We've been busy getting Epicinium on other platforms such as itch.io and GameJolt. This got us a lot more downloads but as a result also a lot more bugs to fix.
Besides bugfixes,
version 0.16.0 has a completely reworked the weather system. In the old system the temperature ranged from -50 to 100 and the humidity from 0% to 100%. Temperatures would change with the seasons and humidity would drop over time by increments of 5%. Humidity now ranges from 0 to 4 and temperatures has been removed completely; the weather now depend on a combination of the humidity, the current season and the total amount of
chaos on the map. For example in Winter all tiles have snow on them, unless they dry out. Firestorm only occurs in Summer and only if 40% of the map has been covered by chaos. The new system is intended to be a bit easier to keep track of and feel less arbitrary.
We've added some more UI elements, such as a player list that shows who the other players are. For observers, it also shows how much money they have, which was something I noticed was really lacking since I've started streaming the playtest session every Saturday on
my twitch channel,
I've also started doing some very short featurette videos to explain gameplay mechanics; the first two are about basic combat and Rifleman units respectively. I have a ton more planned but they were a lot harder to produce than I thought, since the one minute recording that you see is preceded by script writing, setting up the levels in the editor and throwing away the recordings that are botched because (a) I misspeak or (b) those damn random damage events keep killing off the wrong riflemen.
Also, we're thinking about adding
peacemaking to the game. The idea is that once one of your City tiles is captured, you will have the opportunity to send a peace offer to the other player. During the next planning phase, that player will see the offer you made and can either accept or reject it. Whereas normally the winner gets a number of points and defeated player gets nothing, this would allow the points to be divided amongst both players. If you receive an offer that gets you 75% of the 80 points that you think the map is currently worth, you can choose either to take the 60 points right away or to keep fighting. If you keep fighting for all the points, the destruction of the map might leave you with much less than the 60 points you would have gotten, or your opponent might even make a comeback and you go home empty handed.
I'm curious to know what you think.