Future plans for 0.6

With the release of 0.5, I thought I’d share what my plans are for 0.6.

First off, I expect this update to take longer than 0.5: much of the work for 0.5 was already done when I first released AE, and on top of that I expect 0.6 to be at least as big a jump for the game.

There are many features I have planned, and I will cover them in devblogs over the weeks and months of coding 0.6, but for now I want to highlight the biggest change: simulating the actions of every individual member of your little society.

Currently, in 0.5, your people are simulated as groups; exactly the nature of these groups is dynamic and changes with how you decide to divide them up, but still, this limits how realistically your people can act.

For example, in the current patch it is quite difficult to manipulate workers: giving extra wages to factory workers while cutting the wages of hospital employees often doesn’t help you, since the extra money is sometimes distributed via the groups instead of going directly into the pockets of each worker. Currently you’d have to create a unique class for that workplace.

With individual humans simulated, not only would you be able to tactically stop strikes at certain workplaces to prevent a wider revolution (which is difficult at the moment), you would even be able to pay each individual worker different wages within the workplace, so as to divide their loyalties and prevent strikes. And that’s just workplaces; imagine how complex the market will be with hundreds of individual humans buying and selling (and complexity leads to new possible strategies such as market manipulation, monopolising certain goods etc.)

Though it may wait for 0.7, simulating individual workers would mean YOU could play as an individual worker; perhaps if you get booted out of your job as leader, you have to find a job and pay rent in the society you built (and suffer from your own previous mistakes as glorious leader).

Based on my previous work, I’d guess 0.6 will take several months to complete, but I shall keep you updated every now and again on my progress, and of course I will continue to release bugfixes etc. for 0.5.

Thanks for reading, good luck building your Apocalyptic Empires!