Aug 6, 2024

MAJOR UPDATE: Unleash Chaos with New Units, Secret Map, and More!

Nuke Them All - MIKEEURO

Major Update - New Units, New Alien Super Weapons & Croc Buffet New Map!

As we dive into the hot summer, I'm thrilled to bring you the super major update for Nuke Them All, packed with amazing new features, units, and a secret bonus map! Here’s all the cool stuff we’ve added:

New Units:
Enemy Rocketbot - Meet the powerhouse blue robot, usually perched on defensive towers! This enemy is a force to reckon with, so strategize wisely.

Reworked Enemy Jeep V3.0 - Now even more powerful, it comes loaded with a grenade launcher or a Rocketbot. Beware of this jeep, which appears late in the game after enemies upgrade their Vehicle Factories!

Fatso Truck - Introducing our new TIER 5 super vehicle! Now available in Vehicle Factory Level 5 and the Tech Tree, replacing the APC tactical vehicle.

New Bonus Map - Croc Buffet:

This secret bonus map is accessible only if you know where to look! Here’s a hint: try clicking the crocodile on the Jungle World selection screen and see what happens! It’s a brand-new map where robots can swim through the swamp, adding whole new gameplay elements. But beware of nasty surprises lurking in the water!

Reworks & Improvements:

Hellrain Targeting System - Fully reworked to use enemy super weapons smartly, automatically detecting weaknesses in your strategy. Watch out for the new Smart CPU AI!

Alien Allies SUPER WEAPON - Fully revamped!

Instead of the old passive support of 3 UFOs, we now have a fully controllable super weapon delivered via the Alien Beacon. Once ready, drag and drop to target a position and watch the powerful Alien Mothership do the work for you!

New End-Level Fun Cutscene - Featuring the Fatsos, adding a fun twist to the conclusion of your battles!

3 New EPIC Background Music Tracks - Feel the 90s nostalgia with new music tracks that will enhance your gaming experience!

Balance Changes:

Bridges - Now have more health, making them harder to destroy.

Digger - Improved to be sneakier than ever!

Protected Flags - Upgrade faster, providing strategic advantages.

Crashes Fixed:

Resolved late-game rare crashes and freezes.

Fixed Start System and achievements.

In-game Wiki updated with new units and stats.

Happy Nuking!

P.S.

Our $300 Streamer Cash Contest is LIVE!

Everyone is invited; details are available as usual on Discord! https://discord.gg/6EMswKqpJh

Full update video by Papa Mike / Solo developer of this indie game:

Aug 6, 2024

Dev Journal #68 - Economy Primer

Galactic Civilizations IV - [SD] redskittlesonly

Building a strong economy is a foundational aspect of all 4X games, regardless of your overarching aims in that particular campaign: whether you’re racing for a technological victory by researching the most advanced technologies, or raising an unstoppable military juggernaut to crush your enemies with, “the sinews of war are infinite gold” to quote Cicero. Or, in the case of Galactic Civilization’s IV: Supernova, infinite credits.

And even that timeless wisdom doesn’t quite do things justice in a space 4X: infinite credits would be pretty helpful and though we can trade cash for various things with other players, and there are ways to rush build, buy or otherwise purchase goods and services, we can’t always instantly transform credits into advanced technologies, Cultural Starbases or a host of other tools we need if we’re to lay eyes on that victory screen.

GalCiv’s resource system is a large topic, and we covered it fairly extensively in this video on Youtube, but as a continuation of our series aiming to demystify the early game for new players, I’d like to pass over that fine detail and instead give you some very broad advice on how the economy works and what each of these resources does.

As a quick recap, natural resources are represented as Planetary Input, which are then converted by Citizens, Districts and Improvements (and a few other miscellaneous things) into Planetary Output. Manufacturing and Influence are used at the planet level, for colony construction and shipbuilding, and pushing out your borders respectively.

Planetary Output values then contribute to your Empire’s overall treasury of resources known as Civilization Output, where they’re used for various things, and these are fairly intuitive: Research allows your scientists to discover exciting new technologies, Food is shared across your Civilization for Citizen growth and approval, and Income is taxed at a set tax rate to provide Credits, for paying for all your infrastructure, with the surplus pooled and available to spend on a turn-by-turn basis.

This screenshot from my video on GalCiv’s economy summarises things a bit more simply.

Here’s a quick example using Minerals and Manufacturing.

The Core World of Ivoria here has mineral resources called Mineral Input, worth 5 points. We’ve also got a Colony attached, Ivoria III, which is contributing it’s own Mineral Input of 3, for a total of 8.0. If we had Asteroid Bases around Ivoria, you’d see their input here too.

This Mineral Input is then processed by Manufacturing Districts, any manufacturing Improvements (like the Planetary Generator and Elemental Fabricator here), and some other bonuses such as our Governor’s Diligence score (Diligence is a character trait used to modify Manufacturing), and the various Diligence scores of our Citizens too.

You can think of Citizens bonuses to Mineral Input processing as having dedicated workers leading your main industrial operations, and for some civilizations which hate pollution and shun organized industrial efforts, as some kind of highly efficient and alien cottage industry. We can assign Citizens a Worker job, to help them focus on improving Manufacturing output even further.

There are other modifiers involved, including Economic Starbases (which have an industrial element that helps production) and various effects from Civilization Abilities, in game Events and more.

Finally, after applying our current Approval as a multiplicative modifier, we’ve ended up with a score of 23.8 for our Manufacturing Output on Ivoria.

Approval is, and I stress, VERY IMPORTANT, because it directly affects the output of Manufacturing and Research, and low Approval can be crippling to your economy, so work to keep your Citizens happy!

So, what can we do with this Manufacturing output? Well, every construction project on our planet has a Construction Cost, and our Manufacturing score is deducted each turn from that cost until the total cost is paid, at which point you get your shiny new Coordination Beacon, in the example above, which required a total of 120 Construction points to create.

That Manufacturing score is also translated into another resource called Military, which is basically the same as Manufacturing Output, but is used by your attached Shipyard to create shipyard projects (warships, research missions, starbase modules and more).

This is a very brief overview by way of example, and we’ve only taken a look at just one of the Planetary Input/Output chains, but I hope this helps to demystify some of these arcane numbers a little bit. Technology, Farming, Wealth and Culture all have their own little rules but you should be able to follow the example here, with the help of the in-game tooltips, to work out what modifiers are affecting each, and where they are used.

I’d also strongly recommend that you check out the video I linked at the start of the article, as it details all this much better, and in a much more amusing format too, I hope!

If you’ve got any questions about this or anything else, just leave them in a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Cheers!

Aug 6, 2024

Development Blog #2

Solar War - aim.mcmeans

Hello again! Welcome to my second development blog! It’s only been around… 2 months? since my last development blog, so I’d thought I’d give an update on how things are going.

To be honest, though, summers have always been slow for me, so there hasn’t been as much stuff done as I would have hoped. But still, I’ll be showing you my progress anyways!

Why it’s important to balance your game

Because, of course, an unbalanced game does not play well!

But no, seriously, I’ve been trying to balance the game for months now. Well, to be honest, I’ve been trying to balance this game since I started working on it… which has been a few years at this point?

But more recently, I made some changes to powerups that make them more balanced. (Fortunately, all of my changes make them stronger. This time.)

You may have seen some of those changes in the demo update that I recently released, but I’ll talk about them here anyways.

Making The Moon generally better in everything it does

Originally, The Moon (the powerup, not the enemies) had only 30HP and a partly 0.5 HPps recovery rate. That doesn’t sound very much here, but when you realize that that means that each moon would deal only around 15HP to planets before being destroyed, those numbers become a lot worse, actually.

The Large Moon, however, was a significant improvement to the regular Moon, with 150HP and… a 0.5 HPps recovery rate. Wait, why did I say that that was a “significant improvement”, I didn’t mean that at all!

So, what we had was a useless object that essentially dictated a wider berth around enemy planets that was only good at preventing Hamuena from spawning (once), and awarding 100 points upon its defeat.

But we already have a 100 points powerup, and for once, it doesn’t have any other negative effects associated with it! Clearly, some changes are in order.

The first thing we did was raise its max HP to 100, which is the same as The Earth. This means it can withstand a whole lot more blow (2 seconds of blow, in fact!) before being defeated. The Large Moon’s max HP was also raised, to 500HP.

We didn’t stop there, though; we also raised The Moon’s recovery rate to match The Earth’s. This not only represents a general improvement across the board, but it also makes it such that The Moon will recover differently depending on what difficulty level you’re playing at.

This now means that you have an object that you can swing into enemy planets, dealing a lot of damage… or you can keep your distance and use the moons to help shield against projectile shots. Or, of course, you could find some new mechanism that fits your playstyle, the choice is yours!

To help counteract this change, we made it such that The Moon could only be spawned from powerups, which means that The Thing will no longer spawn moons.

These changes are already in the updated demo, go check them out!

Terraformed planets

Did you know that you can terraform planets in order to make them help you? The methods that allow them to be terraformed are pretty complex and I do need to make them simpler, but that’s not for today. Instead, I wanted to address the issue that they are too weak!

The problem is, 2 of the terraformable planets, Mars and Titan, have glaring holes in their defenses that can mean that they are defeated almost immediately after being terraformed. (Ganymede, fortunately, does not have this problem.) Since terraforming planets can be quite expensive, this will not do!

One of their biggest problems is that they can be ripped apart by water projectiles, which actually leads right into our next section…

Making Water less like Wipeout

In its current form, each water projectile deals 2HP of damage to any planet that it hits, with a few exceptions. While this may not sound like much, planets such as Europa and Callisto can shoot up to 300 projectiles at a time, which means that this is the end result if you’re not careful…

(Sometimes? ONLY sometimes?)

This applies to not only Earth, but (almost) every other planet, enemy or not.

But we have a powerup for that! It’s called Wipeout, and it doesn’t even damage your allies!

So we nerfed water by making it deal only 0.2HP of damage. Now, while planets can still be defeated by water (especially if their health is already low), water is more likely to deal just a “splash” of damage. This means that Europa and Callisto won’t clear the board, yourself included.

Some other tweaks

The Wipeout powerup, however, is supposed to clear the board. However, when Heat-seeking shot was active, then all of those wipeout shots would automatically seek toward the nearest enemy planet. This didn’t look real good, so we made it such that heat-seeking was disabled during the duration of the wipeout.

Full Health is also a good powerup to get (especially when your health is running low!) However, when Golden Health was active, then Full Health would not heal The Earth at all. This was changed such that Full Health would heal The Earth by 100HP no matter what (bounded by max health), just like what Needy Health does when it is activated. As a small bonus, this means that terraformed planets will now be healed by Full Health as well.

Thank you for making it this far!

It means a lot to me that you took all of this time to read whatever I felt like writing here. It would also mean a lot to me if you would wishlist this game on Steam!

Until next time!

-Andrew

Aug 6, 2024

Weekly Blog 14

Lost Legions - Bat-Ela

Hi everyone!

Felix here with another episode of our weekly blog. With gamescom only two weeks away we are all working like crazy to make the best out of our demo. I am already pretty excited by the results and I’m sure it will get even better by the time we finally get to show it off behind closed doors. We´re also working on a new gameplay trailer which showcases the latest visuals and features in the game and we´ll upload this one for all to see as part of a showcase that we´ve been invited in to participate in. The excitement - and stress level - have reached new heights. ^^

But my receding hairline is not what I came here to talk about today. Instead, let me talk about how the conquest system works that we´re currently in the process of implementing:

The world of Lost Legions is divided into areas of controls that are centered around villages and fortifications. Each of these regions provides at least one strategic advantage that makes it an attractive target of conquest. It could be rare resources like a mine containing precious ores, a strategic chokepoint like a bridge across an impassable river or a unique building like a mill. Additionally, the forts and villages will be the only places where most of the game's buildings, workstations and objects can be placed by the players.

At the start of the game, all regions in the world are controlled by Germanic Tribes, with the exception of a very limited starting base in the hands of the Romans. The players will have to conquer enemy bases one by one in order to unlock their advantages for themselves and will then have to hold on to those bases when Germanic Raid parties attempt to conquer them back.

Starting a conquest attempt is easy: the players encroach on the area of a village or a fort and initiate combat with one of its defenders. This will start a conquest battle where players will have to defeat waves of defenders, culminating in a battle against the chieftain or commander of the location. If at any point before the village has successfully been conquered the players all leave the area for any reason - they flee, are defeated or a combination of both - the conquest will fail and the village will be reset to its original state. If the players succeed, the location will be razed of most germanic buildings and players will be able to build their own base on top of the remains. The first time players conquer a new region, they can expect to find some nice loot in the stockpile of their newly conquered camp.

The tribes will not sit idly upon being kicked out of their homes however and will mount counterattacks. As long as the players control at least one germanic location a raid countdown will tick down in the background. Once it has elapsed a raid will be launched on one of the areas belonging to players that borders on germanic territory. This means you can create safe zones by strategically conquering buffer areas around places that are important to you.
Once a raid has been launched, players will have a grace period to travel back to the endangered camp in order to defend it. The raid will involve waves of tribesmen that will try to destroy as much of the camp as possible, capture any NPCs they can get their hands on and defeat all the defending players. The raids will be more and more challenging, the more camps players control. Defeated raids will drop nice loot for the players to use. If the raiders manage to defeat all the players however, the camp will be lost and will revert to what it was under germanic control. Any items and resources left in the stockpile will remain there until the players conquer the site again.

This all sounds great in my head and we will have to see during internal and external playtests if it's actually fun. All in all I think this will be one of the major gameplay elements of the game that will drive many of the others around it.

Bonus screenshot: You can now pretend to be Russel Crow in the game. ^^

I´m looking forward to hearing any feedback from you at this level. My next scheduled blog is during gamescom, I hope I will find time to write something in between the excitement! 🙂

Until then: back to the pixel mines!

Felix