Hello again!
As previously announced, here it is! Our next major update The Road To Victory update is now here.
Special thanks to all players who participated in the playtests of this update and to the attendees and organizers of International Festival of Comics and Games in Łódź, Poland for trying out our game and providing valuable feedback! ːsteamhappyː
But without further ado, let's dive into the changes this new update brings!
New Road Building System
You can now build 2 types of roads that allow the units to move significantly faster through the map. Once you researched the required technology, your builders will automatically construct brick roads wherever they travel. In difficult terrain, dirt roads are constructed instead, which are slightly less effective. Construction of brick roads halves the movement points required for entering a tile, while a dirt road reduces the cost by 25%.
Aside from the regular gameplay, the roads are also placeable in the in-game editor, allowing you to spice up your scenarios and maps.
The Settlement Rework
Previously the settlements represented a part of a city, used both for expanding your gold income, and providing population. To spice up the city building element, we have decided to split this building in two.
We hope this provides a fun variety to the gameplay, and enhances the joy of building your realm!
City
A settlement becomes a city when it's placed near the city center or in conjuctions to another city.
The city will provide a substantial amount of gold, but will provide minimal amount of population.
Cities also benefit from gold production bonuses, like they used to, but villages do not.
A city will additionally generate a brick road underneath itself when built.
Village
A settlement becomes a village when it borders neither a city center, nor a city segment.
Villages provide greater boost to your population capacity, but provide little gold in return.
New Victory Conditions
From now on your empires may not only thrive with military dominance, but also with economic and technological brilliance.
Two new Victory conditions have been added:
Technological Victory
The first player to research the new 'Technological Ascendancy' technology located at the end of the tech tree will achieve the technological victory.
Economic Victory
The first player to gather the maximum amount of luxury goods, will achieve economic victory.
New Technologies
We have added a few technologies. These include :
Added 'Loom' technology, which for a small cost enhances the armor of both civilian units and your infantry.
Added 'Road Infrastructure' technology which enables you to construct roads, wherever your builders travel.
Added 'Technological Ascendancy' technology which triggers the Technological Victory.
Editor Improvements
With the release of the road feature, we made some key differences to the editor-only content.
Both types of roads, dirt and brick are able to be placed freely from the editor.
In order to avoid confusion and super-highways across the map, the dirt and road tiles have been stripped from their speed bonuses which were now transferred to the road system. Now they serve purely decorative purpose for your maps. They are also now able to host the roads, allowing for the making of some nice metropolitan settings!
Balance Changes
Decreased the speed of some units (most notable examples included battering ram and builder) to account for the bonus that roads can now provide, and avoid late-game siege rushes.
Reduced horse domestication technology cost from 50 to 25 to make it a more viable pick in the early game, and encourage early exploration.
Bugfixes
Fixed an issue with the unit movement, which sometimes caused the tiles that cannot be reached to be shown as being reachable.
Fixed the issue where a winery foundation couldn't be finished whilst a berry bush, without consuming it first.
Fixed a technology panel scaling issue, related to resolution ratio of a user.
Fixed an issue with victory sometimes failing to sync across different players.
Miscellaneous Changes
Miscellaneous interface changes were made.
Enemy upgrade data is now hidden.
Settlements now have expanded description, to address the lack of clarity the previous one provided. Some other tech descriptions were also updated.
What will come shortly after?
While we cannot reveal all that much about the next update just yet, here are some features that will be brought to life in between them!
At last, the scriptable events are confirmed! Official challenges and scenarios will be given more life. This also brings us significantly closer to producing the official campaign mode.
The triggers will also, not too long after the update be made available to be edited from the in-game level editor, allowing you to create your own complex scenarios, tactical missions, event chains and deep stories!
We are also working on further steam integration, and bringing your maps to the steam workshop for your friends and other people to see!
We hope the changes are to your liking! Let us know your thoughts about the update and have a safe journey on The Road to Victory!