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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. 😁