Hello,
This time i'm going to share some situational update where we are with 0.10 and what is being addressed. Since there's not much to show from 0.11 yet I figured I'll expose what's going on at the moment in everything else.
We're now in the weird phase that seems to happen after every major content release. Even though the releases were quite different each time, there are always same things happening. So let's briefly touch each one of them, since they also affect you - the players - and what's coming next:
- New features are in the game and a lot of new 'loose ends' are attracting new ideas from players, suggestions and criticism.
- Game Performance at the late game is utterly horrible (note that what is late game is moving each update)
- Despite running X weeks of beta, new very silly bugs keep appearing.
- Balancing is off (this is especially true now when difficulty increase was one of the core features)
- New features design for next major update is already in progress.
Loose ends
Those of you who have engaged in discussion with me probably know by now that my approach is something like 'evolutive design'. I often place features incomplete, in a minimalistic form and I let them being bombarded by ideas from players as well as from future myself.
This has an obvious cost of looking incomplete and causing concern when things are too simplistic, or not useful (or complete rubbish). But the benefit is that each feature's potential is being shaped not in a lonely glass petri dish, but right in the wild nature among other real things.
With this 0.10 version i am introducing some features which still have a long way to go before being considered final.
Concealed Future era research
This Future Era is the most sparsely developed feature at the moment. This is a deliberate decision (though I did intend to add full level of Genetic engineering too but the overall experience would not be very different in 0.10), I do not consider myself confident enough to design the entire endless system at once. What I needed to do was a first conceptual phase and start collecting ideas from players. There's not a single feature on the tree that would not have something i see as a 'loose end' in my head.
This is how I see the future tech tree at the moment. Each element has some way to grow.
My intention is to expand Future era retrospectively in future updates (meaning what we now have in Tier 2 will become bigger) but main update will come also in Tier 4 where the future era should theoretically double in size.
Wonder-only builds
If you recall the previous major update, one of the most important changes there was introduction of the new Wonder system using up Workshop slots. A lot of economy builds have been removed due to that limitation and it was really a big debt of mine to reintroduce some alternative builds based off wonders.
With Tier 2 we now have a baseline wonder setup using up some of the newly created world wonders which has proven out to be more powerful (perhaps unnecessarily too powerful) compared to workshops-only setup. This is a first step towards an economy model where swapping to wonders actually makes sense and you have several 'core' setups.
Naive-version of the Ancient Seven Wonders build. A lot more power can be extracted here.
0.10 did not do that much to improve older Tier 1 Wonders in this direction and you need to reach late game T2 to make use of the 'Ancient 7 wonders', but I plan to introduce a few more wonder setups which will become somewhat 'standard' setups of wonders synergizing each other using most of the old Tier 1 wonders.
Level/Difficulty
The first difficulty bump is done and (as expected) a lot of rough edges had to be polished. After doing a bunch of updates the Tier 2 is generally playable in most player strategies, but there still is one big problem I did not anticipate - Tier 1 difficulty progression.
First of all a lot of problems can be very easily avoided in Tier 1 skipping quickly to Tier 2. There's very little that can be 'patched' about that, a broad balancing of Tier 1 must be done so that it lands closer where Tier 2 is now.
Second, the current Ascension flow 'reach tech tree end or use Taj Mahal' is no longer good enough. Tier 2 has proven that this design is not scaling well with new tiers and needs to be re-visited.
I decided to rush with introduction of one feature I was saving for Tier 3 and beyond - a buyable ability costing Lotus, which can be recharged on Ascension tree. Horn of Resolve is the first of this 'instruments' feature. The reason was to introduce a last resort ability for crisis spirals and I needed some way to limit this feature's usage.
Game Performance
Not much to say here. The game is horribly slow at late-game and the cause is the new features and code introduced in patches (since I do not performance-test patches).
But also the reason is that players are now capable of insane combos generating far higher production than the game reallly needs right now.
I will (as usual) plan a performance optimization along some of the future patches but only when invasive functional updates are no longer likely.
Balancing
As stated above balancing has a few pitfalls which I will need to address as a 'semi-major' update at some point. There's currently two options : either to include this as part of 0.11 (ETA May) or deliver this as a separate mid-size update earlier.
Since this kind of change will require a LOT of testing, my preference now is to wait for 0.11 where already a LOT of testing will happen anyway. But if some bits and pieces are patchable safely, they'll land into 0.10 sooner.
There's a bunch of bugs and minor improvements that will 100% make for another small patch some time this or next week.
New Features
Good news is that in between patches I've made a decent progress on the Tier 3 things and have now every feature 'mocked up'. For the moment I've done what could be called a 'proof of concept' so I'm now confident about these features so much that I can reveal their headlines.
- Hunting/Gathering, Slash&burn agriculture and Nomadic map flow.
- New droppable Idols and 'socketing' mechanism
- White Lotus and 'Pledges' mechanism.
- Red Lotus and related 'Sacrifice' mechanisms.
- Black Lotus and related mechanisms.
- Ascension meta-nemesis and related combat mechanism.
I'm looking forward to dig into each of these in future updates. For now this is all, I'll see you in 4 weeks.
Cheers,
Ondrej