Greetings dear comrades of the Soviet Republic. It was less than two weeks ago, the week after last report was published, when we have released the 0.8.5.2 version of the game for public testing, and we already made a good progress in fixing and tweaking the game during this time. We have released 3 updates since then and the changelog is quite extensive. Now, we would like to go through some the points in this report as it may be good to provide further explanation about these changes and fixes. The main focus was still on GUI tweaking though, and we really appreciate your feedback.
Let us start with something new. We added switches to rails and barrier models at dead ends of roads, pathways and rails. You can see them in these pictures and take it as work in progress because we need your feedback and there can be some tweaking for this in near future. It is a visual change, and it should not affect gameplay, but it may look weird in certain situations, even it looks good in simple setups, in complicated junctions it may not be so. It needs some tweaking based on feedback as anything new added to the game.
As we mentioned in the beginning there was quite a bit of tweaking for GUI based on your feedback. We added few options how you can customize your panels. You can now auto-hide the left panel and the construction panel on the bottom. Also you can change the scale of bottom Level 1 and Level 2 menus. We also moved the small window in which you adjust the way how you build stuff to the right bottom corner above the minimap, and it is possible to move the bottom panel to below the Top panel now. Then we disabled the CTRL+G function as it was replaced with G key. This now hides not only your GUI, but it also hides your cursor, yellow highlight selections and blueprint outlines of planned buildings. This should give you ways to take better screenshots and videos from your Republic.
Then we took some time to adjust the government loyalty because the feedback we have got. It seemed to be too insignificant for some of players to bother with, so we raised the impact of government loyalty on the overall performance of your economy. Low loyalty will now affect birth-rate based on your difficulty settings (Unsatisfied Citizen Reaction Level). Low loyalty will now decrease the productivity of your workers even if they are happy and healthy, and high loyalty will boost it even beyond 100% depending further on happiness, satiety and health. Very low loyalty (less than 30%) will decrease the happiness of your citizens instantly based on your difficulty settings. We also added a code that allows you to reset government loyalty if you open an older save and new “Reset/Randomize Government Loyalty” button to cheat menu. Then the effect of loyalty on happiness was removed for citizens living in untouched old city buildings on prepopulated maps.
Besides these the impact of different ways to affect government loyalty was tweaked. Personal cars can now give you maximum 75-85% loyalty based on the unsatisfied citizens reaction level and quality of the car. Radio Broadcast can help you gain up to 70-80% loyalty for citizens without personal cars and 80-90% loyalty for those with personal cars. The only way how to gain 100% loyalty will be TV broadcasting and it will be possible only for citizens with personal cars as other will be limited to range of 80-90%. The boost for citizens’ loyalty from monuments is now 40-50% based on difficulty settings and the effect of monuments was decreased by 20%. You will also be able to see worker’s productivity in Worker’s Window and there will be a warning notification messages about low loyalty.
From other changes that may be interesting to talk about we can mention that we lowered the distance you can place buildings next to roads and the minimal distance which allows you to connect roads and rails. Previously it was at least 10m and now it will be 5m. It still depends on terrain so you may not get the shortest distance while building on a slope. Then we fixed the problem with possibility of placing building too close to each other on hillsides, when the terrain was burrowing the existing building during flattening. We also added warning messages about fuel to harbors and terminals and warnings for construction window in case the road connection is needed for the construction and is missing. Another thing that will solve some issues is about ship refueling. Now ships will refuel at each stop on the schedule if there is fuel available. And finally the ship with fuel coming to pumping harbour without fuel is able to refuel itself even if there is no fuel available in the harbor initially.
Another set of issues was connected to new yellow route signals. We thank all of you who provided feedback and saves with issues because it helped us to tackle some problems, we were not able to create on our own. The new route signal uses a block reservation system, and it should stop a train when there is another train heading to a certain block. Of course, there were unnecessary delays and deadlocks for some of you because not everything worked as intended and some trains were waiting on yellow signals even if they should not. There may still be issues, but we hope we can fix them as soon as we will be able to identify them with your help.
Then we have something that was not mentioned in any changelog yet and it is already present in the game. We added a new measurement tool, and you can find it in terraforming submenu. You can measure distance, elevation or cursor height with it. It can help you to plan better, will remove the need of using workarounds and GUI more options to measure objects and areas on your map. It is quite easy to use, and it shows most of information you may need.
The last two weeks were really productive and helped us to move forward a lot. We have still some time before the deadline for stable version release so we will use that to deal with other issues and improve the game before we release it for players who are not interested in testing the new features earlier. We hope we will succeed and then we may start focusing on the next update and bring you more information and news about that. Until then we wish you success and lot of happiness in your lives. Stay tuned for the next report.
Thank You for Your Support
3Division Team