Hi,
this week's update is going have a more greasy feel to it than usual. With version 0.9 out and most of my time spent supporting players or patching (almost 3 weeks total time out of 4), the current game version is somewhere mid-way towards a presentable state that would normally be for a Monday Update. But I figured I can show that state anyway. Just please bear in mind that all is very 'work-in-progress' and will likely change a lot as soon as testing comes in play.
There's a lot of activity going on at once. We have new hero/government ability redesign roughly in place. We have new UI layout, we have endless mode, we have future era technologies. Let's talk briefly about all of these.
What's wrong with Abilities?
To be clear, we are talking about the features like Enlist, Bolster, Mercenaries, Garden, Festival and Zeal trigger abilities as well as Autocracy and Oligarchy toggle abilities. Anything you can have on the UI as extra buttons except Units and Workshops. In case this is confusing I'm using both term Skill and Ability but I mean the same thing. Because of new features added in the past major upates there are several problems which I think are worth pointing out:
- Skills are gained by unreliable ways: randomly dropped Hero skills and technology. This makes them less available to use throughout the game-play as you progress in tree and hero levels.
- It is always a compromise of a passive ability on a Hero to instead pick a skill. This lowers the appeal of active skill.
- There are little skills useful early on.
- There are different ways skills progress with power (some are limited by resource, some scale with levels)
- Resource like gold/autonomy is difficult to use effectively in many situations and are therefore often useless.
- There are several ways the abilities draw resource costs and how that cost scales making things more complex to understand and plan.
- Many skills cannot have any cooldown because they scale with cost - thus requiring frequent casting (e.g. Enlist or Festival).
- Government abilities have grown weak compared to new abilities.
What to do about this?
At the core of the new changes for 0.10 is a somewhat symmetrical design of skills and unification of the mechanisms behind them. First step is to move all abilities to Governments - which are granted and fixed for every Class and Faction combination. That way you do not have to compensate on passive random generic traits. You always have some abilities available.
Illustration of the new hero ability design. Ellipses represent triggerable skill, Recangles a togglable skill and dotted rectangle is a passive ability. Colors represent factions while position within the 'reverse T' shape indicates the hero slot/class as in the in-game inventory. Teal names are skills originally granted by Technology. Pink names are those originally available from random hero traits. Yellow names are new Skills.
Belief and Law hero abilities
The general idea is that each Belief and Law hero now has exactly one of Triggerable Abilities previously available elswhere. I moved most of the existing abilities like Bolster to the faction governments (i.e. same for all heroes of that faction) and where no reasonable skill existed added a new one to fit that faction. These abilities now scale with Hero Level and have a cooldown and either gold or autonomy cost depending on the faction color.
Leadership abilities
Leadership slots still have a toggle ability. But I completely redesigned them and either moved or converted existing abilities to a Leadership Toggle. For instance Enlist is now a toggle ability on Blue faction which will have an 'affinity' towards using militia.
Economy abilities
The economy governments are (at least for now) simply providing a passive always-active bonus.
'Mana'
As mentioned elswhere, Autonomy and Gold are treated as a 'Mana' resource that is spend by using abilities. All new skills will now use their respective resource based on faction. Red/Purple factions will use up Gold while Green/Blue will use Autonomy.
At the same time these factions will also generate this resource by default (initially in very small amount provided by free workers) so that you can use the abilities from relatively early on.
Example how the heroes skill redesign now exists in the 0.10 branch. Icons and descriptions are still very rough. You can also Ignore any values - no balancing has occured there yet
New UI Panel layout
For various reasons I decided to redesign the layout of the UI panel. Mostly to make skills more coupled with units but also to make space for potential extra stuff in tier 2 and 3. Limit on wonder/workshop numbers also calls for potential extra slots (by whatever rare/expensive means).
Very early mock of the new panel with extra row added to accommodate new skills. Graphics is only a 'usable temporary' will likely need more polish later
Future Era and Endless mode
It is now more or less clear how Future era will work technically. It will be using a combination of the existing technology tree with something i think is commonly known as 'endless' research where player will also not be guaranteed to reach further depending on their power (something you could call a rogue-lite element). So how are all those things going to work together?
What is the future era exactly?
First of all let's talk about what the Future era represents.
Future era will represent technological advancements following the Internet. Yeah you could say we're already living in the future! Future era will however be longer to play than other eras we have previously (my estimate is future era to be worth 3+ normal eras depending on how long you manage to play).
I have made some early mock-ups for some technologies I'd like to place into the tech tree of the future era that would cover the first part (more stuff to be added probably as player gains more powers in Tier 3 and Tier 4)
Early mock-up of technological concepts for first part of Future era. More high-tech stuff will come later.
What's the deal with endless?
I have yet to test the idea but the basic thought I have now is to make future era work similar to Tower of Babel. If you fall you ascend (with all due rewards). So the challenge is to proceed through all the new risks and predicaments without dying.
There will also be 'new things' that will make progress increasingly harder. Dystopian Horrors Eternal Comforts that will be meant to stop your progress and freeze you in a merciless (though fun) status-quo.
New research mechanisms
To make this new problem possible, research in future era will be concealed. You will no longer know what you're researching until you are stuck with it. And some technologies will not be so nice. Of course there will be a mechanism to reveal a concealed technology. But it won't be for free...
There will be several fixed 'Major' technologies (as per the mock image) which will be randomly available in the tree, but there will also be an infinite number of 'minor generated' technologies which will provide a combination of good and bad traits. The exact mechanism of mixing fixed and generic technologies is yet undecided.
This is all for today. Next time I'm hoping to show you some visuals for the future era!
See you next time,
Ondrej