It's been a while since the last dev diary but here we are again, we got some interesting changes coming that we want to tell you all about.
First of all, we’ve continued to work on optimization, older computers should have an easier time running the game now, we hope that by the next update we’ll be able to get rid of a large part of the problems in this area. Finally making us able to complete the political system.
We’ve also worked on some important changes, perhaps the most important is the reworking of loyalty and ambition rewards. You can now choose what reward you want when fulfilling a character’s ambition:
The potential rewards you can choose from range between a simple loyalty boost or unlocking an agent to government contracts or subsidies. Of course what rewards you can get depends on which character you helped.
We’ve also fleshed out the relationships with other characters. It’s now a more involved process to become friends with others or conversely to end feuds.
The loyalty bar has been overhauled, there’s now 5 hearts, either in green or red to show how close of a friend (or enemy) you are with others.
We’ve also reworked how influence works, it became quite obvious to us that most players accumulate so much influence that the resource becomes trivial. We’ve tried to fix this by making more types of actions like using agents or entering negotiations cost influence. But to make sure this doesn’t become a handicap later in the game we’ve made it so that influence regenerates every quarter. The amount of actions you can make every quarter therefore has a cap which will grow in accordance to your influence.
To accompany the influence and loyalty rework we’ve also added a new resource - Reputation.
Reputation is a measure of your character's decency and trustworthiness. If it dips too low most characters will refuse to negotiate with you. Those that you can make deals with will require more influence to get a good price. Your enemies will also have an easier time finding incriminating evidence.
This works both ways though, you can only find incriminating evidence on characters with a negative reputation. The worse their reputation the higher the chance of finding something interesting.
That being said the Chief of Police can still give you a decent chance to find something good on a character with a squeaky clean record. The Journalist can also help lower their reputation by manipulating public opinion. This becomes way easier if you already have some form of blackmail, with just one article the journalist can destroy someone’s reputation.
Additionally, there’s a new trait - Shrewd. Someone who’s shrewd will see through you and will not trust you enough to negotiate if you have a lower reputation than them
Now moving on, we’ve also added 2 new company types. Mining and Metallurgical:
Mining companies extract ore and various types of minerals from the earth in order to then sell these resources to Metallurgical companies.
Metallurgical companies make steel and other metals from ore. These metals are essential for laying rails or building new steam locomotives used by Transport companies.
Thus, Transport companies will no longer be able to get around companies from other sectors simply because they did not have sufficient costs. Creating a more integrated economy.
We’ve also delved deeper in balancing companies. We can now say that all companies seem to have become reasonably equal in potential losses and profitability, so that you no longer have to choose companies from the most profitable sectors.
The last thing we’d like to talk about is the rework of character portraits. It’s a large undertaking but when done the portraits will be much higher quality and we feel it will fit the game’s atmosphere better, so you can see the changes:
Well that was all for this time, we expect to release the next update some time in the coming weeks, until then we wish you all the best!