Hi Guys,

Before adding more content, i released this A 2.40 update* to optimize the gameflow based on your feedback. More optimization and bug fixing (if needed), will come next week for this version.

*For this update you have to start a new game.

New/Improved:

Normal Difficulty has been changed dramatically, into a relaxing and/or learning experience. For a proper challenge choose Hard and Survival.

- During the first year the villagers will consume minimum food, water, energy and tools. Villagers wont get sick during the first year, but they can get wounded from hunting boars. Core villagers start with temporary winter clothes which will expire after the first year. During Normal difficulty you can pause the game instead of slowing time.

Job window system has been improved. On non specialized jobs, the job bars don't change anymore (when the villagers become inactive, ex: going to sleep). Now the system informs you that some of the workers are inactive (Dark Orange color on the job number). You can unassign these villagers even if they are not active, and when they become active, they will return a previous job or idle.

Ctrl + click on the job icons moves the camera to the villagers.



Previous jobs - Now the villager inspector card and villagers list will display the last previous job a villager had. When inactive, it will show his current active job, until he becomes active again.



New message system - A new message system is now available that records a full year of message before deleting them. The scroll bar will be displayed once the mouse is over the message window. Also, by clicking on a message, the camera will scroll to that villager.



Added new sprites for adults and kids.



Road construction has been improved dramatically. The builders will build one after the other, and from time to time will check if a building needs working, since that is priority one.

End game records gold, and ingame global and personal scores windows have been improved. Remember to check Top 100 if you are not in the top 12 on the official site: http://lw-games.com/civitatem-top-villages.php

More tool tips has been added everywhere.

A better font has been added for tool tips and tutorial.

Building placing has been improved.

Added a new scene for villagers that sleep outside.

Added morale, water and food debuffs. On low values the villagers will move slower and work slower.

Event that destroy buildings tells what type of building it destroyed.

They are now 6 villages to be discovered, with 2 or 1 close to the player city (around 2-3 tiles).

Bugs:

- no more bugs with the villagers list
- fixed some bugs with the scouts, still needs more work.
- fixed scouts don't get wounded during the plague events.
- fixed a problem with people not getting married until they had tools or other situations.
- fixed a bug with villagers stuck at/under the fishery.
- fixed a bug on restart with time speed and game scale.
- fixed a missing tool tip for hunting deer.
- fixed a bug with the bakery and fishermans.
- fixed a bug where, the game didn't count how many times you finished the game.
- fixed several minor and medium bugs.

Update 2: Small patch to fix the villager inspector card for all resolutions.

- same fix for end screen and score/achievements screen.
- reduced the end music volume based on the global volume.
- window mode now scales with your desktop, on double clicking the window*.

*On dual monitors switching to full screen mode (after maximizing the window) , sometimes doesn't go full screen so press minimize button on the window, and then select full screen again (i am investigating this)


Update 1: Small update to fix the endscore formula. A big update is coming soon!

With the launch of A 2.00 a lot of bugs were introduced due to the amount of new features. Now after one week, update A 2.20 is released! This update brings tons of bug fixing and tweaks as you can see below:

Due to so many fixes and tweaks, this update is not save compatible.

New or Improved:

- improved several behaviors and their occurrence (eating, going to herbalist, etc)
- farmers now take the rawgrain directly to windmills if available.
- added a max 3 limit to some buildings like bakery, windmill etc.
- faster patient list refresh on herbalist
- added one more city to discover and trade on the map
- added iron to trading goods.
- increased trade selling slots for your village for minimum 1 goods slots, to 2.
- improved herbalist job assignment (based on how many buildings and if they have patients)
- added a icon status for bakery houses, when cooking. + fixed the cross for herbalist
- added tool tips for the region map
- bakers now take the grain form windmill or barn when needed, no need for farmers
- road now regenerates around the building if it was destroyed on construction.
- villagers are now spawned with 90 energy, food, and water, this will give you enough time to build your village.
- if management is researched on unassigning a villager from the jobs window, it will unassign the lowest skill member for that job.

Bugs fixes:


Thank you for your support and have fun!

Update 1: Fixed a bug with the herbalist not making potions - savegame compatible.

Finally! After a few delays Civitatem A 2.0 update is now released!

For this update you will have to start a new game. Expect to encounter some bugs, since this is a complex update, but they will be fixed with quick patches in following days/weeks and they will be save compatible.

This update introduces three main features: Exploration, Trading and Research.

Exploration:

You start with one slot for scouting, and it can be expanded to up to 4 scout slots through research. But why explore? Well first, because you will want to acquire certain resources or products that you don’t have at a certain time. Second, because you will need certain items that you dont have and maybe you can only acquire them through trading. Moreover, with each region explored, the scout has a small chance to find things, like food, villagers, tools, etc.

Trading:

After you managed to discover a Village, you will be able to trade with it. At first you won’t have any gold coins, so you will have to acquire some by selling certain resources/products that these villages needs. The items these villages sell and buy will change every season.

You will start with two trade wagons, one for selling and one for buying, when these are used you cannot trade anymore and you have to wait for them to arrive/return. You can acquire more through research.

Research:

You will now be able to research new technologies. To access the research panel press R or click on the Village List button. They are 15 techs for now, from improve production of buildings, to improving their structure to resist events, or gain more scouts, improve trade or job selection.

The research will balanced and tweaked with each update and more complex tech will be added.

Thank you for your support and have fun!

Update A 2.0 Delayed to 8 March.

Since i decided a few days ago, to postpone again, the A 2.0 update, i wrote this dev diary to give you a brief look at the upcoming features in A 2.0 which are now in development and close to completion, but they need more testing and tweaks.

I am trying to avoid the releasing of updates that are not properly tested, and i also want to add more tweaks and small parts of content to the game. This update, is the biggest update the game will receive so far, so that’s why i delayed it a few times. 8 March will be the final delay for this update, even if i don’t manage to complete and test everything.

Exploration:



In the upcoming update you will be able to scout the world around your village (99 regions). You start with 1 or 2 slots for scouting, and it can be expanded to up to 4 scout slots through research. But why explore? Well first, because you will want to acquire certain resources or products that you don’t have at a certain time. Second, because you will need certain items that you dont have and maybe you can only acquire them through trading. Moreover, with each region explored, the scout has a small chance to find things, like food, villagers, tools, etc.

Trading:



After you managed to discover a Village, you will be able to trade with it. At first you won’t have any gold coins, so you will have to acquire some by selling certain resources/products that these villages needs. The items these villages sell and buy will change every season.

Through trading you will also be able to acquire books, that will help you develop certain technologies, and in the later versions, more seed types and animals.

Research:



The first part of the research system it will also be introduced with this update. With the help of books, you will be able to improve buildings, expand the production of some, research new types and improve the overall productivity of the village.

On top of these big features, the update will also bring several gameplay tweaks, bug fixes and small parts of content.


That’s it for now. As always, thank you for your support. Cya next week!
George

Hi Guys,

In this update i added villagers queues, misc. tweaks and bug fixes.

Queues:

During the day, villagers now will go to eat or to drink water, one or just a few at one time, every few minutes (by reserving food at the barn - hover with mouse over food icon at the top left of the UI to see total food and food reserved). With this new feature, gameplay flow will be more stable and more fun. At the same time, villagers will check before leaving their job, if food is available, compared to the past.


As always, thank you for your support and happy holidays!

Update 1:


Hi Guys,

Here is another update for this month, this time i bring you Scores and Achievements!!one

The game will now record your personal scores on finished games (even on uninstall) and global scores achieved by you and other players worldwide (requires to Civitatem, to have his executable privileges to connect to the internet, or visit the official site http://lw-games.com to see the global scores) .

In addition to scores, we have now the first part of achievements! Check the achievements menu after you finished a game to see what you unlocked. Some achievements are not just a graphical sprite that unlocks when you achieve something to memorize it, some give you persistent rewards. For example at the end of each game, there is a chance that you will receive a reward. That reward will be carried to the all new started games you plan to play.


Misc:

As always, thank you for your support!

Update 2:


Update 1:

UPDATED to 1.61 since more bugs were found during testing(Save compatible with 1.60, so no need to start a new game)



Hi Guys,

After a few months of a development hiatus, i am back to the normal development, so expect one or two updates per month, from now on.

For this update, if your saves are under 1.60, is recommended to start a new game!

What's new?

1) FISHING!

You can now build a Fishery and receive a steady amount of food any season, but it relies a lot of the skill of Fishermen, so assign the ones with the highest skills.

Each Fishery can have up to 7 spots in total, but it's based on where you place the building, so look for the fishing spot tool tip to get the maximum spots.

2) SKILL IMPROVEMENTS:

Skills are much more important now, beside reducing the time to complete a job, or if successful, (fishing) now on certain ranges, they can provide you with double resources. For example a villager with a forest skill of 50, has 50% to get double wood (4 instead of 2) when chopping a tree, and 100% chance to get double at 100 skill.

Beside the bonuses, the skills have diffrent color now on the inspect window and villagers list, for a faster recognition: 50 or more Blue, 100 Green.

3) Map is 25% bigger and Villagers now move 30% faster.

4) Added an Event Window which gives you some details on events, or warnings in certain situations.

5) Tweaked the food values, events, jobs timers to give you a more challenging gameplay.

6) Added user folder in My Documents/My Games/Civitatem which now is used for Cloud saving on Steam and storing saves, and certain user options.

7) Added more tool tips, and nutrition info for Barn Icons.

8) Fixed a ton of bugs including:

- font size+ option and edge scroll didnt work properly
- edge scroll speed scales with the current camera depth
- fixed a few bugs related to Villagers List.
- fixed - a bug where you couldnt select/click villagers close to the status UI on the left.
- fixed - on close vlist - vlist top down icon remains tagged.
- fixed - some speed related bugs on low health for villagers
- fixed a sound bug with building sound not taking in consideration the volume in some cases.

Have fun!

Hi Guys,

I received a lot of good feedback from the awesome early adopters, steam forum players, and through the in-game submit feedback, and came up with this update, for now. Overall this update contains bug fixes for over 90% of the issues reported by you, the players, but also tweaks, improvements, and a few small features.

For this update is recommended to start a new game!

What’s new?

1) Building priority:

Many people asked for this, and it was also in the design, so here it is. Builders by default will build the closest building site to them, or one that was is already in construction. By clicking the priority button on your buildings, they will start working on those after they finish their current task (a few seconds) or if they already close to finish the current building, they will continue and then come to this priority building site. A click makes is priority (red), another click changes back to neutral.



2) Buildings have now a name or number. Houses are named after the family that lives there. Specialized buildings have a number for easy identification.



3) Villagers that arrived to your land through events, have a chance to come with their own tools or even bring some food.

4) An option to increase the font size of the tutorial window and tool tips has been added. You can find it in the options tab.

5) Fast speed of the game has been increased by 20%, and the days and nights last a bit less.

6) Villagers that have a specialized job will wait to finish it, before going to sleep or changing their behavior.

7) There were lots of bugs with the herbalist, and now most of them should be fixed, but they are also improvements to herbs collection where the herbalist goes back to the house from time to time, to store the herbs.

8) Hunting is a bit harder now especially on boars, so don’t send a low ranged skill villager to do it, or he won’t be able to do much. Smoking meat requirement has been reduced from 10 to 5.

9) Random events are more random and don’t trigger if they already occurred in the last season, so no more 3 consecutive seasons of plague.

10) Fixed probably the only game breaking bug that sometimes occurred in year 4 or 5, where villagers refused to take the resources to the storage. Sorry for that, that was caused by old feature that wasn’t finished 🙁

11) Added several triggers, for villagers that somehow got stuck on buildings (it takes around 10-20 sec for them to go back to work)

12) Improved further the road building.

13) Updated the tutorial with more info.

14) Arrow keys can be now used for camera scroll

15) Added a warning when trying to load an old version save.

16) Fixed a dozen of bugs, that might’ve caused villagers to loose their behaviors or get stuck.

Thank you for your support,
George,
LW Games

Update: Deployed a hot fix for the herbalist, there was a problem with the herbalist house, not freeing the patients bed properly and not healing. (wait 1 hour in-game and it will be fixed, save compatible)

Hi Guys,

After reading just about every feedback available from Steam comments, Discord, Youtube, got back to work and today i released, Civitatem – update A 1.20.

I. Customize your Village Elder! – You can now customize your Village Elder before starting a new game. (start a new game, loading old version saves wont work this time) Starting with Name, Fam Name , Gender, the Village name and two specializations point to invest into two skills.



II. Game Difficulty – Since many complained that the game is either too hard or too easy, and since i didn’t want to break my design, i decided to give you more choices, so now they are 3 difficulties to choose from:



Normal – is more on a casual side, the villager get sick less often, village elder doesn’t loose tools durability, events start after one year

Hard – it’s similar to older version with a few tweaks

Survival – it’s basically ironman (you can only save on exiting the game slot
3), with events starting to occur from the first season.

III. Mining Priority – Many complained about this so i implemented a mining priority for Miners. By default they mine stone, but you can change that with one click, if you have other resources selected on the map.



IV. Injuries / Wounds / Diseases – I reworked how injuries work. Now the villagers, will work until they pass out, well kind of. They will go to the herbalist if:



a) if above 50% HP – they will go only when not busy working and the herbalist has the treatments needed (herbs or orange potions)

b) under 50% HP – but above 25% – they will go the herbalist as fast is possible if treatment is available ( orange potions or red potions)

c) 25% and below HP – they will pass out on the ground, and a herbalist will get them to the their house. If he stays there (on the ground) for more than 3 hours, he will bleed out and die (not if he is the Village Elder).

For every villager that is injured/wounded/sick, his travel speed will decrease based on the severity of his wounds.


V. Misc:

– Tutorial Window can be dragged and moved on the screen.
– jobs window lags less, and is updated more often when changing jobs.
– Nights pass 40% faster than Daylight
– more early adopters were added to the villager generator and credits.
– doubled resources on walls until trading is added.
– hunters will refuse to hunt if their health is less than 60%, but they will do other activities (getting meat from dead animals or crafting leather)
– wild boars provide 10 meat and deer 5 instead of 10.
– when most of the events occur, the camera will scroll to that event.



VI. Bugs:

– fixed some problems with some events
– fixed some problems with UI not scaling properly on 1280 displays (including messages, UI and Tutorial)
– fixed a problem with builders refusing to work after some events.
– villager should now loose their jobs far less often
– fixed a bug with placing buildings while clicking on the bottom right buttons.
– fixed a bug with miners refusing to mine walls, if there was no stockpile
– fixed a bug with the hunter not goin to herbalist.



Thank for your support,

George,
LW Games

Hi Guys,

Update II: If you have problems with antivirus programs like Avast read here for help: https://steamcommunity.com/app/670820/discussions/0/1693795812309750381/

Update: Fixed a bug with the game getting stuck on loading, after exiting the map and starting a new game. Added more early adopters in the villager generator.

I released a small patch to fix some memory leak, to fix the launch on Steam problem that some people had, and to fix the problem with regenerating food and trees during Spring season, that some people encountered.

Some people found the game too easy, others a bit too hard, and some thought the game is too short. The thing is, Civitatem is now in Alpha 1, so expect more layers of complexity added each month, that means more content and features. Smaller patches will also be release each week, to fix certain bugs, or add small parts of content and features.

Thank you for your support,

George