Myriad Magic

One focus I have in my game is allowing for a ton of different magical options and systems. Ideally by harnessing different granular aspects of magic and combining them in weird ways, nearly every society in a single game or potentially across many games will have quite differently functioning magic systems. In this post I am going to lay out all the potential aspects of magic.

One of the major systems of magic is trait channeling. You can have a character or populace give away part of their power, or you can steal someone's power, and gift those powers to others. For instant you may gift a unit in your army with the stolen essence of an imprisoned dragon. You can also perform actions essentially similar to communions in Dominions4. You could also steal the knowledge or strength of slaves to give to your people. Stealing the traits of your citizens can incur a political cost, assuming you don't utilize propaganda to make it culturally acceptable. You can also drain the life of an entity to increase the life of another. The way that systems interact in my game the possibilities are limitless. Trading the weight of a spy but gifting them strength or something. Giving your pikemen or shield using troops strength and weight to defeat charges. All sorts of fun stuff.

You also have the more conventional magic systems. Elemental magic, killing spells, etc. Not much to explain.

Another powerful tool is environmental magic. You can alter the traits of a province like the temperature or the rain and so forth. You can also combine this with physical terraforming. There are options like creating a storm or snowfall in a pass, freezing rivers, and various spells like locust swarms and crap.

One of the rather unique systems of magic besides trait exchange is the mental arts. You have the ability of farsight and more interestingly, a sort of foresight. Foresight is more about discovering secrets than actual future vision since the game has no actual future state. Perhaps you get a vision of betrayal in war or of your death, which signifies various plots against you.

Magic in this game can affect economics as well. Magical vs technical automation for instance. Magic powered machines. Doing things like creating roads with magic. Transmutation, conjuring power from magic. Creating fridges using magic to transport or store food. Some sort of time proof field could provide similar effects.

Advancing The Idea Of Research In 4X Games

Research is a wildly undervalued area of 4x games. My belief has always been that all aspects of 4x should have the depth of the combat part and I have set out to make that so. Below I will lay out my vision for an incredible 4x research system.

First I'll start with the most boring part. For basic things like crop growing I don't think interactive research is super valuable. My plan is that provinces will slowly advance in this area mostly automatically. You will gain general crop knowledge that will slowly disseminate across your empire and you will gain regional and biome crop knowledge as well. I am considering knowledge for every specific crop as well, may be too much. You will also slowly gain knowledge in areas like construction, livestock management, etc. You can invest in infrastructure later in the game to increase the growth and spread of this knowledge.

Now we can get to the more interesting areas of research. This aspect involves magical and technical skills. In a previous post I described broad worldly issues regarding magic. Magic has a total level of power and it becomes increasingly difficult to generate new magical knowledge as you approach the total. However the specifics of how research is conducted must be addressed. Every character in the game is capable of research. Using their resources they can put money, time, minions, etc into their research budget. Any character involved in research gains the fruits of their own labor and their controller if they have one does as well.

This system has many implications. There is a substantial incentive to do most serious research yourself or to not allow subordinates access to more powerful knowledge. These people could easily sell you out or attempt to supplant you. However you can also engage in sneaky plots to steal supporters and knowledge from your enemies or even allies.

You have some interesting political and economic choices as well. You could create a highly educated magical society but that may reduce your relative power. Hoarding knowledge will make it harder to get more research done but will allow you to have extremely serious leverage over the less magically gifted. It is probably easier for dictatorial rulers to hoard knowledge and populist ones to spread it around. But both groups still have their troubles.

What knowledge you actually get is somewhat random. You can sort of research magical fields or focus on improving existing knowledge, and your learning is somewhat granular. There is no option to research say, a "levitating airship/weapons platform."

Magical knowledge can come from discovery or boons from supernatural forces as well. Its not purely a research game. I may put up some other articles about the connection of research to society and culture later. But I think the character focused system, which is unlike even the character based system in Stellaris by Paradox, is unique and has a lot of potential for emergence.

Death And Destruction, AKA Combat Mechanics

I am currently putting together a very simplified version of my combat mechanics under the theory that getting simplified major systems working will allow me to slowly complexify things over time while doing some early testing of my basic gameloop.

However, the final combat mechanics will be quite detailed even if you can't really do much during a battle, for time reasons.

I'm still working out exactly how the final version will work and I'm going to discuss some early thoughts here.

The basic mechanics are a simplification of reality. You have "Units" in your army composed of specific groups of troops you define. There is a combat range system to represent magic and ranged weapons and artillery. A unit is comprised of its type, swordsman, pikeman, archer, etc. as well as its population, that is the group of entities you choose for it. A 4 armed pikeman will have advantages over a 2 armed one and similar for height and weight. Units will have a single other unit as a target but may work in concert and at the same time be targeted by more than one enemy. You can't actually see this, all you get is a battle report, but it should influence the way you design your armies.

Larger units can take more hits, have bonuses in melee, etc. Faster units are better for position.

Aside from magic, in theory the potential populations you have available for military units and your army composition should affect the way you fight. You and your enemies will always be trying out strategies to gain an advantage. It will take a long period of time to develop new units and strategies so in theory a nation that cleverly counters an enemy will enjoy a large advantage. Imperial nations will tend to be more resistant to this since they can support multiple schools of military learning, have built up knowledge of many army compositions over time, and have access to a larger pool of potential base populations for their units. Unlike games like Paradox ones where you can tramp across Europe during a single battle, there will be a lot of positioning to win strategic campaigns. You cannot move a large army from one side of a vast empire to another side easily or without serious logistics and either way it takes time. Also because of the time it takes to understand and counter an enemy's strategy, a clever opponent has a long window where they can take advantage of getting ahead of their enemy.

Essentially its all about long term planning and strategic instead of tactical thinking. You do still direct the armies around as in Dom4 or EU4 but you won't give extensive orders ala Dom4 and making an army is much harder than 4 cavalry 12 infantry and 10 cannons ala EU4.

Climate Change, Pollution, And Global Warming

One part of my game I am really digging at is how to incorporate environmental factors into the game. I have biomes which determine certain resource availability as well as temperature stuff. I'm hoping to go a bit further, and also combine this with the racial evolution. From a lore perspective magical ambient energy increases the speed of beneficial evolutionary changes to account for changes needing to come fast for game play reasons.

Climate change will be spurring conflict over resources, pollution will be a powerful factor in industrial nations, and populations will slowly adapt to their environment as it changes.
The scale of the game is such that a 50000 year campaign is an option. That would take approximately 1644 real life years at max turn length but depending on how long you generate history vs playing from month one it probably won't be that much, especially if you don't scale massively to world spanning empire. 164 years from day one I'd expect. You can turn autoplay on and off however, so maybe it'd only take a few decades depending on how much you timeskip.

Propaganda In Strategy Games

I've made a decision in my game to try and add certain aspects of real life that have significant effects on politics and diplomacy because of the way that my project is focused on bringing more stuff into the game besides combat. I've described many of these things in previous threads but I have not yet addressed propaganda.

Propaganda/messaging/w.e you want to call it has several powerful effects in the game. You can use propaganda for all sorts of purposes and all characters in the game are capable of utilizing it to push their agenda.

Instead of clicking fabricate claim or forging a trade war you can apply propaganda to build support for any issue and other actors can counter you. Propaganda also applies to the beliefs of the people and characters in your nation on various political issues. Including imaginary ones like magic vs tech and whether dragons are good or bad or racial interbreeding.

Propaganda needn't be uniformly applied either. You may only need to use it on specific characters or populations especially depending on your government. Propaganda costs money but it also costs time. A low spending level over time can achieve impressive results especially if combined with more nefarious methods.

Does your enemy have magical weapons on mass destruction? Who knows but he is a filthy foreigner and you control the intelligence services and the media anyways and he blew up the Summer Palace with suicide dragons. Let's color bomb that fucker. Yes, false flag attacks are in.

Your effectiveness at propaganda has many modifiers. Intelligence score, the many relationship factors of the people you are trying to convince, magical bonuses, relationship between the target audience and the goal.

Pushing your society towards becoming more accepting of change or magic or war are all options.

I am currently designing the baseline systems for espionage/intelligence and propaganda/campaigning and trying to find a good balance between performance, granularity, and implementation/data. Hopefully by the end of the week I will be testing a working version in various ways.

Gameplay Variation Based On In Game Choices

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.

Potential Early Phase Tribal Mechanics

When I was trying to set up the starting phase of my current project I had some issues since I had been balancing mechanics around the permanent phase. Now, I'd expect most players to start the game using the world gen, which catapults you directly into the permanent phase. This is because certain major features of the game only exist in that phase. Trade, politics, diplomacy, national policy, magic, industry, etc. can only exist in a rich, complex, full world. But I am letting the early phase be playable since it needs to exist for world gen anyways and I happen to enjoy it personally.

Expansion in the early phase is a big problem, at least fun per turn wise. Colonizing wasn't appropriate really, too early, assuming I include it at all. Armies were sorta okay but didn't make too much sense. In both cases expansion was relatively slow and offered few choices or actions to take.

As far as intragroup mechanics, stuff was scaled far more for the permanent phase. Revolts were rather non-sensical and cultural integration is much more of a nation-state based system. There were no merchants or even deep econ to contend with yet. Classes in general couldn't exist since populations were too low.

Instead I opted to try something else. In the early phase I'm going to try and run it more like King of Dragon Pass. I already incorporated some stuff from there event wise but I figured I could do more. Tribal gameplay will focus more on events, while growth will be achieved through the actions of your god-king. Every turn you can perform various actions, which differ based on the characteristics of your god/ruler. Your god ruler is also going to determine some cultural values and your actions will do the same.

The basics first. As a ruler you control an amount of population in your starting province. Your population will grow through neutral populations being absorbed. You have two choices, as does the AI, and here is where nations being to differentiate themselves.

First you can expand by subjugation. This involves raising armies and attacking neutral populations. In this phase of the game subjugation is achieved merely by force. Neutral populations lack a coherent identity requiring the cultural integration that will be modeled in the permanent phase. Basically the population takes some casualties, your army loses some men, and the majority of the neutral population is added to your tribe in the province.

Secondly you can expand by assimilation. In this strategy you attempt to provide pressure to join your tribe through having a happy and prestigious populace. However the most important aspect is the prestige of your ruler. He can go on hunts, perhaps quests, fight in duels, and so forth. He must also repel attacks by monsters or other leaders. Successful efforts result in a prestige boost. Populations will slowly gravitate towards the most prestigious tribes in the province.

Note that you can interleave these two methods into your expansion policy, its not one or the other.

Expanding into other provinces involves the same process, excepting that you must build a for/settlement comprised of some number of your citizens in a new province to get the ball rolling. This replaces the original colonization mechanic. Although neutral populations will proceed along the tribal cohesion path, they will generally merge into a single tribe more slowly. However, they will coalesce enough that combat will probably be harder and attacks on you will be stronger. Other tribes led by their own god will of course be as dangerous as the player, or perhaps more if their nation style is more suited to the early game.

Your nation's character will be more drastically changed in the starting phase by the choices you make. You'll actually design an immortal ruler and your race itself before loading a game which may set you on a particular path from the start, but its wont be as major as national ideas in EU4 or the pretender design and nation pick of Dominions 4. A major goal of the game is that you develop as a nation based on long term and continuous policies during the game.

In previous threads I've made here I discussed how actions in the permanent phase of the game affect your nation. Similar but more limited effects are applied in the starting phase. The populations of your nation will be forming expectations of how nations are ruled based on how you expand your nation and how you rule it. If you rule by conquest and fear and give great power to aristocracy that will shape your nations for millennia to come. In the permanent phase it will be more difficult to integrate populations with national cultures opposed to your own and nations will interact with you diplomatically in a similar manner.