Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working to get the settled gameplay up to a good standard, though I’m sure there are still a few bugs which if you report I’ll be happy to fix.
Settlement
It's now possible to play as a settled nation to do so you must play through the demo and obtain the permanent settlement technology which required bronze working then traders then coinage as a prerequisite, which can take some time in the mean time build up your tribe in other ways.
There are a few places on the map that you can choose to settle in all close to each other as I wanted the experience to be similar regardless of where you settle. On settlement you get to create a new faction and pick your colour, though the UI for that could potentially use some improvements as sliders are used to select which colour to use.
I decided that creating a settlement should be a significant endeavour that you need to prepare for by saving up significant food and authority. I plan to add several events related to the settlement of a town however these haven’t been implemented yet and would require even more authority.
The building system is simple yet punishing and microing is required to get the full potential from your settlement. Each building either has benefits like authority production, or it can be used for production. Both types take in resources and required population to work in them and in exchange give their benefits or production outputs. Having only some of the resources or only partially filling the work force will result in less output, in the case where one of the required resources is missing completely nothing will be produced which differs to say Victoria 3’s factories which can produce despite missing core resources, if at a slow rate.
Trade and Resources
This means that as a player you must be aware of the resource requirements and what you currently have. It is virtually impossible for a settlement, unless very large, to produce every required resource especially when many resources are available only in different regions such as copper and tin. To aid in this the player can move workers between different buildings easily allowing for you to build up a bank of one resource to use later. An even better way is to trade, either between your own settlements or with other factions. Each settlement has a max number of trade links it can support, and goods are moved from where they are cheapest to where they are more expensive based on demand. So, if you have a town with 3 farms and another with a flax field and 2 potters then food would be cheaper in the first and be traded to the second. Pottery would be traded to the first and textiles being produced in both would be traded slightly to the first as it produces less. This means that with long enough trade routs a valuable and expensive item such as purple dye will slowly move all over the map to be consumed.
Quality of Life
I've been updating the tutorial world space to increase the variety of areas in the play space as well as what can be done in the tutorial. For instance, the lake areas and new coastal planes.
There's also a fair few small changes, with more coming in subsequent minor updates. One thing I've been working on is the the UI readability. I've been adding tooltips and adding nicer looking and more uniform icons. As an experiment I added one in the new style to the building icons (the sacred grove) I'd love to hear if people prefer that style or the yellow and black style present in the rest of the icons.
I hope you enjoy this update and building your new empire.