Hi,
today I'm going to show a bit of the new Map update stuff. After three weeks of coding it is still fresh from the oven.
Annotated work-in-progress version of the new Map system.(Nothing is final)
The old Map size for comparison
As you can see the main approach is to turn the map into a more traditional grid. While I enjoyed keeping the simplicity of the staged quest system with 'static' map tiles organised into a 'loose' grid, it has proven to be hard to expand without making it grotesquely inflexible and cluttered system.
So what is the reason of all this change?
You could ask why bother with this update at all...the quest system we had was fine?
The answer is complex but let's list a few of the reasons why making these changes:
- With more activities in research, trade and other areas, the map has proven to be a rather tedious activity mostly in later game phases.
- The only bottleneck on the Quest gameplay in early-era late-game (hope that makes sense) is quest speed. To me that is an indication of the mechanics missing or being too easy to max-out.
- With Trade introduced resources, map becomes too small to ensure any kind of options of playstyle. It even limits gaining several Achievements.
- There is only a limited number of cross-relations between the map mechanics and the rest of the game's mechanics.
20x8 Map size
Yes we could now have a vast map with hundreds of tiles. But to some degree I don't feel it is needed and would rather not increase the map size until it is really justified.
So the decision for now is to have a 20x8 map with left-right scrolling only (fitting the 8 tiles vertically on the screen eliminating vertical scroll feels nice at the moment). Of course technically nothing prevents us now to increase the size to 200x200 with 2-way scroll should we need to in the future.
Tile improvements
A simple chart for the map tile types indicating two 'biomes' (lowlands and highlands) each with three options of improvement on. Each of these three improvements are also convertible to one other within the biome.
In the new system, we will have a more traditional way of cultivating the wilderness. Flat lowlands can be turned into farmlands or forests, hills into mines and quarries. I intend to keep the simplicity roughly on equal level as before. So in the end I do not plan to add more tile types than we had (10 or so in version 0.8). Instead I want the tiles to be flexible and the system more intuitive.
Adjacency bonuses
The main element related to the strict grid is adjacency bonuses for tiles close to each other. While this adds some complexity to the game, I believe it is the core feature behind hex grid that really makes the grid worth its existence. Of course it then depends on how the actual adjacency bonuses are designed...
The current experiment is based on 'adjacency' points system which boosts production of each tile. Villages act as 'wildcard' adjacency boosters for all types of tiles.
At this moment I am experimenting with various mechanics, but the adjacency system is intended to be a key feature of the whole map management. It is also highly invasive into the entire resource economy, so whatever you see on the screenshots now is quite likely to change in the near future.
Other civilizations
Civilization tiles seen in previous version will be upgraded to entire tile regions (with it's home tile same as yours). You will have options to engage with diplomacy (using the Dilemma system that Tribal Villages use) or warfare - being able to steal territory from the losing enemy. Everything else will use the existing game features like Risk Chance, Dilemmas and Quests. We will just 'extrapolate' these features a bit further.
Other than that it is not planned to make Civilization more active agents in the game. For this update at least, the civilizations will be just a spiced-up map features, which grant you more quest options. It is certainly not meant to create a 'technology race' as is usual in classical 4x games. The time will always be on your side.
Worker Limits
Because of the map size increase, the original feature of 'free workers generating resource' will be removed. Instead 'Worker resource' will be directly invested into the map tile expansion acting like a civilization size limit. In other words, each owned tile will reduce Workers by 1.
Because of this Workers progression from population will be re-balanced together with Food production.
Quest Limits
Each quest now has an associated cost. Combat quests will 'reserve' a unit, meaning you will have one less available to you while the quest is in progress (you will have them back for the fight at the end though).
Construction quests (deforestation, irrigation etc.) will respectively reserve a Worker.
This way you will still have no 'actual' hard limit on parallel quests taken, but instead you can trade-off the expansion speed with the ability to defend and produce at home.
No more Quest Stages
Claiming 160 tiles will take more than the time we currently need for a full 6-era run. In fact some of the tiles will have to be wrested from the other civs.
It is now useless to artificially increase effort per tile with quest Stages. From now on, each single quest will cause its transforming effect without the need to repeat it.
The quests duration was not increased (in fact there will be ways to make them even faster), although distance still is the main factor and far quests will eventually be longer than before simply because we now have longer distances.
What's next?
At this moment I am working on Civilization Traits. A new game screen available in the beginning of each run, where you will be able to 'configure' your civilization's semi-permanent traits (meaning traits that last the entire run). At the same time you will be able to pick the starting location on the map - thus give you a 'planning moment' before each civilization run.
I'll share more details about these in the next update.
At the same time I am polishing the game-design for Ascension Tier 2 3 and 4 which is now coming to a solid shape (on paper). I have (un)fortunately had some new ideas to add to the game for these tiers. Some of these mechanics will not be trivial to do, but I kinda fell in love with them too much now to say no.
So as a consequence I might need to adjust the roadmap for Q3 and Q4 as soon as the designs are complete. This could probably add 4 to 8 weeks of work potentially moving the 1.0 launch date later. But we'll see...
See you in another 4 weeks,
Ondrej