Citizens,
Major update #8 - the Economy update is now available to all players. The focus of this update is the city's economy in the middle and late stages of the game. This update adds new ways of controlling your economy, a lot of balancing, and some new content, as well as a new tribe and other bug-fixes and quality of life changes.
Read on below about some of the changes in this update. You can find the full list of changes on our patch notes page.
Note: due to significant content and balancing changes, as sometimes happens in Early Access updates, saves from previous versions are not supported. If you prefer to continue your previous game, you can still play the older version by selecting one of the previous alpha builds from the betas tab on Steam.
New tribe: The Beavers
The Beaver tribe is a new playable tribe that focuses on building large cities. These guys are all about building stuff on the flying platform, upgrading, and reducing wasted resources when leaving buildings behind.
They start with larger cities and pay less for expanding them further, but they are unwilling to build most buildings outside. You'll need to better manage your limited space and weight, but you will enjoy cities that can hit the ground running and require less re-building after flying to a new area.
Assigning workers
In the economy update, you now have better control over the amount of workers assigned to different buildings and production lines. Previously, you either had the full amount of workers required to keep the building working, or the building was disabled. Now, you can assign less than the full amount, and the building will still be able to function, though at a lower level of productivity.
This new system not only lets you prioritize which buildings and production lines are more important, but also allows fine tuning the rate at which you produce and consume different resources and better balance your economy.
Production recipes determine upkeep
The amount of workers, flux and power that is required to keep a building functioning now depends on the selected production recipe. The same wood warper that only requires a couple of workers to produce the bloodwood planks will now need many more for producing acidwood.
This new system allows for better balancing of these basic resources, making late-game economies more interesting and finely tuned.
Building management window
To better control large, late-game cities, especially now that every building has their own worker count and upkeep, we've added a new building management window.
In this window you can see all production buildings (and other buildings that require upkeep), and you can quickly change production recipes, assign workers, and turn the buildings on/off.
Collectable production recipes
We've added several new production recipes that you need to collect before you can use them. These recipes can not be researched, and the only way to unlock them is by exploring Industrial ruins.
These recipes, for the most part, provide alternative ways to produce the same resources either to increase efficiency or to allow more flexibility based on the resources you have available. These recipes can make a big difference in producing sufficient resources, research and upgrade parts for late-game progress.
More self-sustained cities
Several production recipes were added or modified so that they require only renewable resources. These allow creating production lines that can keep working after flying without having to find new resource deposits and reducing dependency on specific biomes.
For the most part these resources are less efficient (in terms of how many workers/power/flux you need to spend per resource produced) than those that require non-renewable resources, but they are far more dependable and are invaluable to keep frequent-flying cities running smoothly.
Balancing and late-game progression
We've increased the costs of much of the late-game content such as research and upgrades, making the more advanced production recipes and upgraded buildings a meaningful alternative to just building hundreds of basic buildings.
We've also increased the production rates of these resources in mid/late game recipes, and the higher levels of houses & apartments now provide more living space.
Additionally, upgrading production buildings now improves their efficiency (amount of resources produced per worker/flux/power), and they are no longer required for producing advanced recipes, making them nice-to-have rather than must-have, but at the same time making them more valuable to have. Instead, you will have to build separate add-ons that do not increase the building's upkeep, in order to allow that building to produce more advanced recipes.
There are lots of changes to the economy balance of pretty much everything - upkeep, production recipes, building costs, expansion costs, upgrade costs, research, etc. For the most part late-game elements were made more expensive, and also more productive, but there are some exceptions. Namely it is now easier to expand your city late-game, making it more feasible to build huge cities.
Saves from previous builds
As mentioned above, due to significant content and balancing changes we were unable to keep supporting saves from previous builds.
If you prefer to continue your previous game, you can still access the previous build through Steam's beta branches feature.
Future Plans
In this update we continue to progress through our roadmap towards the 1.0 build, but we still have quite a bit to go before we are ready. We've updated the roadmap to reflect these changes.
Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes.
The Suncrash team