Hello everyone, and thank you for bearing with me for an unusually long time between updates.

In this update, we looked at balancing how much districts can produce, how quickly districts become established, 2 new upgrades for Ranch and Townhomes, and a new mechanic is born: Special Projects.

Special Projects are, well, projects that is separate from the normal projects your workers work on. In this update, the Special Project we added is mining for Granite and Marble. After a certain depth of your mine, your miners have a chance at finding deposits of Granite and Marble. These deposits are pretty big, and extracting marble and granite can be much more difficult than iron ore (after all, you can't exactly smelt it, so they have to be brought up in chunks). Take note however, estimates of how much granite/marble there is in a project can be inaccurate, and projects can be frought with delays. However, this presents itself as an alternative to buying Marble and Granite from Trading Guilds.

In the future, we will be adding additional special projects, for example opportunities for Traders to make money doing trade runs, or maybe even a use for lumberjacks to clear a plot of land that can become usable for development.

Aside from new features and balancing, one major aspect we worked on is improving the UI in terms of performance and look and feel. Improvements to the way some UI components are handled (such as list of items), means we can potentially move towards adding features like creating lists - wish lists, sell lists, watch lists.

Stay tuned for more updates, and have fun!

Cheers!

dSolver

Well guys, I wanted to make this super complex thing with hotkeys but instead I said to myself "ah forget it, let's just do something that works and we'll figure out the 'ideal system' later". So, you have 4 hotkeys now! (gasp).

space - pause/resume the game
ctrl+s - saves the game
w - goes to worker screen
b - goes to building screen
... more to come for additional screens once I get some feedback about good defaults (w and b are both reachable by the left hand, which I like as a right-handed mouser) (I am terribly sorry for lefties who are left out here by my design decision)

Bug fixes:

* The fur trader guy wasn't following inflation rules after the initial contract, had to remind him of that

* Some district production were wildly off from what they were supposed to be, had to fix it, one by one. There's probably still some severe imbalances, please let me know if you find something


Changes:

* A number of workers/buildings had their batch team size and worker capacity modified so that the capacity is always a multiple of team size. This is an important change for a future update, but also numbers are just nicer now.

* Added a bit of ai to move stuff around between trading guilds. You will notice that the amount of goods are different now, so there's more fur and flax now for example, and there's no longer more marble than you'll ever need

* Various infrastructure changes to support the next major update, perhaps those faceless drones could become more human.

As always, please let me know your thoughts and feedback, and I hope you enjoy the game!

dSolver

Hello everybody,

Thank you for being so patient as I slowly designed, redesigned, restarted one more time, before settling on an idea of what a District means. In this update, the first iteration of the Districts mechanic is unveiled, and in future updates the mechanic will be improved. But first, let's talk about what's in this update.

District:

Your town is getting crowded, let's face it, real estate is a valuable resource and there's just not enough of it. You need large swaths of land to farm but the growing population needs space for housing. Enter the new Districts mechanic.

You can have multiple districts, as many as you'd like hypothetically. Districts are like settlements that you do not directly control. Their health is measured by scores in Food, Loyalty, and Efficiency. Improvements built into a district affects these stats and others too potentially. Improvements can also help the district generate tribute to your town, The Capital.

Your actions matter. If your capital has a disease going around, there's a chance disease can spread to your districts. While disease heals over time like normal, it can cause havoc in a district that is suffering from worker shortages.

Districts bring an aspect to growing your city by allowing you to reduce the amount of farmland and forest land necessary to sustain your population without depending on other city-states (buying goods). However, districts are not without their own challenges. In future updates we will bring on events that can rock the foundations of districts. Will you be a tyrant and rule over your districts with an iron fist, or will you be a more diplomatic leader?

Inflation:

A new mechanic was added to the game where gold actually devalues over time as costs rise. This is a very slow and gradual rise that our economics simulation handles, just know that the longer you play, the more things will cost and thus the more you can sell your goods for as well.

Reducing "stuttering" between screens:

Sometimes a screen could take an abnormal amount of time to load, but it is noticeable. In this update I have implemented some steps to try to reduce the loading time of a few screens, this is important as we are adding more content (buildings, jobs, etc) to evolve your city with.

So, enough of this reading, go try it out and please let me know what you think of the new Districts mechanic. I hope you enjoy it!

dSolver

Hey folks!

Apologies for the lack of updates! This probably isn't the big one you were hoping for (Districts feature), but it continues to lay the groundwork and provides a number of tweaks and QoL improvements.

Tweaks

* A number of techs involving vegetable and fruit farming has been tweaked. Vegetable farming got a noticeable buff so that it will be a bit more worthwhile.

* Pickling and smoking meat will now produce more food than it takes in! Magic? nope - just that scraps and other pieces of produce previously thought of as throw-aways are used as well.

* Reduced the rate of buildings needing maintenance from normal tear and wear. Disasters still pose a significant threat to the health of buildings.

* Added a food theft event, which is like theft event but it targets the granary.

* Whenever an arson attempt is foiled, there will be a notification now (just like when it succeeds or attempted but perps got away)

* Locust swarms will now only affect the speed of a batch rather than the contents

* Increased the amount of stone produced per batch

Bug fixes

* Fixed a bug where a building being repaired could also become irreversibly destroyed while it was in the queue, leading to a condition where the building in the queue cannot be dequeued

* Fixed bugs where some workers had efficiency upgrades multiplied instead of added

* Fixed a bug where the guardhouse wasn't recording monthly history of crimes foiled and salary

* Fixed an issue where some screens could sometimes display up to 3 scrollbars side by side

QoL

* Some techs will now display the worker that the tech affects in terms of produced goods / costs

* Game log is now always visible in the main screen

* Added more item icons

* Changed the display for workers so that you can now see how much each tech / condition affects the output (only basic, there can be events or special cases that affect otherwise)

Groundwork for the future

* District land slots - ability to convert the land in a district for special use (i.e. mining, farming, logging)

* Worker stats, effects were refactored so that eventually we can support modding for new workers, effects for existing ones, etc.

Emergency Patch to fix game-breaking bugs

1. Fixed an issue where a game could crash when salvaging a building

2. Fixed an issue where a soft cap on the number of buildings could cause game to crash

3. Fixed the description for Beast of Burden, and Growth Potion 2.

4. Fixed a bug where the Irrigation tech had no effect, updated the description on Irrigation

5. Removed the extra granary from the initial

Balance

1. Reduced the value of cotton fabric by a bit and increased the value of clothing by a bit.

2. Added some items that can be bought from a few trading guilds and added a few items that can now be sold (if you have a trading guild that is requesting said item)

3. Hovels will now take up 8 units of space as opposed to 5

4. Townhouses have been unveiled via a new tech "Townhomes" that follows "Scaffolding". Townhouses are high density housing for Towns/Cities.


UI

1. The damaged building pane will now properly page, allowing you to see more than one "page" of damaged buildings

2. The number of results per page for damaged buildings have been reduced to 10 from 25 to help reduce the time it takes to load the buildings page

Hey everyone!

Today's update focuses primarily on balance and bug fixes. Don't worry, I made sure to throw in a little curve ball too!

Tech/Exp:

Experience required for gaining a new tech point has increased x4. To compensate for Civil Tech early game, civil exp from building new buildings increased x5.


Buildings

The sizes of buildings were tweaked, in particular hovels and houses were reduced significantly. Space added from going up tiers also increased slightly for plains space.


Taxes

The amount of income from taxes has been fixed, now it is scaled appropriately with the cost of other things.


Refugees

Reduced the number of refugee events


QoL

Trading Guild Cards now have a section for the description and what they are looking to buy.

The tab you were last on individually for each building card is now recorded, so if you switched to the Upgrade Tab for Hovel, you will see the Upgrade Tab by default the next time you see that card.

The default tab for a building card is now Description rather than Cost


Mechanics

Damaged buildings may become extra damaged if left damaged for a long time. At some point it will become totally damaged and beyond repair. At this point, the building can only be salvaged.

Auto Repair will now also look for any buildings that was damaged beyond repair, and automatically salvage them.

Locust Swarm is a new disaster that can strike the land, causing havoc for farmers. The effects are reduced for the time being due to there being little defense against the Swarm. Eventually there will be some upgrades to help combat it, or at least forecast it.


Bug Fixes

The ETA for caravans were inaccurate due to a computation error, this has been fixed

Fixed a layout issue on the Buy Resources tab

Fixed an issue where a Building Instance's Effects wouldn't update when you switch to a different instance


Misc.

Events checking will now happen on an offset step system, which will help reduce processing time on the steps where a large number of events are checked against. This change will allow us to implement a number of new achievements and new events.

As always, please tell us what you think of the changes, the game, and the direction you'd like to see it go!

Cheers!

dSolver

Hey everyone,

Another update is here! Let's take a quick peek at what's happening:

1. We added a new feature, the building-state mechanism. When you start the game, rather than starting with absolutely nothing, you will start with some damaged buildings (damaged during the raid in the story). Repairing these buildings will be cheaper than starting from scratch. Salvaging a building will get you some resources. Since buildings can be damaged, we have revamped the building state system to follow a "building condition" statistic. A building's condition goes down after some time, particularly during big events like floods and blizzards, but idle builders will do maintenance work on their own, so it's a good idea to keep builders around even if the building queue is empty!

2. Two new civil policies: Auto Repair, Auto Upgrade - builders will add repair projects if there are none in queue and there's something to repair. Auto Upgrade means builders will find something to upgrade if there is sufficient resources for the upgrade and there are no upgrade projects in the building queue.

3. New tech: Frameworking, which unlocks the Joinery building and the Joiner job. Joiners will produce Material Sets (Wood) which is replacing some Lumber in some of the more complex buildings. The concept here is that a lot of the framing and paneling can be done ahead of time. Currently the only way to obtain Material Set (Wood) is by producing it, in a future update we will see to it that it is obtainable via other means as well.

4. Tweaks to the exp rate. As you've probably noticed, it doesn't take long to blaze through all of the upgrades. We felt this speed was uncharacteristic (in some cases, getting sufficient exp for another tech point in a month of time). We are aiming for a nice balance such that late game isn't a huge wait between new tech, but at the same time we want to make sure early/mid game isn't too easy with the breakneck tech advances.

5. Tweaks to building sizes and construction time: some buildings have been sped up, some have been slowed down, some sizes have been increased, some decreased. This should not affect any buildings you already have, only new construction.

6. When buying resources, the distance to a trading guild has been replaced with an estimated time to get to said trading guild. This change is made in anticipation of a mechanism that will alter the expected speed (road conditions, bandits, etc).

7. Fixed a bug where pickled vegetables were being consumed even though the player has specified it should not be consumed

Thank you for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to comment below!

dSolver

Hello everyone!

Another update is here! We have a nice mix of bug fixes and new features, so here's the gist:

New Features

1. Some workers will have a new experience mechanism applied. For now it is the Apothecary, Brick Maker, Smelter, and Lumber Miller. More jobs will be make use of this mechanic in the future. For each of these experienced work, there is a concept of top experience, which is pushed when some worker has more experience than the top. However, bonus production is calculated based on average experience of the job, so it could be more worthwhile to keep people at least one person on the job (when removing workers, it removes the least experienced first).
   
   
2. Added a new tech, building and job, (Brick Mold, Brickworks, Brick Maker respectively), for producing bricks. Brick making may not be worthwhile early on due to inexperience of workers and tech.
   
   
3. Added a new indicator for resource changes, it is unlocked at the same time as the ledger, it provides you with information about changes to a resource over the last period of time (you can decide via a slider how many days back you want it to calculate)
   
   
4. Added a new system for managing workers, called Seasonal Workers (civil tech). Once unlocked, you will be able to specify on a seasonal basis how many workers are expected at a job. Specifying seasonal changes is optional. Note, that this also changes the behaviour for workers leaving, see when there are more workers at a job than the specified amount, they will start to leave.
   
   
5. Added a Fur Trader contract, this represents the first of a new type of contract where the guild isn't a city-state, but rather an independent guild with some purpose. They do not possess a market so you can't trade with them except through contracts.
   
   
6. Added 4 new tracks by DYATHON

Bug Fixes/Tweaks

1. Fixed a bug where the toggle policies weren't being shown as active if a player leaves the screen and comes back, even though it is active in the background
   
   
2. Modified the ore discovery mechanism a little bit to slightly increase the odds of finding new veins
   
   
3. Increased the scaling on exp required for unlocking new tech in preparation for a new mechanism being introduced later
   
   
4. Replaced Trader Joe's placeholder avatar with the real avatar

Hey everyone,

First major patch that also brings in a couple new features is here! Here's the gist:

New Features:

1. Toggleable Policies - some techs have been converted over to Toggleable Policies, such that they can be toggled on or off in the Council screen under the appropriate tab.

2. Contracts come with a toggle to switch between per-shipment import/export and total import/export

3. The City Guard HQ is now available, it will be in a new tab in the Council screen. The City Guard will allow you to hire up to 5 constables, who work to combat crime. Their efficiency is set by increasing pay, however be warned because increasing pay also increases baseline salary. So, crime may temporarily drop but the city guard will expect a higher base salary for some time.

4. Synching saves to the filesystem is now implemented. So before now your saves were stored in a local database, which meant loading/saving was pretty fast but you didn't have a file to back up, or (eventually) use steam cloud save. But now, we have a process to automatically create/update a file on the filesystem for each save you have in game. This opens the way for people to share their saves with each other.

Bug fixes:

1. Ability to queue buildings past the limits of land availability has been addressed

2. Waterfront space wasn't properly initiating even though the Dam was created

3. Some players experienced screen tearing in fullscreen. Although this is not addressed for all players who experienced this, it has been addressed for some. We will continue to monitor the issue.

4. Toggling food consumption wasn't working properly

5. Animal Fat kept on being added to the recipe for Medicine, eventually making Medicine prohibitively expensive

6. Addressed a number of performance issues (delays) during some game processes.

7. The "Cold" effect wasn't showing up properly so it was difficult to gauge when the population was being affected by lack of fuel.

Thank you for reading the patch note, and happy prospering!

dSolver