Vapourware That Which Sleeps - Vaporware Strategy RP

Stoked for the backer beta. I'd like to test out the systems for a bit befor eI start a lengthy post on what upsets me and why the devs should chang eit all to cater to my whims.

Out of curiosity - is there a way to calculate the strength of the alliance for the computer at any given time? (I assume there is). If so, you could have one of your minions chime in if the alliance is gaining strength faster than you; if the alliance will reach X strength before you're at treshold Y or if alliance ix ahead of predetermined strength Z by turn K (as defined in scenario). It could then go on to identify the largest contributors of strength to the alliance or the ones least loyal to the alliance. That'd give newer players an indication that things may go wrong in a bit and hints on what they should be focusing on. For those of us who like our FUN™ served raw, the minion could be disable on higher difficulties. Or better yet - allow the player to eat/sacrifice their tutorial minion near the start for a tiny bump of eldritch power. Nothing huge that'd skew the balance. Just an in-character way of shutting up the helper underling.

 

What about representing it visually, via a circle with all the various known factions / governments, which you can ally with, make war with or that are neutral, as points on the circumference of the circle. Colored lines drawn between the various groups indicate trade partners (economic link), treaties (political link), allegiance (military link), hot/cold war, etc. This would make it pretty obvious if everyone is beginning to ally against the one or two puppet groups under your control. There is a name for this kind of diagram, and I've seen it before in games, but I can't find the term for it or even an image. I want to say the GalCiv 4x games used it, and maybe one of the Civilization games? I'm sure ya'll know what I'm talking about.

 

I know what you're talking about. And yeah there's a name and I can't remember wtf it's called. But the first thing that seemed immediately useful was some little pop-up muppet that explicitly tells a ne wplayer "Bro. You're wasting time. If you don't do something, you're fucked. It may look good now, but in 50 turns it won't. Here's some things you could/should be doing". It'd be a good way to ease new players into the game and even veterans. Few things are as fustrating when you're learning something as failing and having no idea why you did so. If your failure lies 50-100 moves in the past you won't learn from it without pointing out.

 

The difficulty there is that the Alliance does not "form" until a sufficient threat is present, which in most cases is relatively late in the game (unless you play Karth orc rush which is the only way I play anymore). The response to that is probably "can I check the circumstances by which a given country 'would join' the Alliance if it did form" but the Alliance can form from so many different areas that it's impossible to gauge who would side with that particular faction and as more parties join it becomes even harder to gauge if an unaligned would have sufficient negative relation with any of the parts of the Alliance to now not be able to join. Add to that Heroes using their own leadership skills to smooth over diplomatic problems and it's not really predictable.

Once it forms there's a simple screen that gives you a relative strength value, but even that is often worthless - they may have a massive army of indestructible dwarven infantry but if the general is in your pocket that strength can be negated at least long enough to let you finish your plans. So it's very difficult to distill the many asymmetric factors of the game into a comprehensible and meaningful number. Even early it's difficult for us to say to you "Be careful, Cylaria's army is strong" because that may actually be part of your strategy - a massive army in a belligerent country raises tensions with other nations.

The Prophet also serves as this "talking puppet" that can help you with tutorial enabled - fun fact: if he dies the tutorial ends. No mercy for those who squander their most passionate supporter.

Yeah we had a very simple "Political Bloc" approach that we had to redesign to support the upcoming Rivals. Haven't finished the new GUI screen for this (and we may not even finish it until we're into Beta) but what you describe makes sense for the approach.

haha - ok so yes that is the kind of advice that we can give. The Prophet essentially makes sure you're recruiting agents as soon as possible and has Scenario-specific advice to try and help the player along the path to a less humiliating defeat.

 

Yea, what your describing sounds like tutorial mode on. Which is cool for non-vets of the game (i.e. all of us when we first play). I still think the faction diagram circle would be a useful tool for the entire length of the game.

 

I haven't followed the updates closely, are there lesser levels of agreement between groups before declaration of an Alliance? That's what I was assuming with my previous post by including economic and political (non-military) agreements between factions. Those could act as the indicators of the likelihood of an alliance, helping players deal with the issue you raised above.

Cool, the easiest one to read that I've seen (and can't remember where...) used parabolic arcs between points. That allows for lines drawn between factions next to each on the circle's edge to still draw the eye, and remain visually pleasing.

 

Ah I see - yeah that is definitely a strong indicator of whether or not these nations would join into the Alliance together though it is a viable tactic to create diplomatic dependencies to entangle the world into a global conflict.

I definitely need to do some research into this - if you, or anyone else, has a suggestions for which games had the best I'm eager to hear. GUI design is not one of my strong points so mostly we're being derivative of other games that have created the most useful menus.

 

Closest I could find to a picture illustrating it on google was this:


Funny how you could swear the relationship-web stuffie is a stable in a ton of 4x'es. But when you try finding concrete examples on google you come up emptyhanded.

Obviously it works best with 3-6 factions. After that it gets cluttered fast. The ideal is 5 factions, because then it draws a pentagram.


For higher numbers of factions, one solution is to allow the player to click a faction to focus on. That faction gets moved to the center of the screen. All oter factions are still arranged in a circle around it, but only diplomatic relatiosn with the focused faction are shown. (so basically it's laid out like the spokes of a wheel).

Like this:

 

Nice! I was just about to post those in addition to this:


None of them have parabolic arcs though. Arcs are nice because for factions near / next to each other, the lines can come very close to non-participating factions. Especially when you have a circle dense in factions.

 

These are fine for a low number of factions as others have said. For a large number I don't think you can beat the ugly but functional 2d mapping, with a full list of factions across the top and down the side.

Looking great as usual KDG, keep up the good work!

 

Civilization series had this and it worked for 20+ nations too. Dont see a problem if its the way you want to go.

 

You could possibly have it tiered. That is, minor factions that only really have influence within a larger one (say, the king, the army, the craftsman's guild, a group of nobles and a wizard circle are all minor factions inside the kingdom of Prosperion) aren't visible at first. Only major factions (Kingdom of Prosperion, Kingdom of Luzuria, Troll Tribe of Andhairistan and the Free Cities of Roxoria) show on the relation web. Each major faction is then colour-coded (or marked in some other way) for internal stability. Focusing on a single major faction opens up a new relationship web showing the minor factions inside the major faction. The more of those factions dislike one another (especially if they dislike whichever minor faction is appointed as leader of the major faction), the lower the internal stability.

Plant agents in the army to make them ally with the nobles and wizards and they may try to overthrow the king etc. I'll fire up photoshop when I get home tonight and try to sketch it out.

 

Didn't the Civ relationship wheel display 9 factions tops? Or was that 11? Either way, the other ones remained hidden and you had to switch between visible factions.

 

Could be vanilla issue I remember seeing a lot of those small circles in 32 player games but that could be expansion/modded.

 

I'm more concerned about this, personally. Once the developer has a pet style, it's likely that the other options are inferior in some way, or have not received adequate examination.

 

We're actually leaning towards this approach for a general overview screen, but after looking at the largest possible scenarios it still gets fairly convoluted when tracing between them and getting a feel for what conflicts are occurring becomes difficult. We supplemented that with a "drill down" into each individual that then refocuses them to the center and aligns others on a grid to represent relative relations in politics and culture which helps but still doesn't capture the primary use case that people are looking for which is generally "Who is at war." During some of my free time this week I'm going to try and create an alternate screen just displaying in a list the ongoing wars or skirmishes between nations, the relative intensity, what heroes you know to be involved, and if the conflict is heating up or cooling down. This is generally the information people need globally at a glance to figure out where to deploy new agents or redirect efforts. The other side of this is (mostly lategame) The Alliance and we have general grouping for that as well.

Even with this I'm sure we'll find a lot more high-level information needs during the beta.

That was more of a joke than anything although I do use Karth rushes to test things because it's the fastest progression to end game.

I can't seem to find anything with higher values, would love to see a screenshot if anyone has one. We ideally need to support upwards of 50 Major Factions, and I'm afraid the only way to do this is through either dynamic grouping as mentioned above or with lists/grids.

 

You could have multiple filters to let players toggle displaying: Factions at War, Factions with Enmity towards each other, Factions at Peace, Factions with Economic Ties, etc. If we had the ability to check multiple boxes, so to speak, and view only the Factions at War and w/ Enmity, that would simplify the presentation. Ideally only the full 50+ factions are displayed if you leave all boxes ticked. Beyond that, the color of the lines/art joining the factions can be used to distinguish the different types of relations.

 

Update #25

Apr 20 2015

Events & Opportunities, Political Screen, Mod Tools Release Update

Hello to our Backers!

We are continuing to work on finalizing the user interface elements, as well as the very time-consuming act of bug squashing - but we have a few more elements to show off today as we get ever closer to the release of our mod tools and, following that, the beta release.

Events & Opportunities
A key portion of the game consists of dealing with the hundreds of unique events that pop up during game play. Opportunities, unlike events, occur while you are performing a challenge - they are often caused by the actions of other AI elements in your POI such as heroes, modifiers, or institutions.

Opportunities tend to have a range of actions go from innocuous to extremely blatant. In this sample we've posted you see what happens when heroes invade one of your dungeons looking for loot. In this instance you have several methods for dealing with them:

• You can rouse the denizens of the dungeon to attack them.
• Transfer a cursed item or artifact to them in secret.
• Infiltrate their group to gain information.
• Attack them directly with your Agent.

All heroes are shown on the left and Agents on the right, clicking on either opens up their full panel as usual so you can quickly gain access to relevant information needed to make your decision.


We think the multiple opportunities and events that pop up during game play really add to the immersion and creates some really unique and interesting situations. As with all of interface screens we're trying to provide clean and easy access to all the information you need to make decisions "at a glance" - and we support that with tool tips whenever possible.

Political Screen
This is one of the two Political screens you will see most often - There is a lot of information here so let's break down what we're looking at.

The screen displays all influential members of the society who have the ability to impact the vote at hand. You can mouseover any individual to see a breakdown of where their influence comes from and any groups, guilds, or affiliations that they may represent.

The Ruler can appoint a limited number of titles to notables creating adviser/administrative roles, the two nobles you see adjacent to the queen are her Marshall and Keeper. Titled nobles gain a bonus to influence on actions that involve their appointed position.

In this political screen the bar goes right (green), left (red), and can also be pulled "back to center" (white) - the maximum value on either side is 100 which represents the most extreme response. In this screen you can see that another nation has invaded one of this nation's POIs and is skirmishing with their garrison, this is called a "Crisis" and invokes an immediate response. (Non-crises receive many days of debate allowing you to take further actions to sabotage)

As a result of this crisis a vote occurs and for each marker it passes a new response is determined. Having crossed the first marker on the path to War the response is "Counterattack" - which is a measured response where the nation will attempt to dislodge the attacker and launch a counterattack.

You can interfere with this vote in numerous ways - clicking on any notable will give you any options that are available such as blackmail, bribe, or call in favors. Any notable you control through corruption will vote the way you'd like, and you can split votes up between multiple notables so as to sew confusion and hatred.

It's much easier to influence votes if you've corrupted people in advance, so properly putting in the time and effort to get yourself situated as a power broker will pay off in the long run. So you can see we've followed our standard MO here - lots of nested information and multiple involved parties allowing for a lot of chaotic interactions and emergent gameplay that is boiled down to just the necessities so that if you want to ignore it you can just go ahead and click on one of the options without worrying.

The other benefit we had when designing this process is that you only see the see these options if you have infiltration, if you were to see them for every nation all the time it would quickly become overwhelming but this way you only see what it is that you are focused on.


Other Types of Diplomacy & Events
We showed off the Mi-Go in our previous faction screen and have received several questions about what other types of diplomacy and interaction may arise during the game. So we thought we'd show off The Matron and some of the many ways you can interact with her (which can potentially even lead to her recruitment).

We plan to introduce even more variations as we implement the Lesser Evils stretch goal.


Mod Tools Release Imminent
Barring disaster our plan is to get Mod Tools into the hands of our mod tier and above backers by the end of this coming weekend.

We are extremely appreciative of the kind words, feedback, support, and constructive criticism you've all given us throughout the process. We are certainly behind schedule as far as release (and Beta release) goes but it is our intention to keep everyone informed and to continue to post weekly updates on our forums. We are working extremely hard to make That Which Sleeps a really great game and we thank you all for giving us the opportunity to do so.

We'll be in touch soon -

Your pals,

KDG​

 

Needs more devlogs

I am so hyped for dis gaem!

 

The dungeon encounter is a really great example of an event in this style of game, because it relies on multiple different factors to determine how it will play out: which adventurers are there, what artefacts you have on hand, the agent present, the nature of the location and perhaps what powers your old one has in play. You could have this event occur dozens of times and it should always feel fresh.

 

Less devlogs, more early access.

 

And get the gog thing sorted, I don't want to buy this on the humble store OR on steam.

 

Preordered!!!!!!

 

Just to be on the safe side everyone should move their fat assburger asses to GOG and click that vote button like you've never clicked before.

http://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/that_which_sleeps?pp=cb4e5208b4cd87268b208e49452ed6e89a68e0b8