A lot has been going on in terms of development, I just have not gotten around to writing a post about it - until now!
Let’s start with the new trade contracts I mentioned in my last post: Those are fully implemented, and after lots of playtesting, they really do make a difference to how the game feels. When I was already producing a lot of something, I was excited to see new contracts coming in, and when a particularly tasty contract came in for something I wasn’t producing yet, I thought long and hard about whether I could create the production chains for it. Similarly, I once found myself producing a large surplus of furniture with no contracts coming up, and it suddenly made sense to switch my villagers from the furniture production into other industries that were more needed at this point. All of these are good developments, I think, and the type of playstyle I want to encourage.
To go with the trade contracts, I also set up a new trade research podium, which more than doubles the now available research projects. Prosperity costs are all over the place, and I found that prosperity generally generates a little slowly at the moment, so I will appreciate any and all feedback about the balance of things. Of course, as additional products will be introduced that can be used for prosperity, balance will shift, and things will be adjusted accordingly as development continues.
Finally, I have updated the entire tutorial for the new mechanics and features (which took a long while as usual). I think it works fairly well, and having gone through it roughly 50 times over the last few weeks has also allowed me to find and fix a bunch of bugs and little annoyances. I have uploaded the new version to the experimental branch already, and will switch it to the public branch once I’ve received a bit of feedback. I will keep you posted.
Until next time!