Though I didn’t spent too much time on Projekt “W” since the last posting I still got some stuff done.
Firstly I went for the technology tree, which was (very much like the list of buildings) something that I pushed back and back during the whole developement. But since the list of buildings is closely tied to the technologytree I actually had to do this, and many technologies are mainly there to unlock new buildings. Other technologies include modifiers for global factors and military stuff like new army units and so on. For the final release I plan on having somewhere in between 30 and 40 different technologies, including “endless-technologies” that’ll make research still important (or at last giving you advantages) when all ordinary technologies have been researched.
And the AI also got some some new feature, it can now finally create military units, make divisions and assign them to important regions. It’ll now even attack other regions to widen it’s territory. But as of now I halted developement of the AI because it actually won’t be a very good idea (and actually not possible) to create a full AI for the AI without having taken care of the next point, the balancing. For this I started with the formulas that are used to calculate the values for a region, mostly population growth, pollution, etc. Although it may sound easy it’s actually not easy to balance them, cause they can be influenced by buildings in the region, technologies and so on. So I rewrote the whole part for recalculating those values and it should now be possible to have a region with all building places occupied that won’t die of high pollution after a few rounds. As mentioned above this is also important for the AI, cause it tries to construct buildings based of the regional factors. And if it would actually be impossible to e.g. have a productive region with low pollution, the AI would struggle to construct the right buildings.
That’s it for now. But with the research tree almost being done I also got most of the content done for the game, so it’s still coming along great!