About two weeks ago, we released the fourth major update to the playtest! The main focus of this update was (as the name suggests) conflict and culture. The animals on the ring are now aggressive and dangerous, but you're no long without tools to fight back. The culture system has been revamped to better mirror the tech tree, and you can now design your culture by combining meme nodes that modify gameplay.
The first combat related building you have access to is the hunter camp. Here you can assign hunters, that will throw rock pebbles with their slings at animals in range, and then gather their meat for food. As you progress, you can also unlock the watchtower, which allows for stationary ranged guards, for a more safe and robust defensive setup of your civilization. After playing, we've seen that these systems need a lot of balancing and tweaking, but it also opened up a whole new dimension to the gameplay!
The culture system is rather minimal for this playtest, offering 9 nodes, compared to the 20 nodes in the tech tree. However, they still provide powerful tools for managing your people, such as global movement speed buffs, sacrificial rituals, and countering of certain morale sinks. Speaking of morale: we brought back this metric, and made it one of the most central parts of the game, functioning almost as a "HP bar" for your entire game. When morale reaches zero, an uprising happens, robbing you of many of the resources and technologies you've worked so hard for!
This playtest saw a record number of players and feedback submissions, as well as some great discussion on our Discord (link on the Steam page!). This is incredibly valuable to us, both for development direction, and for inspiration!
- See you around!