Update 1.9.2 has just been released. This version of the game focuses on four key points: improving the budget breakdown, adding new construction steps to the Monastery, using right-click to close windows and hitting ESC to close (or open) the system menu. But that’s not all: we took this opportunity to introduce some quality of life (QOL) changes as well as fix multiple bugs—including one where villagers would trek far and wide to find the most comfortable benches!
Here’s more details of what you can expect in this update:
Budget breakdown
Understanding Foundation’s economics makes all the difference between running a thriving or a struggling medieval village. For this reason, we now offer a more in-depth budget breakdown. It should help you plan better, but more importantly, get a clearer picture of your expenses and income as they roll in.
Here’s an overview of what’s been added to the Budget tab:
Quantities for resources bought and sold
Upkeep costs per buildings’ categories and types, each with their respective quantities
Territory costs, including those purchased and maintained
Taxes per type, including how many villagers and/or buildings are affected
New categories for data previously displayed under Miscellaneous
Tooltips for all categories
Every single feature mentioned above will work with previous Foundation saves. You will also notice some quality of life changes included in the budget breakdown such as the possibility to collapse/expand data either individually or globally and better category grouping and visibility. On a related note, save files have been considerably shrinked thanks to the compacting of budget data.
Modders will be happy to learn the new, detailed budget breakdown leaves room for custom upkeep costs, i.e. something not called coins.
New construction steps for the Monastery
Last year, one of the biggest changes to Foundation was how players would progress through the game by specializing in different Estate paths. Clergy in particular was completely reworked with the addition of several new building functions and events. Back then, our art team laid out the groundwork for a new and improved vision of what the game should look like, previewed first with the Abbatial Church.
It’s not just about raising the visuals bar either: adding construction steps to the Monastery is something we had planned for a long time, which better reflects the evolution of this prestigious monument and helps bring it to life—complete with scaffoldings for all of its variants!
What you see from the Monastery in this newest update sets a new benchmark for the future of architecture in Foundation. In time, our goal is to apply the same principles to other buildings and thus bring them to higher quality standards.
User experience (UX) improvements
Part of being game developers is taking the pulse of what the community wants so we can deliver a frictionless experience. An oft requested quality of life feature has been added in Update 1.9.2 with the ability to close windows by simply right-clicking on them. In the same vein, we have added the expected behavior of opening (or closing) the system menu when pressing the ESC key.
This concludes the core features added or improved upon with Update 1.9.2. For more details, read the full patch notes below.
1.9.2 Changelog
New
Budget breakdown overhaul
Monastery construction steps
Right-clicking on panels will now close them
ESC key will bring up the systems menu or close it if it’s already open
Improvements
The Daily Average Balance now displays more accurate information about whether you are making money or not
Save files’ size have been considerably shrinked—up to 70% less!
Updates
Housing help topic
Editing buildings help topic (refund)
Localization
QOL
The special panel style for buildings now only applies to the parent building, which should help distinguish them from sub-buildings
Added a confirmation pop-up when unassigning a slot with stocked resources (example: Warehouse)
Improved the resource refund feature when destroying parts to be more consistent across the board
Wealth calculation from the Book will now display a score after the first month regardless of your income status positive or negative)
Improved performance for densely populated villages
Fixes
Fix: in some circumstances, the game wouldn’t properly close on exit
None of the shortage events (except for service) were displayed in the Happiness tooltip
Villagers trying to fulfill needs spread too far from each other on the map would get stuck in a needs loop, which led to further issues
Added a distance limit so villagers won’t be traveling far and wide to use benches
Destroying a monument before its completion refunded too many resources
While a game rule that modified the trading price was active, the “Buy from village” price was rounded before calculating the quantity available for purchase
The Rustic Gate – Elevated part from the Monastery snapped inside the model, which blocked entry to the location
Multiple scrollbars could be displayed when building a Cloister
Modding
The Unlock Trade Route button wasn’t displayed when mods added new resources for trade. The GUI now handles up to 5 resources rows without a scrollbar
Switching a sub-building function in the Fuel mod (1.9+) crashed the game
Exposed the Hospitium, Monk Dorms and Nun Dorms functions for the Monastery
We have some important news to share with you about Foundation’s next steps. The team is pleased to unveil an updated roadmap! 📅
But first, a 2022 Retrospective
2022 was a big year for Polymorph Games, but also one of transition.
First and foremost, we have worked on our biggest update so far, Foundation 1.9, that has added the remaining systems and bound all of them to shape the core experience we intended for Foundation. We also have included and expanded the monastery gameplay, with a revamped visual, representing our work on the final Art Direction (see: GameDeveloper.com).
Another major feature that we were happy to deliver was the first iteration of the map generator, allowing you to have more maps to play with.
The second important change that happened last year was the expansion of our team, with the addition of team members filling important roles, such as an Art Director, a Lead 3D Artist, an Engine Programmer and a Narrative Designer. This is allowing us to work on multiple aspects of the game at the same time: improving our visuals, the game content, as well as the procedurally generated content like the map generator.
Roadmap Update
In the last couple of months, we’ve made the delicate and thorough exercise of reviewing and completing our game design. Every idea and planned feature has been discussed and questioned, and we aimed to leave no stones unturned. This process had us recenter on Foundation’s strengths, and the result is a better defined feature list.
Today we are pleased to share our updated roadmap – a glimpse of both our major and minor updates left to be released.
Upcoming Major Releases
We are planning five major releases until Foundation’s end of Early Access.
1 – Residential Density and Safety Concept
The next Major Update we are working on is about adding Safety, a tool players can use to control the density of housing in specific zones. Safety is also something that will be used and extended by the Castle in the Kingdom progression path. This will also integrate the walls into the construction flow. We will provide more details soon.
2 – The Castle (Kingdom Progression Path)
We know you are eager to get your hands on this one, and we are already working on it. In addition to the new Castle monument, expect more gameplay options from overhauled military missions (including squads!), and more interaction with the new safety concept.
3 – Labor Progression Path
This update will round off the final Estate gameplay and visual overhaul of the three estates. It will focus on giving the tools to improve happiness and taxation capabilities.
4 – Environment Rehaul
As you may know, we are working to revamp our building and environment visuals: environment biomes, skyboxes, lighting, map edges.
5 – End of Early Access Release
This one will have all the completed game content, with the improved residential zoning, and tier 3 housing.
Along the way toward Foundation’s full release, the team will continue to add minor features, to include new quality of life (QOL) changes as well as game content.
Some Planned Minor Releases (not in release order)
Continuous Monument Experience Improvements
Continuous Map Generator Improvements
Continuous Quality of Life Improvements
Continuous Accessibility Improvements
Continuous Modding Improvements
Continuous Balancing Improvements
New Productions Buildings and Production Building extensions
Fertility
Scalable Quests
New Mandates
New Information Layers
Job XP Implementation
Paved Roads
Some shelved or on hold features
As mentioned earlier, the process of reviewing and completing our game design had us focus on Foundation’s strengths. But that also means that unfortunately, some features we have added to the roadmap during the Early Access won’t make it to the full release, as we realized that they will not add any significant fun to the game and will create more micromanagement than we wish to push on the player. We are thus shelving housing decay, aging and families, and graveyards from the roadmap. The disease feature and vehicles are also postponed, meaning they might become part of the game at some point, but not before the end of the early access. Steam Workshop Integration has also been dropped as we continue to focus on mod.io and its cross-platform modding capabilities.
We know some of you will be disappointed about this news, especially the aging and family, but the average village size in Foundation has a higher population count than first anticipated, and having a feature like this would have brought us on the path of survival, micromanagement and overcomplexity.
We have reasserted our inspirations – Pharaoh, The Settlers and Anno – all games that don’t feature aging and death, but are still unique in their own ways and most importantly, great city-building experiences. With that in mind, we are confident that we are on the right path with Foundation’s design plans.
Putting an end to the Trello and to Mantis Public Bug reporter
As many of you may have realized, the Trello board was not being updated often. It has shown to be a lot of work to maintain, and it also creates a divergence with our internal planning tool. Hence why we are closing the Trello, and will instead share updates and progress on the roadmap on posts such as this one.
We are also closing our Mantis Public Bug reporter. We realized that the most efficient way to track bugs and get feedback is through Discord or right here on the Steam forums. It is also a better way to filter what is a bug and what is not, because the community usually provides help as well. So don’t hesitate to join our Discord Server to share your bugs and feedback!
Experimental Builds
In 2023 we also want to give you access to experimental builds. Their goal will be to test new features and progression changes before they’re applied to the live version of Foundation. This is a way for us to get important feedback from you, that will help us deliver polished updates. The first experimental build will be the next minor update that changes a lot of the early/mid game balancing.
When are the next updates planned?
As of now, we are currently working on multiple updates:
1.9.2 is about an improved budget breakdown and multiple Quality of Life improvements, like the ESC and right-click handling (Estimated Release Date: February 2023)
Minor Update: We are preparing an experimental build that changes early progression in the game (In Progress, Experimental in March 2023)
Taxation will be moved to the Labor progression path
Tavern will become a need for the commoners
The early and mid game progression will be reviewed
Trade revenue will be more generous
Minor Update: Plains terrain type (flatter) will be introduced in procedurally generated maps (In Progress, Estimated Release Date, March 2023)
Major Update: Residential Core + Safety (Being prototyped, No ETA yet)
Major Update: Castle (Kingdom Progression Path) (In Progress, No ETA yet)
Note that this planning is subject to change along the way.
Conclusion
In 2023, we are full speed ahead to deliver consistent and substantial updates that will keep improving the overall quality of the game.
We thank you for your continued support, we are lucky to have such a loving and dedicated community.
Foundation’s Update 1.9 is finally available on GOG and Steam.
The team has been hard at work to bring you quality content as part of a new and improved gameplay experience.
Here’s a quick overview of what’s included.
Village Aspirations
A fundamental aspect of Foundation is the customisation of your experience, which is reflected in the game by the organic growth that makes each village unique. With 1.9, we wanted to go one step further and give you the ability to achieve Village Aspirations: optional objectives that offer different ways to play in order to nab sweet GOG or Steam achievements. Examples include building an Abbatial Church or having 100 citizens in your village
Village Aspirations are another way for us to not only increase the replayability of Foundation, but also to make it a somewhat more challenging experience.
Progression revised from the ground up
Update 1.9 changes several elements of Foundation, including the way you progress into the game. Now, each EstateUpdate 1.9 changes several elements of Foundation, including the way you progress into the game. Now, each Estate—whether it be Labour, Clergy or Kingdom—has several unlockables of its own. Investing influence in and thus favouring one Estate makes it more difficult to progress with the others. This dynamic requires more planning on your part and adds weight to your decisions without restricting your ambitions.
In addition to Estate-specific progression paths, there is also a common progression path, which includes quite a few essential production buildings in Foundation, such as the Warehouse, the Stonecutter Camp and the Fishing Hut. In e
In addition to Estate-specific progression paths, there is also a common progression path, which includes quite a few essential production buildings in Foundation, such as the Warehouse, the Stonecutter Camp and the Fishing Hut. In either case, you will need to reach different tiers of Prosperity before being able to unlock some of the most desirable options. This new measure of your success takes into account six factors: wealth, territory size, trade, population, splendor and beautification.
Our next updates will focus on upgrading both the Kingdom and Labor progression paths.
Edicts and privileges
You may have noticed that the progression page has a tab dedicated to edicts and privileges. This is another new feature introduced with Update 1.9. The first case represents what may be described as laws that you enact in your village. The second case represents rewards given by the different Estates to their most loyal Lords or Ladies.
Edicts and privileges grant important boons such as reducing a Splendor penalty between two Estates, increasing the market value of certain resources or reducing the maintenance cost of production buildings by half. They are unlocked with coins or influence points. Afterwards, you just have to choose the edicts or privileges you want to activate.
Buildings and sub-buildings
The city-building aspect is at the heart of the Foundation experience, so we wanted to let you expand the capabilities of your buildings. You can now assign functions to a group of building parts (what we call sub-buildings) instead of individual parts. Each sub-building will therefore be linked to a single function (e.g. Treasury) which you can change should you desire so.
In a few words, this means that a Monastery can now be home to a Chapel, a Scriptorium, a Hospitium, a Monastic Garden and so on. The same goes for a Market, which you can expand by adding a sub-building associated with a separate function from the parent building if you wish, such as a Luxury Goods Stall. At any time, it is possible to browse each of the functions of a parent building thanks to the “Parts List” tab.
A glorious Monastery
Progressing on the Clergy path, you’ll soon notice important changes. For starters, there are several new functions available, including a Hospitium that will host visitors, a Scriptorium that will help you produce Manuscripts used to promote your faithfuls or a Cloister where they can medidate while fulfilling a new need. Moreover, you will have the pProgressing on the Clergy path, you’ll soon notice important changes. For starters, there are several new functions available, including a Hospitium that will host visitors, a Scriptorium that will help you produce Manuscripts used to promote your faithfuls or a Cloister where they can meditate while fulfilling a new need. Moreover, you will have the pleasure of building a prettified Abbatial Church: our artists have done a great job upgrading its visuals for your enjoyment!
Taxation
Previously, Foundation’s economy was largely tied to market stalls. With Update 1.9, taxation replaces the main way to fill your coffers. The Manor House now has a Tax Office function, which is combined with the Tax Collector job. Each house accumulates coins over time, and it’s up to you to decide how heavily your village will be taxed. But beware: people are not too keen on having to pay much, so there is a balance to be struck so as not to collapse your global Happiness factor!
Even more modding possibilities
In keeping with our commitment to the modding community, we’ve outlined several new features that are sure to have a snowball effect in the coming weeks. Without getting too technical, the major changes to unlockables, the progression system and narrative choices will certainly result in the creation of mods that we’ll be happy to share with you!
Looking forward to a bright future
Foundation’s 1.9 update is multi-faceted and marks an important milestone in our Early Access (EA) journey. We hope you will enjoy how we reimagined some of the existing systems while adding more depth to the core medieval city-building experience.
As for what the future holds, in the short term work has already started on a first patch to fix newly discovered bugs. At a later date, and after focusing a lot on the Clergy progression path—particularly the Monastery—we want to give the other two Estates the attention they deserve. We plan to overhaul the Kingdom and Labor progression paths, in that order.. We will let you fill in the gaps as to what that might entail.
Now that the holidays are decidedly behind us, it’s time to think about what the future holds.
There’s little doubt that 2022 will be a pivotal year for Foundation. We know you’re eager to learn more about the game, hence why we’re sharing an exclusive look at what’s going on behind the scenes…and hopefully answer some of your burning questions!
Laying down the cards
After three years in Early Access (time flies!), we are finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Looking back, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished so far, but acknowledge that there’s still a lot of work left to do. Still, we’re confident that we’ll cross the finish line before long.
Our current focus is on Core Game II (1.9), which we’ve actually already talked about last year. We can’t stress enough just how much of a game changer this new release will be. We’ll have more details to share about it very soon. In the meantime, here’s some up-to-date info about the new features being worked on right now by the team for this massive update:
Gameplay Types & Progression
Prosperity
As part of our overhauled progression system, your village will now score points according to various metrics (territories, population, etc.). We’re calling this system Prosperity (which is not to be confused with Splendor). The idea behind it is to allow you, the player, to progress in the game without imposing a specific playstyle. For example, you will be able to progress by focusing on a large populated city, but you’ll also be able to progress by focusing on a prolific monastery. Aiming for higher scores isn’t just for bragging rights: you’ll unlock new buildings and put in place new politics (edicts) along the way.
Estates
The Estates are evolving and will be closely tied to different gameplay types. Each Estate will have their specific advantages over some core features of the game. For instance, the Labor Estate will fare well in villager taxation, the Clergy Estate on luxury resources and the Kingdom—you probably guessed it—on military campaigns. Also, get ready as having a high Splendor with an estate will negatively impact influence with other estates. This is just a quick overview of our intentions. More on that later!
Victory conditions
We know several players would love to see endgame content added to Foundation and 1.9 will deliver on that front. Victory conditions are late game objectives you can complete to score rare player celebrations in Foundation—and their own achievements. Pick one or more victory conditions to track and try to complete all the prerequisites…if you dare!
Narrative
If you’ve been following us on social media, you know we hired a talented narrative designer a couple of weeks ago. Core Game II will be the first occasion to see his work applied to the world of Foundation. What does that mean?
Well…we’re not ready to spill the beans quite yet, but here’s a nugget of information for you: our new narrative events aim to make your experience more open-ended. Since 1.9 redefines our global game progression, we wanted to establish the first step of what we could describe as a “dialogue” between players and Foundation. In that sense, the game will feel a lot more responsive by serving events tailored to your play style.
New onboarding
Core Game II is an opportunity for us to review Foundation’s early game and more precisely its onboarding. Since we’re introducing a lot of new features to the game, it’s important that our tutorials and in-game messaging are on point. We’ve put a lot of effort into explaining our systems and helping players understand the steps they need to take in order to build—and maintain—successful villages.
And more! Look forward to our new blog series that will delve deeper into upcoming features included in 1.9
The Core Game II (1.9) update is scheduled for release in the first half of 2022.
Looking even further
Apart from the work being done on Core Game II, our team is working in parallel on other important additions that will see the light of day before/at release. Here’s a few of them:
Residential Revamp
We are rehauling the residential experience to make it more fluid and informative while improving the game’s overall organic layout. Villagers will still build and upgrade (up to a 3rd level) houses by themselves but through blood, sweat, and tears, they’ll be better at it than ever!
Gone are the days where unused space could really hinder your village’s development. Improvements to our painting tool will help determine more precisely where districts are formed and ensure residential space (as defined by the player) is sufficient. The tool will be able to predict how many villagers can be housed within a specific zone.
Map Generator
We already gave you a glimpse of our Map Generator. Work on this feature has progressed steadily since then and is already showing promising results. We know this is one of the most anticipated features and we want to make it right, hence why we’re keeping things a bit under wraps for now.
New Terrain Biomes
One way to add more uniqueness to maps is by making sure biomes are different enough from each other. How are we going to do it? Well, for starters, we want to improve vegetation a lot—even going as far as having different vegetation depending on elevation. Think leafy on lower altitudes and coniferous on higher altitudes. What we’re not aiming for is to add tropical or desert biomes, as we feel they don’t quite fit with our design.
Accessibility
We strive to make Foundation more functional, accessible and enjoyable by all types of players. Expect even more accessibility options in the future, including improved colored text contrast and colorblind-friendly signs/feedback.
Modding
We will continue to support the modding community. One way to do so will be by exposing more real-time interactions, but we also plan to let modders edit the user interface (UI), among other things.
Quality of Life (QOL)
Delivering a smooth gameplay experience has always been a top priority for us. On that point, we can say this year will introduce a number of interesting QOL changes, included but not limited to: more tooltips, improved handling of panels and ESC key behavior, new Book shortcuts and UI customization (resize).
We are doing everything in our power to get Foundation our of Early Access before the end of 2022. We will keep you updated as we go.
Today we are proud to announce that Foundation’s 1.8.1 update has just landed.
Following a successful and mostly incident-less preview version, we’re releasing this content a bit ahead of time.
Let’s take a tour of the new and updated features, shall we?
Resource Tracker
The biggest and most exciting feature added to 1.8.1 is without a doubt our brand-new resource tracker tool.
It allows you to see where resources are located in your village by right-clicking on a resource icon from the info module, located at the top of your screen.
Left-clicking on the same resource will bring you to its associated entry in the Book, under the Trade tab. We are confident that this addition will make it easier to manage your village and its numerous supply chains!
Understanding Resource Icons
As we pointed out earlier, the resource tracker tool adds useful icons above entities in the world. They’re used for construction, storage, transport and production (input and output).
Here’s a quick definition of each icon type you will see in Foundation:
Resource in storage
Resource in transit
Resource production input
Resource production output
Resource available for consumption
Resource used in construction
Enhanced Construction Step Bundles
Another goal we’ve set ourselves for the 1.8.1 update was to achieve better HUD efficiency.
As of 1.8, we’ve added construction step bundles to Foundation. Since then, most buildings are built progressively. This feature adds a lot to the immersion and can even help you plan ahead as each step requires different resources. But we felt like there was room for improvement about how we communicated this information to you.
If you take a closer look at the above building panel, you’ll notice we now display ready-to-build bundles in the progress bar (second background layer). One of the pitfalls or the previous iteration of this feature was that it involved too much guessing. With 1.8.1, we felt the need to share more information about construction steps—clear the fog, in a way.
Modding Additions
Foundation’s mod scene is still going strong years after we first entered early access. True to our habits, we’ve worked closely with the modding community to fix bugs and crashes related to 1.8.1. But that’s not all: browsing the changelog reveals the newly added exposure of single-property types. Combined with COMP_SOLDIER, we can’t wait to see what modders will create next. As a reminder, we share our favorite mods here every Monday. The talent at work is nothing short of amazing!
1.8.1 Changelog
General
Add: Resource tracker (resource icons are shown above entities when right-clicked in info module)
Add: Resource tracker windows open entity panels
Add: Resource tracking button in the book (resources list)
Add: Shortcut from resources in info module to book
Add: Resource row highlight in the book
Add: Ready-to-build bundles are now shown in construction progress bars
Improve: Construction and Bailiff progress bars are no longer shown behind prioritize and cancel buttons
Improve: parts list and jobs ordering
Fix: color when conditions are met from green to gold (quests)
Fix: missing tooltip on delete savegame button
Fix: buildings generating resources have duplicated descriptions
Fix: missing localization on Controls window title
Fix: crash after building the Village Center is the Build menu was already opened
Fix: if there is at least one incomplete part in a multi-part monument when a reload is performed, all the parts that were previously completed will turn invisible (monuments)
Fix: walls disappear upon reload
Fix: Market Goods and Luxury tables are not unlocking
Fix: crash when building a village center
Fix: crash no crane on mineral deposit
Update: community localizations
Update: rename good and luxury market stall part set category
A preview build of the upcoming, still-planned-this-December 1.8.1 update is now available via Steam and GOG (access instructions below).
We look forward to hearing any feedback and please let us know if you find any issues. Feedback and bugs can be posted on the Steam, GOG forums or alternatively you can join us on our official Discord server.
1.8.1 Preview Build Highlights
Here are some interesting new features included in this new version of Foundation.
Resource Tracker
Ever wondered where to find resources across your village? No more!
The resource tracker tool adds useful icons above entities in the world. Bread, berries, wood, rocks, name it: every resource is shown in real-time.
This feature is toggled on and off by right-clicking on a given resource at the top of your screen (info module).
Left-clicking on a resource will bring you to its book entry, under the Trade tab.
Construction Bundles Improvements
The 1.8 Fall update added construction step bundles to Foundation.
With 1.8.1, we wanted to improve upon this feature by delivering better HUD efficiency.
We’ll go a bit more in-depth with the official release later in December, but know that we put a lot of effort into making sure our whole construction progress is more accurate.
Preview Build Access Instructions
Note: Preview build saves will be compatible with the full release of the 1.8.1 update. Most mods will require migration for the full 1.8.1 release. We recommend starting a fresh save or playing vanilla (no mods) for the preview build.
Steam
If you would like to take a look or help test out the preview build, you can gain access via the Steam betas tab in Foundation properties.
Right-click Foundation in your Steam library
Click on Properties
Navigate to BETAS
Choose the ‘preview – Next Build Preview’ option
The game will automatically update but if it does not you may need to restart your Steam client
GOG
Open Foundation’s Options menu in your GOG Galaxy library
Select Manage installation, then Configuration
Select Preview in the Beta tab
Click OK
The game will automatically update. If it’s not the case, you may have to restart your GOG client for changes to apply.
