Silica Devblog #06

Welcome back to another Silica Development Blog.

This time we're bringing you something a lot of you have been asking for: a way to fight alongside your friends instead of against them. On top of that, there are new options for managing your base, a round of quality of life improvements, and another pass on the AI commanders.

Let's get into it.

Cooperative Strategy Mode

You can now team up with your friends and take on the AI together in the new Cooperative Strategy mode, which makes no promises about fairness.

The host picks the difficulty, so you can dial it up as far as your squad can handle. Player controlled units are also slightly stronger and have a bit more health, because surviving long enough to actually use them feels better than dying to the first shot.

Sell Your Structures

Misplaced a building, or just need the resources back?

Structures can now be sold directly from the build menu instead of being destroyed. You won't recover everything you spent, since the structure's health affects the payout, and the building goes through a proper deconstruction animation before it disappears.

Quality of Life Improvements

A batch of smaller changes that should make running your forces noticeably smoother:

• Double clicking a unit selects every unit of that type currently on screen

• Production structures can be multi selected, so you can queue units across all of them at once

• Getting into vehicles is far less fiddly

• You'll now get a notification when resource storage is full

• Unit orders are now visible directly in the UI

Smarter AI Commanders

The AI commanders got a deep rework. You can now expect them to:

• Expand their territory

• Stage attacks before committing to them

• Call off attacks that aren't going their way

• Switch strategies when a previous attack failed

• Generally read the battlefield a lot better

The result is an opponent that plans ahead instead of feeding units into your defences one at a time.

Better Air Unit AI

The skies got some attention too:

• Dreadnoughts now circle their targets

• AI bombers have improved approach and drop logic

What's Next?

We're continuing to work on Silica's AI, performance, and core gameplay systems, and there's plenty more in the pipeline.

Haven't picked up Silica yet? This is a good moment to grab it on Steam and put these features through their paces.

Thanks for playing, for sending feedback, and for helping us shape the game.

🔥 Join our Discord to catch updates first and talk to the team directly.