Slitherine

Version 0.9.2 wrote:

• Added Headquarters building.
• Added empire frontier penalties (reduced credits and growth with increased distance from Headquarters).
• Doubled territory bonus resource features' + % gains from 25 % to 50 %.
• Increased sell/disband value from 20 % to 25 %.
• Increased trading goods from 1 credits to 2 credits per production.
• Pollution threshold is now influenced by global pollution.
• Changed tier 0 buildings to give +25 % instead of +4.
• Production is now separate for each item.
• Tweaked research tree.
• Tweaked unit terrain power modifiers.
• Halved technology research costs.
• Halved all unit powers except for Bug (power 1), Sciter (power 2) and Galeth (power 4); Colonial Trooper is power 1, Former and Colonizer are power 0.
• Doubled Bug production cost.
• Fixed alt-tab crash.
• Fixed issues when alt-tabbing as resources are being loaded.
• Fixed city screen not refreshing on tax changes.
• Removed intrinsic city resource gains.

It still needs some bug fixing and we might tweak a few more things, but that's what we've got so far. To release sometime today or tomorrow.

After this I'll be working towards the new research tree visualization and I think Lorenz will be getting the alien invasion forward.

Exciting!

I'm particularly interested in how the changes to city resources will work. It's definitely going to significantly slow down sprawl and make terrain more important. I think it's a change in the right direction, especially the change to tier 0 buildings. It's going to dramatically slow down game starts, which I think is probably good. That combined with the effective doubling of alien power levels is going to make things a lot more dangerous. I'll try and get some playtime in and let you know how the changes have gone.

I think frontier penalties are going to be a good addition, I think eventually you'll probably need to have ways of mitigating them, i.e. additional headquarters, reduction of frontier penalties with a road/ airport connection to headquarters, etc. Lets see how they play out first though.

I think starts won't be much slower -- the headquarters building gives you what a city gave you before (+2 food, +2 minerals, +2 production, +2 research); they'll actually go a lot faster on the tech tree. But I liked the production pacing and tech-wise it was too slow.

Cheers,
Rok

Ah, I didn't realize that headquarters gave a bonus. That's what I get for commenting before the updates actually released

That's fine, input is always welcome. :-)