Hi,

I hope you are all well. Today I'm going to share a few small things from the upcoming Tier 2 & Future Era update version 0.10. I'll have some good news and some bad news.

Because things are a bit rough I'm not able to share all artwork I wanted (a lot is still very much work-in-progress) but regardless of the difficulties in the past couple of weeks I'm getting closer to a playable beta version.


So let's get to the important business first. The beta for 0.10 is planned to

That is assuming beta goes with the same pace as two previous major updates... I have no idea if the player engagement will be the same during pre-christmas time. We'll see. If needed I'll make the beta week or two longer.


As I mentioned this version has been rather difficult and I have accumulated a slight delay so had to do some unpleasant rescheduling.


My ambition was to double the number of heroes for Tier 2. While this is still my ambition I know for sure this will not be possible in such short time frame, especially considering these heroes will need to form specific combos with the new wonders and perks. So in general I will have to add heroes by smaller batches. Either as part of major updates or smuggled inside smaller patches.


While I do have 3 new tracks composition in progress none of those tracks is yet ready to use. Also my wish is to 'remake' the existing depressive piano track for a better sounding piano instrument and fix some of its melodic stupidities....so lots and lots of work in this area yet.


This was the hardest decision because I have spent about two weeks working on redesigning of the class perks and their new visuals. They are now working in a more interesting way that should create more combinations with new stuff and I do like the new mechanisms lot better than the previous ones (remember I descoped this feature from 0.9 because the designs were too simplistic back then).

This time the reason to exclude this from 0.10 is the testing and balancing time needed to do this feature in combination of new Future Era and 40 additional levels.

One feature I am looking forward to test and expand in v 0.10 is called 'Crisis Perks'. This is no magic - all Tier 2 crises will be granted special passive or active abilities which will make them in some way harder to fight. Some perks will depend on the Crisis category (Fire, Plague, Uprising, etc.) some will be randomly generated (e.g. for random Rare crises which need some 'extra kick').

For instance a crisis may be resisting damage from some source (e.g. a light unit). It may cause your block shields to be less effective. Or it may periodically 'cast' a special effect on you.

A new Robot Uprising encountered in Future Era on higher levels. This one has an offensive 'Fast' Perk improving the crisis' speed.Crisis perks will be mostly aimed at defending the crisis from the player, rather than making the crisis more offensive. However exceptions to this will exist. As usual this first batch of crisis perks will be only a 'starter pack' with more variants coming hopefully based on beta feedback.



Not originally planned, but it felt irresistible to increase the map size for Tier 2. Adding more civilization rivals and making them more dangerous will be part of the update. However it also felt like a new type on neutral 'critter' crisis is a good idea. So we'll have another type of Crisis next to Cannibals, Mammoths and Barbarians. For now I only intend to introduce this new Crisis type to Tier 2 for simplicity's sake.

Giant Obese Lizards will be added to the mix. Sorry I cannot explain my reasoning for this choice ... It was purely instinctive and emotional decision.

Future Era will of course include its own set of crises and problems. I have added two new Disasters into the 'Predicement' system (the bombs).

• One of them is Economic Depression which lowers your Gold Cap making gold worthless and slowly bleeds your Housing every second.
  
• The other one is Resentment which negates all your Risk Reduction bonuses and slowly but steadily increases your Click Heat.

New Nemeses will be added strictly to the Future Era. This one's concept is called 'Idea Pathogen'. For some of the Nemeses however, there will be no 'mortality' condition for Tier 2, only to be made mortal in Tier 3 (we'll see if that's reasonably playable)



In the remaining time til Beta I still have a lot of Future Era artwork to polish, and add initial Hero/wonder set. Along with an already pre-designed new trait mechanisms and of course the long promised fifth hero slot!

This is all I have for today. I'll be in touch as soon as the Beta is ready!

See you soon,

Ondrej

Hi,

this week's update is going have a more greasy feel to it than usual. With version 0.9 out and most of my time spent supporting players or patching (almost 3 weeks total time out of 4), the current game version is somewhere mid-way towards a presentable state that would normally be for a Monday Update. But I figured I can show that state anyway. Just please bear in mind that all is very 'work-in-progress' and will likely change a lot as soon as testing comes in play.

There's a lot of activity going on at once. We have new hero/government ability redesign roughly in place. We have new UI layout, we have endless mode, we have future era technologies. Let's talk briefly about all of these.


To be clear, we are talking about the features like Enlist, Bolster, Mercenaries, Garden, Festival and Zeal trigger abilities as well as Autocracy and Oligarchy toggle abilities. Anything you can have on the UI as extra buttons except Units and Workshops. In case this is confusing I'm using both term Skill and Ability but I mean the same thing. Because of new features added in the past major upates there are several problems which I think are worth pointing out:

1. Skills are gained by unreliable ways: randomly dropped Hero skills and technology. This makes them less available to use throughout the game-play as you progress in tree and hero levels.
   
2. It is always a compromise of a passive ability on a Hero to instead pick a skill. This lowers the appeal of active skill.
   
3. There are little skills useful early on.
   
4. There are different ways skills progress with power (some are limited by resource, some scale with levels)
   
5. Resource like gold/autonomy is difficult to use effectively in many situations and are therefore often useless.
   
6. There are several ways the abilities draw resource costs and how that cost scales making things more complex to understand and plan.
   
7. Many skills cannot have any cooldown because they scale with cost - thus requiring frequent casting (e.g. Enlist or Festival).
   
8. Government abilities have grown weak compared to new abilities.

At the core of the new changes for 0.10 is a somewhat symmetrical design of skills and unification of the mechanisms behind them. First step is to move all abilities to Governments - which are granted and fixed for every Class and Faction combination. That way you do not have to compensate on passive random generic traits. You always have some abilities available.

Illustration of the new hero ability design. Ellipses represent triggerable skill, Recangles a togglable skill and dotted rectangle is a passive ability. Colors represent factions while position within the 'reverse T' shape indicates the hero slot/class as in the in-game inventory. Teal names are skills originally granted by Technology. Pink names are those originally available from random hero traits. Yellow names are new Skills.
The general idea is that each Belief and Law hero now has exactly one of Triggerable Abilities previously available elswhere. I moved most of the existing abilities like Bolster to the faction governments (i.e. same for all heroes of that faction) and where no reasonable skill existed added a new one to fit that faction. These abilities now scale with Hero Level and have a cooldown and either gold or autonomy cost depending on the faction color.

Leadership slots still have a toggle ability. But I completely redesigned them and either moved or converted existing abilities to a Leadership Toggle. For instance Enlist is now a toggle ability on Blue faction which will have an 'affinity' towards using militia.

The economy governments are (at least for now) simply providing a passive always-active bonus.

As mentioned elswhere, Autonomy and Gold are treated as a 'Mana' resource that is spend by using abilities. All new skills will now use their respective resource based on faction. Red/Purple factions will use up Gold while Green/Blue will use Autonomy.

At the same time these factions will also generate this resource by default (initially in very small amount provided by free workers) so that you can use the abilities from relatively early on.

Example how the heroes skill redesign now exists in the 0.10 branch. Icons and descriptions are still very rough. You can also Ignore any values - no balancing has occured there yet
For various reasons I decided to redesign the layout of the UI panel. Mostly to make skills more coupled with units but also to make space for potential extra stuff in tier 2 and 3. Limit on wonder/workshop numbers also calls for potential extra slots (by whatever rare/expensive means).

Very early mock of the new panel with extra row added to accommodate new skills. Graphics is only a 'usable temporary' will likely need more polish later
It is now more or less clear how Future era will work technically. It will be using a combination of the existing technology tree with something i think is commonly known as 'endless' research where player will also not be guaranteed to reach further depending on their power (something you could call a rogue-lite element). So how are all those things going to work together?


First of all let's talk about what the Future era represents.

Future era will represent technological advancements following the Internet. Yeah you could say we're already living in the future! Future era will however be longer to play than other eras we have previously (my estimate is future era to be worth 3+ normal eras depending on how long you manage to play).

I have made some early mock-ups for some technologies I'd like to place into the tech tree of the future era that would cover the first part (more stuff to be added probably as player gains more powers in Tier 3 and Tier 4)

Early mock-up of technological concepts for first part of Future era. More high-tech stuff will come later.


I have yet to test the idea but the basic thought I have now is to make future era work similar to Tower of Babel. If you fall you ascend (with all due rewards). So the challenge is to proceed through all the new risks and predicaments without dying.

There will also be 'new things' that will make progress increasingly harder. Dystopian Horrors Eternal Comforts that will be meant to stop your progress and freeze you in a merciless (though fun) status-quo.


To make this new problem possible, research in future era will be concealed. You will no longer know what you're researching until you are stuck with it. And some technologies will not be so nice. Of course there will be a mechanism to reveal a concealed technology. But it won't be for free...

There will be several fixed 'Major' technologies (as per the mock image) which will be randomly available in the tree, but there will also be an infinite number of 'minor generated' technologies which will provide a combination of good and bad traits. The exact mechanism of mixing fixed and generic technologies is yet undecided.

This is all for today. Next time I'm hoping to show you some visuals for the future era!


See you next time,

Ondrej

Hello,

due to regression defects introduced by optimizations in patch 0.9.8 I made two small hotfixes today addressing secondary-effect bugs. Apologies for the inconvenience:

• Fixed a regression issue causing Tribal village quest crashing the game if the Village got destroyed in the meantime (e.g. via separate pending Dilemma on the same village)

• Fixed a regression issue causing Workshop Upgrades to stay available after completing them.

• Crisis Auto-Pause was added to the Settings allowing you to stop the game automatically when Crisis appears
  
• Some cases in which Fast-forwarding AFK playtime crashes have been fixed
  
• Fast forwarding performance issues causing virtual 'freezing' have been fixed.
  
• A few optimizations for Fast-forwarding were done to slightly improve the deteriorated speed. (More optimizations will be needed in the future updates)
  
• A bug was fixed which caused Combat during Fast forward to result in loss, due to many Crises spawning at once preventing player from defending in time even though they were OK if played normally.
  
• Dismantle popup should no longer appear for clicking empty place of workshops which arent yet built
  
• Collosus ability now actually spends the money it says it will cost.
  
• Nemesis level is now shown before triggering it to allow player make some life-decisions.
  
• Crisis attacks which can Kill the player will now show an warning indicator if their population is low enough to die from this attack.
  
• Village and Diplomacy quests should now correctly decrement their Card Deck if the game is loaded furing the quest.

Because this patch contains performance optimizations and thus is slightly more likely to contain new bugs, please be sure to let me know if you spot any new defect, email to microcivilization@gmail.com or join us on discord https://discord.gg/kU5RBHWAWy

I usually try to avoid invasive performance optimizations in patches but the current state of Fast Forwarding was horrible and optimizations were necessary. Apologies for any inconvenience.

Hi,

apologies for a hiccup with patches today. After messing up patch version 0.9.5 causing crashes on Ascension research, I have rolled back the patch, fixed it again and now releasing it as 0.9.6. Game should no longer crash and below issues should be included.

• Chichen Itza now correctly providing its bonus only when occupied by workers.
  
• Tech Era boss crisis now prevents you from spending Secrets on its lock at the same time.
  
• You can no longer spend Secrets on Tech Locks which are behind unresearched technologies or locks.
  
• Workshop popups should now appear even when paused
  
• Food storage is now showing explicit 'Stockpiling' label when filling active Granary.
  
• Food storage bonus granted by granary has been reduced while several smaller bonuses were added to Neolithic Technologies. This is to make storage increments slower and less sudden.
  
• Temporarily Corrupted heroes now show explicit text indicating their Corruption duration and more importantly the fact they need to be equipped in order to reduce that duration.
  
• Fixed a few possible crashes during gameplay and map generation.
  
• Small change in Strategic Resource descriptions to indicate their bonus is permanent for the game.

Version 0.9.5 was defective and crashed on selecting Ascension Research. This version was rolled back and replaced by 0.9.6

Hi,

I'd like to thank everyone for their help with 0.9 beta. Today I am launching the new Map Update (along with a Daily Deal discount). This update was full of new challenges and a lot of new ideas came in so I hope you'll enjoy it.

Version 0.9 is very important in adding all the missing core game mechanisms and in some perspective it makes the game mechanics 'complete'. Not in a literal sense - there's going to be more major updates before 1.0 - but all the 'necessary' things for basic playing experience are now in place.

Sure .. a lot of things will change, but after adding Wealth Hero faction (v0.7), dynamic Research tree and AFK gameplay (v0.8) and Map management (v0.9) the game is now ready to start expanding to further levels, higher difficulties and all the fancy mid and late game features.

The map update completely reworks the old Quest system and adds a more conventional territory management in line with the 4X genre. It also reworks the wonder mechanics and adds a new civilization Perk system. If you haven't seen them yet you can check out my previous updates:

Map update

Perks

Wonders

If you would like to participate on future Betas, be sure to visit our community on discord[discord.gg] or drop me an email on microcivilization@gmail.com

Cheers,

Ondrej

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• While selecting starting location on Map you can no longer open main menu
  
• Map in the above state should no longer become exitable via esc after Restarting a civilization round
  
• This is just a 'dirty fix' to an existing deeper issue causing menu state prone to becoming corrupted. A proper Menu state fix to prevent these issues altogether is planned in future but is too invasive to do close to major update.

• Destroyed Wonders should no longer show in building list
  
• Siege dilemma is now mandatory (automatically opened after a few seconds) to prevent some cheesing scenarios.
  
• Some game crashing corner case scenarios were resolved.

• Famine dilemma now offering a slightly less 'malevolent' option when you have no food instead of a surprise attack.
  
• Right-clicking a workshop should no longer toggle activation (it opens the demolish dialog only)
  
• Canceling Festival via right click should now work as expected.
  
• Destroy Wonder attack on Crises should no longer crash the game
  
• Barbarians created from Tribal village now have correct tile assigned and can be attacked normally.(note that this does not retroactively fix bugged barbarians, only newly created ones)
  
• Shield % will now be indicated in red when showing on unblockable attack to indicate the attack cannot be blocked by this shield.
  
• Huns now require 20 soldiers to become vulnerable due to easier access to higher unit caps.
  
• You can no longer end up starting in Sea by using a selected map tile from previous run (selected tile now resets on leaving map).
  
• Can no longer gain infinite strategic resources by working around UI validation on quest buttons.
  
• Workshops without workers now have a more explicit indicator icon on them to highlight missing workers.
  
• Destroyed Wonders should no longer contribute their Traits to your civilization.

• Building Stonehenge without having Classical era unlocked will no longer crash the game.
  
• Starting Autonomy boost ascension should now correctly apply on every civilization start
  
• Era bosses or Nemeses should no longer be trigger by Autoresearch during Grace period after fall.
  
• Midas/Shamanism should now correctly improve their targeted skill
  
• Ozymandias and Caesar should now correctly be affected by new map tiles.
  
• Wheat and Cows rare technologies now affect farmlands in the same way Farmer Perk does (all these effects multiply as usual for multiplier bonuses).
  
• Villages can no longer be cheesed infinitely by not collecting dilemma cards. Dillemas are now mandatory (autocollected) and villages deck no longer resets.
  
• Colossus text made a bit shorter to fit building menu (overflow fixes like this are temporary measure until bulding menu gets upgraded)
  
• Can no longer leave starting map before chosing a location by using menu hotkey.
  
• Map rendering has been slightly optimized and some performance issues removed. FPS Should be a little better though there's still more room for improvements.

• Map is now much larger in size and Quests have been completely redesigned into Hexagonal grid.
  
• Quest stages have been removed. Tile modifications are completed by just a single Quest run.
  
• You can now explore and annex territory on the map using your units and improve your territory based on its biome.
  
• You can build 6 different Improvements: Farmlands, Forests and Villages on lowlands biome, Quarries, Mines and Fortresses on highlands biome.
  
• Tile Improvements boost each other if compatible neighbours are created. Two separate 'adjacency bonuses' are available for each Tile Improvement type.
  
• First (silver) adjacency bonus is granted to Tiles surrounded by 2 compatible hex tiles (what constitutes compatible differs per improvement type).
  
• Second (golden) adjacency bonus is granted to Tiles surrounded by 6 compatible hex tiles.
  
• Map is generated randomly each run.
  
• Mammoths, Cannibals and Barbarians are now randomly spawned 'Crises' on the map during creation and progress through levels along with your civilization.
  
• Map now contains other Civilizations (after unlocking Medieval Era in ascension tree)
  
• Map now contains exploitable Strategic Resources (after unlocking Classical Era in ascension tree)
  
• Trade routes are no longer gained via special Strategic Resources. Instead you gain them via Tribal Villages or other Civilizations.
  
• Trade routes can no longer be 'magnified' by getting more sources of the same Route. Instead they provide a large amount of resource input by default and they scale with Technology and Heroes.
  
• Food trade route is always available (after researching Money).
  
• Your workers are the limit of how many map tiles you can have.
  
• Worker progression based on civilization has been buffed. You will now need roughly 30% population increase to gain another worker.
  
• You can still utilize Villages to increase Workers but you will need to reach its maximum adjacency bonus (i.e. surround the village with 6 non-village improvements)

• Tribal Villages now contain a deck of limited card numbers so you can repeat their quests (number shown on map).
  
• Final Dilemma card always results in the Village disappearance (but the options vary).
  
• Neutral Civilizations offer their own Deck of Dilemmas, but their cards are different.
  
• Neutral Civilizations do not disappear when you exhaust their Dilemma deck. Instead they reshuffle a new deck, or they change to Friendly/Hostile.
  
• Civilizations may also become Allied or Hostile based on some of your Dilemma choices. You can also lead surprise attacks to speed up this process.
  
• You can attack Hostile civilizations and take away their territory.
  
• You can utilize Allied Civilization tiles to provide adjacency bonus to your own tiles without any worker cost.
  
• All dilemmas are redesigned. Some of them offer access to Trade Routes for Wood, Stone or metal. You can now also gain plenty of Rare/Unique Heroes from dilemmas.

• Units over capacity (e.g. after disabling Barracks) are no longer wiped instantly, instead they start consuming Food and will only get wiped one by one when reaching starvation.
  
• Unit cap can now be greatly increased by Village and Fortress map tile improvements. Overall unit cap has increased throughout the eras.
  
• As a result of above, Granary and Barracks no longer grant flat Unit Cap increase.
  
• Barracks now (instead if flat Fort cap) grants Percentage multiplier to ALL unit caps.
  
• Granary now (instead if flat Soldier cap) grants extra Food storage space.
  
• The only way to increase Heavy unit cap (besides unique heroes) is via Fortress with a maximized Adjacency bonus (i.e. surrounded by 6 non-fort improvements).
  
• Aside from growing and feeding people, Stored Food is now used to pay for certain Quests on Map as well as for the Festival ability.
  
• Turning Granary off can now be utilized for rapid consumption of its stored food into growth.
  
• Wonders now occupy workshop slots.
  
• Wonders can now consume more than one Worker when activcated. The number cost is visible on the details as well as on the toggle button.
  
• Player can demolish Workshops to make space for wonders and vice versa.
  
• Wonders economic effects and abilities have been redesigned.
  
• Stonehenge and Pyramids now generate lotus via their charging ability.
  
• Free workers given food traits from technology. Instead Free workers can be tuned by Civilization Perks (see below) to gain specific specialist role.
  
• Free workers are no longer a primary source of Food. Since you can utilize free workers by expanding on map, you can now choose whether to play a 'wide' empire stretched on the map, or 'tall' empire using free workers to boost your workshop output.
  
• Some workshop visual style changed and some housing types were removed (due to upcoming Class Perks)

• Shield ability from Fort units now has only a X% chance to block an attack which increases with technological upgrade of the Fort unit.
  
• Multiple fort instances apply to any single attack. E.g. having two 50% forts triggered will effectively create a 75% chance to block the next attack. Thus you can reach near 100% values by using large enough amount of forts.
  
• A Fort which fails its roll to block (and thus fails to deflect the Crisis attack) is kept and can roll again on further attacks.
  
• Fort block chance is now boosted by Barracks ability. Similar to +200% damage It works statistically as if the fort was triggered three times (thus a 50% fort becomes 87.5%).
  
• Similar block improvement effect as Barracks can be granted by Heroes (in smaller percentage). The resulting block chance is now visible in Hero Inventory screen as well as on the Crisis bar during combat.
  
• Some Crises have been nerfed as a result of above, since it is now more costly to defend against crises attacks all the time.
  
• Three Unique Crises have been created. They spawn randomly on the map and can yield Rare or Unique Heroes as their drop.
  
• Cannibals crisis has been added to the game.
  
• Stun duration is now automatically scaled based on Damage of the unit dealing Stun.
  
• Stun has now become more available for Heavy units and more rare for light/militia units.
  
• Drought is now more punishing for your food production (to give more spotlight to the new Granary storage capacity feature).
  
• New Barricade ability was added available from Classical era. Barricade uses Autonomy to create a Shield effect similar to what Fort units do. It has a progressive cost similar to Enlist with each Barricade used (each ability use increasing block chance but not increasing the number of blocks).
  
• Passive Hero block chances (from various Law abilities) should now be visible on Crisis during combat and are combined with any % Shield ability to create an resulting % chance to block.

• Primary Resource traits for Wood, Stone or Metal are now boosting all three Resources at once to lower the need for hero swapping.
  
• More Rare/Unique heroes are now granted from Tribal Village quests
  
• You can now have three separate equips and switch between the active one.
  
• Heroes can now be filtered by text search
  
• Hero Screen was slightly adjusted to accomodate new buttons and make more space for longer hero and damage descriptions.
  

• At the beginning of all runs (after unlocking Classical era ascension), you can choose your starting location on the map.
  
• Additionally you may pick one Positive civilization Perk. Perks can modify behaviour of Tiles, Free Workers and other features otherwise unachievable by any other means.
  
• You can also choose any number of Negative Perks. Each Negative perk gives you a significant handicap for the next run, but allows you to pick another Positive Perk along it.
  
• Perks are unlocked via Ascension tree (via the central Era unlock nodes)

Hi,

While we have the Beta of 0.9 going on, today I'm going to show some early designs of Ascension Tier 2 which is planned for version 0.10. We're going to talk about scaling levels, increasing difficulty and giving players more powers via new use of Secrets, so far only usable for Tech Locks.


First of all let's make it clear what 'Tier 2' means. The existing ascension tree as you know it is what I call Tier 1. It contains a central 'grade' ascensions which unlock six technological Eras. It also contains secondary ascensions which boost your active and passive abilities. Tier 1 ends with the Babel tower scenario.

Tier 2 begins where Tier 1 ends - after Babel tower. Tier 2 will allow you to keep all ascensions from the previous one and continue further. It will offer one additional era - The Future Era. This era's tech tree will be structured in a slightly different manner than the other 6 eras - more on this on future updates - and will be technically longer.

Aside from new era Tier 2 will contain new Wonders, one of the locked Hero slots and a new mechanism for scaling your economy up.

Most importantly though, Tier 2 will increase global level of all crises and heroes. Together with Future era this will allow you to get up to level 80. This Increase in difficulty will be felt right from neolithic era. New Crises will join the repertoire and old Crises will receive new attacks and their own 'perks'.

Early mock-up of the Tier 2 Tree with some of its notable ascensionsTier 2 will end with it's own scenario and continue to Tier 3. Current plan is to have 4 Tiers in total.



If you ever felt like having two Lumbermills, then Tier 2 will offer a new toy to play with - Magnitude. Increasing a Workshop's Magnitude in principle means multiplying all economical effects of that Workshop 'as if you had two of them'. This virtually duplicates all the workshop's passive effects but also any effects granted to it from your heroes.

Workshop pop-up has been reworked to show a more in-depth breakdown of all it's effects (if you have them).To increase workshop Magnitude you first need to unlock this ability in Tier 2 tree. This will allow you to use Secrets (the same secrets used to force-open tech locks) for increasing any workshop's magnitude.


You can only increase magnitude two times per Workshop. Magnitude will also increase the workshop's worker cost (unproportionally). As a bonus though, each Magnitude III. Workshop will be given a specific unique benefit (different per workshop type).

Secrets will have a fixed number for every run (random due to randomized tribal villages). There will be no way to farm them in Tier 2 - so you need to think carefully which workshop is the best for you. Some rebalancing and hero redesigns will also happen to give you the right amount of secrets per run (I'm looking at you Archimedes).


In case your play style is more expansionist, you may also decide to improve Map tile Magnitude. This uses the same Secret pool, but otherwise works like workshop magnitude. A tile will duplicate all it's effects (including adjacency benefits).

The Beta is currently getting to it's conclusion. There's still one patch planned at a minimum (during early next week). After this I am aiming for an October release (in about 2 weeks from now). However In case you're interested to participate in beta, feel free to join (see instructions here)

As soon as the release is finished, I'll be also updating the Roadmap[docs.google.com]. It is now a lot clearer what work needs to be done for Tier 2,3 and 4 and in what order.

That is all for today,

See you next time,

Ondrej

Hi all,

let me invite you to the beta-test of version 0.9 containing an upgraded Map & Quests, Starting civilization Perks, Worker & Wonder redesign and more.

To access the beta, use the experimental branch via pass-key:


Just go to the Steam, find Microcivilization in your library, go to its Properties, Betas and insert your key to the text box.
The branch is already activated and should contain game version 0.9.0
This Beta will run for a minimum of two weeks. Please if you have any feedback, check out the community forum or visit us on discord[discord.gg].

Here's what changed since the last version:

• Map is now much larger in size and Quests have been completely redesigned into Hexagonal grid.
  
• Quest stages have been removed. Tile modifications are completed by just a single Quest run.
  
• You can now explore and annex territory on the map using your units and improve your territory based on its biome.
  
• You can build 6 different Improvements: Farmlands, Forests and Villages on lowlands biome, Quarries, Mines and Fortresses on highlands biome.
  
• Tile Improvements boost each other if compatible neighbours are created. Two separate 'adjacency bonuses' are available for each Tile Improvement type.
  
• First (silver) adjacency bonus is granted to Tiles surrounded by 2 compatible hex tiles (what constitutes compatible differs per improvement type).
  
• Second (golden) adjacency bonus is granted to Tiles surrounded by 6 compatible hex tiles.
  
• Map is generated randomly each run.
  
• Mammoths, Cannibals and Barbarians are now randomly spawned 'Crises' on the map during creation and progress through levels along with your civilization.
  
• Map now contains other Civilizations (after unlocking Medieval Era in ascension tree)
  
• Map now contains exploitable Strategic Resources (after unlocking Classical Era in ascension tree)
  
• Trade routes are no longer gained via special Strategic Resources. Instead you gain them via Tribal Villages or other Civilizations (or Perks - see below)
  
• Trade routes can no longer be 'magnified' by getting more sources of the same Route. Instead they provide a large amount of resource input by default and they scale with Technology and Heroes.
  
• Food trade route is always available (after researching Money).
  
• Your workers are the limit of how many map tiles you can have.
  
• Worker progression based on civilization has been buffed. You will now need roughly 30% population increase to gain another worker every time (i.e. number of Workers grows roughly with the speed of Logarithm with base 1.3)
  
• You can still utilize Villages to increase Workers but you will need to reach its maximum adjacency bonus (i.e. surround the village with 6 non-village improvements)

• Tribal Villages now contain a deck of limited card numbers so you can repeat their quests (number shown on map).
  
• Final Dilemma card always results in the Village disappearance (but the options vary).
  
• Neutral Civilizations offer their own Deck of Dilemmas, but their cards are different.
  
• Neutral Civilizations do not disappear when you exhaust their Dilemma deck. Instead they reshuffle a new deck, or they change to Friendly/Hostile.
  
• Civilizations may also become Allied or Hostile based on some of your Dilemma choices. You can also lead surprise attacks to speed up this process.
  
• You can attack Hostile civilizations and take away their territory.
  
• You can utilize Allied Civilization tiles to provide adjacency bonus to your own tiles without any worker cost.
  
• All dilemmas are redesigned. Some of them offer access to Trade Routes for Wood, Stone or metal. You can now also gain plenty of Rare/Unique Heroes from dilemmas.

• Units over capacity (e.g. after disabling Barracks) are no longer wiped instantly, instead they start consuming Food and will only get wiped one by one when reaching starvation.
  
• Unit cap can now be greatly increased by Village and Fortress map tile improvements. Overall unit cap has increased throughout the eras.
  
• As a result of above, Granary and Barracks no longer grant flat Unit Cap increase.
  
• Barracks now (instead if flat Fort cap) grants Percentage multiplier to ALL unit caps.
  
• Granary now (instead if flat Soldier cap) grants extra Food storage space.
  
• The only way to increase Heavy unit cap (besides unique heroes) is via Fortress with a maximized Adjacency bonus (i.e. surrounded by 6 non-fort improvements).
  
• Aside from growing and feeding people, Stored Food is now used to pay for certain Quests on Map as well as for the Festival ability.
  
• Turning Granary off can now be utilized for rapid consumption of its stored food into growth.
  
• Wonders now occupy workshop slots, meaning you can no longer build everything at the same time.
  
• Wonders can now consume more than one Worker when activated. The number cost is visible on the details as well as on the toggle button.
  
• Player can demolish Workshops to make space for wonders and vice versa.
  
• Wonders can be destroyed by Crises
  
• Wonders economic effects and abilities have been redesigned.
  
• Stonehenge and Pyramids now generate lotus worth via their chargeable 'Ceremony' ability. Ceremonial wonders will create extra risk and social crises if you use them. You also have to carry and protect these wonders until ascension to actually gain Lotus from them.
  
• Stonehenge and Pyramids only work in their respective Tech Eras (neolithic and classical). They become obsolete afterwards, so If you decide to use them to farm Lotuses, you need to invest in them early on.
  
• Free worker Food traits from technology have been removed. Instead Free workers can be tuned by Civilization Perks (see below) to gain various specialist roles.
  
• Free workers are no longer a primary source of Food, instead Farmland tiles are the main way to increase popuplation.
  
• Some workshop visual style changed and some housing types were removed (due to upcoming Class Perks)

• Shield ability from Fort units now has only a X% chance to block an attack which increases with technological upgrade of the Fort unit.
  
• Multiple fort instances apply to any single attack. E.g. having two 50% forts triggered will effectively create a 75% chance to block the next attack. Thus you can reach near 100% values by using large enough amount of forts.
  
• A Fort which fails its roll to block (and thus fails to deflect the Crisis attack) is kept and can roll again on further attacks.
  
• Fort block chance is now boosted by Barracks ability. Similar to +200% damage It works statistically as if the fort was triggered three times (thus a 50% fort becomes 87.5%).
  
• Similar block improvement effect as Barracks can be granted by Heroes (in smaller percentage). The resulting block chance is now visible in Hero Inventory screen as well as on the Crisis bar during combat.
  
• Some Crises have been nerfed as a result of above, since it is now more costly to defend against crises attacks all the time.
  
• Three Unique Crises have been created. They spawn randomly on the map and can yield Rare or Unique Heroes as their drop.
  
• Cannibals crisis has been added to the game.
  
• Stun duration is now automatically scaled based on Damage of the unit dealing Stun.
  
• Stun has now become more available for Heavy units and more rare for light/militia units.
  
• Drought is now more punishing for your food production (to give more spotlight to the new Granary storage capacity feature).
  
• New Barricade ability was added available from Classical era. Barricade uses Autonomy to create a Shield effect similar to what Fort units do. It has a progressive cost similar to Enlist with each Barricade used (each ability use increasing block chance but not increasing the number of blocks).
  
• Passive Hero block chances (from various Law abilities) should now be visible on Crisis during combat and are combined with any % Shield ability to create a total % chance to block.

• Primary Resource traits for Wood, Stone or Metal are now boosting all three Resources at once to lower the need for hero swapping.
  
• More Rare/Unique heroes are now granted from Tribal Village quests
  
• Drop mechanism should now drop more Rare/Unique heroes even if the crisis level is low.
  
• You can now have three separate equips and switch between the active one.
  
• Heroes can now be filtered by text search
  
• Hero Screen was slightly adjusted to group new buttons and make more space for longer descriptions.

• At the beginning of all runs (after unlocking Classical era ascension), you can choose your starting location on the map.
  
• Additionally you may pick one Positive civilization Perk. Perks can modify behaviour of Tiles, Free Workers and other features.
  
• You can also choose any number of Negative Perks. Each Negative perk gives you a handicap for the next run, but allows you to pick another Positive Perk.
  
• You can also sacrifice gold lotuses to increase the number of Positive perks for a single run.
  
• You start with only a few Perks available, more Perks are unlocked via Ascension tree (via the central Era unlock nodes)

Note: Civilization Class Perks (mentioned in August update) have been descoped from this exact version- so there is only one class at the moment. The reason is that my final tests have not made me convinced that Class Perks are a significant improvement to the gameplay and so decided to revisit this feature and make some upgrades to it (which is still in progress). I will either release this feature in two weeks into the beta, or in case I fail to finalize them in this short time-frame, they'll be postponed to a later release.