Announce post #3434: Pylons

Autoposter

11/7/2022 at 3:13
Keroc, the Starborn
Everyone
Pylons

Hi folks,

Following the damage of pylons across all cities during the War of Night, it is with a little ingenuity and hard work that the pylons have finally been fixed and brought back to life! This encompasses a bunch of changes to certain city systems and is more about laying down some groundwork and mechanisms for the future.

The first thing I want people to know is that all Research trees have been cut down from 8 abilities into simply 5. In a lot of cases the abilities weren't really relevant anymore, kind of broken, or just unlocked things in a way that didn't have a purpose anymore. I've made a point about trimming these abilities away, but its not going to be true for all of them. Some abilities I've instead trimmed back intending to make use of them in other places (Anatomy specifically falls under this, before anyone asks).

Along with now having a max of five ranks, I've had to update the numbers behind researching/upkeeping a tree:

New base ylem cost per rank:
- Rank 1: 200 ylem
- Rank 2: 650 ylem
- Rank 3: 1100 ylem
- Rank 4: 1550 ylem
- Rank 5: 2000 ylem

New base cost to unlock ylem ranks:
- Rank 1: 50000 ylem
- Rank 2: 100000 ylem
- Rank 3: 150000 ylem + 500000 gold
- Rank 4: 200000 ylem
- Rank 5: 300000 ylem + 1000000 gold

Additionally the penalties for researching extra trees have been fixed (doesn't affect upkeep):
- 2nd tree is 15% more.
- 3rd tree is 20% more.
- 4th tree and onwards is 25% more.

Beyond that, most of it is just re-ordering where abilities lie and fixing a lot of code on the backend. Do note that I'm not completely done with the ylem system, so expect that there will likely be more tweaks and fixes to come.

A detailed changelog can be found below:

Research
====================
- All trees have been cut down to 5 abilities.
* I've mostly tried to trim out stuff that isn't super relevant anymore.
* Some things I've decided to keep out and will potentially be reused in the future for different systems.
- New Rank 3 Military ability: Territory.
- New Rank 4 Military ability: Engineering.
- Reworked Rank 5 Military ability: Conduit.
- Rank 1 Military ability renamed to Scouting, was Vision.
- Rank 2 Religion ability renamed to Missionary, was Aegis.
- Rank 3 Manipulation ability renamed to Upsurge, was Resonance.
- Rank 4 Commerce ability renamed to Innovation, was Trademastery.

Modifications
=====================
- Modifications have been moved into the Manipulation research ability and is the base ability of the Manipulation tree.
- Each active rank in the Manipulation tree grants you the ability to enable 3 modifications.
- The Aechrian Coil upgrade description has been updated in HELP RESEARCH to show that it allows city modifications to be used in Albedos.
* It already did this, this is more of a clarification.

Skills
====================
- New Refining Skill: Disperse.
- Receptacle has been moved from its own research ability into Innovation.
* It's also been moved from Enchantment into Forging.
- An attuned Aegis now only has 4 glyphs that are active on it that can affect others.
* When Ensorcelled, it becomes 6.
* The new Conduit ylem power will allow attuned Aegis in the city to become 6.
* This means that aegis attuned outside of a city can only have 4 active glyphs right now.

There are also some changes to the guard/conscript system to accommodate the new Engineering research ability, as they do provide an extra defensive bonus to cities:

Complacency
====================
- Guards no longer receive a 20% damage boost below 5% complacency.
- Complacency now always recovers 5% per a real-life day.
- Complacency now only buffs the radius of call for help by 3 rooms (max), down from 5.
- Chance for complacency to drop per guard death is now 2 in 3, down from 3 in 4.

Conscription
====================
- Conscription of troops and/or guards now costs 1 wheat each to hire.
- Each city has been granted 5000 wheat on top of what they already had collected.

Penned by my hand on Kinsday, the 10th of Severin, in the year 506 MA.

Elene

Some questions:

- Is there a commodities cost or ylem cost attached to the siege weapons in Military tree?

- When you say it costs 1 wheat each per conscription of troops and guards, do you mean like... 100 troops = 100 wheat?

- *EDIT* Apparently Aechrian Coil isn't new, it was just never ever written in HELP RESEARCH

Keroc

Elene said:

Some questions:

- Is there a commodities cost or ylem cost attached to the siege weapons in Military tree?

Yes, CITY SIEGE TYPES will show you! It was bugged and showing the syntaxes only for gods. Whoops!

Elene said:

- When you say it costs 1 wheat each per conscription of troops and guards, do you mean like... 100 troops = 100 wheat?

Yep, 100 troops is 100 wheat for now. We'll see how it goes.