Hey! It’s Dev Minutes #4 time. It took a few days to get some interesting topic to show, so here we are. Also please, stick with us to the end of today’s article, we have an announcement on the end of it. Without extra talking: let’s jump right into the topic!
First we’ll talk about spreading mechanism for the companies, aka popularity gain.
Popularity gain decides how fast company spreads within a state and how fast will it reach for its domination. The main variable that decides on that growth is State Popularity Modifier (SPM) mentioned in earlier Dev Minutes.
The total SPM is called SCE (from words State, Company, Environment) and it is:
- a sum of state popoularity modifiers assigned to states (sv) and of SPMs assigned to companies (cv),
- this sum multiplied by SPMs from events (ev),
- this sum multiplied by SPMs from specialists (spv).
SVs are SPMs assigned to states. They were described in details in Dev Minutes #3.
CVs are SPMs assigned to companies. Each company has a character based on its home state. Character of a company can be either communist or capitalist. If company with capitalist character shows up in communist state, it will receive -20 SPM ‘Communist Influence’ and vice versa. Companies starting within neutral states have assigned characters too, so that applies to everyone.
EVs are SPMs player gets from events. There are a few events that player can get extra SPM from, like moon landing. Either Americans or Soviets can land, and whoever lands first, some states or companies will receive extra SPM. If Americans land first, capitalist states or companies will receive 30% higher Popularoty Gain for two years: that’s the EVs value, which from standard 1 will change to 1,3 in this case (30% increase). Keep in mind, that 30% higher means the modifier EV, not the total value. The main events that use EVs are Olympics, which randomly boost several states during the game for a short peroid of time.
SPVs are SPMs player gets from specialists. Specialists is a mechanics of upgrades that player can buy to improve his gameplay. There are different Specialists: Ship Cargo Team, Aircraft Cargo Team, Researchers, Advertisers, but also Advertisers. Advertisers directly rise the Popularity Gain, up to 30% at Tier 3 Upgrade.
There are also a few minor extra SPMs that are added to one of the four main variables.
The whole value is multiplied by a modifier. Modifier changes overtime, depending on the level of Market Share of a company within a state. Standard modifier is 1, it can vary from lowest like 0,1 to highest like 3 or 4. The graph on the right side shows pretty accurately the percentage rise over the passing days – you can easily see how it gets faster overtime.
We have also started working on the UI. We have very first prototypes ready and also a small animation of the map change overtime, available to watch on our Twitter: twitter.com/imdevstudio/status/1085627733500153856
Oh, and the clock works now too.
Anyway, thank you for reading today’s Dev Minutes. We would like you to do one more thing – please, take this 5-10 minutes survey. It’s about people’s demographics and their opinion on big game dev companies these days. We’re really looking forward to see what people dislike the most and would like to see from devs. Spend a few minutes to make us sure what players really need: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeFPvICPizpZFCsnPy2vdnVIFuTzPRVK_kUzETvPGLNzATPkA/viewform
Iguana Mercenary 