Update log
Full Microcivilization update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
Hello,
Extracted changes
- Gameplay
- Compatibility
it has been very busy four weeks, a lot has happened and a lot needs to be revealed today. Last time I was talking very vaguely about 1.0 release. Today I can finally draw some concrete steps to leave Early access!
First of all I'd like to mention that my amazing wife has brought our second baby to this world two weeks ago. So apologies if I were (and will be) less responsive in the meantime. I am now slowly coming to a new work schedule and managing to get a couple of work hours each day. But it will take a few weeks probably to stabilize on some steady pace.
Good news and Bad news
In my previous update mentioned the following two planning questions:
When the Beta test for 1.0 starts. Optimistic guess = November, Pessimistic guess = December.
When the 1.0 actually goes live (ending Early access phase). Optimistic guess = December, Pessimistic guess = January
Leaving the point one aside for now lets look at point two - the ACTUAL GO-LIVE.
Is Optimistic Go-Live release still doable?
December is a tricky month to release. Because you cannot overlap release week with Steam Holiday sale (you can technically do it but it's a bad idea) the latest day for go live in Dec would be 11th!
December 11th is 4 weeks away, which no longer adds up with the work needed (I estimate minimum of 2 + 3 weeks of Balancing + Beta).
This plan looked less risky 4 weeks ago but with little bit of debt accumulated each day, it is now very unlikely to make it all in time in good quality. In a life-or-death situation (or if I had a mean product manager breathing on my neck) I'd still manage to do it before 11th, but at this point it is not worth the risk.
So the 1.0 Go-Live will happen in January.
What about Beta?
The good news is that postponing release to January gives us more time than we need for Beta. So there is a good chance to add some extra small features planned for post-1.0. It also gives me enough time to do some QoL stuff (there's quite a long backlog of requests from players).
I would therefore start Beta test at something like T-4 months (T being the go live). This would probably be around the start of Winter sales in the middle of December.
I know I have previously mentioned to try start beta in November - it would still be possible by delaying some development stuff for beta, but running an 8-week long beta with major updates in the middle has proven to be problematic (i tried this with 0.10 last Christmas and I ended up with way more hotfixes than I liked). So this time I'd rather do a normal 4 week long beta and spend extra time with my own tests beforehand.
What will change from 0.12?
While I tried to do majority of invasive changes in previous major update, there are still numerous changes - mainly to provide maneuvering space for late-game balancing. I won't go much into detail since majority of these are medium-to-small changes. There's just a lot of them.
Secret Farming
Secret farming from Raven idols was redesigned. It no longer generates Secrets passively, instead it unlocks a 'repeatable' research technology, which rewards a secret every time it is 'finished'.
For a 'diminishing return' effect (and thus a soft cap on max secrets gained) this technology cost rises
Source