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I loved multiple nobles in the first iteration of the game. Having one Vampire in a big empire to mess things up while having a Conqueror start at a smaller group of duchies that crushed them while the Vampire kept the empire busy was amazing. 

I can see the UI problem for sure, most of the time I ignore the voting anyway since it seems irrelevant to my goals. It's not like I can affect the outcome of the voting in any practical way if the nation I'm infiltrating is over a certain size. 

Good to know about the agents. The number could change based on the default difficulty settings.

Interesting additions. 

I think the necromantic doctor is way more powerful than any of the other agents. He can crush entire nations just by himself, while all of the other agents can do minor things to destabilize nations and such. It's quite easy to get an army of 200 or more undead for the necromantic doctor, which is a massive military force compared to how tough it is to get 200 for the Unholy Flesh. 

Unfortunately I had a bunch of null-pointer exceptions that crashed the game. I think mostly they came from characters dying or their locations being destroyed. Once I used the Winter powers to lower temperature and it destroyed a bunch of cities, including the one where my enthralled was. For a while he and some of the others lived in a "ghost dimension" where they didn't exist but had their own society, before a null-pointer exception made an end of that. Likewise, I think when my Unholy Flesh or Undead smashed some cities, it caused problems(or maybe an agent that died in a war?). It's a bit hard to know where the problems come from, except that they're null-pointer exceptions that probably arise from a character disappearing, and then something referring to an empty state where the character used to be. 

The limit of 2 agents and 1 enthralled feels so incredibly low to me. I feel constrained rather than being forced to make interesting decisions, honestly. Much of the time it's tough to advance in society or to influence it in any way(at least the way I play), so having just one enthralled doubles down on the feeling that it doesn't really matter all that much what I do in society. 

Anyway, I think putting the vampire and the necromantic doctors as agents instead of Names is a good idea. 

I saw the 0 power thing again at some point, but I have no idea what it could be related to. At first I thought it was because my enthralled died, but I just tried to replicate it but it didn't happen, so I have no idea what causes it. Perhaps some power has a positive power cost by accident which pushes the power amount to infinite or something? 

Ah, so that's what the military threat multiplier means.

No need to rush on the bugfix, take all the time you need. At this point in the development cycle, these are minors bugs as far as I'm concerned. The idea is to test out interesting stuff, right? Better focus on that stuff, since fixing bugs is kinda pointless if you intend to change things at a rapid pace. A fix today will be pointless if the system is changed tomorrow. :)

First off, things are looking pretty nice at the moment. It took me some while to get used to the way things are now, but I had a ton of fun once I did. The mix of politics and outside threat, whether from the cold or the flesh is a great one. Having a noble in a society, then using his voting powers and influence to sway others into doing foolish political choices when there's an obvious outside threat knocking is pretty great.

A few bugs I noticed while playing:

The first game I played, nothing cost any Power. I started a second game, and things cost Power as they were supposed to.

Reveal terrible truth doesn't seem to increase suspicion at all. (at least the Suspicion % don't move at all)

The economical balancing is opposite to what it should be, it seems to me. A vote passed that said "Move away from Silver to benefit Wine", yet the provinces that produce Wine reduced their prestige from 10 to 7.5, while the ones that produced Silver moved from 10 to 13.3. Shouldn't it be the other way around? 

Temperature and habitability seem delayed(is this as intended?). At first it seemed like they did nothing. I had them at below 0% and the town said "max population -4", yet it still remained alive and operative. Yet, a few turns later a bunch of places suddenly turned to ruins, despite the fact that I had done nothing in particular. If the delay is intended, it might be good to mention it somewhere in-game. 

A few thoughts:

I'm not entirely sure what Information Blackout does. I blacked out a few bottleneck provinces and tried to see whether it'd change the perceived threat % of a nearby society, but I didn't really notice any difference. Is it tied to distance, since the place was too close(even though I blacked out all provinces leading to the threat)? Or is it based on time too(the threat existed long before I did the blackouts)? Or did I misunderstand something? Should I target it at the city of the noble I want to influence, or rather the source of the threat? It's not entirely obvious to me.

Also, in the threat calculation you see from a chosen noble, is the "military threat comparison" % supposed to be the same for each instance? 

Anyway, good job. Can't wait to see how it'll evolve.

While I understand that sort of design philosophy, I really liked the fact that you could mix the powers in some versions of the first game. Like, depending on the situation I could approach it in a dynamic manner by switching agents and buildings and so on. 

For instance, one of my favourite games was when I set up a Conqueror in the north in a small nation, and a regular enshadowed in the south in a huge empire. The conqueror picked out smaller nations and broke the rulers while the southern politics inclined enshadowed set about a civil war in the huge empire, which the conqueror then took over little by little as the infighting grew. It was really satisfying putting those two strategies in tandem. 

Likewise, in other versions of the game I did all kinds of cool stuff with the buildings, and so on. 

Were I limited in my approach based on a pre-game choice I couldn't make interesting decisions based on the political climate, but would be forced to maneuver it from a preordained viewpoint. 

If you do end up making the different playstyles separate, I'd really like an "advanced" or sandbox style where you either have all powers, or can choose a bunch of powers and mix them around. 

Unfortunately, one of the things I liked the least in the games were the Deep Ones. I could never really think up a proper use for them. Most of their abilities were either useless or simply worse compared to the other possibilities. 

In the current iteration of the 2nd game, the Deep Ones are super useless compared to the incredibly powerful Flesh(which I really like as a concept, gameplay wise it's a bit too powerful IMO). 

Also, the politics with the voting on economical things and so on is a bit hard for me to understand, while I really liked the shifting of the Isolationist-Militarist etc things in the first games earlier versions. It was easy to understand and efficient, while voting on whether you produce Wine or something always gets me confused, as I have zero idea what it does and why should I care. It's hard to move up in the societies and form "alliances", while in the first game it was simple to see how I could maneuver up in an empire and set it up so that I could, by making friends and then assasinating someone or waiting for a republic vote to come up.  That I could use an agent to kill a Duke when I wanted was great, since it supplemented the other strategies.

I also liked how the armies worked in the first version. While they were frustrating at times(one game I had essentially won the game, but there was a tiny one city nation across the sea far away where my armies didn't bother heading to and so I ran out of time and lost, really vexing at the time, I think it was the undead horde iteration), they were a lot more exciting than the abstract way the second game currently handles wars.

I also really liked the evidence/suspicion/messenger systems of the 1st game, where they sent out letters to inform each other of things. Getting rid of the messages at a precise moment to cause suspicion to fall on an innocent noble, who would then be executed was one of my favourite things to do. It truly made me feel like an evil force for being able to manipulate things like that, so I'm sad to see it's currently not included in anywhere near the same form. The "procedural" evidence dispersal was a stroke of genius, IMO. 

Anyway, since this is just an early version, I'm very interested to see how it'll evolve, especially since the first game changed so often and so radically, so any complaints I might have now might very well disappear in the next few versions. :)

I really loved some versions of the original, so I'm very excited for a sequel. Personally I felt that the later versions were weaker than the ones in the middle, but I can't remember why anymore. Guess I'll have to replay them to test. 

Really looking forward to how it'll evolve.