Vapourware Clockwork Empires, now in Earliest Access.

[Hellraiser]

Whisky

The steampunk meets lovecraftian cosmic horror bastard child of Dwarf Fortress with an actual GUI is now available in Earliest Access. That's basically early access a month before it appears in steam early access, because reasons. Fuck if I know.

Unlike with the usual cat in the bag brand of early access vapourware, the game has an actual fucking project page which shows what is done, what is to be done and what pieces of the game are in what state of completion. Which shows that at the very least the devs know how to fake being competent and having a plan, unlike most early access devs.

FYI if you want to buy the buggy alpha now it's windows only for now and it doesn't start for international versions of windows, particularly the Frogeater and Potato ones. KURWA!

Being the sucker for DF clones that I am, I will use my potatogold to buy this piece of software as soon as my paycheck comes and possibly write my impressions ITT. But only after they fix the "does not work on the Polish version of Windows 7" bug. Also I foolishly believe the devs are competent because I got brainwashed by reading their dev blogs on this game for the past year or so. And because they quote and often reference Alpha Centauri. Also it has cabbage.

I hope this game has potato and not just cabbage for you to grow.

FYI here's a list of reasons why this might be the DF clone to actually match or surpass DF when it is done:
- proper simulation of colonists, colonists divided into social strata
- fun in the form of cults worshipping cosmic horrors, communist uprisings from your prole colonists, fishpeople attacks
- it uses actual mineral ores like tetrahedryte and hematite
- it will have pipes, electricity and other fun industrial things to build and malfunction spectacularly killing your colonists
- monocles
- an actual GUI
- done by people who are not total autists and/or weekend game developers and coders.

 

[TripJack]

hopefully they haven't infected this game with retardo nurd humor like they did with their shitty roguelike

 

[Whiran]

quill18 did an "earliest access" preview of it on youtube:

http://youtu.be/a99lVgYVdSY?list=UUbx1TZgxfIauUZyPuBzEwZg

It looks intriguing to me. We'll see how it develops.

 

[Hobo Elf]

The building reminds me a lot like Theme Hospital. Game looks pretty good but I'll wait for it to be finished.

 

[Hellraiser]

I spent a minor portion of my monthly kartofelgeld fur arbeit on acquiring this. Surprisingly the issue with potato windows 7 only relates to having a system username in windows with language specific characters like the potato "ł, ż, ź, ś, ć, ę, ą, ń" you get the idea. I figure if you are a kraut and have an umlaut or two in your username that also causes crashes.

Some impressions/observations, not a whole lot since it's not all that stable yet and savegames are not yet in but will be soon:
- it runs like ass. Code needs optimization.
- you can make fishpeople steaks.
- even noble soldiers of his/her majesty are not free from falling under the spell of communism.
- game has an event system with decisions allowing for C&C potential. Basically stuff like immigration "send them away(- prestige)/take one overseer/three of whatever you've got (+prestige). A similar event for supply drops from zeppelins and what you want from the Homeland. Once the metagame layer of diplomacy is introduced I could see how it could be used for more FUN.
- designing buildings is fun, though it could use some UI/keyboard shortcuts, or at least more obvious ones. Also you can't do walls inside the building and have multiple rooms yet. Unless you need to do that by building separate buildings next to each other.
- optional modules for buildings, basically stuff like powersaws for carpenter's workshops and similar. Also loading bay doors.
- the map is covered in fog of war, so unlike DF there's more exploration.
- real world minerals are in, though I am not sure what the merits of malachite are or if mining tetrahedrite yields any silver yet besides copper. Ore nodes are surface only so no 3D mining.
- simulation is pretty good, colonists get their own randomly generated backgrounds, traits (like bee lover, scholar, communist etc.) and aptitude towards different jobs or their current social standing.

Overall, apart from the lack of savegames and poor performance, I would say it's better than Spacebase DF-9, at least as far as the depth of game mechanics is concerned.

 

[LESS T_T]

Now on Steam Early Access

http://store.steampowered.com/app/224740/

 

[Hellraiser]

Played some more earlier today, without the game crashing oddly enough. Could use game saving.

Colonists will cannibalize the corpses of the dead if very hungry. But they go insane from it. So if your colony is on a downwards spiral of hunger you may see a "cult activity is dangerously high in your colony - click to panic (sic!)" notification pop up. Not sure if they summon cosmic horrors yet.

Prairie/colorado or new mexico-esque biome spawns saguaro and huge rock outcroppings, perfect for masonry industry.

Harvesting "exotic" (read: fishpeople) caviar tends to attract more fishpeople attacks, the corpses of which you can turn into steaks. I smell perfect opportunity for a fishpeople harvesting enterprise.

New crop cultivation system makes growing crops and feeding the colony harder. I can see how fertilizer production might be crucial now.

Loading bay doors are great for industrial plants even without any vehicles.

I wish you could build indoor stockpiles.

While the game does run sluggish and needs optimization, exploring and revealing the procedurally generated map doesn't seem to tax the system resources much.

Needs more FUN events that are harder to deal with than fishpeople, although to be honest it lacks the probably because I have not played enough or because there are no save games yet, so there's no reason to implement more challenge at this point. That and the current combat system is a placeholder and it is supposed to get a a major overhaul in the future.

 

[Hellraiser]

They implemented save games finally but I constantly get a crash when I try to overwrite the first save file. Probably an issue on my end, need to look at their forum for details on whether it is or not.

Some highlights from the new weekly experimental build:
- FISHPEOPLE ARE NOW ARMED. No longer do they come with mere scale-covered bare hands, now they carry crude melee weapons as well as ichtious firearms.
- Fishpeople have morale now, can panic and retreat.
- more stuff to grow on farms, including flax, sugar canes and chili peppers, although some are non-functional for now (as in not used by anything further up the industrial chain). I actually hope they introduce biome-specific climate later on which allows you to grow only some crops in some biomes.
- cultists now plant nefarious eldritch plants amongst your crops. Sane colonists get rid of these cosmic horror weeds. Not sure if eating the vile plants causes insanity like cannibalism does, but it most certainly eats into your precious farming team manhours as they need to get rid off these evil crops.
- new memories and traits, lower class colonists get less traits than upper class colonists, overall a nice expansion of colonist simulation.
- Gabions to better fortify your colony against the ichtious menace.
- some graphical optimization that's not done yet and will crash, that doesn't work on AMD cards for now anyway.
- tutorial messages on game start, can be skipped.

 

[Hellraiser]

All praise be to the Holy Cog and its blessing of industry, for it brought a new experimental build that fixes stuff, mostly. The monthly update is supposed to happen soon(tm), which will bring all the experimental build stuff into the main branch, after they fix the main bugs introduced in the experimental builds.

Save games seem to be mostly fixed. I got only one crash on saving so far. Saving twice in a row no longer seems to crash the game.

Optimization happened, far better framerates. Game is a lot more stable, had only one out-of-the-blue crash. With the save game crash that's just two for a whole afternoon of playing. A big improvement at least for me.

Farming/hunger re-balancing. Basically it turned out that the starting supplies aren't enough to feed every colonist to full once. So now there is more food in the starting supplies, a one time emergency food bailout event (which carries a prestige penalty) and some tweaking to the whole farm->cooked food production line.

You can now set work crews of proles to become colonial militias. For now there don't seem to be any differences between a militia and a military squad, but combat is very bare-bones.

Also I'm not sure if they did anything with fishpeople since the last experimental build, apart from fixing the bug that disabled butchering fishpeople corpses, but their attacks become quite lethal after the first 10 days of ingame time.

Food bailout event is bugged because it uses the same timer variable as the supply drop (was probably mostly copy pasted from that event, r00fles). Which means it constantly prevents supply drops. Luckily you can fix that yourself as the events are quite moddable by design it seems, need to just change one line in the event script file for the drop. Also took a sneak peak at other events, some of which are fun.

In other news I discovered that yes, I do not need to click every rock/tree/bush individually to set a job on it, but I can just drag a selection box and a context menu showing all available jobs shows up. Which allows you to mine multiple nodes or forage multiple resources that use the same job type at the same time with less clicking. Pardon if this seems obvious, but after DF such UI features do not.

 

[Hellraiser]

September Update is out and surprise, the monthly update includes extra stuff that was NOT in the experimental branch, here's the changelog. I bolded shit that wasn't in the experimental builds:

Spoiler

Clockwork Empires v31 update: “Conscript Steelcog versus THE MURDERCULT”

New Features Overview

• Cults do more interesting things (murder, farm sabotage, shrines)
• A new monster may appear (in very special circumstances)
• Added Tropical biome (new plants, new animals, new crops, new foods to cook, and lots of Fishpeople)
• Many improvements to farming and crops
• Militia conscription added and military control improved
• Fishpeople now have guns, feelings; may eat your colonists.
• First pass at almost-zero draw overhead (AZDO) pass (requires config file opt-in)
• Lots of texture cleanup to reduce memory footprint of game

And much more! Everything is basically better, details below.

Detailed Update Changelog

Engine/Rendering

• First pass at almost-zero draw overhead (AZDO) pass
• We did lots of texture resizing and texture cleanup to reduce memory footprint of game
• Save/load implemented
• Save/load stability improved
• unicode username support (for users with non-English characters in their windows username)
• performance improvements
• fixed many crashes
• FIXED: Save crash when saving a game after a character has been buried
• FIXED: Save crash when creating a job with a triple dependency
• fixed yet more crashes
• some really weird rendering errors fixed

Biomes/Terrain

• added new tropical embark position
• can select tropical embark position on embark map
• added a ton of new content for tropical biomes
• biome generators modified for tropical biome creation

Characters

• FIXED: crash when attempting to drop a body
• FIXED: corpse dropping errors
• FIXED: crash caused by going into infinite loop of trying to drop temporary tools
• FIXED: crash with overseer jobs being deleted
• fixed up some memory icons (incl. temp fix for frontier justice memory icon)
• added “Military Training” trait (and a couple others, for fun)
• FIXED: sleeping is not 10x as fast as intended
• immigration event pulls from a limited set of colonist types (rather than ANY valid)
• Colonists now given from 1-3 traits. (Lower classes get one only. Military characters always get “military training”.)
• Added a significant number of new memories for citizens to experience.
• Some traits now have physical effects
• Added militia footsoldier & NCO uniforms
• Soldiers now start with weapons
• FIXED: afflictions and damage assignment bugs
• Colonists can form friendships
• Making friends makes people happy
• FIXED: freezing in place when approached by fishpeople
• made eating raw food less desirable
• Can now form militias via militia button & assign civilians to military squads as militia
• “sacrificial dagger” is now a valid weapon
• Possessive pronouns now correctly added to character memory descriptions
• Axe murder re-added
• Cultists will now build creepy little shrines
• Cultists can turn into REDACTED
• a starving colony will receive one food bailout from the Colonial Ministry
• FIXED: workcrew job category filter toggles (though more categories need to be added; some jobs are awkwardly categorized eg. foraging/farming)
• combat tasks now prioritized over hunting /unless/ character is “Big Game Hunter”
• FIXED: memories not being removed

Combat/Military

• civilian workcrews can be conscripted to transform into a militia squad
• civilian labourers can be moved to a military squad to become militia soldiers
• militia soldiers are less good at combat, civilians w/o certain traits become upset when conscripted
• rally points can be set per military squad
• Military loadouts (as in, soldiers try to keep a gun handy)

Fishpeople

• Fishpeople now have morale & will run when they’ve had enough
• Fishpeople morale affected by combat & seeing death
• Fishpeople now have weapons, including guns
• Adjusted quality/quantity of fishpeople attacks slightly toward “quality”
• Fishpeople attack spawns slightly fewer fishpeople (now that they have weapons)
• FIXED: fishpeople now have gibs
• FIXED: various issues with attack_melee and fishpeople using melee weapons
• FIXED: fishpeople weapons not added to player commodity list on spawn
• fishpeople made more aggressive in tropical biome

REDACTED

• REDACTED now have “armoured” tag and more hitpoints

Animals

• FIXED herbivore run animations
• FIXED: people no longer think that killing animals is murder
• Aurochs is no longed tagged “dodo”
• Added “Giant Beetle” to tropical biome, can be hunted & butchered
• Added “Junglefowl” to tropical biome, can be hunted & butchered
• FIXED: “Junglefowl” no longer shoots out giant gibs
• FIXED: hunting animals should no longer trigger combat music

UI/UX

• Alerts can be put on job requirements when job requirements fail, with snooze timers.
• Click & drag rectangle performance improved
• Work Crew job filters fixed
• some sounds added to main menu
• some sounds added to click & drag order creation
• FIXED some missing commodity icons
• Icon displayed on receiving affliction should no longer stack if character receives lots of damage in a short period
• spoiled crops now generates alert
• lacking guns for military will generate alert
• character info window expanded slightly
• sounds added to some UI buttons
• sounds added when giving orders via click & drag

Buildings/Zones

• Gabions can be built and work! Build gabions!
• adjusted utility of gabion construction (no longer higher than basic military duties)
• Added fieldstone foundation textures to a bunch of low-tier buildings
• Turned off “make stone bricks” job (stone blocks will be treated separately from bricks)
• Short wander added to end of dropping item in stockpile (to stop people from stockpiling themselves)
• First pass on adding particle effects to modules (this is really cool – ovens make smoke, etc.)
• added low-end “stone oven” module
• balance: food cooking time halved
• FIXED: issues with graveyards
• improvements to chairs/table placement
• one work crew will now work together to construct all modules in the building
• improved minor trim textures on procedural buildings
• FIXED: workers no longer attempt to make coconut curry directly from coconut palm tree
• new food commodities added: preserved orange cup fungus, preserved white cup fungus, sugar loaf, molasses, rum, chicha, moonshine, maize, maize stew, coconuts, coconut curry, chillies, etc?

Natural Objects

• Clay and Sand are now mined with a shovel rather than a pickaxe
• Doubled berrybush exhaustion chance
• Stone outcrop spawning increased
• Made starting colony biome more consistently temperate (to distinguish from tropics)
• clearables now can require varying amounts of work to clear (grass is easy to clear, shrubs less easy)
• added foraegable Coconut Palm to tropical biomes
• added more fungus varieties for tropical biomes
• improvements to various textures to read better when zoomed out

Farming

• Crops planted/tended by mad cultists will occasionally be Evil
• Evil plants will be removed by non-mad non-cultists
• Removing evil crops is upsetting
• added sfx to “till soil” job
• People farming will now sow seeds in addition to hoeing the fields
• Added new agricultural crops: sugarcane, chilli peppers, redid maize
• Some more crops rescaled (I heard you like big cabbages.)
• improved maize models
• various balance adjustments to make farming more forgiving
• corruption particle effects added to corrupted crops
• FIXED: harvesting corrupted/spoiled crops no longer causes errors
• rebalanced priority of farming jobs
• crops can now be set per-biome, tropical crops only grow in tropical colonies, temperate crops in temperate colonies
• sounds added to tilling soil, for real!
• FIXED: nil index errors

Misc.

• made curry really good
• Removed some FSM console spam, made other parts actually say what was printing them (so they are now useful console spammers)
• This was a real commit message: “- made steak biome look more appetizing”

tl;dr

Tropical biome! Cultist plotting bloodymurder! Hunting Giants beetles for meat! Climate specific crops!

Wonder what redacted is, probably the steam knight. Either that or prosper.

 

[Angthoron]

Oh yeah, by the way, can you kill those cow creatures yet? I was trying to figure it out but somehow my villagers would sooner start killing each others to cannibalize, than kill the cows.

 

[Hellraiser]

Oh yeah, by the way, can you kill those cow creatures yet? I was trying to figure it out but somehow my villagers would sooner start killing each others to cannibalize, than kill the cows.

Aurochs? Hunting job types are by default disabled for all work crews. You need to access the work crew screen and enable hunting jobs for whatever crew you want, they'll automatically pick up weapons and shoot any huntable critter within visual range. Although I recommend using your militia squads to do that as you want them to have weapons on them at all times anyway, in case of fish people attacks. If you have cook steak and similar jobs set at the kitchen your colonists should automatically butcher nearby corpses of dead game for the meat needed by the job.

It's a bit counter-intuitive, as you'd expect to be able to order to hunt them via clicking on them and selecting a "hunt" job.

They changed militia rally points, they are now on the work crews screen next to the "form militia out of work crew" button. So now you can finally have more than one squad deployed in key points around the colony. Although I wish the button for that was in the military command menu. Also setting squads to militias turns everybody into a soldier now.

Oh and most importantly, FISHPEOPLE HAVE NAMES NOW (like "Mersk-iaia"). And yes, they do butcher corpses of your colonists and eat the "long pork" produced in the process. Witnessing said cannibalism does upset and/or cause your colonists to lose sanity as in the case of regular human on human meat cannibalistic action.

 

[Hellraiser]

Newest experimental build made soldiers finally behave properly. They prioritize murdering fishpeople instead of building gabions or other tasks.

Also they added a Chapel building which helps with cults somehow and fishpeople now can use their grenades. And there are some new animals. And you can finally assign work crews to workshops manually. And job AI has been cleaned up so it works better.

 

[Hellraiser]

So the monthly update for November added Vicars and Churches purging eldritch heresy and bandit attacks (they have camps) which try to rob you blind.

Also they're working on a prestige menu to call in favors in exchange for prestige, which looks rather nice:

I'll need to check that shit out and update the LP.

 

[Hellraiser]

In case anyone needed an update on progress for this, and also because I enjoy talking to myself (typing, actually), here's what they added and are adding soon(tm):
- bandit attacks who come to steal your shit (these are great)
- eldritch artifacts, which can be found by naturalist and studied by scientists in a laboratory (for prestige? not sure)
- laboratories where SCIENCE can be done by having said scientists become mad
- finally working workshop UI buttons, advanced queue features (repeat until at least X in stock), ability to manually assign and reassign
- vicars purifying heresy by becoming cultists themselves and spreading the worship of the elder ones
- the above mentioned use prestige to buy shit menu (you get to call in favors every X days). Oh, and you can totally use it to get prisoners for free, in case you feel like recreating Australia (they spawn with the relevant criminal-ish traits).
- a nice zeppelin supply drop animation (crate falling on a parachute, kind of like in worms). Also supply drop amounts are finally affected by prestige.
- animals eat food, more food recipies and some other minor stuff.

They're working on adding industrial accidents and maintenance for machinery and sub-surface mining (though abstracted).

Of course, the damn thing is still a bit unstable and keeps crashing but less so than in the past. And it needs optimization. Still, I figure it is a safe bet to say so far this and Rimworld are closest to capturing what made DF great. Though it needs more shit to do (more FUN), like trade, colonial warfare (I want to kill Stahlmarkians!), natives, communist uprisings.

 

[Makabb]

Is it one of those games that you buy 2 years after release at 90%

 

[Ulminati]

It's one of those games that'll be in "early access" forever

 

[Hellraiser]

Is it one of those games that you buy 2 years after release at 90%

Pretty much.

It's one of those games that'll be in "early access" forever

Nah, probably another 2 years at most. Unless they end up without a budget and/or grants from the kwanadian government.

The colony building and simulation frameworks, and the GUI, are finally at a state where you can say they are acceptable. Now it just needs a few more advanced mechanics (sub-surface mining, trade and commerce, colonial diplomacy and warfare, steampower and/or electricity) plus content (events, FUN, artillery guns with which to bring civilization to the savage natives). And the metagame layer. And stability/optimization.

Yeah, 2 years.

 

[Sranchammer]

The alpha-zation of gaming has gone too far

 

[Ulminati]

We need a new term for "early access" software that will remain "early access" for years before being abandoned by devs (and maybe getting a token '1.0' appended to placate the lawyers.

 

[LESS T_T]

"Abandonware"

Or Early Abandonware.

 

[almondblight]

Hopefully they don't fall into the endless fiddling hell of some early access games.

Hey guys, I know it's been six months since the last release, but we've been working on a ton of stuff. I know you guys are going to be really excited:

• The cool down for rifles has been reduced from 1.7 seconds to 1.5 seconds. It took us several weeks to find the right cool down length, but hopefully we have it now. We might revisit this issue later.
  
• Peasants can now harvest a secondary crop even if they haven't returned the harvest they gathered from the first crop, provided they have space left.
• Our new fatigue system. Previously, a peasant could only do a job for a certain amount of time before stopping. Now, each job costs a certain amount of fatigue, and when the fatigue reaches a certain point they stop.
• blah blah blah

I know we say this every time, but I really feel like we're almost done locking down the core mechanics. Once we've finished that we start making the campaign.

Comments from the five people still playing the game after 8 years in early access:

Holy shit! Feels like a completely different game. Keep up the good work and take your time!

The new mechanics really ruin the game. May I suggest that instead [long list of other minor bullshit tweaks].

 

[sser]

Really excited for this one, but I can't help but think it just looks rather unfixable. I have a feeling that it's going to be in EA-hell for awhile and then just shoved out the door for '1.0 release' as a buggy mess with lagging developer support.

 

[Alienman]

Yeah, I'm starting to feel it was a mistake buying this in early access. The game so far shows a lot of potential, but there is basically zero hype behind the game. No-one buying EA = No dev-money = Early buggy underwhelming 1.0 release with 85% of the features removed because of time / money restraint.

 

[Norfleet]

Of course it was a mistake. It's a violation of the established rules. Imagine that you go to work, but instead of BEING paid, you have to PAY to work there. That's what you're doing.

It's the same baffling behavior that people have been suckered into with this "Kickstarter" thing. I was like, "Wait, you want me to invest MY money so that YOU can rich and I get...what, exactly, should this succeed? Not even my money back?". I realize that it is not intended as a vehicle for profit maximization, but I think it's still reasonable to expect something better than what amounts to an FU...like, oh, I dunno, my money back, or something.