So I know I have been pretty radio silent the past month and I apologize. But I got work to show for it. I have been working on the 100000 BCE start, and it's pretty exciting stuff. By the way I will be calling them status reports instead of status updates from now on to avoid any confusion between these posts and game updates.

Culture Blobs

The map will be populated by something I refer to as culture blobs over time. These blobs represent many small hunter-gatherer groups that share similar traits and roam around within the colored region.

(A culture blob growing larger (Video is sped up))

(New unique culture blobs showing up on the map (Video is sped up))

In the current version, cultures have the same chance to spawn anywhere in the world. This of course doesn't line up with archeological evidence for when humans migrated to the Americas. I plan to address this at a later time. Likely not in 0.16 unfortunately.

Hominids

I've been listening to podcasts about the stone age for inspiration, Tides of History had a segment on the stone age and a lot of human genetic history. It would be very interesting to include other hominid species such as Neanderthals at a later time. This is also not planned for 0.16 but it's a fun thought. The Caveman2Cosmos mod for Civilization IV which is a big inspiration for Epoch did include Neanderthals, which I always found quite interesting. Definitely something to consider down the road.

Cultures Emerging

Randomly generated cultures are back! For anyone that was really early in testing Epoch they might remember the old 100000 BCE start which included this feature. I am proud to say it's been improved a lot and all generated names sound interesting (at least to me). This time I also introduced a language mechanic. It's pretty barebones at the moment but I imagine in the future we could have a pretty complex etymology system built-in.

(A randomly generated culture that emerged)

Gameplay

Work has started on the actual gameplay for the stone age. Right now you are able to spawn your group within any culture on the map that meets the population requirements. From there you can migrate your group anywhere in the world. This is the only mechanic fully implemented at the moment. When I started out I made a really fancy compass you could align in a direction to decide where to travel. But I realized this was very overengineered and kinda unintuitive to use. So I replaced it with a simple button. The next step will be to introduce food and obviously hunting & gathering.

(The user interface for playing a hunter gatherer group in the current dev build (0.16.1))