It is no longer possible to select the world size.
- We were finding this impossible to balance around, as the world size really means something different here than in a standard RTS or similar. Normally in an RTS the world size means how far you have to travel to meet your enemy, but here you start at the same place as your enemy. So really world size was just affecting tedium and the ability to kite the overlord over long distances, etc.
- Now everyone plays on the same size world -- same as you get the same size board in Chess or Triple Town or Tetris or whatever -- and we find this should be a lot more straightforward to balance, and to provide a consistently fun experience for everyone.
Does this mean that if you can maybe balance the larger worlds later, you may release a patch or does it completely rule out bigger maps?
To be honest, I really don't see us doing that, but you never know. The fact is that there are certain things that we just can't do if we're going to vary world size in a non-powers-based fashion (like amplification towers). There are also some nightmare issues with the early game vs the late game on a giant map with the movement speed of the overworld. Things just get unwieldy to the point that the game stops resembling the game.
Rather than trying to do a lot of things in an okay fashion, we're trying to execute on a smaller number of things
really well. That's the goal, anyhow. I don't really see where the variant world map sizes will add much for the game except ongoing balance headaches, and adding in secondary sizes that are really different from the base size really becomes like designing whole new games. Which is a possibility, but really more that's sort of like expansion material, if that makes sense. It would need tons of playtesting and rule shifts and so on. That's just not something that you run into with RTS games or even most TBS games, but this game is pretty unique thanks to how the overlord works and so on.
I'm a little worried about the prospect of being able to permanently lose amplification towers or pyramids.
YES! This better not be the case.
That is absolutely the case, and by design. Choose when to purify your pyramid carefully, get as much out of it as you can, and then when it gets destroyed move on to something else. The amplification towers are also just temporary bonuses now, too.
The only ones immune to the overlord are the cold dispersal, heat dispersal, and ivory towers.
Basically, this is not an open-ended game -- and honestly it never was. You have to kill the overlord before he crushes you. So now it's not quite so black and white in terms of when to purify certain tiles, which I think is really interesting. Once you purify them, you get the benefit of them, but you also risk his coming after them.
It takes him longer to get around now, though, thanks to the removal of most of the warp gates.
And by the by, the balance here isn't final. His movement speed may need to change, we may need more of certain buildings to seed now, others to be constructable from the generic buildings, etc, etc. There are also some other changes in general that we're considering that might have a solid impact on this. But this first round of changes introduces the first core set of conceptual changes; mainly that "rebuilding isn't a thing anymore," and therefore the buildings on the map are a finite resource to be captured and used carefully.
Anyway, it's step one along a path to what I think is a game with a lot more interesting decisions to make on the strategic side. This overlord dude isn't messing around anymore.
