The Future of Bronze Age Revisited

It's been almost two months since I posted The Future of Bronze Age, so lets take another look at it. That devlog was posted shortly following the release of 1.2, I'm now working on 1.5. 

The listed features were:

• Mining and metals - Done in 1.3
• Soil fertility - Done in 1.3
• Nobles
• Religion and Gods
• Research
• Happiness and Morale
• Advanced housing options
• Luxuries
• More enemy types and races - Still Planned, some work on this will be part of 1.5
• Worker job priority system - Kind of done as part of construction priority in 1.3
• Construction queue - Construction priority added in 1.3
• Weather and seasons - Technically done in 1.4, but isn't visible and doesn't affect anything
• Random / narrative events
• Pig Breeding - Done in 1.4
• Chariots
• Boats

Looking at that list, it doesn't seem like much progress has been made. Most of the finished features were done in 1.3. The Settlement Update (1.4) was mostly focused on a rework of settlement production and trade logic and most of the planned work for 1.5 is focused around a rework of the world structure and enemy AI.

Since that devlog there have been a few new big features added.

• Rival Empires - AI empires like the player's
• Graphics Mod Support - Done in 1.4

Feature Creep is a major problem in games (as I'm sure many of you know), so I'm going to look at the unfinished features on that list from the lens of what Bronze Age needs.  From my perspective (please comment if you think differently) I think what Bronze Age really needs is for the world to be more interesting to interact with, and for there to be non-combat setbacks. There's a certain point at which Masklings cease to be threatening, armies in the hundreds can stamp out their villages, and established defenses can turn away even the most savage attack. Cities can grow into the thousands and as long as you keep placing houses the only real challenge is to the CPU.

Let's call those needs Interesting World, and Management Challenges, and look at the list again.

Looking at the features through that lens, about half of them don't fit. That isn't to say that they'll be dropped, but it does seem that they should be further down the priority list. Boats specifically is probably a need, due to the new world generator producing islands from time to time.

A good way to keep track of plans is through the issue tracker or...

Bronze Wiki

Announcing Bronze Wiki!

This is an outgrowth of RashGoneWrong's Beginner's Guide. It has been in development for a few weeks, and there is still plenty to do, but there's a lot of good information already on there with more being added all the time.  Community contributions are more than welcome.

I'd like to thank Rash for his work spearheading the work on the wiki.