Author Topic: The Exile Princes  (Read 20986 times)

Tusky

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #30 on: August 03, 2018, 08:34:17 AM »
Would it be possible to step down from office and forgo an election, then hurriedly stage a military coup instead?

btw did you intentionally left the exile princes out of your welcome post?
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #31 on: August 03, 2018, 09:49:58 AM »
The one for this subforum? Not intentional, just haven't updated it recently enough, good catch :)

Possibly, but there's a good chance the election would be won by someone you weren't at war with, in which case you'd have to wait for a pretext to come along to declare it. The general rule is that elections don't constitute an act of war in and of themselves, which can be useful for the player as it allows you to take over enemy cities without starting a massive conflagration. Declarations of war and peace currently have to wait for opportunities to arise - I could add some system to let you declare war arbitrarily at any point, but it would be kind of fiddly and I'm not sure how much more fun it'd make the game.
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #32 on: August 12, 2018, 10:09:05 PM »
OK, in cities you own you can now pay to spend time training and give units XP. It's not very efficient but it's safer than going out in the field and a good sink if you've got lots of money and want to train some troops up. The "hold court" feature now all works - you get opportunities to raise and lower the taxes and garrison size, to give public speeches, and to reassign the city to an ally ruler from your house.

So that's the "city management" all basically working in a rudimentary form! The next two areas to tackle are 1) the "Search Area" button which each city has but is still useless: it will ultimately be a provider of plenty of randomised sidequests etc, and 2) the defensive battle abilities, which need a new menu button and of course to be programmed in to begin with. The most obvious of these will be the "feint" ability of the horse archer unit, which sacrifices additional stamina to make them temporarily invulnerable as they dodge enemy attacks, and the schiltron ability of the pikemen, which will rebound a percentage of damage dealt to them back into an enemy's face (as long as the enemy isn't ranged, and attacked before they did). There's also a third condition to add for gaining control of a city, "protectorate", which will directly convert a city and its ruler to your side after you reach 250 relations with a city. This is probably the most time consuming but also possibly most straightforward way of gaining control of a city for your faction.
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #33 on: September 03, 2018, 12:53:49 AM »
The Search Area button is working, but it's a slow process adding all the relevant stuff to it.

So far the side opportunities are:
> Search ruins/tunnels (both partly implemented but need work and differentiation)
> Hire a cleric (at temples)
> Escort quest escorting a scholar
> Timed goods-handling quest (much like letter delivery but with a time limit & higher payout)
> Weaponsmiths who can upgrade your weapon for 100 gold

Got quite a few more things to go before it's done, but that's some features to start with :)
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Tusky

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #34 on: September 03, 2018, 08:39:13 AM »
When you do a search is the area then "exhausted" for a time - or can you just run searches wherever and keep getting randomised (I assume also contextual - e.g. clerics at temples) opportunities?
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #35 on: September 03, 2018, 11:23:57 AM »
Yeah, these opportunities are all contextual - each city district gets given a single randomised bonus feature, and each of those can spawn certain of these events. The current bonus features are temples, heroic statues, ruins, tunnels, barracks, fortifications, alleys, marketplaces, tanneries, workshops/smithies, libraries and schools (as you can maybe tell they kind of come in thematic pairs). I may add more bonus feature options at some point but I think this list is plenty to be getting on with! Some districts may spawn events based on other features too - for example, there might be some events tied to a district being really poor or really wealthy.

There will be limitations but I'm not sure exactly what, yet. I think mainly I'm going to make searching take a day of game time, much like staying at a tavern does (the game doesn't actually use days as a metric, it's awkwardly calculated by dividing the length of a week by seven and then rounding so sometimes you get six or eight day weeks, but meh). So that gives you some limitation. There should be more limits on things like cleric hiring so you don't end up getting spammed with unemployed clerics, but I haven't worked those out yet.
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Phoenixguard09

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #36 on: September 16, 2018, 10:50:47 PM »
I am honestly keen as hell to try this out.
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #37 on: November 08, 2018, 11:27:22 PM »
Finally got some more done this evening - I haven't built the front-end for this yet, but the back-end can now produce (and save/load/handle without issue) arbitrarily sized maps rather than just the 3x3 screens standard I was working with. I'm thinking I'll give players options from 2x2 (small) to 5x5 (giant). :)

Next things on the list:
  • More city searching features/results
  • City rulers offering to join your faction if you build up high enough relations with them - the aforementioned "protectorate" feature
  • Defensive battle abilities still aren't done

I'm also wondering if I should actually try building a completely new UI for the game with Pygame or something - I'm worried it would be a complete pain to learn my way around a whole new system, and I've spent so so long getting all the rather many current menus working that it'd be a complete pain to rebuild all of them, but also it just might be nice to make the game a bit graphically neater than tkinter will really allow for. Bit torn on that one.
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #38 on: November 19, 2018, 11:09:55 PM »
The groundwork for defensive battle abilities is mostly in place now :) The hoopoes and horse archers are the two units that have the new feint ability, which lets you spend a stamina point to render enemy attacks useless for a turn (with a catch, namely that it doesn't always work especially if they're faster than you). The next job is to add schiltron, the ability for the pikeman unit, which delivers back to an enemy up to 50% of the damage they did to the pikemen (note to self, need to ensure this doesn't work on ranged enemies). This is an important ability for nerfing the otherwise extreme power of heavy cavalry, and gives them something to be nervous of.
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #39 on: November 25, 2018, 11:03:04 PM »
Schiltron added, as are two defense-side battle abilities for clerics, one which refills the attack unit's resilience and one which gives the cleric a huge but temporary defence boost. There are also 2 non-battle abilities for clerics - every time you hire a new cleric, you get it randomly determined which ability they have.

The protectorate feature is also now done.

I've changed taverns a bit, so each town district gets exactly one pre-generated tavern at the start of the game, with an actual name. Also, the House of the Dragon can now summon dragons (requires 80 adventuring points and 3000 gold coins). Dragons get a generated individual name when you summon them because they're cool like that :)
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #40 on: December 04, 2018, 12:16:49 AM »
Been having a bit of an activity burst on this which I don't have time for but am doing anyway.

A new menu - the information menu - has been added. You can actually access most of the info more easily via keyboard shortcuts but I think it rounds off the menus nicely to have it there too and I may find more uses for it later. Also, in the main game the text input has finally bitten the dust - it's still used for the main menu but eventually that will change as well and it'll only appear when you need to e.g. enter your name. The fact you now don't need to type in the main game means loads more keyboard shortcuts exist - you can use WASD for movement, Q to get a readout of quests, R for army, C to save, Z for stats, and so on.

(To do - add keyboard shortcuts to battle mode as well)

That's all been quite a lot of work - the other current focus is improving access to ships, which are currently a pain and involve lots of search rolls, often with players ending up having to just hit the search button thirty times before they can get off a one-tile island. I'm going to leave that hiring system in place, but also add functionality for players to purchase ships when they're at a port, which will fill a sea tile when the player disembarks and will allow them to re-embark easily.

In other words, I'm trying to work a bit on moving this from being a functional game to one that might actually be playable - at some point that's going to mean writing a tutorial as well, which is going to be a complete arse of a job to do. I have massive, massive piles of content I want to add though and that's going to come in pretty soon - I think when I've sorted the main menu and this ships thing I might be ready to package up an alpha release though, most things seem to work more or less OK at the moment even if the content still feels kind of threadbare.

One of the biggest problems I'm getting is introducing enough diversity with the limited range of mechanics. It's hard to find things that personally test a character, given the character isn't much more than a statline and there isn't a very flexible dialogue system. But that can mean that you end up with an awful lot of fetch and carry quests with occasional battles sprinkled in. I feel like there must be better ideas I'm not thinking of, but, well, I'm not thinking of them!
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Jubal

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Re: The Exile Princes
« Reply #41 on: May 12, 2019, 05:11:41 PM »
Updated first post :)
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