Let Them Trade · build 20830178 · published
Hello folks,
we worked hard and long for this, and today is finally the day we can share with you...
This is the biggest update since the release of Let Them Trade, and it is packed with a lot of new features and improvements. So be sure to check it out if you already own the game - and if not, now is the best time to get into it!
Let's walk through the changes now, shall we?
With this update, there are quite a few new additions to our production buildings and production resources. These are there to make the mid-to-late-game more interesting and to use the mid-game resources for more complex production-chains.
An example is the Brewery, which creates Beer, which can then be distilled in the Distillery.
To accompany these changes, we had to rework the research tree. You can see, we also tried to make the research tree much more straight-forward and less cluttered.
A big part was separating the more general upgrades from the buildings and inhabitants. You can find stuff like the extra knights and extended city limits now in an extra column on the left side of the research tree. You will also find some new upgrades there, more below.
We hope that you will enjoy the new resources and production chains and that they make the game more interesting once you unlock the higher tiers of the research tree. Feel free to tell us how you feel about these changes on our Discord!
We wanted to give players a sense of closure after they completed all objectives on the free-play sandbox maps.
You are now able to hold a great feast in a new building called "Party Pavilion" - you can find it right at the end of the research tree. This is where the aristocrats go to spend all their luxury resources. And you have to keep them happy long enough so the party becomes a success!
A successful party now marks the official end of a free-play map. But to everyone who wants to keep playing - a successful party unlocks special bonuses that can completely change the balance of the game. So if you want to keep playing after the party, please feel free to do so and test out the limits of Let Them Trade.
Cities will now set out a bounty on bandits that robbed them. This will continue until you are able to find the bandit's camp and ask them nicely to go away. After you did this, you will be able to claim the Bounty as a reward.
We hope this improves the motivation to actually fight the bandits.
As we noticed that collecting money from, and donating money to cities is an important game mechanic that was a bit tedious to use, we made life for you a bit easier.
You can now press the left "Shift" key to pop out a new menu with a quick overview of the towns' happiness and easy access to the "Collect" and "Donate" functionality.
What was two became one in our Resource Overview UI. No more switching between two tabs to see market supply and market price. Now you can see everything at one glance, as well as a general trend and how the supply matches the demand.
Of course you can still click on these resources to get a more detailed overview, including graphs and charts and trends.
We received a lot of feedback about our city-transporters. That are these little figurines that move resources inside of a city. Many players found them too unoptimized and found them always a bit too overloaded a bit too often.
We made some changes to address that:
Transporters are now able to carry multiple resources. This can be unlocked via the research tree.
Loading- / unloading-times of the transporters now depend on how much they actually carry. Before, it didn't make a difference if they loaded 1 wood or 20 armor - it always took the same amount of time. Now the time it takes scales with how much they load (which makes more sense)
The logic for transporters was updated as well. They plan their routes much more intelligently and try to pick smart paths where they can pick something up on the way to somewhere else.
They also prioritize what tasks to do first and rank them by importance.
They also weigh in things like distance, travel time, estimated wait time and other factors.
Also indirectly connected: Input- and output-capacities for production buildings have increased to give transporters a chance of delivering and getting the resources in time before the building's storage gets overloaded.
The Ui of the transporter now also shows what they transport and what they want to pick up.
We did some testing and we still get some player that have issues with transporters overloading. Please tell us about your experience on our Discord! We have a much more stable base now to change the behavior of the transporters in the future.
We noticed a not-small number of players having problems with the performance and we got a good amount of crash reports related to the GPU.
That's why we reworked the complete rendering backend of Let Them Trade. This was no small task, as every model in our game and the whole look was dependent on the features the old rendering provided. But most of these features were not stable and reliable enough, but used a lot of performance.
You should notice no change in quality - but a pretty big bump in the games performance.
If you experienced issues and crashes before, please try out this update.
If you still have issues: Please update your graphics drivers to the latest available version, that fixes a lot of problems. If that doesn't help, feel free to come into our Discord and describe your problem.
As you can see above, some players even reported Let Them Trade running smoothly on the Steam Deck! Feel free to try that out for yourself! :)
To give some more visual variety, we added different variations of tiles that have vegetation and the like. We updated the old maps to fit the new look. And you are also able to use these new tile variations in the map editor for your own maps.
Over the last few months we also fixed a lot of stuff that popped up as players were playing the game. Thank you to everyone who reported their issues via the in-game reporter, the crash reporter or via our Discord.
Here are few of these smaller changes:
Fixed movement component accuracy at high game speed
Fixed bandit statistics, fixed display of bandit crimes in tooltip
Removed on tick production building inactivity
Bandits will speed up if necessary when attacking a target
Bandits wont spawn at unreachable locations
Fixed Global Resource Overview UI not updated properly with some tile synergy effects
Added custom bandit tooltip for bandit pin in HUD
New building models and icons
Added new modifications
Tweaks to existing upgrades and modifications
And to the achievement hunters: There are new achievements now and some have been tweaked to be a bit easier.
Alongside this update, we are also releasing...
Our soundtrack got a lot of praise from players, that's why we made the decision to release our soundtrack as additional content to this game. Buying this is a way to support us even after you bought the base game. Thank you for that! As a bonus, you get an album of banger music to listen to while you bake bread, ride on your bicycle through Europe or while snuggled up on your couch.
This soundtrack includes our Main Theme, which was recorded by a real orchestra - we are really proud of how that turned out.
If you want to check out how the Main Theme was made, please take a look at this Short we created of the event where it was recorded:
And to top it all off, we are part of...
Cozy Quest, the most cozy event on Steam is live RIGHT NOW! And we are a part of it! What does this mean for you? Well, a juicy 20% discount on Let Them Trade!
Now is the perfect time to jump into the game, as the new additions and improvements make it a much more rounded and stable experience.
And if you already have the game, now is also the perfect time to stock up on Steam-gift-versions of Let Them Trade so you can make your special relaxing-city-building-loving friends happy at the end of the year! Or why wait till the holidays?
One last thing...
In case you didn't know - we have a pretty active community uploading new maps to our Steam Workshop regularly!
Please check out the Workshop to find new maps to play when you already played through all the official ones. There are quite a few imaginative ones, ranging from recreated fantasy worlds, to real-life continents, to maps with fun challenges.
We want to give more attention to the creative works of our players, and that's why we want to showcase some of them here. We also want to have some contests in the future, where you can get the chance to get your map into our game.
Here are some maps that we found interesting:
Did you make your own map? Feel free to post it in our Discord!
And now, make yourself a hot chocolate, get a warm blanket and fire up a round of Let Them Trade!
Have fun,
Spaceflower