Critias Empire News

It's been a long time since my last update, way back in August. The second half of 2024 really pulled me in too many different directions; I spent most of my time trying to balance working on 3 different game projects and in the end, none of them made anything like the progress I wanted.

[h2]Shorter Focus[/h2]

Partly for financial reasons, and partly for my own sanity, I've started 2025 by focusing on smaller games. I've managed to finish Ambient Dark, which will come out until March. And I've a second small game that will be announced in the next few days, that similarly is close to completion and should release in the next couple of months.

Both those games will be in Steam NextFest, alongside Critias Empire. My plan is to spend February before the festival on Critias Empire, finishing up as many features as I can before NextFest, with a view to release the full game a couple of months later. For those not aware, Steam NextFest is a big deal and a game can only ever be in the festival once, so I want to make sure the game is as good as it can be. But also I'm hoping this will be the push needed to get the game within sight of the finish line, instead of something I'm forever tinkering with.

[h2]Road To The Finish[/h2]

To get Critias Empire where it needs to be for that, I am going to have to be a bit ruthless with features and concentrate on the things that are really vital for the game. That means Festivals feature will get moved to post-launch update. As well, making new disasters, while fun, is something I can shift to after the "main" game is finished, and just keep adding in post-release.

That "main" game will have much larger maps than what are currently in the demo scenarios, with longer play times, more Gods, and more wonders. I've also concluded, after much thought, that the game is best served by having fixed balance settings / difficulty levels. I will therefore balance the game to give specific experiences. Currently I am thinking along the lines of:

• A genuinely chill game where disasters are more helpful than hurtful.
  
• A more narrative focused game where the impact of decisions and God-Player interactions really ramps up.
  
• A game that is far more of a mechanical challenge with much harsher limits on things like worker bonuses.
  

I should be giving updates on each of these as I implement them. In the meantime though, I'll be finishing off the Decisions system and re-implementing the Tutorial, so expect to see those in the next update.

[h2]The Legend of Atlantis[/h2]

Finally, I'm excited that Critias Empire is part of the Myths and Legends festival, which starts today! (Jan 29, 2025). The legend of Atlantis might be one of the more well known stories to have been handed down from ancient times, but the fact only the first half of the story has made its way down through history to us is telling about all the possibilities it sparks in the imagination.



My hope with Critias Empire is that it can be a way for people to explore a bit further some of those "what if..?" type scenarios and imagine what the ancient world was like in the spaces between what records and archaeology can tell us!

The decision system has been implemented and I'm now in the process of creating the content for it. In this update I'll preview that, and the changes I want to make to the tutorial afterwards.

[h2]Think About[/h2]

I've talked previously about plans for the "Decisions" system in the game: Various player actions have a chance of spawning a story snippet, that asks the player to choose between a number of options, each with various possible outcomes.

Which is a very dry way of saying that the Gods are now much more reactive to how you play, throwing you tricky conundrums which you need to respond to. I'm hoping this will make the game feel much more connected to the ancient Greek mythological theme and be a much more intuitive way of interacting with the Gods.



I've finally implemented this! I'm pretty happy with how it works, but it does mean I need to now go and write a whole bunch of story for the game, which is part of the reason I'm not releasing this feature just quite yet.

[h2]What Now?[/h2]

However, I've noticed another problem with Critias Empire:

Some people don't know what to do...

This comes from me watching people play the game at live events, on youtube/let's plays, and is also hinted at in the analytics data recorded about how people play the game. I've known for a while that the game has a couple of problems for new players:

Firstly: There is often nothing to do from turn 2 to turn 4 or 5, as players use up all their stone in their first turn and then have to wait to collect enough stone to build another building.

In most strategy games, players can at least move some units around to explore the map during these very early parts of the game. Typically they'll get random rewards (a.k.a "goodie huts" for those familiar with the Civilization series) from things players find scattered about. which both feels like progress and then enables further decisions. Things such as where to send a newly spawned scout unit, or what to build with the hoard of materials pilfered from ancient ruins.

(As an aside: I think Humankind does this the best of all the 4X games I've played. It's Neolithic era is dynamic and interesting and has lots of fun decisions to make. It's a lot more than just picking a direction and sending the scout that way).

Since Critias Empire doesn't have units, and exploration doesn't work in the same way, I think players get confused and put off at not having anything to do - neither being asked by the game, nor being able to find something themselves.



I plan to use the decision system to get players over this hump and not only give them something to think about, but also give rewards/resources that then enable them to do more things in the following turns also.

[h2]And Why?[/h2]

Secondly: The tutorial does not explain why players' choices are important (or why the tutorial is asking them to do something). It just teaches them how to do various things. For some, that's fine because they enjoy figuring out stuff for themselves. But for others it fails to give them a sense of what to do immediately after they come off the tutorial rails. It also leaves players without an idea of what their short and medium term goals should be.

I always wanted to have a more sophisticated tutorial with gifs and multiple ways of explaining things, but I've realised the content of the current tutorial is also missing this "why" element.

[h2]And So[/h2]

My plan, after creating the initial batch of content/stories for the Decisions system, is to re-make the tutorial. There's a business priority here as well, which is that right now, the median demo play time is 14 minutes, and that's way shorter than it should be - A few people are playing much longer, which is great, but ultimately I want more people to really get stuck into the game and reach the later stages, then go on to wishlist the game. Not just get wiped out after the second disaster because they didn't really know what they were doing (as I've seen happen a few times).

[h2]Fortune[/h2]

The last couple of months have been a bit strange. After going on holiday and unsuccessfully pitching my games to publishers at develop conference in Brighton, I first injured myself while running, then got covid, from which I've only recovered properly this week. I'm quite pleased with myself at merely having got back to doing some normal programming, with the Decisions system, after barely writing a line of code since some time in June!

I'll be at gamescom in Cologne next week, (so come say Hi if you're there also!) though I won't be showing Critias Empire except at a side event (Courage Cologne on Tuesday). Once I get back from that, expect another update some time in September, where hopefully I can talk about the tutorial changes and push the Decision system live / to the demo build.

In the meantime, any thoughts or feedback on the game or this update are most welcome, and you can always contact me on social media or leave a comment below!

The latest version of the demo is out now. It comes with a new scenario, and a new disaster! In this devlog I'll be detailing the changes to the game, plus the facepalm-inducing bugs that I fixed and lots of other small improvements.

[h2]Sea Change[/h2]

As covered in the previous update, Critias Empire now has "scenarios". Each scenario has its own rules and balance, including different resources and buildings, all wrapped up in a bit of story. The maps are still procedurally (randomly) generated for now. I want to see how people find them before thinking about whether to support scenarios with pre-made maps.

Originally I was thinking scenarios would be a relatively easy way to keep adding fresh content into the game, as well as compartmentalise new features or ideas around game balance. However, it's taken a lot more effort than I anticipated to create just the two scenarios in this update, one of which is just a re-packaging of what was already in the game. I have a few ideas for more scenarios but if those also prove to take a lot of time to create, I'll switch focus back to adding features and systems.

[h2]Poseidon's Revenge[/h2]

The new Bronze Seas scenario also comes with a new disaster. You can probably guess what it is from the blog title, but I'll leave the details of how it works as a surprise. I am though encouraged that it was relatively easy to implement.

I'm keen to get more feedback on how the disaster feels, as well as the Bronze Seas scenario balance, so please let me know in comments or find me on social media / discord if you have opinions. This will help me fine tune the disaster balance and also help with determining what disasters to add in the future.

[h2]Epic Facepalm[/h2]

Right from when the demo first launched, players have been reporting strange behaviour and playing on weird map configurations. In the results from the bug reporting button I kept seeing screenshots of maps with tiny slithers of land, and sea, all forest and mountain and bonus resources on every single tile. Completely wrong compared to what should be being generated.

I decided to add in some extra fields/data to the bug reporting to help me find this and other issues. One of those extras was a date stamp. Since I knew people (and by extension, the local time settings on their operating systems) in the USA use a strange month-day-year format for their dates, I'd have to format every date to be in a neutral, non-regional-specific format, before sending the bug report data.

Doing this, it dawned on me that there are some other regional quirks, like some countries use a dot for a decimal place marker, and others a comma. That's when I realised what was going wrong with the map generation. Most of the balance data in Critias Empire is just whole numbers, but there are a lot of decimal points in the balance data for map generation. Turns out, when reading in the balance data from file, the decimal points in that data were being interpreted differently based on what language/location settings the player had. For example, 1.5 was sometimes being turned into 1 and a half, and sometimes into 1 thousand 5 hundred.



I'm kinda proud that my code is so robust it can handle ridiculously large numbers without straight up crashing (too often). But I even had this same type of problem occur on a previous game I worked on earlier in my career. So I feel especially stupid for not thinking about it earlier.

In any case, the bug is now fixed, and everyone can enjoy the maps as they're supposed to be. (Note: I actually patched this fix in in Build 45 around the start of June. But you will need to start a new game for the fix to work. It does not fix existing maps/playthroughs sadly).

[h2]Abandon Ship[/h2]

One piece of feedback I keep getting is that there's no way to destroy a building (land use) except by hoping it gets destroyed in a disaster. Way back years ago, I gave players the ability to destroy buildings and recover a portion of the build cost. I found during early playtesting, often players would simply tear down their empire the turn before a disaster, hold everything in resource stockpiles that are unaffected by disasters, and then rebuild as they saw fit afterwards.

It was quite a smart strategy but removed the jeopardy of disasters in exchange for the player doing a lot of repetitious clicking. That wasn't a fun dynamic, so I removed the ability for players to destroy buildings.



However with the new Bronze Seas scenario, my QA tester at one point got stuck through no fault of his own due to being unable to destroy certain buildings. So I thought it would be a good time to re-open the issue.

Critias Empire now has an ability where you can "Abandon" a building. It stops producing and consuming, and also frees up workers, which can be handy especially in some tight squeezes immediately after a disaster. Abandoned buildings will decay over a number of turns until they are so dilapidated they are considered destroyed and removed from the map. This can anger the Gods in the process. Decaying buildings can however be repaired and reoccupied by paying a percent of their original build cost.

It's not an especially elegant solution, but it introduces some risk vs reward to the decision and hopefully won't be as obviously exploitable as what came before.

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

Last month, I burned out and became incredibly stressed trying to hit a succession of Steam festivals in a row. Around the end of May, I decided to withdraw Critias Empire from the June Steam NextFest, along with my other game, Palm Paradise Garden. Since then I've been much more relaxed and frankly healthier, mostly by actively avoiding optimising my work time. The demo will still remain online and available however, and my plan to keep updating it long term hasn't changed.

The next month will be a bit disjointed as I'll be visiting my family in the UK as well as pitching for a publisher and funding at develop conference in Brighton. However, I plan to get back to regular monthly updates on Critias Empire, so expect to hear from me again around the start of August.



Before all that, Critias Empire is in the "Made in Germany" steam festival! I moved to Berlin in spring 2017, so about 95% of Critias Empire's development has been here in good ol' Deutschland. I will eventually translate the game into German, but unfortunately not in time for this festival.

Development wise, having teased the Decisions system a few months back, I'm hoping to finally get down to implementing it. Doubtless there'll be lots of bugs to fix and balance tweaks to do from the new update, so I anticipate that'll take up most of my time on Critias Empire in the next few weeks.

Beyond that, Festivals and Predictions features are hovering near the top of the to-do list. However, the latter ties into the reworking of disasters I need to do, so may need to wait till I have a few weeks clear of other tasks.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, (especially on Bronze Seas balance and the new disaster) you can always contact me or leave a comment!

Thank you once again for all the feedback on the demo. It's answered a lot of questions I had in my own head about what works and doesn't in the game. As well your feedback and bug reports have assisted in finding and crushing a host of bugs. Also in helping shaping my thinking about the direction of the game. In this update I'll be going into exactly what has been happening and the next steps on the Critias Empire road.

[h2]Empty Handed[/h2]

I finally got around to improving the survey / exploration feature. Adding in search hints means no survey ever leaves you with nothing at all, which given the relatively high cost of surveying, is a good thing. Or at least the survey hints will tell you when there's nothing to be found, so you don't waste time and resources.

Combined with the priorities filter, the hints also allow you to sniff down the resource you actually want, and over time get a bit of a natural instinct for where might be a good place to start a search in the future.



The priority filter also gives you an idea of what exactly there is to find. I'm hoping this acts as a clue for players who get to the middle of the game and ask "ok, I build my empire, I can't see any marble nor gold, what now?"

[h2]Woolly Balance[/h2]

Originally I balanced the game with the final version in mind - much larger maps and more gods, disasters and wonders. It was only later in making the demo that I decided on a condensed version of the game with a radically cut down number of land uses (buildings), products, gods and disasters.

Releasing the demo made me realise that some of the assumptions in the demo balance were actually left-over from previously and no longer made sense. In particular, estates didn't make sense to build versus the number of workers they needed, and the wool->cloth economy needed for cities was far too demanding. Both of these I have made fine-tune adjustments for, which have already been patched into the demo.

The gods and disaster spawning has also been less even than I'd hoped. The game was balanced for gods slowly getting angrier and angrier as the game continued, to keep pace with player progress. However from talking to you fine folks, seem you either get wrecked early by the disasters, especially from Poseidon. Or reach a tipping point after which your economy is strong enough you can just build your way out of trouble. Sometimes even by accident of just building the favoured-by-the-gods buildings - temples, harbours and mines - that you would have built anyway.

The game also had a bug that would mean disasters failed to find a target location and spawned "empty" disasters where the ground shakes and the skies darken but no volcanoes spawn and no land changes. This combined with the uneven god balancing led to a lot of games where there was neither a threat of disaster, nor any special resources needed for victory spawning.

The disaster no-show bug should now be fixed (at least I hope!) In the short term, I will be rebalancing which land uses (buildings) please/anger which gods. In the medium term, this very direct, mechanical way of interacting with the gods will be replaced by the more subtle "Decisions" system I spoke about in previous blogs.

[h2]Difficult Direction[/h2]

However, the biggest learning is that the skill level of you the players is wildly different. I balanced the demo with the objective of not having anyone get stuck in the horrible death-spiral of not having enough stone, food or workers to build and operate mines and farms. Which in turn are need to collect the stone and food already lacking. And more generally, I leaned towards making the game forgiving.

On this front, I'm really happy this death-spiral issue has hardly come up at all. (Or maybe the people who get stuck in this cycle don't stick around long enough to give any feedback).

However, I've instead found more people commenting that the game is too easy. Specifically, it's too easy to spam mines. As well, being able to build anywhere dilutes the need to carefully plan where to build and expand.

I have a few different ideas of how to tackle this, and it also ties in with another piece of feedback I received.

[h2]A Plethora of Non-Options[/h2]

When I launched the demo, I was in two minds as to whether to include all the different options for changing Tenets, Gods, maps and disasters. My concern was that this would be seen as a promise for a lot of content.

While later versions of the game will have lots of things to switch up each time you hit the new game button, right now, most of those things are not implemented. The result has caused much confusion. The game presents false choices - options that aren't actually changeable.

I realised what the game really needed was "scenarios". Fixed game setups that can't be changed, with a story wrapped around them.



I have implemented the framework for adding scenarios to the game, and I'm now focusing on making two scenarios. The first will be a re-packaging of the existing demo balance. And the second will involve a different balance (different buildings, product and wonders) plus some new surprise features that I've been working on recently.

[h2]Selective Scenarios[/h2]

I was hoping to get these new scenarios out in time for the Steam Endless Replayability festival, but there are just too many bugs to iron out. Things like making sure the tutorial still works and that save-load still functions correctly would suck if they broke from me rushing to get a release.

So instead I'm going to spend a bit more time getting these changes really polished. As part of this, I can do the land use (building) god-affinity rebalancing mentioned above. I also plan for the second scenario to address the mine spam and build-anywhere issues. This way the first scenario is still there as a gentler introduction to the game, while the second scenario provides more of a challenge.

My original plan for developing the game was to selectively turn on/off different options in the new game screen whenever I implemented a new god, disaster or tenet (feature) that I wanted the community to test. However it makes more sense to instead create a scenario and have people play that. That way, the game slowly builds up a library of content that can be re-played at any time, whilst letting me test and balance features in isolation. (The release version of the game will still have what I'm for now calling a "Custom Game" with the ability to change all the options).

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

Critias Empire is currently registered for Steam NextFest in June. A game can only ever be in one NextFest ever, so I'm still debating if it's worth sticking with this sooner NextFest or waiting for the edition after, in October.

I also need to portion up my workload on Critias Empire with my other game, Palm Paradise Garden; also currently slated for June Next Fest. I will keep working on the Critias Empire scenarios update in any case. My plan is still to have the demo available all the time and added to on an on-going basis, regardless of the festivals and events the game is part of.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, (or especially if you find a bug I've reported as fixed!) you can always contact me or leave a comment!

The Critias Empire demo is out now! Go check it out (download link is on the Steam page).

The demo launch coincides with TurnBasedThursday Festival on Steam. I've also set up a discord server where you can hang out and discuss the game. Plus in this update I'll guide you through the work done this month and future plans and roadmap for the game.

[h2]Demonstrating[/h2]

The demo is a cut-down version of Critias Empire. There is only 1 wonder needed for victory, rather than the usual 3. As well, it is played on a small map with reduced number of products and land uses (buildings). And there are only 2 Gods and 2 disasters. I'm hoping this, along with all the future planned content teased in the New Game screen, will be enough to excite people for the final game.



If you enjoyed the demo, click that wishlist button - it's free and will massively help support the game, especially when it comes to awakening the Steam recommendations algorithm into showing the game to more people.

[h2]Charting a Course[/h2]

I've talked extensively in these updates about all the things I'd like to add to Critias Empire. My plan is to now update Critias Empire "in the wild". I will keep adding to the demo as more features are implemented.

Decisions, which I talked about in Devlog 12, are top of the list. Mostly because I think the promise of interacting with the complex personalities of the Olympian Gods isn't really fulfilled by the current Affinity system.

Survey rewards, also as mentioned in the last devlog, are also still high up on the list of improvements. If only to make the late game in the demo less of a grind.

Beyond that, I've marked various features in the game as "Planned" or "Roadmap":

Planned - These are features (Gods, Tenets, Maps, Disasters etc) that absolutely will be implemented, even if it kills me. Oracle, Festivals, Zeus, Fire and Flood disasters are guaranteed - Completing them is the measure I will use to determine when the main game launch is at least viable.

If the game has an early access period (something I'm seriously reconsidering), then Demeter and her associated Health tenet and Climate Change disaster, will come after early access launch but before full version 1,0 launch.



Roadmap - These are all things I have planned and designed - that I would love to implement - but that realistically won't happen if sales of the game simply don't justify it. My intention in "teasing" them is to get you excited as I am for the game and all its possibilities. Just not too excited :p

[h2]Shipping[/h2]

As for the last month's work, Critias Empire has been subjected to all sorts of rigorous testing, pokes and prods. I managed to implement about half the UX (user experience) and QoL (Quality of Life) improvements suggested by testers since February. Sadly two of the most requested: Undo, and hovering over bonus resources on the map, didn't make the cut.

What did make it in were mostly tooltip improvements. Making the build info tooltip sticky after hovering over the land uses (buildings) in the build menu - this alone has changed how I personally play the game. There are now tooltips on (nearly) everything, and my hope is that will help with game transparency and learning.



I also rebalanced cloth and wool economies needed for cities. And I put in quite some work on behind the scenes saving/loading functionality. Game saves are now backward compatible. You can open an old save game from a previous version, and It'll use that version's balance data, rather than the current balance data. This also means I can test different game balances without affecting player's current and previous games. In the really far future, I hope to use it to provide "alternative" rule sets and scenarios.

[h2]Joining the Fleet[/h2]

I've been taking part in #TurnBasedThursday on twitter for the last two years, and now the community behind that has organised a Steam Festival, aptly named TurnBasedThursdayFest. It runs from 4th April to 8th April, making it the perfect chance to launch the Critias Empire demo.



Critias Empire being part of the festival selection is something for which I'm incredibly humbled. This is a community that has supported each other, including me, for a long time and is one of the reasons I love working in the games industry. Not only are the other developers lovely people, but their games are also great. Even for attention-hogging and time consuming 4X strategy genre, video games are not zero sum, so I highly encourage you to check out the other games also in the festival.

A number of those other games are also now linked on the Critias Empire store page in their own special section. Definitely give these a look if strategy and turn-based games are your jam!

[h2]Sailing Far and Wide[/h2]

I've also put not-inconsiderable effort into marketing material for the demo launch. I have created a gameplay video without commentary for use as b-roll should any content creators or press wish to use that while talking about Critias Empire. The presskit link is here and I've also added updated screenshots and gifs to said presskit.

You can also now see my beautiful face (eh?) on the broadcast stream on the Critias Empire steam page. I will hopefully be live later in the week, but before then you can watch the pre-recorded video where I play through the Critias Empire demo and introduce the game, explain various concepts and mostly try not to get my ass kicked by the Gods in the process.

[h2]Stormy Waters[/h2]

Doubtless when the demo launches, some of you will find bugs myself and other testers have not yet come across. Please do use the Bug Report feature: Either it will automatically pop up, or you can press the bug report button, or you can press F8 to open it. I won't be able to reply to every bug report but I will read them all and they can be immensely useful!

As well, I have implemented data tracking / analytics into the game. This is mostly to help me with balancing the game and tracking down bugs. However I also want to be up-front about recording/sending/using data. So if you're not comfortable in any way with being tracked, just hit the "Data Collection" option either when you first start the game, or in the settings screen.

Finally, I will mention that some testers have had problems with anti-virus flagging Critias Empire. Specifically windows defender started having problems with the game once I added in buttons to open the Steam store page and news pages from inside the game. I have run anti-virus scans on my build machine and scanned the resulting Critias Empire.exe file with external anti-virus checkers and it has come back clean and virus free each time. I am satisfied it's just windows defender being over-zealous. But in case you are worried, do run an anti-virus checker of your own after installation. Only ever install via Steam, and if you're still worried, don't click the "Read More" and "Wishlist/Discord" buttons on the main menu.

[h2]Shipmates[/h2]

I have set up a discord server for my studio - Crystalline Green Ltd. - with a dedicated channel for discussing Critias Empire. I'm still contactable on twitter/X and less regularly, facebook and reddit, but I'm a big discord user, and in case you are too, or you have questions or problems that aren't getting such a quick response elsewhere, you can now find me on discord.



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

One of my other games, Palm Paradise Garden, was accepted onto the Steam Farming Festival. So my focus between now and then (end of April) will be on finishing the demo for that game. I will however spend my evenings and weekends fixing Critias Empire bugs, so expect one or two small bug fixing patches between now and the end of the month.

After that (or maybe before, depending on my schedule), as mentioned I'll be aiming to firstly make surveying less painful. And after that get stuck into implementing Decisions feature.

As usual, if you have any of your own feedback or thoughts on the game's progress, you can always contact me or leave a comment!