This is an update on the latest progress in the development of Folk Emerging.
In preparation for the game's upcoming demo, I've addressed lots of playtester feedback and added new features and content.
Exciting demo news coming very soon!
Headline Changes
Save System added
Diplomacy fleshed out, Debt added
Food rebalance, Foraging now a Production Focus
Pacing adjusted, more time with later techs
Faction updates + Proto-Civilization tease!
Design
🍏 Foraging
Foraging is now a Production Focus, similar to Farming and Herding. It no longer has to happen every turn, only when selected.
This introduces a trade-off each turn between actively obtaining Food and spending Production elsewhere. The only remaining passive source of Food is domesticated animals kept at the campsite.
It means Foraging yields scale with Production, making band size matter and giving the player more ways to affect outputs.
It no longer forces players focusing on Farming/Herding to forage and impact the local foodweb when they don't want/need to.
Food Forageable from different species has been rebalanced so in the early game Foraging tends to provide around 1-2 turns worth of Food. Optimizing for a Foraging playstyle lets your Bands live off Foraging for longer periods.
🍗 Scavenging & Hunting
Scavenging is no longer a Production Focus, but a direct interaction with Predator Threats. It costs 1 Training Point, gives some baseline Food, and can trigger scavenging events.
Hunting animal clusters on the map also costs 1 Training Point (down from 2). Its baseline Food output varies with the species of the animal, modified by unlocked technologies and other bonuses. Can trigger hunting events.
🗻 Spiritual Sites & Monuments
Each discovered Spiritual Site gives an immediate +10 Culture bonus.
The Explorers clan gives +5 extra Culture to the Spiritual Site discovery bonus.
Worship Points can only be invested in a Spiritual Site once your Tribe has a claimed Monument next to it. The first Tribe to build a Monument next to a Site still gets 1 free Worship Point in that Site.
Monuments with equipped Items now give extra Happiness instead of extra Culture.
🤝 Diplomacy
Every trade good now has a visible & dynamic Trade Value, which defines its cost in trade. Modified by unlocked technologies.
The Tribe that initiates a trade determines the content of the offer, and the Tribe that was approached determines the value of the offer, based on their own perceived Trade Value.
This also means the player can no longer alter incoming deals / gifts, they can only accept or reject. If they want something else they need to initiate a new trade on their turn.
Debt is a new currency that allows Tribes to owe each other. Each pair of Tribes has their own Debt Tolerance, or how much they're willing to owe each other, based on their relationship. Debt exceeding it causes a Happiness malus for both factions.
Tribe relationships now have states based on opinion: Friendly, Cautious, Upset, Angry. Each affects debt tolerance and probability of trade and conflict.
Bands can only participate in one completed trade during their own turn, after which they enter a Trade Cooldown. This also prevents teleporting goods across long chains of adjacent Bands in one turn.
📜 Events
Added more options to the deadliest events, so there are more ways to save key characters from dying.
💾 Save System
Added saving/loading + autosaves.
⏳ Pacing
Increased VP threshold in the playtest/demo to 125 (up from 100), to give players more time to experience later content.
Tech costs adjusted to allow more time with later techs in the playtest/demo.
Removed the +20% Fertility bonus from the "Expecting Food Surplus" state, now there's just the Fertility malus from "Expecting Food Deficit" state. The remaining Fertility bonuses are from more conscious player actions. Slower population growth should help pacing as well.
🚩 Factions
Renamed Wind Tribe to Storm Tribe, and it now has Hunter, Warriors, Explorers clans (swapped out Sages for Warriors), with new synergistic bonuses when each pair of clans has 100+ opinion.
Added Neanderthals as a minor unplayable faction, with distinct stats and behaviors.
Each Tribe can become a Proto-Civilization later in the full game, if they meet the criteria.
To complete the playtest/demo, you must get enough Victory Points and reveal your Tribe's paths to different proto-Civilizations (playable in the full game).
Proto-Civilizations transform the endgame. More will be revealed soon!
🌆 Urban Dwellings
As a small taste of later content, Urban Dwellings are now unlocked early with Stoneworking, boosting the sedentary playstyle (and hinting at some new challenges that this playstyle introduces).
⚖ Balance
Mediating clan relationships now costs 10 Culture (up from 5).
Council cultural norm lowers Culture cost of clan mediation by half.
Made Cultural norms more expensive to counter-balance various Culture bonuses.
Rebalanced yields from Farming & Herding to work with new Foraging yields.
Made Tribe starting population sizes identical to avoid VP imbalance at start.
Happiness bonuses from Chief & Shaman personalities are now additive instead of multiplicative, to avoid counter-intuitive effects when Happiness/turn is negative.
Predator Threats now also give a stackable Happiness malus to adjacent Bands, so they remain relevant even when Risk from Wildlife is minimized.
UI
Added summary tooltips for Tribes, Bands, and Persons, making a lot of information more easily accessible.
Added nested tooltips for certain numerical values, so you can hover over them to see how they were calculated, allowing more streamlined tooltips overall.
Claimed structure icons on the map now apply the claimant faction's color to their background.
Improved diplomacy panel to show more info in a better layout and include Debt.
Holding SHIFT while clicking on a trade good adds/removes 10 instead of 1, and CTRL adds/removes 100.
All factions' victory points, as well as their relationship to the player and any debts, are shown in the tooltip of the player's icon in the top left.
Added a new, centralized menu from which to assign specialist roles, which shows valid candidates from the entire tribe, shows any states relevant to the role, allows quick sorting by each relevant attribute.
Overhauled visuals for campsites, caves, hills, water tiles, selected band highlights, wonder highlights.
Added animations for campsites, inhabited caves, and inhabited urban dwellings.
Added neater horizontal divider lines in tooltips.
Tooltips for event details and outcomes now show up next to the event panel instead of overlapping it.
Band view is reorganized, and tabs are now ordered by: Production, Ecosystem, Members, Military, Campsite
Most quantities (e.g. Training Points, Culture) are shown rounded down to the nearest integer, to avoid cases where an action requires 3 and you have 2.95 but it was getting rounded up as 3, despite action not being available.
All probabilities are now shown as 0-1 instead of 0-100%, to decrease confusion surrounding multiplicative modifiers of those probabilities.
Cleaned up pinned character banners, with less text, bigger portraits, better tooltips.
New loading screen, moved starting premise there instead of in-game.
Streamlined tutorials.
Bugs Fixed
Fixed discrepancy between production time estimates on structure tooltip vs band details.
Increased default audio volume, should no longer be quiet compared to other apps.
Fixed dead characters being chosen as event subjects, now disabled unless explicitly allowed for specific events.
Fixed discrepancy between Training Points shown in military view vs in band view.
Fixed events showing outcomes that already apply (e.g. Person already has trait).
Text and event fixes
Programming
Not queuing movement reminder on turns when band has no tiles it can move to.
Various refactoring & efficiency improvements.
Keep an eye out for demo news soon!
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Cheers :)