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!