A quick heads up, intrepid pioneers of the Farthest Frontier, another update is soon upon us.
We hope you have been enjoying the major additions in v0.9.2 and are eagerly awaiting what's next. We wanted to give you a quick heads up that v0.9.3 should be entering public playtesting in the next couple weeks.
Performance
This update has a heavy focus on optimization, especially for very large settlements. From our own internal testing, we observed as much as a 90% increase in framerate for towns with over 2000 villagers. Naturally, your mileage will vary based on your system specs and town setup, but we expect most players should see measurable gains! This is our first major pass on performance, but not the last. You can expect more improvements as we approach v1.0.
Balance
v0.9.3 also includes a significant pass on game balance. For starters, buildings will have significantly increased radii for desirability bonuses, granting you much more flexibility in how you lay out your settlements.
We also we made the decision to adjust the pace of the game overall. You will find that, at 1x speed, each game day will take 8 seconds, up from 5 seconds. We found that, as we balanced the game over the years, it became difficult to balance villager productivity and needs against the limit of how fast we can make them move around (before it looks ridiculous, and some of you might argue things have already gone too far) and how much distance they can cover in a day. Increasing the length of the day will provide much needed flexibility, result in less villagers accidentally dying of exposure, and provide a more relaxing 1x pace for those that currently find the game to be a bit frantic.
Combat
In addition, we are working on further improvements to combat controls:
In v0.9.3, you will see all of your active military companies on the bottom of the screen, which you can use for quick-selection and deployment without having to track down your military buildings or using control groups.
We also made significant improvements to Archers, letting them move faster and automatically go to rearm themselves when they run out of arrows rather than charging in to their doom in valiant fisticuffs combat.
What's next
We know you are eager to see our plans leading up to v1.0, and we are eager to share them with you. We are in the process of preparing another big State of Early Access update in June that will lay it all to bare! Everything from v0.9.4 to the vaunted v1.0 will be revealed!