Just a quick text update as to what I’ve been doing.
The game’s logic has been flipped!! After reading a lot of feed back and sitting down with numbers I’ve changed how buildings create populants.
The new logic makes populants quicker with smaller settlements, but they are weaker. Bigger settlements make populants slower but they are stronger. This leads to a different strategy, either make lots of small settlements to increase you population fast - but it will be weak. Or build bigger settlements to make a stronger tribe.
Populants now also bump merge. This means if two populants are close to each other or bump into each other they will merge to create a combined stronger populant.
Terraforming now has a new manna cost system. Lower land will be cheaper to effect, with higher land being more costly. This feels good as it starts to prevent spamming. As a player you will start to have to think should you save manna for totem powers to disrupt other tribes population generation or expand.
Have also begun work on adding ‘unmovable’ bedrock that can not be removed. UI for a new totem branch has been added. There have also been lot’s of fixes to AI. Work is also underway to rewrite CPU logic and aggression. Lots of CPU kindness has been sprinkled to reduce CPU overheads which again is good news.
Visually there isn’t much to show at the moment, but the whole game play is certainly being refreshed and looked at. It feels good and can’t wait to share it. Will do a 'screen shot saturday’ tomorrow :D