You can read about what Syphilisation is here and the manifesto for the game here.

Work Done

This week was still mostly playtesting and bugfixing, but I also put in a very interesting major feature; I set up a third build menu. The cities already used self-improvement to build buildings and expression to build units as well as work to work on the report. Instead of being able to only use one of self-improvement or expression each cycle, I now let cities use both each cycle. This results in a lot more units on the map, which I like. It requires a rework of the tech tree though, so I’ll get to that soon

Besides that, it was just a bunch of minor bugfixes, play throughs and UI changes. I fear that no amount of polish will fix some systems which still feel placeholder, so I’m going to try to fix the worst of them next week in addition to the normal polish work. I think this paradigm of one feature and lots of playtesting works well at this stage.

Interesting Fact

I thankfully finished Guns, Germs and Steel this week, but I have no desire to subject you to a second quote from that. Instead, I’m going to turn to In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell - “Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good.”