Hi everyone,
It’s been over half a year since the release of Kaiserpunk, and in that time we’ve released eight larger patches and updates, along with a throng of smaller ones. It all feels like it happened in the blink of an eye - and over a lifetime, all at once. While we’re continuing to work on the game, we wanted to share some of the bigger updates on the horizon.
This is just the beginning for Kaiserpunk. As we’ve said many times before, we're fully committed to Kaiserpunk and its continued development. We’ve already been working on it for almost four years, and we want to make it the best it can possibly be.
My name is Danijel Mihokovic, lead designer on Kaiserpunk, and today I want to walk you through some exciting things that are coming in the future. When developing Kaiserpunk, we drew inspiration from both city builders and strategy games such as SimCity, Anno, Cities Skylines, Civilization and The Settlers to create an innovative blend that allows you to move seamlessly between city building and combat on the war map. Combined with the alternate-history setting, we feel we’ve managed to capture the essence of a grand city builder: one central capital to micromanage, complemented by a large world map - characteristic of the interbellum era.
However, after listening to your feedback, we realized we wanted to further evolve the warfare aspect. Certain design choices limited our ability to reflect how warfare would have been conducted during this era, so this has become an important priority for us - to ensure Kaiserpunk embodies our vision of a grand city builder even more strongly.
Warfare
There are many reasons for improving warfare. We initially considered making numerous small adjustments across different areas - mostly based on your feedback - but it still didn’t feel quite right. So, we made the tough decision to redo large parts of the warfare system and do it properly.
The global view of warfare will remain. You'll still act as the “commander-in-chief,” giving large-scale orders, but one aspect of the era (or what we imagine would be an aspect in this alternate history) that we didn’t fully capture is the grueling nature and attrition of war. World War I was characterized by static battlefronts. World War II was less so, but the idea of battle lines and defense lines that shifted gradually - based on growing manpower and supplies - was still very present. Frontlines didn’t change overnight; they required preparation, time, and a well-thought-out strategy, not a gung-ho “let’s wing it” approach.
This means one of our priorities is to give you deeper insight into the actual battles and more ways to maximize the potential of the economies and industrial capacity you’ve built. In addition to the major changes coming to the warfare layer, we also plan to give you more direct control over organization and logistics within your capital cities.
While we’re already well underway, this work will take time. We want to complete it as soon as possible, but we also need to move carefully. These changes have several knock-on effects we must consider. Although warfare gameplay is our main focus, the updates will also impact other systems such as AI and Resource Management. Since Kaiserpunk is a highly systems-driven game, adjusting one part - like how Resource Management functions - can influence other aspects, such as logistical demands on your depots or access to raw ore on the city map. As you can imagine, this creates ripples across gameplay, leading to additional work and considerations. That’s why we need to map everything out thoroughly to ensure the entire game benefits from these updates. At the same time, we’re keeping the scope focused so that improvements reach you sooner rather than later.
What do you think about the ideas behind the updated warfare system? What are your thoughts and wishes? Your input is incredibly valuable and helps us strengthen the core fantasy of the game. We’ll be sharing more details about the upcoming changes as development continues, so you can expect more dev logs on this topic.
Other Updates
Even though our main focus is shifting from frequent updates to longer-term improvements to the warfare system between releases, we still want to ensure other parts of the game continue to improve and that existing issues are addressed. This means we’ll keep releasing updates with QoL improvements, UI enhancements, and bugfixes, though their size and frequency may vary. But it certainly won’t be quiet on the update front, as you’ve already seen with the last two updates.
We’ll be releasing another game update before the holidays, and we’ll continue sharing dev logs about our progress, revealing more details about what’s coming and what’s changing along the way. Until then, thank you for your continued support - we hope you’ll stay with us as we take these next exciting steps forward.
All the best
- The Overseer Team