Post by nyotas in Shadows Behind The Throne 2 comments

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Hey Bobby!

Just checked my feed, found V3, IMMEDIATELY downloaded it and started playing. It was awesome how the V1 mechanics got added in (at least the power system), had a lot of fun with them.

So anyway, got some feedback and questions for you:

1. The weather power should become permanent, at least the 'death of the sun' one, since it doesn't just lower temp, it literally KILLS THE SUN!

2. I still miss the hierarchy system, because to me it made a lot of sense. Hope you'll add it sometime soon. Any ETA on that?

3.I think you should change the Lord/Lady generation system as well as the darkness one. By that i mean, that the darkness % of the location should slowly try to match that of it's ruler, and have it influence the lords/ladies that spawn there. Ex: a single-town duchy removes a lord, the location's darkness is 56%, thus the new lord has a 56% chance of being darkened upon spawning. And in a multi-town empire, you do the same but add a step before that where you decide which town the lord spawns in.

Hope this helps you! Keep it up! Really love the game! I don't know how to stop! Help! Oh wait, nvm. BYE!!

Edit: Is it possible to make some sore of age system as well? A lot of times i get caught in a stalemate, where the ruler and few of his friends aren't darkened but everyone else is, but everyone loves the ruler, so it's impossible to depose him and any attempt to gain power is blocked by him because he hates all the darkened. So either an age system to make him die of old age, which could maybe evolve later into a whole dynasty system *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* or have the darkened gain a slowly rising dislike for all who have lesser or none shadow level. It's even role friendly, because if they are corrupted , then maybe they get an instictual dislike for the non-corrupted out of envy,jealousy etc. kinda like how zombies are sometimes described, they hate those who have what they don't, even if they don't know it intellectually.

Holy shit did i rant a lot.

BobbyTwoHands4 years ago(+1)

Hey,

Glad you enjoyed it.

1) Yes, it probably should. The idea was that it would keep the world alive, so if you stopped taking action it would return back to normal. For the bugfixed version of V3 the world-wide changes will be made permanent, I think.

2) Maybe in version 4. I think the best approach would be to use the province system. Each province could have a duke assigned, promoted from one of the nobles in the province. Each provincial ruler would report to the king/queen, and you'd have to first be promoted to leader of your province before you'd be allowed to become leader of your nation. It ties into the current setup, where people in provinces are naturally allied to each other, because of shared industrial concerns, and how civil wars occur by splitting off provinces into their own nations.

We've not touched it yet because it would make the game more complicated, and we wanted to get quality of life and understandable gameplay at least somewhat handled before adding complexity to the system.

3)That's a very good suggestion, which makes a lot of sense. The nobles are supposed to be enshadowing their entire cities, so it wouldn't make sense to have new nobles arriving which are somehow unaffected. We'll try to get that added in as soon as possible.

Age) We were discussing this, actually. "How long do you think a turn is?" I figured it was maybe a season, but my co-author reckoned it was about a week. If we decide to implement some actual time system, we'd need to work out population growth speeds and suchlike. The main reason characters don't die of old age is because I wanted the system to be easier to understand and follow, and having characters randomly die would possibly confuse players, or force them to read huge numbers of messages about character deaths. We'll look into it.

Dark Unity) This makes sense, having enshadowed characters prefer each other as rulers. We wanted the dark empire to still have politics, but it would make sense that you could influence the enshadowed to hate those who are still light. Maybe just a power, which you could use to make all enshadowed dislike all light people a little bit?

Thanks for the feedback, we'll get to work on a bugfix version for V3, then on V4.

BobbyTwoHands4 years ago(+1)

Hey,

Just to note,

I have left the weather/climate change as temporary, because I realised that if it was permanent you could win the game just by clicking "end turn" repeatedly, waiting for wars to occur by themselves, and exploiting them. It would take thousands of turns, but would be a guaranteed win, and I don't want that to be a valid strategy.

If we implement some way for the humans to fight the effects, and return life to the sun, we'll make it permanent, probably.

nyotas4 years ago(+1)

Alright, thx for notifying me. Tbh i can't really think of a system for that except maybe as a joke. Have the same system for awareness of the darkness and copy it over for the environment and global temperature drop. Ex: i drop the global temp by a bit, this causes the southern cities to be more habitable, hence their lords there have no motive to do anything, but the northern lords have their cities damaged, which causes them to think about how to reverse it. Now, HOW they reverse can be magic BS, just burning a bunch of things, or something else i can't think of. This way the system encourages using the weather system only when the war is so big that the lords dont have a chance to really fight it.

Other ideas i can think of are:

Have the sun death power be permanent but also a really complicated ritual that needs a dark empire and the other power be temporary one-off spell.

The provincial hierarchy you mentioned is really good and can be tied into casus belli. Ex: The duke wants to war on the nearby empire because they control one of his duchy's towns.

And that's about it, thanks again for the info. Can't wait to see how you develop it further *girly squeal*!

itch.io

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