Trade Routes and Auto-abilities update
[p]Hi,[/p][p]yesterday I've started the 0.12 Beta test so it might be a good time to talk about some of the features in it (most of these features were mentioned in my previous update)[/p][h2]Trade Redesign[/h2][p]Trading has been a neglected feature for quite some time. Scaling of the trade values was isolated and I knew for some time that I need to somehow tie it to actual civilizations and map. [/p][p]The question was how to do this in a simple way so that we don't need an entire new trading mechanism with a special menu etc.. I did like using the trade with the toggle buttons (split by resource type) but I felt I want to make it more synergizable, similar to how workshops now can be enhanced. I also wanted to give players some control over what is traded and how.[/p][p][/p][p]![]()
New system of customizing your Trading goods via Trade Route tile upgrade. Note that all tile benefits enhance your trade route ability - so you can still toggle if you want to trade the resource or not at any time like before.[/p][p][/p][h3]'Borrowing' tiles[/h3][p]In the new version, Traded resource volume is no longer a single (growing) number. You directly control what you gain when the Trade toggle is active. [/p][p]You do so by adding 'Trade route' to other civilization's tiles (using a new 'quest'). Does your neighbour have a farmland with 6-points adjacency bonus (+35% food)? You open a trade route to this tile and your Trading toggle automatically gains all this tile's bonuses (example on the image above)[/p][h3]Costs[/h3][p]Trade routes do not cost workers like your own tiles. Instead every trade route costs gold and each new trade route increases gold cost for all existing trade routes (thus having a polynomial cost growth). [/p][p]Cost and discount system has also been updated so there are now some ways to lower your trade route costs.[/p][p]Trade now also generates profit as base values, so is affected by all your hero multipliers and other upgrades. This has a downside for Drought food trade relief because drought now affects traded food as well. Drought has thus been nerfed a bit.[/p][p][/p][h2]Balancing & Difficulty[/h2][p]Due to new Ability system (mentioned last month) I had to go through the entire game and do an overall rebalancing round. That doesn't mean the game is now perfectly balanced - I think the balancing is an iterative process and will need several more 'sweeps' - but right now I believe most of the difficulty spikes we had are ok.[/p][p]Since the changes made the Normal difficulty relatively easy and did not enforce players to utilize all features, I wanted to include a difficulty that is challenging enough to motivate players to strategize more and to use all abilities offered by the game.[/p][h3]Simple Hard[/h3][p]Hard difficulty is currently a very 'early-accessy'. This means you mostly have only numerical adjustments to crisis health and other variables. The result for now is sufficient for what I needed - you should not be able to carelessly rush through the gameplay without some degree of planning.[/p][p]For the near future I plan to extend Hard difficulty with some exclusive small features like Crisis perks, civilization behavior and more features to gradually motivate players to create multiple working builds for different situation, instead of just one that beats everything.[/p][p]For the moment there is also no Hard-exclusive Achievement. These will be done when the above features are finalized and balancing done at least once more (most likely in next major version).[/p][p][/p][h2]Auto-skill update[/h2][p]One task I didn't want to do but did anyway was Auto-skill revisit. This came as a convenience because I was already reworking Gold-based abilities with Hero skill and trade routes. So I looked at auto skills at the same time to bring them to a common 'mana' economy as gold.[/p][p]![]()
New compact overview of Auto-skill config. Each option affects autonomy costs, which are now non-trivially high. For simplicity's sake they are still only X per second, so micromanaging it in non-AFK can help reduce costs a lot.[/p][p][/p][h3]Logic update[/h3][p]First change is general update of the code backend. Auto skills are now all working slightly differently (hopefully more useful). Some (not all) known bugs were fixed especially in the construction. Auto skill now also have more Options to adjust behavior, they can use most abilities etc.[/p][h3]Price Economy[/h3][p]Second change was adjusting prices. I wanted autoskills to have a cost, they should not be completely free or void of risks. So their Autonomy costs have been raised substantially. To mitigate this I updated some Wonder effects and tweaked Library so that players can now make an actual 'AFK build'. This is planned to extend in the future to make AFK builds have more exclusive features, but for now I could not work on this much deeper (for time reasons).[/p][h3]Auto Quests[/h3][p]Third change was re-introduction of much desired Auto expansion toggle. This now allows you to explore territory, eliminate NPCs, Claim territory around your base and also add Improvements (in a very simplistic manner). There's a plenty of more work on this one, especially if we want to make it capable of rebuilding a fallen empire back to its previous state automatically.[/p][p][/p][h2]Other changes[/h2][p]There's also a number of smaller changes, here's a brief overview of some:[/p]
- [p]Number of Gold Lotus Scores were removed, some new (e.g. unused Secrets) were added[/p]
- [p]Ceremonial wonders no longer have negative effects on them (Red lotus ceremonies still have production decrease though)[/p]
- [p]Hurry quests is now always available and rushes the entire duration on one use. It's expensive though. So you need to be filthy rich to overuse it the way you probably want to.[/p]
- [p]New White lotus pledge perks added. Some might be annoyingly difficult.[/p]
- [p]Some Workshops now have some additional traits for early game flavour.[/p]
- [p]Two of the Economy hero abilities can now mitigate Predicament explosions (freezing a number of predicaments, preventing their explosion)[/p]
- [p]Some wonders have changed their effects and moved along the tree to be available sooner/later[/p]
- [p]New Wonder Oracle can actually predict the future and try to remove predicaments.[/p]
- [p]Statue of liberty wonder was added providing Autonomy 'mana-shield' and an ability to integrate vagabonds.[/p]
- [p]Perseverance rewards from Disasters are now transferred between civilizations (up to 20 of them). They are only lost if you fall. [/p]
- [p]Disasters now give a bit better perseverance rewards. [/p]
- [p]Risks from Vagabonds and Empty houses has been reduced (we now have other more annoying things to worry about so their role is no longer that important)[/p][p][/p]