Hi,
as usual I'm here after 4 weeks with a little update on Microcivilization development. This time I'll be a little brief - Christmas is behind the corner and also I want to restart the updates back to the first week of the month from next year. So yaay we would see each other in 2 weeks!
What's going on with Beta
So far beta is going great. I did not expect people to jump on the game so close to Holidays so I am really grateful to all of you guys who are helping me with the new version.
So far I've only had to do one patch with no 'showstopper' bugs so it seems like a bit happier beta than last time leaving me some space for bigger changes. For the moment there are bunch of defects in the queue to be patched as soon as possible after taking some time off with my family between the holidays. Along with this there's a rather tricky update to balancing calculations.
Rebalancing
After your feedback about the steep difficulty increase in Tier2 I have run a short series of retests using different builds and done a little analysis of the current unit system. As a result i decided to do a combat update (right into this beta) which i had sitting in backlock for some time - waiting for an opportune moment. This is because the damage is not progressing correctly to allow a tier difficulty bump.
So with a cup of hot tea in front of our fireplace and a Christmas tree, let's talk about Damage...
Damage Progression problem
Current damage issue can be explained in a nutshell like this:
- As you play, you build up highlevel heroes providing high-damage.
- All of the heroes provide Damage as ADDITIONS say 100-1000.
- At the end the above damage output is MULTIPLIED by the current Unit available to you (say a spearman has 40%). So your 100-1000 becomes 40-400.
- On level 40 you will however have a Rifleman who let's say provides 1000% MULTIPLIER. So your damage would be 1,000-10,000.
- When jumping up a Tier, all crises get more difficult by ADDING 40 levels to them
- You be facing a 40 level crisis with your spearmen's 40-400. Same crisis which was calibrated against rifleman's 1,000-10,000.
'Damage Flip' to the rescue
The proposed change is simple - let's make Heroes provide a MULTIPLIER as well as ADDITIONS while unit provides only ADDITIONS. Why should that matter? Let's take a look at a picture
Note that the numbers here are for illustration purposes only not actual numbers to use later.
The result is that only one part of the X+Y gets low at the start of a new game (the Y). This allows X to compensate what previously was just Y's job to handle.
In other words:
- Your unit will now have only partial effect on how damage is calculated (part of your Damage value is ADDED from ascensions and heroes)
- The numbers reading on the Hero chart and unit details will flip - Heroes will have a Percentage Damage ability, while units will have a A-B damage numbers.
Simplified Illustration of Difficulty Bump smoothing on Tier 2 with New 'flipped' system vs Old one
The above math may still slightly change as I test this redesign but the general principle will most likely stay. This should give me far more flexibility to balance Tier 2 (and in future Tier 3 and 4) crises.
When is version 0.10 coming out?
Yes according to roadmap it should be out by the end of the year. But considering this rebalance issue I decided I'll extend this beta for at least a week or two. We'll need to run another big patch with this rebalance to see if the game is stable that way. So my hope is mid-January.
What's next?
In the next update I will be sharing roadmap for 2025. As mentioned in my previous update I've accumulated a little delay with some features for Tier 2 and so will have to adjust the plans a bit to get the missing features done.
That's all for today people. I wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,
Cheers,
Ondrej