The second of two major balance patches, that were agreed by the community as necessary to ensure server 2 does not experience any of the balance issues the first one did.

Balance patches

• The mayor "efficiency" stat no longer grants a resource discount to construction, research or troop training; instead, it grants a resource production buff to the city the mayor is hired in.

  • This is seen as a way to encourage resource production and balancing across all cities, as previously a player could ferry a high-level mayor between all cities to receive troops at a massive discount, and then sell off excess resources in the market which hindered smaller players who must rely on the market to make gold

  • The "discount" system placed a soft cap on how large a mayor could get, since it was possible to reach a point where no further discount could be applied and it was useless to increase your mayor's attributes. This has now been fixed as the resource production buff is theoretically infinite!

General gameplay changes

• You can now loot items and relics from defensive battles as well as offensive

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where the equipped resource relic would duplicate into the mayor relic slot on server restart, where it would then bug and could not be removed

This patch now, hopefully, marks a period where all major fundamental changes to the game will stop, and a period of gentle tweaks and quality of life improvements will be made instead. Server two is now very much in the works so watch this space!

Probably high time I started using Steam for patch notes rather than just the discord! Balance patches:

• Resources are no longer capped by the storage cap defined by warehouses, refineries and stables; instead, the storage cap keeps your resources safe from looters. This is intended to fix the issue where many of the resources in the market were far cheaper than intended, as players were selling off resources to avoid hitting the caps.

• NPCs will now equip relics to make them more of a challenge, with better NPCs using better relics. Be sure to scout your targets first in case they've found a meaty tier 10!

• Items can only be bought to be used immediately, and only items won from quests or looting can be stored for later use. This is to alleviate an exploit where someone could mass purchase useful items to hide gold from a potential attacker, retaining those items even if the city was lost, which discouraged defense. This has been offset by warehouses now keeping a portion of your gold safe from looters.

Quality of life (QOL):

• The barracks now has two toggles that allow you to split a queue amongst all available barracks, or all idle barracks, to prevent having to manually queue troops in every barracks

Misc

• The overview map on the map view now updates every 3 days. Previously it only updated the very first time you joined the server

By popular request, Taking London has began the process of supporting MacOS! The game is cross-platform, so you don't need to worry about a lower player base if you're a Mac user. There will be some teething issues with Gatekeeper, as there is no clear way to notarize Mac builds on a Windows machine - despite paying 79 for the joy of becoming an Apple developer... It is likely you may have to follow this guide to get the game to run: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/latest/tutorials/export/running_on_macos.html#doc-running-on-macos You are interested in the section titled "App is signed (including ad-hoc signatures) but not notarized". The team also do not have a Mac available to test on, and emulating modern Apple operating systems (e.g. through a virtual machine) is against Apple's terms and conditions, so we are at the mercy of the Godot exports for the time being. If you're a Mac user and would like to report bugs (either to do with the game failing to run at all, or experiencing bugs within the game) please join our discord to report them directly to the developer: https://discord.gg/c7PzBHTpZT Happy London Taking!