Hello Tycoons,
Version 0.9.4.08 is here! This update changes the game's balance and progress curve significantly. The earlier "just avoid the opponent" tactic is not viable anymore and the so-called "snowball effect" is greatly reduced. You have a new difficulty setting called "very hard" which will likely challenge the better players as well.
SIDENOTE! Your earlier saves still might work but I recommend against using them. Start a new game, or the balance might be totally broken.
How? You may ask.
As the Roadmap suggested from now on technology prices are not fixed, but also market license costs are not fixed either. Whenever a player gets a piece of technology or market (let's say Printers or Germany), its price is lowered. This tries to simulate how in real life things get easier in a market where people are familiar with the product you are trying to sell, how the infrastructure is developing AND how other manufacturers will just spy or reverse engineer new technology. (Later on, when we will have our managers in the upcoming features, these will potentially replace the current mechanic).
The result is that when you buy a commercial license for a market or "you buy into a new country" or you invent something new, you (or the AI players) pay a premium price. Is it worth it? It depends. If you have a not so awesome product, but a lot of money you have to invest somewhere then you should buy a big new market OR research something that the others have (for cheap). You don't have that much of a bankroll but a superior computer? Then you'd better expand into your opponent's markets, because their prices will be peanuts, while your product will likely outperform theirs in sales, thus giving you more and decreasing their profits. Which is a good thing, right?
How much is this price decrease with techs?
Whenever a player invents a technology its price will decrease by a whopping 70%. So the first inventor will pay 100RPs, the second 30RPs and the third 9RPs and so on... Cheap right? Remember tho that late-game techs can have like 70k RPs as price depending on the difficulty level, too.
How about markets?
50% price decrease (but LPs are not changing). So 100k,50k,25k,12.5k and so on!
This offers a chance to the small guys on the market to catch up if you let them. It is way harder now to beat them, especially on the "very hard" mode where the AI starts with a much bigger starting budget than you and they are not kept back in any way.
But these are not the only changes
In general, the AI acts differently now, their algorithms, pricing, etc. are modified, too. Take care! On the hard and very hard difficulties, they will be faster than before.
To be able to keep up with them, you have a new screen: the "Site Manager Screen". On this one, you will be able to manage your sites without visiting them as earlier you had to. The expansion itself is also faster now because you can buy licenses and build sites by double-clicking and pressing Enter on the market list, too. (The earlier maximum 20 building site is also gone now).
Of course, still, it is nearly not a finished or perfect version, but slowly we reach the point where I can start adding the new major features. Before that, I will have to polish a few things (like being able to sell sites, decrease budgets in all departments, or adding the loan options when your bank balance depletes), but I'm already working on the conversations of the CEOs, the CEO goodies screen or the offices, etc. This version with its much compelling challenge and progression curve was absolutely necessary even before the historical map mode.
Here is the complete changelog:
Gameplay and UI updates
- You have a new "Site Manager Screen" where you are able to manage all of your site upgrades and budgets without visiting your sites. This screen appears only when you created your third site (at that point the player should understand how much of an upkeep expense is generated by a department upgrade).
- AI pricing and expansion has been updated, the game also has a new "very hard" difficulty mode.
- You can build unlimited sites.
- The price of a market's license is decreasing by 50% whenever a player buys it.
- The price of a technology's research is decreasing by 70% whenever a player invents it.
- A few were not able to find or use their F1 key on their computers, therefore you can start the game by pressing "SPACE" too.
- Menu animations are speed up for a smoother experience.
- More graphics options in the settings, such as resolution, texture quality and so on.
- You can alter the size of the menus and windows of the game by using two sliders while you are in-game. One for the menus and small pop-up things, and one for the bigger windows such as the computer list or research queue. (your settings are saved and automatically used as soon as you change them).
- You can buy market licenses and build sites on the market list by double-clicking on the given market and pressing Enter instead of clicking on the "yes" button when the game asks you if you are sure or not.
- You can zoom in and out on the research tree.
- You can double click on a tech note on the research tree too to automatically add its tech and all the pre-requisite techs to the research queue. (not only double-clicking on techs in the research queue to add them).
- The tutorial is extended with new information about the changes and other smaller things. An example is that colored research nodes on the tree unblock new computer designs such as the "PC".
- The preferences of people are slowly changing in the world. Meaning that you should check them in your statistics time after time to be sure things are not completely different now than years ago.
- The minimum population size of many markets has been increased.
- The tooltips size has been increased.
- The term "country" is not used in the game anymore, because it was not accurate. Instead, we use the "market" from now on.
- When you copy hardware, its discount will be copied, too.
- I've greatly decreased the size of the game by texture compression.
BUG Fixes
- When the opponent filter was activated on the market list the human player's markets were always shown even when the human player was not selected. Fixed.
- The human player was able to see the hardware profits per unit of the opponents. Fixed.
- The profit per unit calculation of the OS was not deducting the costs. Fixed.
- When you set a budget for a department (let's say factory department), and then you changed the site's view to another department where you cannot change the budget, the budget window was still showing the budget of the factory dep. Fixed.
- The player was able to add cache to the CPU without an active memory tech thus being able to abuse its bonuses. Fixed.
- The pricing screen of hardware was available even when you were not creating PC Hardware (while only PC hardware can be sold separately for end customers). Fixed.
- The inner base price field didn't refresh the computers' outer price field. Fixed.
- There was an avatar error after starting a new game and not selecting a new avatar profile again (the previous avatar was used for the player then). Fixed.
- The marketing screen's start button had a strange effect on activation instead of just turning green. Fixed.
- Sometimes you had no message why you cannot create given hardware. Fixed.
- The messages of the notification window were not saved/loaded. Fixed.
- Various tooltip text fixes.
If you like what I'm doing, please leave a review as well. All kinds of feedback are really appreciated!
Also, I wish to all of you good health and ALL THE BEST for this hard period in the world! I'd love to message you all personally to ask how is it going, but you are just too many - but I think about you!
Your friend,
Andris aka Progorion
http://www.computertycoon.com/ROADMAP/Roadmap.html
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Pictures of The Still Unreleased features of the ROADMAP:
