Hunh, cool. Maybe if I can tear myself away from Autonauts vs. Piratebots I’ll give it a shot.
I’m following the updates, but I’ve put my playing on hold until the 1.0 release, I think.
Looks like they will release the 1.0 this month. I’ve been patiently waiting for it - so excited.
Yeah, I knew I loved it and quit several months ago to await 1.0. Glad it is almost here.
I only just tried this yesterday, since there was a demo on the current Nextfest. I don’t know how this flew under my radar before (this very thread is quite old!) but I’m very glad I found it. I’m also glad it’s apparently coming out soon, since I don’t love playing games in early access. What a wonderful little gem it is, having elements of all sorts of different game types that work well together, and give it a very unique feel.
I also picked up the demo based on this thread. I liked it! It struck me as a great example of game developers advancing the city-builder genre. Incorporating Slipways-style puzzle recipes is neat.
The building artwork is my biggest complaint - it’s too hard to figure out what building is what. (It would also be nice if housing placement had any role at all, beyond requiring to be near a hearth).
There were a lot of cornerstones I didn’t pick that involved getting rewards for citizens leaving or dying. Has anyone tried the tactic of ignoring a particular race entirely (leaving them homeless, ignoring needs, letting them die or just leave) in combination with those cornerstones?
It’s been quite a while since I’ve played, but I think they’re really only useful on the highest difficulty areas. But maybe there will be a balancing pass before 1.0.
I haven’t played in a month or so now and have become far less active in the discord, partly to wait for 1.0 and partly due to distractions, but they are currently doing balancing. I think that some of those cornerstones for people leaving or dying might have been removed or changed. There definitely was a point where you could get a pretty solid game by taking them though.
At the highest difficulties it only works if you get the perk ‘Hidden from the Queen’ so the Queen doesn’t find out about all the problems you’re having; the penalty for people leaving goes up a lot somewhere in the last couple of difficulty levels.
I also agree on the buildings being samey; there was talk of those being made more distinct but I’m not sure if they ever decided to go ahead with it. They are changing all the icons to homemade icons now instead of the bundle they’d been using so fingers crossed they touch up buildings while they’re at it.
Yep, was my biggest issue as well. Seems like they should have made some changes since it was a complaint then as well, but maybe it wasn’t worth the time investment. When I started months ago it was already solid and very enjoyable and that’s why, as I said above, I figured I would just wait on the 1.0 result because I knew I’d enjoy it all over again after the time away.
The team has announced that the game is coming to Steam and GOG on November 1, but it will still be in Early Access. I don’t think they’ve declared a 1.0 date yet. I don’t think it’s too far away based off the state of the game, but they’re definitely not in a hurry.
Here’s the new “release trailer”:
The devs have announced they plan to be in early access for another 6 months following the Steam EA launch. They plan on adding a fifth villager species. Here’s the whole roadmap list:
• 5th playable species
• New Glade Events
• Scarlet Orchard’s unique biome mechanic
• Metal & Mining branch evolution
• Blightrot system evolution
• New Perks
• New Buildings
• New Modifiers
• New Orders
• New Decorations
• New System
• Twitch Integration
• Tutorial improvements
• UI/UX improvements
• Community-requested features
I played for the first time this week and the game seems kind of cool. I like having specific goals and then needing to figure out how to get there. The biggest hurdle is not really knowing what is needed to be able to produce a good when picking my goal, so I need to bounce over to the recipe guide and figure out if I have access to the necessary buildings.
This is on Steam now and currently on sale until the 15th. It seems to universally beloved, the game’s ratings are really high.
For anyone who is interested in what the Against the Storm team is doing as it continues Early Access, they just launched a major overhaul of the basic gathering camps in their Experimental Branch.
Basically, there’s no gathering overlap between the camps, but you can always build a “primitive” version of any of them that is super inefficient. Sounds to me like it’s similar to the way the Makeshift Workshop gives you a cruddy basic way to create refined building materials, but now with raw materials.
They tend to pull these experiments over into the main branch after some tweaking.
Great, missing the blueprint for a needed camp could make a match really annoying to play through.
Nice.
Oh man, I need to get back into this one.
I took a long break but seem to have come back at an auspicious time. Today’s update looks to make the blightrot mechanic opt-in rather than just a fuel and labor tax as well as bringing back some encouragement to explore.
The game had reached a point where the optimal strategy was to only open dangerous glades, starting in year 2 after you’d done a little prep in year 1 to get ready for the dangerous events that might pop up. Now it looks like you’re going to want to be opening small glades again; they’d already been buffed a little because everyone was ignoring them and with the new rainpunk mechanic you’re going to want access to geysers as quickly as possible which means getting out there and exploring.
It looks like it will add more interesting choices for the player in terms of how they want to boost their industry with the pipes we now get and can craft and encourages more metal usage early.
This is only the first pass on the Rainpunk mechanic, they mentioned definitely needing a part two and probably a third eventually but these will likely come in after the 5th race. All in all, I’m glad I started this up again a couple days ago.
Yeah, this is a biggie. I like that it’s bringing forward the “rainpunk” concept in general, too. It has been in there, but not really experienced in the gameplay, just in the flavor of one or two buildings.