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Just bought your game on Steam. Thanks for all your work! I've been playing since Shadows 1, and I'm glad you're still working on it. I am very much enjoying trying out the various different features in the current version of the game.

Some Names and agents features a more fun than others. In particular, I was a bit disappointed with the "Winter's Scythe" Name, and so I thought I'd give some feedback.

These are the things I didn't like about "Winter's Scythe":

- My strategy was to encourage the biggest empire to balkanize, then use 'Death of the sun' over and over during the ensuing chaos to freeze the world. I managed to destroy a few settlements like this, but I was disappointed that the world didn't react very much. The settlements quickly passed from being ruins to being empty locations - while ruins, they increase world panic, but as empty locations, everyone forgets about them! Also, the nobles of the world don't seem to have any awareness that the world temperature was dropping, they just carry on as normal.

- 'Death of the sun' has a 10 turn cooldown, and has to be activated manually each time. This is kind of tedious as it is easy to forget to cast it. Also, even the most chaotic wars don't tend to last more than 15 turns or so, so each war only gives you one or two good casts.

- I felt like it wasn't viable to win the game by reducing world temperature. This is because as the decreasing temperature destroys more settlements, the number of wars become lower, and so the power of 'Death of the Sun' also decreases. If anything, less settlements makes the world more stable as there are less scheming, warlike nobles! I think as a best case, you could destroy, say, 1/2 of world settlements, then try to kill the rest with a good plague or undead horde. On the other hand, because nobles don't really react to the decreasing temperature, `Death of the Sun` has no utility as a secondary strategy - something to distract the nobles with while the player undertakes their *real* plan.

Here are a few suggestions to make "Winter's Scythe" more fun:

- Rather than making 'Death of the Sun' a spell on a cooldown, make it a ritual that the player has to enact. After it has been enacted, it applies constantly - so that any battle (or any mass death from other causes, such as plague) lowers world temperature just a little bit. You mentioned in your post for the v17 beta about introducing 'ultimate abilities' for the player that have to be unlocked: maybe Death of the Sun could be one of these. Perhaps to enact it, the player has to corrupt a few key locations (such as temples or libraries) and build a hidden ritual site (or sites). The light-bringers could stop the ritual by capturing the ritual site. The ritual site could be anywhere on the map - the player could choose to defend the ritual site by putting a big undead army in the way (if the site is in an empty location) or making a shadow empire (if the site is in a big city) or perhaps simply by corrupting and assassinating investigators so that the light-bringers never find it.

- Following on from the above - if 'Death of the Sun' is the big signature spell of "Winter's Scythe", the player should have some fun lower impact spells to play with until they get it. Spells to cause sudden blizzards (disrupting agents or armies), avalanches (blocking paths between locations) or crop failures (causing famine, and temporarily destroying cities) are obvious possibilities.

- Currently, a ruin turns in to an empty location after a few turns of being unoccupied. I think you should consider removing this mechanic - let the ruins stay on the map forever (or until a civ re-colonizes them). This gives better feedback to the player as it shows them how successful they are - seeing a tide of ruined cities slowly descend from the top of the map as the temperature decreases would be really cool. It also lets the nations of the world slowly ratchet up in panic (when half the cities in the world are ruins everyone in the world should be trying to find someone to blame!) and lets the player use the ruins for other nefarious purposes (perhaps agents, or evidence, can be hidden more effectively in ruins. I also feel that the 'Necromantic Doctor' should be able to use them for something!)

- In Shadows 1, you modelled populations for each city, and had refugees. I hope you bring this mechanic back for Shadows 2. I think it can result in lots of interesting interactions. For example, a tide of refugees swarming out of the North should destabilize the southern cities. Perhaps the southern nations can vote on what to do with them all: turn them away, settle them on newly-opened empty territory in the southern wastes, or integrate them in to existing cities. If many of the refugees die, the 'Necromantic Doctor' should benefit. Obviously the player should be able to use them as a vector for plagues, cults, or shadow, too.

- Related to population models - perhaps each location could have a % arable land, based on temperature, which informs their maximum food production, and so maximum population. This way, reducing the temperature in a big metropolis (which utilizes all its arable land) would have a bigger impact than reducing temperature in a sparsely populated hamlet (which has a lot of arable land to spare). This might make for a more interesting, gradual affect of changing temperature/habitability rather than the binary "Is city / Is ruin". It also gives another fun interaction for the player to play with (hound all the refugees in to the one location with enough arable land to support them, then covert them all to deep ones!)

- Make it so that nobles can discover that global temperature is decreasing (via investigators at first - perhaps once many cities have frozen it just becomes common knowledge!) Let them react to this appropriately. As panic increases, good nobles would investigate the cause and eventually attempt a ritual to counter the changes; bad nobles would raid their northern neighbours (while the northerners are weak) or invade their southern neighbours (to capture more arable land). The player could encourage more nobles to be 'bad' so that they make war and strife - and thus more death to feed 'Death of the Sun'.

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Hope that some of that is useful. Love the game, looking forward to where you take it!

(+1)

I think you're completely right. I really like the concept of the Winter Name, but in practice it is underpowered and needs work. The original plan was that it would work alongside with the various monsters, such as flesh or Deep Ones. It would destroy the north, they would then attack from the south. The monsters are currently overpowered, however, so don't need more help, and the Name would be far more exciting if it could bring about an apocalypse of its own. It also suffers from the fact that it depends on politics, which is currently underpowered. Political stuff is my favourite, as it's the most complicated and unique part of the game, but it's often weaker than just sending a giant pile of flesh to eat a kingdom whole.

Initially the design was that the Name would be purely passive. Every battle would have an effect without player involvement, and the Name would have no abilities at all, but it was thought it was a bit boring, and that the player should be involved. I'll see how the 'ritual' approach looks. Gotta make sure the player doesn't forget to re-cast it when it times out.

With the introduction of an actual defeat condition, where the nobles can try to cast the Lightbringer Ritual to save themselves, it should be possible to have the freezing abilities be a bit less constrained. Previously, since the player couldn't lose, all cold-causing abilities had to have a difficult-to-achieve condition to make them work. If the player could spend power to cool the world they could never lose, they could win by hitting 'freeze world' whenever the power got high enough. This new ritual allows us to increase world panic or awareness as a consequence of the power, and so the player has to deal with the Lightbringers. They're also going to receive some buffs, which might well include some ways to reverse the global cooling, at least around a few cities.

I like the idea of having a few abilities which benefit from the cold. Maybe they can only be cast in frozen locations, and do good stuff. Both your suggestions, disruption and path-changing, sound good. Probably can't make it so a location gets fully cut off, but maybe a location could have a few connections cut temporarily, to make it harder for the enemy to reach your agents. We'll have to test some stuff and see what works. We'll also see how Ruins work. Currently I think there's an issue with the Unholy Flesh not being able to spawn on a ruined city, but that should be fixable.

Regarding population:

The previous game did have a lot more complex population mechanics, which was cool in a way, but also rather complex, and added a bunch of stuff without really integrating it into the main game. Ideally this game would be more streamlined, by cutting features back to just what it relevant to the gameplay. This ideally would allow the mechanics to overlap better. An example is how nobles' fear is used across the board. It is politically relevant, has a Name associated to it (merchant of nightmares) but also plays into the agents, as it is how the NPCs agents' specialities are chosen. If we expand the population side of the game, we'd want to do it in a way which lots of different Names and Agents can take advantage of the new mechanic, to allow synergies.

Hopefully we can get some of that back. Certainly it should be possible to get refugees to spawn when a city is attacked, or its food production drops below its population, but we'll need to spend some time looking at how it behaves mechanically, to avoid bloating the game's features without adding gameplay value. Currently it's rather simplistic. Each human location has a max population set by the temperature (with a bonus for coastal locations), and population will grow/fall to reach that value. Refugees should be able to detect which cities can accept more population, and navigate their way there, but right now that doesn't have any gameplay effects, so hasn't been implemented. In time it could be, though, as it could allow spread of disease, new political crises, or even advantages to the NPCs (if a noble successfully gets the refugees integrated as productive citizens their city would grow and be able to support larger armies).


I think the current plan for the next patch is roughly:

-New Agent

-Buff Winter Name

-Save/Load bugfixing, maybe some UI improvements

-Buff Lightbringers (give them crisis response stuff to vote on)

-Maybe add a new specialisation to the NPC agents (Inquisitor)

(+1)

Hey,

So, just pushed a beta-branch update on steam. If it doesn't break anything too horrifically, it'll be in version 18 full.

Buffed a few abilities, made it slower to warm up after freezing. Definitely easier to get stuff done following a successful civil war now.

Gave an ability which allows you to just trade power for cold directly. Once you've reached 12% world cooling you can keep casting it whenever it cools down, to slowly eradicate all human life on the map. Not sure if it's OP or not. Definitely can't be stopped if you disable Lightbringer Ritual. Might rework it slightly such that it REQUIRES the Lightbringer Ritual to function. Maybe it can only be cast while the Ritual is being cast? Would be an amusing way to turn their weapon against them.

Also added in your suggested ability to temporarily block travel between locations. It's called Blizzard, and you can cast it on a location, then another, and any link between them will be out of service while the blizzard lasts. Also not sure how OP this is. It seems somewhat useful, but maybe there's some incredible strategy which can be used that I've not thought of yet. It only works in the snowy areas of the map, making it more useful as you progress along with your grand plan to freeze the world.

Hopefully this makes the Dark Name a bit more playable now, and able to stand alone as its own strategy and thing, not just a way to slightly reduce the number of cities your Unholy Flesh has to eat.

Thanks for the feedback, it really helps

Thanks, I'm really looking to trying the changes you've made.

I really like this idea:

Might rework it slightly such that it REQUIRES the Lightbringer Ritual to function. Maybe it can only be cast while the Ritual is being cast? Would be an amusing way to turn their weapon against them.

Encouraging the player to make sneaky, subtle, overly-complicated plans rather than simple and direct ones makes the game more fun, in my opinion. In this case, I guess the player would get the AI to start the LightBringer ritual, cast their nasty permanent world-chilling ritual, and then disrupt the Lightbringer ritual before it can complete and banish the player from the world? Actually pulling such a plan off would be very satisfying!

I hope that in future versions you're able to increase the ways in which the world is reactive to the player. This is definitely what I enjoy most in the game. For instance, when playing a political strategy, the bit when you start mass enshadowing a big empire, and suddenly everything goes to chaos, is my favourite. The plague mechanics are also really fun for this - introducing a plague immediately causes all kinds of disruption, some easy to predict and some hard.

Even the less 'high impact' actions cause the world to react in an interesting way - for instance, I like how enthralling an agent causes investigators to beeline towards where the enthrall happened. With the new Blizzard ritual, the player can arrange to do their enthralling in an out of the way, far-north location, and then use blizzard to delay the investigator from finding the evidence! In v17, I tried to do this kind of trick by putting the evidence behind a Deep One colony, though it didn't work that well (I don't think there is yet a way to make Deep Ones attack enemy agents?)

I understand what you mean about population mechanics - about not introducing a bunch of extra features that don't interact with the rest of the game. I do hope you're able to introduce some stuff here, though. In particular, I hope you track population shadow separately from noble shadow again. I find it disappointing how quickly an enshadowed metropolis returns to the light after its ruling noble dies. You could hang lots of cool mechanics off of population shadow, such as inquisitors purging the enshadowed population, or fearful nobles expelling people out of a belief (either a true belief or a false, paranoid belief) their their subjects are enshadowed.

Thanks a bunch! I'm sure the game will be fun whatever direction you take it in. I'm definitely getting more out of my $8 Steam purchase than I got from the $50 I put in to the That Which Sleeps kickstarter. 😁

It's possible that the `requires lightbringer ritual' is the best way to do ultimate abilities for each Dark Name. Like you said, it's got a cool strategy element to it, where you force the enemy to give you the tools you need to destroy them. Maybe I'll change Winter's Scythe, then add a few other abilities to the other Names along the same lines.

Regarding new ways to ruin the world, my favourite part is definitely watching the map change in huge ways.  The obvious next way to introduce would be to have the opposite of Winter's Scythe, a Name which turns the world into a giant desert. I've not come up with any good abilities for a Name or for an Agent based around that, yet, though.

The plague doctor probably needs changing, a bit, so they also have a plague. Weaker than the Red Masque, but it would synergise with their undead armies. Might need to nerf the undead a bit, just to keep them from being the ultimate weapon all by themselves.