There has been few topic where devs have told us that the game engine will be changed to Unity.
I would love to hear more about this decision. What will improve? What are the benefits for you as developer and for us the gamers. 
I’m just interested and would like to hear more about this change.
+1
Im all ears
Basically, from what I know (as a graduated Game Designer) is that Unity processes code much faster and lighter, thus pressing down the minimum specs for the game and the load on CPU/RAM and graphicscard. Besides that, Unity comes with a big number of plugins that allow the developers for easy implementation of things like NGUI (the GUI system they use at the moment with the new GUI, if I’m correct) and Unity has its own lighting and shadow engine, which makes things looks quite real, with the right tweaking of course. Basically, also when the developers get into any issues on how to resolve bugs or other things while developing, there is a large database and community behind Unity to support people when they have questions.
Another things might be stuff like Facebook implementation, which ARE supproted by Facebook itself with a Software Development Kit, if you want to brag your scenario scores or something 
There is much more I guess, but I can’t name them straight away because I am not completely familiar with the current setup of the game engine and programming of the game.
All-together, for both devs and players, I’m pretty sure its win-win. (Captain Obvious here, or else why would they even consider going onto Unity?!)
[quote=“WizzyThaMan”]Basically, from what I know (as a graduated Game Designer) is that Unity processes code much faster and lighter, thus pressing down the minimum specs for the game and the load on CPU/RAM and graphicscard. Besides that, Unity comes with a big number of plugins that allow the developers for easy implementation of things like NGUI (the GUI system they use at the moment with the new GUI, if I’m correct) and Unity has its own lighting and shadow engine, which makes things looks quite real, with the right tweaking of course. Basically, also when the developers get into any issues on how to resolve bugs or other things while developing, there is a large database and community behind Unity to support people when they have questions.
Another things might be stuff like Facebook implementation, which ARE supproted by Facebook itself with a Software Development Kit, if you want to brag your scenario scores or something
There is much more I guess, but I can’t name them straight away because I am not completely familiar with the current setup of the game engine and programming of the game.
All-together, for both devs and players, I’m pretty sure its win-win. (Captain Obvious here, or else why would they even consider going onto Unity?!)[/quote]
All of that’s pretty much correct.
Main reasons are
Performance: It’s just waaaay more optimized than our homebrew engine
Modern-ness: It’s not some ancient DX9 thing which will never get updated with new stuff unless we take the time to do it
Prettyness: Shadows, better image based lighting, fancier shaders
Assets: Unity asset store lets you buy all kinds of sweet art assets, plugins, tools etc. for pretty much anything you want to do
Ease of Use: Almost everything we do, paticularly art related stuff will have far more simple and powerful tools to do it. We can probably even assemble engine art in the editor, rather than entirely in code
Support: Our current engine support team is one developer who has her own full time project (incidently, go check out www.ludussilva.com), unity’s support is every developer on the forums, plus their official support team
Future Cross Platform: if we ever want to go to tablets, Mac, Phones, whatever, then it’s a lot more possible from Unity.
It was a hard decision, as it’ll take quite a bit of time and effort, and for ages we were thinking it wouldn’t be doable, but looking into it further it seems it shouldn’t be too bad, thus we plan to do it after the Tycoon release, when Rob and his team are busy balancing gameplay/tycoon stuff (a very long job!)
If it means better performance and not needing to run as administrator, I’m all for it!
Why did you pick Unity over other engines, like Unreal Engine 4? From my experience, Unreal Engine seems more capable.
Since they are Indie developers, not having 1 million in the bank to invest on licensing a game-engine. These things arent cheap. Unity on the other hand, is free to use at first, when going commercial, is only 2000 dollars? That is really affordable compared to the Unreal engine!
19$/month + 5% gross revenue is the UE4 price. Quite good value imo 
But there are offcourse lots of other factors in choosing an engine.
[quote=“Kretus”]
19$/month + 5% gross revenue is the UE4 price. Quite good value imo But there are offcourse lots of other factors in choosing an engine.[/quote]
Oh I’ve read something completely different about the costs some months ago… Well, still I think they deserve every single penny for this game, so would be a shame to pay a monthly revenue to them.
To be honest, UE4 seems like it’d be a lot more work and for minimal gain for this kind of project. Unity’s tool set and huge quantity of available plugins, community support, nice scene editing tools etc. are perfect for us. Once Unity 5 comes out, it has about 80% of the prettiness of UE4 too.