April has come and gone while the team has been working on stability and polish for the Steam stuff.

This month we were mentioned in a Rock, Paper, Shotgun article! Though the words said weren’t very complimentary it’s nice to have some official exposure and critique.

Effects

Shawn

Wake effects are getting a texture change. While this isn’t the final product, it is looking more like water being dispersed by the city’s movement through the ocean.

A new resource will be available soon: the whale carcass. This is a stationary resource that doesn’t need to be chased down like the swimming whale. I made a leaking pool of blood that gets carried away by the ocean current. Also, there’s a strange green aura that indicates that the meat may be festering – a risk of disease spreading through the city but for weary villagers, it might be worth it.

Resource Icon

Kevin

Call me bugzom

Zomawia

I spent a majority of this month getting City Wars as stable as possible. Our AI navigation solution coupled with floating cities guarantees ever present bugs.

Additionally I made over 30 different cities to be spawned in. More to come and my goal is at least 100 by launch.

And of course a small raft where emus have guns.

Game Balance – Hunger

Shawn

Hunger was a previously hidden stat that affects both Happiness and Nourishment. Since it was hidden from the player there wasn’t much need to balance it but rather we balanced around the other two. We recently made hunger a displayed stat that will be managed with food and had to balance accordingly. Now players will see direct correlations between hunger and happiness and nourishment.

Trade Demands and Needs

Zomawia

Within our Trade system I added “wanted resources”. The trade value of any wanted resource will be multiplied. This should give the possibility of getting a good trade.

Also I don’t know if this was ever mentioned but our Trade system is a bartering type; there is no “money” in the game. Higher tiered resources are obviously worth more.

Wanted Resources

In relation to that I added a small UI-based Demands system. During City interactions, if you retreat from a battle (and depending on the city’s behavior and casualties), they will demand resources from you. These should be their “wanted resources” but can be random. Paying the demands ensures a safe retreat.

The demands are also possible from a hostile city. Paying demands will give you free passage, so no casualties!

Next I put the ability to trade any captured prisoners of war. Not all cities and traders deal with trading prisoners. In the future the prisoner system will be revamped to support more gameplay possibilities.

Worth the weight in gold beer

Drifting Resources

Shawn

The floating resources that players can pick up throughout the world now drift with the current. Players can now chase down or occasionally just let them drift into their cities to pick them up.

AI Obstacles

Shawn

The pirate boats weren’t the smartest when it came to chasing the players’ cities. Often they would plow right through large obstacles like decrypted ships seemingly unfazed. Those days are gone, now pirate boats (and other AI driven entities) will actively avoid these obstacles on their course to their destination (it may be a bit buggy right now and some smoothness of the turns are being worked on). Goodbye, dimensional phasing pirates!

Event Scalability

Kobey

We have re-worked our Events a bit to make them more scalable. We wanted to make sure that Events would scale properly with the size of your city so that you always have a chance to come back from them. Each Event has a different difficulty level that gets assigned based on your current population. The higher the population the stronger the event will be. This way if your city has some rough times. The events will be a bit more forgiving.