This update contains major improvements to game balance and usability. The systems of happiness, upgrades, research, and town planning now work together much better than before!
Happiness Overhaul
Major rework was done to the Happiness system to make it more meaningful to progression and also more reasonable to achieve when using multiple Town Centers.
Previously, there were about 50 different 'Satisfaction Categories' that each contributed 1 point to overall happiness if their item(s) were continually supplied to a House. Most items were in their own individual category, so players had a reason to make lots of different items.
But this started causing big problems as soon as I allowed multiple Town Centers...delivering 50 different items to one Town is hard enough, but delivering to 2 or more is simply an overwhelming challenge that is tough to enjoy.
Happiness provided a passive production boost to buildings in a town, but was calculated only based on the local Town Center. So satellite towns with a few houses had miniscule bonus potential. And basically, players could ignore the whole happiness system altogether if they boosted production in other ways.
So it needed some changes...
This is the new Happiness Status panel, shown for a selected House. There are now just 11 Satisfaction Categories such as "Basic Food" and "Magic Supplies". Each item supplied within a category can contribute to Happiness, but there is a maximum amount of happiness that can be earned from each category. So there is still a reason to provide lots of different items, without needing to provide every *single* item. This all makes it much more viable to operate multiple Town Centers.
One nice effect of this is new consumption items can be added easily, without increasing the overall burden for players. Instead, it just gives them more options to earn happiness in a category! Some other notes on this:
- The maximum happiness for each category increases as the House levels up. For level 1 houses, they can consume luxury goods but don't earn any happiness from them. At level 10, houses can earn lots of happiness from a wide variety of categories.
- Some items are worth 2 or even 3 happiness. This gives the player a choice to provide a lot of simple goods, or a few advanced ones, to max out happiness in a category. (Or both, if you just want lots of coins)
- The Happiness production bonus now applies globally to *any* production building that is linked to *any* Town Center. So even a small Town Center can be a useful way to boost up local production.
Population Level
Happiness provides a production bonus which is nice, but I wanted to make it more of a focus for players. So now, Happiness determines how large your town can grow. Players must increase Happiness enough to hit certain target values. Each time they reach a target, they increase their Population Level. Higher Population Levels allows you to build more Houses, which hold more workers.
So raising and maintaining happiness is now a key component of growing your towns.
Don't worry, if Happiness drops you won't lose any Population Levels you've already earned. But you will need to bring it back up again if you want to reach the next level.
If there are plateaus where you're running short of Workers and can't build any more Houses, simply take a look at your House's happiness levels and see if you can deliver new & different items that will bump it up enough to achieve a higher Population Level. Note that you also can also raise up the House limit by performing Civics research.
Tech Level
In the previous version, the available research & technology was gated by your highest Town Center level. This mostly worked, but a big problem was that it consumed items that first needed to be placed into storage. So you often needed to temporarily store some odd item like Antidotes just to perform the upgrade.
Now, research is restricted based on the player's "Tech Level". Increase the Tech Level by making specific items, which will unlock new research tiers. It uses mostly the same types of items that were previously used in Town Center upgrades, but the key thing is it measures items *produced* (not owned in storage) and doesn't consume them when the level increases.
Visible Goals
The game hasn't always been very clear about what specific targets the player should be looking to achieve, and these goals were often buried in menus. Now that there are Population Levels, Tech Levels, and Victory conditions, a new way to view active goals was needed.
So now there is a new panel on the left-hand side of the screen:
It displays current progress towards the next Tech Level, Population Level, and the map's Victory Conditions. When the requirements have been achieved, the button glows and players can click it to unlock the next level or claim victory.
If players want to free up some screen space, they can click the header to minimize this panel:
The Tutorial in Campaign 1 also uses this panel to display the goals of the current Tutorial step.
House Leveling
In a recent version the House Upgrade system was changed to consume the required upgrade items from market deliveries and perform the upgrade automatically. This avoided lots of unnecessary clicking, but also forced the player to deliver & consume specific items that perhaps they didn't want to get rid of (like Planks).
Now, Houses can level up from *any* item that it normally consumes. Each item has an Experience Point ("XP") value based roughly on how hard it is to make, and earns this XP when an item is delivered. With enough XP, the house gains a level and provides additional population capacity.
You can view a House's current XP progress when it's selected, and by opening its Status panel:
In addition, houses now have 10 levels, each with their own look. Each level raises the population capacity by 1.
Town Center Levels & Specialties
Now that Research is determined by Tech Level, and Max Houses by Population Level, that means the Town Center lost a good chunk of its previous functionality. With these changes, why would the player even bother to upgrade the Town Center?
One reason is it still gains area-of-effect radius when upgraded, allowing you to spread the Happiness production bonus further. But the new big reason is that Town Center level now determines the power of its chosen Specialty.
Previously, a Specialty would double the output of relevant recipes for all buildings in the Town. But, that was pretty overpowered. So now a recipe will only double its output based on a probability. This probability rises with the Town Center level. Simpler specialties like Forestry start at 20% probability and gain an additional 20% per level, maxing out at 100% probability at level 5. The advanced specialties like Artistry rise only 10% per level and require a level 10 town to reach 100%.
A related problem is that Town Centers were easy to power-level once you had enough items. Now, there is a requirement that a Town Center must have a big enough town near it in order to earn the next level. This is measured by "Linked House Levels" - it's the sum total of the number of linked Houses, plus the number of level upgrades they've received.
For example, this Town Center needs 48 Linked House Levels to advance to level 4. That means 48 Level 1 houses, or 24 level 2 Houses, or 12 level 4 houses (or any similar mixture) need to be connected to the Town Center with roads.
Note that if you remove Houses from a town, or delete the paths that connect them to the Town Center, the 'effective level' of the Town Center will recalculate. It will decrease to the maximum level based on its active linked houses. This will negatively affect the specialty bonus rate. However, you can resolve this by re-connecting to a sufficient number of Houses.
Mega Recharger
Rechargers are a critical building in the magic stage of the game, used to refill the energy of the battery-like Crystals that power late stage Towns. They are 1x1 so are small, but they also process crystals pretty slowly. This mean players often needed large swaths of space taken up by rechargers.
This update introduces the Mega Recharger. It's a 3x3 building that is extremely fast at recharging crystals. The catch is that it does require a physical input like Mana Shards and Elemental Stones to perform the recharge. Still, this may well be worth the value in having a fast, centralized recharging location.
Misc Improvements
- Notification panel is centered on screen better
- Using ‘Remove Block’ tool when a pillar and path were present now prioritizes deletion of pillar
- Added Wooden Minecart to Quick Access menu
- Renamed Grain Mill to Food Mill, to better reflect its variety of recipes
- Added Status panel & Status hotkey (T)
- Quick Access menu now available in the player actions grid in bottom-left
- Grid-based Icons on Item Tooltip Panel use the full width so they don’t take up as much vertical space
-Added a new Alert when a Town Center doesn't have a specialty assigned (goes away once you select any specialty, even 'none')
- Double-clicking a Town Center will open up its Specialty selection panel
- Property Selection panel (e.g. Access Type, Math Function, Town Specialty) is now resizable and scrollable
- When dragging a path that needs automatic scaffolds, game will use an Arch instead of a full scaffold block if it detects a path underneath it
- Placing a single path (belt / chute / rail) using cursor offset (PageUp) will now automatically try to create a support arch beneath it
- Automatic supports created underneath buildings are now Wood Platforms, not hollow scaffolds
- Standardized icons for Market-based categories in item filters
- Cursor selection boxes on House and Town Centers now match the visual model more closely
- When a worker is selected, other workers won't be targeted by the cursor (unless Shift is pressed to select multiple). This makes it easier to issue commands in high traffic areas
- Tutorial runs in minimized mode if you hit X on the window. Can re-maximize by clicking the Tutorial button in bottom-left
- Notification panel is centered on screen better
Balance Changes
- Plank recipe cost lowered from 2 Wood to 1 Wood
- All tree types no longer require Tree Planter. (Tree Planter will still double yield)
- Coin Cost for planting fruit trees increased
- Cost for planting Herb changed from 10 Red Coins to 40 Yellow Coins
- Cost for planting Cotton changed from 20 Yellow Coins to 40 Yellow Coins
- Cost for planting Cactus Fruit changed from 40 Red Coins to 100 Yellow Coins
- Dragon Punch is now classified as a 'Gourmet' item instead of 'Basic Food'. That means it is sellable at the Tavern, not the Food Market
- Herb is sellable as a Basic Food for 2 Yellow Coins
- Cheese recipe now requires 5 milk instead of 3, but produces 2 cheese instead of 1 (cloth cost still is 1, so there is an improved ratio of cloth input to cheese output)
- Added recipes to make Animal Feed from Carrots or Potatoes
- Kitchen can now be unlocked at Tech Level 3
- Town Center costs 40 Planks instead of 40 Reinforced Planks
- Herb, Sugar, Cotton, Wood Wheel, Iron Wheel, and Gear are now sellable
- Water is now a requested item by houses, but must be provided directly to houses (is not distributed by Food Market). This can be done easily with underground Fluid Pipes. Providing water earns 1 gold and 1 XP, is consumed every 20 seconds and Happiness lasts for 10 seconds after last consumed.
- Increased Wood Conveyor Belt speed by 50%
- Increased Cloth Conveyor Belt speed by 25%
- Apples, Pears, and Dragonfruit removed from Farming specialty (still are contained within Forestry specialty)
- Adjusted happiness production speed bonus thresholds to align more closely with new Population Level thresholds
- Elemental Refinery output capacity for Ethers increased from 10 to 40
- Mine output capacity for all recipes increased from 10 to 20
- All pipe producing recipes’ output capacity increased from 10 to 20 items
- Caravan uses 4 Wood Wheels instead of 4 Iron Wheels, only requires Metallurgy instead of Machinery, and requires 4 Reinforced Planks instead of 10
- Town Center victory conditions no longer can be specified per-specialty. There is now only one value that can be specified, which represents the maximum Town Center level on the map. In cases where legacy maps had multiple victory conditions for different specialties, they were merged into a single victory condition using whichever one had the highest max level.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed incorrect formatting when resizing Work Units panel
- Global Hotbars were not saving or loading items correctly
- Column Select used in the overworld would include underground pipes and structures
- Was unable to use hotkey to assign Worker units to Hotbar
- Pause / Unpause button would not update image or tooltip when clicked manually
- Was able to move a support block from underneath a building or path, as well as attach one to the side of an elevated building without a support. This caused the path to hover in midair and often be un-selectable and un-deletable
- Move tool would select the scaffold block underneath a path instead of the path itself
- Unable to select the path on top of scaffold blocks when assigning a sensor offset
- Number-based victory conditions were not pre-populating the text entry field with current values
- Rail Transfer blocks would become inoperable if a Signal Tag was added, then removed
- Workers were not carrying items at the correct angle
- Town Specialty would not be correctly removed when required buildings removed from the Town
- Some button tutorial highlights would persist on loading new game
- Tutorial was not fully resetting if partially completed when new Campaign 1 map started
- Work Units panel would automatically hide if Work Units icon was hovered on & off again