Currently, Archeo: Shinar uses the Unity game engine's DirectX 11 renderer. However, on a small number of systems we've found it can be less stable and sometimes cause crashes (or frame drops) for some users. You can use the steps below to force DirectX 9 mode, which might potentially improve stability for you, at the potential cost of image quality and performance issues. This solution worked for all of our study cases.
We have seen that a lot of players struggle to finish the game, even on easy. That's why we decided to add a simple cheat. We have tested the cheat and put a limit on it (you can't get more than 100k money using it in a single play) to make sure everything is stable (AI sanity especially). This should not only make it easier to finish the game just for the story but also allows to change starting conditions (or to give an advantage to someone) during local multiplayer (custom games). For now, it's just a simple cheat, but we want more than that, we want to allow players to customize custom games even more. However, in our industry, and in life, one needs resources to realize goals. It will take some time to deliver more advanced updates. We are here, working for all of our supporters, on Archeo and also on an unannounced project. With this little update, we wanted to present a fix to the DirectX bug and force a simple cheat allowing you to mess with the game.
Cheers!
We have fixed minor issues, created a new task log for next month and prepare the game for further changes. It may not look impressive like story DLC or localization, but the game needed this minor changes. Our next update should cover a few more fixes and options, like hiding Cuppy or introducing a Cheat for the easiest difficulty. We have seen a lot of players wanted to enjoy the story without the struggle. However, the localization won't be that easy for our game. A lot of text is in various forms, tabs and 'flexible' frames. Changing language could cause havoc in the interface and we're going to prepare the game for this scenario. Thank you for your support, warm and kind words, but also for your constructive critique and contribution to our small but growing community. Cheers!
Commentary: New way to spend exclusive license with guarantee effect, relations reports, Chess Club, new interface and more. We encourage you to learn more in Archeopedia or in the new tutorial.
Commentary: A notification when the player tries to click on demand when there’s no demanded artifact in the warehouse.
Commentary: With new features Archeopedia needs adjustments. We added there everything about expedition reports, forecasts, new gazettes and so on.
Commentary: No more raw paychecks. The player will get a detailed report including every explorer and overdue value.
Commentary: We have implemented a brand new tutorial divided into 5 parts. The fifth part isn’t released, because we want to keep it for the full release. To access the second tutorial the player needs to finish the first one.
Commentary: For TAoDJ’s favours player couldn’t go back even if there was a need to check which opponent is a threat.
Commentary: The player won’t find expensive artifacts on easy expeditions, and vice versa, the player won’t find cheap artifacts on very difficult expeditions.
Commentary: We wanted to give more credit to explorers’ skills. Overall high skilled explorers are going to find more artifacts.
Commentary: Sponsoring gives 9 instead of 5 items and for one favour the player can get 1 free item.
Commentary: The 3 cheapest artifacts won’t be demanded anymore. If a player needs money and decides to sell artifacts on demand, the cheapest artifacts won’t save the budget. This way there will be more space on demand for other artifacts.
Commentary: The 6 cheapest artifacts won’t be on sale on Black Market. The reason is that there’s no point to do so. The player just doesn’t need to buy cheap artifacts.
Commentary: There’s a shady auction man. Cuppy refers to him in the tutorial, but it’s also an indicator for the player, which shows if the player has already bid in this round.
Old save files won’t work with the new update!
The texts were implemented and tested, but the feature isn’t working as intended. We need to adjust it because for now, it’s just a bunch of silly comments on expeditions. We’re going to make it more immersive, divide them according to the location of an expedition and we want third flavour text on every expedition to be something more. For now, the flavour texts could get contradictory with random events, we cannot allow such a thing to happen. The feature needs more love and attention, and we are willing to spend more time on it because we feel that in its current state it’s not adding anything to the game.
We’ve been working on it in the meantime, the basic mechanics for mission’s goals are ready. We are testing the feature allowing to save explorers for the next mission. We still polish the story and we are not happy about the Career Lobby interface. If everything goes well, we will be able to determine the release date.
The 5th tutorial (Tactics) will be released with the career mode. The content of this tutorial should be hidden from new players because it could affect the experience. It will be accessible after 4th career mission. The 4th tutorial (Shady Operations) was tested before this update (with all the others), and… it’s confusing for new players. Unlike the 5th tutorial, we don’t need to hide it from new players, but we need to improve it. It should be clear for some that ‘Shady Operations’ means the Black Market, and with the 4th tutorial we want not only to show to you that this part of the game exists, but also teach you how to use it in your strategy. However, the Black Market play depends on a lot of variables, like if the player owns a museum, does the player has enough money for the next salary or does the player know the value of an artifact on sale. Our attempt to show this delicate subject in this tutorial caused only confusion. We decided to cut it out and rework it once again. Probably we will reduce the 4th tutorial and place the extra information in the 5th tutorial or in Archeopedia. Our end goal is to create a smooth learning curve, where the player gets one tutorial after each career mission. This way we can prevent the player from failure due to the lack of knowledge about gameplay rules, but also we don’t need to push everything at once. And the implication of this is that the first missions in the career mode will be easy for the early access players, but they will be able to use their knowledge of the game to complete those missions faster.
With update #03 we wanted to finish the gameplay. In the future, we don’t want to change it (like we did with the press), but we are going to monitor the balance and intervene if there’s something bad happening. The game even after the full release will get our support for at least 6 months, and if any problems or bugs occurs we will fix them. Meanwhile, we are working on career mode. To deliver you a decent story, interesting gameplay and maybe something more we need some time, but it is not going to be years. If you are waiting for the full release we are sure it’s the matter of months now. In the Early Access note, we stated that the full release will be after 3 to 6 months after the early access release, and we are working around the clock to keep this promise.
This is a quick, not planned fix. Thanks to the player ‘Stado Baranów’ we have recreated and fixed a game breaking bug in the last round in the custom game. Next update will be there on time (04.04.2019).
Cheers!
Commentary: Basically player has 3 expeditions to choose from. It’s possible to have more choices due to the train station or other factors (random events). The forecast will deliver information about one out of three basic expeditions in advance. Depending on the difficulty the range of forecast may vary.
Commentary: Prices charts for stimulants, because the player needs to know when the Merchant Company is robbing him and Prices charts for the land market because the player needs to know how much has he (or the bot) overpaid.
Commentary: There will always be 3 boosters to choose from, and the merchant company will try to personalize one of the boosters for the player and his needs.
Commentary: In a nutshell, it won’t be that risky like it is now. Also, all of the cheap Artifacts won’t appear on Black Market’s sales.
Commentary: We want to give every artifact at least one chance to appear on demand. Also, we don’t want cheap artifacts on the demand.
Commentary: To balance the starting condition we want to create situation 2-2-1, which means that on start there will be always 2 explorers addicted to stimulant_1, 2 explorers addicted to stimulant_2 and 1 addicted to stimulant_3. And by 'addicted' we mean that they are very enthusiastic about certain stimulant.
Commentary: Clicking on nobody’s lands or on lands of your opponent will open the brief note about the land.
Commentary: The auctions will be prepared in advance and the player will have the opportunity to plan next moves depending on the quality of the lands and their potential value. The auctions will be executed the same as in the current version, but the schedule will let you consider saving money for the next round.
Commentary: Reports contain all the information about the last expedition. The player can access all reports from the current game in the lobby. It’s super important because the information about the chance of success will be there (and it probably will be 100% or 0%, because Archeo gives % chances only for a certain range of lacking skill, and for Quests with “+” there’s no rng at all). With this tool, the player can learn quicker and better how to evaluate the difficulty of expeditions.
Commentary: Bots are aggressive on the land market, and they should be to prevent the player from buying too many lands. But they were too aggressive because they know that they can’t bankrupt. It should be better now, at least after the first 10 rounds, when we feel they should be aggressive.
Commentary: We feel that our last attempt didn’t solve this problem for the Normal difficulty. We decided to place a brand new algorithm for this difficulty, which allows 100% security if the right stimulant is present. The only negative factor (which means it’s the only reason for getting a fear) is now the lack of the certain stimulant (based on explorer’s addiction)
Commentary: It’s important to see the max. limit od land’s statistics. The player needs to know that a certain value is high or low. With bars, it should be clear.
Commentary: We’ve changed the formula for the random quests. Player probably won’t even see the differences but there are a few. First of all, we’ve terminated raw RNG factor. It was a small value, but after a lot of feedback, we decided to terminate it. After that, we had a void in the formula, and we needed to add a new factor to fill it for the balance. We added new relation for the amount of explorer participating in the random quest with the rule “the more the merrier”.
Commentary: After changes to getting fears on Normal Difficulty, cautious attitude became useless. We decided to buff it to make it a tool for players, who want to save some money on the stimulants but also don’t want to risk too many fears. Nevertheless, cautious attitude always will be a better tool on harder difficulties.
Commentary: It was a game breaking bug, and we are glad it’s solved now.
Commentary: Sometimes it showed the wrong winner.
This update provides adjustments to the gameplay and should help a lot with the understanding of the game. We didn’t want players to spend their time in the archeopedia learning basic and trying to figure it out. Instead, we want the player to learn on his mistakes and gather more and more experience with every other expedition. That’s why we added more tools for predictions and reports.
During our work on Update #02, we also had time to work on the career mode. At this time we know exactly what we can add to the game and what we will add in the next updates.
In next days we’re going to talk with you, the community, about our plans for next updates, for the release and about the career mode. We would love to see your activity and opinions and we hope that our plans and your expectations will meet.
Cheers!
Commentary: The soundtrack is finished. The game still needs more sound effects, but we do not plan to add more music.
Commentary: Due to overwhelming feedback from the community we decided to change the difficulty description. It seems like playing on "old" normal was a challenge for everyone, and "old" hard was a nightmare. It's clear now.
Commentary: A lot of players wonder why the career isn't available. Now there is a temporary message to make it clear.
Commentary: Cuppy's commentary was more like a chore to hide than a pleasure. We decided to make it less frequent.
Commentary: It's impossible to hire more than 7 explorers in round 1. We feel that hiring 9 explorers in round 2 is a bad move and we don't want to encourage new players to do so. There always was at least one expedition for less than 7 explorers, but we do not want players to suffer because some expeditions are beyond their reach.
Commentary: We don't want players to exit the game by mistake.
Commentary: We don't want players to set managers by accident.
Commentary: We heard voices that georadar shouldn't be in the game. We disclaimed that georadar is in right place, but we change its description to better introduce it to the players.
Commentary: We wanted to place a outdated weapon for +3 CC Booster. However, to show you more consistent world we decided to change flintlock to still outdated model of revolver.
Commentary: We wanted to give Attitude more recognition. The bonuses from the attitude are bigger now and we decided for Precarious Attitude to give constant value instead random range.
Commentary: The decision to lose artifact and 1 point of reputation or 3 points of reputation wasn't really a choice. Now it changes to artifact and 1 reputation or 2 reputations. Depends on the artifact it may be better now to keep the artifact instead.
Commentary: The game is hard for the casual players and we want them to feel better after not going bankrupt. By normal we mean new normal (old easy). This opponent has decreased reputation gained in his expeditions. We don't want to make casual player sad by giving him the last place on the summary even on the easiest difficulty. Super Easy Opponent won't appear on other difficulties.
Commentary: Gazettes needed rework and we are not done with them. We've added a new stage of relations and a new stage of interest. The relations will take credit of actions even 3 round ago, the gifts will always have an impact (even if it's a wrong one) in the current round, the right gifts will have more impact and the relations will have even more meaning. Our goal is to despite of story value give a chance for the player to get 100% chances of getting favours. In nutshell, if the player keeps great relations with a certain gazette, the favours will be granted for sure.
Commentary: AI opponents will bid less in further rounds because there is less time to get back the value from the lands. Before that bots statistically bid too high after 12 round.
Commentary: To avoid fears game requires stimulants and Attitude Cautious. We decided to give some slack to the easiest difficulty (old Easy) and stimulants are enough to ensure you that there won't be any problems. It means that Cautious Attitude is pointless on Normal, but makes the game better for the casual player. In the future with better tools to introduce mechanics in career mode we might go back, however, for now, it's better this way.
Commentary: There's just too much misinformation going on and we see that players are struggling with understanding how it works. Now there's a place in the game where you can read more about it.
Commentary: First of all, we set more free space in the character creation process. It's a simple action and everybody knows how to do it. We also decided to make the golden team constant statistics and Cuppy will tell more about Random Quest on expeditions. We cut some text just to not making it longer, but the humorous vibe is still there.
Commentary: We’ve seen that a lot of players are confused by this. We added “+” to the skill name in random quest 1 and random quest 5 to inform you better, that those quests are harder than the common ones. There’s no randomness in those quests, in the quest with + the game checks if you have enough efficiency and if not, then it’s a failure. Also, we decided to change random quest 5 the quest with +. What’s more interesting, those quests are always defined by required skills from expedition description. The reason behind no information about it in the first place, was to introduce it after first career mission, but we see that we cannot wait with this any second longer. Now it should be clear, or at least understandable to the new players.
Commentary: We never intended to make you click this tiny button with your mouse. There was always a function under [esc] button on the keyboard, but only a small fraction of the playerbase tried to push the escape. It should be clear now. And we made the button bigger if you still want to click it with the mouse.
Commentary: Now you get the information about bids on the land market. We want to go in this direction with everything in Archeo, to give player more reports on everything going on behind the scenes. And we feel that it’s a wonderful change for local multiplayer when you can see bids of your opponents in your turn when it’s not recommended to sneak peek when they are bidding. We feel your urge to sneak peek, but if you know that you will no matter what see it later, this urge shouldn’t be that strong.
Commentary: At least the big ones like Linquistics.
We wanted to show to our growing community that we care about our game and about players’ opinion. We are working on Career mode in the background and we have in plans a few adjustments to the gameplay, but with this update, we hope you will feel more secure about Archeo’s future. We focused on fixing bugs and little changes as a response to your opinions. In the next updates, we want to add more to the game, but we know that adding new content and features before fixing the old ones doesn’t look promising to you. Next update will be there in 4 to 6 weeks from now, but we’re going to inform you more about it and probably talk about new features on the community hub.
Cheers!
