Alpha 3.0 - Crime & Punishment is live!

Hi everyone!

The new Alpha 3.0 version of HistoriCity: Florence is now available to play via demo!

This is our biggest ever update by a very large margin, as it contains the truly massive amount of new features and changes we've been hard at work on since the last update nearly fifteen months ago.

We know it’s taken longer than expected, so first we want to thank you for waiting so patiently and for continuing to believe in this game. The love and attention we get from the community are huge for our motivation and morale, so thank you honestly and sincerely for helping us get this far!

Without further ado, here are the biggest/most important user-facing changes contained in the new update, which we are calling ‘Crime and Punishment’:

10 new resources:

onions

cabbage

garlic

leather

clay

milk

cheese

gold

jewelry

pottery

11 new structures:

cabbage patch

onion bed

garlic bed

vegetable cellar

cobbler

podesta’s office

clay pit

creamery

goldsmith

potters’ workshop

medici villa

19 new worker outfits:

vegetable cellarer (male & female)

cobbler (male & female)

clay digger (male & female)

cheesemaker (male & female)

goldsmith (male & female)

potter (male & female)

constable (male)

plus six new outfits for Easter service (three male, three female)

27 new building upgrades:

emporium (2)

butcher (2)

tax collector (2)

potters’ workshop (2)

clay pit (2)

cobbler (2)

builder hut (1)

weaver (2)

creamery (2)

tavern (2)

artists’ workshop (2)

market (2)

vegetable cellar (2)

podesta’s office (2)

56 pairs of model variants (active/inactive):

barn (3)

granary (1)

emporium (3)

mine (3)

tailor (3)

tax collector (3)

woodcutter (3)

brothel (1)

butcher shop (3)

clay pit (3)

builder hut (3)

cobbler’s shop (3)

creamery (3)

potters’ workshop (3)

tavern (3)

weaver (3)

artists’ workshop (3)

market (3)

vegetable cellar (3)

podesta’s office (3)

Core mechanic: Crime

As your city grows, crime becomes a concern which impacts immigration. Brothels and taverns increase the chance of crime nearby, while churches reduce it. If crime gets too high, your citizens may decide to commit criminal acts!

Build a podesta’s office and hire constables to patrol your neighbourhoods, keeping crime rates low and enabling criminals to be caught and punished. Choose to put lawbreakers in the stocks as a form of public humiliation, or have them flogged at a whipping post as a stronger deterrent.

Neighbourhood heads of household also gather to witness the punishments as a form of entertainment.

Narrative mission: Righteous Conviction

A rogue Fraticelli preacher arrives and urges your citizens to destroy luxuries to ensure their salvation. Boost your town’s Religion to resist his influence, then convert your podesta’s office to carry out the ultimate punishment for a heretic: burning at the stake.

Core mechanic: Economic Management

Money now serves a purpose! All structures cost money in addition to resources, and all jobs incur annual wages. Earn money through taxation, with each level of housing improvement bringing in more tax revenue, and also through trade via exporting surplus resources at an emporium. Keep your finances healthy, as bankruptcy means the end of your reign.

Tax strikes

Citizens’ needs are now grouped into three categories: survival, comfort, and improvement. Improvement needs allow a house to improve to the next level, and then those improvement needs become comfort needs in the improved housing (meaning those residents now expect continued access to those things from now on). If you fail to provide your people with their expected comforts for too long, they will refuse to pay part of their tax bill, putting a dent in your town’s finances.

Category-based housing improvement

You can now satisfy citizens’ resource requirements by category, instead of being required to produce a specific resource. For example, whereas previously citizens may have needed ‘clothing’ in order for their housing to improve, now they would instead require ‘1 luxury good’ and you could choose to produce either clothing, or shoes, or pottery, or jewelry…

Mechanic revamp: Immigration

Immigration is now driven by demand, which is based on your success in managing all areas of your city (housing + economy + religion + security).

Instead of being drip-fed one person at a time, immigrants will now stream into your city in groups until either your available housing is full or your demand is exhausted (as demand is recalculated with every change to your population). It also means that if you have no demand, you will see no immigration until you improve your city, even if you have housing available.

We have a new UI treatment to communicate this mechanic at a glance, with colorful wedges and a notch-based bar replacing the ‘letter grades’ text treatment from the previous version.

Mechanic revamp: Masters

You no longer need to tell Masters where to stand to utilize them, as they go to where they belong automatically and their powers apply globally regardless of their current location. To accompany this change we’ve also reworked the existing master powers to be more interesting, added two more masters so you’re always choosing from sets of three, and replaced the old Master management UI with a new draggable card/slot based approach that we think is much more intuitive.

Mechanic revamp: Easter Service

Religion is now calculated at a per-person level, according to each citizen’s Easter Service experience. We’ve also added two new UI treatments: one in the info panel for the town square/churches (to clearly show the effect your next service will have on attendees), and one in the Easter Service panel (to show how well your last service went so you can see how to improve it in the future).

Plus, your people now actually eat the food you’ve delivered for the service (becoming ‘overfull’ and thus requiring less other food for a time) instead of it just disappearing from your town while your people may be starving.

Mechanic revamp: Trade

Satisfy more of your citizens’ needs through trade by earning greater trade volumes. Fulfill enough consecutive trade orders and you will be able to level up the deal to larger orders. But miss too many and watch your trade quantities drop.

Mechanic revamp: Density

We have replaced our previous ‘neighbour’ requirements for housing upgrades (eg ‘X neighbours within Y tiles) with a single, simple value called density. All occupied housing in your city now contributes to density, with the amount falling off with distance. This results in a much more natural housing gradient between a dense, bustling core of higher level housing and more spacious, quieter outskirts of smaller, lower level structures.

Multi-resource crafting

Some resources now require more than one type of input, for a deeper and more realistic crafting experience. For example, in addition to wheat, bread now also requires water (for the dough) and wood (to fuel the oven).

Production building upgrades via builders

We have integrated the manual upgrade mechanic into our existing building system. So now when you click upgrade on a production building (eg Bakery), your builders will bring the required resources to the site and work to complete the renovation over time. Buildings under renovation cannot serve customers, so be sure to schedule your upgrades wisely to minimize any disruption to your production chains.

Demolition via builders

Similar to manual upgrades, we have integrated demolition into our building system as well. So now instead of the building magically disappearing in an instant, it will be dismantled over time by your builders.

Branching upgrades

The pasture allows you to raise sheep for mutton and leather, but can also now be converted to specialize in either wool or dairy production (at the cost of some mutton production, since wool/dairy sheep are kept alive longer and older sheep = less meat).

Crop drought resistance

Each crop is now affected by drought to a different degree, based on its natural drought tolerance. For example, leafy green cabbage grows quickly but suffers greatly during a drought, whereas olives take a long time to mature but can weather a drought with only a minor hit to their yield.

Town decorations

Unlock and place decorations like flower pots to improve the aesthetics of your city. This mechanic is integrated into our existing build systems, which means decorations cost money and resources and require builders to build and place them.

Vexillology

As part of the town decorations mechanic, you can unlock and place authentic heraldic banners of some of Florence’s most famous historical families, as well as banners bearing period-accurate coats-of-arms of the city’s professional guilds.

More housing improvement levels

We have added 3 more housing improvement levels to achieve (for a total of 12), each with their own increasingly diverse set of requirements. We have also reworked the requirements themselves for a smoother and more consistent challenge curve.

Housing model variants

There are now four models for each level of housing that the game will randomly use for greater visual variety and more organic looking cities. Combined with the new apartment levels, this means our total number of housing models has increased from 9 to 48. We have also added additional variants for the derelict houses present at game start, again for more visual variety.

New wonder building

The Villa Medici (at Careggi) and its custom construction stages have been added as a more fitting wonder building for a small rural development than the Santa Maria del Carmine. Once built, the resplendent estate contributes significantly to your tax revenues (as long as you have tax collectors making the rounds).

Fog of war

The game begins with a small area of the map revealed, with the buildable area expanding to reveal new things as you progress through the game.

Town messenger

A horseback messenger occasionally arrives bringing news from faraway lands, and sometimes requests, and sometimes more?

Production charts

Tell at a glance if you are under/overproducing any resource by hovering on its icon at the bottom of the screen. You will see a graph of that resource’s inventory levels over time, updating in realtime.

Event log

Important events appear in the (hideable) event log, and you can click them to center the camera on the event in question (eg “Bakery construction complete”).

Wheelbarrows

Production and storage workers can now use wheelbarrows to carry up to 9 items at a time, for fewer trips and a deeper ability to set up your town’s distribution network with buildings like markets.

Cats

As your town grows you will see cats begin to roam the streets and spend time exploring your city (this isn’t a gameplay mechanic, we all just really like cats).

Wildlife

See deer and rabbits frolic in the forests for a greater sense of immersion (the deer’s coats even change with the seasons).

Relic discovery animation

Instead of a simple tooltip, the discovery of new relics is announced via a full screen ‘reward’ animation much more befitting of such a notable event.

Arno River

This build sees the return of a feature we had removed just before the original demo release due to technical issues: the Arno River! In addition to being cool to look at, it will play an important role in future narrative missions…

Extended Soundtrack

We have nearly doubled the number of authentic Italian Renaissance lute pieces in the game from 12 to 23, once again courtesy of the incomparable Elizabeth Pallet. The total running time of our soundtrack is now over an hour!

Mirror structure placement

In addition to rotating structures you can now mirror them as well, opening up many more layout options for your city. This is particularly useful when placing structures with asymmetrical arrangements of entrances/exits such as the Bakery.

Boosted Demo Limit

Since we’ve added so much to the game since the last update, we think it only makes sense to boost the demo limit so more people can progress further into the game and try out new features.

To facilitate this, we have removed the two-hour realtime limit from the previous demo, and instead now allow you to play through the first 30 years of gameplay - a feat that takes nearly nine hours at normal speed!

We are absolutely thrilled to finally get this new version out into the wild. If you'd like to help shape the direction of the game as we head toward Early Access, feel free to post your thoughts on our Steam Community Discussions and/or our Discord.

We hope you enjoy the update, and remember to wishlist us if you haven't already. Every little bit helps!

-The Stratagem DevTeam