Hi, I see that I am not only one who was dissapointed by "That Which Sleeps" fiasco. I bought "Shadows of the Forbidden Gods" on Steam, but I think that I wait with playing to the full release.
Hey! Sorry if this is answered somewhere else, I've been looking but I can't find one. What's the difference between the enhanced version and the standard edition? Is it just portraits?
It is just portraits and music. Think of it as DLC. I had promised to keep the game open source, so no gameplay-relevant stuff could be made paid-for, so a cosmetic DLC made the most sense. We're working on adding Events, like in Crusader Kings or Stellaris, and some of that content might be Enhanced Edition only, depending on how things look when we've done more work on it.
I can't seem to stay under the radar, everyone becomes suspicious of my agents early. Is there a forum I can go to where there are some basic guides for this game, this game is interesting but I honestly do not know what i'm doing
In general, you're not supposed to be 100% undetected. Your agents don't need to survive forever, just long enough to accomplish their objectives. Your enthralled noble might be valuable, but agents can be replaced when they get discovered and killed. You're playing as the evil side here, compassion isn't something you should be worrying about. If a vampire dies, just get another and continue the Great Plan.
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'.
----
Hope that some of that is useful. Love the game, looking forward to where you take it!
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)
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, 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.
Just some suggestions after playing the steam version for 6 hours: 1) If you click on voting when some char is selected then it should immediately open the voting menu with this character selected.
2) Use power and abilites scrolling with scroll wheel is unuseable as it scrolls too much items at once.
3) Nation and province names on the global map when corresponding filters are selected.
4) Semi-tranparent UI side panels. Maybe 35%? Dunno.
5) Resources map mode (not really sure about this one)
6) Clickable buttons for map mode, like in paradox games. Hotkeys are good, but I think there still should be options.
7) Some sort of icons to differentiate between different event in the right bar. (Not sure about this one)
8) Ability to see/highlight hostile agents to the selected agent. (Map mode?)
9) Global map / ability to fast-forward world history
10) Pressing Tab key or Esc to quickly exit current menu
11) More connections between sea regions and coastal places of interest.
12) Maybe at least several turn (5-10?) cooldown between votes? (except for emergencies)
13) More indirect distractions for agents. Maybe bribing local guards, planting false tracks for a chasing agent.
14) I think it should be possible to select abilities and powers to use by clicking.
Sorry, missed this message when it first arrived, only just spotted it. Must have not seen the Itch e-mail about a new comment or something.
I agree with many of these, the UI is constantly being changed to get it to behave a bit better. Slowly it's improving, but there are still issues to be addressed. I'll take a look at them and see what can be done. Some will be harder than others. Due to the use of hotkeys, for example, we're limited to only 9 map modes, so have to decide which are most useful. Maybe we could have buttons which don't have associated keys, for the less-used modes? We'll see what we can fit on screen.
Sorry, yes, early access. Gonna have bugs. We're currently looking at this particular one, because a few people have had the same issue. Could you give us more information about your hardware? We're unable to replicate the issue on all the computers we've tried on, so we believe there's some difference between what we're using and what you are.
Specifically: Which operating system (including 32/64 bit), CPU and total RAM would probably be most helpful.
As far as we can tell, this is some kind of Unity issue, so we'll need to see if we can change how it compiles the .exe to avoid these issues in the future. Bug fix version will be pushed when we can figure it out.
Thanks for the report, including the image (it is useful to us to notice that the number in world panic is what it is, since that's 2 to the power 31, implying a 32 bit integer has somehow been mis-computed).
This are my spec: Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor (12 CPUs), 3.6GHz Memory: 16298MB RAM Card name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
I've 2 monitor Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (165Hz) Current Mode: 3840 x 2160 (32 bit) (60Hz)
if you need more just tell me! (also if you need more screenshot or the Dxdiag.txt)
Thanks. This helps us rule out it being a 32/64 bit issue. Everything else there looks normal, we tested on dual monitors and it worked, so we don't think it's that.
We pushed a new bugfix version, which hopefully will solve it. If not, let us know and we'll have another try.
Hey, we are being told that it doesn't work. Could you download the version 14 standard (now also available on Itch) and see if that works, if you have time? Many thanks, we just can't get to the bottom of this issue. We'll try some stuff but it would help to know if this version is new to V16 or if it's existed all along and we just didn't notice.
Thanks again
Oh, and are you using non-English OS settings (shouldn't affect anything, but I was told by another dev that it sometimes affects games). And maybe it's a anti-virus thing?
Just pushed a new version. We hope this fixes it. We're not actually sure WHY it fixes it, but over on Steam people are saying it works. We'll try to figure out what was going on based on what the bits of code we removed were doing.
Hello! Unfortunately, the game does not run on my PC: running the .exe only opens a Unity loading screen with a green bar, and then... nothing at all! The loading screen disappears and no game starts :(
If you know of any solution to this issue let me know, I'd love to try out your creation!
Sorry this is occurring. Could you post your machine's specs? It's happened to another person, and I just can't replicate it. I've tried on four different machines, but it all seems to work for me, so fixing it is hard. It would help to know what the hardware differences are, in case those are causing it.
Hey there! I uh, downloaded the game and... there seems to be a very serious bug... or just me being unaware of something. No matter in what way I start the game, as soon as possible I am shown the victory screen. On said victory screen, I can't even press "dismiss" to, well, dismiss it. It just stays there and I have to alt tab out. I also clicked "load" and trying to back out of that menu didn't work, just stayed there.
I downloaded both versions, and they seem to be working fine for me. I'll keep looking into this, but it is very strange. I can't immediately think of any reason it would happen.
Alright so, still the same issue. I will note a few new things though. The victory screen claims the max enshadowment of the world is at 7500%, and "world panic" is at a "-(incredibly long and random number)" Also, my chrome download gets to about a fourth of the way there, and then suddenly claims the zip has been downloaded. I suspect this is the issue.
Couple more freshly downloaded zips and its the same exact problem, but this time my chrome has downloaded the zip file fully. I've tried putting it on different locations, running it as administrator, unpacking the zip in a couple different ways, but no difference has occured. Even the weird inability of the load button persists.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I can't replicate it at all. Maybe Unity has some conflict with your setup (32 bit vs 64 bit, some mismatched Windows Upgrade...). Dunno, I'll ask around and see if anyone has heard of anything like this.
If it helps, I'm still running a windows 7. It's the family computer and my parents are very bad with the computer, so changing version to 10 would be very problematic for them.
I do have a mac, though. Is there/will there be a mac version of the game, perhaps?
Just pushed a version which might have fixed it. Still a bit unsure as to what's really happening, but it seems to work for now, for people who were reporting the issue.
← Return to game
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
How do we play the fist one?
Hi, I see that I am not only one who was dissapointed by "That Which Sleeps" fiasco. I bought "Shadows of the Forbidden Gods" on Steam, but I think that I wait with playing to the full release.
Has anyone figured out how to get params.txt to show in-game?
Hey I like the game alot here is my review. Thanks for making such a fun adn unique game.
Hey! Sorry if this is answered somewhere else, I've been looking but I can't find one. What's the difference between the enhanced version and the standard edition? Is it just portraits?
I've been really enjoying the game btw.
It is just portraits and music. Think of it as DLC. I had promised to keep the game open source, so no gameplay-relevant stuff could be made paid-for, so a cosmetic DLC made the most sense. We're working on adding Events, like in Crusader Kings or Stellaris, and some of that content might be Enhanced Edition only, depending on how things look when we've done more work on it.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it
I can't seem to stay under the radar, everyone becomes suspicious of my agents early. Is there a forum I can go to where there are some basic guides for this game, this game is interesting but I honestly do not know what i'm doing
I don't think there's a forum for gameplay, yet, but we did make a few videos to show how we play:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1z3TXRMfvI&ab_channel=BobbyTwoHands
In general, you're not supposed to be 100% undetected. Your agents don't need to survive forever, just long enough to accomplish their objectives. Your enthralled noble might be valuable, but agents can be replaced when they get discovered and killed. You're playing as the evil side here, compassion isn't something you should be worrying about. If a vampire dies, just get another and continue the Great Plan.
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'.
----
Hope that some of that is useful. Love the game, looking forward to where you take it!
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)
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:
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.
Just some suggestions after playing the steam version for 6 hours:
1) If you click on voting when some char is selected then it should immediately open the voting menu with this character selected.
2) Use power and abilites scrolling with scroll wheel is unuseable as it scrolls too much items at once.
3) Nation and province names on the global map when corresponding filters are selected.
4) Semi-tranparent UI side panels. Maybe 35%? Dunno.
5) Resources map mode (not really sure about this one)
6) Clickable buttons for map mode, like in paradox games. Hotkeys are good, but I think there still should be options.
7) Some sort of icons to differentiate between different event in the right bar. (Not sure about this one)
8) Ability to see/highlight hostile agents to the selected agent. (Map mode?)
9) Global map / ability to fast-forward world history
10) Pressing Tab key or Esc to quickly exit current menu
11) More connections between sea regions and coastal places of interest.
12) Maybe at least several turn (5-10?) cooldown between votes? (except for emergencies)
13) More indirect distractions for agents. Maybe bribing local guards, planting false tracks for a chasing agent.
14) I think it should be possible to select abilities and powers to use by clicking.
15) Temperature and habitality map modes.
Hey,
Sorry, missed this message when it first arrived, only just spotted it. Must have not seen the Itch e-mail about a new comment or something.
I agree with many of these, the UI is constantly being changed to get it to behave a bit better. Slowly it's improving, but there are still issues to be addressed. I'll take a look at them and see what can be done. Some will be harder than others. Due to the use of hotkeys, for example, we're limited to only 9 map modes, so have to decide which are most useful. Maybe we could have buttons which don't have associated keys, for the less-used modes? We'll see what we can fit on screen.
Excellent! I don't use steam but I can say i had this bug, and now it is no more. Everything seems to be playing as it should.
Hi! every time i start a new game this happen! (i play the steam version)
Tell me if you want more info because i really wanna play! :'(
Hey,
Sorry, yes, early access. Gonna have bugs. We're currently looking at this particular one, because a few people have had the same issue. Could you give us more information about your hardware? We're unable to replicate the issue on all the computers we've tried on, so we believe there's some difference between what we're using and what you are.
Specifically: Which operating system (including 32/64 bit), CPU and total RAM would probably be most helpful.
As far as we can tell, this is some kind of Unity issue, so we'll need to see if we can change how it compiles the .exe to avoid these issues in the future. Bug fix version will be pushed when we can figure it out.
Thanks for the report, including the image (it is useful to us to notice that the number in world panic is what it is, since that's 2 to the power 31, implying a 32 bit integer has somehow been mis-computed).
Thanks again,
BobbyTwoHands
This are my spec:
Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Processor: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor
(12 CPUs), 3.6GHz
Memory: 16298MB RAM
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER
I've 2 monitor
Current Mode: 1920 x 1080 (32 bit) (165Hz)
Current Mode: 3840 x 2160 (32 bit) (60Hz)
if you need more just tell me! (also if you need more screenshot or the Dxdiag.txt)
Thanks to you! Hope this will help!
Gabriele
Thanks. This helps us rule out it being a 32/64 bit issue. Everything else there looks normal, we tested on dual monitors and it worked, so we don't think it's that.
We pushed a new bugfix version, which hopefully will solve it. If not, let us know and we'll have another try.
Thanks for your help
Hey, we are being told that it doesn't work. Could you download the version 14 standard (now also available on Itch) and see if that works, if you have time? Many thanks, we just can't get to the bottom of this issue. We'll try some stuff but it would help to know if this version is new to V16 or if it's existed all along and we just didn't notice.
Thanks again
Oh, and are you using non-English OS settings (shouldn't affect anything, but I was told by another dev that it sometimes affects games). And maybe it's a anti-virus thing?
Hey,
Just pushed a new version. We hope this fixes it. We're not actually sure WHY it fixes it, but over on Steam people are saying it works. We'll try to figure out what was going on based on what the bits of code we removed were doing.
Hey!
i've just downloaded the new patch and it works now! good job and thank you very much!
Btw i'm using an non-English OS setting but i don't have any anti-virus active (except the firewall)
Hello!
Unfortunately, the game does not run on my PC: running the .exe only opens a Unity loading screen with a green bar, and then... nothing at all! The loading screen disappears and no game starts :(
If you know of any solution to this issue let me know, I'd love to try out your creation!
Hey,
Sorry this is occurring. Could you post your machine's specs? It's happened to another person, and I just can't replicate it. I've tried on four different machines, but it all seems to work for me, so fixing it is hard. It would help to know what the hardware differences are, in case those are causing it.
Thanks
Hey there! I uh, downloaded the game and... there seems to be a very serious bug... or just me being unaware of something. No matter in what way I start the game, as soon as possible I am shown the victory screen. On said victory screen, I can't even press "dismiss" to, well, dismiss it. It just stays there and I have to alt tab out. I also clicked "load" and trying to back out of that menu didn't work, just stayed there.
Huh, you're right, that IS a fairly serious bug. Gimme a second, I'll check it right now.
I downloaded both versions, and they seem to be working fine for me. I'll keep looking into this, but it is very strange. I can't immediately think of any reason it would happen.
We can't seem to replicate it. Tried on three separate machines, downloaded from itch. Maybe it's a corrupted download?
Maybe it is! I am going to download it as I am writing this and let you know how it goes.
Alright so, still the same issue. I will note a few new things though. The victory screen claims the max enshadowment of the world is at 7500%, and "world panic" is at a "-(incredibly long and random number)"
Also, my chrome download gets to about a fourth of the way there, and then suddenly claims the zip has been downloaded. I suspect this is the issue.
Couple more freshly downloaded zips and its the same exact problem, but this time my chrome has downloaded the zip file fully. I've tried putting it on different locations, running it as administrator, unpacking the zip in a couple different ways, but no difference has occured. Even the weird inability of the load button persists.
Looks like it can't be helped. I'll have to wait for another version and see if that works, then.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I can't replicate it at all. Maybe Unity has some conflict with your setup (32 bit vs 64 bit, some mismatched Windows Upgrade...). Dunno, I'll ask around and see if anyone has heard of anything like this.
If it helps, I'm still running a windows 7. It's the family computer and my parents are very bad with the computer, so changing version to 10 would be very problematic for them.
I do have a mac, though. Is there/will there be a mac version of the game, perhaps?
Thank you for listening either way
I've the same bug, with the Steam version.
The game doesn't generate the human faction so you insta win.
I play on windows 10
Hey,
Just pushed a version which might have fixed it. Still a bit unsure as to what's really happening, but it seems to work for now, for people who were reporting the issue.