Hey everyone. Today I'm releasing the newest feature for Glory of Rome, Sandbox Mode.
What is it?
Sandbox mode lets you plan an unending game where there are no victory conditions or deadlines, you create a city from the ground up and build it exactly how you want to.
Use sandbox mode to see what type of city you can come up with and how to optimise your resource generation and management skills. Or just play it for fun, create a city for a while and then just simply start over. The choice is yours!
Setting up your game
Access Sandbox Mode from the main menu, this will bring up the sandbox settings window. Here you'll choose your map and a few initial settings (there are plans to have additional options here in the future to customise how you want to play)
Currently there are five maps you can play from, each differing in size and position. As the game expands and new maps created, these will be automatically added to sandbox mode
New Achievements
As part of the release of this new mode, additional achievements have been created to challenge your skills. These are mostly related to how long you can keep a settlement running and how well you can amass your finances.
Most of the standard achievements you can normally unlock in campaign mode also work here, such as the achievements to create X type of building or have Y number of resources.
Additional Changes
I've also worked on a few bugfixes and optimisations that are part of this release, here are the noteworthy changes
- Right click to disable deletion mode (previously had to select the button or press escape to cancel)
- Delete mode lasts until it's turned off. This will make it much easier to delete multiple buildings like roads.
- Performance tweaks for large cities, performance should scale well to cities around the 500 citizens mark (additional performance changes are planned)
I'd love to see the types of settlements you guys come up with and how they all work! I'm keenly interested in seeing how large and interconnected these cities can be. You can use the Steam community pages to post screenshots of the game, along with start discussion treads to provide feedback :)
As usual I'm eager to hear your feedback and comments on the games direction. Moving forward I'll be focusing on performance changes and bugfixes in early January and then planning for the next campaign following that.