1 Month Until 1.0!!!
The first State of the Game was written exactly 1 year ago as a prelude to the coming Early Access. The game has changed so much based on your feedback. If you have joined us for the Early Access, then thank you. If you are thinking about jumping in at 1.0, then that time is almost here.
Earlier this month we released some information on some secret projects we have been working on. Including:
We are coming to Xbox Series S/X next month.
We are coming to PlayStation 5 next month.
We released a Demo of the game on PC and consoles.
Not only is there a 6th major faction coming, the Sandshapers, but we are also adding 2 playable Rogue Factions. So, there will be 8 playable factions at release.
Also, while we are discussing secret projects. A huge congratulations to the HUMANKIND 2 team on their announcement! I know they are very excited to share the game and it was amazing to see how many people are excited to play.
The Architects’ Update
This is the last big update before release and it is in PTB as I write this. Our focus is on fixing bugs and balance. At this stage, just a few weeks before release, no sane developer would add a major new feature, right. Right?!?
We were never accused of being sane, so we added Modding.
Modding
This was a heavily requested feature. We’ve been quiet about it but wanted you to have it for 1.0. In this early stage we opted to give you power over ease of use. We export almost 30,000 data files from the game that you can modify and package as mods to share with the community.
We put up a few Mods for you to try. It’s super early and these are only available to PTB players. But so far you seem to prefer playing with the mod that increases the max army size to 8. We will see if that holds. And we are excited to see what you come up with. Read more about it here 👇
Checkout the Modder’s Guide
Welcome Console Players!
We were surprised at the amount of Demo players on console. In fact, PC was the least played platform. Granted, a lot of PC players already own the game in Early Access so they have no reason to try the Demo. But we were still pleasantly surprised to see the interest on Xbox and PlayStation.
We also measured average playtime to see if players on console were just trying the game and dropping out quickly or really playing. On the PC the average playtime was a little over 2 hours. On PlayStation it was about 1.5 hours. And on Xbox the average playtime was 4.5 hours.
We are happy to see players spending real time playing the game on all platforms.
Statistics
Kin of Sheredyn and Last Lords continue to be the favorites. We featured the Aspects in the first Demo but switched to the Last Lords for the second to give something new to players that tried both. And because the Last Lords always do so well. We are very curious to see how the Rogue Factions disrupt these numbers.
We monitor a lot of stats for the game. But this has been an important one through Early Access, the average amount of territories owned between human and AI players per turn. As you can see from the first graph, humans quickly outpaced the AI and ended up with about twice the number of territories by turn 100.
It’s not a simple problem and there was no one change to improve this. It would be easy (well… easy for an AI programmer, I would still have no idea how to do it) to have the AI spend all its influence grabbing new territories, but it needs to be balanced between buying foundations, diplomacy, etc. As well as just being sure it can defend the territories it is taking, just continuing to drop camps other players take won’t help.
But as you can see from the second graph we are seeing far better behavior. Not expert player levels certainly (I’m sure some expert players are looking at that chart and thinking “7 territories by turn 100? I have that on turn 12!”), but competitive.
Terrain Readability
One of the things we have been working on is readability. Saiadha is lush and beautiful, but after hours of looking at the screen it can cause eye fatigue when you have even a little difficulty picking out important objects.
We don’t have a single big fix here. And we don’t want to do anything to make the world less beautiful. But we are adjusting a lot of things slightly to help. Including:
District View on in City Mode: Whenever you go into City Mode, District View will come on by default (and turn off when you leave). We have indicators on the type of district it is on all of our buildings, but it can be fatiguing to search for those details when you just want to know where your farms are to avoid or place something beside. So we think this will make it easier, ever if it hides some of the details when you are in City Mode. Our thought is when you are in this mode you aren’t really wanting to see the art of your city as much as make strategic decisions, so we need to make that clear. Outside of city mode you can certainly zoom in and see all the artistic details of your growing city.
Moved settings: We moved the Settlement Darkening and World Details settings from the Gameplay section to the Video section of Settings. Since they don’t impact gameplay and are really about your visual settings we hope more players will find them under Video.
World Details: Speaking of which, World Details is the setting that controls if we show you all the little details on the terrain (bushes, grass, etc). By default, we set this to “Always show”, so we never hide them. But you can turn them off entirely for a much cleaner world map (highly suggested if you find the world pretty, but too busy). Or you can set it to “Hide at Zoom”, meaning that the game will hide details when you zoom out. We updated this so they are hidden at normal playable zoom level, assuming that most players that choose this option want the cleaner world, but still want to see the details when they zoom in.
Slower vfx: We regularly see comments about distracting vfx that are pretty but make it hard to focus on other things. We have tuned these down in a lot of areas over EA, but we think the vfx that remain are the ones that are important (please let us know if there is a vfx somewhere that is distracting and unimportant). Instead of reducing them further we have slowed them down on resources, so they are not quite as “loud” and flickering.
Lighting: The lighting of the game changes as you play. Going from a warm “dawn” orangish light up to a more white noon light. But the more color we had in this starting light the harder it was see the difference in units. An orange light made everything dip into browns and be more difficult to read. So we limited this variation. The color still changes, but it starts a closer to white.
Shadows: Another thing we did to give the illusion of Dawn was to have a low light used that gets higher as you play. This was evocative and did a good job of making you feel like you were going through the changing light of day but also cast long shadows on everything. These shadows not only obscured other objects, but when the object was animated (like a Gorog unit) it would create an animated shadow many times larger than the Gorog which was distracting. As with the prior change the lighting still changes as the game goes on, it just never gets as low as it did before to help with readability.
Unit Updates: We also went through all the units to make sure their color and details came out. We had a couple that became black/brown textures in game without much detail. The Blackhammer and Noqueensi units in particular benefited form a texture update so you can see more color on them.
Ochling Size: And we reviewed unit sizes. Mostly these were fine (and fun to play with in the Larger Units mod). But the Ochlings were really small. They were meant to be small, but it made them hard to see on the terrain so they were bumped about 20%.
Lighten Units: One thing we have left to do is to lighten the units slightly so they pop better against the terrain. That won’t be in the Architect’s update. But we are working on it for release.
Hopefully together these things make the game easier to read without detracting from the beautiful world the artists have created.
Thank you for your Support
A huge thank you to everyone who joined us for Early Access and an early welcome to those waiting to jump aboard at release. This may be the last major update before release, but it’s not the last major update to the game as we continue to support and improve the game at release and beyond.
We appreciate all the feedback, kind words and support. Steam reviews are also critical to the game’s success, especially at this point, because Steam uses them to determine if the game gets promoted so a special thank you if have reviewed as well.
Either way, as a player, someone who has provided feedback and reviews, or just as someone who took time to read this article. Thank you for coming to spend time on Saiadha. Remember 1.0 isn't the end of the journey. It's the beginning of a new one, and we'll shape it together.
