Hello,
it feels as if the last update was just a few days back. Spring days are flying by with incredible speed. There's plenty of new things added to 0.8 but mainly we're going to take a look at the new update to the Adversary system (formerly Crisis system, but there are now more entities to this than Crises, hence a new buzz-word is needed). Also I'll share some quick info about the upcoming v0.8 beta.
Nemeses
As you may already know, the existing Crisis system is somewhat 'temporary'. Not that it would be completely changed, but a lot of features are a bit forcibly simplified. A lot of feedback mentioned a wish for more variability in combat and additional/better progression in difficulty.
Nemeses system is a new feature which should eventually address both. What is a Nemesis? Nemesis is a unique type of crisis similar to existing 'Era' Crises that you combat every 7 technological levels but with a few differences.
The first difference is that each Nemesis crisis is repeatable. As soon as you Unleash the nemesis (more on this later) it will repeatedly be triggered every 5 minutes or so, depending on the outcome of the battle.
Second difference is, that each Nemesis is Invincible. Invincible crises cannot be reduced below 50% HP until a specific condition is satisfied (that differs per each Nemesis, and may eventually differ per each Civilisation run). For instance, when you Unleash the Smallpox Nemesis, you may need to reach a specific amount of Research per second in order to dispel its invulnerability.
Third difference is that Nemeses will only be available on Rare technologies. Rare technologies are a new Feature unlocked in Ascension tree. Each run there is only one Rare technology appearing somewhere in your technology tree, offering massive benefits but also some drawback. A Nemesis Lock will precede each Rare technology, Unleashing that Nemesis as soon as the Lock is Open.
Tech tree now conceals which technologies are behind Locks (and you will have the ability to circumvent that - though not for free). As tech tree progresses, this will open new mechanics to plan your way through if you are looking for speed or safety.
How do I fight invincible Crisis?
For a good part of every run, player will have no means to destroy a Nemesis. The only option is to 'survive'. That can be achieved by usual Fort-everything strategy. Alternatively players will also be able to scare-away the crisis with use of Units. The mechanics here works a bit different than with normal 'mortal' crises.
When you reduce an Invincible Crisis to it's 50% HP, each successive attack will (instead of reducing HP) exhaust one Crisis' attack. When all are exhausted, the crisis disappears (as if waited out).
Only after the Nemesis' Invincibility Condition is satisfied, can you reduce the Nemesis HP to zero, thus removing it from the current Civilization run.
Fun fact: Although there are several hypotheses Smallpox may have co-developed into the severe form between rodents and their best friends - the farming humans about 3000 - 4000 years ago. Luckily in 1977 after a 19-year process, a vaccination campaign eliminated the disease from the whole planet. The cost estimates ~1.3 Billion USD in today's dollars (so about the cost of the GPT5 training) for the eradication of Smallpox, saving ~15 Million people from death every year since.
How many Nemeses are there
The v0.8 will only contain three Nemeses: The Huns, The Smallpox and The Inquisition. Each randomly spawning in your Tech tree after unlocking Rare Technologies ascension. Both the Nemesis system and Rare technologies concept are still 'much beta' and it depends on future beta testing, where the whole complex of features is going to move.
New Technology tree is overall progressing in difficulty with new Eras unlocked. Rare technologies will introduce Nemeses after Renaissance era. Other ascensions were also re-grouped to make more sense progression-wise. For instance Auto-skills are accessed in an early branch right behind Stonehenge while Hero recipes can be unlocked from a shared cluster rather than being spread across the tree.
Disasters
It would be pity if this was all the new trouble coming our way in Microcivilization in v0.8. The next feature is something that would best be described as 'abstraction' of the existing Storm debuff.
As you may have experienced yourself, the Storm debuff (currently available on Babel tower scenario or via Hanging Gardens trait) is a bit of a lonely feature, having little alternative debuffs or any deeper integration with the rest of the game. Have no fear. In v0.8 anyone can have their own storm free of charge. And also Rats, Drought and Industrial Pollution.
Debuffs to ruin your day
This is exactly what this is about. A set of debuffs (for the moment let's call them Disasters) which will amplify any Crisis you face while they're active.
Storm used to add unblockable attacks. It still does. But it also amplifies any Crisis risk in the meantime between Crises.
Rats will add Damage-per-second attacks to new Crises and create a flat Disease Risk.
Drought will ruin your food production and will make all Crises HP bigger.
Industrial pollution will be your best friend however. It increases fire risk and prevents you from constructing anything during a crisis.
Combining multiple Disasters at the same time is possible, though not recommended.
Predicaments turning into Disasters
How does one get a Disaster? Randomly? No. In Microcivilization I believe that the player's action should be the ultimate root cause of everything that happens. No flat % chance of tornadoes here.
Instead, we now have a feature called Predicament. It is a sibling to the 'crisis risk' feature we already know. The major difference is that a Predicament is a certainty that a problem will happen. You just don't know when or what that problem will be. How does that work?
All this leads back to our new Technology tree again. Same way you can unleash Nemesis before starting a research, you can unleash a Predicament debuff. So yay, all of your misery will be effectively self-inflicted.
Predicaments are illustrated as a time-bomb triggered by new technology and they're exactly that. Who knew that leeching gold ore with cyanide atop the hill might eliminate all fish in the rivers in 2 years.
Instead of having a % change of triggering a Disaster, each predicament debuff has a specific Time when that predicament 'explodes' and 'turns into' a Disaster. The time is between 1 minute and 1 hour. (There are going to be ways to find out what the predicament time is).
Of course, there will be other ways to receive a specific disaster (A Nemesis may for instance grant a Disaster debuff directly as one of it's Ultra-Attacks)
How does this work together with Crises?
The long 'time-bomb' period of Predicament means you cannot easily wait them out. You will be forced to move on with the Damocles bombs ticking above your head, risking to end up with a swarm of would-be-easy Crises becoming insane unblockable aggressive ninja Crises with piranhas and locusts swarms. If that isn't fun, I don't know what is...
But don't worry, predicaments don't start appearing until Medieval era. The initial variants should be relatively soft and scarce. Only as you progress further down the ascension tree should the amount of bombs grow and turn into a problem worth considering.
As with Nemeses, this is just a first version. We'll see what direction to evolve the Disaster/Predicament feature.
Secrets
All the above features are revolving around the new 'Lock' system that precedes technologies in your tech tree. This lock system is currently very generic and may change significantly in the future. However one trick was added to help players overcome some of the more challenging Locks, like the mentioned nemeses or predicaments.
Secrets are a new resource, which you can gain by some updated Tribal-Village Dilemma cards or simply from a few selected technologies in the tech tree. Secrets can be used from within the tech tree to force unlock any Lock, without triggering it's effect of having to satisfy the locks' condition (in case of locks like 'complete 3 quests')
With secrets you have some way to strategize your path through the Tech Tree. With Locks and Tribal villages being randomized each Civilization, you may need to change approach each time to get to the later era faster.
In case you're looking for a precise and less stressful play style, stocking on Secrets and using them up to work around Nemeses and Predicaments is the strategy you may want to apply.
When is Beta going to open
Majority of the work in the past month was testing and balancing. There's still a number of bugs to be solved, playtesting to do (especially late-game and AFK play) and some artwork to be made.
However it feels that the code stability and feature coverage is where I expected it to be back in my last update, so I can safely say that the Beta will be opened before the end of May. I'll issue an announcement as soon as that happens.
Away time calculation is starting to look more stable. This is example of the loading screen indicating which rewards your civilization would get, if you accept 20 hours of away time. In the beginning it seems my Civ managed to repel all crises, winning over 80% of fights. But then probably succumbed to some rare fore. So now I can now chose to Accept that to get 21 heroes, along with a beefy 400% drop-rate bonus and 2 Gold Lotuses for the price of having to rebuild the civilization from scratch. Or I can instead load the game as it was when I left the pc yesterday...
Roadmap changes
I have made a few adjustments to the Roadmap to reflect the existing situation a bit better. Overall there are no major delays regarding 0.8 (should get released early June if beta goes OK) or 0.9 (likely by the end of Q3)
I am however starting to suspect that formal 1.0 release date will be affected by Soundtrack work (I have made a different - bigger - plan for Soundtrack) and eventually some artwork features required for Tiers 2,3 and 4. I have been considering doing most of these as Content Updates past 1.0 but for some features i begin to find it make less and less sense. To be transparent about this uncertainty I have stretched the possible 1.0 across Q1 and Q2 2025.
For various reasons I am postponing work on soundtrack to not affect the critical versions 0.8 and 0.9. But like I said in one of previous updates - music is a difficult piece of work to estimate for me and it's quite likely I won't resist the urge to spend more time on this than absolutely necessary :)
This is all I wanted to share for now. Have a nice day.
Ondrej