Near-term plans, reward strategy, and the Museum

Rise of Cultures is 4 years old! As it proudly enters its 5^th year, we’re looking ahead and envision what the near future holds for our game. 

First, there are high hopes for the release of the next era – we hear about it regularly from our players. We’ve already decided on its name, and the design work is also well underway, much like the art. It will be somewhat more complex than releasing our most recent mainline content extension – the High Middle Ages. We have brought the Arabian Allied Culture to its in-game conclusion in 2024, so something else must replace it. It will be one of the most significant challenges we’ll face this year.  

With Arabia’s storyline over, we are also yet to release at least one Arabian Wonder, at some point, to make that Allied Culture “complete”.  

While working on those large topics, we cannot forget about the incremental improvement to our existing features, bringing smaller chunks of playable content to the game, and performing general polishing when opportunities present themselves. 

A couple of smaller, but truly relevant things that will happen early in the year, are a simple friend list and a friend invite system, as well as adding a new type of in-game reward.  

The role of rewards 

Rewards in games take many forms, varying greatly from one genre to another. What is generally the same across the entirety of the gaming landscape is that rewards are probably the most powerful motivator for players. In Rise of Cultures, rewards have been steadily getting more varied over the four years the game has been around. By now, we have managed to build a decent roster of them. There are a bunch of buildings (of various kinds), resources, consumables, items and so on… What is potentially a design challenge is that we’ve been repeating them quite a bit, and therefore they may sometimes lack the quality of being unique. After all, getting your 100^th Pirate Fortress token is probably fine (it is a useful one!), but definitely not super exciting. For that reason, we’ve been looking into further expanding our reward selection. 

Expansion of the reward selection 

This has already been signified by our return to adding new Evolving Buildings with events – something we’ve previously stopped doing for a while. Recently, we’ve even added some new Collector Buildings, and right now we are in the process of coming up with more Season Pass-specific buildings, so the Great Garden will get some company. 

The main challenge of the idea of buildings is that they have to be placed in cities that offer a limited area. Only so many of them can be active at any given time, and the rest will remain comfortably in the inventory – it is a choice that our players often face; how to decide between two equally good Evolving Buildings? We see this kind of decision making as a part of the game, but we do recognize that there is demand for more space. 

There are also ways of granting value to buildings that remain stored away, and we may investigate the possibility of doing that at some point in the future, but what we want to focus on now is a small (but potentially impactful) addition to the oldest building of them all – the Town Hall.  

The role of the Town Hall 

If you happen to play RoC; what is the position of the Town Hall on your city map? Chances are it’s stuck in the upper left corner. The very same spot it has occupied since day one. If you’re more adventurous, you’ve maybe placed it somewhere else, but still out of the way, so it doesn’t interfere with the layout of the city.  

Mainly, it serves as an access point for the economy boost screen, but other than that it’s arguably just dead weight. 

It is a little bit strange if you think about it! Town halls should be in the center of their cities, or at least not shoved somewhere into a faraway corner. That will, of course, only happen if there is a reason for it. So, we figured we can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak: make the Town Hall relevant in the context of the gameplay and expand the existing unique rewards we have.  

Towards the end of 2024, we’ve come up with the idea of what we decided to call “Museum”. 

Museum 

Despite what it sounds like it is NOT, in fact, a new building. It is a part of the Town Hall, an additional screen inside of it. In it, players can view collections of unique artefacts that can be found randomly throughout the game.  

What are those artefacts? Generally, they are historical items that one could conceivably find in a real-life museum (we may stretch it a bit every now and then though). For instance, the very first collection everybody will get when the feature is out is called “Treasure of the Nile” and it consists of five artefacts: Pharaoh’s Gold, Amulet of Khepri, Anubis Sarcophagus, Idol of Bastet, and Key of Life. They are each represented by a picture, and a small description. 

We will start with just a few of those collections, but there could be many in the future.  

It’s also where the unique nature of the artefacts comes to the forefront: every individual artefact can only be found once by each player. It cannot be lost, and no duplicates of it will ever pop up. 

Outside of the first collection, the chance of finding an artefact is rather small. The ballpark would be a range of roughly 0.5% to 3%, and only on specific actions (different per collection and artefact). As an example; Drake’s Firearm – one of the seven pieces of the “Legends of the High Seas” collection, can be found exclusively in the Alliance Treasure Hunt boss battles, and only in the 3^rd difficulty. It can take a while to find it, and it’s meant to be like that. 

In any case, the chance of getting an artefact does not interfere with the chances for obtaining other, previously existing rewards – it is separate, and either it is luckily obtained alongside the usual rewards, or not. 

While the main idea behind the feature is providing some unique items to collect throughout the game, making the Town Hall more relevant also plays a role. How? Simple! Artefacts and their collections grant the building a culture bonus and increase its range. It will probably have to be capped somehow, but again – this is still secondary to the main goal of just letting players collect unique items that come with some history-related lore. 

Future of the feature

As some may be aware, we (the people behind RoC) are a rather small group, so adding anything big to the game can take a lot of time. The beauty of the artefacts is that – from the technical standpoint – they are not complex and can be added with a relatively limited effort. They do require a bit of balancing, 2D assets, and a piece of text. However, other than that they can be included in the game relatively easily. Significantly easier than new buildings, for instance.  

This is also where we see interesting opportunities to enhance collaboration with the community. It is only natural that some of our players will feel the desire to suggest artefact collections relevant to their local history and culture. We will welcome those contributions and – where possible and suitable – include them in the game. 

There is certainly more we could do about our rewards, but we see it as an interesting step, full of potential for good things. 
We’ll see how it goes from here!  

Any thoughts and comments are always welcome in any of our community channels, such as Discord: https://innogam.es/RoC_Discord