State of the game - April 2026

Design Goals

We just passed 7 months in Early Access. 7 Months of feedback and consistent updates that (I believe) made the game better every month. The PTB program has been a great way to test new features before it hits the larger Early Access crowd. And, even more noticeably, sharing early plans with all of you has been very informative to help us get it right when we implement, or even skip implementations entirely when you let us know that you don’t want the change.

Voice of the People Update

​A lot of people are jumping in and playing the Kin after this update. Personally, I’m really liking the changes, but the free fortifications from districts is causing the Fortification Gauge to increment seemingly on its own since it’s coming from a common action (building a district) and not a specific action (building a military district). So, it feels “soft”. We are considering reducing that bonus so Kin players need to make more specific decisions around Fortifications and not get them as easily for “free”.

The other change of free foundations around Kin military districts has been working great. It is impacting placement decisions in a fun way and rewarding the Kin for building keeps. We added a new Custom Faction trait that gives this ability to all districts if you want to try an even larger version.

Kin military districts count as 2 districts for district level-up. Which works well since the Kin now have access to level 3 districts and it balances out putting keeps at city centers for level bonuses or on the outskirts to maximize the free foundations.

We have already talked a lot about Anomaly Districts, All Armies Panel and Gamepad support so I won’t go into them here. But I did want to talk a bit about my favorite change in this update, the Public Opinion change.

I realize I didn’t do a good job of explaining it in the video about the update. I talked about the negative sides of it, the AI remembering when you did terrible, terrible things. But I didn’t talk about the fact that it works in reverse as well. If you sign a bunch of treaties with an AI it will remember that, even well after they expire, that there was once close relations between your empires and it will forever make diplomacy with them a little easier. It doesn’t mean that they will never go to war with you, or that things can’t be ruined by recent actions. But the AI remembers and it will make things a little easier down the road.

The above chart maps out Public Opinions between players from the very first Early Access build (EA 0) up to April’s update (EA 6). Green means great relations between the two, and red means they hate each other. Here we can see that relationships aren’t as black and white as they were in prior builds where we saw early wars and then the AI settling into non-aggression (not because it couldn’t fight wars, but because it liked everyone).

The net result of the change is actually less war declarations as you fight enemies you have bad relations with, but are now able to maintain long term good relations with your allies. If you are interested you can checkout the video 👇 or read the full details HERE

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What’s Next

District Scaling

This is a hot topic and we had planned to make a large change around it for next month’s update. But… we heard that it is a source of frustration for you so we have released a hotfix that does part of the work. It isn’t the full rebalance, which we want to take more time for. But while we test we wanted to get you a partial balance change that reduces the scaling and puts a cap on it so it doesn’t scale forever.

Since we are actively working on the full version for, we would love to hear your feedback on it. Is it a move in the right direction? Is it too much or too little?

Balance

Every update will include a host of balance changes as we play and receive feedback directly or through analytics. We nerfed minor faction armies in the April (Voice of the People) update, which made the Necrophage very happy as they can now start sacking villages and gaining free larva in the first couple turns.

Bugs

Of course, we are always working on fixing bugs reported by you, through analytics or by our own QA.

Writing

​We are rewriting a lot of the quests and changing the way that quests are presented in the game. It’s a big change since we have to produce the art, switch the screens, then go back and change all the data to work in the new system. We expect it will come in the June update. The above screenshots are just showing the new display, the new writing hasn’t been integrated and translated yet.

The team is doing great work on implementing it and internally it’s very exciting to see it making progress day by day.

Diplomacy

Now that the public opinion change is in we can begin to tweak it for individual factions so we can create more specific personalities. We want the Last Lords to have a long memory, slow to anger or to build trust, but once earned it is kept. Conversely, the Tahuks are a bit more chaotic and willing to ignore history for the concerns of the moment.

World Generation

We currently have an issue with Lake generation we are working on so that we can unlock options that allow you to vary lake size and frequency.

​While we are doing that, we are also playing with Ridge frequency. So far, we like having significantly larger ridge clusters in the game. If you want to play with it I recommend switching your Ridges and Cliffs setting to “Many” in your game options. We are thinking about making this the default option and making the “Many” option even more packed (or we may add a 4th option to do this). Please play with it and let us know what you think.

The goal here is to create more blocking terrain to give the world more identity, strategic interest and not become a massive plains by the end of the game.

More Team Colors

We have added 4 more team colors to the game and rebalanced them all so that they are readable and have versions for all the color blindness variations we support. This will be coming in next month’s update for you to play with.

More Distinct Minor Factions

Currently Minor Factions are very similar in power level. The population, units, heroes, collection bonuses, protectorate bonuses, etc are roughly equal, though in different areas. A Gorog unit is at the same power level as a Noquensii unit, but they are very different types of units. Their configurations are also very similar, spawning armies from their villages at about the same size, strength and frequency.

This makes balancing the game easier, but it also makes games feel similar, robbing the minor faction, and areas of the map, of some personality.

We want to change this to make them feel more different and therefore make games feel different. We still want them to be the same relative power level as a whole, but we no longer want them to be about equal in every area. Some minor factions may be strong in one aspect, and very weak in another.

For example, we are playing with switching Gorog to beings big, powerful units that only spawn as single unit armies. The units are more powerful, which means if you make them into a protectorate you have access to more powerful units, which also have increased construction time. But their population is terrible, providing no bonuses besides their base assignment and consuming more food than other population types.

Conversely the Ochlings become weaker but spawn much more frequently than other minor factions, becoming a scourge of weak units in their lands. But making them a protectorate gives you access to cheap units.

The Sollusk stay at the same level but have their spawn frequency increased so… beware the Sollusk.

The Consortium become rich, proving more rewards when they are killed in battle and the Ametrine rewards are switched to providing resources when they are killed.

These sorts of changes generally won’t be noticed in the first few games. But over a lot of games it should help the minor factions develop their own personality as allies and enemies and improve replayability by making games feel unique and special.

Thank you for Playing

I hope you are enjoying the Voice of the People update. Your game analytics, survey responses, steam reviews, discord feedback, comments on reddit, steam and Amplifiers all help improve the game. We have a lot more to come.