🧪 Beta Patch 0.5b - Big Balancing Update

Feedback is essential for us to successfully add new features and improve Dorfromantik together with you. Of course, it helps us a lot if you are specifically trying to test features that we have listed up in the Beta Patch Notes for the current update.

🧪 Beta: If you also want to test new features earlier and help with your feedback the development of Dorfromantik, then find out here how you can participate in the public beta.

🌻 Community Feedback: We highlight items that we have implemented based on community feedback or suggestions. We look forward to your feedback in our Steam Community Hub or on our Discord server.

Patch 0.5 will bring improvements to our general balancing. We have two main goals we want to achieve with these changes.

[h2]Improving the general experience[/h2]
To improve the general experience, we increased probabilities of generally more useful tiles (e.g. lake variations or tiles with only one or two segments on them) and reduced the probabilities of very difficult or awkward to place tiles (e.g. tiles with many individual segments or tiles including the Y-shaped segment). Note that tiles are still chosen randomly, so all combinations (even very rare and unlikely ones) can appear.

[h2]Preventing the game from getting easier[/h2]
Our second goal is to make the difficulty level such that it is theoretically possible to play an infinite session without it getting easier at some point, which diminishes the value of progressing further. It is in the nature of perfect placements that a larger (perfectly built) world means a reduction in overall tile spending, as placement options increase and fewer tiles are needed to close edges.
However, we like the principle that a perfectly built world means the basic requirement for a theoretically ever-expanding game.

That's why our balancing starts with the quests:
Previously, a certain number of active quests on the map meant a reduced spawn rate of new quest tiles (about 1 in 20 tiles), but it remained at that level no matter how many quests there were. This resulted in maps in the late game having hundreds of quests active at a time and caused the stack to tend to increase instead of decrease after a certain point. Because of this, with this patch the probability of new quests continues to decrease until it reaches 0% when there are 15 active quests (not counting flag quests or preplaced tile quests).

So, in any case, from 0.5 onwards, it becomes more difficult to achieve extremely high scores. We have not yet been able to conclusively determine whether this solves the problem completely. Therefore, feedback from you would help us a lot, especially from the players who have already reached high scores of 100,000 points or more. We appreciate your feedback here in the Community Hub or in discussions on our Discord server.

[h2]0.5 Release and effect on the leaderboard[/h2]
We plan to release the 0.5 update in late February or mid-March, depending on your feedback and how well our balancing changes work. We're definitely open to improving the system further, so we look forward to hearing what you think!
Due to the changes in balancing, it will be more difficult to reach high ranks on the current leaderboard starting with patch 0.5. Our plan is to archive the current leaderboard as an "Early Access Highscore" leaderboard for the 1.0 release and start a new leaderboard where everyone plays at the same difficulty level. Games started before 1.0 will continue to be entered on the Early Access Leaderboard, while highscores from 1.0 will end up on the new Leaderboard.

Balancing
• Changed probabilities of many tile presets. This should result in a higher spawn probability for generally more useful tiles and a lower probability for difficult tiles
  
• Increased frequency of all lake variants
  
• Water Train Stations spawn frequency decreases as the game progresses
  
• Unified Quest difficulty across different quest types (e.g. it now should be just as difficult to complete a field quest as a forest quest)
  
• Introduced a limit of quests that can be active on the map at once (not counting flag quests or preplaced tile quests). The main purpose of this is to prevent the game from getting easier in the very late stages
  
  Usability
• 🌻 The first 5 tiles of a game will now always have one or two empty edges so they will never be incompatible with the empty starting tile
  
• 🌻 Click on quests markers when highlighting offscreen quests (by pressing "H") to move camera towards them
  
  Rudimentary Controller Support
• Most ingame actions can now controlled with a gamepad (tile slot selection, tile rotation, tile placement, camera controls, offscreen quest highlighting, toggling menu)
  
• Press left joystick to switch between two tile slot selection methods: moving through the tile slots via joystick or selecting tile slots with cross hairs by moving the camera
  
• Gamepad menu navigation, gamepad key remapping, input-independent tutorial texts / tooltips, quest edge highlighting and creative mode controls are not yet implemented
  
  Other
• Save game preview images are now loaded when the save game selection screen is opened instead of when the game starts, improving loading times when you have many save games
  
• reward images are now also pre-rendered instead of being generated on start, improving loading time
  
• improved tile stack animation behaviour
  
• tile preset 2A-2A-2A (with 3 segments occupying two edges each) can now spawn
  

💛 Thank you for helping us with your feedback and testing new features!