Dev Diary 59 - Orders

So, here it is. Another huge update with mechanics that change the gameplay completely.

New Graphics Style

We’ll get to the gameplay features shortly. But firstly, I decided to tweak the graphics a little bit, and to enable one of my older experiments with outlines. I doubt a little bit that someone will notice the difference, but here are some screenshots anyway! What do you think?

Orders

Long ago I dreamt of a minimalistic 4X game where you can do limited sets of actions each turn. Start a production? Takes one Action Point. Move unit? Takes another action point. I was extra hyped when Old World came out - they have exact these mechanics and it was implemented quite nicely. You could move your units extra far away by consuming more action points. But the game was far from minimalistic - you had dynasties, events, and a lot of other things, and most importantly, the amount of action points you got at the beginning of the game was… 13! Thirteen! Nope, that’s not what I had in mind. Would be cool if in the beginning, it could be super tight on actions and you would have to choose, for example, three absolutely the best actions - the other options could be done next turn, and so on.

When I was initially designing Colossal Citadels (or “Cartographer”, back then) the concept didn’t really fit. But now - hell it does.

Before you could reassign your workers completely at every turn. E.g. this turn everyone farms food, and the next one everyone is building walls. It’s not the most efficient way, because different workers are best at different things (and the best layout is maximized automatically), but it was possible and it doesn’t make much sense narratively. Now, to assign or unassign a worker, you have to spend an Action Point. And this turns on long-term planning and many other interesting things.

The other things that require an action point are movement orders, spell activations, world structure activations, and research pick. Other actions are free - you can reposition your creatures for free as well (but repositioning a working creature takes an action point too).

I added many pieces of content that play around action points (or “Orders”). You can increase max orders, increase order regen per turn, restore orders in a lot of ways (for example, a procedurally-generated passive that restores 1 order on kill).

Orders are also serving as a hint of what actions can you do at your turn. So, I like that change, I need to test it more.

Martial Arts

Now, creatures can’t fight without a weapon.

Now the player is forced to try to find a way to deal damage with their creatures. There are many ways to do that, for example.

• they can get a weapon blueprint from starting knowledge
• they can get a basic damaging skill from starting elemental gems
• they can get a martial arts understanding that will allow creatures to do a little bit of damage with bare hands.

But now the most factions are peaceful in the beginning, and you can’t rush it by upgrading your humans to magically kick the shit out of enemies with bare hands!

Changelog

So now I shifted to one update per month instead of a week… That’s sad, but I have to make moneys too :D

These were most important changes. There are also a lot of bugfixes and small pieces of content. Here is the changelog:

• Action points

  • New effects for procedural passive related to action points

• Herbs, Bushes, Incense

  • Decorative bushes can now be mined for herbs
  • Herbs are used for alchemy, healing, and making incense
  • Incense is used for prayers and some other various things

• Humanoids now can’t fight without a weapon (unless they know martial arts or possess other thing that allows them to fight)

  • Getting attacked while you’re unarmed drops your morale to 0 and makes you try to run away

• New understandings and opinions

  • Martial arts
  • Might or Magic
  • Education

• Healers as profession

• Prayers

• Temples

• HP regen now doesn’t heal each subturn, but only on the end of turn, so it might take a lot more turns to heal

• Bugs

  • Creature will fail to cast spell if it’s outside the range
  • Creatures don’t move to group center automatically (remnants of the old movement system)
  • Moving a creature doesn’t remove visuals of production anymore
  • Sometimes there was the same seed for random passives
  • Houses are no longer dropped on the ground when their owner dies (uhm…)

• Balance

• Combat mechanics updates

  • If a creature has caster a spell, you can’t reposition it anymore

• Super cool particles and sound when levelling up

  • Knowledge particles fly to player’s top left of the screen to indicate that knowledge has increased

• When player gets gems, particles fly to top left of the screen

• Balance

  • Stronger creeps overall, remade creeps placement algorithm
    • Creep creature levels now (at least try to) tell you if it’s too early for you to go for them
  • Much stronger far away creeps
  • Dropped weapons take durability damage

• Procedural passive improvements

  • New effect parts
  • Prevented conflicting/too powerful effect parts

• Soundtrack updates

  • New track
  • New main menu track

• Faction select track set from one of previous tracks

• Uneven Dungeon logo at start

• Fixed bugs

• New bugs

That’s it, folks! Thanks for reading!