Rebalancing Food + New Unstable Version

[Jon Shafer]

Edit: there are new updates in posts at the end of this thread.


I had originally planned for v1.1 to be focused on quality of life improvements before I came back around to work on gameplay, but having thought about it some more getting the survival and economic aspects of the game in a solid place will affect the gameplay experience a lot more and for a larger number of players. Ultimately, my priority is making the game more fun to play before I make the game easier to play. I’ll be refreshing the update plan soon, but wanted to give everyone an idea of what I’m up to in the meantime.

I wanted food stored as turns in order to make it easy to keep track of how much you had left, but in the end the system has ended up being really hard to balance and I now believe it would be best to simply make food a resource like any other and adjust all the numbers accordingly. Because you could bank stored turns when your costs were cheap it was almost a “reverse inflation” where the more you invested earlier the easier the game would become. The goal is for there to be the constant threat of starvation, but unfortunately it actually turned out to be quite easy to avoid as long as you knew what you're doing. The ability to stack lots of multiplicative bonuses just makes it easier. So the plan for v1.1 is now to take another look at food, starvation, and resource production balance generally.

The target full release date for v1.1 is mid-May, but I'll soon start posting new builds to the unstable branch in Steam every Friday afternoon, with the first going up today. The balance is definitely off and things will continue to change, but if you want to follow along with how things are shaping up feel free to have a look.

If anyone has thoughts on this topic feel free to post them here. I'm also happy to answer any questions, and will post design and implementation updates in this thread as v1.1 progresses. The next patch after this update (v1.2) will be focused on quality of life improvements. No specific ETA on that yet, but it'll probably come in the month or two after v1.1.

In terms of specifics, foragers, timber structures, and stone structures will be separated into 3 distinct tiers. Previously they all kind of overlapped, but now they're a clear hierarchy in terms of both output and cost. You will use and need all 3 in each game now. Food is now much more important, so don't ignore it! You can stay ahead if you prioritize it, but it can also sneak up on you pretty quickly. If you run out of food the mood of your clans will start to drop, and if at least half of your clans become resentful they’ll actually overthrow you and the game will end.

Here’s a changelist for all the stuff that’s in the new unstable v1.0.1.1:


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v1.0.1.1

2019 April 19

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MAJOR FEATURES


- Food is no longer stored as turns, but is a normal stockpiled resource like all others. Surplus food production no longer spoils. Players now start the game with only 5 turns of food, which will disappear quickly!

- Starvation now results in the Mood of all Clans dropping by 1 per turn. All other penalties associated with starvation have been removed. If more than half of a player's Clans are Resentful when the turn ends the player will lose the game.

- Each subsequent Family now joins a Clan in 10% less time than the previous one. Families now provide a Clan with a Combat Power bonus, but no Resource Production bonus, as this ended up breaking the game's economy and food balance.

- Significantly rebalanced the cost and output of most Structures and several resource refinement Professions.



MAJOR BUGS FIXED


- Fixed rare crash in Goal AI.



GAMEPLAY TWEAKS


- Increased XP required to gain a Level in a Discipline. This means it will generally take longer to train Clans in the midgame.

- Increased rate at which new Clans arrive.

- Increased Cloth cost of increasing the Popcap.

- Skipping the Settlement's turn now produces 1 Treasure and 1 Fame per resident Clan (previously always 5 Treasure).

- Stone Structure Apprentices now produce as much as the base version of the Structure. Adding an Apprentice slot now costs 20 Boards and 10 Parchment.

- Paths now increase movement speed by 3x.

- Caravan price balancing. More to come.

- All Plant and Mineral Resource Deposits now last for 24 turns (previously it was a mix between 24 and 18).

- 'Resentful' Clan Mood is no longer permanent.

- Free food goody hut result now provides 10 Food (previously 5).

- Increased cost of Tinkerer to 30 Tools (previously 20).

- Watchtower Apprentices now cost 20 Weapons (previously 5) and produce 20 Fame per turn (previously 5).

- Cooper now provides 4x food (previously 2.5x) and costs 3 Boards per turn (previously 2).

- Armor upgrades for Warrior Professions now provide a larger bonus.



MINOR BUGS FIXED

- Fix for borders not visually updating after capturing structures.

- Fix for crash when loading a save file when a 'new faction unlocked' notification was up.

- Minor text fixes.



MISC

- Resource stockpile now shows the current number of turns of food left, now that it's no longer automatically stored AS turns.

- Brought back 'STARVATION' label in the resource stockpile panel.

- Caravan Screen: re-ordered price and quantity labels, and softened gold-colored buttons for specials.

[Moat_Man]

Hurray! Thanks for the update Jon. Glad to hear you are still plugging away. Keep at it.

[Captain_Duck]

Started a couple of games with this today. At one point i didnt pay enough attention, ran out of food and game overed because my people were starving, nice.

Also had one crash still after a big number of turns so were not out of the crash-woods yet.

What i think is important for you to focus on is the enemy AI. Way to often AI's do something wrong and just nothing anymore until you waltz over them.

Anyway keep it up, the game is a very interesting 4x game thats so different from all the other ones.

[athelasloraiel]

thank you for continued work. PLease have energy for more...thnx.

[Alxe]

Jon, game doesn't launch properly on Linux. It seems a build problem more than a system one:

$ file AtTheGates.bin.x86_64
AtTheGates.bin.x86_64: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2, for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, BuildID[sha1]=34403d8a85a8866764d276fb89765a03c6da16e5, not stripped

$ ldd AtTheGates.bin.x86_64
	linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffe73993000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib64/libm.so.6 (0x00007f20d6ef3000)
	librt.so.1 => /lib64/librt.so.1 (0x00007f20d6ee9000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib64/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f20d6ee3000)
	libpthread.so.0 => /lib64/libpthread.so.0 (0x00007f20d6ec1000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib64/libgcc_s.so.1 (0x00007f20d6ea6000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib64/libc.so.6 (0x00007f20d6ce0000)
	/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f20d70a7000)

And then, the error on launching the binary:

 $ ./AtTheGates.bin.x86_64
Cannot open assembly 'AtTheGates.exe': No such file or directory.

Which seems it's either missing the EXE file (why would it need it?), implying it's either misconfigured or files are missing. I checke file integrity and all files were correct.

[Captain_Duck]

Played a couple more games and wooo boy that new food system can be brutal, i got 2 more food game overs today. I like it though, gives some challenge. Also had another crash and posted all the crash info on official forums.

[Medway]

Thanks for the update, will start a new game and check it out.

[Elhoim]

Awesome! Thanks for the update, looking forward for more!

[clayffo]

I"m not a fan of this change. I have played the lombards 3 times now and unless there's fishing very nearby, they fall apart immediately. (starvation). Forcing more and more people on you without a say and then not allowing foraging is just a bad combo. There should be a way to decline a clan or fire a clan to keep food demand down.

also, i end up with like 8 people in camp because there's no where to put them without training the more advanced skills. they all get pissed off and things go sideways.

The cloth thing also doesn't work out with the Lombards. It's too damn expensive now and i can't make enough money early on to buy it like i used to.

[zeitbauer]

this is good news. realistic economy makes for more fun!

[Jon Shafer]

Thank you everyone!

Originally posted by Captain_Duck:

Also had one crash still after a big number of turns so were not out of the crash-woods yet.

What i think is important for you to focus on is the enemy AI. Way to often AI's do something wrong and just nothing anymore until you waltz over them.

Thanks, will look into the crashes.

I agree that the AI needs a lot of work. I'll be focusing on it later this year after finishing up with balance, the Romans, and diplomacy.

Originally posted by Alxe:

Jon, game doesn't launch properly on Linux. It seems a build problem more than a system one:

Thanks Alxe, looking into it.

Originally posted by clayffo:

I"m not a fan of this change. I have played the lombards 3 times now and unless there's fishing very nearby, they fall apart immediately. (starvation). Forcing more and more people on you without a say and then not allowing foraging is just a bad combo. There should be a way to decline a clan or fire a clan to keep food demand down.

also, i end up with like 8 people in camp because there's no where to put them without training the more advanced skills. they all get pissed off and things go sideways.

The cloth thing also doesn't work out with the Lombards. It's too damn expensive now and i can't make enough money early on to buy it like i used to.

I'll be working on the balance of all the different factions once the core rules in a good place. The goal is to make most factions somewhat tough, as opposed to before when only the Lombards were challenging. For now that means the Lombards will probably be impossible to win with. I'll be continuing to balance things intensely over the next few weeks, and off and on for a long while after that.

- Jon

[Orogenese]

Awesome work, Jon.

I've played some on the unstable version, and I noticed that buying food from the Caravan is bugged. I bought 40 fish, and my food count rose by just +0.02. The same happened when I bought olives. Could this be a remnant of how food was handled in the previous version?

(not sure if this is the best place to report bugs, though. Please redirect me if there's a better place)

[Jon Shafer]

v1.0.1.2 is now up. It's a fairly small update since I've been spending most of the week playtesting. Should be more changes in next week's build.

- Jon

[Jon Shafer]

Originally posted by Orogenese:

Awesome work, Jon.

I've played some on the unstable version, and I noticed that buying food from the Caravan is bugged. I bought 40 fish, and my food count rose by just +0.02. The same happened when I bought olives. Could this be a remnant of how food was handled in the previous version?

(not sure if this is the best place to report bugs, though. Please redirect me if there's a better place)

Thanks Orogenese! I'm assuming this was in a fresh game and not one you continued from an earlier version? If not please send a save file to [e-mail] from just before when you bought the food and I'll take a look.

- Jon

[clayffo]

Originally posted by Jon Shafer:

v1.0.1.2 is now up. It's a fairly small update since I've been spending most of the week playtesting. Should be more changes in next week's build.

- Jon

I don't mean to be overly critical, but we're supposed to be doing the play testing. Jon, you're supposed to be doing the programming., you know, the deliverables that were left out. maybe drop in some scripts so the bots provide at least a Civ 5 level of competition?

it is extending the time frame unnecessarily when you don't post for a month and then say, well, i've been playtesting.

[Moat_Man]

Originally posted by clayffo:

Originally posted by Jon Shafer:

v1.0.1.2 is now up. It's a fairly small update since I've been spending most of the week playtesting. Should be more changes in next week's build.

- Jon

I don't mean to be overly critical, but we're supposed to be doing the play testing. Jon, you're supposed to be doing the programming., you know, the deliverables that were left out. maybe drop in some scripts so the bots provide at least a Civ 5 level of competition?

it is extending the time frame unnecessarily when you don't post for a month and then say, well, i've been playtesting.

Come on Rob. You are definitely being overcritical. If Jon had used the word testing instead of playtesting would you have said the same thing?

Jon has had a lot of criticism levelled against him, and rightly so. The development delays, (explained by Jon and we've moved on), the release which should have been early access (acknowledged by Jon), and his general lack of communication. But now he has posted some development reports where he is working on the things he said would be in the game and you take a shot at him for taking some time to test his code? I know you see the possibility of an amazing game here so I'm going to chalk up your statement to over-enthusiasm but but as someone in the media and influencer I think you should be careful about what you say.