Hi,
I hope you are all well. Today I'm going to share a few small things from the upcoming Tier 2 & Future Era update version 0.10. I'll have some good news and some bad news.
Because things are a bit rough I'm not able to share all artwork I wanted (a lot is still very much work-in-progress) but regardless of the difficulties in the past couple of weeks I'm getting closer to a playable beta version.
When is the next Beta?
So let's get to the important business first. The beta for 0.10 is planned to
start somewhere between Friday Dec 13th and Dec 20th ending by end of December
That is assuming beta goes with the same pace as two previous major updates... I have no idea if the player engagement will be the same during pre-christmas time. We'll see. If needed I'll make the beta week or two longer.
Some bad news
As I mentioned this version has been rather difficult and I have accumulated a slight delay so had to do some unpleasant rescheduling.
Fewer Heroes and Wonders
My ambition was to double the number of heroes for Tier 2. While this is still my ambition I know for sure this will not be possible in such short time frame, especially considering these heroes will need to form specific combos with the new wonders and perks. So in general I will have to add heroes by smaller batches. Either as part of major updates or smuggled inside smaller patches.
No new music
While I do have 3 new tracks composition in progress none of those tracks is yet ready to use. Also my wish is to 'remake' the existing depressive piano track for a better sounding piano instrument and fix some of its melodic stupidities....so lots and lots of work in this area yet.
Class perks postponed (again)
This was the hardest decision because I have spent about two weeks working on redesigning of the class perks and their new visuals. They are now working in a more interesting way that should create more combinations with new stuff and I do like the new mechanisms lot better than the previous ones (remember I descoped this feature from 0.9 because the designs were too simplistic back then).
This time the reason to exclude this from 0.10 is the testing and balancing time needed to do this feature in combination of new Future Era and 40 additional levels.
The good news - Crisis Perks
One feature I am looking forward to test and expand in v 0.10 is called 'Crisis Perks'. This is no magic - all Tier 2 crises will be granted special passive or active abilities which will make them in some way harder to fight. Some perks will depend on the Crisis category (Fire, Plague, Uprising, etc.) some will be randomly generated (e.g. for random Rare crises which need some 'extra kick').
For instance a crisis may be resisting damage from some source (e.g. a light unit). It may cause your block shields to be less effective. Or it may periodically 'cast' a special effect on you.
A new Robot Uprising encountered in Future Era on higher levels. This one has an offensive 'Fast' Perk improving the crisis' speed.
Crisis perks will be mostly aimed at defending the crisis from the player, rather than making the crisis more offensive. However exceptions to this will exist. As usual this first batch of crisis perks will be only a 'starter pack' with more variants coming hopefully based on beta feedback.
Bigger Map & New Crisis Types
Not originally planned, but it felt irresistible to increase the map size for Tier 2. Adding more civilization rivals and making them more dangerous will be part of the update. However it also felt like a new type on neutral 'critter' crisis is a good idea. So we'll have another type of Crisis next to Cannibals, Mammoths and Barbarians. For now I only intend to introduce this new Crisis type to Tier 2 for simplicity's sake.
Giant Obese Lizards will be added to the mix. Sorry I cannot explain my reasoning for this choice ... It was purely instinctive and emotional decision.
Future Era will of course include its own set of crises and problems. I have added two new Disasters into the 'Predicement' system (the bombs).
- One of them is Economic Depression which lowers your Gold Cap making gold worthless and slowly bleeds your Housing every second.
- The other one is Resentment which negates all your Risk Reduction bonuses and slowly but steadily increases your Click Heat.
New Nemeses will be added strictly to the Future Era. This one's concept is called 'Idea Pathogen'. For some of the Nemeses however, there will be no 'mortality' condition for Tier 2, only to be made mortal in Tier 3 (we'll see if that's reasonably playable)
What's Next?
In the remaining time til Beta I still have a lot of Future Era artwork to polish, and add initial Hero/wonder set. Along with an already pre-designed new trait mechanisms and of course the long promised fifth hero slot!
This is all I have for today. I'll be in touch as soon as the Beta is ready!
See you soon,
Ondrej