Microcivilization News

Hi,

Happy New Year to you all. In the first update of 2025 I'm going to give you a sneak peek of what is planned this year. There's lots to do and no matter what, I want to get the game out of Early Access this year.


[h2]Roadmap[/h2]

Be sure to check out the new roadmap here.

I am uncovering some of the big items planned for Tier 3 now and have done some plan adjustments based on my experiences with 0.9 and 0.10. There have been some delays, but it did not turn out to be as dramatic as I feared before holidays. A couple of weeks if no catastrophe happens.

[h2]So what exactly is coming in 2025?[/h2]

First of all I need to get the core Tier 3 stuff into the game. There's a massive whiteboard with concepts and relations for new meta-game mechanisms linked to in-game progress and this needs to be implemented as soon as possible - before my head explodes.

Naively, before launch in 2023 the Tier 3 was thought to be a difficulty increment where you reset all your Technology Era progress and start from neolithic again. With additional Lotuses to provide a new challenge. But as time went on the idea of 'repetitive resets' felt like a cheap extrapolation of existing game with no truly new experience.

Considering the game's success during launch I decided to do this thing properly. So I approach the progression in a more story-telling way (weird that such term is applicable for a relatively narrative-free game).

So instead of repetitive resets, we will just have one. But big.

[h2]The Abyss[/h2]
There's hardly a good story without a 'fall into the unknown' element to it. Luke's first fight with Darth Vader ends with one such fall (physical AND emotional). Forrest Gump's (repeated) rejection by Jenny leads him through many transforming challenges. Captain Miller (Saving private Ryan) crying in the trench with his squad's confidence broken leads to a very complex transformation and dual sacrifice - first of his mysterious background, then of his life. Gandalf getting pulled down by Balrog eventually leading to the breaking of the Fellowship. Or Peppa the Pig discovering one of her milk teeth is loose.

The principle of established order crushed by contact with 'the real adversary'. Not knowing what to do the hero uses his will to sacrifice what must be sacrificed and to rise up again, transformed, often with new haircut, et cetera.

I am ambitious, I think we should have something as profound as Peppa the Pig. So here's how this will play out (tiny spoiler alert though)

The grand metaphysical scheme of things. Hand-drawn line illustrates the player's progress through the individual parts of the game. Colors identify version in which the parts of the 'story' will be released. Note that the Fall segment needs to be initiated by the 1st Confrontation while the transformation needs to end in an safe point above 'the abyss'. These are features belonging to Tier 2 and Tier 4 respectively, which make the v0.11 so big an update.

So Tier 2's scenario is going to be the first step in this 'Story progression'. It will also introduce to you the 'true adversary'.

[h2]The Confrontation[/h2]

Sure there will be a new difficulty bump in the Ascension Tier 3 (like it is in Tier 2) but the main part of 0.11 will be a what occurs in between your runs. A game of the games - the meta-game.

Until now your ascension tree has been a safe harbour. A little shop where you spend your hard earned money (lotus). Each civilization's outcome is translated into lotuses and all sins are forgotten. This ends in Tier 3.

You will not just shop lotus anymore. From tier 3 you will be playing the big game and will be exposed to harsh reality of a 'judgemental force' preventing you from gaining lotuses at arbitrary cost to human lives. This is going to be a step-evolution of the Black lotuses - though black lotuses will still be a key part of this mechanism.

[h3]The Meta-Nemesis[/h3]

In between some runs, when a 'certain progress bar' comes full (no more spoilers atm), you will face a new arch-crisis not with military units and abilities, but with new Lotuses designed specifically for this ultimate combat. These new Lotuses will use different strategies to farm than the old Gold Lotus. Rules of this fight will be slightly different than beating your usual mammoths but the general principle will be similar.

Initially it will be difficult to survive the meta-nemesis. And only after mastering the meta game you will be able to defeat it. This meta nemesis will be the ultimate challenge of the game and - at its last manifestation - its Final Boss.

[h2]Back to the Trees[/h2]

Pre-neolithic era will be the next (and last) technological era to be added to the game. As pictured on the 'grand scheme' its role is to provide the 'Abyss' theme after your Big Fall. Despite that callsign I intend to design it as a funny interlude in which you can forget all your troubles so far.

That way going up to Tier 3 (or actually falling down to) will take away player's access to Classical and beyond. Games will again be quick as you will struggle to survive long in a hunter-gatherer band. Say good bye to tanks and say hello to fighting lizards with sticks and evolving lactose tolerance through death and suffering trial and error.

Ancestral era (I think that's how it's going to be called) will also not have any settlement building per se. Instead your civilization will be moving across the map in a nomadic way exploiting resources square by square (or hex by hex?).

You'll be using the same tile/quest mechanisms, but your quests will be different, territory will change frequently as you are getting expelled from your lands by more advanced civilizations or as resources get exhausted. This time you will be in the shoes of barbarians, tribal villages and those poor cannibals (yes I think cannibalism will be an actual new ability - so that you can finally eat the hearts of your enemies). Expect also vengeful mammoths to have their big moment here...

Getting out of Ancestral era and reaching agricultural revolution finally creating permanent settlements will mark the end of Tier 3 and your transformation into a 'real heroic civilization'. Expect new fancy abilities.

[h2]Tier 4 and Tech Eras on Steroids[/h2]

After Tier 3 your renewed progress from Ancestral era will be different. Specifically the Eras are planned to be longer and more dangerous. You will again unlock eras similar to Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, Modern and Future eras. But this time on Tier 4 they will have more technologies, higher levels, more features on crises etc.

For now this all I can share. All the above is still a concept and not added to the game . But I wanted you to have some insight why I make such a big deal in releasing Tier 3 along with borderline features of Tier 2 and Tier 4. The tech era reset will create a rather big game experience shift and so I want that version settle down a bit more stable grounds when player finishes it.

I'll be sharing progress on these features as we go and will continue our 4-weekly (bi-fortnightly?) updates. I am targeting 0.11 beta in May-June so a lot can happen until then.

[h2]v0.10 Live Release[/h2]

The current Beta of 0.10 will be running still for a couple of days. I plan to do at least one small patch, but all depends on the rate of bugs now. Unless we discover major regression problems I am hoping for a release within two weeks from now. Either way I want to again thank everyone participating beta, you have been a massive help.

That's all for today, see you soon,

Ondrej

Hi,

as usual I'm here after 4 weeks with a little update on Microcivilization development. This time I'll be a little brief - Christmas is behind the corner and also I want to restart the updates back to the first week of the month from next year. So yaay we would see each other in 2 weeks!

[h2]What's going on with Beta[/h2]
So far beta is going great. I did not expect people to jump on the game so close to Holidays so I am really grateful to all of you guys who are helping me with the new version.

So far I've only had to do one patch with no 'showstopper' bugs so it seems like a bit happier beta than last time leaving me some space for bigger changes. For the moment there are bunch of defects in the queue to be patched as soon as possible after taking some time off with my family between the holidays. Along with this there's a rather tricky update to balancing calculations.

[h2]Rebalancing[/h2]

After your feedback about the steep difficulty increase in Tier2 I have run a short series of retests using different builds and done a little analysis of the current unit system. As a result i decided to do a combat update (right into this beta) which i had sitting in backlock for some time - waiting for an opportune moment. This is because the damage is not progressing correctly to allow a tier difficulty bump.

So with a cup of hot tea in front of our fireplace and a Christmas tree, let's talk about Damage...

[h2]Damage Progression problem[/h2]

Current damage issue can be explained in a nutshell like this:

• As you play, you build up highlevel heroes providing high-damage.
  
• All of the heroes provide Damage as ADDITIONS say 100-1000.
  
• At the end the above damage output is MULTIPLIED by the current Unit available to you (say a spearman has 40%). So your 100-1000 becomes 40-400.
  
• On level 40 you will however have a Rifleman who let's say provides 1000% MULTIPLIER. So your damage would be 1,000-10,000.
  
• When jumping up a Tier, all crises get more difficult by ADDING 40 levels to them
  
• You be facing a 40 level crisis with your spearmen's 40-400. Same crisis which was calibrated against rifleman's 1,000-10,000.
  

[h2]'Damage Flip' to the rescue[/h2]

The proposed change is simple - let's make Heroes provide a MULTIPLIER as well as ADDITIONS while unit provides only ADDITIONS. Why should that matter? Let's take a look at a picture

Note that the numbers here are for illustration purposes only not actual numbers to use later.

The result is that only one part of the X+Y gets low at the start of a new game (the Y). This allows X to compensate what previously was just Y's job to handle.

In other words:

1. Your unit will now have only partial effect on how damage is calculated (part of your Damage value is ADDED from ascensions and heroes)
   
2. The numbers reading on the Hero chart and unit details will flip - Heroes will have a Percentage Damage ability, while units will have a A-B damage numbers.
   

Simplified Illustration of Difficulty Bump smoothing on Tier 2 with New 'flipped' system vs Old one

The above math may still slightly change as I test this redesign but the general principle will most likely stay. This should give me far more flexibility to balance Tier 2 (and in future Tier 3 and 4) crises.


[h2]When is version 0.10 coming out?[/h2]
Yes according to roadmap it should be out by the end of the year. But considering this rebalance issue I decided I'll extend this beta for at least a week or two. We'll need to run another big patch with this rebalance to see if the game is stable that way. So my hope is mid-January.

[h2]What's next?[/h2]
In the next update I will be sharing roadmap for 2025. As mentioned in my previous update I've accumulated a little delay with some features for Tier 2 and so will have to adjust the plans a bit to get the missing features done.

That's all for today people. I wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy New Year,



Cheers,

Ondrej

Hi all,

let me invite you to the beta-test of version 0.10 using the experimental branch pass-key:

[h2]WelshCorgiPembroke[/h2]

Just go to the Steam, find Microcivilization in your library, go to its Properties, Betas and insert your key to the text box.


The branch is already activated and should contain game version 0.10.0
This Beta will run for a minimum of two weeks. Please if you have any feedback, check out the community forum or visit us on discord.

In 0.10 you can finally continue in the second tier within the Ascension tree, unlock new Magnitude mechanics, new Hero slot, bigger map and the first version of the new Endless Future Era.

Here's what was changed:



[h2]Tier 2 Mechanics[/h2]

• Following Babel tower scenario you can now unlock new Ascensions in Tier 2 of the Ascension tree
  
• Unlocking the first Ascension in Tier 2 will increase the difficulty of the game by 40 levels. This provides higher level heroes as well as more difficult enemies.
  
• Crises on Tier 2 now have unique perks boosting their combat abilities.
  
• You can now drop Heroes up to level 45 in Tier 1 and up to level 90 in Tier 2.
  
• Tier 2 now has bigger map with more civilizations.
  
• Some civiliztions on Tier 2 are initially hostile.
  
• You now have Diplomacy options with Hostile civilizations
  
• New type of Map crisis added on Tier 2 - Fat Lizards.
  
• You can now Magnify your Workshops and Map tiles by using Secrets. Magnification will multiply all effects of the Workshop/tile. Magnification is unlocked by purchasing its Ascensions on Tier 2.
  
• Several existing Ascensions have been modified and new Ascensions added to tier 2 to provide a smoother difficulty progression.
  

[h2]Heroes and Wonders[/h2]

• Hero Abilities have been completely redesigned and no longer drop randomly on heroes. Instead they are attached to Belief and Law Governments based on faction color.
  
• All Heroes now generate autonomy or gold as part of their Government (faction) ability to enable using their abilities from early game.
  
• Existing Leadership Hero Government toggle abilities were redesigned and all now consume either autonomy or gold.
  
• Generic Traits chances have been redone. Newly dropped heroes will have significantly different drop chances of individual Traits.
  
• There is a number of new traits heroes can have.
  
• Number of Hero traits now boost Workshops or Wonders. These traits will multiply also if Magnification is used on that Workshop.
  
• New Wonders were added and existing wonders where modified to provide a more meaningful economy build variations.
  
• New Unique heroes were added, some of whom now provide important boosts to Wonders.
  
• Unique Hero bundles were added. You can Collect and 'sell' sets of your extra unique heroes to gain small permanent bonuses and achievements.
  
• About 30 new Achievements were made. Some of them cover previous 0.9 features (because 0.9 did not contain any new achievements)
  
• Hero recipes were simplified and are now all available from start. No recipes are unlocked in Ascension Tree anymore. There are at the moment only effectively 2 recipes.
  
• Hero Level up recipe is now only requiring Culture points but is limited by your other-heroes maximum Level.
  
• Merging 3 heroes into a higher tier (or rare reroll) now uses the input hero traits to limit the pool of resulting Hero. It now also has a small chance of dropping Unique hero.
  

• New era was added to technology tree - Future Era - unlocked in Tier 2.
  
• Future era is an 'endless mode' in the Technology tree containing a randomly generated structure of positive and negative generic and unique technologies.
  
• During Future era you are playing in Sudden ascension mode, similar to Babel Tower. If you fall, you ascend.
  
• Future era technologies are Concealed (new mechanics) which may lead to accidentally researching a negative technology giving you a penalty or risk.
  
• You can now use Secrets to reveal Concealed Technologies to prevent hitting a tech you dont want.
  
• Future era tech tree contains several fixed Major technologies (they are on random positions). These can be both positive and negative.
  
• Some Major Negative technologies might be necessary for you to survive Future Era, but may at the same time create more problems.
  
• New Nemeses and Predicament Disasters were added to Future era.
  
• Future era doesnt have a final technology, instead it is open ended and will be further updated with future updates.
  

Hi,

I hope you are all well. Today I'm going to share a few small things from the upcoming Tier 2 & Future Era update version 0.10. I'll have some good news and some bad news.

Because things are a bit rough I'm not able to share all artwork I wanted (a lot is still very much work-in-progress) but regardless of the difficulties in the past couple of weeks I'm getting closer to a playable beta version.

[h2]When is the next Beta?[/h2]

So let's get to the important business first. The beta for 0.10 is planned to
[h3]start somewhere between Friday Dec 13th and Dec 20th ending by end of December[/h3]

That is assuming beta goes with the same pace as two previous major updates... I have no idea if the player engagement will be the same during pre-christmas time. We'll see. If needed I'll make the beta week or two longer.

[h2]Some bad news[/h2]

As I mentioned this version has been rather difficult and I have accumulated a slight delay so had to do some unpleasant rescheduling.

[h2]Fewer Heroes and Wonders[/h2]

My ambition was to double the number of heroes for Tier 2. While this is still my ambition I know for sure this will not be possible in such short time frame, especially considering these heroes will need to form specific combos with the new wonders and perks. So in general I will have to add heroes by smaller batches. Either as part of major updates or smuggled inside smaller patches.

[h2]No new music[/h2]

While I do have 3 new tracks composition in progress none of those tracks is yet ready to use. Also my wish is to 'remake' the existing depressive piano track for a better sounding piano instrument and fix some of its melodic stupidities....so lots and lots of work in this area yet.

[h2]Class perks postponed (again)[/h2]

This was the hardest decision because I have spent about two weeks working on redesigning of the class perks and their new visuals. They are now working in a more interesting way that should create more combinations with new stuff and I do like the new mechanisms lot better than the previous ones (remember I descoped this feature from 0.9 because the designs were too simplistic back then).

This time the reason to exclude this from 0.10 is the testing and balancing time needed to do this feature in combination of new Future Era and 40 additional levels.

[h2]The good news - Crisis Perks[/h2]
One feature I am looking forward to test and expand in v 0.10 is called 'Crisis Perks'. This is no magic - all Tier 2 crises will be granted special passive or active abilities which will make them in some way harder to fight. Some perks will depend on the Crisis category (Fire, Plague, Uprising, etc.) some will be randomly generated (e.g. for random Rare crises which need some 'extra kick').

For instance a crisis may be resisting damage from some source (e.g. a light unit). It may cause your block shields to be less effective. Or it may periodically 'cast' a special effect on you.

A new Robot Uprising encountered in Future Era on higher levels. This one has an offensive 'Fast' Perk improving the crisis' speed.

Crisis perks will be mostly aimed at defending the crisis from the player, rather than making the crisis more offensive. However exceptions to this will exist. As usual this first batch of crisis perks will be only a 'starter pack' with more variants coming hopefully based on beta feedback.


[h2]Bigger Map & New Crisis Types[/h2]

Not originally planned, but it felt irresistible to increase the map size for Tier 2. Adding more civilization rivals and making them more dangerous will be part of the update. However it also felt like a new type on neutral 'critter' crisis is a good idea. So we'll have another type of Crisis next to Cannibals, Mammoths and Barbarians. For now I only intend to introduce this new Crisis type to Tier 2 for simplicity's sake.

Giant Obese Lizards will be added to the mix. Sorry I cannot explain my reasoning for this choice ... It was purely instinctive and emotional decision.

Future Era will of course include its own set of crises and problems. I have added two new Disasters into the 'Predicement' system (the bombs).

• One of them is Economic Depression which lowers your Gold Cap making gold worthless and slowly bleeds your Housing every second.
  
• The other one is Resentment which negates all your Risk Reduction bonuses and slowly but steadily increases your Click Heat.
  

New Nemeses will be added strictly to the Future Era. This one's concept is called 'Idea Pathogen'. For some of the Nemeses however, there will be no 'mortality' condition for Tier 2, only to be made mortal in Tier 3 (we'll see if that's reasonably playable)


[h2]What's Next?[/h2]

In the remaining time til Beta I still have a lot of Future Era artwork to polish, and add initial Hero/wonder set. Along with an already pre-designed new trait mechanisms and of course the long promised fifth hero slot!

This is all I have for today. I'll be in touch as soon as the Beta is ready!

See you soon,

Ondrej

Hi,

this week's update is going have a more greasy feel to it than usual. With version 0.9 out and most of my time spent supporting players or patching (almost 3 weeks total time out of 4), the current game version is somewhere mid-way towards a presentable state that would normally be for a Monday Update. But I figured I can show that state anyway. Just please bear in mind that all is very 'work-in-progress' and will likely change a lot as soon as testing comes in play.

There's a lot of activity going on at once. We have new hero/government ability redesign roughly in place. We have new UI layout, we have endless mode, we have future era technologies. Let's talk briefly about all of these.

[h2]What's wrong with Abilities?[/h2]

To be clear, we are talking about the features like Enlist, Bolster, Mercenaries, Garden, Festival and Zeal trigger abilities as well as Autocracy and Oligarchy toggle abilities. Anything you can have on the UI as extra buttons except Units and Workshops. In case this is confusing I'm using both term Skill and Ability but I mean the same thing. Because of new features added in the past major upates there are several problems which I think are worth pointing out:

1. Skills are gained by unreliable ways: randomly dropped Hero skills and technology. This makes them less available to use throughout the game-play as you progress in tree and hero levels.
   
2. It is always a compromise of a passive ability on a Hero to instead pick a skill. This lowers the appeal of active skill.
   
3. There are little skills useful early on.
   
4. There are different ways skills progress with power (some are limited by resource, some scale with levels)
   
5. Resource like gold/autonomy is difficult to use effectively in many situations and are therefore often useless.
   
6. There are several ways the abilities draw resource costs and how that cost scales making things more complex to understand and plan.
   
7. Many skills cannot have any cooldown because they scale with cost - thus requiring frequent casting (e.g. Enlist or Festival).
   
8. Government abilities have grown weak compared to new abilities.
   

[h2]What to do about this?[/h2]

At the core of the new changes for 0.10 is a somewhat symmetrical design of skills and unification of the mechanisms behind them. First step is to move all abilities to Governments - which are granted and fixed for every Class and Faction combination. That way you do not have to compensate on passive random generic traits. You always have some abilities available.

Illustration of the new hero ability design. Ellipses represent triggerable skill, Recangles a togglable skill and dotted rectangle is a passive ability. Colors represent factions while position within the 'reverse T' shape indicates the hero slot/class as in the in-game inventory. Teal names are skills originally granted by Technology. Pink names are those originally available from random hero traits. Yellow names are new Skills.


[h2]Belief and Law hero abilities[/h2]

The general idea is that each Belief and Law hero now has exactly one of Triggerable Abilities previously available elswhere. I moved most of the existing abilities like Bolster to the faction governments (i.e. same for all heroes of that faction) and where no reasonable skill existed added a new one to fit that faction. These abilities now scale with Hero Level and have a cooldown and either gold or autonomy cost depending on the faction color.

[h2]Leadership abilities[/h2]
Leadership slots still have a toggle ability. But I completely redesigned them and either moved or converted existing abilities to a Leadership Toggle. For instance Enlist is now a toggle ability on Blue faction which will have an 'affinity' towards using militia.

[h2]Economy abilities[/h2]
The economy governments are (at least for now) simply providing a passive always-active bonus.

[h2]'Mana'[/h2]
As mentioned elswhere, Autonomy and Gold are treated as a 'Mana' resource that is spend by using abilities. All new skills will now use their respective resource based on faction. Red/Purple factions will use up Gold while Green/Blue will use Autonomy.

At the same time these factions will also generate this resource by default (initially in very small amount provided by free workers) so that you can use the abilities from relatively early on.

Example how the heroes skill redesign now exists in the 0.10 branch. Icons and descriptions are still very rough. You can also Ignore any values - no balancing has occured there yet

[h2]New UI Panel layout[/h2]

For various reasons I decided to redesign the layout of the UI panel. Mostly to make skills more coupled with units but also to make space for potential extra stuff in tier 2 and 3. Limit on wonder/workshop numbers also calls for potential extra slots (by whatever rare/expensive means).

Very early mock of the new panel with extra row added to accommodate new skills. Graphics is only a 'usable temporary' will likely need more polish later


[h2]Future Era and Endless mode[/h2]

It is now more or less clear how Future era will work technically. It will be using a combination of the existing technology tree with something i think is commonly known as 'endless' research where player will also not be guaranteed to reach further depending on their power (something you could call a rogue-lite element). So how are all those things going to work together?

[h2]What is the future era exactly?[/h2]

First of all let's talk about what the Future era represents.

Future era will represent technological advancements following the Internet. Yeah you could say we're already living in the future! Future era will however be longer to play than other eras we have previously (my estimate is future era to be worth 3+ normal eras depending on how long you manage to play).

I have made some early mock-ups for some technologies I'd like to place into the tech tree of the future era that would cover the first part (more stuff to be added probably as player gains more powers in Tier 3 and Tier 4)

Early mock-up of technological concepts for first part of Future era. More high-tech stuff will come later.

[h2]What's the deal with endless?[/h2]

I have yet to test the idea but the basic thought I have now is to make future era work similar to Tower of Babel. If you fall you ascend (with all due rewards). So the challenge is to proceed through all the new risks and predicaments without dying.

There will also be 'new things' that will make progress increasingly harder. Dystopian Horrors Eternal Comforts that will be meant to stop your progress and freeze you in a merciless (though fun) status-quo.

[h2]New research mechanisms[/h2]

To make this new problem possible, research in future era will be concealed. You will no longer know what you're researching until you are stuck with it. And some technologies will not be so nice. Of course there will be a mechanism to reveal a concealed technology. But it won't be for free...

There will be several fixed 'Major' technologies (as per the mock image) which will be randomly available in the tree, but there will also be an infinite number of 'minor generated' technologies which will provide a combination of good and bad traits. The exact mechanism of mixing fixed and generic technologies is yet undecided.

This is all for today. Next time I'm hoping to show you some visuals for the future era!


See you next time,

Ondrej