Another great week went by and I’m ready to push version 0.3.0 of Eons of War to Steam! This update is filled with pretty significant changes based on the feedback from private beta players. Let’s dive right in!
New Combat System
One recurring comment from beta players that I kept getting was about how the combat system feels like a black box. Another problem with it is that enemy attacks are unpredictable and they take out locations in one charge. The new system is based on combat strength (CS) and population. CS comes from multiple modifiers that include the type of location, research, and a few others. The damage is calculated based on the CS difference between the two combating locations and involved populations.
You can still control how much population you want to participate in the battle but now, unless you have a huge military advantage, you can’t take out all of your enemy’s population in one attack and vice versa.
We also updated the combat interface. It gives you a breakdown of CS modifiers as well as how much of yours and enemy’s populations will survive after the attack. As you can see, the population is shown as a range. This is because we added a degree of randomness to damage calculation to make it more exciting.
There’re countless other little interface changes improving the combat experience that you’ll notice during the game.
Adviser
Several beta testers pointed out that certain Eons of War game mechanics are not obvious (e.g., how resources work, what happens when stars go supernova, etc.). Instead of creating a tutorial mission, I decided to add an adviser (similar to the one in Civilization V) that provides information based on the current context. It was more work than adding a tutorial but I think it’s a worthy investment at this stage since I can tune the timing and the content of the adviser messages as more game mechanics are added.
Other Changes
Here’s the list of other less significant changes:
[UI] Add numbers for turns until supernova and remaining minerals to the location details panel.
[GAMEPLAY] Lock the next turn button until the player picks a new research item.
[GAMEPLAY] Increase base amount of minerals in all locations.
[GAMEPLAY] Lower attack and population/mineral transportation energy costs.
[GAMEPLAY] Increase energy sphere and reactor energy outputs.
[GAMEPLAY] Building a hyperspace tunnel to a neutral location automatically colonizes it.
[GAMEPLAY] Make enemy resources visible if the location is directly connected to one of our locations by a hyperspace tunnel.
[GAMEPLAY] Drop the space fleet requirement for mineral and population transportation.
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to focus on:
[GAMEPLAY] New game mechanic that generates random positive and negative events in your locations.
[GAMEPLAY] New game mechanic for fortifying locations.
[GAMEPLAY] Other minor changes based on player feedback.
A whole week flew by like it didn’t happen! We launched the private beta on Monday for about 100 folks who originally signed up for the beta test. About ten of them played the game for over an hour and provided a lot of great in-depth feedback. I certainly learned a lot of lessons on how to run betas with limited time and resources; I’ll write up a blog at some point in the future describing the juicy details.
Based on the feedback three things stood out the most:
People generally like the game and find it fun once they learn the rules.
The battle system has to be completely revamped. Currently, it’s too simplistic and unpredictable.
About 70% of folks didn’t have any trouble figuring out the mechanics; some got frustrated because they didn’t feel like there was a clear direction during the game and they weren’t sure how different types of resources and structures relate to each other.
There’s still more to learn but I’m really glad that the beta resulted in more clarity about the direction of the game as well as the missing pieces.
I just pushed version 0.2.0 of the game to Steam with tons of improvements. Here’s a high-level breakdown:
[UI]: Added a settings menu with sound effect and music volume controls.
[BUGFIX] Fixed a serious bug when, in certain edge cases, resource rates didn’t take research values into account.
[BUGFIX] Fixed performance issues on older video cards.
[GAMEPLAY] Lowered population and energy limits.
[GAMEPLAY] Added low (instead of zero) initial rates for population, minerals, and energy.
[GAMEPLAY] Increased research point cost for higher level research items.
[UI] Added lots of tooltips that explain game mechanics and the meaning behind structures and resources.
[UI] Hide population rate for when a location has no more resources to mine; hide population rate for asteroid fields.
[UI] Renamed “resources” to “minerals.” Now resources represent all three key resources: population, energy, and minerals.
[GAMEPLAY] Remove fog of war around all locations connected to our locations by hyperspace tunnel. The clear radius around those locations is extra small because the point of the change is to give a clear view of location messages.
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to focus on:
Working on the Civ-style adviser.
New battle system.
Balance tweaks as we learn more from beta players.
Great news: we officially launched the private beta today! Last week was mostly filled with tons of testing, planning, and various uninspiring errands that had to be run prior to the launch. But it’s all done now and we can focus on building the game again. You can join the fun if you are interested in trying out early versions of the game and providing feedback!
We still managed to squeeze in several important gameplay changes. The most significant one is the new type of location called asteroid field. Asteroid fields represent large asteroid deposits that contain significantly more resources than regular locations.
Asteroid fields don’t generate any energy or population, so the only viable strategy for extracting resources from them is to build an energy reactor, an asteroid harvester, and a space fleet, so you can transport resources to neighboring locations. If you want to increase population in asteroid fields (say, for defence purposes), you’ll have to transport it from other locations.
Another change has to do with asteroids contributing to location’s total mass. As you extract resources around stars, the total mass of the star system goes down making it cheaper for other stars to attack or transport resources and population to it.
We also modified the supernova logic. Now stars don’t ever completely disappear but instead, depending on the type of star, either collapse into white dwarfs without the explosion or go supernova and collapse into black holes.
Other minor improvements include:
Global notifications when new research becomes available.
The AI difficulty setting now maps to AI’s attack modifier. Basically, the harder the AI setting the more painful attacks become.
AI players don’t cheat anymore by having the whole map visible to them. Now, they also have to deal with the fog of war and build space telescope to discover stars near them.
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to focus on:
Working with the private beta community to figure out which core game mechanics work and which ones don’t.
Adding better tooltips that describe game mechanics.
First of all, I’d like to thank everyone who signed up for the private beta! You are all awesome and I’m thankful for your interest in Eons of War.
I’m officially launching the private beta of Eons of War on Windows, Mac, and Linux today. It's an early version of the game that's currently about 30% done. Here’s a list of things to consider before installing it and providing feedback:
We are a small shop with one full-time developer and a handful of contractors. We’ll try to be on top of updates and communication as much as we can but please be patient if we don’t respond to you right away. A gentle nudge is always appreciated though.
Eons of War is not Stellaris or Master of Orion. It’s a 4X grand strategy game in space with some unique mechanics but don’t expect the same type of gameplay from it. I’m fully committed to building a unique game that borrows some good ideas but is not a direct clone of another great title. Also, we are not a team of 50, so expect less in-game content.
I see the game being fast-paced (no 1+ hour battles) but still deeply strategic.
The single player campaign format and storyline are being worked on and they are currently not part of the beta.
If you are okay with this list above then welcome to the beta! To get a Steam key please do one of the following things (if you haven’t done it already):
You can share feedback directly through the following channels:
Messaging the private beta #feedback channel on our Discord server.
Directly emailing us at hello@vasinovgames.com.
Commenting or creating a discussion in the Eons of War Steam Community.
All feedback is welcome but here’s the list of things that I’m particularly interested in:
Are the core game mechanics fun? Would you change anything? Would you add anything new?
Did you notice any bugs or glitches?
Do you like the aesthetics? How’s the graphics? Do you like the music and sound effects?
Development Roadmap
Our current plan is to run the beta up until April to get as much feedback as possible. The game launch is scheduled for May.
We are using a public Trello board to track the progress and capture game ideas. Anyone can vote on cards and it's really important that more people do that, so we can focus on things that are important to the beta community.
Again, thanks for your interest and enjoy the game!
Last week was filled with lots of Eons of War improvements and turkey eating! We are about a week behind in our development, so we decided to move the private beta launch to December 3. Now, let's take a look at the changes over the past seven days.
Gameplay
We were finally able to finish designing and implementing all technology research items. There're six research branches with four technologies per branch. Each branch focuses on a specific game style that players can adopt to bring victory to their civilization. There's a lot of research balancing that will have to happen over the next few weeks during the beta test.
Here are other gameplay additions and updates:
Space fleet is required to transport resources and population. This meaningfully slows down expansion and makes it more difficult to use the rush strategy.
We changed all base rate and storage multipliers to be percentage-based. This way it's easier to make decisions about research and colonization decisions.
All base multipliers like the population rate multiplier (and many others) get affected by the type of location. For example, black holes have a higher attack multiplier but lower population rate multiplier.
We decided to go back to fractional rates for increments. We realized that by using percentage multipliers it makes sense to either increase the granularity of population, energy, and resource increments or increase the absolute amounts of stored items. We decided to go for the former to keep in-game numbers low as it's easier to reason about them. So, now your location's energy rate can be 2.4 and in three turns your stored energy will be equal to 7 instead of 6 with the old rounding down system.
User Interface
More tooltips were added to different UI elements explaining how certain values are calculated.
Location info panel now includes base multiplier information.
Location details panel now includes icons for structures that can be built or upgraded during the current turn. This is super useful because players don't need to shuffle through their locations to see what's available for construction.
Check out some of the UI changes in this screenshot of the glorious black hole:
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to work on:
More playtesting and gameplay improvements.
Graphics optimizations.
New type of location: asteroid fields.
AI improvements.
Steam build upload shenanigans for the private beta.
We added tons of good stuff over the past seven days! We are also getting closer and closer to the private beta. The current plan is to have the beta out sometime during the week of November 26.
Gameplay
Here's the list of various gameplay additions and updates:
The base attack multiplier is now different for every location. The higher the energy output of the star the lower the attack multiplier. This was done to balance out overpowered blue giants that generated too much energy and population, which resulted in their ability to execute swift crushing attacks that didn't seem fair. Before this change the only downside of blue giants was their shorter lifetime. Now, it feels a lot more balanced. The "scientific" justification behind this change is that stars with higher luminosity make it harder for civilizations to coordinate offensive and defensive operations in space. Since research stations are not stars and don't have regular star properties, we changed their base attack multipliers to be extra low.
Research stations have limited population now. This change makes a lot of logical sense and also makes stations much easier to re-capture.
Black holes and research stations don't have energy spheres anymore. We needed this change for logical and gameplay consistency, since neither of the two objects have any energy output capabilities.
How do black holes and research generate energy now? We added a new structure called an
energy reactor*. It generates less energy than energy spheres but is cheaper and takes less time to build. You can also build it in any other location if you need a little bit of energy quickly.
Research stations now have a research lab structure. It increases population and resource limits and the research rate.
Research rate was changed to be dynamic based on the number of stations (5% per station) and research lab structure upgrades.
User Interface
We added more properties to the location info panel that now includes the base attack multiplier and the building cost rate. We also added a popup message to research points that shows what the current rate of research is.
We added a global (not location-specific) message that shows up at the top of the screen at the beginning of the turn. For now it only tells you when a research item is done. In the future, we'll add more items to it like when a player gets eliminated or some plot-specific event happens.
We added icons for all location structures!
Check out some of the UI changes in this screenshot:
To prepare for the addition of the hotseat multiplayer mode we had to refactor turn processing and the event notification system. Those changes aren't immediately visible but are necessary for the work that we are going to focus on over the next two weeks.
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to work on:
More playtesting and gameplay improvements.
Finish technology research tree and do some initial work on trying to balance different research items.
Graphics optimizations. Ideally, I want the game to run smoothly on systems with Intel HD Graphics. There're some low-hanging fruit fixes that I can quickly apply to get closer to this goal.
Steam build upload shenanigans for the private beta.
This week's update is mostly focused on incremental and quality changes to the game. The reason for that is because we had to produce a playable and relatively bug-less alpha build to meet the Indie MEGABOOTH deadline on November 9. I'm happy to report that we successfully submitted Eons of War for consideration on Friday and if the game gets accepted we'll get to present it at GDC or PAX in 2019!
Music and Sounds
We added new sounds for when players press buttons and select locations. We also added three amazing songs to the soundtrack. Check out one of them in this three minute alpha footage of me playing the game:
Jeesh, what a crazy week! I'm publishing this weekly update a day later because there were a few loose ends that I wanted to wrap up yesterday.
With this update we are introducing some monumental changes to the game! You can finally do more than just build megastructures, colonize other stars, and try to survive in an evolving stellar environment with supernovae and black holes. Now, you can research new technologies, capture space stations, and finally, thanks to a completely rebuilt action UI, make sense of why certain actions are not possible to execute.
Research Stations
Research stations are a new type of object that players can build hyperspace tunnels to. They operate differently from stars, in a sense that they don't have any resources to harvest and their energy output is low. They also generate very little population and you can only build the radar and the space fleet around them.
Why capture research stations then? They accelerate technology research—a brand new mechanic that we added last week!
Technology Research
What good is a grand strategy game without a research tree? I was planning on adding research a while back but never got around to it. After a few days of going pedal to the metal for 12 hours straight, I was able to design, build and somewhat balance the first version of research.
This is one of the better looking countless drafts that I generated during brainstorming.
So far, we have 12 out of 24 research technologies implemented. There are three core research groups: building, exploration, and colonization. Each group has to do with different aspects of the game and different styles that players can adopt during the battle. There are four tiers of research items (two research items per tier). One researched item in the lower tier unlocks both items in the higher tier. Every research item has positive and negative affects during the game. For example, Management Automation improves all construction time by 20% but also decreases energy collection rate in all locations by five points.
Each item requires a certain number of research points in order to be researched. Research points are a global resource that gets incremented every turn based on the number of captured locations. For example, if the player controls three stars and one research station then they get four research points per turn. Research takes a certain number of turns to complete and controlling research stations improves research speed by 15% per station.
Action UI, Tooltips, and Better Camera
We also managed to squeeze in several UI improvements. The biggest one is the action UI update. Now, whenever you attempt to start an attack, build a hyperspace tunnel, and transport resources or population, the action panel will give you reasons why something is not possible.
Other improvements include:
Tooltips for some labels and buttons without text on them.
Camera can be moved by pushing the cursor against any edge of the screen. Before this change, camera movement was only possible if you dragged it with the right mouse button.
Update #4, folks! On top of regular bug fixes, minor UI improvements, and general polish we managed to add two major features last week: supernovae and custom battle settings.
Before launching the private beta in the middle of November we are going to submit Eons of War to the Indie MEGABOOTH! The idea is to show off the game either at the GDC or PAX in 2019 before launch. The Indie MEGABOOTH is a curated showcase of games from different game developers; getting accepted would be a huge honor!
Supernovae
Most of the week was taken up with supernova and stellar mechanics development. Here's are several new game mechanics around star cluster evolution that we added:
At the beginning of every battle the star system is at 70% "capacity." It means that as the game progresses new stars appear randomly with diminishing probabilities until the star system is "full."
Stars go supernova when they get down to about 20% of their original mass. Before the supernova, luminosity—or energy output—goes up allowing players to harvest more energy.
Once the star enters the supernova stage, it lasts for several turns (it's impossible to know how many). During this time nothing can be built and no action (like attack and population/resource transportation) can be executed. Also, the supernova kills off a small percentage of nearby stars' population every turn.
Once the supernova is over, the star either disappears, turns into a black hole, or a white dwarf. All structures that existed before the supernova are damaged and sometimes completely destroyed. Some population, stored energy, and resources are destroyed as well.
Black holes and white dwarfs never go supernova and are eternal in the context of the battle.
With the addition of supernova mechanics we finally executed on our original vision of the grand 4X strategy experience that doesn't exist in any other game. Pretty exciting stuff!
Battle Settings
Since the beginning, in addition to standard single and multiplayer modes, we wanted to have a customizable battle mode where players can set whatever battle parameters they want. Now we have it!
Currently, the game supports custom settings displayed in this screenshot:
We also updated the main menu to make it more presentable:
That's all for now!
Random aside: happy national cat day!
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to work on:
Adding research advancements.
Adding research stations.
AI improvements that we didn't get to work on this week.
Week #3 is here! We keep making good progress towards the private beta. Currently, the plan is to have a playable version of the game for folks to test by November 12.
Fog of War
We really doubled down on adding improvements to various aspects of the fog of war mechanic.
First, we added partial fog to areas that have been previously explored by the player. For example, if you used to control a star that was later re-taken by the enemy, you'll still see that region of the star system with the star in it. The region will be translucent and it won't show any upgrades to the star structures that the new owner made.
Second, we added a new type of star structure—a space radar—that allows you to increase uncovered fog of war area around the star. Consequently, we reduced the initial fog of war radius for all stars.
Star Details UI
We added several major improvements to the star details panel:
Whenever the resource or energy limit is reached, the corresponding number is highlighted in red.
A new notification system was added across the whole game with some actions generating messages above player's stars. You'll see those messages when a structure is built or upgraded, when the enemy captures your star, and when your attack succeeds or fails.
When the player zooms in on a star the panel scales correctly without looking huge at maximum zoom.
These changes turned out to be disproportionally beneficial to how the gameplay feels. For the first time ever, I was truly sucked into the process of playing the game during one of the playtesting session :).
Next Week
Over the next seven days we are going to work on:
Improving the supernova mechanics and new star generation.
