amiga-news.de - Turn-based strategy game: Farm update for "Settle the World"

27.Aug.2023
Christian Wiegel (Mail)

Turn-based strategy game: Farm update for "Settle the World"
After several developer diaries in which he describes his programming progress, Christian 'TheoTheoderich' Wiegel has published a farm update for his turn-based building and trading game "Settle the World". He writes about it:

"This update is also just another small step on the way to a complete game.

I have completely rewritten much of the programme code for the game over the last few months. The game was not originally designed to be greatly expanded. But since there is still a lot missing in Settle the World (regular elections, natives, computer opponents, etc.) it became urgent to rework everything.

The advantage is that the game now requires much less chip RAM and I can therefore include more music tracks in the coming months.

The changes

Pioneers can now build farms after the citizens of your cities have reached the worker class for the first time. Farms are needed later in the game to supply the aristocrat class with meat and wine.

There are new units to make the best use of farms:

Cowboys for cattle breeding
Grape pickers, to harvest grapes
Winemakers, to produce wine from grapes (luxury good for the aristocrat class)
Butchers to process cattle into meat (food for the aristocrat class).

New buildings:

Wine press (can be built on farms)
Slaughterhouse (can be built in cities)

Other new features:

Integrated help texts/guidance (but it's still early days).
More sound effects.
More intermediate images for events.
New function "Move to town". Moves units via pathfinding to the selected city.
New terrain type "Plains".
Millitary supply wagon to heal/repair damaged millitary units outside cities or to equip colonists to soldiers.
Soldiers can mount horses outside of cities and thus become dragoons.
Map generator completely rewritten. No longer generates diagonal land bridges and creates varied landscapes.
There are now more whales, horses and bison on the map.
Unnecessary transport units (ships and trade wagons) can be destroyed in cities and the player gets half of the construction costs back.
Citizens of higher classes of citizen now need more food types per turn (fish and meat in addition to wheat).
Large ships can now only anchor in cities if at least one dock is available.
The entire graphics system has been reworked to free up more chip mem memory for more future in-game music.
Countless things have been added, changed, tried and thrown away since the last update in February 2023.

What's still "missing" in this update:

Elections

Keeping citizens happy does not yet have a big impact on the game. In the future, there will be regular elections, which the player must win in order to remain in power. The technical foundations for such an election system have been laid in the current version.

Native people

Here, too, the basis for integrating native tribes into the game has been created in the current version. The plan is to place native villages and units on the map with which the player can interact. Unfortunately, I did not manage to include this feature in time.

Computer opponents

CPU-controlled opponents are very complex to implement. I have been working on this intensively for several weeks, but I have to put this feature off until later. With the programming of the natives I will hopefully be able to gain enough experience to be able to realise computer opponents later.

You see...I am far from finished with the development of -Settle the World- ;-)

So that the next update doesn't have to wait for months, there will be two versions available for download on the project page in the next weeks. One is the "official" update and the other is a current development version.

The development versions will hardly be tested, but most of them are compatible with the game state.

I hope this will give me some more feedback on the game ;-) (dr)

[News message: 27. Aug. 2023, 15:12] [Comments: 0]
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