News
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š„ The AI update is out of the oven!
ā¦along with rebalanced campaign and a number of new levels!
You should suddenly find the AI rivals to be much more cunning, diligent, but also less unhinged and hopefully more fun to play against. Let me know what you think! (survey link).
I will continue to tweak the AI in the coming weeks (thereās still some known issues), but Iām also eager to move on to new exciting features, more info on those plans shortly!
Beware: Due to changes in level generation, old conquest map links are unfortunately not compatible with this version of the game. If you want to replay some old favourite maps, you can still play them on the older version of the game over here.
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New year, same old news
Happy new year everyone! I hope Konkr will keep bringing you joy in 2023! At the moment Iām still hard at work on finishing the major AI update which you can test over here (for more detailed news on that check Discord). Iād like to incorporate it into the game ASAP! More regular content updates in the main game will resume once I manage to do that.
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š Merry Christmas!
Thank you for your support and continued feedback, you make making this game worth it! ā¤ļø
You may notice the game got some cute little wholesome additions for the holiday season. Rest assured this is strictly temporary!
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šļø I see you!
The AI rivals in the test branch are now much better at noticing when youāre actively leaving them alone and appreciate you for the benevolent neighbour you are (or at least feel slightly more guilty while invading š).
- Thereās also a Short feedback survey about the AI changes, have your say!
- You can now also read about the different AI personality presets over here.
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About the AI personality presets
Currently, you can find four AI personality presets in the customization console in the test branch. These represent a few different answers to the crucial question: How should the AI rivals behave in order to be fun to play against?
The short version is:
- competitive - it should try to win by any means necessary
- roleplaying - it should represent a kingdom in the game world which reacts to player actions in a way that feels natural
- maniac - it should be constantly attacking, making the game fast and exciting
- neutral - it should have no feelings towards others, simply attacking whoever happens to be in itās way at the moment
For a slightly deeper explanation see the section below.
I donāt think there is necessarily a single ārightā answer here, rather I suspect it might be a thing of personal preference. Which makes me very curious which of these personalities sounds most fun to YOU. Itās one of the questions in the feedback survey! Or does your idea of an ideal AI rival behavior not fit any of these? In that case Iād really like to hear about it!
More detailed info on each personality preset bellow. Please note that this describes the goal I have in mind for each personality type, the current implementation might not be the most accurate reflection of it yet āŗ. So far I was mainly focusing on polishing the AI behavior with the default settings (ācompetitiveā personality).
Competitive
In a Game of Thrones, you win, or you die.
This was always my preferred direction for the AI in Konkr. Each AI rival tries their best to win the game, emulating a reasonably skilled human opponent. Itās a competition where everyone is aware that the second place is worth nothing.
- Every turn demands your full concentration and any mistake can be very costly, even when youāre in the lead.
- When one faction gains the upper hand, the others will conspire to take it down - late game usually becomes a āyou vs everybody elseā battle.
- Rivals have strong sense of self-preservation and avoid reckless risks unless they are desperate.
- Alliances are only reliable for as long as they remain mutually beneficial, not for one turn longer.
Roleplaying
Violence begets violence.
This is more along the lines of what you would expect in a more immersive sandbox strategy game. The rival factions naturally grow and respond to player actions, but they are not focused on winning the game. Weaker factions donāt conspire to stop the stronger ones and allies rarely betray you.
- The human player is in control and usually free to choose who to attack and who to ally with, leading to a wide breath of strategic choice (but perhaps not enough challenge).
- The rivals can strike back, but the player can generally relax once they get a sizable lead.
- Alliances are reliable, grudges are bitter.
- Rivals have strong sense of self-preservation and avoid reckless risks.
Maniac
Ride now! Ride for ruin and the worldās ending!
For those looking for a more fast-paced and action-packed experience. The AI rivals are there to make crazy and exciting stuff happen on the board. They expand and attack recklessly, leaving their defenses wide open, but can also greatly benefit when their gamble pays off.
- The human player mostly has to react to the rivals actions in order to consistently punish their numerous reckless gambles.
- The games are fast and full of grandiose moves, but donāt leave much space for strategy or politics.
Neutral
What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
This is closest to the pure Slay experience. It essentially removes diplomatic considerations from the game. There are no grudges, truces or alliances, everyone is simply out for themselves. Thereās also no conspiring against stronger factions. The rivals take over tiles from other players with the same kind of indifference as if it was a neutral tile.
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Looking for your feedback!
Iām finally quite happy with the current state of the new AI!
GO MESS WITH IT HERE and let me know what you think! A more structured feedback survey will be coming up shortly.
Itās also where you find the new levels for this week š.
Coming up next in the AI update branch:
- overhaul of the diplomacy layer (how your actions affect relations with other players)
- looking into ways to scale back the difficulty so that players looking for more relaxed gameplay arenāt totally left behind š
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AI beta test guide
Here are some tips for messing with the new AI available at www.konkr.io/releases/dev/test-ai-update/:
Your progress is tracked separately in this branch (cloud sync is disabled), so you can keep track of which levels you tried (and/or beaten) with the new AI.
There are cheats! Iām letting you cheat a bit in this branch so that you can experiment with various situations and AI settings:
- you have unlimited rewinds (you can rewind even with no lives left)
- you can use middle mouse button to make your units movable again, even if they already acted this turn
You have a Faction customization panel at your disposal, which allows you to adjust the AI playstyle. Hereās a quick summary of all its options:
For more info on each of the adjustable traits, continue reading!
Daring
(previously called expansive)
How much the AI is willing to get greedy and take big risks.
- When set to 1, the AI will basically stop defending, using all itās units to aggressively expand or harass other factions.
- When set to 0, the AI will heavily prioritize securing its existing territory before taking any risks.
Combative
(previously called disruptive)
How much the AI is willing to start conflict with other factions.
- When set to 1, it will always prefer taking tiles from others, rather than expanding into neutral territory.
- When set to 0, it will basically only ever attack in self-defense.
Important to note here, this has no effect once the AI is under attack, it will always begin to fight back after that (though it can revert to being at peace if you leave it alone for a few turns; how long? proportional to how much damage you caused).
Ambitious
How much the AI is trying to stop anybody else from gaining an upper hand. This is what causes the infamous phenomenon of your ally brutally backstabbing you just a turn before you were about to do it to them :).
- When set to 1, the AI will quickly begin to plot against anyone whoās getting too far ahead of the other factions.
- When set to 0, the AI will ignore the big picture and play consistently
This also affects how much the AI shifts itās playstyle based on the total situation. For example the AI becomes more daring when itās behind and less so when ahead. Setting ambitious to 0 gets rid of these effects and makes the AI playstyle const from the start to the end of the game.
Honorable
This controls how much the AI let its approval of other factions (what you see on the red-green spectrum of factions emojis) affect its decisions.
- When set to 1, the AI will almost never attack allies
- When set to 0, it will pay zero attention to its relations with other factions.
Attack Skill
Getting tired of the AI waltzing in from half across the map with just enough units to snipe your capital? You can use this to limit the range at which the AI āseesā attack opportunities.
- When reduced to 0.5, the AI usually wonāt make lunges farther than 5 tiles from its borders.
- When reduced to 0, the AI basically behaves like the one in main branch, only rarely discovering any effective attack opportunities
Defense Skill
Getting tired of the AI always placing just enough defenders to prevent any juicy cut? This can be used to introduce some extra gaps into the AI defenses. It makes the AI slightly underestimate the forces at your disposal.
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Getting there!
The new AI in the test branch has become a lot more consistent over this weekend and just learned to properly defend multi-town provinces, but it still needs a bit more time in the oven before it really works the way Iād like it to. Stay tuned!
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I may have created a monster...
You can now play against the in-development version of the new AI over here! It still has a few major blindspots at the moment and may act a bit drunk, but Iām already having a blast playing against it, so might as well share!
It may play a bit too well in some aspects, donāt expect all campaign levels to be beatable in the test branch! Do expect a proper beta test by next week, when Iām done fitting the few remaining pieces and ironing out a bunch of bugs.
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AI update progress
As it often happens when I start digging in the AI code, the scope of the update grew a lot larger than I originally expected, with major changes in three of the AI pillars (attack planning, high level strategy and diplomacy). But at this point itās starting to all come together pretty nicely! Aiming for public beta next week if everything goes smoothly. For another small sneak peak at the progress continue here.
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AI Playstyles
No exciting changes this week, so instead Iāll share a peek into the ongoing work on the next AI update. Continue reading if that sounds interesting to you!
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What do bandits and zombies have in common?
Neither can now move over walls! This gives you a bit more power to manipulate bandit movement. Some subtle UX improvements were added too, for example you can now shift-click to quickly place multiple units!
For other news see changelog and if you miss the zombies already, the infected version of the game is quarantined over here.
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What the š
Terribly sorry around this, but the latest release seems to be infected with some kind of conveniently thematic mutation. Hopefully Iāll manage to clean it up by next week!
In the meantime, if you donāt want to deal with this, an untainted version of the game is still available over here.
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šŖ "It's not you, it's me!"
In this weekās update āalliesā are still as likely as ever to backstab you at the worst possible moment, but at least they should no longer keep smiling at you afterwards!
A few other small improvements are detailed in the changelog, while I work on a larger rewrite of the AI decision-making and diplomacy layer.
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The game has changed!
A major upgrade of AI defense capabilities is now released! You should find your rivals to be less recklessly aggressive, but also not quite as easy to outmaneuver anymore! Many campaign levels got slightly updated and moved around to match their new difficulty level, sorry for any confusion that might cause!
Now I feel the main remaining weak point of the AI is attack planning, that will be my next focus!
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š¤ "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
The AI is getting feisty! You can test a beta version of a major AI overhaul at www.konkr.io/releases/dev/test-ai-defense. Iām very much looking for feedback, so give it a go! Itās where you can also find this weeks new levels (they will arrive into the main game later, together with the update).
Continue reading here for more details!
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AI tuning continues...
I just restored some teeth to the AI, it was becoming a bit too eager to leave you alone and focus on defense in some cases š.
Iām working on a big upgrade of the AI tactics when it comes to defending choke points and large provinces. Expect more news on that soon!
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Rivals now 35% more satisfying to crush!
Your rivals just became a fair bit more expressive! Watch them react to your actions! Be it with love, awe or despair š.
Some tweaks to the AI behavior have landed as well. You should see a bit less suicidal aggression from the AI and fewer facepalm-inducingly stupid moves. If youād like to know more about the changes and whatās coming next, continue reading here.
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Say goodbye to "Unknown Island"!
Conquest maps now get unique names! You can bring back your favourite islands or share them with friends by entering the name, or even more convenientlyā¦
ā¦look for the brand new ālinkā button!Your links to fun maps are also welcome in the new
#map-sharing channel on discord! -
ā Play from anywhere!
The cloud sync update is live! If youād like your campaign progress safely backed up and shared between your phone and PC, just click the little ā cogwheel icon in the top right corner and choose your preferred sign-in option!
You might also notice some additional UI changes, you can read about those here.
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New levels!
This weekās new levels landed at numbers 8, 13 and 26, have fun!
My focus remains on the cloud sync update, which is nearly ready now. Should be landing later this week! š¤
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Survey results š
Hey everyone, this weeks new levels can be found at numbers 5, 17 and 18! Other levels got moved around and one got removed. Sorry for the constantly changing level numbers! Iāll try to move to a better system soon.
If youād like to know about a subtle rule change to bandit behavior and the player survey results, continue reading over here!
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š§ New levels every week!
Hey everyone, I would hate to keep you starved for content while Iām working on the bigger improvements. So starting today, Iāll be adding 3 new handcrafted levels to the campaign every week!
Todayās batch includes new levels 8,9 and 10 as well as rebalancing of some existing ones. Thereās also a bunch of bugfixes and little improvements, more in the changelog.
Also the player survey is still open, big thanks to everyone who gave their feedback so far!
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š What do YOU want to see next?
Help me decide by taking this short survey!
Slowly but steadily thereās more and more of you awesome folks playing my game, so Iād love to learn more about what kind of improvements youād appreciate the most š.
Also if youād like to know more about my own thoughts around the future of Konkr, continue reading over here!
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What's next?
Hi everyone, so ever since v2 was released about a month ago, Iāve been trying to collect as much feedback as I could.
And itās been kind of amazing.
Sentimental rambling
After about a year of hacking away at this thing, seeing that Iām clearly not the only one who is utterly in love with the concept of this game is beyond rewarding. Massive thank you to everyone that gave me feedback on this or the earlier version of Konkr.io over the past months (and years). You are my heroes, and I wouldnāt make it this far without you ā„.
This is also the first time that Konkr feels to me like a complete, finished game. Thereās no longer a laundry list of things I still need to do before Itās truly fun and playable, and that feels awesome.
Of course, this does not mean Iām done! In fact Iām more excited than ever to keep expanding the game and bring it to the next level of greatness! But how does the next level of greatness look like is a somewhat open question now. I will share my thoughts below, but I would also love to know what you think. So if you didnāt yet, please do me a favor and take this short survey!
The Paths Ahead
Iāve recently transformed my massive todo/idea list into a more high-level overview of the possible paths in which I could see the game expand next. Here it is!
As you can see, I think the next big feature should be an option to login and save your progress in the cloud. I view this as a blocker for a lot of other exciting stuff, like a map editor and a big expansion of the campaign.
Why? Currently, all your progress in the game is just stored in your browser. There are two big problems with that:
- itās really easy to lose all your progress by for example clearing your browser data.
- itās impossible to share your progress between devices (like your phone and a pc).
The current 20-level campaign is about the limit of the amount of content Iām willing to bet on such a flimsy storage mechanism. I really donāt want you folks randomly losing many hours of progress!
So my main plan at the moment is:
- get an (opt-in) login/cloud-sync in place
- add a lot more campaign content
- add map editor & map sharing
And after that, thereās a sea of other cool improvements I could be working on.
All that said, the results of the survey posted above might still shake up things quite a bit, so stay tuned for more updates!
I hope this cleared things up a bit. Going forward I would like to be more transparent about my plans, rather than just dropping random updates on you folks out of the blue š.
Thanks for reading all the way through this! As always, Iām happy to chat about any of this with you on the Discord server.
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New campaign levels!
The main campaign was just expanded to 20 levels, check them out! There are 9 new ones, some old ones were shifted around, others tweaked and the utterly evil last level was removed for now.
Big thank you to everyone that has been sending me feedback on the levels, it really helps. ā¤ļø
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Play on your phone!
Konkr is now touchscreen-friendly! Visit konkr.io on your phone to try it out. As always,
let me know if you run into any issues.For the next update I will be most likely focusing on content, so expect new and rebalanced campaign levels soon!
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New website!
A shiny new version of Konkr calls for a shiny new website, so I took some time to update the web.
It includes a standalone version of the in-game How to Play guide and a new About page.
You can now also keep a closer eye on any changes to the game by following the Changelog.
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Welcome to Konkr v2!
I hope youāll enjoy it!
If you have any feedback, donāt hesitate to email me or
join the Konkr.io discord server.And just in case you want none of this new fanciness, you can still play the old konkr here š.