Hey everyone! Since we are targeting a July Early Access release, we’ve been busy behind the scenes working continuously on improving gameplay and rounding out features. To that end, the team has been focused almost exclusively on our sandbox mode and have temporarily halted work on the campaign in order to ensure the core gameplay gets as much time as possible for refinement. In sandbox mode, you can choose one of several factions and their respective starting locations to begin a game and work your way through conquering the globe to become the premiere drug kingpin.

Let’s dive into some details on what we’ve been working on in particular with sandbox mode. First, I’d like to mention that a new gameplay flow and economics of producing and selling your product is starting implementation. We no longer have an abstract UI where you control your exports as a whole, but rather you will now look at the world map with your supply of goods and decide on trade routes on how to deliver them. Depending on where you want to deliver to, there will also be the possibility of taxes, bribes, or certain types of vehicles required to complete the route (air, land, and sea). You can also make multiple stops along the way and save, load, or modify route templates in order to more quickly manage things as exporting grows in complexity. Territories that you own will more clearly show what types of illicit substances they’re demanding, which are ever-shifting during the course of gameplay, and you should be able to adjust your production accordingly by changing what crops you’re planting in order to process a final product.

To add more dynamic elements to the mix, we’ve started to also implement world events that can globally adjust parameters temporarily in game. For example, certain crop production could be boosted or hampered based on climate-related events for several turns, or perhaps a festival is happening soon and a major demand surge is expected for a certain handful of drugs. Make sure to utilize this knowledge and plan ahead. More products sold means more money, and more money means more power!

In addition to managing crops, your leadership must also now be managed. As you expand your empire, the amount of land you will control will also grow and necessitate the usage of admins. You can hire admins to oversee operations in each region that you have some stake in. Admins that you hire have different random traits that can bolster production or efficiency in several areas, such as reducing the cost of hiring new units or growing crops in your secondary camps. As they continue to work they will also level up and grow stronger in their bonuses or even gain new abilities.

One last update regarding the world is that we have visually updated all territories. Fog of war is vastly improved and cleaner. The backend for fog of war in particular has been overhauled, allowing us greater control on what is shown and we can use it to help color territories for displaying information such as heatmaps. Territory borders are smoother. Our world was quite bare before so more environmental details have been added such as roads, mountains, and vegetation have been added.

Enemy AI is also being updated to reflect more interesting decision making. We’ve started to explore adding personalities to each faction, which can make them more inclined to be aggressive, diplomatic, economic, or isolationist as some examples. Behind the scenes our AI uses a weighting system when deciding what kind of “plan” to pursue next, and these weights configured at varying sets of values can produce different emphasis on certain decisions to overall reflect these personalities. We’ve also been working to expand AI to include more advanced behaviors, such as implementing spy and espionage actions.

Speaking of spies, this is another area which has seen a lot of recent attention from our team. Spies are useful agents that the player can leverage to gain valuable intel or execute devastating acts of subterfuge that can give you an edge. They are special units on the world map that can roam quickly while visible or slowly while invisible – though they can be detected by other spies. If you’re caught by an actual fighting force, your spy automatically gets captured as well. If you don’t get caught, you can embed these spies in territories and over time gain access to increasingly powerful actions. 

The longer they stay embedded, the larger and more powerful your “spy network” becomes. Over time, you can accumulate enough action points to gain advantages such as sabotaging defenses before attacking a territory or even go directly for the head and assassinate enemy commanders or admins. If enough conditions line up, you can even have the option of attempting to assassinate an enemy leader which will completely remove them from the game if successful. Spies are a powerful tool to be used and can be used as an alternate means to victory over brute force.

If you did want to use brute force, the battle system has also received updates since the last dev log about the new turn-based battle system. Now, there’s a new strategic layer for combat we’re calling unit affinities. In essence, this means that some units prefer to be deployed with certain types of commanders. 

These types include: Field Commander, which specializes in firepower; Street Doc, which specializes in keeping your men alive, Iron Captain, which specializes in making your forces resilient to attacks, Block Boss, which specializes in shutting down enemy offense, Tactical Chief, which specializes in tactics and positioning, and Odds Master, which wins by manipulating probability and dice roll margins. 

Each of these five archetypes has a set of preferred units that activate synergistic abilities when serving under them. These abilities can range from flat passive bonuses to formation bonuses, such as buffing adjacent allies or having advantages against certain opposing enemy types. Learn and master these synergies and you can overcome a battle over just having more raw numbers. Make your forces fighter smarter, not harder!

I wish we could share more, but it’s time to get back to it! We’re still diligently working on all of these features and more. Everyone on the team greatly appreciates your continued enthusiasm and support! Thank you, and we’ll see you next time.