Hello everyone!
We are back with the 2nd monthly update for December (sorry for the small delay, it's been a busy holiday season!). This month, we have mostly worked on finalizing cities, be it on the mechanics or visuals side. With the adding of multitile cities and the internal market, the economy part of the systems for Almanach is almost complete! We will then need to use those systems to make content for the actual game.
Multitile cities
It is now possible, for an influence fee, to expand the borders of your cities and add adjacent tiles as districts. This enlarges the buildable area for your city, and also expands the territory you control around them. This change makes is so that it is now possible to buy megalopolises which span over as many hexes as you want... as long as you have the influence to support it.
Internal market
Cities now also have access to the internal market, an empire wide market which allows cities to buy and sell resources. Selling a resource to the market will give you money and make it available for other cities to buy; buying a resource will cost you gold, but award another city with that resource. Be careful about distances however, as the buying price of the resource will increase as a function of how far the two cities are and how much infrastructure you have to support commerce...
Visual benchmark for cities
On the art side, we have finally converged on the next benchmark look for cities, which you can see below. We tried to imagine ways in which cities could be made to look as a whole rather than an assembly of spare parts, and this concept art is what ended up coming out of our lead artist's head. Next step: figure out how to implement this 2D image into the 3D world of the game! Expect to see more about this in the coming months!
