Weekly Progress #9

There isn't anything new this week as visually dramatic as last week, but a lot of improvements to the foundations of the game.

On a feature level, Pop Interactions are in place and functional. Pops belonging to other empires can be attacked, expelled, or assimilated. Hostile empires may attack your pops as well. The first non human/Atlantean species was added as well, you can now find packs of wolves in the world, and even domesticate them (a variant of Assimilation). Wolves bring with them the first functionality for Species/Cultural traits. As wolves have the traits Dumb (which prevents them from working jobs other than foraging or hunting) and Carnivore (which gives them a bonus to production when hunting). The Artisans trait that the Atlanteans have now gives a 50% bonus to Crafting jobs.

To go with the new Sun and Moon, I've made changes to the world generation. The placement of biomes has been tweaked to better represent the effects of sunlight. The center of the world, now in perpetual twilight is home to the mushroom swamps. The new biome logic needs as bit of tweaking still, as cold climates are pretty rare.

A bunch of small quality of life changes were also added. Things like colored territory borders, region borders, and better handing of the Escape key to close popups. The first two settings are in, a volume slider and the ability to change autosave frequency.

I've also discovered that I haven't been seeing a lot of crash issues due to the way Godot runs in the editor, so I've changed my testing approach, and you should be seeing a lot more stability now and into the future.

What's Next?

Next up I have some crashes to trace down, and some new hunting animals to add. Then it's time for Masklings!