Gotlands first forest

In this post we wanted to share a quick preview of some of the mid season updates that we are working on and that will hit live servers in a not to distant future.

Gotland now has forests

As part of our ongoing effort to make Imperia Borealis just as beautiful as the real deal, we have added a new system for content aware forests. This means that player actions carve out space in the forest to create beautiful groves or forest roads.

With this feature we also introduce a content aware map zoom, that reduce details as you zoom out. As the player base grows the map "clutter" increases, this new feature is meant to still keep the parish map easy to understand and navigate, but without loosing critical information. Any feedback on this new feature is much appreciated.

Master craftsmen

Imperia Borealis is designed with trade in mind. We want there to be incentives for players to trade between them. The issue that we have had is that, currently all resources are eventually available to all estates. There is no specialization in the game that would give rise to scarcity or incentive to trade goods or wares.

With the master craftsmen system we take a step in that direction by giving players the option to specialize their estate further into a few tracks.

To produce luxury goods (highest tier of goods) you are now required to "ascend" an expert by level up a combination of skills. This will make the expert a master of that craft (amber, alchemy etc) and, when assigned to the appropriate building(s) can start to produce that resource.

The number of master craftsmen is capped so that not every luxury item can be made from a single estate. The goal here is to create a market for resources that a player cannot produce on their own (by trading resources that they can produce).

This system only affects the top tier of resources, we don't want a system that blocks player progression, lower tier resources can still be produces as normal.

Catalyst rebalance

Catalysts can currently be obtained in two ways: By having access to a special location on the map, or through level 6+ outposts.

When we designed catalysts the design goal was to introduce a resource that wasn't available through normal production in the estate, that could give a tangible improvement to players that did have access to them and therefore could create some friction in the game.

Over time catalysts have drifted from this goal and have become requirements for estate progression. For example, steel, beer, glass and salt currently requires catalysts to produce. Instead of realizing the design error and making the right choice of removing catalysts as a requirement for progression, we instead applied band-aids to introduce catalysts passively to each estate through outposts. This not only bloated the design of outposts, it also removed the friction that we wanted to achieve with catalysts and in the same stroke, de-valued them as items of trade.

With the next update catalysts now only matter for luxury item (working together with the aforementioned master craftsmen update), special locations becomes more valuable and catalysts also trade for substantially more in foreign kontör trades.

Estate decay and inactivity

While we are not currently at that point, when Imperia Borealis reaches a higher player count, we are faced with an interesting design challenge in that there is only so many estate slots on the map to claim. Eventually the island will be full and no new estates can be placed.

One of the ways to combat this is the new estate decay system. The system works by flagging inactive estates after a period of time, once flagged the player will get a notification via email that their estate is about to go into decay. Once in the decay state the estate is free for any other player to attack and pillage without retaliation. After another shorter period the estate is then removed from the realm and the estate slot is freed for new players to claim.

The state of an estate is telegraphed by icons on the estate.

One important thing to note here is that there is a difference between an ACCOUNT and an ESTATE. Loosing your estate to decay does not remove any achievment, cosmetic, title or rewards that you have gained or purchased on your account. They are still there for you to use once you return again.

Vacation mode

In tandem with the estate decay system we are also introducing vacation mode. Sometimes you just don't have the time to login and play, and that is totally fine. Vacation mode essentially freezes your estate from producing resources, it cannot be attacked or attack but it also greatly slows down the inactivity/decay timer. The vacation mode can be activated in the settings menu but has a 48 hour activation delay so that it cannot be abused as a panic combat shield.

Small UI / UX fixes

There are also quite a few smaller fixes to the UI, to road generation and to the UX of some game systems.

This is something we are always iterating on, if you feel that some part of the game feels clunky or looks out of place, please let us know.

Fin

I hope this entry has given some insight into the upcoming changes and the reasoning behind them.

You can try out Imperia Borealis today for free at Imperia Borealis