Turmoil News

Hello and welcome to part 2 of the series where we reveal the contents of the soon-to-be released multiplayer gamemode.

• Multiplayer part 1: an introduction
  A look at what the multiplayer campaign is and what a turn of playing looks like.
  
• Multiplayer part 2: a match in action ← You are here
  
• Multiplayer part 3: game history and end-of-game
• Multiplayer part 4: customization and matchmaking
• Multiplayer part 5: questions & answers
  An overview of community questions that were answered previously. Make sure to put your questions in the comments!
  

Last time you saw what it will be like to play a round of the multiplayer campaign. While playing your own levels is fine and dandy, you also need to know what your opponents are up to. How else are you going to decide how much to bid on the auctions?

Enter the round recap, which happens once each turn. The round recap contains three phases, showing you how much money they earned in their previous level, the distribution of land, and the winner of the stock auction.

Example of a level recap - well done t4!

The first thing you get to see is the level recap. It reveals important information about your opponents, like the amount of money they earned and which upgrades they purchased. You can also view a replay of their level if you’re curious. Watching three replays every round is a bit much, so there are stamps to help highlight all kinds of interesting events that might transpire in a level.

Note that this is a real screenshot of an internal version of the game. We could record a GIF showing the animations but we don’t want to spoil everything!

Example of a land auction recap after it has ended

Continuing to the next phase we arrive at the land auction recap. Just like in single-player mode, the player with the lowest money balance at the start of the round gets to make the first bid. The players will keep bidding automatically according to their previously assigned priorities, until everyone has a plot of land.

A notable observation here is that the first area has only one plot of land for each player. These first area plots are free of charge and will always contain the same amount of oil in a given game. Similar to single-player, the amount of oil per plot is based on the plots close to it. A juicy plot indicates that anything close will likely also be good, even if the plots are separated by an area border!

These two recaps are both for the same in-game turn, but they have a different year indicated at the top. What gives? Each turn, you play a level on the plot that you bought in the previous turn. This means that the level recap is for the previous year, and you’re viewing the land auction for the plot of land that you get to play in the current year. Don’t worry if this confuses you, it’s not that important to understand the exact chronology when playing.

An animation of the stock auction recap

Now for the final phase, the stock auction. There’s not much to say here! This recap reveals everyone’s offer, like someone offering $50,000 too much for what could have been a cheap share. The winner takes all, and all other players get a refund. In multiplayer, the stock auctions start right away after having played the first level. You might only have enough money for either upgrades or stocks, so choose wisely.

After getting up to speed with the competition, the game is on. Everyone gets to dig into their new plot of land, and the bidding starts anew. Don’t forget to buy upgrades!

As usual, discuss below, we love to read your reactions. Would you like to know more? You can catch up on part 1 here, or come back for a new post in a week’s time. See you then!

Hello everyone, this is Herman A.K.A. 1000 Gibibit, lead programmer on Turmoil.

We've announced multiplayer for Turmoil a while ago, and now that we're close to finishing, we'd love to tell you a bit more about it. So, welcome to a new series discussing the contents of the upcoming multiplayer update. In the coming weeks we will be going over several facets of multiplayer explaining the gameplay and design choices of the new game mode. This is a more lengthy format than your regular patch notes post, so feel free to skim the post if you’re not into that.

First off, a roadmap of the posts that are coming up:

• Multiplayer part 1: an introduction ← You are here
  A look at what the multiplayer campaign is and what a turn of playing looks like.
  
• Multiplayer part 2: a match in action
• Multiplayer part 3: game history and end-of-game
• Multiplayer part 4: customization and matchmaking
• Multiplayer part 5: questions & answers
  An overview of community questions that were answered previously. Make sure to put your questions in the comments!
  

Several players have requested multiplayer in the past, by asking about it on the forums. Some of those posts go back as far as 2015! The answer was always the same, we did not have the resources to start an ambitious project like this. So how did we end up where we are now?

You may remember that multiplayer was first announced back in September 2018. And before that, we already started working on the “remake” of the game in May 2018. That remake is in fact the 3.0 version of the game that is live on Steam. Around this time we were in a better position to take risks, partly thanks to the publisher for the mobile version of Turmoil, Leiting Games, allowing us to get started on designing the new online gamemode. More news about Turmoil on mobile soon!

In the initial brainstorms we came up with some crazy ideas, like a giant map where you would be able to drill on plots uncovered by the whole community, and invest as a group into rails to reach new areas. While this sounded really cool, we did not feel like this type of gameplay would be very well connected to the existing game. There were some other ideas as well, but in the end we compromised and simplified, two disappointing words for what is in fact a very exciting result!


The gamemode we settled on can be best summarized as follows:

An online version of the 4-player campaign, shortened to 12 levels instead of the regular 40

The normal campaign, but multiplayer! Meaning each of the AIs is replaced with a real player. All the players have to compete for land and shares in auctions, and the land you buy will be drilled for oil as usual. Whoever gets more than half the shares first, wins!

Because you are now playing against other people, the game is turn-based. Every turn you start by playing a level, and afterwards you bid on the land and stock auctions. This repeats for a maximum of twelve turns, until a winner is declared. You perform your turn in your own time, which means the other players might not be at their computer while you are offering on stocks, and vice versa.

The multiplayer town - the background is the same as in the classic campaign for now

You can see some tid-bits here that are unique to the multiplayer campaign. The player status below the names (in this case a wagon) indicates what your opponents have to do to finish their turn. Of course, there is a brand new map to drill just for the occasion.

The new map - you start at the top left next to the train

The multiplayer map contains 12 plots for every player, so a total of 48 plots. A free starting plot in the fertile lands, three plots in the rock-filled desert, four plots of gas-boosting action in the plains, and finally a nail biting finale in the harsh snow area. Because the map is much smaller than usual, all upgrades are reduced to about half-price. Your starting balance is still the usual $20,000.

Now that you have to bid against other players, the land auction does not happen in real-time anymore. Each player sets up their offers, and only after everyone has made an offer on four pieces of land, ordered by priority, the auction takes place. Placing an offer looks a little like this.

Offering on land

Instead of overbidding other players as the auction happens, you have to decide your maximum bid on each plot. When the actual auction begins, you will automatically make an offer on your top priority, starting at $2,000. Anyone else that has the same plot as top priority, will keep outbidding you until one of you has reached their maximum bid and continues with the second best plot.

Like in the singleplayer campaign, the stock percentage determines who wins the game. Stock auctions start right away after playing your first level, so you can’t just cruise along and buy every upgrade you want! Some strategy is involved, and we’re sure you will figure it out once the game is out there.

Offering on stocks

Similar to the land auction, you have to make a blind offer. Contrary to the land auction, the amount you enter is always what you pay if you win, so you can’t just bid your entire balance. Blind bidding may seem dull, but it was actually quite intense in our playtests. It introduces poker-like situations where you can sometimes get stocks for cheap, and other times force your opponents to bid unreasonably high just by having a lot of money in the bank. Note that you do not know the exact amount of money that your opponents have in the bank. This is only revealed after each turn has completed. More on this in the next blog post.


One issue we’d like to address but which did not fit in anywhere else is the choice of a turn-based game versus a real-time game. Some of you might not have a problem with the online mode being turn-based. Let’s be clear, you don’t play completely in order. Everyone can play their level for that turn simultaneously, and offer on the stocks and land simultaneously as well. This makes it an asynchronous turn-based game.

But why not full real-time? Just give everyone a limited timer of 15-20 minutes to take their turn and you can play the entire campaign in one sitting! This is simply not feasible. With the multiplayer campaign reduced to 12 levels, a full campaign takes about 3 hours to play. Turmoil is still a casual and relaxing game at heart, and having to play 3 hours in a row does not fit in with this vision. So we stuck with turn-based, which honestly is a perfect fit and just as exciting to play. Only with a bit of patience required.


We’d like to leave you with a small teaser to go. The public Steam playtest for the multiplayer playtest is planned to be released Q1 of 2022. Just like the 3.0 playtest, that means you will be able to sign up for it on the Steam store page and have a random chance to be selected to play.

That’s all for now folks. This post mostly explained how multiplayer worked from the current player’s perspective. Next time we’ll explain how you get information about what your opponents are up to!

PS: if you're reading this in your browser, you can view any of the screenshots above at a higher resolution by using right-click -> open in new tab.

Dear oil magnates,

Today we bring a small update that prevents your campaign from getting stuck due to bugs. Of course we always try to solve bugs before they reach you, but when one manages to slip through it is better to have a fail-safe.

[h3]Corrupted levels workaround[/h3]
The game will now delete your level progress if it detects an error while loading the existing level. This prevents your campaign from getting stuck on a corrupted level save, instead of reloading the corrupted save every time you try to continue the campaign. Your campaign save will stay intact when this happens and you can retry the level.

A small hotfix to yesterday’s update to fix some minor bugs.

[h3]Changelog[/h3]

• The campaign AI will now purchase upgrades in a logical order again, which may slightly impact difficulty. Shout-out to Stuff+ for pointing this out. Yes, the AI does need to purchase upgrades in order to improve their profits.
  
• Town upgrade scroll tooltip now appears on the correct position for resolutions other than 1920x1080
  
• You can now use the enter key to purchase upgrades in town when selected.
  

Dear oil entrepreneurs,

Version 3.0.38 of Turmoil is now available. This patch brings some minor bugfixes and several changes to tune the game balance.

[h3]Game speed has been lowered by 10%[/h3]
After the 3.0 update, we found the game was running 20% faster than the old version. This put a little bit too much pressure on decision making, so we decided to lower it by 10% again. This means the result is still a little more fast paced than before, but not as frantic.

[h3]Mole changes[/h3]
The mole gas-seeking behaviour now uses the distance to the nearest corner of the gas well, instead of the distance to the center of the gas well when determining whether to reveal it. It improves the reliability of finding gas bubbles with moles, especially for larger bubbles.

[h3]Other changes[/h3]

• Updated localization files.
  
• Reduced general memory usage.
  
• The Higher/Lower minigame now retains the same set of cards after reloading the campaign.
  
• Added particles to The Heat Is On stock auction.
  

[h3]Fixes[/h3]

• The in-level silo tutorial now gives you the proper amount of money required to complete the tutorial. A rounding error caused you to have too little money in some scenarios, which meant you could not continue the tutorial.
  
• The single game menu now uses the entered seed when starting the level, fixing some edge cases where it would previously not use the seed.
  
• The post-campaign dialog in The Heat Is On now uses the correct localization after having played the bonus island.
  
• Resolved a UI issue related to attempting to build a pipe to the very edge of the screen in fullscreen mode.
  
• The “Tip Top” achievement is attainable again, now by reading all the tips in the Turmoil campaign instead of buying them.
  
• Fixed an issue where the "All Oil Sold" bonus was awarded even though not all oil was sold.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Magmificent achievement requirement applied to the oil well's radius, instead of the volume as was intended. This makes the achievement easier to obtain.
  

[h3]Next up: Multiplayer[/h3]
Starting next week we will be posting a weekly write-up about how the upcoming multiplayer game mode works. We hope you are as excited as we are about this, stay tuned!