I've been away from this for a lot longer than I meant to; just tons of things going on. Anyway, we settled on Japanese because there's just so much interesting stuff there and because we could make them really different. This is what I wrote up about them from the 1.008 release notes thread:
Skyward Collapse: Nihon no muraAll of the updates in this release are part of what we are working toward for our big
2.0 version of Skyward Collapse. This one 1.008 version takes us a ton of leaps and bounds toward 2.0, actually, but there's still more to come. All free updates, and definitely exciting stuff.
Alongside the free updates, we're working on the first paid expansion for the game, as well. This will be called Skyward Collapse: Nihon no mura. It adds a new Japanese faction, as well as
hamlets.
The Japanese faction is really exciting because they work so differently from a fundamental premise. They have fewer human units, but more mythological ones. Their gods have
no direct powers and don't stand around passively, but instead wander around causing trouble -- and summoning mythological creatures unique to them. Rather than three powers per god, it's three unique creatures. Very different from the Norse and Greeks!
The design for hamlets is still ongoing, but I'm really excited about how this will extend the game into a civilian direction that can be played alongside the main military showdown. Lots of things on this still need to be fleshed out, and then lots of playtesting needs to happen before those ideas are truly honed. But we're expecting to hit public beta for the expansion in July, and then do our full 2.0 release alongside the expansion in early August.
In terms of comments about obviousness not being a bad thing, I agree to an extent. I find Babylonians fairly boring as well. But there is a difference between "most obvious" and somewhat obvious. Anyhow. Egyptians probably will be what we do for the second expansion.
A few other things to clarify:
1. For the expansions, I wholly agree that just a new civilization is not enough to hold up that. Obviously there is a bunch of new music as well, but there also needs to be another "anchor feature" or a ton of smaller features. In this case, the anchor features is the hamlets.
2. Regarding the civilizations, bear in mind that you're only ever seeing two at once still -- red and blue, whatever you assign them to. Even in the base game you can do greek on greek if you like. But now you can do any of the combinations including (or not) Japanese. It's kind of like the AI Types in AI War (although now with the dual-type AIs I guess that's a hair different). Having all the factions out on the board at once is definitely not a goal of mine: it would make the games way longer, the maps way bigger, the maps way more crowded, each turn far slower, the faction flag colors progressively less clear, and the interface impossible to handle (because of the need to show the stats for more factions at the top of the screen, and having no room for that).
