Progress

No picture this week, but things are coming along nicely. The remaining structure upgrade work is done (houses can be upgraded now!), and I've just finished off rivers and mountains. I'm not entirely happy with the results, but I think they're good enough for now. I'm aiming for a release sometime Friday. 

Most of the items left for 1.4 Feature Parity are low priority enough  that I would feel comfortable letting them slip to 2.1. Of the items I really want to get done, only error reporting and sprite layering are left to do.

Bronze Age Post 2.0

Once 2.0 is out the door I've reserved time to work on bugfixes and tweaks. The code-base has been more or less totally rewritten, and even though it's been very stable in testing I expect all sorts of weird corner cases to be hit once it's out in the wild.After that the next two items are capturing/abandoning settlements, and citizen happiness. 

Capturing and Abandoning Settlements

Unlike 1.4 warriors don't blindly attack structures they run in to. Instead they will be able to capture a central "town center" structure. For the Masklings that structure is the Totem, a giant mask central to their religion. For Humans that structure is the administration center, which currently looks like a bunch of tents.

The "town center" structure will also tie into abandoning settlements. You will be able to demolish the town center to  abandon the settlement. The remaining structures will remain, but the entire population will become migrants. That abandoned settlement could then be claimed by anyone settling the region, creating their own "town center" in the process.

Citizen Happiness

It's quite easy to get very large populations in Bronze Age, all you need is enough wealth (in 1.4) or enough housing and food (in 2.0). The goal of Citizen Happiness is to make large populations more challenging to manage, so you have to work to maintain your metropolis. This will be accomplished through an escalating resource sink. Each individual citizen will gain base unhappiness as a settlement grows. The total unhappiness will grow quadratically with population. To combat this you can provide luxuries to your citizens. These luxuries will provide happiness at a fixed rate. So, as the settlement grows the needed luxuries per capita will also increase. This should have the effect of a soft cap on settlement size. The more luxuries you can funnel into the city, the larger it can grow.

The luxuries themselves will be geographically scattered, requiring expansion and trade to continue to grow. In the future, some features will be tied to population. A noble caste, for example, can only exist on a large population base, and armies of charriots require idle nobles who can dedicate their time and wealth.