Post by nyotas in Version 16: Masque of the Red Death comments

Version 16: Masque of the Red Death » Comments

Viewing post in Version 16: Masque of the Red Death comments

OOOOOOOH! TY! I'll see if i can make time to play it tomorrow.

btw, was thinking about the "too many threats to keep track of" problem and got an idea, put hard limits on stuff: nobles in a duchy only care about their duchy and will only vote if it's a national issue, the dukes / duchesses care about their duchies the most but will still help allies in voting, inquisitors are state sanctioned so should only be allowed in no mans land and their own nation unless the 2 nation's rulers are friends, they should become slowly become shadowed if their liege is shadowed; have something like a newspaper which gives some 'gossip' every month and tells the player the most important events ie an empire going offensive, a new king / queen, maybe a comment on their personalities (warmonger , defender of the peace etc),

make threats localized and able to be permanently neutralized so the player can decide to focus on one area, 'conquer' it and then with some maintenance be able to go on to other areas, thoughts?

BobbyTwoHands3 years ago

Hopefully you haven't downloaded it yet, as I had to real quick push out a version 16.1, due to bugs in the merchants. Should all be fixed now.

I agree that the inquisitor should only stick to their own nation, to avoid some inquisitor from across the map turning up and upsetting your dark empire. Wouldn't make much sense, since they wouldn't have any legal authority, and could lead to very tedious work for the player, checking every nation every turn to make sure they aren't getting an inquisitor.

Localised situations (threats and victories) are reasonable, I agree. I think it's at least somewhat done, with the dark empire being at least free of concerns about evidence or inquisitors. The climate change should also be handled, since it reduces parts of the map to just snow, which you can then ignore forever. Possibly it does need a bit more balancing, to make this a bit more reliable. We'll need to look more at the end-game, now that the core mechanics are in, and enough agents are implemented to give a good variety of options to the player in the beginning and mid-game. Ideally push towards some giant final battle between good and evil, where the player can bring their stuff all together, and the NPCs can try to form some kind of last stand against you.

nyotas3 years ago

Did download it, just redownloaded it ;D. About climate change, is there any magic in the world? I know we have our evil magic (power) but do normal mortals have it as well? If so, then maybe they can do rituals to push back against climate change. Maybe even allow the player to somehow disrupt them. As for the last stand thing, how about making a "conscript" mechanic, where the corrupt nobles will draft more peasants than their nobler counterparts, which allows them to field bigger armies but they suffer economically due to lesser manpower. Then give an ability to the player if he controls a dark empire to call all peasants to form a huge peasant army, which causes the enemy to do the same to combat our peasants. This then allows a huge long war to start during which the player can start sabotaging stuff through agents or powers.

Extra: 4 Peasants -> 1 Army Strength

Extra 2:this system would probably work better with a tile system so maybe it's not fully applicable to your node system

BobbyTwoHands3 years ago

Previously the mortals did have access to magic, but at some terrible cost (which was never explained in lore). If things were very bad, they could become lightbringers, which were immune to darkness, and had cities which remained warm regardless of climate change. That was Shadows 1, it's not yet in Shadows 2 because late-game balance requires the start of the game to be established first, to figure out the different ways the player can reach the late game. Hopefully we can now start looking at that part of the game.

Could be looking at the possibility of giving the NPCs a way to defeat the player, as well as maybe a turn limit. Will need to look into it, especially using automated testing to get a good idea of the statistical distributions we'll be looking at for the end game.

We tried industrial stuff, with long term vs short term economic decisions, but couldn't get the balance to work very well, I'm afraid. It wasn't considered a priority, so we never released it into a main build. Possibly one day, but for now there are other more important things to deal with.

itch.io

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