After several weeks of work and plenty of testing, it's finally here: Update 1.2.0! With this update I wanted to tackle a big chunk of the wishes and feedback I got from the community. I focused on four areas: more mechanics and depth, more building variety, less tedious clicking, and clearer information and UI.
I'm excited to share the details with you today!
New Resource: Faith
A common request from the community was more complexity and challenge in city planning. My goal was to introduce a new need for your citizens that affects the game in both the early and late game, so faith is now joining as a new resource. Past a certain city size, your citizens expect a certain faith level to stay happy. To produce faith, you need buildings like the chapel or the church. During services, they convert coins into faith, each with its own conversion rate. Manage to keep a particularly high faith level, and you'll be rewarded with an extra happiness bonus. Neglect your citizens' faith needs, though, and their happiness will suffer. The current faith level constantly decays on its own, so you need to keep production running to maintain it. The new faith display keeps you up to date on the current level at all times, and the tooltip also shows the possible maximum and the current happiness impact.
For the church, this means a fundamental shift: instead of providing happiness directly, it now produces faith. Every extension you build increases its output and brings its own conversion rate along with it.
New Buildings
Many of you wanted more buildings to choose from, so this update brings four new ones. Some of them also come with a zone of influence, making city planning even more important.
The Chapel: Lets you generate small amounts of faith before you build a church. It becomes available as soon as your citizens start demanding faith. Placing parks nearby can boost its faith production.
The Inn: A source of prosperity and joy that gives a +3 happiness bonus and a steady production of 20 coins. In return, an inn won't tolerate other inns within a certain radius.
The Statue: A statue made of pure gold that lets the city show off its wealth. This lavish structure doesn't make everyone in the city happy, though, and only provides a +1 happiness bonus.
The Bastion: A piece of wall with room for a soldier that also increases the soldier limit by 3. No soldiers are trained here.
I've also adjusted the park models for the desert and mediterranean biomes, so that the parks fit in better with both, sharing a new model now.
Automatic Recruitment
Manually staffing towers, gates and the bastion can be quite a chore. From now on, you can attach a banner to defensive structures. This signals that soldiers should be hired there automatically as soon as enough coins and trained recruits are available. No more recruiting one by one. Banners can of course be removed again at any time.
Clearer UI
Clearer communication was another important topic I worked on, and three changes now give you more clarity:
Zones of influence used to only be shown through faintly highlighted tiles, which was hard to spot in densely built areas. They're now clearly highlighted in blue and raised in height, so they stand out even in dense or heavily built-up areas.
Where a market extension can be placed was previously only explained indirectly through the tooltip. Now, valid building spots are visualized directly as soon as you select the market extension.
Building tooltips in the build menu now directly show a building's happiness impact, so you can gauge it at a glance.
New Achievements
Two new faith-related achievements are waiting for achievement hunters:
Devout: produce a total of 30,000 faith in one session.
Cathedral: build a church made of 10 church parts.
Miscellaneous
Houses now start with a random orientation for more variety in your cityscape. You can of course still rotate them individually to whatever orientation you like.
Production buildings, like fields or lumberjacks, now keep producing coins even during an attack, so a city's income stays more stable under pressure. Traders still hide in the market once they've reached it, though, so they still only generate coins once the attack is over.
Later in the game, there are now longer breaks between attacks so your city isn't under constant siege.
Based on community feedback, I adjusted two production values to improve game balance:
Stonemasons now produce up to 50 coins instead of 30.
Beekeepers now produce a maximum of 35 coins instead of 50.
Bug Fixes
The Continue option in the main menu now works as expected in all situations.
The happiness tooltip is now correctly scaled on Steam Deck.
The delete tooltip is now correctly scaled on Steam Deck.
The font for on-screen messages is now larger on Steam Deck.