City Expansion cancellation details - October 24, 2025

The City Expansion mode that was intended to release as part of the Nanowish expansion for The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt has been cancelled. There are a number of reasons as to why, primarily to do with mechanics conflicting with the mode's end goals, the mode's end result leading to it being more of a Counterintelligence Lite (after Counterintelligence just released in the last expansion), and the amount of development time that would be needed to make a mode that would end up being a weak busy-work mode in the end. More details behind these reasons follow:

1. Conflicting mechanics between the goals of The Demon Rush: Legend Corrupt and the goals of a city builder mode

One of the goals that The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt has for its non-action modes is to have the player characters' playstyles and personalities strongly influence the mode's mechanics. This was the goal for the bigger new modes of The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt (Naval Conquest, Prison Break and Counterintelligence), and was intended to be a similar design approach for City Expansion.

However, a city builder mode by default is going to be more impersonal than other modes when it comes to the involvement of the player characters, as its focus is on the city more than the player's party of 3. I did not think this would be an issue initially, as Counterintelligence is a grand strategy mode and the characters would likely be less involved in such a mode that focuses on managing and ruling territory compared to Naval Conquest's focus on the player and ship and Prison Break's focus on the party escaping. This ended up not being the case for Counterintelligence, as it was able to have a more personal touch by allowing customization of the player's ruling style, the player characters' Field/World/Marriage passives giving them gameplay variety through the characters' personalities, being able to visit, hunt spies in, and invade Castles/Towns/Farms/Mines, and getting married and having children.

The obvious first step to have a city builder work with The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt's mode goals would be to do what Naval Conquest, Prison Break and Counterintelligence did -- allow customization before the game starts and throughout it, have the player characters' personalities provide more of a unique feel for each character, and let the player be personally involved with the "journey" (Naval Conquest not being menu based and allowing the player direct control to sail their ship, Prison Break to have the player take advantage of the smallest benefits that they can within the prison layout to work towards their escape, Counterintelligence allowing the player to explore territories, hunt for Spies, invite nation leaders to dinner, get married/have a child, etc.) -- in the case of City Expansion, this would have been for the player to be able to explore the city that they are working at building.

This originally seemed as though it would be straightforward as a design goal (just repeat the design approach of the previous modes), but unfortunately, City Expansion's handling of The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt's mode goals conflict heavily with the city builder genre (at least so far as a mode unconnected to Story Mode is concerned).

If trying for something like Counterintelligence's customization approach, allowing more thorough customization in City Expansion before and during the game runs into design issues immediately. If the design goal of City Expansion is to have a functioning city that the player can explore as they build, then they will need the same sorts of buildings/structures for each city -- houses, apartments, police, fire, hospitals, power stations, schools, transit stations, etc. If the player has to build all of this from scratch every City Expansion, then that is just tedious busy work per City Expansion game with little depth to it. As a potential solution, the "before" part of customization for City Expansion could be handled by different city presets (for example, a more tech/research-focused city preset, a more tourist-focused city preset, a more idyllic city preset, etc.), to cut out the busy work of early city building and add different approaches, challenges and requirements for a city.

However, the city preset idea runs into problems against the character's personalities playing a role. When it came to the character personalities playing a role in City Expansion, the original goal was for the party of 3 that became the city council to push overexaggerated laws and deal with events in over-the-top ways (and often in ways that could conflict with other party members' laws), and in some ways could have wound up as a more dynamic version of Counterintelligence's Ruling Approach. However, this had a lot of other issues -- there would be so many permutations, that it would have issues with being unintuitive on a mechanical level and too chaotic in nature for a Strategy Mode.

If going the route of the characters being more of a caricature for City Expansion, there would also need to be random events to better emphasize this as the feel of the mode. If the characters were going to be over-the-top caricatures of themselves in their actions, simply having their personalities added only to the making of WRITTEN laws would make the characters feel not like themselves, which defeats the point of the character's personalities being put into the City Expansion Mode. Random events that could also be handled in a way to further emphasize the caricature approach would help with this, but the problem is the "random" aspect as a major gameplay progression point -- if the best and/or major parts of the gameplay are random, then that either means a lot of waiting around as a primary gameplay mechanic (not good) or needing a giant number of random events with actions that give different results for 12 playable characters (and maybe some combinations of character approaches), and would be FAR too many permutations with gameplay that would be difficult to nail down if done in this manner (gameplay based on varying responses to a giant pool of random events is less gameplay and more seeing what result pops up onscreen at random).

Since the more light-hearted caricature approach had no solid gameplay mechanics that players would be able to intuitively grasp, the approach for City Expansion was to be changed to a more serious city management approach, which is something that would be able to have the gameplay mechanics nailed down better and would work better with city presets. The original thought was that the characters have their personalities affect building upgrades or new buildings (Cherry gets better police and fire workers/buildings, Pound gets better tech research/power stations, Jimmy gets better transit stations/tourist handling for his superhero/entertainment focus), but the characters focusing on improved buildings also led to issues.

The goal for the player having personal involvement with their city in City Expansion runs into problems with the above approach, especially when it comes to seeing the impact of the player's management decisions in the city they can walk through. If a player improves a fire station or hospital and they walk around it -- what are they going to do there? Walking around and interacting with random things in the buildings that winds up having no overall gameplay substance could be a nice supporting part of gameplay, but not as a primary gameplay goal. Prison Break could make it work, as taking advantage of the small things was the way the player could eventually escape from prison. In City Expansion, smaller interactions being the primary gameplay portion of walking around adds little depth to the player being able to explore their city.

This would also have the unfortunate problem of there being LESS purpose to exploring the city when the player is playing well. Are the police keeping crime rate down, the fire department preventing and putting out fires better, the hospitals keeping everyone alive and healthy, and the schools functioning as they should? Then, the player is rewarded with nothing out of the ordinary happening. If police/fire/hospitals/schools/etc. were handled badly by the player, then the player could end up encountering interesting events. Worse police handling could lead to more encounters with criminals on the street, worse fire department could lead to encountering more fires, but even that adds little to gameplay depth. Criminals could lead to the player entering combat or getting hospitalized, and the player's party is the city council and not the fire department, so they cannot put out the fires and cannot interact with it.

At the same time, even if one area is filled with crime or if one area is on fire, the player could just simply ignore it with likely little consequences outside of needing to go back to the city management menus and improve police and fire in some way. To get around this, having a strong end goal with a time/resource limit for City Expansion would be needed, such as how Naval Conquest had the player prepare for the Imperator's Fleet within 20 or 30 days, Prison Break had the player need to escape prison within a week or be executed, or Counterintelligence requiring the player to either conquer the world or own the most territory after 10 years.

However, even working out what the end goal could be got messy. If the goal was to make the city prosperous, the measurement of money alone could be easily exploited by characters that are focused on high taxes raising the taxes a lot in the last few "turns" to get the money they need, and this would subsequently make characters who lower or do not raise taxes less useful. Same thing with a bigger or more advanced city -- the characters that focus more on building would be more valuable than those who do not, and the characters who raise taxes so that the city can afford to be built larger would again be more useful than those who lower or do not raise taxes.

The solution that I had originally come up with consisted of two design choices. One was to use the Naval Conquest style of end game, where the player has a limited amount of time to prepare their city for a giant invasion (which would allow the unique buildings/upgrades that individual characters can build to be useful for the final invasion). The second was to have the population be more involved in the city overall -- different demographics with their own needs and goals based off of their job and where they live would allow the characters' different playing styles to have a larger variety of impacts and make it so that each playstyle could be more useful, especially if the actions of the player help keep citizens alive in the final battle based on stats like confidence, education, and the like.

Unfortunately, even though the above allows the gameplay to become more dynamic and varied, their implementation would add their own set of issues.

Preparing for an endgame invasion (original plans were 1 year of time for the player, where each week is 1 or 2 minutes, similar to Naval Conquest's Days) would mean that for the time factor to be of significance, the gameplay would have to reflect that. This would mean no fast travel back to the city council building to focus on expanding the city, so the player would likely need to spend most of their time sticking close to the city council building, as there would be no reason for them to have to explore their city. If they wanted to visit a particular city block, they would have to walk long distances to get there (and deal with cars) or use the transit sytem, which would have little difference and would just be waiting for the bus to go rather than walking. Essentially, the City Expansion Mode would be a walking simulator with nothing of depth to do here. If more combat was forced in for the sake of variety or maybe to support a progression system for character levels/abilities to prepare for the endgame invasion, it would still be out of place to have fights popping up out of nowhere in a mode that is mostly about building a city, unless the player deliberately made Crime Rate shoot up to grind experience, which would also not be great.

Having the population be affected and their stats change from the player's city building actions would also be too subdued of a gameplay mechanic -- if actions on the player's behalf raise a certain city block's education or a certain type of worker's confidence for the sake of being prepared for the endgame invasion, the population would still not do anything meaningful until the final battle -- which means 1-2 hours of menu-based city building prep work, where the payoff (if any) is not seen until the last big battle.

There is probably more that I could add as to how The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt's mode goals conflict heavily with that of the city builder genre, but the above is already very wordy and covers a lot of the major issues behind the conflicting mechanics.

2. City Expansion would essentially be Counterintelligence Lite

One of the other major issues that led to City Expansion's cancellation is that Counterintelligence Mode, released just three months ago, already does a lot of what City Expansion was planned to have. Originally, Counterintelligence was supposed to be just a PvE spy-versus-spy type of mode, but when implementing customization options, character personalities as passive abilities for gameplay mechanics, and the options available whe exploring territories, it became a grand strategy type of mode and ended up eating a lot of City Expansion's lunch.

While Counterintelligence does not have any base or city building in it, the amount of customizability for the player's Counterintelligence nation before the game began already offered many options in the form of Soldier Type, Religion, Ruling Approach and starting Mine Type. The city preset idea for City Expansion, even if it had different city type passives to add more to them, would be less like Soldier Type/Religion/Ruling Approach from Counterintelligence and more like starting Mine Type, as the player would still need a lot of the same buildings and approaches for running their city in the same manner that the Counterintelligence player will want minerals from the other Mines and will likely get them anyways.

Resource management is another big reason -- Counterintelligence has Mez, Food, 4 types of Minerals, Nation Points, Soldiers, Scouts and Spies that all have uses throughout the course of a Counterintelligence game. In comparison, City Expansion would likely just have Mez to pay for expansion projects. Other resource types were under consideration for City Expansion, but if there is minimal combat or conflict in City Expansion, there becomes less purpose to more resource types in a modern city and adding them for their own sake could create unnecessary complexities to a City Expansion game. The population could be considered a more complex "resource" due to how dynamic they would have been, but they would be less something that the player can deploy and more something that reacts to player actions based on what they build and where. Since the population would be a reactive part of the game and not something that the player could actively make use of, the resource management parts of City Expansion would not be as strong as Counterintelligence, especially if the only way to add strong resource management is to introduce new resources for their own sake.

Counterintelligence also has Crime Rate as an important feature, requiring bandits to be hunted or some Religion-based criteria to be met to drop it, and it makes an impact by reducing the player's income from that town. Though the 12th character that is coming with the Nanowish expansion is not officially revealed yet, one of their Counterintelligence focuses is intended to revolve around Crime Rate, which should give Crime Rate further depth (again, this is subject to change for Character 12).

In comparison, City Expansion's Crime Rate handling would have less that the player would need to interact with. If Crime Rate increases in one area, the player would not be affected when exploring if they avoid the area, and it would likely not be a problem in the grand scheme of a City Expansion game if the rest of the city is maintained well, as the only endgame issue the City Expansion player would need to worry about is the final battle. Counterintelligence can get around this and have Crime Rate make more of a substantial impact due to it having combat feature heavily, but City Expansion itself would have a more difficult time making Crime Rate in one area a serious threat. Even if Crime Rate prevented use of the building in the area, it could be resolved by either adding police nearby or just building that same type of structure somewhere else.

If it seems as though I'm picking on Crime Rate in City Expansion, it would be because it would be a strong focus for things happening as the player explores their city before the endgame. If the player is required to walk around their city, high Crime Rate not being a real threat defeats the point of dealing with it.

In Counterintelligence, the player could explore their territories, usually to hunt down Spies or invest money for better resource output. In City Expansion, there would be little purpose to exploring the city from a gameplay standpoint. If the player was able to interact with each citizen out of the tens of thousands of citizens in their city, it would be difficult to make that have any sort of an impact on the overall City Expansion game, especially if going the route of a timer ticking to the final battle. If the player was able to get into direct combat to fight criminals for little to no gain when the police could do it, that would take away the player's limited time until the final battle. If there were better rewards for fighting criminals, then that would essentially be rewarding the player for deliberately making a crime-filled city.

Counterintelligence also had a lot of "bigger" moments in its gameplay -- assassinating a nation leader (which would show a short cutscene if a Spy did it) and gaining all of their territory, being able to win large battles that shift the game into the player's favour (such as securing a chokepoint that might prevent 2 enemy leaders from meeting up to have children), being able to get married and see the wedding in action (as well as if assassins are trying to disrupt the player's wedding), and having children, among others.

City Expansion as a more serious city management mode would not have much except for the final battle. The random events that were originally going to be done in the caricature type of approach were going to try and bring a lot of these big moments, but their heavy randomness makes them difficult to apply as a major gameplay feature (as it would just be the player hoping for something interesting to happen beyond their control) and the very large number of permutations of characters' actions from them would be very unhelpful in nailing down the gameplay mechanics reliably.

3. Problems with development time

Development time on its own for the creation of a mode is not something I typically have concerns over -- even if a game mode eats up a chunk of development time, it is worth it, because the game mode itself adds more value to The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt.

Naval Conquest (about 7-8 months of dev time), Prison Break (5 months of dev time) and Counterintelligence (5 months of dev time) were all game modes that I love, and I felt that they were worth the heavy dev time costs. Even early on in development of those game modes, they were something I was actively looking forward to developing and eventually getting to play myself, as there was enough hooks and depth to them to get me hyped about them.

I feel the exact opposite when it comes to City Expansion -- there are no hooks I look forward to and the conflicting mechanics and Counterintelligence Lite handling actively cause problems for depth.

Where development time ends up being something that I have concerns over is when a game mode would take in the area of a half year to develop (going by the dev times of the other "big" modes) and it has too many conflicts and issues this early on in development and planning. Allocating such a high amount of dev time for a game mode that would be okay at best (but would likely not even reach that) is a poor use of dev time.

It does not help, either, that the current dev time for The Demon Rush: Legends Corrupt's 6 expansions is already well into overtime. The original expectation was 4-6 months of development time per expansion for a total of 2-3 years of dev work for the 6 expansions. At present, the amount of dev time is almost 4 years so far to be almost half done Expansion 5. A big part of this is dev time was taken up by Naval Conquest, Prison Break and Counterintelligence requiring a combined dev time of about a year and a half. Without them, the expansion completion time would have been closer to the original plan, but they were worth the dev time.

Keeping an extra half year or so of dev work with City Expansion, a mode that has issues of heavily conflicting mechanics and being too similar yet lighter than Counterintelligence in its planning stage, on an already giant project that is taking more time than originally planned is not feasible at this point.

I apologize that the City Expansion mode is not going to make it into the expansions. I wrote this dev blog page to show that it was not a decision that was made lightly and that there was a lot of consideration from a lot of different parts of the development process. Even at the time where I decided to cancel it, I had already spent two weeks on City Expansion's planning phase and spent more than a month after that thinking on its possible cancellation before finally reaching the decision I did.