HexLands Playtest · build 24362418 · published
Here's v0.45, which is a huge update, with new features, including Disasters and many reworks! There are tons of polishes and fixes as well, but they are just so tiny besides these big changes. Keep in mind that these new systems could be rough on the edges so I'm all ears! :)As always: join my Discord server to share your thoughts and receive instant access to the Steam playtest! ;)Anyway, let's begin with the patch notes!
Demands were kind of boring as some of you mentioned it, worst case it way annoying, best case it was chore-like. So now they are gone, but I kept tasks because optional quests for rewards can make the game quite interesting. I also removed quests which heavily forced you not to progress towards the population goal. (e.g. "do not increase the population for X turns")However, a game without threats is a boring one, so above your resource panel now there is a timeline. As you may have "guessed" from the title, every now and then various disasters appear on that timeline. You must plan ahead to mitigate their effect, and lower your chances of being caught off-guard. Some are simple: just reduce your food or wood generation for a few turns. These can sound boring, I know, but these simple ones are there so you can relax a bit between the more complex ones.Some of them put harmful cards into your deck, like Poor Harvest putting Starvation into your deck. Which unless are removed or used (costs food), reduce the population of your towns. To be more specific it targets population provider buildings directly. So you could end up easily with empty houses which should be just demolished to free up the space.Some of them target tiles a few turns ahead, like Storm Surge. It targets coastal buildings, and if you don't reinforce those tiles via the Reinforce cards you are given temporarily in these case, they will be destroyed, leaving Ruins on that tile which should be demolished if you don't want wasted pace.Oh, and you may ask: but how do I lose reputation with this new system? Sometimes directly, like each destroyed building causes your reputation to decrease... and sometimes indirectly, due to population loss! Because as you have guessed it, population loss now always decreases your reputation. Of course the old reputation system wasn't compatible with these changes... so let's continue with that.
Having just 3 reputation points meant that all reputation losses would reduce it by at least 33%. Which is pretty harsh when you get 2 harmful cards, or e.g. 3 tiles are marked by a disaster.So to have a more granular reputation, instead of 1–3, I scaled it up to 1–100. Which also means that now I can introduce minor reputation restoring mechanics along a run, instead of having just rare resting camp nodes, giving +1 reputation (+33%). So there are quests which reward you with a small amount of reputation, and also a new card doing the same:
Pilgrimage: Sends a group of villagers on a pilgrimage, granting you Reputation in exchange of population.
Houses and buildings no longer claim tiles on placement, thus card play is much more fluid. Instead extra tiles are granted on rank-up. Expansion is added to the starter deck, which now has the same cost as, but with Exhaust.
Instead of receiving a small amount (35) of food and wood when you request resources, now you can choose between 75 food, 75 wood, or 20 gold & 3 workers.This way it's much more likely that it will help you after one use because most likely you are missing just one resource. Thus previously usually you had to request resources twice (possibly causing a dead turn) to reach a proper amount of wood or food. And while I was there, now that we can choose, let's add an option for gold and wood, in case that's what you need! :)
Church: first infinite per-turn population provider.
Retain: Makes a selected card "sticky", meaning that it remains in your hand until used or discarded.
Royal Favor: Makes a selected card free.
Coins and reputation are now displayed in the top left corner, so run-wide attributes are grouped together.
Relics are now displayed in the top right corner, thus only negative and temporary positive modifiers are displayed on the existing panel on the left.
The progress bar which used to display the turns left till a new task or demand arrives is now removed. Upcoming tasks are now indicated on the new timeline.
Updated the resource panel art, though I may revert it, let me know what you think about it.
Lots of performance improvements, mostly when some action was done by the player, e.g. ending the turn, placing a new building, etc. These consist of code optimizations and caching some heavy calculations between operations. Frame-to-frame GPU performance (as far as I remember) is untouched. Keep an eye on saving because lots of optimizations were done there! ^^
If lower-end hardware is detected, software cursor is disabled and target framerate is capped at 60 FPS by default.
Thanks for reading and an even bigger thanks if you could give it a try and give me some feedback! :) If you'd like to share your thoughts on these changes or report any issues, join my Discord server! (and of course I'll grant you instant access to the playtest on Steam! ;) )As always, a huge thanks for your continued support and feedback!Tibor a.k.a. Tudvari a.k.a. Portgate Studios