Microcivilization News

Hi,

with the past few updates being quite chunky this time I'll be a little more brief. As you may know, we have a Beta of v0.8 running for two weeks already. There are no big new features being built and the focus was on getting 0.8 stable (and also taking some time off). So instead of specific features, in this update I'd like to take a closer look at the Roadmap and answer some questions I see from time to time regarding future updates:

[h2]Where is the roadmap?[/h2]

The roadmap can be found here. I regularly update the document by adding new versions of the sheet while keeping the old roadmaps for fun and also as a monument to the saying 'man plans, God laughs'.

[h2]Whats coming next?[/h2]

That's easy - we're nearing the end of Q2 of 2024 and the v0.8 will hopefully see the light of the world by the end of June. Beta is all in progress. We're getting a new research and autonomy updates with a lot of minor features (that will take us ages to fine-tune). Yay!

[h2]Ok so what's coming in later after Summer (Q3) [/h2]
Lots I already I mentioned elsewhere but to summarize, the next version (0.9) will focus on Map update. That means a bigger map, tweaked Quests, selectable starting position and some civilization traits to select each run. Also expanding the Dilemma card system to other areas like diplomacy and expanding the already present mechanism of Strategic resources.

All this to balance quests with the added complexity in research and trade in recent versions. The quest system is really old now and even with some minor updates the Map is too small and too inflexible to support the rest of the game properly. So this is basically to 'catch up' the pace of the game.

Even though it looks quite sizeable in the roadmap, Map update is not planned to be as large (in terms of work done) as the two previous ones. But considering the content might actually have higher impact on gameplay.

[h2]Will there be more levels of heroes?[/h2]
Yes the summer's 0.9 version is also going to push forward in the ascension tree (finally) and go to higher levels and difficulty. You will reach higher level heroes, crises and new technologies. But mainly, the tier 2 will bring in new mechanics in the Ascension tree itself.

[h2]What about the two locked Hero Slots?[/h2]
These will become unlocked in Tier 2 of the acension tree (most likely also in 0.9). But I won't share what their mechanics will be. Because I don't know (or to be more precise I have not decided between 3 options)

[h2]More eras beyond Modern?[/h2]
I am still not 100% decided but there's a plan to introduce a 'future theme' although not quite like the other 6 eras which are strictly defined. Rather I'd like to mix this with the 'endless' concept and a few other minor features to be introduced in Tier 2.

I also plan to expand to the other side of the tech tree, before the fire. But that's still very vague in my drawings.

[h2]Will there be more Hero colours?[/h2]
Yes and no. The current four base colours represent all factions designed for the game. There will however be a number of mechanics to change behaviour of these base factions. Some improvements planned for recipe system to make factions more flexible. And also changes to the corruption system - we ought to consider the 'temporary' Black colour (a corrupted hero) to play a bigger role in the future. Similarly an opposite 'white' temporary colour is something to be added in future.

[h2]How about the rest of Ascension tree[/h2]
Provided all goes as planned in summer, what follows in Fall will be Tier 3 & 4. As with Tier 2 there is going to be a little evolution going on with the Ascension mechanics from Tier 3 and 4. As I hinted before this is going to revolve mainly around the Black lotus mechanism. I'd like to introduce a conceptual change with every new Tier. The player should be aware that something has 'tiered-up' not just grown in level number.

[h2]What kind of scenarios besides Babel Tower are there going to be?[/h2]
This is one of the bigger question marks. I have a few samples in mind, but I have not parked them to each respective Tier yet. What I know for sure:

1) Each Tier will have at least one Scenario, some possibly more.
2) There will be a mechanics to make sense replaying the scenario (to maximize/farm a certain score)
3) Scenarios will have separate rewards (unlike the current state where they simply give you gold lotuses)

[h2]How many Unique heroes will there be[/h2]
I do not wish to leave early access with less than one hundred. Something close to two hundred would be preferable.

[h2]Will the game get translated?[/h2]
Yes but because of my decision to treat Ascension tiers as more content-heavy I will not initiate localization support until all four ascension tiers are done and tested. So most likely translation will start appearing AFTER game is functionally ready to leave early access. Which is why Localization support is parked at Q1 of 2025.

[h2]How about those cloud saves you promised ages ago?[/h2]
Cloud saves will come as a separate update for 0.8. The only issue there is they cannot be tested within a beta branch so the plan is to test them only with dev accounts and release that as a separate update to avoid a big bang failure (which could easily happen if there was a bug in 0.8 as well as bug causing your save get badly synced)

[h2]How about resolution support[/h2]
There's a tiny patch to fix letter/pillar boxing for different devices coming soon. I have done some testing on a Steam Deck and it 'seems to work for me locally'. The same patch should also make wide monitors playable in fullscreen. This is still far from resolution support I want but it's a first step in that direction and it will come out as part of 0.8 this month.

[h2]How about Deck support[/h2]
At the moment the formal state is unsupported but the game can actually run on it. It is obviously missing some key aspects like automatic action mapping and Cloud saves. There's no reasonable support for the controller actions (so you have to use the native touch-pad-mouse) and it also has quite bad readability of texts. (though this might slightly improve with resolution patch). There's no support for save sync on deck's unsuspend and a few other smaller issues. It is planned to fix all these in time, but I have not yet made any specific plans besides the Cloud saves (as it doesnt make much sense without those).

Thas will be all for this update. Have fun and keep an eye here in the Community for the upcoming 0.8 release announcement!

See you next time,

Ondrej

Hi all,

please let me invite you to the beta-test of the version 0.8 containing Research&Autonomy upgrades!

To access the beta, use the experimental branch via pass-key:

[h3]WelshCorgiPembroke[/h3]

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 0.8.8
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.

Detailed updated about what you can expect in 0.8 are here:
May update April Update March Update February Update

A more brief change-log of the version update follows...




[h2] Research [/h2]

• Technology tree has become slightly randomized and contains non-mandatory branches
  
• Technologies are categorized into Central (mandatory), Minor (randomized with small bonuses) and Major (main techs with multiple traits).
  
• Tree has become more compact visually to accomodate more technologies and more dynamic elements
  
• You can now skip certain units and workshop levels in tech tree and aim directly for the higher levels.
  
• Tech tree now contains Locks for optional major technology branches. A lock has to be first open in order to access the techs beyond it.
  
• There are multiple types of locks - some require a condition to be fulfilled, some more difficult will require defeating a boss.
  
• Tech tree now evolves with unlocking Eras. Locks become gradually more difficult.
  
• As consequence of adding locks, Bonus stars mechanism has been removed altogether.
  
• Instead from Bonuses, you now receive Heroes for every Major technology in your last two Eras.
  
• Research speed has been slightly increased to compensate missing Research speed bonuses from Stars.
  
• New Research Resource 'Secret' can be now gained in various ways and used to overcome technology locks faster.
  
• You can discover random Rare Technologies not previously part of your tech tree after unlocking appropriate Ascension.
  
• Era Boss Crises (Neolithic revolution etc.) have been converted to Locks (but other than that they work pretty much as before)
  

[h2] Autonomy [/h2]

• Autonomy resource (the black-green beetle token) is now capped at your current population size (you can't have more autonomy than people). There's no way to exceed this and no penalty to be on the maximum.
  
• Autonomy's passive effects to boost Research remains as before. However more instances of similar 'provision' traits have been added (not just for Research).
  
• Except for passive effects Autonomy can now also be used as a 'mana' to use Autonomy-specific skills. This is similar to how Gold is used.
  
• Autonomy is now hard to keep. Each Population dying causes a loss of two points of Autonomy (you can mitigate this to some degree).
  
• Library is now the main source of Autonomy and it's traits have been completely reworked.
  
• Theater percentages have been nerfed. Theater now also requires Gold and Autonomy to charge up (providing no passive bonus). Theater now however uses all Drop Rate bonuses and can drop Unique heroes.
  
• Theater can cause one of two new types of Corruption. These contain both debuffs as well as unique boosts which can be utilized for specific gameplay style.
  
• Existing Autonomy skills (auto-combat, auto-construction, auto-research) have been moved to Ascension tree (so you don't need blue heroes to use them.
  
• Autoclick is still a blue trait available on heroes.
  
• Autonomy skills now generally drain Autonomy per second (and all should be visible in the calculations)
  
• Can select multiple technologies in a queue by selecting a Tech further down the tree.
  
• Festival has been redesigned to use Autonomy as its cost and provide it's bonus in scalable way with increasing cost (based on active Festivals).
  
• Festival now has a counter-part ability called Garden which costs gold and instead of mitigating excess food, it can convert excess free housing.
  
• Both Festival and Garden behaviour can be improved by a number of rare traits (mostly from Unique heroes).
  
• There is now also an Auto Quest skill which will automatically send quests to all tiles. This is a simplified version, which will be updated with the new Map update in next version.
  

[h2] Away-Playing [/h2]

• Before loading a game, player can choose to preview what their civilization would look like if playing for the time they were away.
  
• If the player likes how far the civilization survived, they can choose to continue, or instead load the game as it was when they left.
  
• Away-time can be calculated up to 24 hours. It currently takes about 30s to calculate the preview for entire 24h (depending on your device specs ofc)
  
• Accepting away time will grant a reward for each Hour that the civilization managed to thrive.
  
• Away-time is a highly beta-feature at this moment.
  
• To survive in away time it is recommended to utilize Autonomy skills and eventually combine with Blue heroes who can further boost the stability of your civilization.
  

[h2] Combat [/h2]

• There are now new debuffs which can modify Crisis strength (similar to Storm from older versions).
  
• Debuffs can be now gained through a new 'Predicament' mechanism which delivers a Debuff in a some randomly picked time (something like a time-bomb).
  
• Surviving a debuff will grant you a new perseverance trait buff which lasts until the next ascension.
  
• Later in game you will encounter new type of unique crisis with new challenges.
  
• Stun has been slightly updated to only affect either Light or Heavy units (there are now two separate Stun traits)
  
• Militia now upgrades with Technologies.
  
• There are now new ways to increase your Militia charge cap and recharge speed.
  
• Auto Combat skill now is configurable to support each unit type.
  
• Era Boss Crises (Neolithic revolution etc.) have been converted to Locks (but other than that they work pretty much as before)
  
• There is a new Click supercharging skill that especially auto-clicker players may like.
  
• Festival is now a method to reduce Click Heat.
  
• Workshops no longer scale charges capacity with level. Instead charges cap has to be increased by other (more uncommon) means.
  

[h2] Other [/h2]

• Black lotus now works differently. Instead of being used as currency, it will negate any gold lotus gained during ascension.
  
• Ascension tree has been expanded and restructured. As a result your old save game might end up having Ascensions which are dislocated.
  
• Can select multiple technologies in a queue by selecting a Tech further down the tree.
  
• More damage number details in Hero screen
  
• Adde Damaged from Bolster or Barracks is now indicated on the unit ability popup
  
• Unit charging traits are now showing in the same way for Workshops and Units as % per second.
  
• There are now new tutorials appearing in various secondary game screens (heroes, research, quests)
  
• Corruptions no longer can be avoided by equipping a trash hero. The priority to which hero it will assigned to is calculated from a more complex score system.
  

Hello,

it feels as if the last update was just a few days back. Spring days are flying by with incredible speed. There's plenty of new things added to 0.8 but mainly we're going to take a look at the new update to the Adversary system (formerly Crisis system, but there are now more entities to this than Crises, hence a new buzz-word is needed). Also I'll share some quick info about the upcoming v0.8 beta.



As you may already know, the existing Crisis system is somewhat 'temporary'. Not that it would be completely changed, but a lot of features are a bit forcibly simplified. A lot of feedback mentioned a wish for more variability in combat and additional/better progression in difficulty.

Nemeses system is a new feature which should eventually address both. What is a Nemesis? Nemesis is a unique type of crisis similar to existing 'Era' Crises that you combat every 7 technological levels but with a few differences.

The first difference is that each Nemesis crisis is repeatable. As soon as you Unleash the nemesis (more on this later) it will repeatedly be triggered every 5 minutes or so, depending on the outcome of the battle.

Second difference is, that each Nemesis is Invincible. Invincible crises cannot be reduced below 50% HP until a specific condition is satisfied (that differs per each Nemesis, and may eventually differ per each Civilisation run). For instance, when you Unleash the Smallpox Nemesis, you may need to reach a specific amount of Research per second in order to dispel its invulnerability.

Third difference is that Nemeses will only be available on Rare technologies. Rare technologies are a new Feature unlocked in Ascension tree. Each run there is only one Rare technology appearing somewhere in your technology tree, offering massive benefits but also some drawback. A Nemesis Lock will precede each Rare technology, Unleashing that Nemesis as soon as the Lock is Open.

Tech tree now conceals which technologies are behind Locks (and you will have the ability to circumvent that - though not for free). As tech tree progresses, this will open new mechanics to plan your way through if you are looking for speed or safety.

[h2]How do I fight invincible Crisis?[/h2]

For a good part of every run, player will have no means to destroy a Nemesis. The only option is to 'survive'. That can be achieved by usual Fort-everything strategy. Alternatively players will also be able to scare-away the crisis with use of Units. The mechanics here works a bit different than with normal 'mortal' crises.

When you reduce an Invincible Crisis to it's 50% HP, each successive attack will (instead of reducing HP) exhaust one Crisis' attack. When all are exhausted, the crisis disappears (as if waited out).

Only after the Nemesis' Invincibility Condition is satisfied, can you reduce the Nemesis HP to zero, thus removing it from the current Civilization run.

Fun fact: Although there are several hypotheses Smallpox may have co-developed into the severe form between rodents and their best friends - the farming humans about 3000 - 4000 years ago. Luckily in 1977 after a 19-year process, a vaccination campaign eliminated the disease from the whole planet. The cost estimates ~1.3 Billion USD in today's dollars (so about the cost of the GPT5 training) for the eradication of Smallpox, saving ~15 Million people from death every year since.

[h2]How many Nemeses are there[/h2]

The v0.8 will only contain three Nemeses: The Huns, The Smallpox and The Inquisition. Each randomly spawning in your Tech tree after unlocking Rare Technologies ascension. Both the Nemesis system and Rare technologies concept are still 'much beta' and it depends on future beta testing, where the whole complex of features is going to move.

New Technology tree is overall progressing in difficulty with new Eras unlocked. Rare technologies will introduce Nemeses after Renaissance era. Other ascensions were also re-grouped to make more sense progression-wise. For instance Auto-skills are accessed in an early branch right behind Stonehenge while Hero recipes can be unlocked from a shared cluster rather than being spread across the tree.



It would be pity if this was all the new trouble coming our way in Microcivilization in v0.8. The next feature is something that would best be described as 'abstraction' of the existing Storm debuff.

As you may have experienced yourself, the Storm debuff (currently available on Babel tower scenario or via Hanging Gardens trait) is a bit of a lonely feature, having little alternative debuffs or any deeper integration with the rest of the game. Have no fear. In v0.8 anyone can have their own storm free of charge. And also Rats, Drought and Industrial Pollution.

[h2]Debuffs to ruin your day[/h2]
This is exactly what this is about. A set of debuffs (for the moment let's call them Disasters) which will amplify any Crisis you face while they're active.

Storm used to add unblockable attacks. It still does. But it also amplifies any Crisis risk in the meantime between Crises.

Rats will add Damage-per-second attacks to new Crises and create a flat Disease Risk.

Drought will ruin your food production and will make all Crises HP bigger.

Industrial pollution will be your best friend however. It increases fire risk and prevents you from constructing anything during a crisis.

Combining multiple Disasters at the same time is possible, though not recommended.

[h2]Predicaments turning into Disasters[/h2]
How does one get a Disaster? Randomly? No. In Microcivilization I believe that the player's action should be the ultimate root cause of everything that happens. No flat % chance of tornadoes here.

Instead, we now have a feature called Predicament. It is a sibling to the 'crisis risk' feature we already know. The major difference is that a Predicament is a certainty that a problem will happen. You just don't know when or what that problem will be. How does that work?

All this leads back to our new Technology tree again. Same way you can unleash Nemesis before starting a research, you can unleash a Predicament debuff. So yay, all of your misery will be effectively self-inflicted.

Predicaments are illustrated as a time-bomb triggered by new technology and they're exactly that. Who knew that leeching gold ore with cyanide atop the hill might eliminate all fish in the rivers in 2 years.

Instead of having a % change of triggering a Disaster, each predicament debuff has a specific Time when that predicament 'explodes' and 'turns into' a Disaster. The time is between 1 minute and 1 hour. (There are going to be ways to find out what the predicament time is).

Of course, there will be other ways to receive a specific disaster (A Nemesis may for instance grant a Disaster debuff directly as one of it's Ultra-Attacks)

[h2]How does this work together with Crises?[/h2]

The long 'time-bomb' period of Predicament means you cannot easily wait them out. You will be forced to move on with the Damocles bombs ticking above your head, risking to end up with a swarm of would-be-easy Crises becoming insane unblockable aggressive ninja Crises with piranhas and locusts swarms. If that isn't fun, I don't know what is...

But don't worry, predicaments don't start appearing until Medieval era. The initial variants should be relatively soft and scarce. Only as you progress further down the ascension tree should the amount of bombs grow and turn into a problem worth considering.

As with Nemeses, this is just a first version. We'll see what direction to evolve the Disaster/Predicament feature.

[h2]Secrets[/h2]

All the above features are revolving around the new 'Lock' system that precedes technologies in your tech tree. This lock system is currently very generic and may change significantly in the future. However one trick was added to help players overcome some of the more challenging Locks, like the mentioned nemeses or predicaments.

Secrets are a new resource, which you can gain by some updated Tribal-Village Dilemma cards or simply from a few selected technologies in the tech tree. Secrets can be used from within the tech tree to force unlock any Lock, without triggering it's effect of having to satisfy the locks' condition (in case of locks like 'complete 3 quests')

With secrets you have some way to strategize your path through the Tech Tree. With Locks and Tribal villages being randomized each Civilization, you may need to change approach each time to get to the later era faster.

In case you're looking for a precise and less stressful play style, stocking on Secrets and using them up to work around Nemeses and Predicaments is the strategy you may want to apply.




Majority of the work in the past month was testing and balancing. There's still a number of bugs to be solved, playtesting to do (especially late-game and AFK play) and some artwork to be made.

However it feels that the code stability and feature coverage is where I expected it to be back in my last update, so I can safely say that the Beta will be opened before the end of May. I'll issue an announcement as soon as that happens.

Away time calculation is starting to look more stable. This is example of the loading screen indicating which rewards your civilization would get, if you accept 20 hours of away time. In the beginning it seems my Civ managed to repel all crises, winning over 80% of fights. But then probably succumbed to some rare fore. So now I can now chose to Accept that to get 21 heroes, along with a beefy 400% drop-rate bonus and 2 Gold Lotuses for the price of having to rebuild the civilization from scratch. Or I can instead load the game as it was when I left the pc yesterday...



I have made a few adjustments to the Roadmap to reflect the existing situation a bit better. Overall there are no major delays regarding 0.8 (should get released early June if beta goes OK) or 0.9 (likely by the end of Q3)

I am however starting to suspect that formal 1.0 release date will be affected by Soundtrack work (I have made a different - bigger - plan for Soundtrack) and eventually some artwork features required for Tiers 2,3 and 4. I have been considering doing most of these as Content Updates past 1.0 but for some features i begin to find it make less and less sense. To be transparent about this uncertainty I have stretched the possible 1.0 across Q1 and Q2 2025.

For various reasons I am postponing work on soundtrack to not affect the critical versions 0.8 and 0.9. But like I said in one of previous updates - music is a difficult piece of work to estimate for me and it's quite likely I won't resist the urge to spend more time on this than absolutely necessary :)


This is all I wanted to share for now. Have a nice day.

Ondrej

Hi,

I hope you all had a good month. It's been very productive time for Microcivilization's 0.8 build. With all the new features added to the system, it has come to integrate them all together into a sensible gameplay progression. In this update I'll share more details about some of these new features and how they are (likely) going to connect with the rest of the game you already know.

Many new features are unlocked with new ascensions roughly arriving around second half of current gameplay. As a result I had to stretch the tree out a bit.

[h2]Autonomy resource[/h2]
As I mentioned in my previous update the Autonomy resource will go through a complete redesign. The general idea is to use Autonomy as a 'mana pool' to do stuff. Pretty much like Gold is now used. However there's a significant difference between the two resources. First it should actually be explained what the Autonomy represents in-game.

[h2]Why do we want Autonomy?[/h2]
First, let's consider why we need a resource like this in the first place. What gameplay style does this resouce even aims to reinforce?

The idea behind autonomy is to let players choose somewhere between these extremes:

Option 1 - a government strictly protecting and guiding its people through the struggles of the world. With the player being the wise all-knowing hand that rewards, protects and disciplines its faithful population who hardly know what is good for them and would otherwise end-up as hedonistic cannibal heretics ever-struggling in petty internal clashes. Who else than the player to show them a way to civilized society...

Option 2 - a government that promotes individual merit, personal freedoms and admitting that no single ruler knows more than the massive experience of community, the player guides their population into independence, self-sustainability and self-governance where everyone's voice is heard and no-one is left behind...

Sweet huh? Well unless things go sideways and option 1 ends up with a totalitarian dictatorship, purges and slave camps (more on that in future updates) or if option 2 ends up with a collapse of control and a coup leading to an orwellian animal-farm version of option 1. So there's the gameplay 'we all want and love'...

[h2]What is Autonomy[/h2]
The resource itself represents the ability and will of your micro-population to govern and act on their own impulse. Mathematically:

Let P be a total number of your Population.
Then let Autonomy A be a number of P who are not complete gullible uneducated ignorants.

Armed with this foolproof definition we can now clearly see what autonomy would offer us as benefits and at the same time as potential problems.

[h2]The bad news[/h2]
As per the definition, autonomy will be representing some kind of attribute belonging to your population. For that reason autonomy will strictly by capped by the amount of your Pop size. You can't have more independent-thinkers than you have actual people right?

This constraint alone will make autonomy rather hard to get, especially in large and fast-growing empires. Roughly speaking a single point of autonomy will be about as valuable as two gold coins. Considering the population in level 40+ can reach into a million, this makes growing fully independent society a long term goal.

With new system a new breakdown details. This time it will be necessary to provide cross-linked information of what is boosted by autonomy and why.

The other bad news, is that each single death will cause a loss of two autonomy points. People get scared. And their will usually then turns to prioritizing their own family survival, than the benefits of others. Forcing out legion of unarmed militia to fend off invaders may quickly ruin the self-governance ability of the democratic society and create a need for your authority to help get them back on their feet (or on their knees if you choose).


[h2]The good news[/h2]

Other than by population loss, Autonomy will not drop unless you say so. Only by using (or abusing) your population's will you spend the hard-earned autonomy resource. Is that a good idea or bad idea? Depends.

Autonomy will provide not only a mana-pool to use special abilities, but also a set of passive bonuses.
Since autonomy is scaling with population, these benefits will also scale with population. This single reason can potentially make all 'autonomy provision' benefits far more powerful than existing resource progression provided by workshops.

For instance earning +1 Stone per 1000 Autonomy points could easily grow to a +1000 stone in modern era (which is huge even if this is added as a flat bonus not boosted with +% modifiers). Therefore some of these benefits will not be easy to get. Some will only be accessible through Wonders or Unique heroes with complementary down-sides.

One of the basic autonomy skills is a boost to your Militia cap and charging speed. If all goes wrong, sacrificing your passive bonuses to gain extra counter-crisis capability can be strategically wise desicision. Keep in mind that Militia also causes direct death and thus more autonomy loss.

Compared to gold, population and free housing, autonomy will not have any beyond-limit penalty so you can stay on Max autonomy all the time with no extra risk. (exceptions will exist, more on this in the future). Same as before autonomy points are used by auto-combat, auto-click and auto-construction skills however their cost is now represented always a X per second to allow long-term calculation for AFK play.

Another good news is that autonomy will be feeding into a number of other late-game mechanisms mostly to those available on Blue faction heroes. Overall you will have to make a decision whether to keep your autonomy up for passive bonuses, or use-up the autonomy on abilities that may prevent you falling to the next upcoming crisis.


[h2]Library and Theater[/h2]

With the new autonomy mechanisms tied to other parts of the game, Theater and Library can now be turned into their originally intended roles as main workshops of autonomy flow.

Similar to other resource workshops, Library will be the main source of autonomy points. Representing the practical education of society, library feels to be the natural choice to drive autonomy spread and a 'vertical' improvement of your population. The active charge power of Library is now modelled in the same way as Marketplace - turning other charges into autonomy surge. This creates a bit of symmetry between those two workshops.

Caps & Recharge speed of workshops is now using similar mechanic with military units so there was a small unification of the UI display of the recharge in progress so that both systems use the same philosophy and numerical representation.

Theater stays to be the only workshop providing you with permanent value - Heroes. However with economy of gold and autonomy in place, it can be properly tied to Marketplace and Library to form up a combo. Theater will now have independent rolls for hero and corruption drops, so it will not be a guarantee to always end up with one. It will also be possible to scale up its charge cap, recharge rate and allow dropping of unique heroes.

To compensate for all that, theater will be the only workshop which passively consumes resources instead of providing them (gold and autonomy in this case). This places Theater sort-of to the top of the food chain of your economy.

[h2]Other changes[/h2]


[h3]Automation Skills moved to ascension[/h3]
After much consideration, core automation skills - Auto-Construction and Auto-Combat have been moved off to Ascension tree. That means they can now be unlocked at any point and used regardless of your hero setup. The previous setup, where only Blue hero faction had this ability proved to be too limiting and prone to re-equipping. It is still planned to keep Blue faction specialized for autonomous play, but having removed the skills themselves, opens more flexibility to combining blue faction with other colors. After all it is not intended to reward single faction builds, but instead promote multi-color builds.

[h3]Research queue[/h3]
Research can now be queued. So you can select any tech available down the line and they will automatically get switched as they are finished researching. With several new decisions to be done in tech tree during gameplay, auto research has become a rather tricky problem to solve - similar to automatic world-map expansion.

So for now neither of those two (auto research or auto quests) will exist. When the system gets more mature, those two autoskills will probably appear. For now research queue should solve the tediousness of repetitive runs.

[h3]New Corruptions[/h3]
New features mean new punishments. Main mechanism for punishing the player are Corruptions. So far there have only been a few trivial Corruptions that are 'generally bad debuffs' but nothing to really strategize about. The new version will introduce new Corruptions which will provide a very distinct punishment to one of your economic aspect, but also provide an option to turn another aspect to a benefit.

The first new Corruption will be Despotism (Leader-specific corruption) with a unique ability that hides all risks from you, while providing resources based on lack of Autonomy.
The other will be Fanaticism, which will (among other effects) penalize Research while gaining of rush of Autonomy from free workers.

[h3]Charge cap[/h3]
Until now, workshop charges were scaling up with upgrade levels. With the new system it is possible to scale workshop cap with Hero traits. In fact the Blue faction can now specialize on Workshop Cap increase. This will enable hoarding of resources through period of AFK play mostly. This also opens the door to other features planned for the future tiers.

A tiny bit of update on Workshop hover details was necessary to include all traits that boost the workshop from other sources (e.g. from map tiles or from autonomy)

[h3]Militia upgrades[/h3]
Militia is the main unit tied to the autonomy for obvious reasons. Militia has therefore been updated to increase in power with technologies in the same way other units do. Militia cap, damage and recharge rates will also be subject to various new abilities revolving around Blue faction and Autonomy resource.

[h3]Black Lotus redesign[/h3]
Black lotus now has it's fate determined for the future tiers. The original plan was a bit more modest than the new plan (which I don't want to share yet). However the difficult decision was to change existing black lotus behaviour for Tier 1 entirely.

From now on, each Black lotus will destroy a Gold lotus you gained in the same scenario. Thus if you earn 10 Gold Lotuses, but due to high amount of deaths you also acquire 3 black lotuses, you'll only end up with 7 Gold lotuses. Black lotuses are not preserved (at least not in ascension tier 1).

A few details are added to ascension screen to explain black lotus calculation. Scoring is still old and will change after balancing is done in the next couple of weeks.

That in essence makes black lotus a pure punishment as opposed to before, when it could be also used as a 'consolation prize' to unlock certain abilities. Along this line, the rules of obtaining Black lotus will also change. There will be more lucrative ways to gain Black lotus for different short-term survivability benefits (and vice versa).

To share a few spoilers though, previous mechanism where Black lotuses are gained as a resource and used to obtain new ascension will reappear later. Black lotus' role will be one of the central moving pieces of the ascension tree after the Babel tower scenario together with the emergence of other Lotus types.

[h2]What's next[/h2]
The existing version 0.8 now has all new features programmed into the system. Those features are not fully tested, and far from 'variated' (for instance we will need more corruptions, more new crises and a plenty of new technologies in the tech tree). Also all the new features will have to go through balancing, so that the player experience progresses as expected.

This 0.8 version is probably going to be the biggest update of the early access phase in terms of 'things impacted'. So the balancing and testing phases may in fact be longer than I estimated. Still my plan so far looks realistic to reach beta in May. The sheer complexity of the 0.8 features cross-dependency is also one of the reasons I failed to deliver the planned 0.7 patch supporting cloud saves (the cost of switching context for that update would be very counter-productive). But hopefully I'll get to this patch as soon we're closing to the beta (possibly merging the cloud saves support with 0.8 - but nothing is decided yet)

Next time I hope to share more details about the new adversary concepts that will accompany crises beginning from mid-game and will introduce some more challenges to the player. Also hopefully to show the final look of the v0.8 tech tree.

See you,

Ondrej

Hello,

Another four weeks are gone and now would be the time I would share all the news I have, But this time it will have to be different. There's a lot of things I can't yet share. But I'll give you some sneak peek what this is all about.



The first topic I want to touch is the future of ascension tree. In the past I only hinted a few details about this. The main reason is that I was never very sure how exactly the tree will be extrapolated. Will there be a new mechanic on tier 2 or tier 3 or both? Will there be one new type of lotus or more than 1? Will they all have different mechanics? How is the Black lotus going to come into play? How many Tiers will there be? What Scenarios will be between future tiers? What connections will there be between the scenarios? How is difficulty going to scale? Many questions are still unanswered but some had to be answered a few days back.

Originally I planned a 3 tier ascension tree. Because 3 is a nice number. There was never a reason why exactly three. After finishing a few books and spending a few days with a virtual whiteboard I came up with some ideas and realised we need one more.

Current plan (and I am 90% sure the plan will still evolve) is to separate the ascension tree into 4 tiers, each concluded by a scenario similar to the Babel tower. As you will progress through higher tiers, the hero level will continue to rise approximately ~50 levels per tier, thus leading up to level ~200. My expectation is that each tier would have roughly same game length as the first tier. However there are updates planned for the first tier as well and a potentially a number of optional 'grind' time. So this is hard to estimate.

These tiers would each introduce a new core mechanic to the game. That could be a new type of lotus awarded for different achievements. That may be a new type of problems your civilisations will have to face. That may also include transformation of existing concept into something more complex. This can be all above at once. I have specific ideas but for now I won't share any spoilers.

The fifth tier is where this vision ends. There's no specific decision for tier 5 yet. One option is the Tier 5 is not going to make it to version 1.0 and will be done later. Another option is that tier 5 will be created as a simple endless feature and will be incrementally improved over post-1.0 content updates. But for now it is outside my perspective.



In my last update I mentioned the new Dynamic technology tree. Tech tree was an ancient piece of code in the game and it was in bad need of cleanup and upgrade. The good news is that this is done and as a result I now have the following capabilities:

1. Add 'accidental' technologies to the tree on-the-fly (for instance by discovering a rare technology from a tribal village). Hello medieval penicilin.
   
2. Can make accidental technologies permanently available (through ascensions for instance) thus creating a new meta-progress.
   
3. Can in theory make Unique Heroes or Wonders unlock otherwise unavailable technology
   
4. Can end the tree with endlessly generated list of random technologies
   
5. Can have optional branches so that you no longer have to research nearly everything every time
   
6. Can skip certain workshop levels or units as part of 'tech rush' strategy
   
7. Can modify existing technologies through ascensions (yes you're probably scratching your head 'how does THAT make sense')
   
8. Can 'forbid' a technology from research
   
9. Can block any technology branch by a 'gate' similar to how current era bosses work.
   
10. Technology gates can be arbitrary - for instance a tech can be locked until a certain map tile is upgraded or a foreign tribe is found
    
11. We can use a new resource to open any tech gate. A sort of a 'wild card'
    
12. We can get make the Star Bonuses dynamic every run
    
13. We can also replace or mix bonuses system with the gate system
    

The bad news here that all the above are just 'options'. Whether or not I chose to use some of them or none is yet to be decided. At the moment it is not clear which features will be advantageous and which ones would end up being just an unnecessary frustration to the players. For the moment the biggest advantage is to have all those options available until an opportunity presents itself to use them as a solution to an actual problem. So for the next month's work I decided to swap to the second area of focus.



This is simple. Autonomy resource is currently very limited in use. We need to give it a significant 'face-lift'. The general idea is to follow the same logic as the Gold update had. Just do everything a little differently.

[h2]Autonomy shop[/h2]
As with Gold, Autonomy will get it's unique skills unlocked by both technology as well as by Heroes/Wonders. Those abilities will be accessible via it's own Shop screen and will use the same User interface principles - Trigger abilities and Toggle abilities.

This new concept will include existing automation skills of course. However the skills will have to go through a bit of redesign first. Additionally there's a number of policy skills that will give player more abilities at their disposal and will also make use of the population number itself (as opposed to using Workers as the sole economical unit).

As with gold, autonomy will work as a 'mana' resource to spend on abilities.

[h2]Connection to ascension tiers[/h2]
In addition to above, Autonomy is planned to be more deeply embedded into other game features. But for simplicity's sake those features will not manifest themselves until later through the game. This ties to the new planned mechanics unlocked in ascension tiers 2,3 and 4.

[h2]Theater and Library redesign[/h2]

There is no coincidence that Research and Autonomy are being redesigned together. This all stems from the need to provide a meaningful function to the workshops that specialize on these two mechanics.

Theater as is now is providing a too easy way to create trash heroes with little cost. At the same time it doesnt provide a very meaningful passive ability unless you use Autonomy skills heavily. Library is relatively OK, but doesnt provide any 'significant' mechanic for the player. So as part of the upcoming update, both of these workshops will be updated and rebalanced.

[h2]AFK[/h2]
One of the fundamental features left out from the game on early access release day was AFK play. This is the feature that you know from Idle games, that lets you complete a lengthy projects over a real-life night. That is, when the game gets loaded next day, you are able to use that idle time the game was off to your advantage. (basically the game will check how long it was off, and then fast-forwards the game world to the future)

This feature was there for November release but was problematic and therefore has been disabled. Finally it has been turned back on and is now being thoroughly tested. I'll share more details about this when the final version is ready for beta test. Will have to also run more performance tests on lower-spec machines.

For now however let me repeat what I said back before that this AFK feature will not be a mandatory thing. I am perfectly aware that not every time you can spend time to prepare your civilization for 48 hours of complete autonomy. So there's always going to be a choice to not skip 'to the future'. The Idle play should be just one of the play styles of this game. One that you can entirely skip if you choose to.



As part of some of the changes and decisions around Research tree I had to adjust the plan a little bit. About 2 weeks of extra work (features I did not want to do at all now seem more attractive to do) was added to the last plan's version and another 2 weeks were lost mostly to being sick.

You can check the new roadmap here.
As usual I keep the original roadmap versions in separate tabs - so you can see what the plan looked like earlier.
The main outcome is that version 0.8 (new research and autonomy) will not be finished completely within Q1 and so will most likely get into beta near the end of May.

That's about it. See you next time.

Ondrej