Hey everyone.
I've been really busy the past few month working on a massive update of the game, focusing primarily on the Roman Campaign. I've polished up a whole heaps of systems and mechanics, each of which should make your gameplay feel more balanced and rewarding
Rewritten Roman Campaign
I've started from scratch and rewritten all 12 scenarios in the campaign. The original scenarios I felt had poor balance, and un-even scaling with difficulty. They just didn't feel rewarding.
These scenarios now follow a more balanced difficult scaling, the first few missions start by getting you used to the systems and buildings. As you progress they get increasingly more difficult, requiring you to create more resources, have a higher population and increase the density of your residences.
I've adjusted the deadlines for all of these missions, giving you more time for each. This should make each scenario feel less rushed.
With these updated scenarios comes updated dialog. I've made the start of each scenario more detailed, giving you much more information as to what exactly you need to do: Note: I'll be releasing another update in the next few days to update the voiced dialog.
New Buildings
There's been over 20 new buildings added as part of this update. I'm really happy with how these turned out. They comprise a range of new industry and civic service buildings. here a few examples of what you can find in this update.
Council Chambers | Assembly
Secondary School | College
Monument to the Legion | Outdoor Bathhouse
These new buildings will give you more options with how you play out each scenario
Expanded Civic Services
As part of this update, all of the civic services have been adjusted. A new civic service called Administration has been introduced and a range of new buildings added to the existing services.
Adjusted Residential Services
All of the civic services have been re-balanced. It used to be that as you place higher income citizens, they require all of the civic services the group below them needed. This ended up meaning that your high income Romans required all 5 civic services to upgrade. It was simply too hard to manage. Now each income type will have 2-3 services they require to thrive.
Low Income Romans
- These citizens now only need Cultural and Religious services to upgrade
- Several new cultural buildings have been added, of various sizes, effectiveness and costs.
- New religious buildings have been added and existing structures have been renamed after the Roman gods.
Medium Income Romans
- Requires Health and Entertainment services to upgrade
- New entertainment venues have been added, such as the Sports Field
- Several new buildings have been added to the health category such as the Healing Sanctuary.
High Income Romans
- Requires the new Administration civic service along with both education and security.
- 6 Administration focused buildings created.
- Several new educational buildings such as the Secondary School and College have been added.
All of the civic service buildings have been adjusted so that they have a greater circle of influence. The high end versions of the civic services often have massive ranges, allowing you to place them far away and build up your residences around them.
You'll find that to cater to the higher levels of development, you will need multiple civic service buildings, which will come with a heavy financial upkeep. The idea will be that you need to create a thriving industry to offset the price of these needed civic services. It should help address some of the late game "snowballing" issues.
New Resources
Introduced in this update are Lentils and Exquisite Clothing, items that were highly desired by the low and high incomes citizens respectively.
Lentils
Lentils are desired by your low income citizens once they are approaching their maximum density. These are grown at a slow but stead rate at the Lentil Farm.
Exquisite Clothing
The wealthiest citizens in your settlement will require high quality clothing. You'll need to construct a Flax Farm to produce raw flax. This flax will be processed by a Linen Weaver to create Linen. You'll use a combination of Linen and Wool to create these garments.
Adjusted Residential Resources
Resources have been adjusted for all income types and levels. This change should make it simpler to upgrade your dwellings and make the construction of your industries feel more balanced.
- Low Income - water, bread, olive oil, lentils
- Medium Income - meat, pottery, statues, clothing
- High Income - wine, exquisite clothing, grand statues, furniture, artworks
Refined Gameplay Systems
There's been a heap of updates, tweaks and adjustments to all parts of the game. I've been aiming to polish it up in preparation for the transition out of early access.
Updated Senate Missions
All of the senate missions have been drastically overhauled. Each Scenario has around 3-6 missions fully voiced missions tailored to that scenario. They'll start to appear roughly 25% of the way through the scenario.
You'll be provided with 2-4 senate missions, meaning each playthrough you might receive a set of different missions, hopefully adding some more reliability. The requirements of the missions have been rebalanced, they should feel more fair and you should be able to complete every mission (and in doing so get some great rewards).
Overhauled Help System
At the start of the first few scenarios in a campaign, you're often shown a help dialog. These windows are used to explain key concepts and ideas. They've been updated with better explanations, better images and are now fully voice acted. You can dismiss these if you just want to jump straight into the gameplay.
Finances Menu
The finances menu has been overhauled. You'll now see a summary of your income and expenditures and be able to see an in-depth breakdown of your finances. You can use this to see where the majority of your income is coming from for example.
Game Speed Changes
You can now pause, slow and speed up your gameplay. Previously I ran into issues getting building placement to work when the game was paused. In this update I've now got it all working. You can pause the game, place some buildings and resume gameplay. Press the 1-4 keys on the top of your keyboard or the 1-4 keys on your keypad. Note: I'm still looking for bugs or strangeness caused by this pause setting, let me know if you run into anything.
Person Highlighting
I've made people much easier to select and also show an indicator to visualise which citizen you're highlighting. This will be useful in pause mode when you want to select a citizen to see exactly what they're doing
Resource Optimisation
Agents have been updated. They now follower a smarter set of logic when they both collect and receive goods.
- Transformer buildings that create a resource that other transformer buildings require (e.g a Mil that creates Flour, used by the Bakery) will send their resources to those buildings first, before sending them to a warehouse or storage yard
- End level transformers that create a finish resource such as the Bakery and it's bread will send it's goods to the Market first before going to a warehouse or food storage yard, so it's more useful.
- When a residence is about to collect a resource, it checks to see if it has capacity, if the collected good would bring it over capacity it instantly returns the resource, preventing occasions where multiple agents are collecting the same resource but they only needed 1 of them.
- Almost all industries have more collection or delivery agents to help speed up the transfer of goods
- Some buildings that caused bottlenecks e.g the Bakery have had their requirements changed. Instead of 2 flour for 1 bread, it now will take 3 flour and produce 2 bread, speeding things up.
Other Adjustments
- The Senate UI where you could once see your interactions with the Senate has been removed. The interaction mechanics with the Senate are being revised so for now they've been removed
- Several African missions adjusted to reduce the number of items required
- Tribal Exchange had it's delivery agents removed. There's no need to have delivery agents on this market building
- In the building browser, you can now press the resource button and it will open a UI outlining information about that resource, along with what buildings produce it
- Can now zoom in and out with the + and - keys (along with mouse wheel scroll)
Updated Visual Design
All of the Roman buildings have been given a visual upgrade. Originally the aesthetic I was going for was a really low poly style. However, with the release of both Africa and Gaul, there's been a change to a more detailed style.
Food Storage Yard
Clay Mine
All of the buildings will have a more consistent style and are now more inline with the visuals I always wanted for the Roman campaign.
Whats next?
Keep an eye out over the next few weeks. I'll be releasing a new announcement that'll outline the dev roadmap for 2022. Thanks again for playing and I look forward to bringing you new and exciting content next year!