Hi everyone. The next update for Atomic Society is now in the last stages of development. Apologies for lack of contact. I'd been hoping the new version could’ve been released a few weeks ago (hence holding off on making any announcements) but we hit the usual bug explosion at the end of a version. However, the fixes are going well, and as soon as we're sure we’ve caught the last few bugs, we’ll upload everything to Steam. Thanks to everybody for their patience. If we hit any more unexpected snags I’ll let you know.
Everything you see below in the patch notes below has already been finished by us, it’s a just a case of ironing out the last few bugs with it so we can safely release it. The patch notes will probably grow a little bit as well because new things are still being added.
Meanwhile, aside from this update, we've also finished a lot of the design work for future improvements to the resource/economy side of the game, and other more substantial gameplay changes, which has also taken a lot of careful planning, but is now done. We’ll start working on that as soon as this next patch is out. We're not going anywhere. :)
We'll get the new goodies to you as soon as possible.
Upcoming Patch Notes Preview:
• Flogging solution added. The final ethical solution has now been added to the game and you can choose to flog your citizens for their crimes if that sounds right to you. Flogging is a quick but violent solution that will greatly reduce the health and morale of the punished person.
• Gateway building added. A new building has been added. The Gateway acts as an optional gathering spot for new migrants to your town, rather than them all gathering at the first storehouse you make. This will make it much easier to create multiple small towns and to spread out where people arrive.
• Worker priority panel added. A new panel is now available at the Town Hall once you have built one. This panel shows you every building currently in your town, how many workers it has, and how many it needs. You can tick boxes beside the workplaces and any unemployed people you have will go and work in those structures first.
• New (optional) day/night cycle feature added. The sun now slowly moves around the sky on each map, causing the lighting and shadows to change realistically and creating moody nights. If you don't like the lighting changing, you can pause the sun’s rotation, or even adjust it manually using a slider to get it just the way you want it. This helps the world feel more alive.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed: A rare bug where the need bars of your could appear to crash to zero suddenly and people would randomly die of thirst.
- Fixed: A bug where sometimes the raiders would stop interacting with you entirely if you saved and loaded after ignoring them.
- Fixed: A potential memory leak problem that could cause the game to slow down slightly over time.
Other Changes
- New building placement guides added. You can now see the range and radius of more buildings when placing them, such as repair shacks, prisons, etc. This should help you see if your buildings are in range of repair workers...
- The optional camera mode is now the default camera mode. The camera no longer automatically snaps to the town leader when giving orders and you can boss the leader around like an RTS unit. If you prefer the old way, you can switch to it in the options. (We have already started the work on a much bigger camera overhaul as well - coming in a future update).
- (This change will only appear in new games, not old saves) The missing side-effects for picking punishments/laws have now all been implemented. We tried to make this backwards compatible with old saves but sadly it wasn't possible technically.
- Several new help messages have been added the first time you place certain structures if they have unique gameplay features that new players need to know about.
- Enforcer/execution status text improvements
- New sound effects added in certain places.
- Various buildings have had their prices and performance somewhat adjusted. In general food and drink production has been slowed down slightly to make it harder to get a surplus.
- The raiders now come at 250 citizens (up 50).
- Migration speed has been slowed down slightly to avoid too many unemployed.
- (This change will only appear in new games, not old saves) The demands of the raiders have been reduced greatly to make building guard towers less important. It should now be possible to have a “peaceful” life surrendering to them now, if you want to give in. We felt it should be possible to complete the game being a vassal state of the raiders if you want to avoid building defences.
- Buildings now have a slightly longer durability before they need repairs. In addition to that scavenger huts no longer need repairs at all.
- (This change will only appear in new games, not old saves) The text and impact of some of the side-effects when you change your laws has been improved somewhat.
- Various small UI tweaks have been made here and there to tidy things up, new graphics, icons, etc.
- And we have now finished all the behind-the-scenes work on getting the game text files ready to translate (which was a huge task) and can move onto the next step of actually translating the words in upcoming versions. Stay tuned.
Looking forward to sharing all this with you soon. :)