Dream Engines: Nomad Cities Patch Notes Archive

Build 0.5.259 - Early Access Release

July 14, 2021

The early access release build brings a large content update and lots of polish, UX, quality of life and bug-fixes. We also introduced six new languages.

Below are some of the more significant changes in this update. I hope you enjoy it, and as always looking forward to hearing your feedback. The full list of changes can be found below that.

Note: Since the change is so significant, saves from previous alpha versions are not supported. If you wish to continue your old games, you can still play the older version by selecting one of the previous alpha builds from the betas tab on Steam.

Other than this update we spent a big portion of the last month or two preparing for launch - making a new trailer, reaching out to press and content creators, preparing a game guide, and many other related tasks.

Mid-game economic content and balancing

One of the bigger changes to the game is in the mid-game phase, after you leave your starting map and have gathered plenty of Bloodwood and Featherstone. We've added two new resource nodes - Crystals and Cabtus, both in the desert maps.

We've also added several new refined materials, some are made of a combination of multiple raw resources which can't fly, so they can only be produced in maps that have all these resources present at the same time. We've rebalanced several of the buildings, upgrades and crafting recipes to use these new materials, and we also added multiple recipes to produce Flux, power, upgrade materials, research, etc - all using these new refined materials.

These advanced materials can also be used to build an apartment block, a more efficient version of the house to increase your city's population.

Landing area traits

When you take-off and search for a new place to land your city, the landing area selection has become much more interesting. Other than the new resources, we've also added random map traits to each option. These traits can have various positive and negative effects that will take place during your next landing, and will require you to adjust your strategy and choose your destination more carefully.

Each biome now also has constant bonuses and penalties. For example, the desert map allows your stone worker and harvesters to produce much faster, but on the other hand your purptato farms produce much slower due to the dry weather. You'll need to build more farms or find alternative food sources.

Tribe selection

When you start a new game, you now get to select the tribe that you will be playing. Each tribe has different bonuses and penalties, some of which may significantly change your strategy. You can unlock new tribe options while playing with other tribes.

In this build there are two playable tribes, and we will add more in the coming updates.

Weather effects

To add some more life into the game, we added a couple of weather effects that may occur randomly. These effects do not impact the gameplay, they're just visual atmospheric aids.

Musical scores and audio

Each biome now has its own unique musical score that will randomly play between sets of the more generic ambient music. Alon Kaplan did some great work with these, and we're sure you'll enjoy listening to them while you play.

We've also added shorter musical cues when you leave a map, and when you win or lose a game. Lots of new and changed sound effects and ambient city sound that slowly fades into wilderness ambiance was were added as well.

Spider thing

A new mid-level enemy - the Spider thing - was intorduced. These creatures shoot at a range longer than the previous ranged enemies, and at a significantly faster firing rate, but they come in smaller numbers and are not very hard to kill.

Gameplay changes

Plenty of balancing, bug-fixing, UX, quality-of-life, and gameplay changes have been introduced. A few notable ones include the removal of ammo from ranged weapons, more difficulty customization, a new production layer in the management mode HUD, a city overview window, and the ability to configure the resource panel in the HUD.

Full Change List

Build 221 to 259

Added

New mechanic: Map modifiers. Every map now has one of several modifier options which can give dramatic bonuses or penalties.
Each biome now has permanent bonuses and penalties depending on the biome.
Added support for new languages: French, Russian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese and German.
Added weather visual effects. At the moment they don't have any effect on gameplay.
New art when winning the game.
Added several pre-defined difficulty presets that will automatically set all the individual settings to cater to different preferences. Manual customization is still possible.
Added more difficulty customization options, including an economic difficulty.
New mechanic: tribe selection when starting a new game. Different tribes have different characteristics and bonuses that require different strategies. Currently two tribes are available, more will be added.
New Enemy: Spider Thing with longer range and rapid fire that comes in small numbers.
Added an overview window when clicking the city name or threat level. This shows all the current global bonuses, info about the current map, city levels and perks unlocked with each level, and other general information about the city.
When switching from crossbow to rapid gun, the model on Tiny will now change.
Added a button for the in-game menu (ESC key) on the HUD.
Added three new musical scores by our awesome Alon Kaplan, one for each biome, played randomly between sections of the ambient music.
Added musical cue for finishing a map, winning, and losing the game.
Added raw resources Cabtus and Crystals.
Added a bunch of refined resources, some requiring the presense of several raw resources on the same map.
Added new, more efficient production recipes for food, power, flux, research, upgrade materials, and more.
Added a new apartment building that is more space and weight effective than the smaller houses.
Added a credits screen
New "Production" layer in management mode that shows what each building is producing and lets you change it directly on the map.
Added city ambiance sound that slowly switches to wilderness when walking away from the city.
You can now configure the resource list that appears in the top-left of the HUD.
Added the ability to repair buildings.
Added a global warning when you don't have enough workers and some buildings are disabled.
Added a recurring research at the end of the research tree that you can research again and again (at increasing costs) for additional bonuses.

Changed

Removed ammo mechanic. Ranged weapons can now be used without any ammo requirements.
Starting map now always has one ruins area.
Starting city area and each expansion are now 1 tile longer in each dimension.
Replaced executable & steam library icon.
Added and replaced several sound effects.
Materializer production recipes balanced so they only use Flux and are much more useful, but also added a limit to how many materializers you can have.
Last game's difficulty settings are now remembered when starting a new game.
Balanced which enemies appear on the map so that resources and farther areas of the map have more and harder enemeis than those close to the city.
Reduced amount of small ruins around the large ones, but they each yield more loot now.
New window design for production recipe selection.
Enemies no longer attack autocarts, neither on rails nor all-terrain carts. They may still attack the harvester buildings.
The game now auto-saves before closing with ALT-F4 or returning to main menu.
Replaced the Charged Cannon with a Rapid Gun (similar functionality, different name and appearance).
We gave our Steambot a name - Tiny!
Renamed "Relaxed Mode" because it was misrepresenting the game feel when activated.
Stored resources window now has a City tab (that does not include Tiny's resources) in addition to the All tab.
Ambiance sound effects now have a separate volume slider.
Changed economy balance to use the new resources in several recipes and blueprints.
Added an icon on top of raw resources that shows these icons can not fly.
Keyboard binding window now has categories
Made the resource drop-off and storage building a tier 2 resource instead of tier 3. They no longer require copper and can be built earlier in the game to automate resource transportation from harvesters.
Tutorial now teaches rotating camera and resetting to default view.
Tuned down the smoke-screen module which was a bit OP.
Balanced some ruins crafting costs.
Added a grid in management mode so you can more easily tell in which mode you are in.
Changed the general warning icon when a building is manually disabled to a more descriptive icon.
Each production recipe now shows which categories it belongs to (to more easily figure out which bonuses apply to it).
Management mode can now be separated from top-down camera. You can manually switch camera mode and management/combat mode separately (by default they are still connected).
Tutorial objective now appears as complete for a second before continuing to the next objective/mission.
Situational tutorials are now shown at least once even when the tutorial itself is disabled. If you finish the tutorial you can start a new game with it disabled, and you will still be introduced to new mechanics you haven't enountered yet.
Updated and improved the tutorial, and added more situational tutorials.
Shift + clicking on a research that is already queued will dequeue it and anything that comes after it.
Production recipes that are unavailable due to missing upgrades/add-ons will now have an icon next to them in the recipe selection list.
Players can now disable turrets manually again.
Reorganized the build info panel so it's more clear where the building costs are and where the maintenance costs are shown.
Balanced some maintenance costs.
The game will now auto save just before being raided.
Some building add-ons now cancel each other and you can't build them together.
Default difficulty level is now a little more forgiving, with a recommendation to switch to the challenging difficulty after learning the basics of the game.
Separated the raid timer from the threat timer. Bonuses/penalties (such as smoke-screen or dying) that affect the threat level will no longer affect how long between raids.
Melee attack has a bit wider AOE now.
Harvesters on depleted resources production rate incresed to 50% making them more useful.
You now need to expand the city more times in the areas close to the center before you can choose to expand farther away.

Fixed

Scrapping a building will now also refund 50% of the add-on and upgrade costs, not just the building itself.
Fixed bug that showed wrong resolution in settings after restarting the game.
Fixed towers kept shooting at enemies outside of vision range without dealing any damage.
Fixed research progress showing 0% for completed research.
Fixed an issue where configuring key mapping didn't always work.
Fixed issue with AOE weapon explosion particles showing broken building pieces.
Fixed bug where a building's production could become stuck when the consumption of raw materials was very fast.
Fixed issue in production recipe chooser where costs were not shown for all recipes if the first recipe in the list had no costs.
Fixed a bug where building entrances and exits were always shown even when they were behind buildings, after saving a game or grabbing a screenshot.
Fixed bug that caused upgrade layer to sometimes show the warnings line even when there was no warnings.
Fixed a bug where you couldn't open a resource's UI because there were enemies nearby. You still can't build a harvester, but you can open the UI now.
Fixed featherstone icon in destination selection to show featherstone and not crushed featherstone.
Fixed had in lower aspect ratios so it doesn't overlap. It does get smaller if the aspect ratio is too low so we recommend 16:10 or higher.
Building exits remained when the rails themselves were removed, if the building was in the city and the rail outside - after flying.
Fixed an issue when switching from managemenet to combat view and the camera would stop following Tiny for the duration of the transition.
Fixed a problem in how the game behaved when placing a long rail line and only having enough Flux for some of it.
Fixed a bug when there were very few enemies on the map they could enter the visible area and remain invisible, wreaking havoc on your city.
Fixed issue where some building and item icons were blurry.
Fixed cursor issue when switching between management and combat mode when the cursor did not have the default cursor icon.
Fixed blurriness and other issues with biome images.
Loading a game in the middle of a raid will now start the raid music.
Fixed an issue with building a rail into a building that doesn't create a crossing like it should.
Fixed raiding enemies getting stuck when there were lot of static enemies blocking them outside the view range.
Fixed issue in production recipe selection where an upgrade/add-on was missing and the message was not shown correctly.
Bonuses that give extra loot from debris/enemies was not working and were fixed.
Fixed texts and typos.

Build 0.4.219 - Alpha 4 - Swarms Update

March 13, 2021

The swarms update mainly tackled combat, balancing and performance aspects related to it. We made the combat more fast-paced and with a better flow to it, mainly through the use of weaker, faster enemies that come in much larger numbers. In this update we also added a major UX change that better separates city-management tools from combat controls, allowing us to show more information and simplify the UI for each phase.

Below are some of the main changes in this update. I hope you enjoy it, and as always I am really looking forward to getting your feedback. The full list of changes can be found below that.

We also spent several weeks since our previous update working on a demo version that was available for a limited time during the Steam Festival. It is no longer up-to-date, however, and keeping it so would consume additional resources - so the demo is no longer available.

Swarms - faster, better flowing combat

My original direction regarding steambot combat while exploring was to give it a feel of survival - where every shot counts and every hit hurts. But I also didn't want to put too much emphasis on quick reflexes, since this is after all primarily a strategy/building game.

The result was some kind of hybrid, where enemies attacked in medium numbers, so there was no intense 1 on 1 combat against strong bosses, but neither were they quick and simple combat encounters. We were not happy with it. I came to a realization that to create proper survival-style combat we'd have to put a lot of resources into combat alone - with many unique enemies, each with a different set of behaviors, and complex AI. This would be almost like making a whole new game, and we prefer to spend the majority of our valuable time and resources on improving the city building aspects, adding more content, and making an interesting world to explore.

So I decided to simplify the combat mechanics, make them faster, simpler, and more rewarding. The solution came in the form of swarms. The vast majority of enemies you will enounter following this update are weak enemies that can be killed with a single hit. They attack in much larger numbers, making the whole fight quicker and more action-packed. Skill is an important factor, if you manage to get yourself surrounded by tens of dream plagues you'll get hurt bad. That said, you don't need to be an expert player in order to fight well, as long as you have decent equipment on your steambot and city defenses.

Combat balancing

With the change from a few stronger enemies to swarms of hundreds of weaker ones, there was a lot of balancing that needed to be done.

Melee was pretty much worthless because you could only hit one enemy at a time, at short range, while being surrounded by tens of them. So we made all melee attacks into area attacks that could hit multiple enemies. This introduced a problem with the special melee weapons that had splash damage - they became unecessary if all melee attacks dealed damage to a whole area.

Heavy crossbows were totally useless, with a very slow firing rate that would hit a single target and deal 10x more damage than was necessary to kill it. So we made them shoot explosive shots that hit several enemies for high damage. The light crossbows were better, firing 5 shots in succession, but even they were a bit too slow for the swarms, so we increased their combo to 10 shots, and slightly increased their fire rate. We also added upgrades that increase ranged attack speed even further.

We faced similar issues with turrets. These had a more interesting solution. We have 3 turrets (wood, tarbomb, and copper tiers). So the basic wooden turret now has slower firing rate but deals explosive damage that can hit several enemies, and kills the weaker ones in a single shot. The tarbomb turret has a very long range, deals even more explosive damage with double the explosion area, but fires even slower - perfect for defending a large area against weaker enemies. The copper tier turret, we gave a single-target attack, but they fire at much faster rates with much higher DPS. The high DPS makes it perfect against bosses and stronger enemies, while also efficient against swarms of weaker enemies due to its high firing rate.

Which brings me to the next issue - with hordes of weaker enemies, at some point, the numbers stop mattering. If there is a choke point that allows a limited amount of enemies to pass through, at some point your defenses with 3-4 turrets can destroy any number of enemies faster than they can pass through. Increasing the amount of enemies makes no difference. So we needed some stronger enemeis to add to the mix, which required a slightly different strategy, and allowed us to better control the difficulty curve. There are now 4 sizes of each enemy - small, regular, large and boss. small, regular, and to a lesser degree large enemies can show up in the map while exploring. Bosses only show up in higher difficulty raids, and can challenge your low-DPS area of effect towers.

This is step one, in future updates we'll add more weapons, defenses and abilities - each better suited against different enemies - which will also consist of more unique types. We'll add special bosses in the map guarding unique treasures, and other goodies to make combat more interesting.

Management mode

There's a lot going on in Dream Engines. You have a city to manage, a world to explore, enemies to fight, and a steambot to customize. Each of these requires different controls, and mixing them all together is a challenge that could get confusing for players. Most city-building games let you left-click a building to open it, but fighting and exploration requires left-click to attack. So, to make things easier and less complex, we decided to separate them.

In comes management mode. Previously, pressing space-bar opened the strategic view, which changed the camera angle and added some info and buttons on the map. Now, space-bar toggles between combat mode and management mode, and each mode behaves very differently.

In management mode, left-clicking does not trigger an attack. Instead, it can be used to open a building's interface, and lets you manage these buildings without having to move your steambot near each building you want to open. Management mode is now the only mode in which you can build, move, and demolish buildings, and we added keyboard shortcuts to select buildings and categories.

In combat mode, left and right clicking are used to attack with your Steambot's weapons. The keyboard shortcuts that would let you select buildings in management mode now let you activate quick-bar items and abilities. Re-using the same keys like this was not possible before when there was a single control scheme.

Ammunition

After a lot of thought and uncertainty whether adding ammunition to the game will make it more interesting or just add micromanagement, we decided to add it in a fairly simplified manner, another small consideration into how you fight enemies with your steambot. Ranged weapons now have an additional drawback compared to melee, in the form of using up ammunition.

At the moment there is only one ammo type used by all weapons, it is a global resource (so you don't need to deal with inventory management), and it is fairly easy to produce. It does cost some resources and Flux, so players will be a bit better off economically if they use less ranged weapons and more melee, but it's not a blocker on using ranged weapons.

In the future, we are considering different ways to expand on this - exotic weapons that are very strong but use more expensive ammo, maybe even some that use ammo which you can only find, and can't produce or craft. Another option is switching ammo for the same weapon, with different costs & beneifts.

The management/combat mode separation also freed up some screen real-estate to show currently equipped weapons & their ammo in the HUD.

Title screen & music

We have a brand new title screen, that comes with a new original music score by Alon Kaplan. This beautiful piece will serve as Dream Engines' main theme.