Citadelum 2.0 "Julius" huge update. Play in advance!
Ave, citizens of Rome. Six months after Citadelum release on Steam (with very positive reviews) Abylight Studios presents a huge free update (Citadelum 2.0 "Julius") that adds new gameplay, buildings, mechanics, technical improvements and optimization.
This is the biggest update in Citadelum to date, and makes a better, deeper experience for fans of strategy/ city building set in ancient Rome. Please, find here some of the improvements included in the game, available free next April 11th:
Be the first to play the new version of the game including a new level from our upcoming free campaign The Gallic Wars, accompanying the troops of Julius Caesar. (This free content will be released later).
New features in Citadelum 2.0 Julius:
New resources and production buildings: now you can extract Salt and Clay, and produce Olives, Oil, Clay Bricks, Ceramics, Cheese and Honey in your settlement.
More complex production chains: some products such as Bread now need to combine two resources (Wheat and Salt).
Technology improvements: upgrading the technological level of your city will improve the performance of your buildings and increase the capacity of your warehouses.
Diplomatic relations with cities: the better relationship you have with each city, the better prices you will have to trade and the more troops you will be able to recruit from them.
Secondary missions: Councilors of the city will make requests to be fulfilled in a period of time. If they are fulfilled on time you will get benefits but if not. .. there will be punishments.
Trials: once you have built the Palace of Justice, you will have to make decisions about incidents that affect your city. In each trial you will be presented with two decisions, each one with its consequences.
Health system improvements. We have introduced several important changes in the health of the population. Now the health of your town depends on two factors:
Salubrity: frequently dead people will appear in your settlement, either by natural death or by some violent event such as assassinations or revolts. These dead will remain in the streets lowering the health of your town. To keep the streets clean it is important to build morgues that cover all of your inhabited areas.
Health in the houses: to maintain the health of your houses to the maximum it is important that they are covered by maintenance buildings and medical centers.
God improvements. The relationship with the gods has undergone two important changes based on the feedback you have been reporting:
Regia and pontiffs: we have added a new building that allows you to automate the festivals of the gods. You can even prioritize the gods you need the most at any given moment.
Sacrifices can no longer be made at any time. You will only be able to make sacrifices when your faith level is very low. Thus we have put an end to the exploit of the pigs.
Construction of wonders: we have added 3 new wonders that besides being huge and beautiful, will increase the desirability of your city.
Simulation mode added for battle confrontations: now you have the possibility to simulate each battle without the need to play it. As you add troops for the confrontation you will see a bar that will determine the probability of victory.
New achievements.
New languages: Polish and Catalan are added to English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Italian.
Quality of life improvements.
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On top of that, we made new optimization enhancements, making sure Citadelum runs better on every PC, and shows some technical improvements:
Level of detail: we have added 2 LOD to environmental elements such as trees and rocks to reduce the polygon load when making an overview of the settlement.
Mesh optimization: we have reduced the number of polygons of objects and characters to free up GPU load without any perceived loss of quality.
Improved loading times: we have optimized the data loading routines to reduce loading times.
Avoid unnecessary memory reservations: we have optimized some processes to reuse already reserved memory to avoid creating garbage that would collapse the collector.
Caching building search processes: We have expanded and improved the caching systems to ensure that costly building search processes are only executed when necessary.
Avoid invalidation of caches: cases where building search caches are invalidated have been cleaned up to make them valid for much longer periods of time.
Revise algorithms to avoid or replace costly processes.
Disable features in materials if they are not used: we have found materials that used shader functionalities that consumed precious GPU cycles without being necessary and we have disabled them.
Avoid data copies in frequently used methods: many methods now receive data by reference, instead of by value, when it is possible and makes sense. This saves unnecessary data copies and potentially frees up a little more CPU.
Avoid running animation events on distant characters: when we know that it is not possible to hear a sound because it is too far away, we now do not even try to play it, thus saving resources.