Devlog time again! I'm back to working on cities at the moment.
- One non city feature, a new menu - the army menu screen! This allows you to set your initial attack unit, order of battle, and initial defence unit, speeding up battles as you can rely on e.g. pushing the unit you need trained out into battle first rather than clicking through them all. The army menu also lets you dismiss units, which if your army is getting too big and too costly can really help. The army menu is also a way of reviewing the stats and abilities a unit has (though I've left the "ARMY" typed command available for a quick overview - the downside to the menu is that it's good for examining particular units, but less strong on getting an overview I think.)
- Elections have been beefed up and diversified. You can now give speeches to try and change public opinion, visit target areas of the city yourself, and get previews of how areas might be thinking of voting. Areas will also petition you for particular changes depending on items in their vicinity: areas with a library may want to hold public debates, areas with a barracks may ask you to increase the number of armed units the city has, and so on. Several of these random opportunities are only available if you're in the city and staying in a tavern there, AND you get more opportunities per week if you're inside the city. Staying in the city can be an expensive option though, especially if you've got a big army with you.
- Once you win control of a city, you're in charge of it! That means you'll get tax revenues, which is nice, but there's a catch: if you win via an election, those campaign promises will get implemented. Did you promise to increase the military budget, or pay for better temple upkeep? You're now going to have to deliver on that, eating into the revenue you can get from the city. There'll be a lot more "city management" end things to come.
- City armies got a lot smarter. They'll now move high-attack units into the attack slot by preference, and high-defence units into, well, defence, giving them a much stronger battle line for you to face up to. Most of the time they'll only get to do this a certain amount of the time, so if you can kill off one unit then you'll sometimes get one or two softer ones opened up, unless the city's ruler has the "general" trait (see next item), which allows them to use the AI script every battle turn.
- Finally for this week's dev updates, the cities' rulers have been hugely three-dimensionalised. Rather than just being a name that gets thrown out when you go up to get a quest, they now have personality traits and will give a range of greetings dependent on them, and you can find out more about them by gossiping with the people of their city. Those traits will affect how they react to you both as quest-givers and potential opponents - one ruler might be a snide demagogue who sneers at you in private but is a ferocious debater and friend of the common folk in public; another might be an honour bound old-money noble who practices sorcery; another might be a madly brilliant general who spends their spare time entertaining the wealthy merchant classes and indulging a passion for terrible puns (yes, there is a "jester" character trait that some characters have). Hopefully this will bring the characters to life rather more (there are plans to do more with characters and traits in future, too).
What's next? Two major areas, also related to cities, before I get out and do more with the exploration side again. One of them is sidequests, which will be found via the "search city" feature. These will allow you to get yourself better known in a city and especially boost your popularity in particular parts of the city, which will give you an important head start if you later want to get elected.
The other area is city management and diplomacy, which is a
huge area that I've barely started on. The plan is that you won't be able to micromanage cities: rather, you'll be expected to hold court every so often, and if you leave it too long your relations with your city will decrease. Holding court will give you opportunities (randomised much like those from elections) to shore up support, improve the city, or try and milk more money out of the populace, depending on your strategy. You'll also have the risk of losing what you've gained: if your popularity gets too low, you might well get challenged for another election. If you're at war with another city, you might find your own gets under siege. Meanwhile other cities will be doing exactly the same vis-a-vis one another, with sieges and elections happening elsewhere too. Once I've scripted all that. Eep!
Beyond that, there are a few other obvious areas before a beta is ready: one is defensive skills such as the horse archers'
feint ability and the pikemen's
schiltron, since I've only implemented the offensive ones so far. I'd also like to add some more general quests and search options, and I think some additional enemy types are definitely needed, including more sizeable enemy parties. A more developed religion-generating system is possible, but might be left until I'm already in beta.