Hello,
it has been very busy four weeks, a lot has happened and a lot needs to be revealed today. Last time I was talking very vaguely about 1.0 release. Today I can finally draw some concrete steps to leave Early access!
First of all I'd like to mention that my amazing wife has brought our second baby to this world two weeks ago. So apologies if I were (and will be) less responsive in the meantime. I am now slowly coming to a new work schedule and managing to get a couple of work hours each day. But it will take a few weeks probably to stabilize on some steady pace.
Good news and Bad news
In my previous update mentioned the following two planning questions:
When the Beta test for 1.0 starts. Optimistic guess = November, Pessimistic guess = December.
When the 1.0 actually goes live (ending Early access phase). Optimistic guess = December, Pessimistic guess = January
Leaving the point one aside for now lets look at point two - the ACTUAL GO-LIVE.
Is Optimistic Go-Live release still doable?
December is a tricky month to release. Because you cannot overlap release week with Steam Holiday sale (you can technically do it but it's a bad idea) the latest day for go live in Dec would be 11th!
December 11th is 4 weeks away, which no longer adds up with the work needed (I estimate minimum of 2 + 3 weeks of Balancing + Beta).
This plan looked less risky 4 weeks ago but with little bit of debt accumulated each day, it is now very unlikely to make it all in time in good quality. In a life-or-death situation (or if I had a mean product manager breathing on my neck) I'd still manage to do it before 11th, but at this point it is not worth the risk.
So the 1.0 Go-Live will happen in January.
What about Beta?
The good news is that postponing release to January gives us more time than we need for Beta. So there is a good chance to add some extra small features planned for post-1.0. It also gives me enough time to do some QoL stuff (there's quite a long backlog of requests from players).
I would therefore start Beta test at something like T-4 months (T being the go live). This would probably be around the start of Winter sales in the middle of December.
I know I have previously mentioned to try start beta in November - it would still be possible by delaying some development stuff for beta, but running an 8-week long beta with major updates in the middle has proven to be problematic (i tried this with 0.10 last Christmas and I ended up with way more hotfixes than I liked). So this time I'd rather do a normal 4 week long beta and spend extra time with my own tests beforehand.
What will change from 0.12?
While I tried to do majority of invasive changes in previous major update, there are still numerous changes - mainly to provide maneuvering space for late-game balancing. I won't go much into detail since majority of these are medium-to-small changes. There's just a lot of them.
Secret Farming
Secret farming from Raven idols was redesigned. It no longer generates Secrets passively, instead it unlocks a 'repeatable' research technology, which rewards a secret every time it is 'finished'.
For a 'diminishing return' effect (and thus a soft cap on max secrets gained) this technology cost rises with each instance researched (and is reduced with Idol power/count).
Along this change I also redesigned some research-supporting Wonders and Heroes to create a feasible synergy build. Festival of Radiance has also been tweaked to introduce Food->Research->Secrets synergy.
Unique Idols
Golden calf now has two other friends. These three unique idols provide a more powerful version of their non-unique Idol power (instead of a passive unique trait granted by previous version Calf). As extra downside, this unique idol power prevents usage of a single type of Workshop (depending on the idol type).
I'll be rolling out Unique idols to cover all 6 existing animals eventually.
Windmill un-cheesing
Workshop recharge cooldown has been increased (more so for Windmill) and Hero traits boosting Windmill recharge rate have been 'mostly removed' from the drop pool. Garden skill has also been nerfed (mostly on higher levels).
Windmill can still be boosted to very high recharge rate (yes it is a fun build), but it should now be more complicated to setup.
Worker/Food/Wood Rebalance
A complex rebalancing was done to make Workers more scarce and also to reduce the overall utility of mass-forest-light-unit-spam strategy.
There are numerous components to this change but most notable are:
Higher worker costs for high-magnitude workshops & wonders
Lower food sustain bonus values from heroes (requiring more farms)
Lower food bonuses from heroes/ascensions etc.
Lowered +% Resources Adjacency bonus on gold-adjacency tiles (+10% instead of +35%). This can however be doubled to a +20% with appropriate Perk.
Villages now give only +2 workers (with Gold-Adjacency), but there is a perk improving this to original +3. Public schooling will further raise this to +4 (as in 0.12).
Urbanization perk from modern era has been removed. Villages adjacency will no longer be 'broken'.
New Heroes
A bunch of new unique heroes were added where build synergies were missing. I have also tweaked some existing unique heroes to better shape unit-specialized synergies.
Main objective was to move power from light-units to other combat units and abilities.
Perk group limits
Resource perks modifying tile yield and per-worker-resources are now 'grouped' and you can only have three of these perks in a game.
Some of these perks have been buffed to make players choice more relevant.
Festival Perks
New Perks now allow you to modify your Festival ability to either boost Hero ability power or Recharge workshop charges. Festivals are now more powerful but also cost food per second when they are active providing a 'conversion opportunity' for high-food yield builds.
Strategic Resource Exploiting
Strategic resources can now be 'eaten' providing a persistent passive bonus (depending on resource tier). That way you can use up resources you do not need.
Unit-damage strategic resources have been nerfed but they now spawn in up to two types per map. They also have more diverse secondary effects (Instead of +Workers on each).
I also added a basic-tier food oriented resource (since food will now be more challenging to get).
Unique Crises spawn
Unique enemies no longer spawn on map start. Instead they randomly spawn during game for a limited time. They will have a very high level but if defeated will provide big reward pile including a unique Badge with permanent passive effect.
Special Badges
As mentioned above some unique enemies now award badges when destroyed. Randomly spawned unique enemies drop three types of badge while Future era Nemeses drop three ultra-powerful badges when destroyed (yes this is possible on tier 4). These badges work same as Hero-bungle badges, except they are exclusively gained only from these 'difficult' fights.
Flood & Future era extensions
Instead of relying on a frustrating combination of Research penalties, Predicaments and invincible Nemeses, Future era now has a new mechanism that serves as a primary method of killing you - flood.
Over time (after finding certain techs very late in the tree) you will start losing tiles around your home (you will keep a small area around it).
There is also a number of very-late random technologies in Future era available only on Tier 4.
You can also adopt Future era techs in the same way you adopted ancestral techs in tier 3.
Judgement refund & rebalance
Judgement combat will now fully refund meta-powers used when you're not victorious. Costs, damage and health of judgements will also be rebalanced.
Culture economy will also be revisited. Vulture idol ability will now provide a way to farm extra culture points and artists level will be better spread out to gameplay to avoid sudden requirements to grind.
Tier 4 is currently very grindy so this will hopefully be smoothed out by the above changes and later during beta.
Some UX updates
A new user control (shift/control) was added to trigger 10 or 100 units or workshop charges with single click. This doesn't aggregate the effect, merely acts as 10/100 clicks on the button with less lag. Can also be toggled on/off.
Similar effect is added for levelling up of heroes.
Some frequent Quests can now be quick-started on map (using shift)
Reward/Quest buttons are grouped (and there's more of them)
Forts should no longer lag that much when you have thousands of them.
Crises difficulty is now estimated on map (to prevent some suicide missions)
Crisis bar explosion is now a bit faster, takes less space and (hopefully) is less laggy.
And we're now running in 60 fps (yeah I know...cutting edge technology)
What's next
In the following days I'll be finishing all there is to the current version and doing my best not to start any new invasive changes. I'll also be reviewing the suggestions from the October survey (thanks everyone for their ideas).
In my next update, we should be pretty much ready to start 1.0 beta.
See you next time,
Ondrej