This update includes a big improvement to the Research system, as well as very useful Coin Booster upgrades which turn surplus Coins into flexible increases to production speed.
First, a little background on why these changes were made:
Old Research System
Previously, the School was basically a production building that generated units of research in exchange for paper, books, and sometimes a special ingredient. But it had several things I didn't like:
- It was clunky to have to keep switching the research 'recipes', especially when trying to use multiple Schools.
- When a new type of special ingredient was required, you'd often have to destroy & rebuild supply lines and also wind up with wasted items.
- It was usually simpler to place Schools a good distance from your town and just set up an isolated book delivery loop. This kind of breaks expectations, which is that schools should be near population centers.
- Players could just steamroll through the tech tree without using the tech they had unlocked. The system wasn't flexible enough for me to require specific items to unlock higher tiers.
New Research System
To fix these problems, a number of changes were made. The biggest one is the introduction of Research Points. These are basically a special currency that is earned by delivering paper, books, and other research items to Houses. Once you have enough Research Points, you can open the Research panel (R) and purchase an available technology to unlock it and begin using it immediately.
The research panel - with a list of specialty Research Points across the top
However, there are several different types of Research Points like "Industry", "Nature", and "Magic" which are needed to unlock related technology. To earn these, you must craft and deliver several different types of specialty Books. These require a lot more advanced resources to produce.
A row of icons representing different types of Research Points
Various types of Research Tomes that generate special Research Points
These specialty books or "Knowledge Tomes" are available at three tiers of quality. Higher tier tomes require more advanced ingredients, but are much more efficient at producing large quantities of Research Points. These tomes are produced at two new buildings: the Laboratory (for Industry and Nature), and the Mage Tower (for Mana & Elemental stuff).
Laboratory (left) and Mage Tower (right)
The recipes available at the Laboratory that produce special Knowledge Tomes
The School no longer produces anything directly. Instead it simply acts like a Market, distributing all the types of books to any nearby connected House. So players should position one or more schools within their Town Centers and then deliver books to those Schools.
A school, connected to several Houses via roads (just like the Food Market)
Although it sounds like a lot of changes, the basic flow is still very similar:
- Produce Books and special Research Tomes...
- Deliver them to a School (which will distribute to nearby Houses)...
- This will earn various types of Research Points...
- That you spend to unlock new technology using the Research Panel (R).
Coin Boosters
One new technology that can be unlocked are Coin Boosters. It is an optional upgrade on production buildings that will slowly spend coins in exchange for production speed. While it is active, production speed will be raised and a coin will be spent every few seconds. You can easily deactivate the coin booster, or crank up the upgrade amount to spend more coins for more boost.
In exchange, coin cost has been removed from almost all recipes. The Forester, for instance, no longer consumes Yellow Coins when it's producing wood. So now you get to control coin spend.
This is meant to address a few problems. One, players often found themselves with a huge surplus of coins at different stages of the game. Two, a recent update moved the Happiness bonus to only apply within town borders, meaning that external factory units didn't have a good way to keep up speed. Three, when coins are a required part of the recipe, it can create ugly bottlenecks that are tough to resolve. But now, if you run out of coins, the recipe will still produce, just at its normal un-boosted speed.
Now, players can very carefully fine-tune their coin spend at specific buildings, and with its boosted output the player can free up workers for other purposes. Different buildings allow different types of coin boosters (Yellow, Red, Blue, and Purple).
With coin boosters, it'll now be more important than ever to keep track of your coin income and expenses. Fortunately, the Coin Production menu has been updated to be more useful. It clearly shows coins gained and spent within a certain interval of time, which you can adjust.
Coin spend is now shown per-building as well, and if you click on one of the building rows the camera will zoom right to it.
Stonks!
Here's the rest of the patch notes:
Misc Improvements
- Added highlight on water-connected tiles when placing a building that can be connected to water
- Added tooltips to show currency & research point sources
- Lines are no longer drawn outside of the production chart
- On Production chart, only one coin type is drawn at a time, and scale is set to show smaller changes easier
- Made Fish tile highlights more visible when Fishing Boat selected
- Renamed ‘Fire Purification’, ‘Water Purification’, etc research recipes to ‘Fire Power’, etc
- Starting a new campaign map now fades in from black
- Can click during opening campaign cutscene to skip
- Added admin command to configure inventory slot size for worker units. E.g. “set Boxcar ObjectPropertyInventorySlotCapacity 2000”
- Rebuilt Research panel to not be as cluttered, and to group items according to required Town Center Level to make it more clear what research items are potentially available at the current Town Center Level
- Added alert icon if Market or School is not connected to any Houses. Shows an informational popup tip if you click on the icon
Balance Changes
- Removed mandatory Coin inputs from most recipes. In some cases increased required work units (idea is they can be compensated by optional Coin Boosters).
- Added lots of new individual research for different blocks & buildings, so that one research doesn't unlock too many new things
- Advanced Logistics now requires Base Level 5
- Added specific Town Center level requirements for research items that were only implicitly restricted based on other prerequesites
- Deep Mining research requires base Level 5 instead of Level 4
- Jewelry research requires base Level 5 instead of Level 6
- Added new recipe to make a Book from 4 Paper and 2 Cloth
- Chute requires Basic Logistics
- Basic Logistics available at Base Level 2
- Harvest Fish uses 6 work units instead of 5
- Fish Oil uses 10 work units instead of 8
- Cloth Conveyor Belt requires Intermediate Logistics
- Pusher, Sorter, and Splitter require Basic Logistics instead of Intermediate Logistics
- Plank cost for Foresters reduced from 20 to 10
- Mining Research no longer dependent on Railway logic, is dependent on Metallurgy instead
- Mines no longer cost Railway tiles, they cost Pickaxes. Reinforced Plank cost decreased from 40 to 20
- Town Center upgrade to level 3 costs 10 Stone Slabs instead of 20
- Town Center upgrade to level 4 costs Cloth Conveyor Belts and Stone Slabs
- Town Center upgrade to level 5 now costs Rail Tiles and Iron Wheels
- Town Center upgrade to level 6 now costs Metal Conveyor Belts and Antidotes
- Town Center upgrade to level 7 now costs Mana Bricks and Powered Rails
- Town Center upgrade to level 8 now costs Enchanted Books and Health Potions
- Town Center upgrade to level 9 now costs Magic Rails and Magic Conveyor Belts
- Fishing Boat no longer requires Iron Plates and Fishing Boat Research no longer requires Metallurgy. Instead requires Base Level 3 and Woodworking
- Removed Fixed ‘Fish’ filter on Fishing Boat. Can now transport up to 8 items of any single type
- Health Potion requires Advanced Medicine instead of Intermediate Medicine (since it lines up better with unlock process for Enchanting)
- Mana Power requires Base Level 7 and Mana Purification, not Mana Transmission
- Added individual research for Magic Belt, Magic Rail, and Powered Rail
- Tavern unlocks with Kitchen research
- Apothecary unlocks with Basic Medicine research
- Specialty Goods store unlocks with Mana Power research
- Apothecary cost of Iron Plates replaced with Planks
- Removed Water cost from Egg and Chicken recipes at Pasture
- Removed Fertilizer output from Chicken recipe at Pasture
- Removed Fuel requirement for Mechanical Rail
- Mana Brick is now sold at the Specialty Goods store instead of the General Store, and is no longer in the same satisfaction category as Stone Brick
- Cake and Apple Pie now sell for 4 Purple Coins each (instead of Yellow Coins)
- Magic Rail Tile and Magic Conveyor Belt now output a depleted elemental crystal instead of consuming it. Fuel input removed. Recipe also moved from Magic Forge to Enchanter (though will remain at Magic Forge on legacy maps for compatibility)
- General Store costs 20 Stone instead of 10 Stone Slabs
- Cost for Steam Locomotive increased from 50 red coins to 200 red coins
- Cost for Boxcar, Hopper, and Tanker car changed from 500 yellow coins to 100 red coins
- Pasture requires terrain under all 9 foundation positions
- Mine only requires terrain under center foundation position
- Steam Booster upgrade cost changed from 20 Iron Wheels and 10 Gears to 10 Iron Wheels and 10 Steam Pipes
- Cost for Steam Generator changed from 100 Iron Plates and 100 Stone Bricks to 20 Iron Plates and 20 Steam Pipes
- Removed Steam Booster upgrade option from Medicine Hut
- Modified Consumption Time and Happiness Duration for most items, generally increasing consumption time and decreasing happiness duration
- Houses will consume Items much faster if they are required for a current upgrade
Bug Fixes
- Fixed bug: ‘No Recipe Assigned’ tooltip would remain on cursor after double-clicking a building
- Fixed bug: Affordability of cursor action was not being recalculated when player’s resources changed
- Fixed bug: unable to customize item filters on Storage item slots configured as ‘output’
- Fixed bug: Storage item slots set as inactive were displayed under the ‘output’ category
- Fixed bug: Houses would not connect to all Markets in the same town, if the House was not in range of any single Market (even though during placement preview it would indicate the connection would succeed)
- Fixed bug: Experimental terrain tools ‘smooth up’ and ‘smooth down’ were useable and buggy, hid them until further development can be done on them
- Fixed bug: Top-level building filters of 'Packed' or 'Unpacked' were not successfully filtering delivered items
- Fixed bug: Filters on a Locomotive were always overriding train car filters, instead of merging their list of allowed items
- Fixed Cactus Fruit not being growable on Beach Sand which was visually identical to Desert Sand
- Fixed bug: double-clicking to move camera on a campaign map after the campaign animation completed would show the campaign welcome message again
- Fixed bug: ‘Create Workers’ tutorial step would complete after creating just 1 worker instead of 2
- Fixed bug: Production Buildings’ happiness bonus was not being recalculated when their town connection state changed
- Fixed bug: Some campaign maps had objects with target id of 0 which could cause unexpected behaviors and missing production chart data
- Fixed Campaign Maps 3 and 4 using a legacy recipe for Steam Pipes
- Fixed bug: In Creative Mode, underground ores could not be accessed by Mines unless the Deep Mining research was completed (even if mine shafts were built)
- Fixed bug: incorrect preview blocks shown for auto-placement of rail stops
Up next will be Campaign Map #8. And a friendly reminder - if you feel like writing up a review on the game's Steam Store page it would help me out a lot, as it brings new people into the game and helps fund further development. Thanks!
Erik