Hi,
I hope you all had a good month. It's been very productive time for Microcivilization's 0.8 build. With all the new features added to the system, it has come to integrate them all together into a sensible gameplay progression. In this update I'll share more details about some of these new features and how they are (likely) going to connect with the rest of the game you already know.
Many new features are unlocked with new ascensions roughly arriving around second half of current gameplay. As a result I had to stretch the tree out a bit.
Autonomy resource
As I mentioned in my previous update the Autonomy resource will go through a complete redesign. The general idea is to use Autonomy as a 'mana pool' to do stuff. Pretty much like Gold is now used. However there's a significant difference between the two resources. First it should actually be explained what the Autonomy represents in-game.
Why do we want Autonomy?
First, let's consider why we need a resource like this in the first place. What gameplay style does this resouce even aims to reinforce?
The idea behind autonomy is to let players choose somewhere between these extremes:
Option 1 - a government strictly protecting and guiding its people through the struggles of the world. With the player being the wise all-knowing hand that rewards, protects and disciplines its faithful population who hardly know what is good for them and would otherwise end-up as hedonistic cannibal heretics ever-struggling in petty internal clashes. Who else than the player to show them a way to civilized society...
Option 2 - a government that promotes individual merit, personal freedoms and admitting that no single ruler knows more than the massive experience of community, the player guides their population into independence, self-sustainability and self-governance where everyone's voice is heard and no-one is left behind...
Sweet huh? Well unless things go sideways and option 1 ends up with a totalitarian dictatorship, purges and slave camps (more on that in future updates) or if option 2 ends up with a collapse of control and a coup leading to an orwellian animal-farm version of option 1. So there's the gameplay 'we all want and love'...
What is Autonomy
The resource itself represents the ability and will of your micro-population to govern and act on their own impulse. Mathematically:
Let P be a total number of your Population.
Then let Autonomy A be a number of P who are not complete gullible uneducated ignorants.
Armed with this foolproof definition we can now clearly see what autonomy would offer us as benefits and at the same time as potential problems.
The bad news
As per the definition, autonomy will be representing some kind of attribute belonging to your population. For that reason autonomy will strictly by capped by the amount of your Pop size. You can't have more independent-thinkers than you have actual people right?
This constraint alone will make autonomy rather hard to get, especially in large and fast-growing empires. Roughly speaking a single point of autonomy will be about as valuable as two gold coins. Considering the population in level 40+ can reach into a million, this makes growing fully independent society a long term goal.
With new system a new breakdown details. This time it will be necessary to provide cross-linked information of what is boosted by autonomy and why.
The other bad news, is that each single death will cause a loss of two autonomy points. People get scared. And their will usually then turns to prioritizing their own family survival, than the benefits of others. Forcing out legion of unarmed militia to fend off invaders may quickly ruin the self-governance ability of the democratic society and create a need for your authority to help get them back on their feet (or on their knees if you choose).
The good news
Other than by population loss, Autonomy will not drop unless you say so. Only by using (or abusing) your population's will you spend the hard-earned autonomy resource. Is that a good idea or bad idea? Depends.
Autonomy will provide not only a mana-pool to use special abilities, but also a set of passive bonuses.
Since autonomy is scaling with population, these benefits will also scale with population. This single reason can potentially make all 'autonomy provision' benefits far more powerful than existing resource progression provided by workshops.
For instance earning +1 Stone per 1000 Autonomy points could easily grow to a +1000 stone in modern era (which is huge even if this is added as a flat bonus not boosted with +% modifiers). Therefore some of these benefits will not be easy to get. Some will only be accessible through Wonders or Unique heroes with complementary down-sides.
One of the basic autonomy skills is a boost to your Militia cap and charging speed. If all goes wrong, sacrificing your passive bonuses to gain extra counter-crisis capability can be strategically wise desicision. Keep in mind that Militia also causes direct death and thus more autonomy loss.
Compared to gold, population and free housing, autonomy will not have any beyond-limit penalty so you can stay on Max autonomy all the time with no extra risk. (exceptions will exist, more on this in the future). Same as before autonomy points are used by auto-combat, auto-click and auto-construction skills however their cost is now represented always a X per second to allow long-term calculation for AFK play.
Another good news is that autonomy will be feeding into a number of other late-game mechanisms mostly to those available on Blue faction heroes. Overall you will have to make a decision whether to keep your autonomy up for passive bonuses, or use-up the autonomy on abilities that may prevent you falling to the next upcoming crisis.
Library and Theater
With the new autonomy mechanisms tied to other parts of the game, Theater and Library can now be turned into their originally intended roles as main workshops of autonomy flow.
Similar to other resource workshops, Library will be the main source of autonomy points. Representing the practical education of society, library feels to be the natural choice to drive autonomy spread and a 'vertical' improvement of your population. The active charge power of Library is now modelled in the same way as Marketplace - turning other charges into autonomy surge. This creates a bit of symmetry between those two workshops.
Caps & Recharge speed of workshops is now using similar mechanic with military units so there was a small unification of the UI display of the recharge in progress so that both systems use the same philosophy and numerical representation.
Theater stays to be the only workshop providing you with permanent value - Heroes. However with economy of gold and autonomy in place, it can be properly tied to Marketplace and Library to form up a combo. Theater will now have independent rolls for hero and corruption drops, so it will not be a guarantee to always end up with one. It will also be possible to scale up its charge cap, recharge rate and allow dropping of unique heroes.
To compensate for all that, theater will be the only workshop which passively consumes resources instead of providing them (gold and autonomy in this case). This places Theater sort-of to the top of the food chain of your economy.
Other changes
Automation Skills moved to ascension
After much consideration, core automation skills - Auto-Construction and Auto-Combat have been moved off to Ascension tree. That means they can now be unlocked at any point and used regardless of your hero setup. The previous setup, where only Blue hero faction had this ability proved to be too limiting and prone to re-equipping. It is still planned to keep Blue faction specialized for autonomous play, but having removed the skills themselves, opens more flexibility to combining blue faction with other colors. After all it is not intended to reward single faction builds, but instead promote multi-color builds.
Research queue
Research can now be queued. So you can select any tech available down the line and they will automatically get switched as they are finished researching. With several new decisions to be done in tech tree during gameplay, auto research has become a rather tricky problem to solve - similar to automatic world-map expansion.
So for now neither of those two (auto research or auto quests) will exist. When the system gets more mature, those two autoskills will probably appear. For now research queue should solve the tediousness of repetitive runs.
New Corruptions
New features mean new punishments. Main mechanism for punishing the player are Corruptions. So far there have only been a few trivial Corruptions that are 'generally bad debuffs' but nothing to really strategize about. The new version will introduce new Corruptions which will provide a very distinct punishment to one of your economic aspect, but also provide an option to turn another aspect to a benefit.
The first new Corruption will be Despotism (Leader-specific corruption) with a unique ability that hides all risks from you, while providing resources based on lack of Autonomy.
The other will be Fanaticism, which will (among other effects) penalize Research while gaining of rush of Autonomy from free workers.
Charge cap
Until now, workshop charges were scaling up with upgrade levels. With the new system it is possible to scale workshop cap with Hero traits. In fact the Blue faction can now specialize on Workshop Cap increase. This will enable hoarding of resources through period of AFK play mostly. This also opens the door to other features planned for the future tiers.
A tiny bit of update on Workshop hover details was necessary to include all traits that boost the workshop from other sources (e.g. from map tiles or from autonomy)
Militia upgrades
Militia is the main unit tied to the autonomy for obvious reasons. Militia has therefore been updated to increase in power with technologies in the same way other units do. Militia cap, damage and recharge rates will also be subject to various new abilities revolving around Blue faction and Autonomy resource.
Black Lotus redesign
Black lotus now has it's fate determined for the future tiers. The original plan was a bit more modest than the new plan (which I don't want to share yet). However the difficult decision was to change existing black lotus behaviour for Tier 1 entirely.
From now on, each Black lotus will destroy a Gold lotus you gained in the same scenario. Thus if you earn 10 Gold Lotuses, but due to high amount of deaths you also acquire 3 black lotuses, you'll only end up with 7 Gold lotuses. Black lotuses are not preserved (at least not in ascension tier 1).
A few details are added to ascension screen to explain black lotus calculation. Scoring is still old and will change after balancing is done in the next couple of weeks.
That in essence makes black lotus a pure punishment as opposed to before, when it could be also used as a 'consolation prize' to unlock certain abilities. Along this line, the rules of obtaining Black lotus will also change. There will be more lucrative ways to gain Black lotus for different short-term survivability benefits (and vice versa).
To share a few spoilers though, previous mechanism where Black lotuses are gained as a resource and used to obtain new ascension will reappear later. Black lotus' role will be one of the central moving pieces of the ascension tree after the Babel tower scenario together with the emergence of other Lotus types.
What's next
The existing version 0.8 now has all new features programmed into the system. Those features are not fully tested, and far from 'variated' (for instance we will need more corruptions, more new crises and a plenty of new technologies in the tech tree). Also all the new features will have to go through balancing, so that the player experience progresses as expected.
This 0.8 version is probably going to be the biggest update of the early access phase in terms of 'things impacted'. So the balancing and testing phases may in fact be longer than I estimated. Still my plan so far looks realistic to reach beta in May. The sheer complexity of the 0.8 features cross-dependency is also one of the reasons I failed to deliver the planned 0.7 patch supporting cloud saves (the cost of switching context for that update would be very counter-productive). But hopefully I'll get to this patch as soon we're closing to the beta (possibly merging the cloud saves support with 0.8 - but nothing is decided yet)
Next time I hope to share more details about the new adversary concepts that will accompany crises beginning from mid-game and will introduce some more challenges to the player. Also hopefully to show the final look of the v0.8 tech tree.
See you,
Ondrej