itch.io

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.

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. :)