Posted May 12, 2021
Hello everybody,
With this developer diary we want to start to give you more information about the current development and to answer more of your questions. Please be aware that we sometimes still have to give development priority over a DevDiary and that the latter then appears either belatedly or on a smaller scale.
We have been working flat out on patch EA 0.9.14 since March. The patch is very important to us and is expected to be finished and ready for you at the end of May/beginning of June! But what will be in there? Quite a lot, we can assure you!
Balancing: We continued our efforts to further balance the game. Since every screw that you turn in one direction or the other can have an effect on completely different areas in the game, we will of course continue this after the patch. At this point, we would like to thank everyone who helped us a lot with their bug reports, their suggestions and their constructive criticism. You are great!
Difficulty level: Many of you criticize that the game is too easy. Yes, unfortunately this is still the case in EA 0.9.13.5. The level of difficulty actually has little effect on the game and we had to a) first make the AI “smarter” and b) among other things, enable our designers to use advanced formulas to calculate costs and reputation. Additionally, with patch EA 0.9.14, the handsel and salaries of employees will scale with the level of difficulty, as well as the chances of success with performing especially social actions.
AI: While we're at it, AI will see the vast majority of improvements, and AI dynasties will now become serious entities and adversaries. And if you play hard or impossible, then you will really have to nibble. Of course, there is still room for improvement here and we will continue to turn one or two screws in the future to make AI even smarter. But we look forward to your feedback as soon as you've played the patch.
Sound: In March we already presented you with the first iteration of our SFX revision. In patch EA 0.9.14, we not only continued where we left off, but we also added a lot of new sounds. For example the noises that handcarts and horse carts emit and the sounds in the village and in the city :-)
This is only a small glimpse into patch EA 0.9.14. We would like to address one more thing that has nothing to do with the patch at the end of May/beginning of June and is only relevant for those of you who do not want to play in English or German: We are planning to translate all so far untranslated texts and to include them in a patch in July or August - depending on how long the translation into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese takes. We have waited until now to take this step, as a lot of new texts on the basic functionalities of the game have been added up to this point in time. The new texts that come into play from then on will be translated at a later date.
In the next DevDiary in June we will talk about our further plans. Stay tuned :-)
H. Meyer
Producer, THQ Nordic
G. Holzer
Project Manager, Purple Lamp Studios
With this developer diary we want to start to give you more information about the current development and to answer more of your questions. Please be aware that we sometimes still have to give development priority over a DevDiary and that the latter then appears either belatedly or on a smaller scale.
We have been working flat out on patch EA 0.9.14 since March. The patch is very important to us and is expected to be finished and ready for you at the end of May/beginning of June! But what will be in there? Quite a lot, we can assure you!
Balancing: We continued our efforts to further balance the game. Since every screw that you turn in one direction or the other can have an effect on completely different areas in the game, we will of course continue this after the patch. At this point, we would like to thank everyone who helped us a lot with their bug reports, their suggestions and their constructive criticism. You are great!
Difficulty level: Many of you criticize that the game is too easy. Yes, unfortunately this is still the case in EA 0.9.13.5. The level of difficulty actually has little effect on the game and we had to a) first make the AI “smarter” and b) among other things, enable our designers to use advanced formulas to calculate costs and reputation. Additionally, with patch EA 0.9.14, the handsel and salaries of employees will scale with the level of difficulty, as well as the chances of success with performing especially social actions.
AI: While we're at it, AI will see the vast majority of improvements, and AI dynasties will now become serious entities and adversaries. And if you play hard or impossible, then you will really have to nibble. Of course, there is still room for improvement here and we will continue to turn one or two screws in the future to make AI even smarter. But we look forward to your feedback as soon as you've played the patch.
Sound: In March we already presented you with the first iteration of our SFX revision. In patch EA 0.9.14, we not only continued where we left off, but we also added a lot of new sounds. For example the noises that handcarts and horse carts emit and the sounds in the village and in the city :-)
This is only a small glimpse into patch EA 0.9.14. We would like to address one more thing that has nothing to do with the patch at the end of May/beginning of June and is only relevant for those of you who do not want to play in English or German: We are planning to translate all so far untranslated texts and to include them in a patch in July or August - depending on how long the translation into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Korean, Chinese and Japanese takes. We have waited until now to take this step, as a lot of new texts on the basic functionalities of the game have been added up to this point in time. The new texts that come into play from then on will be translated at a later date.
In the next DevDiary in June we will talk about our further plans. Stay tuned :-)
H. Meyer
Producer, THQ Nordic
G. Holzer
Project Manager, Purple Lamp Studios