[DEVBLOG#243] Vehicles-related Ideology update (Patreon)

Hey everyone and welcome to another development blog! This time I will take you through our latest update to Vanilla Vehicles Expanded - which includes brand new ideology related content!

The update is not out yet, but it will arrive in the near future.

Coming soon, The Wisent update features one brand new vehicle, 4 unique vehicle-related memes with 8 new precepts, 5 new vehicle components required to construct tier 2 vehicles, a major rebalance to crafting costs of vehicles and quite a few bug fixes.

The solution developed for an ever-evolving battlefield, the Wisent is the best and most affordable option of delivering squads of exposed soldiers and supplies to the front lines. Drive through the snow and hills to deliver enough troops and material to assemble a Roadkill, along with enough fuel to get everyone back home. Get yours today, dirtbags!

Wisent is the vehicle I feel like quite a lot of you want, even though you might not know it yet. It allows you to load a decent amount of cargo on it, as well as six passengers in the back. While the passengers sitting on it are exposed to gunfire, the truck itself is quite decently armored, which should allow you to drive it to the frontlines to drop your soldiers, and then drive away.

The pawns sitting on the back actually visually render, which will make all your catgirls or deserters (or both) visible as you drive them to the warzone!

Five new vehicle components get unlocked with various different research projects, and will now be required to construct Tier 2 and Tier 3 vehicles. This is our attempt at further separating tier 1 from other tiers. While tier 1 can be constructed using standard components unlocked with the Basic Vehicles technology, Tier 2 requires you to complete considerable amounts of research - or simply purchase the required components from traders!

This also means that Tier 2 vehicles become quite a bit more valuable - you can expect that constructing a lot of them will cost a lot of resources and will inflate your wealth quite a bit. And rightly so! Have you seen what the Bulldog does to enemy raids?

Don't worry, we've checked everything on a very important balancing spreadsheet. It's all scienced. I promise.

As for the new memes, our focus was to make vehicles actually matter for ideologies. Your people may be happy that they got to sail in their boat, or they might outright refuse to enter an airplane. There is plenty of options and precepts for you to play with to tailor the ideology to your liking.

Of course all the above-mentioned precepts also have stages that are not used by any of these memes, but can still be chosen when creating a custom ideology. I believe these ideos are a good start, and there is plenty of other aspects we can tie to ideology later on.

Let me know what you think!

The Wisent update will release as soon as we're done implementing the Wisent. There has been quite a lot of changes to various stats in Vanilla Vehicles Expanded, so I want to ensure we got it all right. 

In the meantime, we're wrapping up work on Deserters, which should be releasing soon-ish. We have also started work on quite a few other vehicle submods... and I can only show you one picture to get you going: