MoLAoS
Guest
I'm bored and when I'm bored I type out long walls of game design stuff, so here you go:
I made a lot of effort to allow for a wide variety of national playstyles in my current game project. I have all the standard stuff. If you play the tribal start you can create your own immortal leader(who will probably die in a couple thousand years or ascend beyond the material plane eventually) and your own race. So Dominions4+ style nation design. You make your ruler AND your race.
Your leader and race are generally somewhat independent of your national policies on trade and diplomacy and shit. However, certain choices you make, and which the AI nations will sometimes include as well, can drastically affect your gameplay in general. How does this work? That is the topic of this wall of text post.
One of the choices you can make is to create an immortal powered by worship. Basically, instead of working on more material and mundane jobs, some portion of your populace must be focused on worshipping your god. Building cool temples and shit helps as well, but takes away from your material capital the way worshippers take away from your human capital. Also magical races, or half breeds, get a buff to worship power. Aside from temples and worshippers, stuff like expensive worship garments and idols and decorations and shit also boost worship.
You can also find spirits, or demons, in the game that are worship powered. Like your national immortal they provide blessings and buffs to your nation based on worship.
Worship powered immortals, demons, and spirits function the most like the common depiction of real life gods. Using a non worship based immortal is more like having a powerful Malazan like Ascendant on your side. For instance Pretenders in Dominions are much more like Ascendants than actual gods.
Some in game creatures, demons, and spirits, function more like Elder gods of many different fantasy settings. Worship doesn't directly empower them, merely draw their favor. And excessive worship is more capped with entities whose power doesn't derive from worship. Whereas the aforementioned worship powered gods gain power limitlessly as worship increases. This power doesn't grow linearly of course. The higher your worship value gets, the more worship is needed for each increase in power. Otherwise it would be super overpowered.
Other playstyles are not decided at character creation but must be obtained from the world. For instance, there will be some provinces in the game that will contain an entity that wishes to cover the world. Your nation can choose to exist in symbiosis with this entity. One example is an entity somewhat based on planet brains or the real life giant ass mushroom in Oregon. This entity has an overriding public goal to cover as much land as possible. It will attempt to cleanse/infect land itself as a sort of ascendant like a national immortal. But if you enter into treaty with it and follow through in fulfilling it goals, it will provide buffs and work in concert with you. There are dozens of types of these entities with different goals and powers and things it will ask of a potential symbiotic nation. They will be generated at world start and what map has what entities is pretty random.
Another playstyle that is quite different from a normal one but not too similar to the above two styles is the single resource of failure society. There are certain in game resources that are immensely valuable and provide unique magical or technological or magitechnological options. But they have no substitute good in the economic sense. That means that although they grant you great power, you are totally dependent on them. If you run out, any construction that depends on that resource will become dormant and useless or even collapse depending on how it integrates the resource. Your society will be very focused on obtaining more of this resource. Similarly, other races using the resource will be a huge problem. They will need to be wiped out quickly, especially as the AI might not be quite so optimal in how they use the resource as you are. This will be one of the ways the game fairly represents the rise and fall of powerful societies. A great empire may collapse if it burns through its supply of super powerful magic energy crystals causing its technology to fail and remnants to fight among themselves over the remnants of available crystals.
Note that all these game options are choices. You are not trapped in them at race selection. You could burn a potential world swallowing forest to the ground instead of allying it, you could bury the discovery of energy crystals, and if you like, you can simply stop worshipping a worship powered entity. Granted world forests would fight back and a failing god might try to bully people into worshipping it, either threatening you, or coercing another weaker nation into becoming its thralls and then trying to build up and avenge itself on you for abandoning it. Maybe a crystal based society finds out about your hoard and you have to employ it to defend yourself as they switch the focus of their military machine to you alone. Choices have consequences after all.
I made a lot of effort to allow for a wide variety of national playstyles in my current game project. I have all the standard stuff. If you play the tribal start you can create your own immortal leader(who will probably die in a couple thousand years or ascend beyond the material plane eventually) and your own race. So Dominions4+ style nation design. You make your ruler AND your race.
Your leader and race are generally somewhat independent of your national policies on trade and diplomacy and shit. However, certain choices you make, and which the AI nations will sometimes include as well, can drastically affect your gameplay in general. How does this work? That is the topic of this wall of text post.
One of the choices you can make is to create an immortal powered by worship. Basically, instead of working on more material and mundane jobs, some portion of your populace must be focused on worshipping your god. Building cool temples and shit helps as well, but takes away from your material capital the way worshippers take away from your human capital. Also magical races, or half breeds, get a buff to worship power. Aside from temples and worshippers, stuff like expensive worship garments and idols and decorations and shit also boost worship.
You can also find spirits, or demons, in the game that are worship powered. Like your national immortal they provide blessings and buffs to your nation based on worship.
Worship powered immortals, demons, and spirits function the most like the common depiction of real life gods. Using a non worship based immortal is more like having a powerful Malazan like Ascendant on your side. For instance Pretenders in Dominions are much more like Ascendants than actual gods.
Some in game creatures, demons, and spirits, function more like Elder gods of many different fantasy settings. Worship doesn't directly empower them, merely draw their favor. And excessive worship is more capped with entities whose power doesn't derive from worship. Whereas the aforementioned worship powered gods gain power limitlessly as worship increases. This power doesn't grow linearly of course. The higher your worship value gets, the more worship is needed for each increase in power. Otherwise it would be super overpowered.
Other playstyles are not decided at character creation but must be obtained from the world. For instance, there will be some provinces in the game that will contain an entity that wishes to cover the world. Your nation can choose to exist in symbiosis with this entity. One example is an entity somewhat based on planet brains or the real life giant ass mushroom in Oregon. This entity has an overriding public goal to cover as much land as possible. It will attempt to cleanse/infect land itself as a sort of ascendant like a national immortal. But if you enter into treaty with it and follow through in fulfilling it goals, it will provide buffs and work in concert with you. There are dozens of types of these entities with different goals and powers and things it will ask of a potential symbiotic nation. They will be generated at world start and what map has what entities is pretty random.
Another playstyle that is quite different from a normal one but not too similar to the above two styles is the single resource of failure society. There are certain in game resources that are immensely valuable and provide unique magical or technological or magitechnological options. But they have no substitute good in the economic sense. That means that although they grant you great power, you are totally dependent on them. If you run out, any construction that depends on that resource will become dormant and useless or even collapse depending on how it integrates the resource. Your society will be very focused on obtaining more of this resource. Similarly, other races using the resource will be a huge problem. They will need to be wiped out quickly, especially as the AI might not be quite so optimal in how they use the resource as you are. This will be one of the ways the game fairly represents the rise and fall of powerful societies. A great empire may collapse if it burns through its supply of super powerful magic energy crystals causing its technology to fail and remnants to fight among themselves over the remnants of available crystals.
Note that all these game options are choices. You are not trapped in them at race selection. You could burn a potential world swallowing forest to the ground instead of allying it, you could bury the discovery of energy crystals, and if you like, you can simply stop worshipping a worship powered entity. Granted world forests would fight back and a failing god might try to bully people into worshipping it, either threatening you, or coercing another weaker nation into becoming its thralls and then trying to build up and avenge itself on you for abandoning it. Maybe a crystal based society finds out about your hoard and you have to employ it to defend yourself as they switch the focus of their military machine to you alone. Choices have consequences after all.
