With our Early Access date just around the corner, we're aiming to share a series of announcements about the mechanics and game world components that New Cycle will have in Early Access, as well as our future plans for them, both with a devlog and in the form of smaller explanatory pieces.
For this purpose, we'll try to convey some details on Trade and Regions as the first week's topics of focus.
Trade:
In the early access version, traders representing other settlements, large and small, struggling to survive like you, will visit our settlement from time to time to barter with you.
Merchants will have different goods according to the background stories of their communities and will demand different goods from you in return. These differences will always lead to partial variations in the base values of demanded and offered items in trade. (E.g. a small community living in an old quarry may be less receptive to your offer of stone, while they may place more value on resources far from their reach, such as fish).
Exchange rates and the overall value of the products that can be offered will vary according to volume. An example scenario would be a small community with all their processed metals, but without an unlimited supply of more advanced goods such as Medicine, Clothes and Power Tools, which they may demand in return. When making a counter-offer, you’ll need to take into account the gradually declining base value of the products you offer, sometimes having to part with them for next to nothing, depending on the circumstances.
According to our roadmap, in the second major update, you'll be able to display these communities that you can trade with on your regional map alongside having the chance to make timed trade agreements. With the addition of a "trade hub" building to the game universe, we aim to expand the trading mechanics with more coordinated additions, allowing the player to make trade agreements based on much more specific rules.
In the same update, you'll be able to procure special goods defined as 'luxury goods' from some communities. These goods, which you can't access with your own production capability (such as Tobacco, Sponge and Salt), will have annual consumption rates according to the number of people in your settlement. You'll have the chance to plan permanent trade agreements on a scale that will meet the needs of the community for a certain period.
Regions:
An adventure of discovery that starts with neighboring lands outside your settlement will lead you to learn about the whole of a vast geography and to encounter many strings of events. However, the outside world will not just consist of small stories to be explored and consumed. We offer gameplay in which the entire geography can hold different risks and resources according to its environmental conditions, where you can build outposts, functioning as satellites that contribute to your settlement's production, as well as transferring resources from them to your city via railroad networks according to your level of development.
While we will be able to offer a limited amount of external world and exploration-oriented narratives in Early Access, we believe that the Region mechanics and the balance of management and resource traffic between your settlement and these units will greatly contribute to gameplay.
In the World Map view, there are different visible layers such as the ownership status, production efficiency and infrastructure status of Regions. According to our roadmap, we aim to complete these layers with diplomacy, which will be added in the future.
Next week's headlines : Conveyor Belt System & Disasters and Universal Interactions
Alp Geven
