Prosperity wants to be an experience shared by all sorts of people. One of the advantages of being text based is that those who have trouble seeing and require screen readers can play them. Unfortunately, Prosperity isn't 100% of the way there, but this update brings it up to say... 60%, I hope?

After speaking with some blind gamers, I decided to shift my focus on this update from features to QoL improvements, so here they are.

* Massive changes to the structure of the game code so that it is screen-reader friendly

* Styling changes to make it easier for people with light sensitivity (aka, game is now dark mode)

* Ambience audio channel is now split between Ambience and UI. UI channel provides audio cues to things happening on the screen such as tab changes and popups. UI audio is a work in progress, there is still a lot missing but better than before.

* Fixed a number of bugs that affected building effects (warehouse capacity doesn't update right away), statistics labeling (foodCapacity instead of Food Capacity), and pages that incorrectly reset state when you move away from them

* Started working on a new mechanic called Market Upgrades. This new feature will have a few upgrades for the time being and more to be added later

* Started implementing a "Market Reserve" feature. To move goods to the "Market Reserve", open up the contracts widget (not the trading page), and if you have active contracts there will be an option to move the goods into the reserve. Goods in the reserve are used first when a contract shipment is expected, and cannot be moved out. More features to be added to the Market Reserve.

* Changes to the district zones algorithm to avoid district slots that cannot eventually build Road to Capital due to impossible pre-requisites.

Hope to put in some more time on fixing accessibility issues.

Cheers!
dSolver

Hello everyone,

Thank you for being so patient with this latest update. After taking a short break, we: the game testers and I noticed many more areas to improve. So, here we are.

This update is an important milestone, we are closer now to having a fleshed out Culture system, which we promised would be the first victory condition. With that in mind, let's look at what is new, what got fixed, and what we are working towards.

New Features
==================

District Specializations: Once a district has Road to Capital built, you may choose to specialize the district. There are three specializations: Research, Resource, and Culture. Each unlocks unique improvements to that district. For the time being, the cultural and reserach improvements are for show only, while we work on finalizing the effect they have on the capital.

Improved Contracts: The contracts system was adjusted so that the number of long term contracts are reduced, and we also introduced a new toggle on a resource so you can mark it as not for trade with trading guilds.

Improved Resource Management: ctrl + click on a resource in the Warehouse/Granary pins it (green background), but now it will stay visible even when the granary/warehouse has been collapsed so you see only what you want to see. Additionally, clicking on a resource will now provide additional details that you may find useful. Note this is also a quick way to sell resources once you have your own trading guild established.

Beginner Quests: Starting the game can be very challenging, one of the biggest complaints we receive is that people don't know what to do. To address this, we created a small series of "quests" that give incentives/rewards. Let us know what you think of this system, we may expand it!

Culture Level: One of the "victory points" is culture. We will be describing the culture system in more detail later, but in a nut shell, culture is your way to influence other towns. On the map there are multiple points of interest, some of which are city states. Your culture affects your influence on them, so that eventually they will come under your influence. Having influence on every city state (not faction capitals), is the first victory condition. Culture points will lead to additional boosts to help you achieve this diplomatic, cultural hegemony.

Research Points: The Porcelain Tower will now unlock Innovators (Expert), as well as a new Research Point. You may use research point to help you balance out your tech sectors. For example, if you need more Agriculture tech but have plenty of Civil tech, you can trade 2 Civil tech for 1 Research Point, then 1 Research Point for 1 Agriculture tech. Point trading will not affect sector level, and therefore will not affect how much sector exp is needed for the next point.

Aesthetics Overhaul: The Aesthetics system is drastically changed. Instead of a pure average, it is now the average of the top X buildings, where X is defined by the number of people in your town. The greater the population, the greater the X.

Experts change: Expert contributions have been redesigned for some more flexibility in the development end. One balancing aspect is that expert contributions will hit a maximum, and Experts can choose to retire.

Artist Contribution change: Art comes to life! Artworks will now be displayed in their respective buildings if you open up the building instance.

New techs added to the tech tree: Ore Crusher, Advanced Lumbermills, Drilling

New Civil Policy: Prioritise repairs


Bug Fixes
=============

* Fixed a bug where the music keeps playing after the game goes back to main screen
* Fixed a bug where Monument cannot be built due to NaN build time
* Fixed a bug where volume control does not persist
* Fixed a bug where artist slots were not being updated when buildings were created/destroyed
* Fixed autoupgrade bug where it did not respect limits of upgrades
* Added a link from District Improvement to Tech if it is a prereq
* General performance improvements when loading busy worker screen/building screen

Future Work
===================

In the upcoming weeks we will begin testing the mechanism for Culture growth and Research growth from districts, hopefully we will get it right in the first few tries. As part of this improvement, we are also working on a visualization for the world map.

Thank you so much for your patience and contributions to our discussions about how to improve the game.

dSolver

Hello everyone,

Thank you for being so patient with our new update - we have a lot of cool new stuff this time, and will be rolling out additional content that takes advantage of the new systems in the coming weeks, based on feedback!

* Weather system
* Seasonal effects of weather on productivity, farm bonuses
* New ambience sound effects from weather

* New Experts system - Artists
* Hire artists from the Experts panel in City View
* Artists create works of art - which adds to Aesthetics



* New Global Settings control - control display mode and zoom level

* New Special Projects panel, replaces individual project panels



* New story - Mason Marky

* Bug Fixes:
* Double counting on building instances
* Fixed issue with performance when there are too many buildings in building queue
* Fixes bug with volume slider not always working

* QoL:
* Some tutorial hints early game
* Wording changes based on feedback of various UI and dialog
* Drastically reduced size of assets


Hope you enjoy it!

dSolver

Hey guys, just letting you know we've issued a patch (1.16.6) to address a few issues that we missed during testing.

1. Sometimes buildings were taking much longer to repair than anticipated - this was because we changed the scaling but it was not applied uniformly in some edge cases

2. When you add a lot of projects to the building queue it can dramatically slow down the performance of the building screen, this patch addresses one of the performance issues

3. The game could sometimes hang in late game when you have thousands of workers, and they were all starting their batches at the same time

4. Fixed some issues with Aesthetics, where a number of Aesthetics upgrades were not being properly unlocked if your game was started before the last update

5. Fixed some issues where the progress bar would jerk around instead of being a smooth animation

Hey Everyone,

Thank you for being patient with our July update! We've been making progress in increasing the depth and giving players more control over different aspects of the game, so let's get down to the details.

New Features

* Tools system - Tools have come into existence! Your workers have an innate desire for tools and if you have the tools they will use it. Overall efficiency of all workers depend on availability of tools (there's no penalty for not having tools). Efficiency is calculated as a percentage of "tool points" fulfilled vs. desired. Note that tools do break over time so it'll be necessary to replace broken tools. Improved tools provide 3 points and regular tools provide 1 point (i.e. 1 improved tool is equivalent to having 3 regular tools in terms of how long they last).

* Work Orders - This new system was created so that players can request special batches that are not the workers' normal batch. For example, Lumber Millers will have the ability to create Fine Lumber from (Regular) Lumber. Work Orders are unlocked once workers reach a certain amount of experience.

* Land Clearance - The Explorer was redesigned in this update. Instead of randomly finding Forest space for you, they will now have a chance of finding Land Parcels, which represent a piece of land that can become useful - if you decide to invest in working them. It will take some time, and resources, but you'll get a very rare resource - land.

* Apothecary Shop - a new Improvement for Forest zones in Districts, Apothecary Shops can improve your district's resilience against the spread of disease.

Tweaks

* Hospital Privitization previously simply added some money to your coffers (except when it didn't because there was also a bug). This tech has been modified to provide the player with a scaled policy to set just how greedy the Hospital should be run.

* A new one-time conversation happens now when you hire a lot of lumberjacks

* Taxation - changed the scaling for awesomeness when tax income increases

* Reduced the scaling for tech exp required for next level

**Bug Fixes**

* Fixed a bug where the game crashes when a batch was reset prematurely

* Fixed a bug where abandoning a district doesn't empty the district of its workers properly

* Fixed a text description bug regarding Tree Selection

QoL

* In game notifications will now display a button for the relevant action to describe what would happen when the player clicks on the notification (for example, go to the trading screen)

* Special Project Cards will now describe how many days Setup and Ramp up could take

* District details will now explain the stats - Workers, Food, Loyalty, Efficiency, and Production in the tooltip in greater detail

* Efficiency Breakdown for workers will now be shown right away when you open the worker details

* Added icons for land, missing item icons

* Added new actions for some in game notifications for switching to a different screen

Big thanks to all the beta testers and new players who provided me with all the bug reports, suggestions, to make this game incrementally better at every update!

Cheers!

• The save folder has changed locations for windows users! Don't worry, the game will migrate your files over automatically
  
  
• Fixed a bug where currency can go negative from the Garden Stall
  
  
• Fixed a bug where you can lose resources for starting to create a new district but then cancelling instead of hitting create.
  
  
• Fixed a bug where workers can go negative when a building collapses from natural disasters
  
  
• Added failsafes to prevent population from going negative (which shouldn't be possible, but there are some far flung edge cases)
  
  
• Auction houses now provide money properly
  
  
• Tweaked a number of tech upgrades
  
  
• Job description will now provide efficiency breakdown if available
  
  
• Lots of progress on the work order system but it is not yet available
  
  
• Started work on the Perks system (not available yet)

See you for July update! :)

dSolver

Hello everyone, thank you for being so patient with the game updates.

There has been major rework in the infrastructure side to support the extent that we'd like to see the game go.

The goal hasn't changed, we would still like to deliver the military campaign, the religion system, the cultural influence system, and very importantly we want to create vertical integrations across all these systems to improve gameplay.

In the May update, we added the necessary infrastructure behind the military campaign. Specifically, the world is now mapped with locations (points of interests), roads (which connect them), and we moved over anyone that moves such as battalions and caravans to the Traveler system, which makes use of these roads. We have built systems for building up an army and maintaining them, battle sequences between opposing forces, and the concept of faction ownership on locations. Additionally, some locations are tagged as Fortress, Castle, or City and provides additional bonus.

Another feature rolled out behind the scenes is the World Entities system. This translated a number of in-game values to actual entities with common properties. For example, the Granary, Warehouse, and Treasury are now "Resource Containers" in game, this will lead eventually to the concept of splitting up containers for budgeting/planning so that you could for example set up a container specifically for Contracts that automatically takes resources out of the main Stockpile based on certain policies.

A unified approach to developing in game widgets has led to a number of QoL features. The Sell list in the Trading screen can now be sorted to help you decide what needs to be sold. The Warehouse and Granary both have ability to sell goods instead of discarding them directly once you have the Market unlocked. The tagging system enables the warehouse to be sorted into categories so that you can quickly see what you have.

We also heard you loud and clear, the early game can sometimes be dull while you're waiting for buildings to be completed. You can't spare any more builders either, so instead you can help out your builders similar to chopping wood and gathering food.

We also introduced a few features based on feedback from the community. Farm houses and Tree houses now have an added bonus where they improve the efficiency of workers in the Agriculture and Forestry sectors respectively. This works by calculating the number of workers in the relevant Sector, and calculating the percentage of which is living in one of these location-specific homes. Makes sense if you think about it, someone who doesn't have to commute far can do more work with their time. However! Farm houses, like all other buildings in the Plains, is prone to being flooded, and Tree houses like all other buildings in the Forests, is exposed to forest fires.

Finally, we also released the full version of the Consistency Engine. This is a value checker that runs every now and then in game to make sure certain things stay up to synch. As we say in the development world, there's 2 hard problems: naming things, and cache invalidation. For sake of performance we cache a lot of frequently calculated values, and unfortunately the cache can become outdated. Given the scope of the game and the number of interdependencies, it is almost too easy to create accidental inconsistencies. The Consistency Engine is equipped with a set of formulas to ensure things like number of worker slots is consistent with the buildings that are operational, or that the seasonal bonus is appropriately updated for every batch in every job.

Now I understand that this update talked about a lot of infrastructure stuff and not a lot of features. Please be patient as we work towards the June update that will add some more content to the game.

Cheers!

dSolver

Hey everyone, Happy New Year!

Now that bellies are full and holiday stress is over, let's dive back into routine with a new update.

In addition to posts here, from now on I will (try to) keep a changelog over at https://home.prosperity-game.com/changelog

* New feature: Market Auto-sell on District Improvements. Once a Market is built in a district, the player will be able to toggle goods produced in the district to auto-sell. This feature figures out what the district produces by keeping a running list of goods produced via each improvement

* District Improvement changes:
* Compost Yard - will now provide Food points to a district instead of increasing efficiency of farms
* Road to Capital - Reduced the prerequisite district stats, replaced Explorers Guild with Porcelain Tower

* District Upkeep cost adjusted, will now have a base cost to upkeep districts to discourage creating too many all at once

* District Details UI - now displays a badge beside each stimulus package if there is currently any time left on a stimulus pack

* Districts are now prone to flooding if there is a river zone in the district. Flooding can kill inhabitants and will delay production

* New District Improvement: Levee - can be built on district zones with a river, reduces chance of flooding.

* New District Improvement: Stables - are built in the Core of a district, once built it will provide a productivity boost of 20 for every farm built in the district

* Fixed an issue where a district improvement in ramp-up mode produced negative goods

* Fixed an issue where district efficiency could potentially become negative

* Fixed an issue where 2nd floor (and other building upgrades that added housing capacity) wasn't adding any housing

* Fixed an issue where the upgrade toggle on a building card reset itself if the building was not marked as being upgradable

* Fixed an issue where starting a project called for 1 more worker than listed in the project card

* Fixed an issue where the commission on the trading screen was incorrectly calculated

* Fixed an issue where typing the amount of goods to sell did not trigger an update on calculating what the total gains should be

* Granite and a number of other exotic resources are now able to be sold through the Sell tab of the Trading screen

* Overflow penalty for warehouse will now be more prominent by adding a debuff marker. Overflow penalty will now scale when population < 100

* Increased base salary of Constables, constables will now provide a static increase to security awesomeness

* Sleeker UI for setting up a game, added potential for more professions to be added

* Behind the scenes: Modified the food history so that annual food consumption will be recorded in a separate archive, which reduces memory needs to store food history in total

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