If you didn't get to watch the 1.0 Release Announcement Trailer, watch it here:
Key Features of TFC 1.0:
Strategic Options From The Beginning: Inspired by the giants of the genre, TFC looks to expand on the mechanics of classic RTS in interesting ways, giving you several strategies to explore from the very beginning of a match.
Authentic Bronze Age Setting: Settle your people in the Ancient Age, where everyone starts on equal footing. As you advance, a pivotal moment awaits: choose one of three legendary Bronze Age civilizations to lead your people to glory!
Expanded Content: Experience the new Campaign Mode, as well as new units, technologies, map types and more, offering hours of additional gameplay.
Improved Mechanics and UI: Enjoy a smoother and more intuitive gaming experience with updated interfaces and refined game mechanics.
Community-Driven Enhancements: Benefit from numerous tweaks and improvements based on player feedback during the Early Access phase.
To get a notification once the game releases. wishlist now!
Announcing the Release Date for TFC: The Fertile Crescent 1.0!
Dear TFC Community,
We are thrilled to announce that the highly anticipated 1.0 version of TFC: The Fertile Crescent will be launching on 13.06.24!
To mark this occasion, we're releasing an announcement trailer that tells the story of the culmination of our seven-year journey, leading to the completion of our dream RTS game and its upcoming 1.0 release:
With the release of 1.0, we're introducing exciting new features that will take your TFC experience to the next level:
Expanded Content: Experience the new Campaign Mode, as well as new units, technologies, map types and more, offering hours of additional gameplay.
Improved Mechanics and UI: Enjoy a smoother and more intuitive gaming experience with updated interfaces and refined game mechanics.
Community-Driven Enhancements: Benefit from numerous tweaks and improvements based on player feedback during the Early Access phase.
We want to express our gratitude for your support and enthusiasm. Your feedback has been invaluable in shaping TFC into the game it is today, and we can't wait for you to experience everything we have in store.
Thank you for being part of this incredible journey with us. We look forward to seeing you on the battlefield!
- Wield Interactive Team
Developer Updates March 2024
Hello there!
In this post, we're posting our Discord Developer Updates from March 2024.
Mission dialogue
Our very first sneak peek into the upcoming Campaign mode!
This is Ninsun, a mysterious priestess, that will provide guidance.
Thanks to our pixel artist, Campaign missions will have dialogue, and various characters will play their part.
Solving technical issues
On to something more technical!
We're currently working on fixing some performance issues. For battering rams, there are some edge cases in the public build that can severely drag down performance.
As an example: in the image attached, a nomad battering ram is trying to find a path to a wall target, and the target node is indicated by the blue circle.
The green nodes are valid pathfinding nodes (they have enough space for battering ram to move through).
Since the battering ram can't get all the way to the target wall node, indicated by the blocked path by an X, the pathfinding looks through the entire map without any success.
Just one of many examples of the "behind the curtain" stuff we're sorting out that isn't neccessarily visible to users (only when it fails) but that will make the overall game experience better.
Snaphot!
Just a quick post showing an idyllic spot in The Fertile Crescent.
That's it for now! Stay tuned for more updates on TFC: The Fertile Crescent.
Developer Updates February 2024
Hello there!
In this post, we'll update you on our current whereabouts. We have some exciting news to share!
Screen Queensland Support
For starters, we are now supported by the Queensland Government through Screen Queensland’s Games Grant program.
We're very excited about this support!
Expanding Team
We've hired a professional pixel artist to help us get TFC to v1.0.
The artist is an experienced pixel artist who was part of the team behind the amazing and successful game Unpacking.
Discord Developer Updates
Recently, we started sharing snippets of improvements coming to the game for our Discord community more regularly. However, we know that not everyone prefer to use Discord, and so we're sharing it with our Steam community as well here.
Arabian Ostrich
2024 kicks off by showing some more hints at what's coming. The Arabian ostrich was an important subspecies of ostrich in The Fertile Crescent. Sadly, it went extinct around 1966, but will be featured in the game.
Buldings seperate into Civilian and Military buildings
We're also busy implementing general improvements!
As an example, we've ran out of space for building icons in the construction menu.
Therefore, we have split construction into two categories: civilian and military buildings, and drawn some new art for these.
Rivers
"For seven years, my feet have wandered, traversing endless plains, with only flat horizons stretching before me. Land, both fruitful and arid, offered the sole variety. The vast openness seemed unending!!!
Yet today, a revelation unfolded. My eyes beheld something unfamiliar. A glistening, flowing substance. 'Is it a river? And a path to traverse it?' I marveled. Have I truly arrived? Will there dawn a day when walls need not encircle our entire village for protection?"
Food Trend Indicator
The food trend indicator is making a comback!
In the past, TFC used to show if your food gathering was higher than your food consumption in general. This way (in theory) you would get a better idea if the amount of foragers and farmers were enough to sustain your population or not.
It hasn't been easy to provide a good representative for this, since it keeps varying based on villager walking distances, etc. The previous solution didn't work as well as we wanted, and so we ended up abandonining it altogether.
Since then, we've given it another attempt to implement this, and we're much happier with the new solution!
There will be up to 3 arrows up or down based on the speed of increasing/depleting your food stock.
Visible Counter System
We'll talk more about new modes and features at some point, but for now, here's another "general improvement" that we've been working on.
There's a few things to notice here!
For one, we've seperated melee armor and ranged armor in this panel, whereas now this panel just shows if a unit generally has good or bad armor. The reason for this change in 1.0 is that the disctinction between melee and ranged armor will become more important.
Another is that you'll get hints about what units it generally counters and gets countered by. These are not VERY hard counters like in comparable RTS games, but they are a good guide, and there will be further balance changes to make these counters slightly more profound.
The last thing to notice is the ?. What's this unannounced unit that counters slingers? Stay tuned!
Improved AI
Another area that will see some improvements is the AI. As an example, AIs on higher difficulty levels will now make additional granaries when farms are not close to any delivery points. This will boost their late game economy and make them a more formidable foe.
That's it for now! Of course, these snippets are just a small taste of everything that is to come.
Stay tuned for more updates on TFC: The Fertile Crescent!
General Improvements Update
Important regarding save games!
We were forced to rewrite parts of the saving and loading system to fix bugs related to it; thus, old saves will NOT be compatible. You will not see unsupported save files in your list of games to load. We apologise for the inconvenience!
In the future, if you want to avoid this problem, you can always turn off automatic updates of the game through Steam and wait to update until you are confident that you won't need to load any save files anymore.
We will do our best to inform you when new updates break old save files.
About General Improvements Update 09000
This update mainly addresses concerns from the last tournament. We're giving the game over screen an overhaul, significantly improving performance (which hasn't actually been a major concern, but we did it anyways!), and added some general improvements, a healthy chunk of balance changes, as well as some minor bug fixes.
This will be the last substantial update during Early Access. Yes, you read that correctly. The next significant update will be 1.0.
We hope you're enjoying TFC and our improvements to the game. If you haven't already done this, please consider leaving a review on Steam. We'd love to know what you think!
Working on 1.0
We'll tell you more later, so stay tuned! In the meantime, here's a few sneak peaks that we also posted on our Discord channel.
TFC has always only offered one map type, "Open Terrain", but that's not gonna be the case anymore in 1.0.
As we're adding more map variety, this includes more details like flowers for grassland and water lillies for wetland.
Change Log 09000
General
Game Over Statistics
- Overhauled titles with icons instead of text (holding over the icon shows tooltip) - Now showing the peak population of villagers (as well as the total villagers count) - New columns for food consumed, food gathered, wood gathered, bricks gathered, and metal gathered - Removed total resources gathered column
Rally Point and Waypoint
- Rally point has new art, animation and placement effect - Rally point command button has new art - Waypoint has new art and animation - Waypoints set on units (and animals) will now follow unit movement after being set
General Improvements
- Several significant performance improvements (especially for pathfinding and updating unit vision) - Holding CTRL while clicking stop production for selected building button will now cancel all production in the building (updated tooltip to reflect this) - It's easier to click on individual animals to see info about them or order villagers to hunt them - Input binding for opening the technology tree is now set to close the Technology Tree as well (ESC still works as before) - Multiplayer lobby now shows the current region that you are connected to - Improved Villagers and Housing tooltip and added information about how the training speed of villagers slows down as your population of villagers grow - Improved How To Play section about settling your tribe, and added information about how the training speed of villagers is dependant on factors like Food Surplus Level, plus that it will slow down as your population of villagers grow - Updated description of siege damage stat - Windowed display mode sets resolution to full-screen resolution, and window can be resized by the user - Revolting units will no longer destroy their own Village Center before randomly attacking remaining players
Skirmish AI
- Skirmish AI is more likely to wait longer to gather a bigger army to attack after a previous offense failed - Skirmish AI will now consider chopping wood in areas with at least 1 tree instead of what was a much higher threshold (which caused the AI to occasionally ignore trees much closer to the base) - When a Skirmish AI villager is attacked, the villager will ask other villagers nearby to flee back to base as well (unless they are defending or farming)
Balance
General
- Village Center generates (0, 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5) Knowledge based on Food Surplus Level (from (0, 1, 2, 2.5, 3)) - Building Wonder stages will provide Knowledge Points as a reward (3, 4, 5, 6 for the four construction stages) - There is one less wetland animal spawned per region on Large maps
Units
- Slinger attack speed is 1.5s (from 1.75s) - Slinger costs 30 food and 15 wood to train (from 25 food and 15 wood) - Archer attack speed is 1.75s (from 1.5s) - Archer base ranged damage is 10 (from 9) - Javelin Thrower attack speed is 2s (from 1.75s) - Elite Javelin Thrower needs to be out of combat for 1.5s seconds to gain special bonuses (from 3)
Assyrians
- Trade Colonies: improves all villager resource gathering speeds by 5% (from 6%) - Conscripts: provides any villager with Militia status with an additional +1 melee damage and +1 ranged damage
Babylonians
- Defensive Tactics: now provides +1 armor to all military units, and they are no longer required to be within influence range for this bonus to apply - Defensive Tactics: it now also provides +1 armor to villagers who are militia - Defensive Tactics: no longer affects Scout unit - Fortifications: no longer increases health and siege armor of selective defensive structures. Instead, all Babylonian buildings receive 40% reduced damage from any siege attacks (buildings with this upgrade shows siege armor icon in selected building UI like before) - Garden: has 350 hitpoints (from 300) - Garden: must be placed on very fertile soil - Garden: reduces food consumption by 3 (from 1)
Egyptians
- Medicine: increases villager hitpoints by 50 (from 25) - Papyrus Scrolls: each priest improves farming speed by 5% (from 6%) - Sickle: upgrades farming speed by 15% (from 10%)
Neutral Settlements
- Potter's Wheel is no longer required to claim neutral settlements with Outpost - Researching Potter's Wheel will now double neutral settlement bonuses granted - Orchard provides +5% base farming bonus (from 10%) - Ancient Temple now provides +0.3 base knowledge generation (from 0.5) - Settlement now provides +10% base villager training speed (from 25%) - Settlement now increases villager training speed at Villager Center and no longer spawns extra villagers at the settlement itself
Siege Warfare
- Buildings no longer have default siege armor stat, and so walls no longer start with 1 base siege armor - Heavy Axeman deals 5 siege damage (from 6) - Light Axeman deals 4 siege damage (from 5) - Spearman deals 3 siege damage (from 4) - Javelin Thrower deals 2 siege damage (from 3) - Swordsman deals 1 siege damage (from 2) - Most Mountain Nomad units deal less siege damage
Battering Ram
- Costs 75 wood, 25 food, 15 metal (from 50 wood, 50 food, 25 metal) - Base move speed is 3 (from 2) - Improved Elite Egyptian Battering Ram die animation - Improved Elite Egyptian Battering Ram dead sprite
Bug fixes
- Fixed out-of-syncs that could happen when a player disconnected from multiplayer game - Fixed a problem for newer Macs with m1 where the game resolution was set wrongly - Egyptian Battering Ram UI icon portrait no longer always shows blue player color even if your player color is a different one - Fixed typo in Palace description - If Wonder Victory is off and Wonder level IV is constructed, the notifications about this will be displayed correctly - Fixed wrong Wonder upgrade tooltip descriptions - Fixed wrong description of Conscripts technology - Fixed wrong description of Garden technology - Fixed a case when an enemy building was partially visible to local player but holding mouse over would not show attack symbol - When villager can no longer find any resources to gather and asked to continue gather resources the idle icon indicator no longer quickly switch on and off - Fixed a case where the stop production button would show wrong picture
1v1 Civilization Wars Winner Announced!
The final games of the 1vs1 Civilizations Wars were played between veterans Nown0 and Sigh.
We are pleased to announce the winner of the tournament: Nown0
Nown0 retains the title of the Revered Leader of The Fertile Crescent. Congratulations!
Find the games that were streamed and commented by the tournament organiser HeavyBeber here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4dKriMQfaskz-G3CqqOZfzn3_HZ230d0
Sigh, #2 in the tournament, uploaded replays from his POV which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrTZiAMTETJ1e7FVPZHESsP7L_aN2zqEk
A special mention for this game between Andrej and Dragevann during the rumble stages, which was a game of epic proportions: https://youtu.be/Vc-uy3LYoY0
See you next time!
1v1 Civilization Wars Sign-Up Deadline: 2nd of August
If you forgot to sign up for 1V1 Civilization Wars, there's still time! You only have a few days to sign up though as the deadline to sign up is the 2nd of August.
The tournament will be played between 4th-8th of August.
This update addresses some of the feedback we received after releasing the Factions Update.
It will be the Tournament Build for the upcoming 1vs1 Civilizations Wars tournament, which you can read more about here. Of course, if any game-breaking bugs appear, we will address these, but there will be no more balance changes before the tournament.
Improved unit AI targetting
- Improved targetting system so that if a target unit is behind a walled in area and can't be reached the unit chasing it will find another target instead of just potentially standing there forever - If a unit is blocked for a while chasing a target behind a big group of units it will reconsider and find another target if it finds any closer
General improvements
- While holding SHIFT to set waypoints the mouse cursor will now show cursor changes similarly to when not holding SHIFT - Ranged units distance to buildings take into account that buildings have different sizes, so a ranged unit like the slinger don't have to move so close to a large building as a Palace as before, and it will be able to attack Wonder with ranged attack - Increased the distance of buildings of same type to select on double-clicking building by 100%
Skirmish AI
- Offensive Armies on higher difficulty levels will stay longer in fights before fleeing against larger armies - Reduced threat level for Watchtowers so that AIs will make a bigger effort fighting them before fleeing - Battering Rams will no longer count as part of the defensive force and will not be used as part of defensive operations - Fixed a problem that prevented the Skirmish AI from researching all the technologies it should research - Substantially reduced how much AI counts Scout unit as a threat - Battering ram has 24 vision range (it was 16, which caused it not to find nearby walls to attack in some scenarios)
Horde Mode
- Horde strength increases slightly more for each wave on higher difficulty levels - When reaching the last wave the game over screen on defeat will show correctly that the last wave was reached
Unit Balance changes
- Heavy Axeman has 8 base move speed (from 7) - Slinger vision range is 24 (from 26)
Other Balance Changes
- Gazelle flock has 8-10 animals (from 6-8) - Boars will no longer spawn next to any player starting locations
Bug fixes
- Assyrian technology Trade Colonies now works as it should for farming gathering rate - When a clay pit is constructed, villagers who were initially tasked to construct the clay pit but were then commanded elsewhere before it was fully constructed, will no longer move back to it to dig clay when clay pit construction is completed by other villagers - Fixed wrong pixels in Egyptian Gate under construction sprites - Clicking production buttons (like produce equipment) has no effect after game has ended - When selecting single building from control group the rally point position for that building will show correctly - It is possible to select enemy units behind your walls to see their information
1v1 Civilization Wars
Brave warriors, listen closely to the call echoing through the Fertile Crescent! Destiny awaits, seeking a true leader. It's time to ignite your passion, sharpen your swords, and rise to claim the throne!
Embrace the rich legacy of the ancient Egyptians, with their majestic pyramids and mystical pharaohs. Or delve into the formidable might of the Assyrians, known for their advanced warfare and vast empire. Alternatively, unlock the secrets of the Babylonians, renowned for their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and law.
Yet be forewarned, brave warriors, the path ahead is strewn with challenges and trials. The battlegrounds will test your skills, strategy, and leadership. Only the most courageous and skillful among you will emerge victorious, etching your name into the annals of history.
Now, champions, embrace the call to greatness and embark on this incredible journey. The time has come to prove yourself worthy of being the next Revered Leader of the Fertile Crescent.
The tournament will be played between 4th-8th of August.
