RTS_18 "War, Melee Military Units & New Unit Icons"

Declaring war is now on the table! It's now fully functioning and that means any units owned by that player become enemies. Which means it's finally time for the first war aspects of the game!

Units have different attack numbers. Right now warriors can only attack once per turn but I can imagine other troops in the future that might be able to attack multiple times per turn so I've left it in as an optional feature in-case I ever create a unit that does.

Melee units when they kill another unit will enter the tile of the unit they killed. Balancing combat is going to be very difficult but I'll post my math so far at the end of this post, but I expect that terrain will play a large role.

Now, right now workers, settlers, and warriors are all using the same unit visual. But they each have had an icon overhaul:

Once again, I want to keep updates pointing toward the final product now that I have many of the core features in, so it's nice to have high-quality icons now.

This is exciting! You'd think that the obvious next thing to work on would be ranged units but I'm finding testing to be more and more important as development moves forward so I want to work on moving more features out of the editor and into the game. So for the future, I want to work on the main menu & automatic settler placement.

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

The Math So Far
Base Modifiers:
-3% damage when attacking

Terrain Modifiers:
+10% damage when attacking from a hill
+10% damage when defending on a hill

Type Modifiers:
-20% damage if you're a siege unit attacking a unit
-40% damage if you're a normal unit (not siege) attacking a building
-60% damage if you're a normal unit (not siege) attacking a city core

RTS_17 "Diplomacy & Player UI"

This update was entirely created as getting together all the features necessary to work on the next update, so stay tuned for that!

Diplomacy is obviously very important in any game like this since most multiplayer features such as war, trade, etc. will be handled through it so I decided that it was time to add it, but before I could do that I'd need to add some more things to the player's UI, so I did just that:

The player is now able to end their turn from within the game instead of only inside of the editor. This update also includes 2 new buttons, a research button, and a diplomacy one. The research button is just a placeholder for now but I thought it was important to have so that I could get a better understanding of how the final UI will look. And so far I'm liking it. Along with those is a test minimap which sometimes clips parts of the map, but is also just an experimental feature to get a better feel for how the game will look in the end.

Now with that initial UI out of the way, I can move on to diplomacy:

Currently, the only action is to declare war:

I also spent a good portion of time reducing the space taken up by various parts of the game. This will help reduce RAM & Hard Drive size as well as optimize the game to use less data over the network when I get around to adding multiplayer.

There were also several bug fixes & balancing patches made to the game, I usually don't point these out since the game is still in development but I think these ones in particular, are of note. In previous updates, you may have seen building icons/player icons render over the City UI so that has been fixed. I've also increased the amount of food produced by a farm from 2 to 3 which helped balance how many farms were needed to sustain the population of a city.

Sincerely,

Blake Gillman

RTS_16 "Player UI & Limiting Units"

Most information relevant to the game such as current resources and being able to go to the next turn has been handled inside the editor. But I think it's important to start moving that stuff out on to the screen for the final product.

This was much harder than I had anticipated. For starters, I have continuously stated that I want my UI to be minimalistic so it was pretty hard determining what the minimum amount of necessary information to display was. Ultimately I decided on only displaying the player's resources since I think that's all the player needs to know at a quick glance.

Here's what it looks like with the city screen open:

Besides the UI, there is a small balancing update that I wanted to make. It occurred to me while testing that someone could very easily set up a city so large that they produced multiple military units per turn. Other games such as Sid Meier's Civilization V get around this by making so you can only build 1 thing at a time per city such as if you're building a unit or constructing a building. I've decided to balance this by limiting the number of units you can have in queue to 2. This means that at any given moment a city can be producing 2 units & constructing 2 buildings.

This may seem a bit arbitrary, but I think it's important for balancing. I'm perfectly fine with a player spawning multiple troops per turn, however, when it gets to the point of spam is when it can break the game and make it no longer fun. So 2 units being made simultaneously per city it is.

Thanks to this update being so short, I'll have time to write more updates in-advance! So things should be back to their 2~3 feature/thing per update schedule!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

RTS_15 "Unit Spawn Building"

So far I've been barely keeping ahead to keep these updates released on time but after that 1-week vacation, it all just fell apart. I've been very swamped with work and everything else I had to catch up on, but now I'm back!

And looking back I realized that I've spent a lot of time polishing things but have neglected to add many new features. So before I go on a polishing spree again I want to lay down some more fundamental mechanics! And where better to start than unit spawning?

Since there are only 2 units in the game right now (Worker/Settler) I decided to make a "Worker's Hut" which is just where you spawn workers. Spawning units is done from the city screen where you can see each building and what units you can spawn, as well as which units are in queue to spawn:

So having units able to spawn in is exciting and moves us a lot closer toward having all the fundamental features here, so it's a huge relief to finally have it done. Now, my usual template for these updates is 2~3 features/things per update but you guys have waited long enough so this and the next update are going to be 1-feature updates so that I have time to get back to writing normal ones again.

I had forgotten how much work it was making the game as fast as I was, I have no idea how I did it! I worked all night to get this one to you guys so by the time this comes out I won't have even begun working on the next update, so we'll see how it goes!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

RTS_14 "River Edges, New Farm Visual & Beaches"

As part of my quest to continue to add detail to the map I felt that rivers were a bit flat, so I decided to add edging to them:

I think this helps make the map look a bit more 3D. Since this only modified the ridges and didn't add anything means that this won't impact performance whatsoever while still looking much better.

But why let just rivers get a visual overhaul? As my friend wisely pointed out it would look better if farms didn't fade but were rather more a part of the map. I agreed, and so I reworked the farm visual:

The texture doesn't quite take up the whole tile anymore but this was intentional to add more realism to it. I've also added several 3D objects to add to the detail of it. Overall, I like it more than the previous visual but I'll likely change it again in the future.

Now, this next update I had always intended to do but I actually didn't know how I wanted to approach it. But after developing the edges-only territory system I'll be using the same technique to render beaches!

Once again this adds a new 3D layer to the game and I love it. I also wanted to make sure there was some variety so if a land hex is bordering an ocean hex, instead of a beach it'll render a cliff side:

Once again the map is looking a whole lot better, and at some point, I think I want to do a post dedicated to my favorite seeds & locations, but for now, work continues!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

RTS_13 "Starving & Fixing Rivers"

I forgot to mention in the last update that I had modified the formula for city stability. The only modification was to food happiness which is now calculated like so:

This was because the last formula was a bit illogical for food happiness. It calculated based off of the food needed for your next population which didn't make much sense since happiness is derived from feeding your current population.

I had also forgotten to make so food is removed from your city every turn based on consumption (population x 2) so that now happens. The city also will automatically start with 10 turns worth of food in its stockpile.

Starving
So your people can starve now! Hooray! It wouldn't be much of a downside to ignore feeding your population if it didn't do anything, so the rule now is that every 4 turns that you don't have enough to feed your city you lose 1 population. I've considered making so that the city goes "deserted" so that you have to repopulate it if it starves entirely but then I'd have to create exceptions like for your capital so that you didn't lose the game if you starved at the beginning. So, for now, I've just made it so you can't go below 1 population.

Now, something that has been bugging me is as I get closer to the final look of the game I want to make sure that I have a good idea of how things are. That has been very hard with rivers because there are giant cracks next to them all the time that make it impossible to view the map in a way that lets me understand how the final product will look. So I finally decided to do something about it:

The reason I hadn't already done this was because I was completely confident that it would take upward of 4 or 5 hours to fix, which I absolutely dreaded having to work on something so tedious for so long when there was so much else I could be doing. But once I started working on it I was able to get it done in only about 30 minutes. Really glad that I did get it done, now the map is looking much more polished!

So all of that polishing is nice, but where are the new features?! Well, not in this update or the next! I really like working on the game's visuals and polishing it up so I'll likely be doing that in the next update as well.

I know this update was pretty small but at the time this will be published I'll have been out of state. And since I knew that I was going to be out of state I made sure to write whip up these updates in-advance so that you guys still had something to chew on while I was away!

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman

RTS_12 "Territory Rendering, Farm Visual & Resource Storage Buildings"

I had planned to work on unit spawning buildings but I noticed the farm visual in the last update looked a bit lonely. Not only was it hard to see because of how small it was, but it was hard to see because of the bright red territory around it.

So first, I wanted to work on how the territory looked. I had always planned to make territory only render the edges so it was only a matter of time until I got around to doing this:

This will remove your player's color from overlapping every tile you own (making so you get to see everything much more clearly now) while also still being able to clearly see which territory you own.

The territory also no longer renders underneath anything so that the borders of territory are always clearly visible over buildings or units or anything else.

Now making the farm building bigger for a cartoony look was an option, but I didn't like how it turned out, so an even better solution (and one which I probably should have thought of before) was to add farmland:

This also means that farms now take up 2 hex slots so a second building can't be built on the same hex as a farm. This makes it even more important to plan your city in advance.

The next thing I wanted to work on was unit spawning, but looking at farms made me realize I had forgotten one other thing. Food is stored inside of a city and isn't used outside of the city, but most other resources are such as wood or science. So I made so that the player can stockpile produced resources! However, the idea for balancing has been that the player can't do this to infinity.

So I've added a new building type: Resource Storage Building. All these buildings do is increase your max storage for each resource.

I want to say I'll work on unit spawning next, but we'll see how it goes.

Sincerely,
Blake Gillman