Microcivilization News

Hi,

i've just released a little hotfix. Mainly for a couple of regression issues caused by the big patch 0.10.11
[h3]0.10.12[/h3]

• 'Obsoletion lock' of Taj Mahal Should no longer crash the game when displaying first warning dialog and has a correct icon
  
• Babel tower should no longer generate Locks in the tech tree after loading a game
  
• Game should no longer crash when multiple ascension boosts are active (defeating multiple era bosses in short time)
  
• Game should no longer crash in some corner-cases with Storm debuff
  
• Game should no longer crash when having Autonomy higher than max 32-bit number.
  

Hello,

this update I want to reveal a bit about Tier 3's ancestral era Map. Also since this goes back to 'ancient history' I thought it would be fun visiting the history of Microcivilization as well.

So let me show how our present Quest system evolved since the game's beginning and in the end I'll show you how it will evolve further in Tier 3 and beyond.

[h2]First Idea[/h2]

In one of the older updates I've shown you how the project started. But it doesnt show the actual first concept. That first concept was this:

This is the Microcivilization's first idea, picture in mspaint created September 8th 2021 8pm. Simple clicker, research tree and a miniature civilization glass ball with little people running around and autonomously building a little city inside. Nothing else, there were no Quests or Map. Simplicity itself. Four-months project maybe?

But we know now that this concept was not what happened. I quickly realized that there's a plenty of ways to make this into a more complex game that nobody has made before (I don't know if that was true, but to my past self's ignorance wisdom it was). So features started appearing very fast.

[h2]Quests 1.0[/h2]

Quests were the first 'extra' feature I've added (i.e. besides research and construction/growth). Their role was to provide source of chaos to the game. Quests were meant to be a choice to speed up progress in your game at the cost of problems. But I didn't yet know what the problems would be. There were no Crises there at that time.

Version as at early October 2021 about 98 hours of total development time. Quests were just timed resource buffs. Notice that quests 'reserve' population. This was meant to be the limiting mechanism way before units and workers were added.

The idea about quests mechanics was quite simple .... you either send your population to quests, or you keep them in your workshops. How you distribute this would define your 'strategy build'. Quests would be flexible - so you had a slider that allowed you to send whoever was 'idle' to the mines or wherever. Neat....

[h3]Crises[/h3]

It soon became clear that in order to justify any 'strategy' the game needs to have some dynamic combat. Otherwise players would have no real problems to solve. My inspiration here was the Clicker Heroes and I always imagined that the level of complexity would never go beyond that game.

December 2021 about 300 hours in the making of Microcivilization (that name did not exist back then). First Crisis was added around this time. Notice that the combat was done via Clicking Sword and Shield and by constructing a Fire brigade. Units did not exist at this time. Crisis also did not have any 'attacks'. Instead it was reducing your population over time. You can also see a new background style - I was learning pixel art here while re-doing the first conceptual graphics.

Crises added the core concept of combat. With that it quickly became apparent that Risk management needs to be added as a bridge between Quests and Crises.

[h2]Quests 2.0[/h2]

Existence of Crises implied how to structure quests. I had to split between high-risk and low-risk quests. Those that required strong military and those that would be used after exhausting combat to replenish the economy.

Also I realized that using individual population slider for quest did not scale very well. While workshops have consumed percentages of population, quests used actual people - that didnt really work. Player had to do a lot of math and when numbers didnt add up, it felt really stupid and frustrating.

So I ditched the individual population constraint on Quests and decided to keep using Percentages of population as a kind of single resource. At this point I realized this will need some specific 'new resource' but decided to postpone such decision.

This is pretty much how the next version of Quest system looked like:

Bunch of starter quests. You can see there is a concept of 'limited' quests (which you could simply exhaust) and infinite quests. Also you can still control how many people you send. But only in 5 percentage options.

[h3]2022 stasis[/h3]

Believe it or not, this quest system felt more than sufficient. At that moment I knew I would like the quests to be represented with some kind of 'map-like' background. I also knew I will need to add more dynamics to how quests change over technological progress. But virtually all parts of the game needed more attention and prettification of quest system would not move me any closer to a playable version.

To put this into more context, during this stage I had maybe a 30-60 minutes of gameplay (semi-idle clicker). There was no Hero system, no Ascensions, no presentable visuals.

Early 2022 was about adding actual content. Crisis types, Inventory screen, UI graphics, workshop animations and more variation of the buildings.

This phase had one objective: The gameplay must be good enough end-to-end to turn it into a Trailer. No more 'fake' graphics or missing core features. 30 seconds of video must be able to tell the whole story what this game is about (and why it should be worth any real-world money).

So quest system stayed intact for maybe 8 months, with minimal changes.

Screenshot from June 2022 version. You can still see the old combat system except we now have fists on Yin Yang button. The idea here was that Food automatically converted into Damage during crisis. So the Wheat icon just turned into Fist. Completing the Growth bar dealt damage. We still had percent Idle people instead of workers. We still didnt have military units. But we had Mammoths alright.

[h2]Quests 3.0[/h2]

In November 2022 first Teaser video was made and I started marketing the game publicly. Which meant I was done making the game look pretty and had to make it play well.

Geek Note: In November 2022, after about 840 hours spent on the game almost all my backend code was a single class. That class was holding all the game logic as well as save data and was about 3300 lines of code (separated to 10 files). It wasnt until november 2022 that I split it into a more structured architecture. It was really fun to work with in this first stage. I definitely recommend YAGNI approach in case you are building something very volatile and you're not at all sure what it will become.

This upgrade of the quest system added visual map. And because I didn't want to be a cliche and have a hex grid, I used this yin/yang approach with tiles being linked to two individual quests. The map was technically still a hex grid, but didn't betray that fact so obviously.

First 'Playtest' version of Microcivilization in April 23 used the top-right map. This was the first quest system players could actually see. Full-size map came later for the Demo.

Along this version, Worker mechanism and Military Units were added and the whole Idle % reservation system removed.

With this third system I went live in November 2023. And I thought it would be all. I'd do a bunch of major updates during Early Access, finish up the ascension tree tiers, and in a year or so call it a 1.0. End of story....

[h2]Quests 4.0[/h2]

But thanks to the success on Early Access launch day I realized I have to change plans. Players really like the game. So what the hell. Let's finish this the best way I can...

You can pretty much see what followed. After Purple Faction major update and Research/Autonomy update the new World Map was added into the game. So in the end I decided to go with the cliche and added a hex grid.

The map as it was done in version 0.9.

This fundamentally changed not only quests but also the entire economy of the game. I consider this change to be the most invasive in terms of game design and has catapulted the difficulty of game design to a new level. Not only do we have tile improvements generating resource, there's also tile adjacency mechanism, fixed critters on the map, other civilizations and diplomacy.

So where do we go from here.

[h2]Tier 3 - hunter-gatherer's struggle[/h2]

As mentioned previously, Tier 3 will be a dark place. After finishing Tier2 the player's civilization will be thrown down to literal abyss of history. They will lose all they had until now until they can prove worthy to regain it.

Current Tier 3 map with some of the new features explained. With endless mode and expanding hostile civilization it will effectively be a rogue-lite battle-royale

• You will be fighting an enemy far more advanced than you. You will have no diplomacy, no culture, no city.
  
• The enemy will be actively hunting you. A 'Conquistadors' Nemesis will be unleashed right from the beginning and the Hostile Civilization that controls it will be expanding its territory over time until it takes up the entire continent. You will be able to move your 'camp' on the map to pospone your inevitable fall.
  
• You'll also be missing your Neolithic technology tree. Basic technolgies will have to be re-discovered in a similar manner as Tier 2 future era - navigating around dangerous dead-end paths. So your tech tree will be 'endless' right from the beginning.
  
• Your ability of doing Research from population will be gone. You will need to actively explore Ancestral ruins to gain research production.
  
• You will have no heroes. All heroes you had will be un-equippable for the length of Tier 3. (more on this topic in a future update)
  
• You will have no workshops. Most of the time you won't even have any territory.
  
• You will end the run if your civilization dies (same as during Future era).
  

[h2]Light at the bottom of the abyss[/h2]

But not all is bad. For all your suffering there's a couple of new features that will uplift your poor civilization.

[h3]Farming Secrets[/h3]
In Tier 3 there will be a few new mechanisms that will allow acquiring more Secrets. The price will not be small. But it will be there.

[h3]Adopting Technologies[/h3]
You will be able to adopt any technology you find in the 'endless' tree. That means you can pay a certain price and you will permanently gain that technology for the future runs. In this manner by exploring the 'endless' tech tree you will be slowly 'rebuilding' the Neolithic tree. When you reach Future era again (in Tier4) you will be able to apply this on Future era technologies too.

[h3]Remove Nemeses from the game[/h3]
I know, you are asking 'like how permanently'. Like really permanently. Every Nemesis will have a specific scenario which can be played (like babel tower, but shorter and simpler). After winning it, the nemesis will be completely defeated and will never-ever appear in any game.

[h3]Doing 'bad stuff' and utilizing Black Lotus[/h3]
Critical features for your survival and ultimate victory in Tier 3. More on this another time.

[h3]Taming Mammoths[/h3]
Yes. Finally.

But leaving the 'lore' behind, Tier 3 is meant to be a little refreshment. Unlike jump from Tier 1 to Tier 2 it is not intended to step up in difficulty or make things more complex. It should instead provide some brand new mechanisms and a simpler flow taking you again back to brute-force start.

It shouldn't also be very long. I expect Tier 3 to take maybe 50-75% of Tier 2 playtime length (depending on how many ascensions you buy). New Hero type and different Lotus mechanisms will change the pace of the game as well until the player re-emerges on Tier 4.

This is all for today. I'll see you in four weeks.

Ondrej

Hi,

after a a longer time than I intended I managed to scramble the promised small patch addressing some of the difficulty issues.

Because some of these changes were quite invasive I had to properly consider what to do as part of next major version (which will take a bit of time, being the biggest update so far) and what can be done as a patch.

The main reasoning here is risk management - invasive changes done badly and released in a patch without a proper beta-test can lead to many side effects or eventually a complete rollback of these changes. Also some of the changes can be in conflict with the next major update. A lot can go wrong.

At the same time I did not want to trigger another beta test stage merely for the sake of balancing so I decided to split the work. So what you are getting today is the bit which I considered either safe or worth the risk.

Leaving aside small bugfixes, this patch contains three main 'feature changes':

1. Babel tower now runs on Level 40+ - effectively babel Tower is a Tier 2. The objective is to make this scenario act as a proving grounds before entering Tier 2 for real. A gateway of sorts. For players enjoying rushing strategy this should act as a check before irreversibly jumping to higher difficulty where progress can be a lot more pain. Small changes to the Babel tower were also made, but nothing big - only to make this a bit more playable. A lot of bigger changes are planned for later Major Updates.
   
2. Ascension rules have been redesigned. This is a bit of an overstatement as the rules aren't really that complex. But from now on you do not need Taj mahal to ascend mid-game. Instead you will have an opportunity to ascend after defeating Era boss starting from Tier1 Medieval era (I intended to keep this close to where Taj Mahal was available previously). From Tier2 this is available right at the Neolithic. So in case you DO overexpand to Tier 2 with weak ascension build, you have easier way out through lotus grind.
   
3. You can Respec your ascension tree. Because I believe the above two changes address the Tier 2 overexpansion sufficiently I decided I can also add respec to the mix. My reasoning here (as per some community discussion) is that I don't want respec to be a method to commonly use in ascension rushing strategy. The feature should serve in case you make a mistake, or when you get irreversibly affected by a bug or a design problem (as is the case for a few players on version 0.10). The respecs for now are limited to two per game and I did not add any method of 'farming' respec points yet (will probably do at some point). First point is gained with Medieval Era unlock, the second point is gained on Tier 2.
   

That is the main stuff which deserves a bit of explanation. Below is the full list of changes inclusing small tweaks and bugfixes.

As usual please report any bugs of problems to the community or discord. I hope there's not many more issues to solve before we can consider 0.10 to be fully stable.

Thanks,

Ondrej

You can now Ascend after defeating any Era boss crisis. This is enabled for 1 minute after the crisis destruction.
Taj Mahal no longer allows players to ascend at any time. Instead it has become a Ceremonial wonder similar to Pyramids and Stonehenge.
Once per Tier you can Respec your ascensions via a new button on the ascension screen.
You can now quick-buy ascensions with shift-click
Babel tower scenario now works as if a Tier 2 round - has a +40 levels penalty and other difficulty challenges. This is mainly to prevent players from rushing their way to tier 2.
Babel tower Scenario events now kick off 2 minutes later due to a more difficult start
Babel tower heroes are now level 70 instead of 50
Population milestone locks on technologies tweaked to better match reasonable population levels (with respect to difficulty on that level)

Auto research now has a Predicament triggering option.
Auto research no longer triggers Wonder obsoletion locks
Added a few tutorials and warning messages to important moments in the game. This was based on recent feedback where some elements were missed by accident.
Truce dilemma on Tier 2 requires slightly less units.
Early research costs in neolithic era where slightly reduced.
World war 'Era Boss' now correctly spawning before Internet when Future era unlocked.
Theater can now give both a Corruption and a Hero. Also the displayed percentages should now be accurate and make more sense with respect to Magnitude increments.
Messages on screen can now be dismissed in bulk by clicking while holding left shift (useful in late-game or when hero farming)
Should no longer be able to start the game in Sea by selecting a tile and subsequently regenerating the map.
Crisis attack buttons should now have a smaller bounding area allowing correct hover details to pop out when they overlap.
Collecting hero should now use the Currently selected tab if possible.
Inquisition Autonomy mortality condition has been reduced to 40.
Removed some obsolete Locks from the tech tree.
Map tiles can no longer increase their level past your current technology level +5.
Unit damage no longer adjusted by technology level it is unlocked on. Unit damage is now always the same.
Fixed babel tower event messages
Chichen itza is now unlocked by Warrior code instead of agriculture

Hello,

This time i'm going to share some situational update where we are with 0.10 and what is being addressed. Since there's not much to show from 0.11 yet I figured I'll expose what's going on at the moment in everything else.

We're now in the weird phase that seems to happen after every major content release. Even though the releases were quite different each time, there are always same things happening. So let's briefly touch each one of them, since they also affect you - the players - and what's coming next:

1. New features are in the game and a lot of new 'loose ends' are attracting new ideas from players, suggestions and criticism.
   
2. Game Performance at the late game is utterly horrible (note that what is late game is moving each update)
   
3. Despite running X weeks of beta, new very silly bugs keep appearing.
   
4. Balancing is off (this is especially true now when difficulty increase was one of the core features)
   
5. New features design for next major update is already in progress.
   

[h2]Loose ends[/h2]
Those of you who have engaged in discussion with me probably know by now that my approach is something like 'evolutive design'. I often place features incomplete, in a minimalistic form and I let them being bombarded by ideas from players as well as from future myself.

This has an obvious cost of looking incomplete and causing concern when things are too simplistic, or not useful (or complete rubbish). But the benefit is that each feature's potential is being shaped not in a lonely glass petri dish, but right in the wild nature among other real things.

With this 0.10 version i am introducing some features which still have a long way to go before being considered final.

[h3]Concealed Future era research[/h3]

This Future Era is the most sparsely developed feature at the moment. This is a deliberate decision (though I did intend to add full level of Genetic engineering too but the overall experience would not be very different in 0.10), I do not consider myself confident enough to design the entire endless system at once. What I needed to do was a first conceptual phase and start collecting ideas from players. There's not a single feature on the tree that would not have something i see as a 'loose end' in my head.

This is how I see the future tech tree at the moment. Each element has some way to grow.

My intention is to expand Future era retrospectively in future updates (meaning what we now have in Tier 2 will become bigger) but main update will come also in Tier 4 where the future era should theoretically double in size.

[h3]Wonder-only builds[/h3]

If you recall the previous major update, one of the most important changes there was introduction of the new Wonder system using up Workshop slots. A lot of economy builds have been removed due to that limitation and it was really a big debt of mine to reintroduce some alternative builds based off wonders.

With Tier 2 we now have a baseline wonder setup using up some of the newly created world wonders which has proven out to be more powerful (perhaps unnecessarily too powerful) compared to workshops-only setup. This is a first step towards an economy model where swapping to wonders actually makes sense and you have several 'core' setups.

Naive-version of the Ancient Seven Wonders build. A lot more power can be extracted here.

0.10 did not do that much to improve older Tier 1 Wonders in this direction and you need to reach late game T2 to make use of the 'Ancient 7 wonders', but I plan to introduce a few more wonder setups which will become somewhat 'standard' setups of wonders synergizing each other using most of the old Tier 1 wonders.

[h3]Level/Difficulty[/h3]

The first difficulty bump is done and (as expected) a lot of rough edges had to be polished. After doing a bunch of updates the Tier 2 is generally playable in most player strategies, but there still is one big problem I did not anticipate - Tier 1 difficulty progression.

First of all a lot of problems can be very easily avoided in Tier 1 skipping quickly to Tier 2. There's very little that can be 'patched' about that, a broad balancing of Tier 1 must be done so that it lands closer where Tier 2 is now.

Second, the current Ascension flow 'reach tech tree end or use Taj Mahal' is no longer good enough. Tier 2 has proven that this design is not scaling well with new tiers and needs to be re-visited.

I decided to rush with introduction of one feature I was saving for Tier 3 and beyond - a buyable ability costing Lotus, which can be recharged on Ascension tree. Horn of Resolve is the first of this 'instruments' feature. The reason was to introduce a last resort ability for crisis spirals and I needed some way to limit this feature's usage.

[h2]Game Performance[/h2]

Not much to say here. The game is horribly slow at late-game and the cause is the new features and code introduced in patches (since I do not performance-test patches).

But also the reason is that players are now capable of insane combos generating far higher production than the game reallly needs right now.

I will (as usual) plan a performance optimization along some of the future patches but only when invasive functional updates are no longer likely.

[h2]Balancing[/h2]

As stated above balancing has a few pitfalls which I will need to address as a 'semi-major' update at some point. There's currently two options : either to include this as part of 0.11 (ETA May) or deliver this as a separate mid-size update earlier.

Since this kind of change will require a LOT of testing, my preference now is to wait for 0.11 where already a LOT of testing will happen anyway. But if some bits and pieces are patchable safely, they'll land into 0.10 sooner.

There's a bunch of bugs and minor improvements that will 100% make for another small patch some time this or next week.

[h2]New Features[/h2]

Good news is that in between patches I've made a decent progress on the Tier 3 things and have now every feature 'mocked up'. For the moment I've done what could be called a 'proof of concept' so I'm now confident about these features so much that I can reveal their headlines.

• Hunting/Gathering, Slash&burn agriculture and Nomadic map flow.
  
• New droppable Idols and 'socketing' mechanism
  
• White Lotus and 'Pledges' mechanism.
  
• Red Lotus and related 'Sacrifice' mechanisms.
  
• Black Lotus and related mechanisms.
  
• Ascension meta-nemesis and related combat mechanism.
  

I'm looking forward to dig into each of these in future updates. For now this is all, I'll see you in 4 weeks.

Cheers,

Ondrej

Hello, based on feedback I've now released a new (bigger) update targeting difficulty.

Besides bugfixes and tweaked values it contains some full new features which might be more suitable for a bigger update, but during tests they turned out to be more effective ways to tune difficulty than nerfing the threats.

There's still more to do around difficulty, I still expect a minimum of one more patch in the next couple of days/weeks. And since this is very hasty feature update I think we'll also find some new bugs around. But I think the bigger problems around difficulty should now be near-solved.

Cheers,

Ondrej

[h2]'Crisis Spiral' reduction[/h2]

• All Economy heroes now have a Toggle ability similar to Leadship heroes. When active these abilities reduce Risk. The difference (for now) is only in resource cost (gold/autonomy per sec) and whether it affects All risks or One Highest risk.
  
• Hostile civilization war risk is now based on proximity to your tiles. Neighbour tiles give 10%, 1 tile distant give 5%, all others give 1%.
  
• Send Diplomat quest is now twice as fast.
  
• Quest speed modifier now showing on map. (yes with a breakdown popup)
  
• Added a 'contingency ability' called Horn of Resolve which can wipe all existing disasters and crises (no rewards) and activate Grace Period (no risks for 5m). This ability needs to be recharged in ascension shop for Gold Lotus (after unlocked with Medieval Era). This is to provide better alternative to dying a slow death in a crisis spiral. Cannot be used for Confusion of Tongues.
  
• Civilizations which are initially Hostile can now spawn on Tier 1 after Unlocking Industrial era. This is to introduce its War risk challenge earlier than during the Tier 2 difficulty big-bang.
  
• Removed social crisis risk from Internet
  
• Default crisis reward reducing risks now reduces 10% for 5 minutes instead of 5% for 3 minutes.
  
• Removed Wood boost reward from default crisis crisis reward pool.
  

[h2]Disasters & Crisis Perks[/h2]

• Social Crisis on Tier 2 now has new Resist Heavy Unit perk instead of Thorns perk.
  
• Uprising on Tier 2 now has new Resist Light Unit perk instead of Fast perk.
  
• Fire now has the Fast perk instead of Hard to Block Perk.
  
• Disease now has the Hard-to-block perk instead of Resist light unit.
  
• Thorns Perk is no longer spawning by default on any Tier 2 standard crisis.
  
• All disasters now have duration of 2 minutes instead of 3 minutes.
  
• Stacking disasters now increments duration instead of stacking their effects.
  
• Resentment now grants Thorns Perk to new crises instead of its Click Heat increase.
  
• Thorns granted from Resentment deal more damage than original Social Crisis thorns.
  
• Thorns Deaths no longer reduce Autonomy.
  
• Unit buttons now showing indicator when a Thorns Perk would affect them
  
• Rats now add new Poisonous Perk to Crises instead of giving extra attacks. Poisonous perk deals low amount of unblockable damage over time.
  
• Rats now give Growth efficiency penalty instead of Disease Risk.
  
• Storm now grants 3 unblockable attacks instead of 1.
  

[h2]Generic Hero trait drop changes (only for newly dropped)[/h2]

• Risk reduction now more likely on blue heroes
  
• Unit Cap increase on blue heroes increased.
  
• Crisis slowdown now spawning as a random trait for Blue and Red heroes
  
• Fixed incorrect odds of various traits.
  
• Unit recharge speed increased for Purple heroes (also for Mercenaries skill, which applies retrospectively for older heroes)
  
• Quest speed values scaling fixed (also retrospective for previous hero versions)
  

[h2]Other Bugs & Tweaks[/h2]

• Gold rewards from crises on Tier 2 should scale with the Era (meaning lower gold rewards early on). Same applies for certain Dillemma costs.
  
• Fixed a bug causing Babel Tower scenario not to be won correctly if the last Confusion of Tongues was defeated by Autocombat in one tick (which became more likely thanks to previous Autocombat multi-attack-per-tick patch)
  
• Babel Tower can no longer be destroyed by Wonder Crisis Attacks preventing you from winning the scenario.
  
• Added game speed buttons to hud.