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Hello Millennia fans, I’m Ben Friedman, the Design Lead for the Millennia DLCs, and we’re back with more Developer Diaries, this time about our upcoming DLC Atomic Ambitions!
This DLC is larger than our previous Ancient Worlds DLC and I’m here to give an overview of what we have in store for y’all, so if you don’t mind me skipping a long pre-amble, I’ll dive right into it!
Atomic Ambitions
This DLC was designed to answer the “What if?” questions around harnessing the greatest power source known to man, the atom. The atom represents both awesome possibilities and incredible danger. To explore each path to its fullest, we’ve added two new Ages to Millennia, the Age of Atom and the Age of Wasteland. We specifically placed the Age of Atom and Age of Wasteland in Millennia’s timeline to spread out content that would otherwise need to be unlocked in the historical Age 8 period, which is already a rich and dense time period in Millennia. Age of Atom is an early peek into Uranium and nuclear power, while Age of Wasteland comes after your typical Age 8 gameplay as a result of your actions in that Age.Age of Atom
The Age of Atom is an Age 7 Variant, it’s our way of exploring a potential early discovery of atomic power and a craze for an “atomic future.” The prototype technologies of this Age will rocket your Nation into an early modern period, and a widespread enthusiasm for the new technologies provide futuristic dreams to shape your Nation.
The Age of Atom allows you to make use of Uranium in a number of new ways. Primarily, it is a potent power source, but it can also be converted into Ferrouranium, a variant of Steel, as well as other experimental Goods. Try new things, like Luminous Paints, or convert Uranium directly into Delicacies in your new Radium Kitchen.
Early atomic power is a risky endeavor, humanity is not yet ready or able to create safe Nuclear Reactors, instead you’ll be building prototype Fission Reactors which consume raw Uranium to create power, at the risk of having a catastrophic meltdown. Keep your reactors hot for massive gains, or play it safe to avoid losing control of the technology.
The Age of Atom is about sunshine, rainbows, and endless possibilities, but once you leave the Age, you’ll discover some of the side effects that come with relying too heavily on Uranium for every-day Goods. Enjoy your time in the Age while it lasts!
Age of Wasteland
The flip-side of this coin is the Age of Wasteland, an Age 9 Crisis trigged by the rampant proliferation and abuse of nuclear weapons.
As you unlock and stockpile Nuclear Warheads you’ll inevitably end up in an Arms Race against other Nations and Factions in Age 8, and if the pressure builds too high then the timeline will be sent down the path of Age of Wasteland.
The Age of Wasteland is a Global Crisis, meaning every Nation contributes to bringing about the Age. Progress towards the Crisis Age is tracked by the new DEFCON meter, showing everyone the current likelihood of total nuclear annihilation. It’s your collective responsibility to use nuclear weapons responsibly, or better yet not at all.
If instead you set off the chain reaction of global annihilation, you’ll find your world transformed into an apocalyptic wasteland. Your goal in this bleak Age is to rebuild civilization, which will be a challenge given the war scarred state of things.
The potential future where global thermonuclear war wipes out the majority of the world’s population has lots of downsides, but the silver lining here is that you unlock cool new technologies on your path to rebuilding civilization! Discover new uses for Junk, find stockpiles of Canned Foods preserved in Old-World Ruins, and turn your precious Textiles into Rag Dolls to keep your Nation’s Unrest down.
Jokes aside, there are cool technologies to be discovered in this age, like Battle Cars, the Thunderdome, and new radioactive “medicines” that turn your armies into Mutant Soldiers. The Age is not just our way of punishing players that over-use nuclear weapons, but also an homage to our favorite post-apocalyptic media. Use every resource at your disposal to be the Nation that rebuilds from the global catastrophe, or at least stop your competition from rebuilding faster than you… have fun!
To compliment the Age of Wasteland we also have a new Game Start Setting, Wasteland Start, which allows you to experience being literally set back to the Stone Age after total nuclear annihilation. You get to explore a Wasteland-scarred landscape and rebuild civilization from scratch, for real this time.
National Spirits
We had originally promised “a new National Spirit” for Atomic Ambitions, but after seeing the potential in the themes of this DLC, we actually made THREE new National Spirits!
The first two, as you might expect, are Age 8 National Spirits that focus on the DEFCON system and nuclear warfare, the Flower Child National Spirit and Nuclear Superiority National Spirit (or the NS NS as we call it internally).
The Flower Child is a voice for peace, they befriend other Nations and ask for disarmament of nuclear weapons in exchange for Arts XP, Diplomacy XP, and Culture bonuses for themselves and their Allies.
Nuclear Superiority cares about one thing, and one thing only: have the most nuclear weapons and make sure everyone knows you’re willing to use them. Building a large stockpile of weapons grants bonuses, and you can use the weapons in public Ballistic Testing demonstrations for even greater bonuses.
These two National Spirits compliment each other and interact more directly with the new DLC content. That’s not to say they’re the only National Spirits that do that, we’ve also made some updates to existing National Spirits in a way that works for players that don’t own the DLC but will also enhance your experience with Atomic Ambitions.
The third National Spirit is called the Siege Masters National Spirit, available in Age 4. The Siege Masters care about building the best Siege Weapons and putting them to great use against their enemies, unlocking unique Siege Engine Units and the ability to build them on their front lines on-demand.
The reason we made this third National Spirit is because the Siege mechanics in Millennia are getting an update to support the new nuclear weapons. The Siege Masters are intentionally available early in the game so that you can have an in-depth experience with what we’re calling the Strategic Warfare update.
Strategic Warfare
The Strategic Warfare update polishes the existing Siege mechanics we have and introduces a new layer that allows you to hit your enemies where it hurts. The goal of this system is to deepen the options you have for waging war in Millennia. Previously, the way to reduce an enemy’s ability to oppose you was generally limited to total conquest – you had to capture an enemy Region to take it out of your enemy’s hands. With the Strategic Warfare update you can now reduce a Region’s capabilities by bombing it from a distance, damaging buildings in the Capital, similar to how you can raze Improvements. Siege Units were previously like other Units in an Army, they were best used in direct fights, risking damage to the Siege Units. You could not use artillery to wear down an enemy from a safe distance. Now you can. Siege Units, starting with Catapults in Age 3, have Barrage and Siege Defenses Unit Abilities. Barrage allows you to damage enemy Armies from range while Siege Defenses damages both defenses and buildings. We’ve also updated some Naval Units to play a similar role to Siege Units, and they have an anti-Navy Torpedo Unit Ability and an anti-City Missile Strike ability.
As technology advances, the range of these attacks increases, making it possible to engage enemy Armies or Capitals from greater and greater distances as time goes on.
Similarly, bomber aircraft now have a Strategic Bombing Unit Ability that allows them to target and damage enemy buildings.
These are only the non-nuclear options for the Strategic Warfare. Once you have discovered nuclear weapons and started to manufacture warheads, you can use some of these same Units to deliver them. Bombers gain a Load Nuclear Payload toggle that switches them to dropping nuclear bombs when attacking. Submarines gain a Nuclear Strike Unit ability that allows them to launch a similar shorter-range nuclear attack. And, if you’ve gone down the Special Operations National Spirit Route, there is also the option of equipping a Special Forces Soldier with a Briefcase Nuke.
In later Ages, you can advance your technology to a point where ICBMs are available and no settlement on the map will be safe from potential destruction.
Conventional and nuclear weapons generally do similar things in Strategic Warfare. Nuclear weapons just do far more of it. This is especially evident if you erase a Capital City with an attack or target them on several enemy Armies that happen to be close together:
They also leave behind Fallout, which is typically not something you want to have around.
When buildings take damage they stop working and must be repaired. Damage to buildings can be seen on your City UI or in the tooltips for the Capital.
Damaged Buildings are repaired passively each turn based on your Production income, as if you’re “rebuilding” the Buildings, but this does not take away from your actual Production income (so the Region can build something new while also repairing).
We toyed around with the idea that repairing Buildings would be similar to upgrading them, you’d have to put them back into your Production queue, but that felt really punishing (and tedious to queue up damaged buildings each turn to top-off their health). We also considered the auto-repair dividing the Production points between all damaged Buildings, but that too felt harsh as your economy would already be diminished from losing the Buildings in the first place. If you had a dozen damaged Buildings at once you could potentially never fully repair any of them.
This auto-repair design, where your Production income is duplicated across all damaged Buildings, is what felt the most practical and forgiving, while still making players feel the pain of their Buildings getting damaged.
Other Updates
Alongside our main pillars in Atomic Ambitions, there are numerous other updates. We have updated various Improvements to produce Pollution. With the addition of Uranium to the game we felt Radioactive Waste was a natural addition. This byproduct of Uranium provides negative value to your Region, and is referred to by economists a “Bad” (which feels silly, but has the same logic to why we call things “Goods” in the first place). Once we decided we were going to add Radioactive Waste, I pitched the idea of retroactively adding other Bads to our fossil fuel Improvements, and that conversation grew to the new Pollution update.
Some Improvements early in the game provide Waste, later fossil fuels Improvements provide Pollution, and Uranium Improvements provide Radioactive Waste. All of these Bads provide negative value to your Regions, but can be cleaned up by the Recycling line of Improvements which convert the Bads into things like Fertilizer and Recycled Materials, depending on the Age.
The Improvements that now produce Bads have been rebalanced to account for this negative output, the most notable will be sweeping changes to the Coal, Petroleum, and “green energy” Improvements, which have been rebalanced to against each other and the new Uranium Improvements.
We have also made an important update to the Diplomacy system.
We wanted to make our Diplomacy system more transparent, both so that players understand why the AI does or doesn’t make decisions or agree with your requests, but also to help players see the differences in the AI Personalities.
You can now see the weights that the AI Nations use to accept or decline Diplomatic Actions.
These range from generic modifiers, like Diplomatic Opinion, relative strength of your Nations, and so on, and also modifiers specific to their Personalities. These insights should both help you understand what kind of Personality you’re dealing with, but also allow you to make informed decisions when you send a request, whether you’re sending a risky shot in the dark or a guaranteed success.
We have also added an option to Compel the AI to agree to your requests at the cost of additional Diplomacy XP.
Compel only works on AI Nations, it isn’t available to use on other human players in a multiplayer game. It’s unlocked as you progress through the game and has a scaling cost based on how likely the AI was to agree to your request originally. Compel can be used to top up the success chance to avoid feels-bad RNG moments, or it can be used to strong-arm a hostile AI into playing along with your plans. The world is your oyster!
The last major update I feel we need to call out here is a new Game Rule that allows you to start new games in later Ages
You can select your Starting Age for new games and pick up at the start of Age 1, 4, 6, or 8 (the Ages that unlock National Spirit slots, aside from Age 2 which we felt was close enough to Age 1 that players would prefer to start in Age 1 anyways), and you’ll begin with a procedurally generated world state fitting for that Age.
Using the Starting Age setting you can jump into the middle of a game of Millennia and test out Age of Atom and Age of Wasteland right away!
This is a large DLC and there are a number of other changes: Simultaneous Multiplayer is greatly improved, there is a new map, we’ve added new default Nations, new Events, new Expeditions, new Landmarks, new music, reworked several National Spirits, added a number of UI improvements, and done our normal rounds of bug fixing and balance improvements too. It’s big!
Atomic Ambitions brings a lot of cool new stuff to Millennia, and we’re excited to get it into your hands! Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more Developer Diaries.