaves you with nothing at all, which given the relatively high cost of surveying, is a good thing. Or at least the survey hints will tell you when there's nothing to be found, so you don't waste time and resources.

Combined with the priorities filter, the hints also allow you to sniff down the resource you actually want, and over time get a bit of a natural instinct for where might be a good place to start a search in the future.

The priority filter also gives you an idea of what exactly there is to find. I'm hoping this acts as a clue for players who get to the middle of the game and ask "ok, I build my empire, I can't see any marble nor gold, what now?"


Originally I balanced the game with the final version in mind - much larger maps and more gods, disasters and wonders. It was only later in making the demo that I decided on a condensed version of the game with a radically cut down number of land uses (buildings), products, gods and disasters.

Releasing the demo made me realise that some of the assumptions in the demo balance were actually left-over from previously and no longer made sense. In particular, estates didn't make sense to build versus the number of workers they needed, and the wool->cloth economy needed for cities was far too demanding. Both of these I have made fine-tune adjustments for, which have already been patched into the demo.

The gods and disaster spawning has also been less even than I'd hoped. The game was balanced for gods slowly getting angrier and angrier as the game continued, to keep pace with player progress. However from talking to you fine folks, seem you either get wrecked early by the disasters, especially from Poseidon. Or reach a tipping point after which your economy is strong enough you can just build your way out of trouble. Sometimes even by accident of just building the favoured-by-the-gods buildings - temples, harbours and mines - that you would have built anyway.

The game also had a bug that would mean disasters failed to find a target location and spawned "empty" disasters where the ground shakes and the skies darken but no volcanoes spawn and no land changes. This combined with the uneven god balancing led to a lot of games where there was neither a threat of disaster, nor any special resources needed for victory spawning.

The disaster no-show bug should now be fixed (at least I hope!) In the short term, I will be rebalancing which land uses (buildings) please/anger which gods. In the medium term, this very direct, mechanical way of interacting with the gods will be replaced by the more subtle "Decisions" system I spoke about in previous blogs.


However, the biggest learning is that the skill level of you the players is wildly different. I balanced the demo with the objective of not having anyone get stuck in the horrible death-spiral of not having enough stone, food or workers to build and operate mines and farms. Which in turn are need to collect the stone and food already lacking. And more generally, I leaned towards making the game forgiving.

On this front, I'm really happy this death-spiral issue has hardly come up at all. (Or maybe the people who get stuck in this cycle don't stick around long enough to give any feedback).

However, I've instead found more people commenting that the game is too easy. Specifically, it's too easy to spam mines. As well, being able to build anywhere dilutes the need to carefully plan where to build and expand.

I have a few different ideas of how to tackle this, and it also ties in with another piece of feedback I received.


When I launched the demo, I was in two minds as to whether to include all the different options for changing Tenets, Gods, maps and disasters. My concern was that this would be seen as a promise for a lot of content.

While later versions of the game will have lots of things to switch up each time you hit the new game button, right now, most of those things are not implemented. The result has caused much confusion. The game presents false choices - options that aren't actually changeable.

I realised what the game really needed was "scenarios". Fixed game setups that can't be changed, with a story wrapped around them.

I have implemented the framework for adding scenarios to the game, and I'm now focusing on making two scenarios. The first will be a re-packaging of the existing demo balance. And the second will involve a different balance (different buildings, product and wonders) plus some new surprise features that I've been working on recently.


I was hoping to get these new scenarios out in time for the Steam Endless Replayability festival, but there are just too many bugs to iron out. Things like making sure the tutorial still works and that save-load still functions correctly would suck if they broke from me rushing to get a release.

So instead I'm going to spend a bit more time getting these changes really polished. As part of this, I can do the land use (building) god-affinity rebalancing mentioned above. I also plan for the second scenario to address the mine spam and build-anywhere issues. This way the first scenario is still there as a gentler introduction to the game, while the second scenario provides more of a challenge.

My original plan for developing the game was to selectively turn on/off different options in the new game screen whenever I implemented a new god, disaster or tenet (feature) that I wanted the community to test. However it makes more sense to instead create a scenario and have people play that. That way, the game slowly builds up a library of content that can be re-played at any time, whilst letting me test and balance features in isolation. (The release version of the game will still have what I'm for now calling a "Custom Game" with the ability to change all the options).


Critias Empire is currently registered for Steam NextFest in June. A game can only ever be in one NextFest ever, so I'm still debating if it's worth sticking with this sooner NextFest or waiting for the edition after, in October.

I also need to portion up my workload on Critias Empire with my other game, Palm Paradise Garden; also currently slated for June Next Fest. I will keep working on the Critias Empire scenarios update in any case. My plan is still to have the demo available all the time and added to on an on-going basis, regardless of the festivals and events the game is part of.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, (or especially if you find a bug I've reported as fixed!) you can always contact me or leave a comment!