Post by Supercat345 in The road to Version 2 comments

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Thanks for responding to my comment! I really liked the first game and am excited about this one. If you wouldn't mind, I have a few questions about the future of the game:

Will you eventually add in other types of evils to play as; like in the first game you could play as the chaotic evil with the cards or the evil that mainly used undead that could only go for human extinction?

Are you going to be adding any features that have to do with the worms, and do they have an intended purpose in the game beyond being something for humans to fight before we start messing everything up?

Do you plan to add in any other government types like republics, theocracies, tribal chiefdoms, absolute monarchies, or maybe even the communist revolutionaries from the first game?

el_cramps5 years ago(+1)

I would love to know about the playable evils as well, or put more broadly: how much do you think will SBTT2 be the game That Which Sleeps promised? It doesn't look like we are getting the latter any time soon, sadly.

BobbyTwoHands5 years ago(+1)

Sadly it does seem that That Which Sleeps isn't arriving.

The game should share a range of properties with it, but also differ in a number of ways. I tried to introduce agents in a previous version, but they didn't work with existing mechanics. I think the voting system is too interesting (in my opinion) to give up, as it allows the player to directly interact with the major mechanics of the game. As such, agents are somewhat abstracted away as just "actions" you can take.

Ideally we'll salvage what seems like a good idea, try stuff out, and produce the best game we can.

Remember there's no actual guarantee that the mechanics of That Which Sleeps would produce an interesting or balanced game, as we never got to play it, so we don't know if it worked together.

el_cramps5 years ago

Thanks for the reply. You sound like you guys have a good handle on things and are proceeding in the right direction. Can't wait to see what future versions look like!

BobbyTwoHands5 years ago(+1)

We would like to re-introduce the different types of evil, but there's a few different ways of going about it, and we'd like to pick the one which is best. I personally like the idea of being able to mix and match different ability "sets", such as "Deep Ones" or "Undead", as well as sets such as "Advanced Politics" or "Madnesses".

The two core issues are balance and complexity. Don't want to allow overpowered ability combinations (or at least not have them as a default option, perhaps the player could enter into a sandbox mode to use them). We also don't want to have the game simply throw all the abilities into a giant pile which are impossible for new players to navigate.

As such, a basic start could well be having different Gods/Evils/Factions..., each of which has a special set of abilities, and shares a few basic ones (politics, external influence, enthrallment shadows...). If the ability set is powerful by itself (such as the undead) we could then introduce the limitations (the undead couldn't enthrall because it was just too easy if you could use both). We'll have to see.

Different government types would be interesting to play with, and would also come under the issue of being too complex for new players. We were thinking of toggle-able complexity options. For example the base game would have all governments be feudal monarchies, but you could click an option to allow them to become republics, theocracies, dictatorships...

We've no current plans for the worms. We may think of something at some point, but for now there's nothing on the board.

Supercat3455 years ago

Thanks for answering my questions! I'm really excited to see how this game eventually turns out, and will definitely be interested in future versions of SBTT2 or any other game you start working on.

Tiavals5 years ago(+1)

While I understand that sort of design philosophy, I really liked the fact that you could mix the powers in some versions of the first game. Like, depending on the situation I could approach it in a dynamic manner by switching agents and buildings and so on.

For instance, one of my favourite games was when I set up a Conqueror in the north in a small nation, and a regular enshadowed in the south in a huge empire. The conqueror picked out smaller nations and broke the rulers while the southern politics inclined enshadowed set about a civil war in the huge empire, which the conqueror then took over little by little as the infighting grew. It was really satisfying putting those two strategies in tandem.

Likewise, in other versions of the game I did all kinds of cool stuff with the buildings, and so on.

Were I limited in my approach based on a pre-game choice I couldn't make interesting decisions based on the political climate, but would be forced to maneuver it from a preordained viewpoint.

If you do end up making the different playstyles separate, I'd really like an "advanced" or sandbox style where you either have all powers, or can choose a bunch of powers and mix them around.

Unfortunately, one of the things I liked the least in the games were the Deep Ones. I could never really think up a proper use for them. Most of their abilities were either useless or simply worse compared to the other possibilities.

In the current iteration of the 2nd game, the Deep Ones are super useless compared to the incredibly powerful Flesh(which I really like as a concept, gameplay wise it's a bit too powerful IMO).

Also, the politics with the voting on economical things and so on is a bit hard for me to understand, while I really liked the shifting of the Isolationist-Militarist etc things in the first games earlier versions. It was easy to understand and efficient, while voting on whether you produce Wine or something always gets me confused, as I have zero idea what it does and why should I care. It's hard to move up in the societies and form "alliances", while in the first game it was simple to see how I could maneuver up in an empire and set it up so that I could, by making friends and then assasinating someone or waiting for a republic vote to come up. That I could use an agent to kill a Duke when I wanted was great, since it supplemented the other strategies.

I also liked how the armies worked in the first version. While they were frustrating at times(one game I had essentially won the game, but there was a tiny one city nation across the sea far away where my armies didn't bother heading to and so I ran out of time and lost, really vexing at the time, I think it was the undead horde iteration), they were a lot more exciting than the abstract way the second game currently handles wars.

I also really liked the evidence/suspicion/messenger systems of the 1st game, where they sent out letters to inform each other of things. Getting rid of the messages at a precise moment to cause suspicion to fall on an innocent noble, who would then be executed was one of my favourite things to do. It truly made me feel like an evil force for being able to manipulate things like that, so I'm sad to see it's currently not included in anywhere near the same form. The "procedural" evidence dispersal was a stroke of genius, IMO.

Anyway, since this is just an early version, I'm very interested to see how it'll evolve, especially since the first game changed so often and so radically, so any complaints I might have now might very well disappear in the next few versions. :)

itch.io

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