Clockwork Empires April Update: Atlas Ironcog And The Airship Mast

Once more, a Clockwork Empires update appears from a crate that fell from the sky. We present for you:

ce_2015_apr_promo_illustration_small

This update will go live to every Clockwork Empires player via Steam!

We have also updated our Clockwork Empires: Development Progress report!

(Don’t own the game? Clockwork Empires can be purchased on ClockworkEmpires.com via Humble or from Steam.)

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Patch Notes:

Major Features

  • The Seven Colonist Start
  • Progress Bars
  • Factions window
  • lots of new events
  • Airdrop Signalling Mast to control drop point of supplies & immigrants

The Engine

  • added flag to executable that should (hopefully) automatically select NVIDIA cards on Multi GPU (Optimus) laptops
  • FIXED: beacon/gabion/etc. placers now show up again

Human Characters

  • sight radius is lowered at night
  • Naturalists get increased sight radius
  • rebalanced idle/wander/gossip weighting
  • added more seed memories to characters upon spawn – should make combat morale/behaviour more stable for recent immigrants
  • Small grammar fix to memories while sleeping in a bed
  • angry citizens may occasionally smash a commodity in anger.
  • cultists will attempt to preach The Occult (and spread madness)
  • balance: higher class characters are much more persuasive when recruiting characters of lower classes for cults (class-relevant traits ie Communist also apply to this logic)
  • added ability to lose a friend (& associated sad memory)
  • added concept of rivals/enemies to characters (framework only)
  • added various means for cultists to decide to leave their cult
  • cleaned up cult leader death & selection (will end cult if no one is maddened enough to lead)
  • added more character names
  • characters can have origin stories related to their traits and/or class (and added many new possibilities)
  • added a floating starvation warning icon to starving characters
  • FIXED: starvation floaty icon will not remain over dead people
  • added dress version of “freak out” animation
  • Naturalists will go to any explore beacons, no matter how far away they are
  • colonists can tell what class of bed they are sleeping in, and have different memories depending on the quality of bed relative to their social class
  • butchering fishpeople creeps out (most) colonists
  • added Vicar job to deprogram cult members
  • gossip can no longer be interrupted for more gossip (should fix some of the weird socialization pileups)
  • tools can now be despawned in-place via Magical Stowing rather than requiring walking to a drop position and performing full animation
  • FIXED: issue in civilization calculation that caused erratic “return to civilization” behaviors
  • FIXED: various people getting items stuck in their hands
  • FIXED: occasionally grabbing a social job if you had non-social work you could be doing
  • FIXED: some nonsense with the job mailbox system
  • FIXED: broken nametags (& disappearing nametags on load)
  • FIXED: military characters will no longer use specially skilled civilian outfits if overseer has skill
  • FIXED: characters assigned uniform via office job should stick to those uniforms correctly
  • FIXED: militia NCOs no longer revert to civilian form if they have skills
  • colonists will now be slightly happier eating food in chairs rather than standing

Combat & Military

  • added an emote when military decides to retreat due to low morale
  • added new military idle: Stand at attention
  • alarm waypoints will self-delete if no enemies nearby (military should stop responding to alarms after menacing enemy is killed)
  • soldiers will grab gun instead of fleeing if both enemy AND weapon is in range and morale is high
  • tweaked how reloading animation was set so civilians who have a very long reload time don’t look like they’re idling
  • successfully retreating from enemies will make people … well, not happy really, but slightly less upset at least.
  • FIXED: militia was confused about what jobs to take in some cases
  • FIXED: invisible soldiers
  • FIXED: characters ending up with 2, 3, 4 or more guns fused onto their hands
  • added morale feedback to character panel (as it pertains to not fleeing from combat)

Non-Human Characters

  • FIXED: stuff getting really weird with corpses (particularly fishpeople corpses) after they’re moved to another position
  • FIXED: Bandits actually respect truce now!
  • FIXED: bandit drop/flee cycle

Economy & Buildings

  • added airship signalling mast to control airdrop position (only for supply drop right now)
  • flatten terrain job is now in “construction” job category ( & overseers can now take flatten terrain job)
  • gabion construction changed to a civilian job
  • farming time now correctly uses farming skill
  • standalone module construction / deconstruction uses tools & ‘construction’ skill
  • FIXED: Improved understanding of who owns what meat.
  • Work crew job filters now automatically flipped to “off” when a work crew is assigned to a workshop (except hauling). They can be manually re-enabled to allow work crews to work outside the workshop
  • farming: tweaked values for prioritizing the maintenance of existing plants over planting of new ones and removal of dead ones
  • FIXED: characters getting stuck in Ghost Modules
  • framework for containers, smart objects

Biomes & Terrain

  • balance: no (live) fishpeople should appear in (immediate) vicinity of a tropical gamestart
  • added clay & stone near-ish to starting spots

Events, Metagame, and the Overworld

  • implemented seven dwarves mode ’cause yolo
  • balance: reduced starting resources
  • added guaranteed muskets at game-start
  • all events now have a default choice “timeout” so will eventually proceed whether or not you react to them
  • attached all airdrop & immigration events to airdropmast, if player has one active
  • “Population Below 5” bailout changed to “Population Below 3” bailout because the previous system encouraged murdering people for free bonus civilians
  • Fixed script error in “Bandits Offer Plunder” event
  • Clarified effect in flavor text of in “Ominous Dreams” event
  • “Colonist finds overlooked supplies” event has ticker text for items recieved and other minor improvements
  • Small optimizations in a few events
  • redcoats favour NCO now always starts with a pistol
  • FIXED: an error in “Research Family Tree” event
  • events that give randomized items (plunder, etc) now tell you exactly what you got in the ticker
  • added event for bandit to defect to player’s colony
  • new event: Hale and Hearty colonist overcomes affliction
  • new prestige favour: Food shipment
  • new event: Gain rewards for hitting certain population levels
  • added event to give 1 prestige a day for surviving
  • new event: doing paperwork reveals extra supplies that weren’t recorded!
  • new event: commoners feel understood by sympathetic aristocrat
  • FIXED: Dead people will no longer send ministry investigators after you. (Or initiate any other events)
  • FIXED: non-deleting science crates (+ added fun icons to ticker reports for science crates)
  • balance: increased bandit event timers
  • FIXED: isDay wasn’t set to true on first day!

Multiplayer

  • backend for basic Steam integration (initiating multiplayer, joining a game from friends lists, Steam P2P  communication)
  • proper multiplayer initiation
  • deterministic network world building
  • in-game determinism checking tools
  • non-deterministic ‘find nearby location

Music & Sound

  • added music cues to events and nightfall

UI/UX

  • added framework for cute progress bars for jobs! (first case: tree chopping)
  • added progress bars to farming
  • added progress bars to construction jobs
  • added new Daniel Nametag Zoom System
  • FIXED: the contextual module tutorial appearing more than once
  • upgraded the old food icon to not be all pixelated (THANKS CHRIS)
  • changing around size of Work Crew subpanels for more efficient use of space (in progress)
  • FIXED: slowdown in jobs menu with lots of gabion jobs
  • UI: workshop button removed from work crew job filters (assignment to workshop implies workshop filter active)
  • FIXED: pumpkin and cabbage stew icons! And yellowcup fungus bushel. And fixed some incorrect smelter icons
  • removing a farm now closes its control window if it was open
  • memories now use specified iconSkin strings (more icons possible for memories; will fix some invisible memories)
  • FIXED: laudanum (and other drinks?!) not showing up in commodities window
  • tutorial: updated refining tutorial to reference Metalworks as place to refine ore

 

Have fun and let us know through our mysterious portal or forum if anything goes wrong!

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4 Comments

4 Responses to “Clockwork Empires April Update: Atlas Ironcog And The Airship Mast”

  1. Michal says:

    Maybe it would be a nice idea to have a preferred social interaction between a soldier and the NCO to let soldier to salute the NCO. I would make the NCO slightly happier, as well as any soldier with proper military-loving trait. On the other hand, if pacifist colonist would be drafted into the army, saluting would still be a preferred social interaction for them (as it is their duty) but it would make them slightly upset instead…

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  2. octopod says:

    Is there a Linux build coming?

    ::covets mightily::

    { reply }
  3. Armando Brewmeisted says:

    I think the 2,3, or 4 weapons being graphed onto a worker’s arm was a nice addition actually. They reminded me of the obliterators from this space age game set in the future where there is only war.

    { reply }

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