Dream Engines: Nomad Cities News

Hey everyone,

This is a short post to update you on the progress and timeline for the next major update. Usually I release a major update every 3 months, more or less, but this one will take a bit longer.

Today, our first title - Judgment: Apocalypse Survival Simulation is celebrating its 5th anniversary (from the full release)! I thought it would be nice to give it some well deserved love and celebrate the occasion with a new update including another free DLC, which is why the next Dream Engines update will take a little longer.

I'm now back 100% to working on Dream Engines, and I expect Update 12 to be released mid-July, and it will include some interesting new mechanics and content. If you have any feedback, this is a great time to share it before I finalize the next update's content.

While you wait, if you already own Judgment, you can try out its new content. If you don't own it but you enjoy our games, you can get it now for 60% off.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/455980/Judgment_Apocalypse_Survival_Simulation/

Thank you all for your patience and for your continued support.

Tomer @ Suncrash


Edit: it's taking even longer than predicted, so I updated the date to mid-July (was originally late June). Finalizing some of hte finishing touch, and then another week for translations.

Hey everyone, major update #11 is now live. This update took a bit longer than usual, partly because of the holidays and some time off, and partly because some of the changes in this update were very wide (as in they affected a lot of systems) and time consuming. The focus of this update is "quality of life", features and content that make the game more enjoyable to play, while removing some frustrations. Several of the features were suggested by you, our players, and others that I felt necessary.

Read on below about some of the larger changes in this update. You can find the full list of changes on the patch notes page.


While not the most glamorous feature, it was one of the most time consuming. I think I spent over a month on this one alone. I saw that the previous tutorial was annoying for a lot of players, and the learning curve too steep. Many players abandoned the game before even finishing the tutorial, so I felt something needed to be done, even if the price was a bit steep.

The improved tutorials are no longer presented in pop-ups, instead they appear in the corner of the screen and you can read and follow them at your own pace. There's a short core tutorial explaining the basics of building, the economy, transportation, and exploration - and then additional explanations will appear whenever you unlock a new feature or encounter something that needs explaining.

I've also made improvements to the flow, highlighting buttons you need to use to achieve your current objective, showing objectives in the minimap when you need to find something, and in general made the tutorial more player firendly. I hope these changes will make the new player experience more enjoyable with a less steep learning curve.


A neat quality of life feature will now leave burning debris wherever the Dream Plagues destroy your buildings or fortifications. You will be able to see exactly which buildings were destroyed, and with a single click, you can rebuild them including all their upgrades, add-ons and any settings. Get your city back up and running in seconds - if you can afford it (you still have to pay full price, like building from scratch. It's still better to keep your buildings safe!)




Rifts will now appear around the edges of the map, and these will serve as spawn points when the Dream Plagues raid your city. Enemies will no longer just pop on top of you or your buildings, and you will be able to plan your defenses in advance, once you explore the map some and find these rifts.

Every map will have 5-8 rifts in different edges of the map, so you'll still have to keep your city well defended from all directions. You won't be able to build near the rifts (except for harvesters and rails).




This new building can be used to receive resources via rails and send them to faraway resource drop-offs using terrain transporter carts that don't need to connect via rails. It works the same way that harvesters send resources to drop-offs, except this building can send any resource and not just raw materials.

You can use these to build production outposts outside the city, or to send resources from one side of the city to the other. Like harvester carts, these can only travel outside the main city platform.




After some tedious research and several attempts, I managed to find a way to better distribute the different resources around the map.

It will minimize the chances of finding all of your acid shards in one corner of the map, that also happens to be by murphy's law the last area of the map you explore. Whatever direction you decide to explore first, you are now more likely to quickly find whatever resource you are looking for.




Up until now the loot from ruins and ancient debris were the same no matter the map difficulty. Now, when you land in higher difficulty maps, you are more likely to find higher tier resources and larger quantities of lower tier resources.


The settings window is now divided to tabs, and by popular demand, I've added several new graphic settings that you can use to adjust the visuals to your liking, as well as a few other new settings to customize your experience. You can also use these to improve performance by sacrificing some visuals, if needed.


You can now scrap equipment that you don't need such as obsolete weapons and armor, in exchange for some resources.


Saves from the previous version are supported, however, if you happen to be still playing the tutorial I strongly urge you to start anew. Some tutorials may appear again, or appear as soon as you load the game, but this is a one-time thing. Also, when you load a game from a previous build, new Rifts will immediately appear in your current map. These may be near your existing buildings if you have some near the map edges - something that shouldn't happen in subsequent maps because it's not allowed to build near rifts.


Here's our latest roadmap as work continues towards Dream Engines 1.0.



As always, I'm listening to all feedback channels, and your feedback is very much appreciated. A lot of the changes in this update originated from your suggestions. I invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.

I hope you enjoy all these latest changes.
Tomer @ Suncrash

Citizens,

Major update #10 - the Fortifications update is now live. This update focuses on city defenses and raiding enemies. It is now more important than ever to defend your city well, because the raiding enemies are smarter, and also smaller groups of dream plagues may attack your city without warning. To deal with these threats, I've also added new tools at your disposal (such as stone walls and turrets), and made existing tools more effective.

The goal of these changes is not to make the game harder. I want you to think more about your defenses, and plan smarter. Some of these changes can be disabled from the new game difficulty settings, and I've also created a couple of mods that cancel others, for those who prefer to play the game as it was before.

This update also introduces a lot of performance improvements, especially late-game. These improvements touched the very foundations of the game code, and introduced parallel computing, so despite rigorous testing, some new bugs may have slipped through. Please let us know if you find any bugs or issues so I can fix them ASAP.

Read on below about some of the changes in this update. You can find the full list of changes on the patch notes page.


The Terra Multa tribe (known as 'Terrans' for short) are a hard working people who can make the most out of what the environment provides. They excel at harvesting resources and are able to extract more before depleting a node.

They have a cool ability that lets them find one additional resource node per map, and that resource can be of any kind within the difficulty tier limitations. That means you can find acid shards in the desert, or crystals in the Blightlands. You don't know this in advance, however, so it's less about planning and more about enjoying a positive surprise every once in a while.

Their main drawback is that they don't use materializers, so your cities are less self-sufficient at later stages.




One of the most meaningful gameplay changes in this update is what I call "mini-raids". Every once in a while, smaller groups of dream plagues (similar in composition to those you encounter when exploring the map, but weaker in numbers) will attack your city. These attacks happen without advance warning, and if unprepared, can do considerable damage.

These attacks are not meant to challenge your defenses. They are here so that you will have to defend your city and expansions at all times - rather than only defend them during raids. Simple walls and/or a tier-matching turret at exposed areas should be enough.

Note: raiders will no longer attack harvesters, unless they're directly in their way. So while you need to better protect your city buildings, you can still build harvesters out in the wilderness and in most cases they will survive.


One of the major complaints I've been hearing is that walls were too weak. I agreed, but up until now I couldn't change it - because raiders would target all walls before moving on, making them OP. Just building a bunch of walls in the middle of nowhere without even blocking the passage would be enough to keep the dream plagues occupied while Tiny or your turrets destroyed them all.

So now, the raiders are smarter. They will move around walls if possible, and once they break through, they will move through those holes rather than destroy all wall sections before proceeding. This has its limits, if enemies spawn from the north they are not likely to walk around your entire city and attack from the south just because it is less well-guarded, however a small detour that will save them the need to destroy a wall will be preferred.

So the raiders are smarter, but your walls are now stronger! I roughly doubled the strength of every wall, and added a new wall tier (see below). So you need to make sure your walls cover the entire pass, but it takes longer to breach a layer of walls than it did before.


A new middle tier of defensive structures has been added, including Stone Walls, a Stone Gate, and a Stone Turret. These are tier 2 buildings that require carbonite and featherstone to build, and they are roughly 50% stronger than wooden walls. The metal walls have been made even stronger (roughly 2.5x as strong as they used to be).

Stone turrets are somewhat similar to the wooden turrets, but they have increased firing rate and they don't have a penalty against armored enemies (see below).




Another mechanic is that some of the dream plagues are now considered to be "Armored". These are the larger variants of tier 2 enemies and higher. What does it mean that they are armored? Simple, some weapons deal less damage against armored enemies (such as wood turrets and light crossbows), while other weapons deal extra damage against armored enemies (such as Atlas turrets and heavy crossbows/guns). You will encounter these armored enemies mainly during raids of threat level 15 and above.

This new mechanic is meant to encourage you to build the more effective higher tier defenses, while balancing the previous OP strategy of just spamming hundreds of wooden turrets.

Bottom line - when moving to higher threat levels, make sure you have more than just wooden turrets protecting your city.


There's a new high-tier weapon, the explosive launcher. This is similar to the heavy crossbow but it is copper-tier (like the Rapid Gun & Spread Gun). This weapon is especially effective against armored raiders.

Carbonite sand is a new resource that is produced from carbonite. It is cheaper than carbonite (a single carbonite can produce 5 carbonite sand), and is used to construct the new stone-tier defenses.


The siege beetle is a large dream plague that appears during raids later in the game. It is armored, has ranged attacks that deal high damage but at a slow attack rate. It is especially strong when attacking buildings and defensive structures, with an added damage against these.




I spent a large portion of the time allocated for this update on infrastructure and performance optimizations. I collected save files from several players on the discord server, and used these huge cities to investigate performance bottlenecks. I managed to improve performance in extreme situations by x3 and even more, and hopefully all these fixes will eliminate performance problems that make the game unplayable. We will keep improving it even further in future updates, and If you do encounter situations in which performance is really bad and you can't play the game, please grab a save file and send it to me as explained in this post.

Some of the improvements required that I touch some of the core infrastructure of the game, and I added more parallelization (multiple threads that can use multiple CPU cores at the same time). While effective, these changes are risky and could create what we programmers call "race conditions", which are bugs that don't happen all the time, and as such are much harder to find during testing and to fix.

I'd like to think that the decades of programming experience that I have, the deep familiarity with the game code, and the rigorous testing will prevent any bugs from slipping through, but that's wishful thinking so if you do encounter any new bugs, please let me know. Save files and logs (see link above) will be very helpful.


Saves from the previous version are supported, however, city defenses that were satisfactory in the previous build may be inadequate, so if you load an existing save you may want to adjust your defenses as soon as you can.


Here's the updated roadmap as work continues towards Dream Engines 1.0.



Once again, a huge thank you to all our early access players for your patience and your help in improving the game, which was essential in testing and debugging all these infrastructure changes in real-world scenarios.

I am always listening to all feedback channels, and your feedback is very much appreciated. I invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.

Let me know if you like these latest changes and any feedback you may have.
Tomer @ Suncrash

Citizens,

Major update #9 - the Expeditions update is now available. In this update we added a new Expedition Center building, where you can assemble and send expeditions to nearby areas of interest in search for valuable resources and technology. This update also adds new content, a new tribe, and a building upgrade module feature that allows you to better customize your economy.

Read on below about some of the changes in this update. You can find the full list of changes on our patch notes page.


The remnant seekers are a tribe of explorers. They excel at moving around and finding interesting locations for high-quality salvage. They believe that within the past they will find the secrets to saving the future.

Their cities can fly more often for less fuel, and they start with an expedition center, which also has more options than other tribes and is more efficient. Their defenses are a bit weaker, and they are a bit slower in research, but the technology they can find by exploring ruins can more than make up for it.




A new expedition center building will let you send expeditions in search of resources and high-quality loot. Each map will have a different set of expedition targets that you can choose from, each with its own resource requirements, preparation and exploration times, and possible rewards.

Expeditions offer some unique loot such as building modules (see below), equipment for Tiny, and technology blueprints. You may also find research data that will allow you to advance your own research, as well as upgrade parts and old-world tech scraps.




Your buildings now have slots for inserting upgrade modules. These modules provide different bonuses to different buildings, such as lower fuel costs for floatation devices, lower resources usage for refineries, and higher yield for harvesters. Some buildings will have to be upgraded for unlocking module slots, and some have multiple slots so you can customize them.

Building modules replace the old "City Modules" that were installed on Tiny, which can now be installed in the city core, which supports multiple modules after upgrading. Tiny still has its own modules that enhance the steambot itself.


Dream cores are a new rare resource that can only be found in expeditions and rarely at ruins. These powerful old-world artifacts are the key to reaching the highest upgrade levels for some buildings, building the nullifier shield to win the game, and for some special buildings and equipment.

Glowwood is a new resource that requires the rare Glow Honey to produce, which is usually sought for producing fuel. Glowwood is now used for some of the more advanced upgrades and crafting recipes.


Scout posts are a new type of building that helps you explore faraway lands. As such, it improves your ability to choose your next destination when flying away (through free re-rolls of the destination options).

Scout posts are unlocked by finding their blueprints in tech ruins or expeditions, and require Dream Cores to build.




The tarbomb turret is a defensive building in high demand due to its long range and area damage. Previously you had to find them in ruins, but each kit only let you build one. Now, you can also find blueprints that let you build as many as you like, but they are expensive to build, and require Dream Cores which are hard to come by.




There's now a new rare item that lets you reset all your infrastructure upgrades and re-assign them. This can be very useful when your focus or play style changes throughout the game. Find this item in expeditions and ruins.


Saves from the previous version are supported. Any city modules installed on Tiny will be removed and returned to your inventory, so be sure to install them in the city core after you load your save.


Here's our updated roadmap as we work towards Dream Engines 1.0.



Know that we are always listening to all feedback channels, and that your feedback is very much appreciated. We invite you to hop onto our discord server and chat with us directly, leave your feedback in the Steam discussion forums, or in-game feedback form.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on all these changes.
The Suncrash team