After a long hiatus, I was pleased to announce a little over a month ago that Eons of War is back and it's being actively developed. We have an actual budget now to help us hit future milestones and contract out music, some graphics, creative writing, and marketing.
While parsing the feedback from the private beta players and doing more internal playtesting, we realized that the 4X game mechanics weren't compelling enough, so we started brainstorming how to fix it. After several months of churning through various ideas, we made the decision to change direction. Eons of War is now a real-time survival strategy with rogue-lite progression elements.
Whoa, that's a big change, right? It certainly is and we believe it's for the better. The updated game is in very early alpha and is already loads more fun to play. There are many more game loops left to implement but for the first time in over a year I'm very optimistic about the whole thing.
Let's take a look at some of the more exciting new mechanics and graphics!
Survival and Base Management
Survival became the main theme of the game. According to the new lore, stars in your sector of the galaxy started to "malfunction" decades ago producing intense radiation spikes that destroyed space equipment and sterilized planets, killing millions.
The most effective remedy to those spikes are giant energy shields that can be enabled around planets and space stations. Shields require thorium to function making it critical to find the right balance between typical RTS-y things (like mining resources, building out your base, and hiring units) and managing shield protection levels. A good analogy for shields is the generator and steam hubs in Frostpunk.
Autonomous Spaceships
As in any typical strategy game, you have to build units, but in Eons of War you also have to hire crews to pilot them. Crews require space credits to keep performing their tasks otherwise they might quit and you'll be left empty-handed.
Spaceships act completely autonomously deciding themselves when to do their assigned jobs (terraforming, mining, exploration, battling, etc.) vs. having to perform upgrades and repairs with the money they've earned.
Rogue-lite Progression
To make level progression more interesting, we decided to add rogue-lite elements to the game. Just like before, all levels are procedurally generated for greater replayability.
There are two game layers that you'll interact with while playing in the story mode: the galaxy layer and the planetary system layer. Planetary systems is where all the action takes place. As you complete a level, more planetary systems open up in the galaxy view.
The story unfolds during in-game quests that you can either complete or fail. Some quests will reward you with resources and artifacts. Artifacts are special items that can be deployed on planets and space stations. As levels get increasingly more difficult, it becomes more critical to pick the right collection of artifacts to bring with you on new missions.
Hopefully, this gets you excited about the new direction! Our goal is to post monthly updates exploring game mechanics and features in more detail up until launch.
We are going to run a private beta in June 2021, so if you are interested please signup on our site:
https://www.eonsofwar.com/beta/