LilCi World 0.2.0 – worlds you can come back to

Version 0.2.0 is out. The big one is saves – a world no longer dies with the browser tab. Fights also work differently now, and the fixes are listed at the end.

The game saves your world on its own at every 5,000-cycle mark – at 5,000, 10,000, 15,000 and on, no matter when you started or loaded. There's one autosave for all modes, so a new game overwrites the last one, and the mode screen warns you about it before you start. The game also saves when you switch to another tab or minimize the browser, as long as at least 200 cycles have passed since the last save. That way a tab closed halfway doesn't eat everything after the last mark. Each autosave shows a short banner at the top of the map for a couple of seconds.

If you want to keep a particular moment, you have two slots of your own. The Save world button in the header opens them, you pick where the world goes, and the autosave never touches those slots.

Saved worlds live in the Your worlds section on the mode screen and in the Load a world window in the header. Each slot shows the mode, the cycle, who saved it, you or the game, and your clan if you played as its patron. One click takes you back into that world. Before a save overwrites a slot or a load replaces the world you're playing, the game shows exactly what you're about to lose. Saves are kept in your browser on this device. Clearing site data deletes them, and if the browser runs out of room, the game tells you instead of quietly failing.

Now the fights. Watching raids on one test world, we noticed that over seven raids the defenders lost 147 lilcis and the raiders lost 2 to a blow. The raiders weren't stronger. The defenders just weren't fighting back, and there turned out to be several reasons, each of them small.

A defender at a distant settlement didn't consider armed strangers enemies at all. Only intruders on clan land near home counted, so twenty raiders at an outpost were passers-by. A fighter also broke and ran from the very first blow, same as a peasant. Now a fighter holds until one blow takes three quarters of his remaining health, and only civilians run at the first hit. And every blow gave part of the damage back to the attacker as energy, so whoever struck first kept getting stronger. That is gone.

The biggest one was that food healed wounds. A lilci had a single number for everything at once, fatigue, hunger and injury, and a raid marches with supplies and shares rations along the way. Over six assaults the raid ate back 17,318 energy against 5,366 for the defenders. Health and energy are tracked separately now. Food restores energy, and health comes back slowly on its own, but only once a lilci has been out of combat for a while, on both sides.

With that fixed, one more thing showed up. Defenders went out to meet the raiders one at a time. Each one ended up alone against a crowd, with nine enemies around him, and lived about one cycle. Defenders of a besieged settlement now have the same kind of combat mode the raiders always had, and a fighter waits nearby until enough of his own are there to strike together. If an enemy is right next to him, he fights anyway. This last change alone took raider combat deaths from 4 to 20 and defender deaths from 112 to 74 on the same six assaults.

The Population Cap setting finally does what it says. It used to change nothing, because the birth brake stopped every world around a thousand souls no matter what. Now the brake scales with the cap. The default is still 1,500, the slider now goes up to 3,000, and above 1,500 the game warns you honestly that it will lag.