Rejoice! Jake brings thee new hours to waste!
Note that initially, this patch will be in beta, meaning you need to manually check it out in the steam thing, "properties / betas" something. It will remain in beta until all fires are put out.
I spend some extra time on this video, probably 2, and the editing makes me appear surprisingly coherent. I hope you like it, because the ordeal was very frustrating.
Like usual, I don't really know what I've been doing. I should see a doctor about that, as some reviewers have insinuated. But you'll find the patchnotes I've scribbled down during the journey at the bottom.
What I do know is that this is the last batch of the Early Access period. Let me explain a bit what that means here as well, so that there's little confusion.
To me EA is a label that means:
"Some things are missing, or are a bit broken. Features will be added and removed and experimented with based on your input. As an EA player, you are a beta-tester". EA is like a pre-order for a game with some perks,
Now though, the fundamental systems are in place. They work. The balance is there, even though it will require possibly years to perfect. The only place-holder feature remaining is nobles. It is time. New systems will be added, but they will not be controversial. Things like Ports, sieges, pets, races, rooms, campaigns etc. are things that add to the game and have no negative side effects.
However, these things are plans, they are not promises. If you buy SoS after EA, you should be happy with its current state.
The 1.0 patch will be the fist patch of this nature. For instance, there will be:
- water wheels to boost industry
- Farmstead to boost agriculture
- More monuments
- More and prettier roads
- Park room
- Police building
- Medical research fascility
- New compact pasture variation.
- Meaningful fortifications.
Note that there's just additions here, without fundamental changes to gameplay. What will change is:
Nobility overhaul, throne room overhaul
Some things I want you to be aware of:
- Price might increase 25 -> 30$, although I haven't decided.
- I might team up with a publisher for launch
- There most probably will be sales.
This is not to mess with any of you. No $3.99 hat DLCs. It's simply to reach a wider audience, and yes, to make money. If I make more money, not only will I be happy, but I could also scale up the game and increase development pace without personally break myself.
Patchnotes
- New event mechanics & new and refined events.
- Better and more error resistant saving
- Baths consume coal at a predictable rate
- Changing room materials do not crash saves
- new and improved bonuses and stats for regions
- new and improved road and path generation for the world.
- new mechanics for world pathing and trade partners.
- More state is saved when a room is copied or broken. Such as radius, and logistics settings.
- Stage & Arenas now have fixed sizes, but come in different shapes.
- Some visual candy for the woodcutter. Increased storage for them.
- Mines and refiners have differently sized output storage, bigger in general.
- Pastures do not get penalised for their surrounding fence, which will make indoor pastures better.
- new sprites for dirt and blood for portraits
- new tutorial cut scenes
- new titles icons
- Barber is more space efficient.
- Hospitals need fabric to function, and give 10% recovery. Opiates is optional and gives an extra 40% recovery.
- The import depot is now a potential pull source.
- New list for room construction projects.
- You can now easily swap punishments for captives, they will not go into exile. Also fixed some general weirdness with punishment rates.
- Pools now need direct canal access and will suck water out of the system.
- Woodcutters, farms, orchards and pastures now operate on base fertility, and will instead get an additive boost from sweet water.
- The old boost to knowledge from libraries is scrapped. Instead Libraries have their own separate tech point system.
- The tech tree has been remade visually with some new helpful information.
- The tech tree has been remade and rebalanced, quite a bit of thought has been put into it: All industries now have the same possible maximum boost at the same cost, making it viable to specialise in whatever.
- All industries have different times to shine, mimicking human evolutions. Farms are best at first, then comes mines, refiners and finally workshops that are best late game. In have all the same value.
- Army supply depot has been remade. It no longer stores supplies, but instead loads carts depending on demand, and leaves for the edge of the map. Considerable logistics is needed for large armies.
- Rooms no longer breaks when they are fully degraded. This is because I can now track monument degrade.
- Awe, harmony, etc. is scrapped. Instead all monuments have their own aura. This is so that monuments can be expanded upon.
- Some rooms like markets lets subjects register their surroundings.
- Pools work the same way as roads in terms of fulfilment.
- Improved rendering speed significantly, which will also increase game speed.
- New improved work assignments. Plebs will automatically change workplace based on their building preference. There's also the possibility to assign individual rooms to specific races. This is not an absolute tool, more of a hint, but it's working pretty well.
- Refactored the region development code. City hall is built with government points, generated by nobles.
- Excess world workforce generates denari.
- Growable taxes are only shipped on their harvest day.
- Admins are repurposed. An admin combats mid/late game overhead that will come creeping. Overhead increases exponentially.
- The old noble offices no longer exist. Instead, when you've appointed a noble, you assign them to an office manually. These offices are split between different industries and regional management. The former boosts a limited amount of workers. The latter will result in Gov Points that are used to upgrade regions.
- Export depots have spoilage
- Events for regions
- Ores generate differently on the city map. You get 100% deposits, but only enough for 30 workers without world deposits. This is to make self-sustaining early games possible.
- Consumption of edible goods added to the UI.
- New world battle mechanics. Better and more stable engine, with more options, such as defending a city with an army on top, assist you allies, and more.
- Got rid of the false virus flag.
- Enhanced the tutorial.
- REgion buildings rebalanced and fixed.
- Organization in regions is gone.
- Added 'Worth' to regions. It's a function of mineral deposits, fertility and area. It is used by the AI to estimate how much they want the region.
- Showing your net worth in the treasury UI.
- Showing a factions net worth in their UI.
- net worth includes worth of your population as slaves. Each pop is worth their upbringing time x the cheapest food in Syx x 2. This was bugged before with the average price of food, which could be very high.
- Fixed broken power calculations, which were a cause of raider and AI strangeness.
- Retirement fulfilment based on your total amount of retires.
- Threat is renamed into Rivalry, and is not counted towards your trade.
- You get penalised bad for failing to protect your vassals.
- Vassal tribute slightly decreased. Their armies will attack your enemies though.
- You get a trespassing penalty from moving armies in un-allied territory.
- If you have an army in a distant faction's territory, they are allowed to declare war on you.
- Factions that are at war with you, yet can't reach you, will continue to be at war with you until you make peace.
- When signing peace, you sign a peace with all factions you are at war with.
- Peace deals are less powerful. To get some cash from it, you seriously need to threaten the AI by having armies in their territory.
- Factions must break off their agreements until neutral before they can declare war.
- Wars decrease the opinion of your allies over time, along with city loyalty and region loyalty.
- Neutral factions will station their armies by your border.
- Raiders may cross through any other faction to attack you.
- Raiders will demand more unique and varied things.
- Raiders will on occasion destroy a trade partner instead of you.
- Minimum opinion is needed for trade, pact and ally. This is so you know what opinion is expected to upkeep your stance.
- Factions with low opinion, that can not attack themselves will "poison" all other factions against you. Given enough time, war will break out.
- Factions that can't reach you, but wants to kill you, can give their armies to a neighbour at war. They can not start wars though, other than "poisoning" your neighbours.
- Increased flattery from emissaries.
- Fortifications have different and better ways of being destroyed. Enemies can scale the walls if the outer tiles are broken. This means the thickness of walls is only used to station troops on.
- Drastically decreased the strength of every structure that is not fortifications, to emphasise their important.
- I have a hugely genius plan to improve the importance of fortifications for 1.0. Just wanted to mention that.
- It could also be possible to shift the map when you are invaded to the invasion spot. That is, move all buildings away from the invasion spot, which would allow you to make better use of archers and artillery (think about that will you)
- Friendly fire from archers reduced.
- Trees only block 50% of projectiles, and are no longer a real obstacle.
- Fertility changes. Fertility now goes from 0.5-1.2 in bonus. Irrigation goes from 0.5-1.0. So irrigation is mandatory for all maps. You get free irrigation close to natural water places.
- Annoying sudden confusion of divs in formation fix.
- Div movement 'stuttering' fix.
- Defenders on walls get "high ground" advantage in melee combat. This is x2 on grand fortifications. This should give the defender a clear advantage.
- Pathing for divisions improved
- Intanglement for divisions improved
- New setting for ranged units where they will not move to attack targets
- UI for battle improved.