Hello everyone! It’s been almost exactly a month since the big launch on Steam we’ve already been hard at work bringing you the next iteration on Founders’ Fortune.
The Update
The Diplomacy update focuses on the goblins first and foremost – making friendship and hostility both possible, but it also gives some more depth to your dealings with the Trader’s Guild. Besides balancing and bugfixes, we have a small cherry on top, giving you curtains, carpets, and more to make your colony even more cozy.
How to continue playing Alpha 8
Some people would like to continue playing with their old colony for a while. While the saves are not compatible between Alpha 8 and Alpha 9, you can keep playing Alpha 8.0.6: Right click on Founders’ Fortune on Steam, select “Properties” go to the “Betas” tab and select the branch “alpha-8”. Your old saves will be available.
We are planning to discontinue this legacy branch when the next update releases.
What’s happening with mod support
Many of you will remember the post where I showed you the potential modding capabilities of Founders’ Fortune a while back. This triggered a community discussion on the forum where a lot of people expressed their support for modding, but warned us to not lose sight of the core gameplay prematurely. That’s why Alpha 9 does not feature any new modding capability, but instead we’re planning to have mod support trickle in step by step over the next updates while we continue to spend time on the core systems.
How community feedback has influenced Alpha 9
If you’ve been active in any of the official Founders’ Fortune communities at all, you’ll know that we’re receiving new suggestions and more feedback everyday. We’re happy to say that this update we were able to incorporate a lot of requests and bugfixes which should hopefully improve your general experience quite a bit. Of course there is always more that could be done, but I believe it’s a good step in the right direction.
About the Future
In the Early Access description on the Steam store it says “we’re going to work on Founders’ Fortune until sometime between September 2019 and September 2020, depending on the amount of support we receive”. I think it’s fair to say that the Steam launch has been a success and we were able to recoup the money we put into the project from our personal bank accounts. Yay! We still have to figure out some real life stuff before we can give an updated date on how long we will be able to work on Founders’ Fortune from now, but it’s looking good at the moment 🙂
In the next 1-2 weeks we’re going to be on vacation. Before and right after the Steam release we put an incredible amount of work in the game to make it as smooth as possible for all the new players. After that we didn’t even take a break but instead threw ourselves us right into the next update. Now that it’s finished and summer is in full swing, it’s time for us to recharge our batteries as well, so that in September Founders’ Fortune development can continue full steam ahead!
So, without further ado, let’s get to the changelog!
Changelog
New Features
- Give presents to improve relations and ask for tributes to get easy resources
- Pay tributes to your goblin overlords to avoid raids
- Build statues of friendship for your allies to improve relations
- Bandage fallen foes to improve relations
- Positive and negative relations harden after a while. It becomes more difficult to convince a long term enemy of sudden friendship
- Ask for discounts when trading
- Make the trader take a detour and have them visit your colony on as soon as possible
- Goblins make armor and weapons to try and keep up with your colonists
- Tiki Goblins have a sense of ownership and will not take lightly to you destroying their village
- Pay a tribute to free kidnapped colonists
- Beware of angering the Traders’ Guild…
- New traits: Xenophobe and Xenophile. Act, think, and wish as you would expect them to
- New trait: Diplomat. Socializing with members of other factions has chance to improve relations
- New traits: Season lovers/haters feel better or worse depending on the time of the year
- Carpets and Rugs (I love the royal carpet especially)
- Curtains
- Window Shutters
- Cob wall and straw floor for early game
- Korean, Chinese and Dutch translations
Balancing changes
- Flu healing more probable!
- You now get a third of your resources back when deleting something that’s already been built
- Healing potions are only automatically consumed when health is <60%
- Trading prices are more precise. For example, wood is only worth 0.3 gold now
- Trader is more probable to sell scrolls
- Trader is more probable to buy the things you manufactured
- More goblin villages per island
- Excessive salary for colonists doesn’t make them as happy anymore
- “Colonist Died” mood debuff lasts longer
- Kidnappings are more probable
- In combat mode, work or idle interactions are restricted, so that player remembers their colonists are in combat mode
Community Requests outside of Balancing or Bugfixes
- Tiki Goblins try to rebuild a damaged village (though they will not respawn if completely destroyed)
- Goblins are stronger in dangerous worlds
- Colonists now wish to “own” tool, weapon, armor, and clothing storage, not “have them in their house”. This gives you the chance to make armories
- Hold the mouse button when building or deleting to “paint” on the map with your tool. Makes setting up farms a lot easier.
- Added a button to delete saves
- Added a dialog to ask if player really wants to quit to main menu if it the last save was more than 5 minutes ago
- Autosaves no longer trigger a pop up message
- Added a “slow vsync” option to force lower fps in favor of less power use, cooler graphics cards, and quieter fans
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug that allowed people to interact with furniture through walls (not 100% perfect now probably, but most cases are covered)
- Goblins can no longer hit a wall and damage a colonist (that was a strange bug)
- Fixed a bug where the trader could arrive with an empty inventory
- Fixed a bug where relaxing people sometimes were invulnerable (the attacker couldn’t get close enough to hit them)
- People no longer eat the first food item in each category (for example they were only eating bread in favor of apple strudel or strawberry cake)
- Fixed a bug where you could put furniture into a wall if you were quick enough
- Unconscious colonists no longer jump to live when asked to sleep in a bed until completely healthy or when activating combat mode
- “Sleep until healthy” makes people with flu stay in bed now
- Fixed some missing resource descriptions
- Fixed some 3d model clipping bugs here and there
- Fixed a bug where the game over screen didn’t appear properly
As always, I’m not 100% diligent keeping track of the changelog and these lists are often missing the small changes we make here and there.
Have fun playing and keep the screenshots coming!
