It's been a while since the latest announcement, so I wanted to make sure everyone knew what I was up to!
I've been busy working on a huge rebalance patch that I believe makes a dramatic improvement to the game and makes progression much more meaningful & fun. I hope to have it out next week - but in the meantime, here's some information about what's upcoming.
At the heart of this patch is a fundamental change in the way Houses and Markets work:
- You can now sell goods directly to Markets.
- Houses now only purchase Food items, and only consume when hungry
- But you have to bring items directly to your houses.
(Note that there has been an improvement in Worker behavior so it's actually pretty easy to distribute goods to a cluster of houses)
There's a number of benefits here. Towns now require more careful planning, which I think is a fun challenge that has been missing. Happiness and Coin income are no longer this awkward tug of war that made balancing impossible. Coin Types are now linked with Market types (e.g. General Store always produces Red Coins) so there's no confusion over arbitrary coin rewards. It'll still be a challenge to reach max happiness too, since higher-level houses produce more happiness but also consume their goods faster.
Another big change in this patch is that coin costs have been added to many production recipes. This creates a much better sink for coins so you don't wind up with huge amounts (thus removing all incentive value of generating coins). At the same time coin costs have been removed from creating Buildings, so that a stalled out coin economy won't put you into a deadlock where you can't create new buildings that you need to boost up income.
Lots of research & building requirements have been added & modified as well to make progress from Base Level 1 to Base Level 10 more sensible and structured.
Along with these gameplay updates will be many UI improvements that make it easier to accomplish these additional management tasks.
Overall I am really excited about how these changes are working, and they are improvements I've been wanting to make for a long time. It's a lot at once, but it made the most sense to bundle together, and this also helps minimize inevitable disruption. (It won't break existing saves, but certainly some town rearrangement will be necessary to reach new optimum levels of production.)
The changes are up on the beta branch if you want to get an early look. Always interested in feedback & concerns if you have any, just post them on these forums or the Discord server.
Cheers!
Erik