Rejoice! Jake brings thee new hours to waste!

Note that initially, this patch will be in beta, meaning you need to manually check it out in the steam thing, "properties / betas" something. It will remain in beta until all fires are put out. [previewyoutube=T3pODHjm1Us;full][/previewyoutube] I spend some extra time on this video, probably 2, and the editing makes me appear surprisingly coherent. I hope you like it, because the ordeal was very frustrating. Like usual, I don't really know what I've been doing. I should see a doctor about that, as some reviewers have insinuated. But you'll find the patchnotes I've scribbled down during the journey at the bottom. What I do know is that this is the last batch of the Early Access period. Let me explain a bit what that means here as well, so that there's little confusion. To me EA is a label that means: "Some things are missing, or are a bit broken. Features will be added and removed and experimented with based on your input. As an EA player, you are a beta-tester". EA is like a pre-order for a game with some perks, Now though, the fundamental systems are in place. They work. The balance is there, even though it will require possibly years to perfect. The only place-holder feature remaining is nobles. It is time. New systems will be added, but they will not be controversial. Things like Ports, sieges, pets, races, rooms, campaigns etc. are things that add to the game and have no negative side effects. However, these things are plans, they are not promises. If you buy SoS after EA, you should be happy with its current state. The 1.0 patch will be the fist patch of this nature. For instance, there will be:

• water wheels to boost industry
• Farmstead to boost agriculture
• More monuments
• More and prettier roads
• Park room
• Police building
• Medical research fascility
• New compact pasture variation.
• Meaningful fortifications.

Note that there's just additions here, without fundamental changes to gameplay. What will change is: Nobility overhaul, throne room overhaul Some things I want you to be aware of:

• Price might increase 25 -> 30$, although I haven't decided.
• I might team up with a publisher for launch
• There most probably will be sales.

This is not to mess with any of you. No $3.99 hat DLCs. It's simply to reach a wider audience, and yes, to make money. If I make more money, not only will I be happy, but I could also scale up the game and increase development pace without personally break myself.

Patchnotes

• New event mechanics & new and refined events.
• Better and more error resistant saving
• Baths consume coal at a predictable rate
• Changing room materials do not crash saves
• new and improved bonuses and stats for regions
• new and improved road and path generation for the world.
• new mechanics for world pathing and trade partners.
• More state is saved when a room is copied or broken. Such as radius, and logistics settings.
• Stage & Arenas now have fixed sizes, but come in different shapes.
• Some visual candy for the woodcutter. Increased storage for them.
• Mines and refiners have differently sized output storage, bigger in general.
• Pastures do not get penalised for their surrounding fence, which will make indoor pastures better.
• new sprites for dirt and blood for portraits
• new tutorial cut scenes
• new titles icons
• Barber is more space efficient.
• Hospitals need fabric to function, and give 10% recovery. Opiates is optional and gives an extra 40% recovery.
• The import depot is now a potential pull source.
• New list for room construction projects.
• You can now easily swap punishments for captives, they will not go into exile. Also fixed some general weirdness with punishment rates.
• Pools now need direct canal access and will suck water out of the system.
• Woodcutters, farms, orchards and pastures now operate on base fertility, and will instead get an additive boost from sweet water.
• The old boost to knowledge from libraries is scrapped. Instead Libraries have their own separate tech point system.
• The tech tree has been remade visually with some new helpful information.
• The tech tree has been remade and rebalanced, quite a bit of thought has been put into it: All industries now have the same possible maximum boost at the same cost, making it viable to specialise in whatever.
• All industries have different times to shine, mimicking human evolutions. Farms are best at first, then comes mines, refiners and finally workshops that are best late game. In have all the same value.
• Army supply depot has been remade. It no longer stores supplies, but instead loads carts depending on demand, and leaves for the edge of the map. Considerable logistics is needed for large armies.
• Rooms no longer breaks when they are fully degraded. This is because I can now track monument degrade.
• Awe, harmony, etc. is scrapped. Instead all monuments have their own aura. This is so that monuments can be expanded upon.
• Some rooms like markets lets subjects register their surroundings.
• Pools work the same way as roads in terms of fulfilment.
• Improved rendering speed significantly, which will also increase game speed.
• New improved work assignments. Plebs will automatically change workplace based on their building preference. There's also the possibility to assign individual rooms to specific races. This is not an absolute tool, more of a hint, but it's working pretty well.
• Refactored the region development code. City hall is built with government points, generated by nobles.
• Excess world workforce generates denari.
• Growable taxes are only shipped on their harvest day.
• Admins are repurposed. An admin combats mid/late game overhead that will come creeping. Overhead increases exponentially.
• The old noble offices no longer exist. Instead, when you've appointed a noble, you assign them to an office manually. These offices are split between different industries and regional management. The former boosts a limited amount of workers. The latter will result in Gov Points that are used to upgrade regions.
• Export depots have spoilage
• Events for regions
• Ores generate differently on the city map. You get 100% deposits, but only enough for 30 workers without world deposits. This is to make self-sustaining early games possible.
• Consumption of edible goods added to the UI.
• New world battle mechanics. Better and more stable engine, with more options, such as defending a city with an army on top, assist you allies, and more.
• Got rid of the false virus flag.
• Enhanced the tutorial.
• REgion buildings rebalanced and fixed.
• Organization in regions is gone.
• Added 'Worth' to regions. It's a function of mineral deposits, fertility and area. It is used by the AI to estimate how much they want the region.
• Showing your net worth in the treasury UI.
• Showing a factions net worth in their UI.
• net worth includes worth of your population as slaves. Each pop is worth their upbringing time x the cheapest food in Syx x 2. This was bugged before with the average price of food, which could be very high.
• Fixed broken power calculations, which were a cause of raider and AI strangeness.
• Retirement fulfilment based on your total amount of retires.
• Threat is renamed into Rivalry, and is not counted towards your trade.
• You get penalised bad for failing to protect your vassals.
• Vassal tribute slightly decreased. Their armies will attack your enemies though.
• You get a trespassing penalty from moving armies in un-allied territory.
• If you have an army in a distant faction's territory, they are allowed to declare war on you.
• Factions that are at war with you, yet can't reach you, will continue to be at war with you until you make peace.
• When signing peace, you sign a peace with all factions you are at war with.
• Peace deals are less powerful. To get some cash from it, you seriously need to threaten the AI by having armies in their territory.
• Factions must break off their agreements until neutral before they can declare war.
• Wars decrease the opinion of your allies over time, along with city loyalty and region loyalty.
• Neutral factions will station their armies by your border.
• Raiders may cross through any other faction to attack you.
• Raiders will demand more unique and varied things.
• Raiders will on occasion destroy a trade partner instead of you.
• Minimum opinion is needed for trade, pact and ally. This is so you know what opinion is expected to upkeep your stance.
• Factions with low opinion, that can not attack themselves will "poison" all other factions against you. Given enough time, war will break out.
• Factions that can't reach you, but wants to kill you, can give their armies to a neighbour at war. They can not start wars though, other than "poisoning" your neighbours.
• Increased flattery from emissaries.
• Fortifications have different and better ways of being destroyed. Enemies can scale the walls if the outer tiles are broken. This means the thickness of walls is only used to station troops on.
• Drastically decreased the strength of every structure that is not fortifications, to emphasise their important.
• I have a hugely genius plan to improve the importance of fortifications for 1.0. Just wanted to mention that.
• It could also be possible to shift the map when you are invaded to the invasion spot. That is, move all buildings away from the invasion spot, which would allow you to make better use of archers and artillery (think about that will you)
• Friendly fire from archers reduced.
• Trees only block 50% of projectiles, and are no longer a real obstacle.
• Fertility changes. Fertility now goes from 0.5-1.2 in bonus. Irrigation goes from 0.5-1.0. So irrigation is mandatory for all maps. You get free irrigation close to natural water places.
• Annoying sudden confusion of divs in formation fix.
• Div movement 'stuttering' fix.
• Defenders on walls get "high ground" advantage in melee combat. This is x2 on grand fortifications. This should give the defender a clear advantage.
• Pathing for divisions improved
• Intanglement for divisions improved
• New setting for ranged units where they will not move to attack targets
• UI for battle improved.

[ 2025-01-15 12:26:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello. Just want to quickly address a new issue that has popped up. The windows defender warning. This is a peculiar thing. It started happening long after I had patched V67 for the last time. I managed to find the offensive files in the game .jar, and remove those, and I thought the problem was solved. But now it seems to have found something else to complain about. The particular files it's nagging about is the framework "lwjgl", which is all about rendering things to the screen. This exact copy of it is also in V66, which to my knowledge passes the defender tests. With the files being identical, I can only surmise that this must be something about dates and modification dates. My own personal theory, which is probably not correct, is that there are variations of SoS floating about on the internet, and some of them contains a virus/malware. The defender then sees all SoS copies of this and that modification date as threats. I can only say that I have not uploaded anything dangerous. This I can prove with the fact that this started happening long after I had patched V67. (I have patched since to remove the offending malware warning. It was useless files in any case). So, I'm at the mercy of the whims of windows defender here. Since I have no knowledge of the matter, all I can do is pray. And you can help me out by reporting the file to Microsoft. There should be a button somewhere when you get the warning. I am 99.99% sure this is a false flag thing. I can't say 100%, because I'm not all knowing in the matter. I'm also not overly worried, since this only affects V67 beta, and I'll look into it seriously for V68. Also, make sure you let steam verify the installation. Might be that you haven't gotten the latest version, and that this version is fine. If you have any information about this, of things I can try to do, please let me know. /Jake

[ 2024-11-25 08:40:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings friends! Finally some progress from your beloved developer (now with some company). This patch is special in that it's save-game compatible with V66. However, it will not move to stable, and it will not be translated, as I want to make more of these patches. Note that you can't load a V67 save in V66 though, so keep backups. It revolves around what is already in the game and making it better and live up to its potential. Some highlights are maintenance, raiders and events. You can access the game by selecting it as a beta in the steam-thing (V67). I will now go back to coding V68. This patch should be relatively bug and issue free, although I've probably made a few oopsies here and there that I will fix in the coming days. [previewyoutube=0gFIw25sULI;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]

[ 2024-09-05 09:06:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Esteemed Despots, What a ride, and what a toll on my delicate nerves. A beta release + the influx of a huge number of new players, a poor logistics implementation, etc. That was a bad combination. But now it's over, the bugs have been squashed, strange choices remedied, oddities swept in under the carpet. Stable V66 is now released, praise be the Astari. that means that the default branch on steam will be updated to V66, and your V65 saves will not work. To continue playing those, you must manually check out V65 as a beta in the steam client. As always, I planned for V66 to be perfect, however under scrutiny, many issues has been revealed. That means that I will continue to patch the game with a few more mini-versions. The gamechanger here is that I will not break saves, I will just rebalance things. And the patches will be smaller, more frequent and narrower in scope. The rough plan is this:

V67 balance.

• Make maintenance great again and make sure upgrades to buildings is not a one-time cost for the player.
• Make services more costly if maintenance isn't enough, especially the late game ones.
• General love to fulfilment modifiers and race diversity.
• Admin to replace organization. Still focus on < 12 region kingdoms. Law and health rework in order to make this the primary late-game pushback, but still give you tools to mitigate them.
• Further work on the difficulty progression, by making early game more forgiving, and increase difficulty at higher populations.

V68 diplomacy

After a lot of work, I feel that the basic diplomacy is stable. That means I can add layers to it, to make it more fun, immersive and engaging. I want stories generated through your journey, and make your AI counterparts feel alive. There's also a problem with opinion and the threat modifier. The plan is to sort of hide this modifier, so that you'll be under the impression that they love you, but as you grow, you'll be targeted for backstabbing. Also make the traits of the rulers more impactful, so that you'll use diplomacy more. I can also work with adaptive difficulty, trying to figure out how much pushback to give you for the best experience.

V69 battles

Fix movement, friendly fire, etc. Balance the actual fighting. I'm still bent on making battles be about breaking the enemy, not killing them as in most Hollywood inspired games. My best total war experience comes from a mod called Rome total realism, which had just that. I don't want it to be about your clicking skills, I want it to be about your tactical planning skills. I'm sure there will be 1-2 more of these mini-versions. I also have a guy helping me in my effort and to organize stuff. His username is Vanir, and so far, he's doing one heck of a job. Right now he's scouring suggestions from all corners of the world, which will all be considered. And he's a machine when it comes to testing. I'll also put him on balancing, we will see if he's up to snuff. As you see, 1.0 is still a bit illusive, but I'm thinking it should probably be Q1 of 2025. A reminder is that 1.0 will contain the major feature of proper nobilities and their rooms, the throne room, and professional soldiers parading the streets. The main idea behind nobles is to tap into that story telling mechanics that are in other games. I'm still debating with myself and others, if we really want this, or if it will just be an annoyance, as you try to optimize your city. We will see. I've also saved a bunch of low-hanging fruit in terms of content. Final note, I want to thank everyone for testing the beta, which is 98% of all players. Just please be thoughtful that in the beta of and EA title, made by a solo fool in his garage, there is bound to be bugs, strange features and balance issues. If you find something that annoys you, chances are it's not intended to be that way. But I have no idea of knowing unless you let me know how you feel.

[ 2024-05-20 11:10:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

The time has come. It is time for a new of my world-renowned dev-log videos. I've got so much to say, yet so little time, and so much confusion. Beta is now released. You check out the beta manually from the steam client, or your other store's clients. This beta is in a good state, but there might still be bugs I need to fix, and rebalancing, so it might be a bumpy ride. It will also be updated, sometimes several times per day. So if you're not into that, wait for the official stable release, else, I am very grateful to you who give it a shot. You got the patch notes in the previous announcements, so instead I'll talk a bit about this nice little marketing push I've received. As you know there was a 20% sale, and a huge video by Seeth - the youtuber. SoS made it to the top 20 worldwide on Steam, and #4 on another store who's name shall not be mentioned. This increased sales indeed. I basically made 6 months normal revenue in 24h. I'm not gloating, I just think some of you might be genuinely interested. It didn't stay in the top very long though, sadly. I planned on releasing V66 along with it, to create extra buzz, but there were too many bugs. I was defeated. All in all, I'm very happy with it, and I might do sales in the future, since the response has only been positive. And I'm confident 1.0 will be a good. [previewyoutube=L8keRTj5EWM;full][/previewyoutube]

[ 2024-04-22 12:26:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings earthlings.

It's about time I divert my attention from my codebase, and try and explain myself as best I can. First of all, I want to inform you that the game will be on sale the first time ever (and maybe last), from today to April 29th. Personally, I would have loved to skip sales all together, but SoS strangely isn't the top seller of the decade, so I want to try this once and see what it brings. The reason I chose to do so now, is that I have some good things happening all at once. Firstly, the renowned youtuber Sseth is releasing a SoS video today, and the digital stores promised to give me some extra exposure. We will see what it brings, I'll keep you posted. [previewyoutube=oucHl9NM97g;leftthumb][/previewyoutube] Secondly, I'm not very active in the steam forums, as you might have noticed. This is simply because it eats a lot of my time, and I need to focus when I'm making new patches. I will be back when V66 is done, if you promise to be nice. The steam boards have degenerated a bit, I think we can all agree, as is expected as the game grows. The good old days are in the past. If you want nearly daily rambles, I cordially invite you to the discord, where I post progress more regularly, and open to chats. Discord Link Thirdly, about V66. V66 is very special to me. It is most probably the patch before 1.0, and it's focused on polish and stability. I have not drastically altered anything. And I've made a special save thing, so maybe it will even be compatible with 1.0. Focus has been on mid-late game, mainly about getting the AI factions to behave, and present challenges from 1k population. I've been good with patch notes this time, so I'll include them here. In a perfect world, I would release the beta today, but I'm trying to come up with all kinds of distractions to keep me from playtesting, which I'm not too fond of, not sure why. But it should be released within a week, along with one of my astounding video logs. What 1.0 means is that the game is in a state I'm happy with. It does not mean that development will stop, just focus will be shifted more towards polish and stability and balance. No new ground-breaking that breaks all saves. From 1.0 and forward, all saves and mods will be compatible. And when I'm done doing that, maybe 6 months from then, I will probably start working on an expansion pack. Forgive my misspellings and other deficiencies.

MISC

• Campaign engine.
• The tutorial converted into a campaign.
• Selectable scripts when generating random game.
• Different "scenario" options. A scenario is a save that you can distribute with mods. Battles for instance.
• Trait system remade and reworked to work both or royals and subjects.
• Military equipment has efficiency based on race, added as a modding request. I've added some malus to the Argonosh.
• All kinds of racism is now connected in the world and your city, and other factions.
• Save resilience. Saves should now be able to be opened with different mod configurations, if the mods are not too exotic. Custom maps also have a good chance to work all the way to 1.0 as well.
• 14 new sountracks. The soundtrack is now complete.
• A nifty little property saver that saves for instance wall-type in room construction to your profile. Can be used to save many such QoL, suggestions are welcome.
• New menu background
• New Titles: The Undefeated, The Incompetent, The Merciful, The Merciless, The Wise, The Bureaucrat, The Clumsy, The Gourmand, The Entertainer, The Drunkard, The Caretaker, The Pleasurer, The Uniter

CITY

• Admin and knowledge now have sticky production, meaning values will not swing back and forth during the day.
• Accidents are back. Also some panic when accidents occur.
• Pimped the Embassy. Made it more space efficient. It now needs jewellery and fabric, although it's optional as the admin.
• Sick and injured people no longer counts as workforce, enabling you to control work priorities properly.
• Soldier fulfilment based on total number of soldiers, not per race.
• Grave mourners now stand beside the grave.
• Market rooms keep their settings when copied.
• Pasture output tiles capacity increased.
• Overtime now has significant penalty to happiness.
• Water pumps can now only be placed on ground water. You must plan for the canals.
• Data for resources and credits are now per day instead of per season.
• Resource piles have much greater capacity, reducing their amount and potential lag if the map becomes filled with them.
• Rooms listed in construction order
• removed entrance check when building rooms, allowing you to build in mountains.
• Saved blueprint now moved to the construction screen of individual rooms. Saved blueprints made more robust.
• Made some small changes to the bottom menu. I know you don't like this, but it's for the better. Some small changes might occur next patch, but after, I'm done.
• Food preference improved. You'll get a slight value when there is one out of many.
• Service overlays now better.
• Entertainment buildings keep better count of available services.
• Services such as food stall and restaurant now count to fulfilment by themselves. Restaurants are on average used ever 8th food stall day.
• Tree regrowth rate halved, and woodcutter production boosted.
• Auto employ removed from crafting buildings.
• More road types, and they look better.
• Road access remade. Now remade into preference, which works the same as the building materials.
• Hospitals now offer fulfilment to citizens.
• Multiple drink types. I only have two. Tavern has been pimped, and has an upgrade. Drink preference works just as food preference.
• Massage parlour added. What happens in there is up to everyone's imagination. In practise, it is just another service, but reduces health slightly.
• New room "stockade" is a holding place for prisoners. It is dirt cheap, and it is not a punishment. Prisons are now purely a punishment.
• Law is remade, so it starts at full fulfilment, then climbs down as crime starts appearing.
• Added escape events to stockades and prisons.
• Work priorities and the assignment mechanics got some love, and now work better, even when priority is 0.
• -Logistics remake-
• Two new major things to know about. Fetch and deliver orders. These are set per room. They are similar to the old "empty to" functionality.
• The warehouse have 4 available fetch orders. In addition, it also has a toggle for "regular fetch", and a true store function. It also has a limit that decides how much other storage fetchers may fetch from it.
• The hauler has the same things, but only two fetch orders.
• The old fetch mechanics is thus retired. Warehouses will only grab stuff from the ground and from production rooms, if no fetch orders are issued.
• Logistics are nerfed a bit. They have less radius, and less carry capacity. The carry capacity is based on race and can be upgraded. Garthimi sucks, Dondorian and Cretonian excel.
• Transports have 4 delivery orders available. Their capacity is now 60, and they will depart more regularity. Their speed is slower than a regular pleb, but they obviously carry a lot more. They are good for moving big numbers of resources. For few numbers, a warehouse will do.
• Export depots and military supply depots work similarly to warehouses, in that they grab resources on the ground, and also have pull orders.
• The "export when over" is thus scrapped and replaced by the power of the pull orders.
• The army supply works like a warehouse with 2 fetch orders available.
• Exposure tweaks. You must now provide wells and hearths all over the city, as everyone will become cold and hot. Clothes will only decrease the frequency of getting cold/hot, thus making the city more efficient.
• Divisions when sent out to an army will take some time to return.
• Option to send out divisions even if they're not fully trained.
• Raids pimped up. They no longer spawn an army, they attack directly. You have a chance to fight them on the field.
• Raid chance is reworked. Now based on riches (resources, slaves and credits) and your military power. Also your military reputation.
• Raids no longer scale as you defeat them until you're faced with impossible odds. Instead they are randomized each time.
• Raiders have a captain and a name.
• There are a number of unconditional raids added that you can't avoid.
• Roundness is now an addative value.
• Made some visual changes to walls.
• Some 20+ techs added and tech tree restructured.
• Refined how slave submission works.

WORLD

• Generation now tries to base the size of the region on capacity, meaning larger, infertile regions.
• Roads made a bit more pronounced.
• Some color and sprite changes.
• Editor. To share maps you make, make a mod and put the save from the editor into custom folder.
• Havens now have lower requirements in order to join you. More will join if you exceed the requirements though.
• Build points removed. World buildings rebalanced.
• "Organisation" a new world thing and is based on how much workforce you have allocated. Replaces distance, although distance is still there.
• Organisation lets you either expand though upgrades or through region amounts.
• Building buildings now has a new flow. Loyalty and health is based on the population target, not current population. Enables you to know exactly what to build.
• Building buildings is done in bulk that lets you experiment with different configurations without spending money.
• Prosecution in you capitol also affects regional happiness.
• Representation of species in your capitol affects regional happiness.
• Representation of nobles in your capitol affects regional happiness.
• Prices have been fixed all over, and is now derived from the prices of goods. For instance slaves cost their food and upkeep during breeding, and mercenaries their equipment and training.
• Region generation improved.
• Battle stats for armies and factions. Military reputation based on your prowess. Affects AI factions and in-city stats.
• Mercenary rework. Scales with your size, and have a long cooldown when disbanded, and low replenishment. Also correctly prices, more than it will cost you to train your own.
• Raid stance added for army. Allows you to get slaves and resources.
• Artillery is now an army supply.
• Only rations and clothes are mandatory, drinks improve morale.

FACTIONS

• Opinion "threat" now reworked. Based on population vs Ai's population, meaning small states will hate you more/faster. Some additional stats added.
• UI of opinion enhanced.
• Reworked emmisaries. Now a diplomatic point system. Points allocated will stick to the court when someone dies. Better UI for this.
• New "sabotage" diplomacy option in order to get a faction to attack you without getting a betrayal penalty.
• Betrayal added. If you act like a jerk, you will be severely punished by all factions.
• Factions will not attack you simple because they do not like you. They will make sure they can beat you in auto resolve.
• Factions with low opinion will secretly convince other factions to attack you with time.
• New diplomatic options available:
• Alliance -> a military alliance, you will share enemies. You can get a cheap alliance by helping someone out that is at war.
• Colleague -> a non aggression pact. Promise to not attack each other.
• Vassal -> become, or make a vassal. A vassal pays a yearly tribute to its overlord, and is protected by it. As an overlord, you can pick what kind of tribute you want, and as a vassal, you'll pay 15% of your shit each year.
• Protector -> above reversed
• Join Federation -> Unite. Pay a hefty sum to have a faction join yours without bloodshed.
• New trait system for royalties. Shapes a unique personality that has a large impact on your relations. Hopefully this will prompt you to assassinate more.
• All factions now has an army. These armies grows slightly as you expand.
• Initial generation of factions makes sure you will have nice progression. The neighbouring factions are immune to events, and will stay there until you're ready to expand.
• Slave trade.
• War diplomacy fixes.
• The betray system hopefully fixes exploits, such as selling a region and then attacking it shortly after.
• Opinion has less impact on trade prices.

SOUND

• Reworked the sound engine.
• Added multiple new sounds in theory, but I haven't added much of the actual sounds.
• Sounds that you can be added by modding:
• -Room ambiance
• -Room on click
• Furthermore, there will be a variety of sounds coming from the subjects themselves, but I'm saving these until after 1.0, as it will not affect saves.

MODDING

• Some changes to scripts. Now there are selectable scripts, and forced scripts. Forced scripts can be adding ui tools or whatnot, selectable is a traditional script. Scripts are selected on a new random game.

[ 2024-04-16 16:55:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

It is here! This version can now be checked out as beta in the steam client. Right click the game and there should be something like "betas" or "properties -> betas". [previewyoutube=EKCzZpcLSvg;full][/previewyoutube] Patchnotes:

• WORLD
• Overall the world has been overhauled to 1.0 status. Lots of smaller adjustments.
• Armies are now reinforced by garrisons and other armies nearby in an intelligent way.
• Better auto resolve based on damage types.
• Better army composition for the AI.
• Most UI reworked. Made sure it fits on a 1200x720 screen.
• Improvements to FOW and minimap FOW and highlighting.
• Lots of new functionality around trade.
• Improved world buildings on the map. Each race have specific ones.
• Improved neighbour factions spawning
• Mineral deposits rework. All deposits available in any region and in any city. The amount of deposits dictate the efficiency of the mines. Settlement will be generated with the same quantity of ores. The ore nodes will increase quality of the nodes.
• Epidemic events on the world map.
• NPC factions communication events.
• All UI and mechanics concerning army management and recruitment polished.
• The world construction has been completely revamped with new mechanics and buildings to choose from.
• CITY
• Generating initial roads according to the world roads.
• Generating small rivers according to the world map.
• Equally large mineral patches will be generated (about 1500 workers each) on every city. The richness of the spots is determined by what world location you pick.
• new Main UI
• Historic data for equipment wear and initial equip.
• Full control over house assignments.
• Brawls still happen now and then (prevented by segregation of hateful species with the new home settings). Big brawls are now an event that happens with low fulfilment.
• Army recruitment UI redone. Bulk edit of divisions, and reordering. More info on whats going on.
• Strangeness regarding training of different battle types fixed. A recruit can train at any facility for basic training, and will then start specialising.
• Warehouses are now upgradable for more space and less degrade. Visually a bit more exciting.
• Overtime command now gives flat bonuses. The actual work hours are not affected, they just work more efficiently.
• Work time is now "elastic" in order to let the peeps travel farther away services without affecting production. When a peep has been away in the arena, he will work extra shifts afterwards to compensate.
• Arenas now have workers istead of using prisoners. Death in the arena is an optional punishment form.
• Arenas are now renamed "fighting pits" and are available early. The size option does not affect quality.
• A new Grand arena building is available late game.
• Eatery renamed food stall, and look much prettier. Canteens -> restaurants, and I've increased coal consumption and work time for it! The idea here is that while it's theoretically possible to give everyone restaurant access, you shouldn't, you should use in conjunction with food stalls.
• Roundness and squareness now replaced with only roundness, and it's not tied to rooms, it's tied to the walls of your whole city, including mountains. Added roundness liking to Garthimi.
• Hearths no longer require wood to be brought to them. Instead they cost a lot of wood to contruct and maintain.
• Added some terrain decorations.
• Made the mineral deposits a bit more visually appealing.
• Shrines to all gods added. Shrines is your everyday religious fix. Shrine have a tiny radius. Temples can serve more people and have a much wider radius.
• All services are now a bit more tolerable for being full. A subject will try to find a vacant service several times before they mark it as unavailable.
• Made some changes to the workload calculator, hopefully giving you more accurate results.
• Entry points to your city is now fixed and mirror how your city is connected to roads on the world map. You must keep these points open, or receive negative consequences.
• Invasions can happen even if the entry points are closed. Invasions will find a suitable area to spawn on. They will not spawn on places that can't be reached from the world map, like in a mountain, but they are not tied to entry points, so you can't just fortify those. More will be done, I plan on keeping track of where enemies attack, and your fortifications in the area, so that they don't walk into kill boxes. If you go all in on fortifications and artillery, I plan to have them simply besiege you until you die.
• Mountains are now "soft" around the edges, so that you can initially tunnel quicker, however tunnelling will be slower the farther into the mountain you dig.
• Clearing other terrain stuff can be a bit slower, but yields more resources.
• Fixed so that you can always get 1 of each race through immigration, unless you're prosecuting them.
• Added more hate and racism :). This will make sure the world map is less diverse, with more regions oppressing other races. I also increased the importance of the "other" fulfilment thing, as well as gave x2 expectancy to your non-starting race.
• The liking of other species is now an absolute value 0-1. If A likes B with 0.5, they will only tolerate having 0.5 of that species relative to their own population.
• Workshops and refiners now have fixed amount of workers that are guaranteed to have something to do if raw materials exist.
• Daily production/consumption UI for rooms.
• Tools are now tied to the rooms they are used in, and not equipped.
• Pastures have an efficiency item, and get a small boost from sweet water access.
• Consumption of resources when producing also apply to bonuses, meaning when you boost something by x2, its consumption is also boosted by x2.
• Lowered all raw material production rates. (It's not harder, just more balanced).
• Animals on the map are now hunted manually.
• Hunter rooms are now a perpetual source of meat, though limited to very few employees.
• New building type added. The "hut". What's special about this is that it's free, but take a long time to build. Amevias like it.
• A new food panel, that gives you daily production and detailed info about food.
• Smallest housing option removed. The other houses have had their capacity increased by 125%
• Nurseries now unlock with you population. Maximum children is based on the population of the race in question.
• WATER
• Water table scrapped
• Instead there is ground water in both sweet and salty variants. You can terraform these areas as you're used to. These areas cover the generated natural water on the map + 8 tiles surrounding it.
• New water pumping system. You now need to build water pumps to generate water pressure that you can channel into canals. The pumps stack their pressure. these are manned by workers, although you'll need less as you upgrade them. You get the best result by placing the pumps close to sweet ground water.
• Every map is generated with at least 1 small body of water.
• To channel water through as structure you can use a drain.
• The canals emit sweet water, and increases fertility.
• Where there is sweet water access you can place different kinds of pools. These are moddable, I've added moats, ponds and pools to vanilla.
• Wells no longer emit sweet water, but can be placed anywhere.
• Bathhouses need access to sweet water to function optimally. Their pools look a bit better.
• Deep water can now not be completely removed. you can create a pathway through it, and place roads on that, and it will mimic a bridge. You can also remove the pathway.
• Skinny dipping access gets you a small fulfillment bonus.
• Fish amounts on the map is scrapped.
• Instead, you get a fixed, 1 worker/64 tiles in your fisheries.
• But, you get a lot of fish from new "deep water fishing spots" that will litter the edge of the sweet water tiles that's adjacent to deep water. These will send out boats to sea to fish.
• Salt water gets more of these tiles, since it has crap fertility.
• Just wood needed for fishery, they now have an upgrade.
• Indoor farms get a small boost to fertility from sweet water access.
• BUGS
• All bugs reported fixed. Noteworthy:
• The Cannibal now produces resources as it should.
• Fixed broken camps (Cantor, Argonosh).
• BATTLE
• Military Training and Training rooms now moddable. Each room has its own training stat and bonus. Each stat has its own set of bonuses. Divisions will be populated in a smart manner, best candidate first.
• Added new damage and armour types. Blunt, Pierce, slash
• New division power calculations + advanced auto resolve calculations.
• Added new battle equipment: short sword, long sword, warhammer, plate armour, leather armour and shields.
• I've rebuilt and rebalanced everything regarding battles. It is now much better, but far from perfect. It is important that you give me test cases where the AI is acting weirdly. Save before a battle, and if possible before the oddities occur.
• MISC
• 4 new sound tracks
• new day-night cycle, kinder to the eyes.
• New lock and unlock mechanics for everything, which makes the possibilities of the tech tree much more interesting and increases modability. For modders, full syntax examples should be in the tech files. Also works on titles and player levels and world buildings.
• Improved fonts, especially for non-latin languages.
• Visually improved main menu.
• New icons for everything. Improved icon rendering.
• Increased maximum resource types from 64 to 128. It can be increased further without hassle, but I think 128 will be enough for modders.
• New and improved titles, totalling 20. Titles have a 1:1 relationship to steam achievements.
• Steam achievements are now automatically updated when starting and exiting the game.
• Timed super screenshots
• Launcher is now translatable, with a new look, and a live language select.
• Quarter speed added by double tapping 1x speed
• Fixed the "non shading" option.
• MODDING
• First off, I've ruined a lot for current mods, and I apologise for this. I will most probably not do such a big change as this again, it is close to 1.0.
• The biggest thing is the new bonus system and unlock. It is much more versatile and broader, but has a different syntax.
• Added optional flag "AI_BUILDS" to world buildings.
• Made world generation heightmaps able to have any size (256px is the current world size) for better precision.
• Added default liking for other species.
• Better moddability for ranged weapons.
• Moddable damage and armour types
• All projectiles are now moddable, one can mod the damage done, velocity, etc. Added max arch angle as well (for muskets and cannons).
• Services are now tied to needs, and needs are moddable. This means that you can add a service and tie it any existing or new need you come up with. A physician can be reskinned and repurposed to deal with some other need for instance, very similar to industries, where you can change input/output.
• Water pool buildings available to be modded.
• Moddable city map size
• NOTES
• Brawls can not be a crime in the game. A crime needs an intent, while brawls are a sporadic thing, and will not work in the current law system. We will have to live with them going unpunished.
• Fishing boats can indeed bump around in an ugly fashion in your fisheries if you build these in weird shapes. Please let me know.

[ 2023-12-17 08:07:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

My dear despots. Apologies for the radio silence. I have not checked the steam boards for a month, because I've been spending all my time on programming, and while doing so I've become more and more anxious about coming here. Of course I've been available on email and on the discord. I'm now half-way through the next update V65, code name water. In reality it is more about polish, getting as many mechanics into a 1.0 state as possible. So far each update has been about adding some new mechanics, while trying to maintain the game in some kind of playable state, but spending as little time as possible on balance and polish. Now, focus has shifted to refinement and making the mechanics that are in, good as a whole. I am happy with the raw potential the game now has. I have now finished up the overworld mechanics into a state that I wished would have been in V64. But there was no time, (and it's always good to let things mature and collect feedback). UI reconstruction has been the focus, so that you can truly use all the mechanics present regarding AI faction management and building your realm. Manual trade agreements have been re-added. Trade in general has been the secret to expansion for very long, mostly because it's a semi-exploit. I'm now deferring trade to a later stage, and the game will play like a classic colony sim for the first part. I've completely remade the world buildings to make it more interesting and have a sense of progression. There are now many more Special buildings that upgrade your kingdom as a whole, meaning the more regions you have, the more specialization, and the greater the kingdom as a whole. The AI aggressiveness will of course scale according to that. The AI also communicates with you. From time to time they will send proposals, such as trade agreements, but also requests and gifts. For instance, a disgruntled king might demand of you to give up a region or face their armies. As for the city-builder, I'm now getting started on that part, and I have big changes in mind. For instance, I will separate services such as wells and baths, so that they will use both. Wells will have a small radius while the bath will have a huge one. That will force you to build a city centre as the city grows, and allow final results to look more organic. I will also separate the entertainment building such as the arena into fighting pits and Colosseum. Fighting pits you will have to spread out everywhere in your city, while a single Colosseum covers mostly your whole city. Similar to this, I'm planning shrines vs temples. Food stalls (replacing eatery) vs restaurants (replacing canteen). I also want a new building bazaar with all equipment and furniture for you citizens. Housing will have more precise settings, allowing you to easily set up districts that do not burn down in brawls. As for the balance, I want a streamlined experience that lets you set your own pace and difficulty. If you want a cosy little city-builder, then you can have it by expanding carefully and slowly, and if you want a challenge worthy of 100s of hours, then you must expand and face the challenges. As for the water, I'll keep it simple. A bridge will be needed to clear deep water. You will be able to remove/add shallow water around the natural bodies of water. For irrigation, you will need a water pump, and connect canals to it. It will in other words cost you some manpower. Water table will be scrapped, but settling close to water will be equally important. Visually, I'm happy to announce that I've gotten help from a very talented artist, and all the icons of the game have ben redrawn to perfection. I will also dive into battle balance this time around, and make sure its well balanced. Speaking of which, I've added a very moddable equipment system with different kinds of damage and protection. I have added slash, blunt and pierce damage types, with equipment to go with it. I will leave magic to the modding community. release of the game is approaching. Apart from the 1.0 quality of existing features, I still have the following to add:

• nobles (will include a whole set of posh buildings)
• military (fix AI issues on the battlefield) Perhaps add commanders to divisions, more training options, royal guard)
• Tutorial
• Campaign
• Zombies
• Atrifacts
• Sound overhaul

There are a pile of suggestions on top of this, and I know many of you might be waiting for this or for that. Boats and harbours for instance. Thing is, I do agree that the game would be better with boats, but the amount of work needed for this does not outweigh the benefit currently. Depending on how long I will work on the game, it might still make it into the pipeline. With 1.0, I envision a certain degree of quality. It's not the end of the game at all, but it's a shift in my work, and I'll have to be more careful not to break things, and keep the balance of the game. Raw progress will be slower. My plan on building and maintaining momentum for 1.0 release is you guys. I want to make the community come alive, have moderators, events, competitions, and most importantly modders. Taking advantage of you modders have been the plan from the start, as you create the best stuff. Vanilla will be as good as I can make it, but mods will make it excel. I hope to work more closely with you and guide you through the process, and hopefully present you with rewards and opportunities. I plan on opening up the entire code base for you to play around with, make changes, and finally release mods from it. If you would be interested of helping me with the community, please let me know! When the big 1.0 release might be, I do not know yet. It's always been 4 years now, but I do see the horizon within a year.

[ 2023-09-26 11:12:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

A new era dawns. The greatest gaming event of 1999 is here. Song of Syx has a new patch.

Oh, where to begin, it's been so long, and I've forgotten what I've done, and lost the patch-notes in a game of poker. But basically, it's been all about the world map, and adding a sort of 4X experience to go along with the city builder. We now have proper generation, proper factions that are alive, proper everything world related on steroids! No video this time, my mic broke. But here's the thumbnail:

Here's a neighbouring king, and his heirs. He will like you differently depending on his characteristics, and your history together. You can interact with him through diplomacy.
You can also send emissaries to keep him and his heirs happy. If he makes a fuss, assassination is an option.
You now have much greater control over your realm, with proper buildings, shamelessly ripped from the total war franchise (before they had the good sense of streamlining it).
I've also added a few things to the city building experience, features, fixes and quality of life. Orchards for instance.
There's still a bit missing that I didn't have time to add to the World. Most notably anything regarding armies. That's on the to-do list for the next version. Next up, I want to do another polish update, focusing on the city map. I have a lot of plans, you can see them here: Trello Overall, I'm exited, we're closing in on 1.0. I have only nobles left as a major feature, and of course a mountain of polish and balance. EA 64 has to be checked out manually in steam for now, as a beta. I'm very curious about the balance late game, and how the AI conducts diplomacy and decides to take you on, so let me know, I'll be here, and on the Discord The previous version is now available as the demo, for those of you who are still waiting for a sale or whatnot, so have a look at that. Now go forth and conquer the world!

[ 2023-06-27 12:32:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everybody! I just want to say, that you never have to worry about the state of the game. It's going to be finished, I've got enough funds to keep at it now for another decade, and I've already been at it for about a decade, so it would be a bit silly for me to stop now. I'm working on the game every day, sacrificing PR and community management for the sake of coding, that's why I'm not super active on the forum ATM. Work on V64 has been a bit frustrating and slow, and it's going to be the longest wait you've ever had to endure, so I made a little video on the current state of it. Excuse the quality and the cohesion of my scattered thoughts. [previewyoutube=gFbYKEZUbuU;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]

[ 2023-04-11 08:32:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello! I'm finally done with the new patch. The patch is currently in the beta branch on steam. To enable it, right click the game -> properties -> betas. Select "ea V63". It might be unstable, but has been alpha tested. With it, I'm pretty happy about the city building experience of the game, and now feel ready to start on the world map and its mechanics that I've promised. I kept notes this time! [previewyoutube=LRwjquKRB_4;full][/previewyoutube]

• An attempt to fix shuttering mouses on certain PCs.
• An in-game palette that lets you change colours of roads and structures for visuals.
• Climate and weather redone. Now with fully simulated cycles. Snow and ice added. Terrain has been redrawn and will respond to weather and wind. Map generation improved. Wild growing things adjusted and remade. One should now no longer be able to support maximum 100 people through harvesting.
• Buildings can be built next to deep water.
• Water now increases fertility around it. Irrigation is scrapped.
• Sweet and salt water are now environments.
• Overlays have gotten some love.
• Minimap improved + flawless zooming in/out.
• Room panels and priority panels have been improved. Now possible to prevent employment by setting priorities to 0.
• Farms have been re-coded to make more sense. The coming harvest is the result of many factors, clearly listed.
• Blight and bountiful harvest events added. (+2 years playing) 25% chance per year
• Droughts events. (+4 years playing) 6% chance per year-
• Lots of effort put into the new sprite system for room. Making it more moddable.
• Homes now need a structure, the ugly walls are gone. Easier to copy and handle. Poor isolation leads to more furniture degrade.
• Copying items is easier.
• Unique sounds for all animals. sorry about the volume, WIP.
• Animals now have fixed spawning points. These replenish at a slow rate. Animals will stick to these points. Animals will attack people near them, except for hunters. Once you build near a spawning point, no more spawning will happen.
• Hunter room simplified. The rate is nerfed.
• People will not try to fetch corpses that are in dangerous zones, such as a animal spawn point.
• Corpses bleed.
• Sounds will play when fast forwarding.
• Room rates have been improved, now showing produced per day per room.
• Workload calculations improved.
• The use of walls when building rooms have been improved.
• 3 new soundtracks
• Huge refactorings, making the game less error prone.
• Fishing events for improved/decreased fish output.
• New Housing panel panel with improved overlay and tools.
• Oddjobbers will find homes faster.
• Improved the top panel.
• Remade and improved bottom panel.
• Wiki improved + moved race info to new wiki and improved them a bit.
• Made openings of buildings a bit clearer.
• A light cycle toggle in the settings.
• Upgrades for all mines + small fixes
• Improved overlay for minables
• Difficulty settings for random game.
• New resource: Machinery. Used mostly to upgrade rooms.
• Added some visual help to room construction.
• Made roads go diagonal next to diagonal walls.
• Outdoors added as a building preference.
• Fixed Maintenance overlay
• Added a type swapper to room copying and saved blueprint placer.
• Industry recipes will revert if the recipe is re-locked.
• New script engine. Now possible to inject java code, and package them as mods. See pdf in installation directory of how to get started.
• 3 scripts added
• Shape for rooms are now individual for each room, and it's possible to please everyone regarding squareness and roundness.
• Refiners remade. Are now upgradable. Unlocked from start. Production lowered. Early survival tactics is to use grain + bakery.
• Accidents more rare, but more deadly.
• Workshops have been converted to the new sprite system. Visually improved. Has their own storage, same as refiner. Some have upgrades. They are more space efficient.
• New workshop added. Makes the machinery resource.
• New UI for individuals. Added a gimmic that generates biographies to each subject. Also added opinions as to what individuals want improved in the city. Each race can have their own template, and there are templates for scared, normal and confident subjects. Can be easily modded to add infinite flavour. If someone do, please let me know.
• Big refactoring with rooms. Room files now in folders. Modders, check out the new way of specifying rooms in other files.
• Improved the text rendering engines, taught it some new tricks, and better looking text.
• New thing - tourists. Tourists can come to see the marvels of your city. They're attracted by large scale industries that have a high work preference with the race of the tourist. Tourists will leave some cash and a review. You must build an inn to be able to accept tourists.
• Thanks to Victor Baker, who wrote a lot of tourist review texts.
• University has gotten a face lift and is more space efficient.
• Upgrades for service rooms, although, I've only enabled it for lavatories so far. Lavatories got a facelift, with sanitary lids for the toilets.
• Added population to save game files.
• The throne can no longer be instantly moved, but must be constructed. Trapped people can still function and find jobs in their vicinity.
• Changed the trade controls a bit.
• Reworked exposure to work differently. Exposed people will seek services or shelter. In shelter they are still exposed, but at a lower rate. Prior to death, that can also go insane.
• Strikes added as an alternative to emigration and riots.
• Made titles be able to lock rooms (requested by modders).
• Made trees and other growth be able to grow randomly when fertility is increased by irrigation.
• Fixed buggy Workstations
• Added different sizes to wells, and an upgrade. And emitting of sweet water.
• Gave hearths the same treatment as above.
• Added fulfilment modifiers for all monuments, meaning you can get happiness from specific monuments per capita.
• Two new monuments. Flower beds and humidifier.
• New road: festival square
• New thing: Benches. Idle subjects will search out benches to sit on in a small radius. Useful for letting them absorb the environment.
• Law remake. More detailed and more options.
• All punishment types affect fulfilment differently for races.
• Stocks added as a compliment to punishment. This shortens prison time by half.
• Guard post now come in different sizes. They now have a visible radius. The chance of arresting a criminal is based on distance to guard post.
• Fullfillment from tourists.
• The enemy kills stat increases neuroticism and crime rate.
• Guard posts remade. Now work with a radius. The closer a crime is committed, the greater likelihood for catching them.
• More crime, and more penalty from it.
• Individual crime statistics.
• Micro and macro actions for your people. Free drinks, money handouts, day off work and arrest. Can be used to temporarily boost happiness.
• Ability to set punishment for prisoners manually + better ui for managing criminals.
• New growable resource 'Herbs'. Used in the ration maker. Will be used in cooking services for the nobility in later updates.
• Serial killer event
• Added stuff to the tutorial.
• Updated external libraries.
• Fixed broken steam achievements.

[ 2023-01-02 12:51:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

I shall tell thee a bit of what's going on and why. The main focus of this update has been polish. I thought it was just a couple of things, but once you open one Pandora's box, it leads to others. A lot of work has gone into a brand new climate simulation, that allows for snow, and a living world that looks much better. Wind stroking the grass for instance. Animals have gotten an overhaul, with fixed spawn spots, and hunters work more predictably. Animals are also quite dangerous, so heads up.

I've dug through all UI panels, rearranged them, fixed them up, added new ones, removed others. Adhering to countless suggestions and bad reviews. A big thing has also been to refactor code, so all rooms use a new sprite system that allows for upgrades. All refiners now have upgrades and some of the workshops. Other from that it's just been about refining systems, and make sure everything works well. When this update is done, I consider the city-builder game to be very close to 1.0. That doesn't mean it's done, but in an acceptable state. Heck, I'm sorry, I'm not good at this, I refer just toiling away at the code. I realize polish might sound bleak to players who have already made the effort to understand the game, but I'm sure there's something here for you as well. And, I'm getting close now to checking the last item on the list, in which case I'll start adding some new content. The new content will be the ability that, through choices, get a public image that is either tyrannical or beloved. Choices can be public handouts, buying subjects drinks, or have your guards shake down a neighbourhood. Being a tyrant will be good for law and loyalty, while beloved increases happiness. There will also be tourists, which will rate your city and throw you a coin based on their experience. There will also be a lot more monuments, decorations and benches for your subjects. Now, unfortunately, this is going to be the longest wait you'll ever had to endure. I plan on releasing V63 in early January. The reason for this is I'm on a working holiday for a few months, and I don't have the equipment to make my technically marvellous release videos. I'd also like more time doing this update, In the long term, it's a good thing, since a release is a lot of overhead. Alpha testing will start mid December though, so if you're up to that, keep eyes peeled for the call, and join the discord if you haven't already! Next version is going to be all about the world map. Factions, diplomacy, trade, and region development. I'm looking forward to that.

[ 2022-10-31 10:43:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings, noble ones. Thank you for your patience and confidence. A bunch of new features and fixes are now available for consumption. I've started alpha testing with this patch, so it's pretty stable. I will be at the bug reporting section for a week or two before I start working on the next batch. We now have:

• Personal homes
• New tech tree
• Elderly care
• Disease & health
• World camps
• A new species and religion.
• Balance and fixes

Full patch notes can be found in the game's launcher. Special thanks this round goes to all the alpha testers, and for Fatmice for leading the testing, and Buildus Maximus for his astounding balance overhaul. I hope they'll both stick around for the future. Check it out by right clicking the game -> preferences -> betas and look for V62 Here's a video: [previewyoutube=G-bpOvaC5pQ;full][/previewyoutube]

[ 2022-08-04 11:49:03 CET ] [ Original post ]

I thought it was time to check in before you start lynching me. First off, I'd just want to say that I'm officially not keeping up with the community. I used to read everything, but there's just too much now. That's why I've created a special sub forum: https://steamcommunity.com/app/1162750/discussions/3/ Please, don't hold back from posting there if you have anything directed to me, it's what it's there for. I don't want to be left in the dark. I'll also read bugs and suggestions of course. Progress regarding V62 is slow but steady. The primary feature is health, and I haven't gotten around to that yet, but here's what's in so far: Private housing:
All subjects will require their own 3x3 house to live in. You get to set what race and class lives where. They require materials, which the subjects will go fetch for themselves if allowed. This visually upgrades their houses!
I've also remade techs and the tech tree, according to rewarding discussions here on steam.
Now each node has the possibility to be upgraded several times. Some nodes are one-ops though, that contain special stuff and unlocks. Bonuses can now be either factors or terms, making for more interesting combinations. And the hideous forgetting mechanics is scrapped, you now get a penalty towards all bonuses instead.
Health will be easy enough to add, so I'm not to worried about that. I would like to catch up with my backlog regarding quality of live and suggestions though, so this might still take some time. A potential problem with housing would be space. I've estimated that you'll need 25% of the map dedicated to housing for a 10k city. We'll see if this is a real problem or not from your impressions later on. The map can be expanded, in fact a 1500x1500 map has been tested, and performance is ok, but I haven't decided. RAM usage will be severe and there will be slowdowns.

Edit:

Since there seems to be a lot of nay saying, I just want to clarify a few things. Dormitories and apartments are removed. Apartments will make a comeback later as an inn for tourists, but that's much later. Sleep as a need is removed. Instead, people have a need to have homes. Every single person will want to their own home, I can't make multi-homes. Not if you want to be able to set what type of subject sleeps where. This is how it works. Build your industry:
Build some homes to accommodate it, this takes about 1.26 seconds:
Build a hundred homes in 0.56 seconds
If you feel creative, build creatively:
This is what 500 homes look like, in a boring grid:
It still looks much more like a city than any Dormitory or Apartment complex would look like. Finally, skip homes, why not. People will find somewhere indoors and sleep with a blanket, no big deal having some of your people homeless. More or less expected. I'm not going to do families, at least not in this update, and maybe never. This is an upgrade from the current Dorm / apartment system, making people a bit more individualistic. In fact, it's pretty close to what apartments used to be. Chambers will still be available for nobles.

edit 2

Still little love for the new housing! I've spent the night thinking about how to technically allow for more residents per house, and I think I found a way that I will examine next week. Also different sizes make sense in that regard, so I'll add that as well, going from "homestead" to "longhouse". The only restriction will be that only members of the same race can occupy a house. With 2 people per 3x3. This will result in twice the area needed compared to the apartment room in previous versions. Actually a bit less, considering you don't need walls, and I think this is a good thing. Housing should make up a good chunk of a city. To compensate, I'd rather make other rooms (services and workplaces) more space efficient. I don't know if the different sized rooms should have increased efficiency in terms of capacity. It makes sense that a 4x4 room has space for 4 people, but that would only prompt the player to use the largest size? But if so, this can be mitigated by having race specific penalties/bonuses according to size. That would limit creativity based on race preference however. Still having dormitories as a shelter/backup is a good idea in theory, but I don't think it works in SoS. It would work in a capitalistic game, but in SoS you can choose between building houses or a dormitory, and why would you build a dormitory if it's just simply an inferior choice? this is how I see it, feel free to argue:

Pros:

• They use resources that you allow to upgrade their house, going from slum-looking to something really nice.
• The resources adds a new, familiar from other games, depth to the simulation. A lot more resources will have bigger meaning and demand. Cantors wants gems and cut stone, very expensive to keep happy. Garthimi requires a slab of clay for full upgrade.
• The thin walls and detail makes it look much more detailed than the 1x1 tile walls of Dormitories/apartments. It also takes less space that say an apartment complex.
• Need 5 more beds? No need to refurnish a room and evict everyone. Add dynamically
• No need to build a city with dorms, unlock the apartments and have to tear everything down to add them. Now the houses can stay. You upgrade them by allowing for more furniture resources.
• "Communist ant simulation" gets a hit. Everyone will have their own little space they go to, uniquely furnished (automatic) by the individual.
• Easier to decide where, and how big services to place down.
• Zoning, getting to decide exactly who lives where (if you want to). If you don't, the game will work out the most efficient placement of your citizens, and move them about as you change your workplaces.

Cons:

• More space requirement (x2)
• Dormitories and Apartments gone (Chambers still available, and you can still mimic the apartment room if you want.)

Regarding map size. Indeed, the idea is to have this as an option. You computer specs doesn't really matter regarding this, since it's mostly dependant on the performance of a single CPU core. And CPU cores today are mostly similar, it's the amount of cores that increases with price. It has nothing to do with your graphics card, that only affects what you currently see on screen, which will be the same. So, state of the art PCs might only benefit 100-200% compared to a potato. The reason I don't want to add it ATM, is mostly because I don't need more bugs. Map size has the possibility to increase current bugs by multiplication. It will definitely be a thing later on though.

[ 2022-06-09 08:47:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Greetings, Gratitude to those who have tested and been patient about V61. It's now stable enough and moved to the default branch. The demo has also been updated to V59. As always, the new version is not save-compatible, so if you want to continue building a V60 city, you need to check this version out manually in the steam client. To my great surprise, there weren't many tasks left on Trello, which means 1.0 will be done in a foreseeable future, which is fun. That doesn't mean I'll quit the game, it's just a milestone. Next up is mainly health.

• People will have a "healthy" stat that will be increased by comfortable jobs, food rations and visits to a doctor. Hygiene will be important to keep off epidemics. I'm thinking immigration could also increase the chance for that. We will have wards, or hospitals that will need supplies of medicines (made from opiates I'm thinking). A curfew decree that will cause everyone to stay indoors to prevent spread. Obviously your economy will suffer from this. I also want to make some kind of martial law mechanics where soldiers will patrol the streets, we will see about that.
• An elderly care building for retired people, where they can hang around playing cards as the elderly often do.
• I also plan to make private housing. Each dude will have one of different quality. They will also fetch stuff such as furniture and cloth to improve their dwelling, if you allow it. You'll be able to specify what species get to live where. I'm aiming to make some funny interaction between neighbours as flavour, but also potential problems.
• Some races will be converted into a sort of "creature" instead. They will not immigrate, but they will have camps on the world map that you can persuade to join you if certain conditions are met. Cantors will be one of those. There will also be a new ant species.
• I've had this idea about changing up the tech tree, and just display all bonuses that you can allocate tech points into, indefinitely, but at an increasing cost. This will really simplify the whole tech aspect of the game, while offering more freedom at the same time. I'd like to hear if anyone has objections to that.
• A new notification system that will bake messages and notifications into one, with some clever mechanics and customization options, so that you can decide exactly what you want to be notified about.
• I have an idea of a new sprite system as well, that will benefit modding, and allow for more variation and detail. Basically I want to put all sprites in a folder and have all assets map to the sprite they're using. that way a lot of sprites can be reused, and you can mod in new rooms without having to draw stuff.
• Tons of suggestions and QoL's and polish are going into this one as well.

As always, much of what's to come are suggestions from you fine folk, so thank you for that. It shouldn't take long, but I always think that, so we'll see.

[ 2022-05-06 07:04:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

[previewyoutube=9knYxqj7VGc;full][/previewyoutube] New version is now available as beta in steam. Beta means you manually have to select it in your steam client. Right click Songs of Syx and there should be something about betas there. It will break saves, but, you can deselect the beta and continue on V60 saves if you want. Beta means there are still bugs. And this time probably a few. Most bugs will be harmless, some might crash the game. However, I've always managed to fix the game in the beta progress, so you most probably won't have to restart. Just make sure you save regularly. This update is focused completely on military aspects. It adds archers and artillery to the game and an AI that can attack walled settlements and fight you on the field without causing too much weirdness. It's still raw, and in need of some balancing. Thank you for waiting so long for this one. It's been an intense ride. Next up is an update focused on health and sickness. It's quite simple, so I think I'll manage to add quite a bit of polish and quality of life into it. The coming updates will focus a lot on polish for the city builder.

[ 2022-04-07 06:56:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello everyone, I must regretfully inform you that the next major update is further delayed with a few days! I said end of March, then I bought time to Monday, 4th of April, but now I need even a few more days. I theoretically could release on Monday, but there are still a few features that are sub-standard that I want to refine, such as the battle AI doing weird stuff, and it would be stressful for me, and annoying for you, if I released it in the current state. These update has not been too fun, with a lot of challenges and brick walls along the way. Bare in mind though that I'm not making a new room or service, I'm trying to reverse engineer a "Total War"-game engine. This has absolutely been the toughest and most code intense update and I've set a new record, there having been 3 months since the last update. I'm not too happy about that. I also have another one of those damn kids around since 2 months, and that haven't helped. I just want you to know, I'm working every day, I haven't abandoned anything. The reason I might seem quiet is because I'm putting 99.9% of my time coding to give you as much substance as possible without the fuzz. So, It's hard to say how long it will take for me to adjust these minor shenanigans that the AI is doing, but I don't think it will take more than a few days, Absolute deadline will be 9th of April. What is on offer? You guys primarily wanted ranged combat, and I added that, and cracked opened the fundamentals of the battle mechanics and re-did them.

• Now we have catapults and archers and troops on walls, gatehouses.
• We have an AI that's semi-smart.
• We have complex and true to life morale and combat mechanics. Configure your own troops in almost infinite ways.
• We have increased modding support for battle-related stuff. Someone wants to add javelins, slings, scorpions, WW1 machine guns, no problem.
• Big performance gains. New pathfinder that's better and smoother and faster.

Unfortunately I'm too incompetent to make a gif, but imagine catapults firing, people screaming and flying and body-parts flying around.

[ 2022-04-03 16:19:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

[previewyoutube=_raSyfOxeWw;full][/previewyoutube] Shadows and Dust adds Entertainment and Religion to the game. It also changes and improves on a lot of things. In fact, so much that I've forgotten all about it. Songs of Syx is now going strong thanks to you esteemed players. I am very thankful and in admiration that you can actually play the game and build awesome cities (now that I've played a little myself). We now have 1000 reviews and the game has sold enough to fully finance the remaining years of EA development. This version is now available as a beta in steam as usual. It should be quite bug free, but if you encounter something, please shout it out. Up next, I'm going to do a military overhaul and add a more fulfilling experience. /Jake

[ 2021-12-01 08:48:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

V59

EA version 59 is now out in beta. As always, it is not save game compatible. To help me out with stability, please check it out in the steam client.

This version adds a lot of quality improvements. The main feature is reproduction and education. It has a new happiness system and if it goes low, people will riot. Children and adults can now be educated for massive boosts and knowledge points. Should you wish, you can instead indoctrinate them and make them a bit easier to handle. [previewyoutube=Ybo0k-goH3U;full][/previewyoutube] It breaks all mods, but it should be quite quite easy to fix. The first step is to create a new folder in your mod root folder, named V59 and drag all old stuff there. Next version, you'll create a V60 folder and so on, so that mods are versioned, which is good. Translation efforts have now moved to a place called crowdin, which is great, and everyone can contribute to their language. I will implement mechanisms that will make the game fetch all translations from that place in the coming days. Thanks to Bendi for the new graphical assets, and to Fatmice for being an awesome new moderator and bug resolver. Check it out -> https://crowdin.com/project/songs-of-syx

Path notes, V0.59

• Patch notes will automatically be shown when something new has been added to the game!
• Rebalance happiness in general. Should now be more stable, and immigration shouldn't ruin it.
• Rebalance a few technologies.
• Added more flavour to all species.
• Tech tree now allows unlocking multiple techs at once.
• Slave uprisings. Slaves no longer runs away. If they are unhappy enough they will rebel.
• Slaves can now be sold to the slaver
• Riots. When loyalty is low for subjects there is a chance for a riot. Can be put down with guards and soldiers.
• Law remade. Much easier at first and climbs with your population. Happiness is no longer such a big factor.
• Burials now count differently. If no deaths take place, value will be based on available grave spots.
• Farm and pasture yields increased slightly
• Production rate remake for all rooms. Adds intelligence as a possible factor and a lot of tweaks for better balance.
• Fixed correct training for your city divisions on the world map.
• Fixed library/admin paper bug, and made gaining tech/admin faster, while decaying at a lower speed.
• Warning icon on harvestable food when not ripe added.
• University room for education of adults
• New smart remove tool.
• Reconstructing rooms with different structure now works.
• Workflow of room construction made better. Now refurnish without prompt & builds over other jobs.
• When hovering a job/ something buildable, you'll be prompted to build jobs of the same type by hitting a hotkey.
• New translation opportunities through crowdin. The idea is that the game will ship with these translations automatically, no need for mods.
• New species, the Tilapi. Thrives in forests, and likes to eat people. Hates basically everyone. Good fighters and herders.
• New portraits for all races. Thanks to Bendi!
• Storage and logistics wiki entry
• Immigration can now be set to a absolute number.
• Launcher screen selection is now a bit clearer and simpler.
• Education added. Education + intelligence = production boosts and knowledge. Will decrease loyalty a bit.
• Indoctrination as an option to education. Indoctrination only adds to submission regardless of education.
• School added. Can only be used by children. Will rapidly educate them.
• Changed so that wild growables spawn based on yield rate, and decreased regeneration of all of them.
• Added a multitude of hotkeys and new ways of assigning them.
• Path notes will automatically be shown when something new has been added!
• Children. Walks around and eats your food while contributing to nothing. Can also go to school.
• New procreation rooms that lets you make new citizens. Breeder for Cretonians, Nursery for men and Hatchery for Garthimis.
• Rooms on battle minimap fixed
• Nerfed hunter success by 50%
• Room refurnishing vanishing resources fix.
• Added addition useful info to the food days tooltip.
• Fixed disparaging enemy garrisons after battles
• Tweaked pathing a bit. More road usage, and smoother paths.
• Hearths now used once a week, even if no one is cold.
• Fixed population decline in world regions.
• Remade room, work and priority panels.
• Made slaughtered animals into skeletons in pastures, so to stop the confusion.
• World generation now have moddable blueprints for the terrain. Random seed also added.
• Export depot remade into a static design, and has only one resource. Global settings for exporting in the UI
• Visual genders for certain species, with feminine and masculine names.
• Admin nerfed slightly. Harder to remain in control of regions. You need either an army stationed, or a big garrison.
• Admin room now unlocks at Cheiftain (500 people)
• Import depots have controls for global import level.
• Import depot has a visual resource
• Lavatory basins fixed
• Janitors do a better job at fetching needed resources
• New title system. Titles can be unlocked and then used with a new game. Unlocked titles persist between games and also hopefully versions.
• Savable room layouts that will also hopefully survive between versions.
• x200 speed added if you push the third speed key twice.
• Some rooms leave the floor/road when deleted
• Steam achievements now triggered when you press the sync steam button.
• Trade resource counter fixed
• Bonuses in status panel sorted alphabetically
• Warehouse and export depot UI fixes
• Added tooltip for equipping resources with their wear-rate
• Improved the room creation UI
• Added UI for how much a race like other races in the race info panel
• Some needs now resets, such as drink. Will help that initial drink supplying.
• Improved canteen workers significantly and their usage as well.
• New room - transport. A cart pulled by animals that is loaded and then sent to a destination. Requires livestock to operate. Moves 200 items at a time.
• Hauler now come in different sizes.
• Made freed slaves immigrants, so you'll have some time before their expectations rise.
• Smarter Deliverymen
• All now have multi-carry capabilities. They'll carry up to 3 resources, and be a bit smarter about it.
• Refiners have common storage for output.
• Deliverymen has had their carry capacity nerfed a bit.
• Prolonged the day-length. This is to optimise things and make distances less important. Leisure time can be experienced as longer in early game though.
• New stat: riches. Based on the amount of credits you have per citizen.
• Military depots have setting how much they'll be filled.
• Trade interval halved, more frequent trades. Good deals for SoS. Trade reworked, should be better in general.
• Import depots has more storage.
• New penalty for exports. You'll be paid less at the beginning, but this penalty can be reduced by techs and levels.
• AI now receives tribute as to what makes sense, not a static amount for each, resulting in a more balanced market.
• Spoils and tribute will go to the throne, if there is no import depot for the resource. Also imports that has had their import depots removed.
• measuring tool with right click.
• Deposits colored after density
• A new super copier tool
• Fixed keyboard issues
• Proximity instead of distance in services. And this has been nerfed, allowing you to reach 100%.
• Service coverage radius increased by 50%
• Toggable overlay when building roads
• Some rooms have their settings copied when copying them. Worker limits and warehouse settings.
• Fixed mining output based on workers
• Added "Starfoth The Burgundy"'s Silk Rug's2 nobility mod to the main game.
• 5 new soundtracks
• Info in main menu about starting race
• Expanded info when placing down first city
• MODDING
• Environments (awe, harmony) modifiable.
• Monuments/decorations made modifiable, and ordinary rooms can map to these.
• Added support for invalid keys for mods. Race init files can now have rooms that doesn't exist. Make sure you have debug on when modding to test that you aren't making mistakes.
• Remade the appearance block of subjects almost completely. Now allows for more modularity when rendering portraits. There is an example race you can have a look at in game folder that hopefully explains it. Not too difficult too convert from the old system.
• Added a file-type "_IgnoreVanilla.txt". Place this anywhere in order to ignore all vanilla assets in the folder.
• Added new mod versioning. At the root of the mod folder, you must have a new folder VXX, where XX is the major version number of the game. So you can now support multiple versions.
• Sync steam button no longer hangs
• Removed totorial + examples is mod does not have their own.
• Added support for more textures. Crazy content mods is no problem, and bigger fonts possible, such as Asian ones. (you specify texture size in mod _info.txt as TEXTURE_CACHE_SIZE Can be 4096, 8192, 16384)

[ 2021-09-20 09:41:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Deer despots, The latest conquest update really propelled the game to new heights in terms of exposure and sales. It's both good and bad, I would prefer the game to stay under the radar until I feel it's polished and fleshed out enough for no one to find any complaints and be able to have a close relationship with anyone getting involved, or playing it. And crash-free of course. Not that I'm complaining. This is all unbelievable to me and a huge thanks to every one of you, and especially those who come back with praise/criticism/feedback. I'm just sad, I might not be able to give you the response I used to be able to do. The hours of the day just isn't enough, and I have to focus on game progression for everyone sake in the long term. The next update will be rich in "quality of life" features, based on suggestions. For one, we'll see a bulk copier tool that allows you to select anything (rooms, jobs, roads, etc. ) of any size, rotate it and slap it down somewhere else. It also contains the possibility to save room-plans between games. Logistics within the city will be more or less finalized, with multi carry for everyone, and a new transport-room that has animal powered carts that will ship huge amounts anywhere on the map. Knowledge will also be polished and finalized. New features includes procreation that will take place in nursery rooms. subject will visually have gender and there will be children. Immigration will now be but a second way of boosting your workforce. The benefit of procreation is that you get to educate your children in a school system. You can choose to either teach them stuff, which boosts productivity and gains you knowledge, or indoctrinate them, making them easier to control. Tyranny will be a new term, and can be gained through indoctrination and by other means, such as statues, soldiers on active duty (I'll try to make them march around), executions, or secret police. With more tyranny, you can have lower happiness without risking riots. I'll also attempt to balance the game. As it stands currently, I think there are many exploits there that allows you to basically skip the mid-game and tax your way to world dominance. I'm planning on making it so that you need a much bigger army presence in regions to be able to tax them without them revolting. The game released in September last year, and I hope to release V59 before a year has passed, so that I can say I do 6 major updates per year. A year ago, I thought I'd work on the city builder part of the game for 3 more years, now I think it's closer to 2 years. This is what I'm still aiming at doing: Religion (temples, cultists, human sacrifice, power struggles and riots between religions) Entertainment (stage for actors, singers, maybe arenas for gladiators) Health (pandemics and epidemics. Doctors, wards) Nobility (Smarter, interesting nobility that has wills of their own and needs to be pleased for gains. Nobles will have their own homes and families and require some micro) Once the city builder has all this, I will consider it to be 1.0, and move on to military related updates (which I know many of you are eagerly waiting for, sorry). And after that, I'll focus on the world map and empire management. I hope this sound good too you, I'm here, (and now also getting payed) to serve. If you want a chat, I'm here, or at the discord. https://discord.gg/eacfCuE

[ 2021-08-10 06:55:48 CET ] [ Original post ]

Adds conquest to Sys. Have fun. Don't forget that if you want to continue your saves of V57, you can check that out as a beta in the steam client. Big patches are never save-compatible.

[ 2021-07-02 16:11:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Sorry for having kept you waiting. For three long moths I have added basic Civilization/Total war mechanics to songs of Syx. You can now sally forth and conquer your foes and do that which Conan the Barbarian loves so. It is now available as a steam beta - V58 Beta. It will remain there until the bugs are sorted. I will try to keep it save-compatible during this time. [previewyoutube=FJdNf9m6n7E;leftthumb][/previewyoutube] I lost tracks of the path notes the first month, but here is what I've got:

• Entirely new gameplay mechanics for the overworld.
• Space usage for sprites severely reduced, making it possible for more mods.
• UI for goods remade. Now merged with trade.
• Inflation added. 10% of credits per year will be lost. Sorry.
• Treasury UI remade
• New Happiness modifiers and fixed ones.
• Improved Pastures ability to deal with bad daily work.
• Made Lavatories modable
• Added some load information to services and heatmaps for access.
• Added dynamic yield for mines based on assigned workers.
• Added some kind of growth inside mountains, made mountain generation a bit better
• Races now have terrain/biome preference in addition to climate. MODDERS: added a TERRAIN clause for
• animals. Added POPULATION clause to races.
• Fixed a lot of streaming issues, like discord. Just uncheck "debug" in the launcher, if it complains when you exit the game.
• Workshop rooms furniture improved.
• 2 new races.
• 3 new music tracks
• Price for leather fixed through a moddable thing in resource init files.
• Fixed CTD regarding monuments and smaller rooms.
• Added forums and a wiki to the webpage (well, community did really).
• Middle mouse button now grabs map.
• Knowledge cap now limitless
• Mines now produce according to employees and deposits, you can now build over bad deposits.
• Administration room, works as library to make admin points, used to upgrade regions.
• Rations and rationmaker
• Autosave & quicksave new UI
• Changed apartments to only need work every 4th use.

There's also a new wiki on the webpage songsofsyx.com Thank you to everyone involved and for all you patient players!

[ 2021-06-24 13:15:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update is taking quite a bit of time, and in fear of nightly pitchforks and torches, I'll attempt to explain a bit what I'm working on and what you'll get to play soon. I finally caved to the pressure of the community that wanted expansion of the battle mechanics of Syx. My reluctance was based in the fact that city building stuff is pretty solid ATM, and adding the few more features I want in would be fast. The world management were still just loose ideas I had, and seeing them to completion would take a lot of effort. And it has! So, having said that, this update will take some time. I'd say at least another month. But hopefully, it will be worth it. As we all know, the world map is divided into regions. What's new is that each region now has an urban centre. If you control that, you control the region.
You'll now conquer regions with world armies. A world army is a marker on the world map, which you attach garrisons from regions / cities. You then move around with your armies, fighting other armies in field battles, or conquering rebel/AI regions. Your regions make up your kingdom, and you can tax and manage them. And there is depth here, to satisfy all our needs. You'll be forced to focus on different things to achieve a strong kingdom.
On the city-building side, there will be two new rooms. Army Depot - works like a trade depot. Battlegear, food and clothes will be collected when your city garrison is attached to an army somewhere else. this is your supply line. If you fail to deliver stuff, your army will fail. Administration - This will employ clerks, that produce administration points, used to control your regions. It will work the same way as with knowledge. Apart from this there will be some QoL improvements.

[ 2021-05-04 11:54:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

This was supposed to be a small update, but it turned out big. And I don't remember what I was supposed to do, half way through, I decided to flesh out the slave mechanics. The results were marvellous. As usual, it will be in beta for a few days to find the bugs, so you have to check it out manually. We've also got a bunch of new stuff, cannibalism rooms, taverns, eateries, funeral services. I've had a lot of fun playing through it. It took me 3 days to reach 750 people. Here's a video about it: [previewyoutube=VGfywE5zjds;full][/previewyoutube]

• Build a spell checker that checks for spelling/typos whenever I build the game.
• Room production overhaul. Enables us to specify in-rates, so that bread can cost 0.5 wood and 1 grain for instance.
• Added a "do what I did last" Button and hotkey for the build menu.
• Clarified and fixed squareness a bit.
• Clay exavatable resource + claypit
• Ability to mod occurrence of exavatable resource based on terrain.
• Happiness screen overhauled.
• Info on city selection refined.
• Trade adjusted and balanced.
• Potter Workshop and Pottery. Coal + clay = pottery
• Alcohol resource and brewery. Wood+pottery+grain/fruit = alcohol
• Eatery room. Very basic food distribution place. Replaces kitchen.
• Canteen room. Now works as a kitchen with tables.
• Tarven is now for drinks only.
• Alcohol limit to dictate. Adds happiness, but can make subjects drunk an unproductive if set too high.
• Changed so that all rooms that needed wood to run now requires coal instead at a lower rate.
• AI faction trade and production overhauled. Still needs some work, but better now.
• Well room, a simple bath.
• Jewelry and jewelers. Jewelry can be worn.
• Proper slaves. Can be gained through beating Krull, or as a form of punishment. Slaves have a collective happiness that is still based on the racial composition of all your slaves. You set work priorities for slaves, same as citizens. Slaves have simpler demands in general. They don't have expectations, but the more slaves you have per citizen, the happier you must make them. Slaves can run away if too unhappy. Will revolt in the future.
• Slaver room for punishing criminals and gain slaves.
• New slave UI screen.
• Unique slave happiness based on the number of citizens compared to slaves.
• Lots of rebalancing around happiness and a few stats added/removed.
• Touched up some icons.
• Slaves will run away, while citizens will commit more crimes and not emigrate if unhappy.
• Slaver event, lets you buy slaves.
• Notifications reworked, some new added.
• Death statistics and death causes added.
• New grave alternative - Crypt
• Cannibal room that butchers corpses for resources.
• Mass grave for corpses.
• Hover info for room copier.
• Room category UI remade.
• industry storage visible on hover.
• mines/woodcutter proper errors.
• Guard post placed inside fixed.
• Forgetting techs now disables all dependent techs.
• Horizontal scrolling of tech tree with ctrl + mousewheel
• Notification when nobles die.

[ 2021-03-17 12:27:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

[previewyoutube=e9RDveADLVw;full][/previewyoutube]

• Hauler room added. Can be placed for free on cleared ground and will employ haulers, that will fetch resources to the room.
• Proper Woodcutter room added. Now fully renewable and with fixed output, same as other industries.
• Much easier to reach 0% squareness.
• Logistics mechanics overhauled, added a "empty to" mechanics which lets you empty resources to specific warehouses.
• New Janitor room with maintenance now separated from construction. Only janitors can do maintenance. Janitors need construction materials in the vicinity, or they will become less effective.
• Auto employment for some rooms, which will make the AI fire/hire 1 subject per day based on workload. Workload calculations improved.
• Normal speed triggers when there is a message
• Immigrant value now decreases more slow, allowing you to fulfil the needs of new immigrants.
• Onx pastures for cold and temperate climates.
• Hotkey for getting to the throne/capitol.
• Status concept. New profile screen.
• Level (title). You now increase your level according to your population, which unlocks bonuses and rooms. The throne visually upgrades with these levels.
• Faction visuals. Change faction name and colors while playing.
• Faction banners. Randomized banners for all faction and a banner editor for the player.
• Added on "available services" tooltip. How many are used and how many that needs work.
• Fixed various crashes from streaming. Requires you to uncheck "debug" in the launcher.
• Remade light engine and prettier fires/candles
• Recoloured ore
• Huge AI refactoring. Not that anyone cares, but it allows for faster AI progress.
• Criminals. Come in three flavours: thieves, vandalisers, streakers, and murderers. Each race has a property on their chance to become criminals. The amount of criminals spawned depends of law and happiness.
• New guard post room. Guards will catch criminals in their vicinity, or if they happen to stumble into one on their patrols. Guard posts also deter crime in their vicinity.
• Prison. Employs guards that bring food and empties latrines of the cells. Criminals will go here after being caught, if your policies are set up that way. Prisoners will stay there for a number of years before being let out and become citizens again (average 6 years).
• Game will now save to "new_city" before you place your throne, allowing you to restart at any time by loading it.
• Scaffolds room. Employs executioners. Prisoners will go here to be executed according to your policies.
• Courts. Prisoners will go here before going to either prisons or scaffolds. Improves justice. Can also instantly turn some prisoners back to friendly subjects.
• Added a width/height restriction to rooms.
• Made so that the tunnelling bonus actually works. Dondorians tunnel into mountains twice as fast.
• Rearranged resources categories a bit.
• Law. Law is gained by apprehending criminals, having courts for them as well as Prisons and scaffolds. Law makes your citizens happy and deters the spawning of criminals.
• New algorithm for determining build order when constructing massive walls now enables you to build as thick a walls as you'd like without people getting stuck.
• The above also holds true when building rooms with inner walls.
• Added demography to understand retirement better. Also made it more clear that retired people doesn't work.
• Returned rock ground under mountains that had disappeared.
• Moved key settings to in-game menu.
• Touched up the happiness screen in an effort to make it more understandable.
• New tech tree with unlockable buildings.
• Made room construction render above terrain.
• Decreased snoring sound.
• Deleting room blueprint no longer removes roads beneath.
• New employment mechanics with new priority system and panels. AI will now distribute workforce evenly.
• A bit more UI info about service rooms.
• New trading mechanics for stabler trade and prices.
• When Krull dies, his son will take up his arms and continue raiding you.
• optional resources shown as optional on hover when build.
• Harvest jobs can be placed, but only performed when ripe.

[ 2021-02-16 10:18:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello fine folk! I'm finally done. Focus has been on introducing a new law mechanics, but also did a lot of other stuff. To check it out, you must manually opt it out in the steam client as a beta. It will become default as soon as I've gotten some feedback. Here's a video about it: [previewyoutube=e9RDveADLVw;full][/previewyoutube] Here's the changelog:

• Hauler room added. Can be placed for free on cleared ground and will employ haulers, that will fetch resources to the room.
• Proper Woodcutter room added. Now fully renewable and with fixed output, same as other industries.
• Much easier to reach 0% squareness.
• Logistics mechanics overhauled, added a "empty to" mechanics which lets you empty resources to specific warehouses.
• New Janitor room with maintenance now separated from construction. Only janitors can do maintenance. Janitors need construction materials in the vicinity, or they will become less effective.
• Auto employment for some rooms, which will make the AI fire/hire 1 subject per day based on workload. Workload calculations improved.
• Normal speed triggers when there is a message
• Immigrant value now decreases more slow, allowing you to fulfil the needs of new immigrants.
• Onx pastures for cold and temperate climates.
• Hotkey for getting to the throne/capitol.
• Status concept. New profile screen.
• Level (title). You now increase your level according to your population, which unlocks bonuses and rooms. The throne visually upgrades with these levels.
• Faction visuals. Change faction name and colors while playing.
• Faction banners. Randomized banners for all faction and a banner editor for the player.
• Added on "available services" tooltip. How many are used and how many that needs work.
• Fixed various crashes from streaming. Requires you to uncheck "debug" in the launcher.
• Remade light engine and prettier fires/candles
• Recoloured ore
• Huge AI refactoring. Not that anyone cares, but it allows for faster AI progress.
• Criminals. Come in three flavours: thieves, vandalisers, streakers, and murderers. Each race has a property on their chance to become criminals. The amount of criminals spawned depends of law and happiness.
• New guard post room. Guards will catch criminals in their vicinity, or if they happen to stumble into one on their patrols. Guard posts also deter crime in their vicinity.
• Prison. Employs guards that bring food and empties latrines of the cells. Criminals will go here after being caught, if your policies are set up that way. Prisoners will stay there for a number of years before being let out and become citizens again (average 6 years).
• Game will now save to "new_city" before you place your throne, allowing you to restart at any time by loading it.
• Scaffolds room. Employs executioners. Prisoners will go here to be executed according to your policies.
• Courts. Prisoners will go here before going to either prisons or scaffolds. Improves justice. Can also instantly turn some prisoners back to friendly subjects.
• Added a width/height restriction to rooms.
• Made so that the tunnelling bonus actually works. Dondorians tunnel into mountains twice as fast.
• Rearranged resources categories a bit.
• Law. Law is gained by apprehending criminals, having courts for them as well as Prisons and scaffolds. Law makes your citizens happy and deters the spawning of criminals.
• New algorithm for determining build order when constructing massive walls now enables you to build as thick a walls as you'd like without people getting stuck.
• The above also holds true when building rooms with inner walls.
• Added demography to understand retirement better. Also made it more clear that retired people doesn't work.
• Returned rock ground under mountains that had disappeared.
• Moved key settings to in-game menu.
• Touched up the happiness screen in an effort to make it more understandable.
• New tech tree with unlockable buildings.
• Made room construction render above terrain.
• Decreased snoring sound.
• Deleting room blueprint no longer removes roads beneath.
• New employment mechanics with new priority system and panels. AI will now distribute workforce evenly.
• A bit more UI info about service rooms.
• New trading mechanics for stabler trade and prices.
• When Krull dies, his son will take up his arms and continue raiding you.
• optional resources shown as optional on hover when build.
• Harvest jobs can be placed, but only performed when ripe.

Hope you enjoy! Next up is going to be kids and procreation. I'm also going to overhaul eating and everything with it + alcohol, education, elderly care and a profile that you get to keep between games. /Jake

[ 2021-02-11 12:11:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hohoho! Here's a small Chrismas present from your devoted dev. This update changes a lot of things and adds stuff you could only dream about!

• Sithilion Ore
• Happiness based on resource storage (modable)
• Stockpile crates size increased,
• Stockpiles have adjustable radius,
• Smaller radius for workers giving a hand,
• Bread resource,
• Bakery,
• Grain made inedible,
• Proper hunting room with radius,
• Proper fisheries,
• Ability to regenerate city map,
• Added tilling period for farms,
• Manual food usage in kitchen,
• Manual usage of specific raw materials in workshops"
• Streamlined production in general and added rates to most industries,
• All industries internal storage reduced"
• Tiny saves < 1MB. No need to zip anymore!,
• Minables much bigger, lower yield, visible by right click,
• Room placement undo better,
• Ability to change roof of room when reconstructing,
• Ability to reconstruct room constructions,
• Lifestock resource,
• Animals have different secondary resource (pelt/eggs),
• Pastures reworked,
• Added new types of pastures
• Eggs now edible,
• Animals spawned according to climate. Also applies to pastures
• Minimap and room colors + categories reworked,
• Farms disabled in certain climates,
• Ability for wide-screeners to pick both with and height displays,
• Service rooms have heatmaps on hover,
• Multiple mods,
• 3 more soundtracks!,
• keyboard rework. Ability to assign more keys,
• All production rooms and their rates reflected on the world map"
• Trade rewamped. UI polished,
• Hotkeys: quicksave + zoom
• Baths made modable
• Clarified service access happiness
• added distance stat to services.
• Immigrants will now walk to the throne and kiss it.
• Happiness and immigration completely reworked
• New, rare race added (Cantors)
• Maintenance and upkeep reworked
• More resource expenditure UI
• Snow and temperature.
• Exposure to temperature with risk of death.
• Walls count to building pref.
• Squareness stat added for room construction. Affects happiness
• Isolation added to rooms based on walls surrounding it.
• Maintenance on unisolated rooms increased.
• Hearth room for cold winters
• Skinnydipping now when dirty/hot
• Room cost and upkeep is increased by big rooms.
• Efficiency/coziness reworked. Based on actual stations.
• Trees now emit harmony. awe, harmony reworked.
• Noise. Noisy rooms disturb subjects.
• Paper and papermaker.
• Library x4 with paper
• Fixed game zooming",

In short, the game should be much harder. With more workers required for basically everything. The great dev himself could only manage a 100 pop city. There should also be a strong insensitive to build smaller and more thought out with the noise pollution. Maintenance is also boosted severely. Good luck!

[ 2020-12-20 12:04:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Game is now updated to V54. It is not save-game compatible with V53, but V53 can still be checked out in the steam client and you can continue playing it. In the steam client, right click Songs of Syx, and click properties.
Now, on to the goodies! Whenever the game updates in steam, you can now easily get a sense of what updates has occurred in the launcher:
Two new tiers of sleeping. One suited for the nobility.


UI iteration 2563. Might not be perfect, but better than before. Thanks to the community and especially Rowen in the Discord for the help in getting there.
A bunch of complicated stuff enhanced and modifiable. The goal of this update has really been to nail down the city population framework, to make the game more complex, while also opening it up to modding. feel free to start making your own species!

Nobility. This is kind of hollow ATM, but you can appoint people as nobility. Nobles will walk around boosting their assignations.
There is lot's lots more features and fixes. You can have a look in the in-game launcher for details.

Modding

I've opened up a mod.io account for the game and written a few rudimentary guides for you to get started. My business plan has always been to create the framework of the game and steal the content from modders, much more talented than me. So if you have something you'd like to put in the game, let me know. https://songsofsyx.mod.io/

Unstable testers

Thank you all so much, those who have played the unstable branch these few days. I think this is the most stable version of Songs of Syx ever.

Reviews

We are low on reviews. Reviews are really important for the growth and future of the game (algorithms and stuff) . If you haven't left a review yet, what are you waiting for!? If you intend on leave a positive one that is, otherwise disregard this shoutout :). Please keep in mind that this is clearly stated as early access and should be treated as early access in reviews IMO. You can always change it later if the game turns out to be crap. Have fun, and thanks for playing!

[ 2020-11-10 15:24:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Finally, I'm done-ish with nobles and slaves and tons of suggestions and bugs! I've put it in the unstable branch for now. There is a lot of new stuff and changes that requires a lot of testing, and while I'll be testing myself, it will speed things a lot if those willing will help. Here's how to check out the unstable branch:
Now on to the goodies!

FEATURES

• Version log in launcher!
• Nobles!
• Slaves
• Ability to enslave Krull's men.
• Emigration
• New top panel
• New bottom build panel
• New room - chambers. The finest of sleep services.
• New Room - flats an upgrade from dormitories.
• Dormitory reworked and job-less.
• Dorms and flats modable. You can add your own versions.
• Sleepy subjects will find sleep facilities in the order they like them. Then find a place indoors to sleep.
• Reputation now Happiness. Complete rework.
• 2 new songs + music changes with battles/stops at night.
• All panels have been reworked slightly
• Subjects get clean in baths and by skinny-dipping. They get dirty over time, visiting the lavatory and spending time in industries and mines.
• Added harmony and Dread influence to work the same as awe. Added ability for roads to emit different kinds of influence. Specific monuments for harmony and dread will come
• Added a bunch of new statistics and some happiness tied to them.
• Added extensive modability to races.
• Retirement mechanics added
• Service room access reworked
• Kickstarter names for subjects added
• Building preference added. Races like to stay in different buildings.
• Reworked room placement UI
• Added walls and doorways when placing rooms.
• Added colors for battlegear upgrades
• Minimap boxes for resources and wild edibles.
• Work priorities added
• Secondary work priority added per race
• Races have different skills and different preferences when it comes to work
• Added light & awe coverage to right click explore.
• New font for launcher

Fixes

• Might now correspond at a 1:1 ratio with your population. For claiming regions 1500 might is required for each of them
• Added email in error messages.
• Possibly trade depot bugs fixed.
• Added manual steam-fetch mods button in launcher.
• Export/import setting is set to 50%
• Fixed a bunch of placability issues.
• Woodcutters stopped from chopping invisible trees.
• Rooms can now be built on top of degrading roads.
• When placing monuments, you can delete mistakes by holding shift.
• Collision with domesticated animals removed.
• Available services changed to a "usage" percentage. Can be sorted in menus.
• Flowers no longer grows on fences.
• When you're building a room, Right Clicking or opening another panel will construct the room (if it's constructible). This also applies when Refurnishing a room
• Krull increases his tribute as you yield.
• You are warned where Krull is likely to strike.
• camera pans to where Krull attacks
• Adjusted working schedules, so that there will be more activity in the day.
• Graveyard items fixed
• Might have fixed world map lights
• Subjects will return equippables to stockpiles if there is storage for it before they drop it on the ground. Inc. Battlegear.
• Delta generation fixed.
• Fixed Stockpile UI.
• Light, awe and road access now only updates when a subject is outside of a room.
• Main menu: rearranged buttons a bit, removed others.
• Mouse scrolling now opens the minimap.
• Fixed some rendering bugs with growables.
• Adjusted Animal spawn rates, eating behavior.
• Adjusted light colors somewhat.
• Fixed subjects clothes color.
• Fixed minimap colors for rooms working as intended, no need to load save
• Fixed a visual bug with degraded floors/roads
• Errored jobs show what resource is missing.
• Changed a little trade thing with imports. The game would import resources in order depleting your treasury on the first ones, never getting to the last ones. Now changed to prioritize resources based on incoming/storage capacity.
• Mushrooms now placable in caves.
• Monument no longer removes cave roof when removed.
• Fixed some stat and cost values for room items.
• Added support for non 16:9 screens (no more stretching).
• NOTE: some drivers might report faulty resolutions, casing crashes.
• Hopefully fixed the game from going into low FPS when Vsync is enabled.
• Defeated divisions un-musters
• Accepting Message prompt about Krull's tribute closes the message UI
• Soldiers move from their current division to ones with more experience if experience is gained. Fixed a few training bugs
• Animals no longer run away from hunters
• Animals drop a lot more resources
• Hunting fixed in general
• Animals in water rendering fix.
• Entities saved differently, shaving off a few MB of savegame size
• Sorted the order of resources.
• Flimsy placement of walls/ceilings fixed.
• Graveyard desecration values reworked. (Avoid penalty by deactivating it and let the graves disappear)
• Max room size now can't be exceeded.",
• Dormitory knickknacks different costs",
• Library and knowledge fixed, it was a disaster.",
• Slayed enemies now says that they were slayed by you.",
• Outposts such as fisheries always finds fish, even if once depleted",
• Double click for save/load in menu

BUGS

• Fixed CTD when undoing items in room construction.
• Fixed continue button in menu when saves were deleted.
• Fixed a CTD when restarting from the main menu a couple of times.
• Fixed CTD when trying to delete non existent save
• kitchen had a nasty bug, hopefully fixed.
• Rare corpses stay active fix
• Fleeing Krull messes everything up fixed.

Notes

• Doors are no longer intended to use with rooms. They're going to be changed to gatehouses, but I leave them in for now.
• Some things are coded in the blind. I only have a 16:9 display for instance, so, wide displays may/may not work, please let me know if you have one...",
• I seem to get crashes when choosing certain full screen displays. I hope this is because I bought a cheap display :). Let me know if you get any of that.

There is no tutorial in the unstable version. I will fix it once it stable. P.S. Some day V53 is going to be the new demo. If you have a city you're proud of, please send me the save, and I'll add it to the example cities.

[ 2020-11-04 12:37:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hello! I felt the time was right for me to show you that you're getting a return on your investment. I've been refactoring like crazy, basically ripping out part of the old AI and inserting a new one that allows for extensive moddability for races and more flexible code for me to flesh out.

Now, all resources can be made "equippable" and you can define what boosts they give to a subject. You can also define traits with similar properties and chance of occurring. Reputation is now called standing and is also fully modifiable per race. You can also define what trades your race likes, making it more important with trade or race diversity in your city. Thanks to some feedback, I've also been experimenting with a new UI layout, especially to improve trading and other aspects.

I want to get rid of the full screen ones in general and trying to figure out ways to convey a lot of information in a simple way. I really like the standing main panel. Not only is it clean, it also allows me to crop the main game somewhat, which saves a few % in performance. I've also tried to fix the most pressing bugs in the current release. the rest will have to wait for V54. Currently the main challenge is not to starve from waves of immigration. I plan on tipping this over. You'll have a toggle to allow immigration and Instead we'll have emigration when your standing is low, and "retirement", meaning that it should be more of a challenge as your city grows and not the other way around. Then there will of course be the nobles and slaves, which I hope to get to next week. Other from that, lots of QOL, bugfixes and tweaks for a better experience. Hope you'll like it.

[ 2020-10-10 13:15:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hi everyone. I'm very happy you guys are playing and keep sending me bugs! I have spent most of the time since launch trying to calm my nerves and fixing some of the bugs that makes sense right now. the problem is that I've already started on the next update (54) and it gets very complicated when fixing the same bug in two different places. so, I'm postponing a few bugs to be fixed in v54, just so you know. So, what progress is being made? New face generator. A bigger face in general with many billions of possible variations.
Here's how it's done:
I'm also more or less rebuilding the reputation mechanics and improving on the AI in general.

And what's really cool is that is mostly all modifiable. You can add items to equip, traits and new services, and you can change how each race feels about them. The big thing to come though is the nobility class and slaves, even though this will be a bit barebones in the beginning. I also have a list of hundreds of bugs and minor suggestions that I hope to address before launch. I probably shouldn't give you an ETA, but I'm hoping for 6 weeks. Pray for me :) /Jake

[ 2020-09-28 09:43:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

53.51 - fixed tribute from claimed regions - fixed forgetting knowledge from affecting all techs. 53.52 - fixed a CTD that occurred when building baths that I introduced in 53.51 :)

[ 2020-09-26 08:03:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

The game has sold beyond my expectations. With 1000 copies in less than 12 hours. Please excuse me if this post makes no sense, as you can imagine, I haven't slept much. So, a big thank you to all who have supported me this far. If you weren't aware, Songs of Syx was kickstarted 4 months ago, found here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/songsofsyx/songs-of-syx With those funds, and the ones I'll receive now, another year of development is firmly secured. Also big thanks to the volunteers in the community and its managers! You are really taking a load off my shoulders! Thanks to Superwutz, who is now part of the development team. First off, some bug fixes:

• The damned message panel can now be closed. (it could be closed with right click, but now also through clicking the 'x').
• Crashes when pressing the wiki button is gone. Instead no wiki will be opened, because there isn't one yet for all room types.
• Steam screenshots should now work. Unfortunately the in-game screenshots made by clicking buttons /pressing prtsc are not connected to steam yet, but will be in the next major update.
• Mac unplayability: When playing on mac, the steam overlay goes rabid and completely takes over. I have no control over this. The only fix now is to disable it. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=9394-yofv-0014 Long term fixes is Steam fixing it, or me dropping Mac support, if it's not acceptable.
• Crashes when clicking play. This seems to be conflicts with other software running on your PC. I've had Bandicam as a culprit for example. try turning those off.

Criticism

A lot of criticism is based on the lack of polish and lack of user-friendliness really and that is fair and expected. But please keep in mind, I'm a solo developer and just an ordinary homo sapiens, not a AAA studio. I've also tried to make it clear that despite having in development now for 7 years, it is still rough. I don't spend much time on polish and balancing yet, simply because that gets in the way and constitutes extra work as I continue to add new features and mechanics. That's how it's going to be, but the reason I'm launching on steam now, is that I believe a threshold has been reached, where enough foundation work has been built to allow me to focus more on making it all, well, fun and intuitive to play. So the game ATM is aimed at people who want this kind of game hard enough to live with hiccups, bugs and other bumps along the way. In the end I hope to make a great game for the mainstream audience, but it is not there yet and not for the vast majority of people at it's current state. I expect this to change within 3 years. And I don't expect to release 1.0 for another 5 years.

UI

This is an ongoing process. I think the current one is better than the demo, but I've heard it still isn't... perfect. I'll continue to work on it, but I'd love to hear more concise suggestions on how you'd like the UI to be in the future, where to move buttons, how to group functionality and so forth, so please let me know if you're up to that.

Multiplayer

A lot have asked if there will be multiplayer, especially since I have a button for it :). The button will be removed. It won't have multiplayer in any foreseeable future. the closest thing to it will be a mechanic, where you can optionally upload your cities to a server and let other players raid and conquer them. But this is pretty far off.

The Coming Months

Apart from that, you guys seem to enjoy it, which gladdens me. I've already started on the next update. It will focus on your subjects. I'm making races more modifiable and adding slaves and nobles, although they'll be primitive at first. ETA: 6 weeks. After that, I'm going to revisit the production mechanics, and make some new rooms and try to solidify that. Meanwhile I'm hoping the modding community picks up and that they donate a feature or two to the main game :) You can see what I'm doing here: https://trello.com/b/wF5RYqdF/songs-of-syx

The Future In General

The primary goal for the next 1-2 years is fleshing out the base-building aspect of the game. This includes adding religion, heath care, alcohol and many other features. The foundation for empire management and battles are there, but they'll have to wait a bit until this is done, so that the game can be enjoyed in some aspect for the mainstream audience. Fear not though, battles will be spectacular with ranged units and artillery and you'll spend most of late game conquering and enslaving the world. All right, thanks for playing and don't forget to communicate your feedback. AND DON'T FORGET TO LEAVE A REVIEW! /Jake

[ 2020-09-22 09:29:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

The time is nigh, even closer as in the last announcement. A new age is upon us! Songs of Syx is releasing on steam September 21st (more or less exactly at 4 pm UTC)! Finally you will be able to play the full game in its current state here on Steam and enjoy all the little benefits we have implemented from Steam so far (Workshop, Rich Presence, Achievements).

Release Stream

To properly celebrate our launch into Steam EA we will host a little live Stream in which two of us (Jake! and Superwutz) will play the game and talk along. We will talk a bit about how the development went so far and what to expect in the future. Also you will be able to live witness the moment we press the release button in Steam Backend (yeah Steam has no timed auto-release function!?).

Where and when to watch?

We will stream directly here on Steam. The stream should be visible on the Songs of Syx store page as soon as it starts! We plan to start streaming one hour before release, so at 3 pm UTC.

Live Q&A

During the stream we will try to watch the streams chat and also we will have a designated Q&A textchannel on our Discord during the stream. We will be happy to answer some of your questions about the game during the stream!

Please forgive us!

We are no professional streamers and this will be besides some tests our first time. While trying to make it as pleasant to watch as possible, please forgive us any mistakes/issues we might have during the stream!

[ 2020-09-18 10:53:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Release of the free prototype on Steam

Hi guys! We are closing in for our EA release in Steam which will happen in less than a month! For those of you eager to try out the game before buying: We just released our free prototype as a demo on steam! You can download it on the store page. Note: This is the same free prototype which has been available on itch.io since our kickstarter. The demo will not receive any content updates and the game in its current state has already progressed quite a bit compared to it. Anyhow it shows the basics of your gameplay and is good enough to already give you an idea on how it plays. For those who already know the demo: Nothing changed except for some small fixes. But hey now you can play it on Steam!

Be part of the Community!

I cant say this often enough, but you can have a direct impact on how the game shapes! We are loving all the discussions, suggestions and feedback we get on our Discord server. Feel free to join!

[ 2020-08-27 07:51:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

The time is neigh. A new age is upon us! Songs of Syx is releasing on steam September 21st and all efforts in regards to this update has been focused on eliminating some of the annoyances fresh and veteran players might have encountered. For some reason, which I've forgotten, I've also increased modifiability by a lot, tried to squash bugs and implemented a few minor suggestions.

Modding

The following is now open to modding:

• Resources
• Many room types
• Technologies
• Sounds
• Structures (fences, walls, ceilings, fortifications)
• Floors & Roads (they look better too)
• Animals

The character set has now been expanded to cover many Latin alphabets. This can also be modified to accommodate any language not using thousands of characters and read left to right. There has also been a lot of improvements and fixes around mods to make a modders day a bit better. A guide on how to mod a few basic things will come soon.

Quality of Life

New placement tools for basically everything. Should help you to build even more beautiful and organic-looking cities.
Completely new room placement and building mechanics. You no longer need to build structures first, these are built automatically.
The farthest zoomed out level of the map can now me used just as the other zoom levels, which will give you a greater overview when doing your thing.
Hotspots can now be named and show on the minimap, so you can name your various districts.

New UI

A bit bigger in general and more intuitive is the idea. A lot of improvements here and there.

Optimizations

I managed to increase performance by roughly 10%, allowing for even bigger settlements.

Rich Presence, future Steam achievements, Cloud Saving and Steam Workshop

We also made the first foundations for various integrations we want to have in the game. Mainly thoose are Rich Presence, achievements for Steam and Discord and also the integration of famous Steam Workshop. So lets explain a bit what we want to do with thoose things: Rich presence, as you might now, is the little flavour text which is shown besides your player name in Steam friendslist or Discord. We think it is a good way of sharing your progress in game and in generating general interest in what the game is and what people are doing while playing it.
Our Rich Presence implementation is divided into an information part we call state. This one includes some basic stats of your current playsession. For now we decided that your current population, your reputation and the year since founding of your colony are interesting values to see. Anyhow on a later point of development, as the worldmap and also your city empire becomes bigger there might be other important values. The second part is called detail and basically adds the flavour to the whole thing by telling people what you are currently doing. For now just to test the integration is just says "Ruling over [your city]" but later we will add much more texts, reacting to the stuff and events that happen in game. Here are a few examples: "Fighting off Krull" "Conquering XX" "Surviving winter!" "Building lavatories" Rich Presence in steam looks basically the same, sadly without fancy images. We are very open for any ideas and suggestions for flavour texts! Also we started working on Steam (and also Discord) Achievements! We know from many other games that there are people looking for the 100% achievement hunting challenge so we just had to put some into the game. For now we kept the achievements very simple so they are like "Kill 1000 enemy soldiers", "Farm 10000 mushrooms", "Have a total population of 1000", or "Fell every tree on the map". Most number related achievements will come in tiers. For now we have iron, silver, gold and platin, so you can track your progression with little rewards on the way. Again as the game development proceeds we will have more challenging and also some hidden achievements for you to find and hunt! Songs of Syx will support Steam Cloud Saving on release. So wherever you enjoy the game, may it be at home, in the train with your laptop or at work (dont let your boss see it), savegames will be automatically synched between all your devices via Steam.
As this update is mostly about modding we also started thinking about how to distribute and share all your beautiful mods. Thats why we layed the code wise foundation for Steam Workshop to natively interact with the game. We intend of making Steam Workshop the main platform for SoS mods. For thoose of you which dont like or use steam, we have created an official moddb site as a platform for all non-steam users: https://www.moddb.com/games/songs-of-syx Credits for this goes to Superwutz on the discord. BTW, join the discord! https://discord.gg/eacfCuE

Some fancy art

Meet King Crom. One of the great kings of old. He will henceforth be the mascot of Songs of Syx. Congratulations Crom! Credits goes to https://conartist23.tumblr.com/

The future

Next up is the nobility. The goal is to have a unique building for them, a quarters with servants. You will elevate your nobility yourself and appoint them to govern parts of your city. They will produce a boost to their responsibilities, but since they require servants and doesn't work traditionally, they're only beneficial in mid-late game. I'm also going to look into modifiability for races and refine the management of your population. After that, there's going to be a production overhaul, where production is going to be straightened out and polished and rooms such as hunters and mines are going to be proper rooms. I'm also going to look further into maintenance and see if it can be made to play a much bigger role in the city management. Now, lets all cross our fingers for me and the steam release. Feel free to write a review when the time comes.

[ 2020-08-18 19:56:23 CET ] [ Original post ]

The world map has been redone visually and is now generated better. Check out those mountain ranges!

Regions

Regions The map is now divided into regions. You start with one. Regions can produce resources if you tax them. You can see the potential of each region for each resource. To tax a region, you'll need honour and that is the same as reputation ATM. You set a general tax on the region and then distribute that tax over the resources. It's better to focus on one resource than several.
Every other day, a shipment will be created, that will make its way into your city and deliver its goods in your import depots. You can claim other regions as you reputation increases.

Land Marks

I've also added landmarks to the world map. Landmarks have no function ATM, but they're in and those generous souls who opted for that reward have their name and description tied to them.

Trade

A fully dynamic trading system, based on supply and demand is now yours to exploit with the other NPC factions. In the resource manage screen you can see prices and adjust your trading. You start with 0 credits, so if you want to get into the game, you'll have to export something first. There's no benefit to hoard credits, you should use them to import stuff.

Toll

A small toll is paid with each purchase. This goes to to caravans. The caravans will distribute this toll along the path they take. In other words, being between to trading factions will earn you credits.

Trade Depot

This is where you export your goods. It has workers that function just like your stockpile deliverymen. You set how much to export in the for of a %, that represents your stockpile's current load. You can for instance set export when over 70% and your traders will fetch when your stockpiles are above this level.

Delivery Depot

This room has no workers and can accept only one resource. Place them where needed. They are needed to accept any form of resources from the outside world, be it deliveries from your regions, or imports.

Trade overview video

Here is a little video explaining and showcasing the trade features: [previewyoutube=cCnB_yB9e_w;full][/previewyoutube]

The Future

Sadly I need to do a bit of boring stuff for the coming future. I'll spend the day up to steam release working on bugs, a few suggestions, re-factoring the code base and polishing the UI. I hope to make something clever with room construction and simplify the process. I also intend to add support for more languages and modding. I'm also going to commission Jasinka and have her make some more music. After steam release I'll start on nobility and slaves.

Be part of the Community!

We are loving all the discussions, suggestions and feedback we get on our Discord server. Feel free to join!

[ 2020-07-14 12:46:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

It is with great pleasure that I bring death and suffering to the world of Syx! For too long have the Dondorians enjoyed a careless existence of baths and feasts.

Introducing Krull, who will mercilessly raid your city. Krull was never loved as a child and is now haunting the lands with his bandits. To face him you must man your forges and train you little subjects in the art of war. Image by rancis O'Nell, tumblr: conartist23.

In addition, Songs of Syx has launched on KICKSTARTER in order for it to reach new heights. Open up your hearts and wallets, and help in making a very cool game!

Features

RTW Style battles

Train troops in the training grounds and equip them with battlegear to defend your city. Or take the fight to the open field, by loading up an included save game.

Room Expansion

You can now expand rooms! In addition, the whole furnishing process has been reworked for a smoother experience.

Minor Fixes

Prettier roads Rendering optimizations Tool level now set for each room Zoom move with mousewheel Coziness implemented bonuses special items for other rooms Instant feedback when trying to place something where it doesn't belong Room furnishing new item-sizes for all rooms with feedback when trying to place them. Night gamma setting Script loading/saving more robust Better job prioritizing by the AI. It's not perfect, but better New technology screen Ground is prettier gets wet in rain Start camp is now placed manually at the beginning of a game Jobs shows when there is a problem Continue in main menu loads latest save Deleting graveyards will give huge penalty to reputation Fine structures uses cut stone Hotspots - mark part of the map and navigate to it easily Globian eggs dropped by killed Globians

How do Battles Work?

First of all you'll need a training grounds. These are built just like any other room. You then open up the army panel:
A division is a group of soldiers. You can have a total of 96 divisions and there can be a maximum of 150 soldiers in each. You set how many you want for each yourself. Subjects will now automatically assign themselves to the division, but before you can deploy them in battle they need at least level 1 in training and until then they'll be considered recruits. It takes roughly 4 days for a rookie to level up. And the higher the level, the faster they loose their training skills. A level 1 soldier is good for 10 years, but a level 15 soldier will drop down to level 14 in just two days. In addition you set the amount on battlegear each soldier of your division will equip themselves with. This boosts defence and attack even more so than training. The soldiers will equip themselves when you muster a division. Race and Experience should be left alone for now, but as soldiers fight, they have a chance to gain experience. At the bottom panel there is a shield and pressing it should bring you to the battle view. It should be pretty self-explanatory, especially if you've played a "total war" game before, as it's "inspired" from those games.
Combat is pretty straight forward. Fight until someone routs. There is still a lot of work to do in this department, but it works as a prototype for now.

This is the last free edition of Songs of Syx!

As much as I've enjoyed having almost 10k play my game over at itch.io, it ain't putting food of the table. That is why future updates of SoS will cost money. Head over to the KICKSTARTER and get a copy for ~$20. Hope to see you there! Also, I made a little guide for new players to get started here: [previewyoutube=RluqfR3XbFA;full][/previewyoutube]

[ 2020-03-26 12:35:11 CET ] [ Original post ]