Micro-log Monday #8
Good day to you all,
Only a few versions back it was impossible to leave this game idle for 10 minutes without collapsing into endless crisis streak. Since then a few new things were added to alleviate this issue a little and provide you with means to become a thriving and stable sticks-and-stone empire (at least a few minutes more).
In the last two weeks I have finished the cherry on the top of this game's core system - the Offline play - i.e. the game progressing even when you don't have it on.
[h2]Offline play[/h2]
Since Microcivilization is a bit full-fat in terms of dynamic features (read: things that can kill you in the minute you leave your hand off your mouse) the Offline play poses a bit of a challenge.
How can we leave our precious civilization without observation for the night? For the weekend? You need a way to balance your population, mitigate risks, to use abilities during crises and keep your civilization in a growing or at least stagnating state.
Now we have new heroes to handle all this. If you select your build properly, you can get a hero-government configuration that will make your microcivilization last centuries without a single click. But it's not free or easy to get. Also it might not be a favorite play style for everyone. For those reason the Offline play is an entirely optional feature.
[h2]Optional Fast Forward?[/h2]
What does that mean? Simply put, each time you would load a game, you can either continue where you left or after the time you were away. To make this choice you will have some limited information what the 'future' state is (i.e. how many crises occurred while you were away, how many people you have left, how many rewards you gained for defeating some of those crises). And then you choose which save variant you actually want to continue. So there is no penalty, just a potential gain if you left your civilization in good hands (hero-wise).
Technically we need to understand that the game does not actually play while off - there are no cloud servers or anything running online - all the calculations are done on the fly on your computer when you start the game.
This is why this build also was a relatively complicated one, requiring the game to run at a minimum 1000x speed. Otherwise you would wait for your overnight result for minutes. Since it still has some glitches I decided it's not going to be released to Demo yet.
[h2]New Better Autonomy Traits[/h2]
To make sense of any reasonable Offline gameplay, autonomy features from the Blue Hero Faction have to be grown into more matured system.
The existing version has proven to be very unintuitive and unclear. Also the traits supported were rather weak in comparison with other hero traits. So I decided to fix this.
Autonomy mode has been modified and simplified. 'Autonomous mode' will no longer be a separate upgradable toggle ability, but instead each individual autonomous feature will be separately togglable - pretty much like the current Leader ability. Specifically you have a toggle for Automatic clicking, a toggle for Auto-research and two new toggles - one for automatic combat and one for automatic construction. This will eliminate a level of complexity and make the autonomy toggle abilities work exactly like an already existing feature.
Auto-combat (besides triggering units in crisis) is using your barracks charges to boost unit damage right before use, times walls to the last second before receiving attack and 'heals' with granary charges if low on population. Auto-construction mainly keeps your vagabonds numbers in check and makes sure the civilization grows if low on space.
As soon as the whole system is polished and tested, I'll share more details about it.
[h2]Demo update is going to happen[/h2]
Since I was unable to update demo for new features lately for various reasons, I intend to reconcile this a little bit in the near future. There are a few small features that would be suitable for adding to Demo and I'm aiming to release those hopefully within next four weeks. I have to carefully time this between other activities - like the Steam Strategy fest next week - so please bear with me.
With another big spike of demo players this week I have gathered a number of very useful data from crash analytics. I am hoping I'll be able to resolve some of the incidents that about 1% of users have with running the game. Plan is to produce a patch this week.
[h2]Next build[/h2]
In the following two weeks, I am going build the first Ascension Scenario. This feature will be a special case of ascension run with special rules and a single goal (different per scenario). You will have to finish this scenario at least once at the end of each ascension tree tier in order to progress further on the prestige meta-game. More on next update.
With Early Access release plan crystallizing in my Excel sheet (yes I do use Excel and I love it) I think we might have a opportunity for a short public Beta test. I cannot promise anything at the moment - this depends on stabilizing the full version in a very short period of time, but the option is 'on the table' now. If this Beta test happens, it happens in October and I would announce a signup at least 3 weeks before.
This is all for this update. See you around in two weeks.
Have a nice day,
Ondrej
Only a few versions back it was impossible to leave this game idle for 10 minutes without collapsing into endless crisis streak. Since then a few new things were added to alleviate this issue a little and provide you with means to become a thriving and stable sticks-and-stone empire (at least a few minutes more).
In the last two weeks I have finished the cherry on the top of this game's core system - the Offline play - i.e. the game progressing even when you don't have it on.
[h2]Offline play[/h2]
Since Microcivilization is a bit full-fat in terms of dynamic features (read: things that can kill you in the minute you leave your hand off your mouse) the Offline play poses a bit of a challenge.
How can we leave our precious civilization without observation for the night? For the weekend? You need a way to balance your population, mitigate risks, to use abilities during crises and keep your civilization in a growing or at least stagnating state.
Now we have new heroes to handle all this. If you select your build properly, you can get a hero-government configuration that will make your microcivilization last centuries without a single click. But it's not free or easy to get. Also it might not be a favorite play style for everyone. For those reason the Offline play is an entirely optional feature.
[h2]Optional Fast Forward?[/h2]
What does that mean? Simply put, each time you would load a game, you can either continue where you left or after the time you were away. To make this choice you will have some limited information what the 'future' state is (i.e. how many crises occurred while you were away, how many people you have left, how many rewards you gained for defeating some of those crises). And then you choose which save variant you actually want to continue. So there is no penalty, just a potential gain if you left your civilization in good hands (hero-wise).
Technically we need to understand that the game does not actually play while off - there are no cloud servers or anything running online - all the calculations are done on the fly on your computer when you start the game.
This is why this build also was a relatively complicated one, requiring the game to run at a minimum 1000x speed. Otherwise you would wait for your overnight result for minutes. Since it still has some glitches I decided it's not going to be released to Demo yet.
[h2]New Better Autonomy Traits[/h2]
To make sense of any reasonable Offline gameplay, autonomy features from the Blue Hero Faction have to be grown into more matured system.
The existing version has proven to be very unintuitive and unclear. Also the traits supported were rather weak in comparison with other hero traits. So I decided to fix this.
Autonomy mode has been modified and simplified. 'Autonomous mode' will no longer be a separate upgradable toggle ability, but instead each individual autonomous feature will be separately togglable - pretty much like the current Leader ability. Specifically you have a toggle for Automatic clicking, a toggle for Auto-research and two new toggles - one for automatic combat and one for automatic construction. This will eliminate a level of complexity and make the autonomy toggle abilities work exactly like an already existing feature.
Auto-combat (besides triggering units in crisis) is using your barracks charges to boost unit damage right before use, times walls to the last second before receiving attack and 'heals' with granary charges if low on population. Auto-construction mainly keeps your vagabonds numbers in check and makes sure the civilization grows if low on space.
As soon as the whole system is polished and tested, I'll share more details about it.
[h2]Demo update is going to happen[/h2]
Since I was unable to update demo for new features lately for various reasons, I intend to reconcile this a little bit in the near future. There are a few small features that would be suitable for adding to Demo and I'm aiming to release those hopefully within next four weeks. I have to carefully time this between other activities - like the Steam Strategy fest next week - so please bear with me.
With another big spike of demo players this week I have gathered a number of very useful data from crash analytics. I am hoping I'll be able to resolve some of the incidents that about 1% of users have with running the game. Plan is to produce a patch this week.
[h2]Next build[/h2]
In the following two weeks, I am going build the first Ascension Scenario. This feature will be a special case of ascension run with special rules and a single goal (different per scenario). You will have to finish this scenario at least once at the end of each ascension tree tier in order to progress further on the prestige meta-game. More on next update.
Beta back on the table
With Early Access release plan crystallizing in my Excel sheet (yes I do use Excel and I love it) I think we might have a opportunity for a short public Beta test. I cannot promise anything at the moment - this depends on stabilizing the full version in a very short period of time, but the option is 'on the table' now. If this Beta test happens, it happens in October and I would announce a signup at least 3 weeks before.
This is all for this update. See you around in two weeks.
Have a nice day,
Ondrej
