Development plan for version 0.7
Hello,
Holiday time is upon us! Even though the past four weeks were not entirely busy with development work, some progress was made in the new Trade & Purple heroes update and I promised to share that with you when the time comes.
As you probably know by now, the fourth (purple) hero faction was omitted from the released 0.6 version. The reasons were mainly complexity and dependency on features not fully proven with a broader player base. Since launch there's been enough feedback to fill the gaps so all the postponed decisions can now safely be made.
Many of the features related to trade are cross-dependent on each other, and so there are various areas of the game to be updated at once in hopes to introduce a new cohesive player experience and also add a whole new play style. So let's go through the features one by one.
[h2]The Wealthy Faction[/h2]
Purple heroes - both generic and unique - are coming to version 0.7. Like the other three factions, purple heroes will have their own shared Government Traits as well as specific random Traits available exclusively to them. As you may have guessed Purple faction is oriented on wealth generation (read: lots of Gold). Wealth in the sense of Microcivilization means flexibility.
Having a sufficient backup of Gold will let you convert that Gold into other much needed value. Construction materials, Risk prevention, Quest speed, Workshop cooldowns and eventually Damage and protection against Crises.
There is however no silver bullet in the Gold mechanism. Transforming money to any practical value bears efficiency costs spent on trade logistics and protection. It is limited to what your neighbors are willing to sell you. And then there's the need to backup your currency with precious metals.
[h2]Strategic Resources[/h2]
We know them, we love them, strategic resources are coming to the world map. They are special map tile features, which directly improve your economic benefit from that tile. Corn, Iron ore, Silver, Gold, Gems, Coal, Uranium and Oil are some examples of the strategic resources planned for distant future.
Strategic resources were originally planned to be included in the World Map update in Q2 (see Roadmap) however due to strong dependency on the new Trade System and consequently dependency of new Trade System on the Purple heroes, I have decided to do a little box shuffling and split the Strategic Resources update to two parts. First part with Trade-oriented resources will come along the 0.7 while the rest will be added as part of World Map Update in spring/summer 2024.
We will soon need a bigger map
Strategic resources will now determine your trading 'magnitude'. There will be random Civilizations generated on every game each with a single resource at their disposal. You will have option to either eliminate the civilization, or establish a Trade route with them (this choice is made via the usual Quest system).
Should you prefer exploiting resources yourself, beating the civilization would be preferable and the strategic resource thus conquered will give you a massive resource boost. Should you aim for a more adaptable benefit, you can convince the civilization to be your trade partner, which in turn increases the magnitude of your trading for that particular resource -i.e. makes your Trade Route ability a lot more powerful.
[h2]Shop 2.0[/h2]
Trade menu has been completely ditched and redesigned along with existing trade abilities. No more spamming Food Shipments or Stunning crisis. Trade abilities are now designed in a more extensible fashion in line with workshops and government/autonomy abilities. There are two types of trade abilities:
[h3]Skills[/h3]
Trading skills are triggerable abilities, much like workshop abilities or military units. They recharge, you press a button and get an immediate effect. The effect varies between Skills but they have two things in common. They all cost Gold and they all have Cooldown between use.
Starting a Festival to temporarily get rid of excess food, or Bolstering your units damage with expensive weapons are examples of Skills to be added to the game.
[h3]Trade Routes[/h3]
Unlike skills which are triggered, Trade routes are an on/off abilities. They will work exactly like togglable government abilities or autonomy toggles, except they cost gold per second to operate. Initially you will be able to activate trade routes for basic resources like food and wood and will unlock other resources as your technology advances.
Trade routes offer an extremely flexible way to affect your resource production in times of need. For that great flexibility however they are not so easily scaled up. You need to work hard on the world map expansion to establish trade partners in order to increase the throughput of goods coming through your kingdom. You will also need strong heroes to improve the cost effectivity of your trade as well as technologies to access wider variety of resources.
With all the above it is clear that Trade and Gold generation could easily become a cure for all ailments and a no-brainer when choosing a strategy. This is not what I intend. Trading will be more a situational tool. So here comes the trickiest feature to introduce...
[h2]Gold Soft Cap[/h2]
As part of the 0.7 version Gold will have a semi-soft limit. Semi soft in this context means that the limit will be an actual number you can calculate, but you will be allowed to go beyond that number (incurring a penalty to your economy and trade).
Your Gold Cap will increase with your civilization quite naturally, so most of the times you will not affected by the gold cap.
The gold cap is meant for only the hardcore capitalist players, who focus on massive gold acquisition and its transformation to other resources via more complex 'engines'. For those players, gold cap is going to be a one extra problem to 'game'. A few interesting features like fiat money, war bonds, gold reserves, slush funds, corruption, inflation and economic crises are planned to revolve around the gold cap but these are still only 'on paper' and not all of them will make it to the 0.7.
*Numbers on this picture are insultingly high for illustrative purposes. The actual penalty values and milestones will be way different.
As for the in-game 'lore' the gold cap is represented by backing money with Gold Reserves. While Gold-backing mechanism works slightly different in real world(and so does the whole Microcivilization economy in many ways) using this metaphor allows interesting integration with world map (acquiring gold mines) the tech tree (bimetalism, paper money, international institutions and other fancy 'technologies') as well as heroes (monetary government policies etc.).
But don't worry about the game becoming an economy lecture. In the game reality, the mechanism of the new gold pool will work very similar to a 'mana pool' for an RPG mage. At least that is the same mind-set you can use to operate new Trade System. With Gold Reserve increasing your 'mana' capacity, and Gold Income functioning like 'mana recharge'. Your Trade-routes and Skills will be your 'spells'. Simple.
[h2]Other Changes[/h2]
Aside from 'new stuff' there's also a plan to solve the Hero Clutter problem happening on high levels when running through a large number of low level crises. I am experimenting with a bunch of solutions in dynamic drop chances and have not settled on any single approach yet. But hopefully the next version should see this problem occur much less frequently.
The 0.7 version will see a new drop balancing. Some traits will become only available from certain levels so that the complexity slope is not too steep for new players. There's also going to be a general rebalance of trait power and a few new traits.
The 'Sell' Project will also be removed from the game. Instead Marketplace will directly convert unused construction material into gold - with rate based on it's upgrade level as well as your trade culture.
[h2]0.7 Release Date[/h2]
It is still uncertain when the 0.7 will be launched. But I am trying to aim for mid February with 'Beta' being open a few weeks earlier. In case you're interested to try out the new update early, watch this space - if all goes well I'll be sharing my plans for opening the 'experimental' beta branch on my next update.
That's all for this time. Have a great holidays everyone, I'll see you in 4 weeks.
Ondrej
Holiday time is upon us! Even though the past four weeks were not entirely busy with development work, some progress was made in the new Trade & Purple heroes update and I promised to share that with you when the time comes.
What is coming in Version 0.7
As you probably know by now, the fourth (purple) hero faction was omitted from the released 0.6 version. The reasons were mainly complexity and dependency on features not fully proven with a broader player base. Since launch there's been enough feedback to fill the gaps so all the postponed decisions can now safely be made.
Many of the features related to trade are cross-dependent on each other, and so there are various areas of the game to be updated at once in hopes to introduce a new cohesive player experience and also add a whole new play style. So let's go through the features one by one.
[h2]The Wealthy Faction[/h2]
Purple heroes - both generic and unique - are coming to version 0.7. Like the other three factions, purple heroes will have their own shared Government Traits as well as specific random Traits available exclusively to them. As you may have guessed Purple faction is oriented on wealth generation (read: lots of Gold). Wealth in the sense of Microcivilization means flexibility.
Having a sufficient backup of Gold will let you convert that Gold into other much needed value. Construction materials, Risk prevention, Quest speed, Workshop cooldowns and eventually Damage and protection against Crises.
There is however no silver bullet in the Gold mechanism. Transforming money to any practical value bears efficiency costs spent on trade logistics and protection. It is limited to what your neighbors are willing to sell you. And then there's the need to backup your currency with precious metals.
[h2]Strategic Resources[/h2]
We know them, we love them, strategic resources are coming to the world map. They are special map tile features, which directly improve your economic benefit from that tile. Corn, Iron ore, Silver, Gold, Gems, Coal, Uranium and Oil are some examples of the strategic resources planned for distant future.
Strategic resources were originally planned to be included in the World Map update in Q2 (see Roadmap) however due to strong dependency on the new Trade System and consequently dependency of new Trade System on the Purple heroes, I have decided to do a little box shuffling and split the Strategic Resources update to two parts. First part with Trade-oriented resources will come along the 0.7 while the rest will be added as part of World Map Update in spring/summer 2024.
We will soon need a bigger mapStrategic resources will now determine your trading 'magnitude'. There will be random Civilizations generated on every game each with a single resource at their disposal. You will have option to either eliminate the civilization, or establish a Trade route with them (this choice is made via the usual Quest system).
Should you prefer exploiting resources yourself, beating the civilization would be preferable and the strategic resource thus conquered will give you a massive resource boost. Should you aim for a more adaptable benefit, you can convince the civilization to be your trade partner, which in turn increases the magnitude of your trading for that particular resource -i.e. makes your Trade Route ability a lot more powerful.
[h2]Shop 2.0[/h2]
Trade menu has been completely ditched and redesigned along with existing trade abilities. No more spamming Food Shipments or Stunning crisis. Trade abilities are now designed in a more extensible fashion in line with workshops and government/autonomy abilities. There are two types of trade abilities:
[h3]Skills[/h3]
Trading skills are triggerable abilities, much like workshop abilities or military units. They recharge, you press a button and get an immediate effect. The effect varies between Skills but they have two things in common. They all cost Gold and they all have Cooldown between use.
Starting a Festival to temporarily get rid of excess food, or Bolstering your units damage with expensive weapons are examples of Skills to be added to the game.
[h3]Trade Routes[/h3]
Unlike skills which are triggered, Trade routes are an on/off abilities. They will work exactly like togglable government abilities or autonomy toggles, except they cost gold per second to operate. Initially you will be able to activate trade routes for basic resources like food and wood and will unlock other resources as your technology advances.
Trade routes offer an extremely flexible way to affect your resource production in times of need. For that great flexibility however they are not so easily scaled up. You need to work hard on the world map expansion to establish trade partners in order to increase the throughput of goods coming through your kingdom. You will also need strong heroes to improve the cost effectivity of your trade as well as technologies to access wider variety of resources.
With all the above it is clear that Trade and Gold generation could easily become a cure for all ailments and a no-brainer when choosing a strategy. This is not what I intend. Trading will be more a situational tool. So here comes the trickiest feature to introduce...
[h2]Gold Soft Cap[/h2]
As part of the 0.7 version Gold will have a semi-soft limit. Semi soft in this context means that the limit will be an actual number you can calculate, but you will be allowed to go beyond that number (incurring a penalty to your economy and trade).
Your Gold Cap will increase with your civilization quite naturally, so most of the times you will not affected by the gold cap.
The gold cap is meant for only the hardcore capitalist players, who focus on massive gold acquisition and its transformation to other resources via more complex 'engines'. For those players, gold cap is going to be a one extra problem to 'game'. A few interesting features like fiat money, war bonds, gold reserves, slush funds, corruption, inflation and economic crises are planned to revolve around the gold cap but these are still only 'on paper' and not all of them will make it to the 0.7.
*Numbers on this picture are insultingly high for illustrative purposes. The actual penalty values and milestones will be way different.As for the in-game 'lore' the gold cap is represented by backing money with Gold Reserves. While Gold-backing mechanism works slightly different in real world(and so does the whole Microcivilization economy in many ways) using this metaphor allows interesting integration with world map (acquiring gold mines) the tech tree (bimetalism, paper money, international institutions and other fancy 'technologies') as well as heroes (monetary government policies etc.).
But don't worry about the game becoming an economy lecture. In the game reality, the mechanism of the new gold pool will work very similar to a 'mana pool' for an RPG mage. At least that is the same mind-set you can use to operate new Trade System. With Gold Reserve increasing your 'mana' capacity, and Gold Income functioning like 'mana recharge'. Your Trade-routes and Skills will be your 'spells'. Simple.
[h2]Other Changes[/h2]
Aside from 'new stuff' there's also a plan to solve the Hero Clutter problem happening on high levels when running through a large number of low level crises. I am experimenting with a bunch of solutions in dynamic drop chances and have not settled on any single approach yet. But hopefully the next version should see this problem occur much less frequently.
The 0.7 version will see a new drop balancing. Some traits will become only available from certain levels so that the complexity slope is not too steep for new players. There's also going to be a general rebalance of trait power and a few new traits.
The 'Sell' Project will also be removed from the game. Instead Marketplace will directly convert unused construction material into gold - with rate based on it's upgrade level as well as your trade culture.
[h2]0.7 Release Date[/h2]
It is still uncertain when the 0.7 will be launched. But I am trying to aim for mid February with 'Beta' being open a few weeks earlier. In case you're interested to try out the new update early, watch this space - if all goes well I'll be sharing my plans for opening the 'experimental' beta branch on my next update.
That's all for this time. Have a great holidays everyone, I'll see you in 4 weeks.
Ondrej