Exile Princes Closed Beta Testing

[Jubal]

Hey! Could I get a James Bond version too? I have little bits of time so can have a poke around for you if poss.

Not sure which the game needs more. I'm sort of interested in adding a trade sub-game as mentioned above, and in adding a load more options for holding court (allowing you to e.g. invest money in a city), but I'm not sure if the latter would be interesting enough that I should prioritise it.

My 2 cents are that something like quests will give people something to keep them busy - which is better for people that are starting with the game or more of an idle player.
The holding court mechanic/s sounds like it will add loads of depth but perhaps once the player has played for a little bit and is invested in various things... But trading will definitely be a fun addition, and you can probably tie in the odd quest with it?

Yep - holding court is already in, it's just there's a very small range of possible opportunities from it so it's currently fairly boring, and it's something you're sort of required to do as the lord of a city so just having to go back every few weeks to listen to people telling you that taxes are too high or too low is probably not much fun. Currently it's less of an issue because the late game is usually quite quick, once you're set up to capture cities you can blitz the map pretty fast. However, I'm planning to slow the late-game down a lot, so I think I'm going to need more holding court stuff to balance that out. Of course, maybe some of the holding court petitions could lead to more advanced quests...

[Tusky]

Thanks! Things so far...

Coule of Q's

• I went rummaging around in some tunnels and so on, and my hero got rather battered and was on -4 hp out of 14. Is the only way to regain health to stay at the tavern over and over again gaining a single hp from time to time? I noticed there was also a search event that you could heal on - but didn't feel that thay would be a wise thing to try with a very injured hero
• No idea how to start engaging in city politics - is it just a time based things like with unit upgrade offers?

Bugs / issues I encountered

During tutorial I ran a search on every tile going from the city to the bandit (output below). I got this error during the tutorial, and then saw it again during the normal game

You find only a single gold coin, discarded by some previous traveller. You find nothing here. Exception in Tkinter callback Traceback (most recent call last): File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__ File "mainfile.py", line 1773, in handlershipX File "mainfile.py", line 6710, in mineparse File "mainfile.py", line 12242, in searcharea IndexError: list index out of range

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After doing a search in a forest I encountered a new hero and was asked if I wanted them to join. There was an error, although the only thing in the output was the word "error". I already had a cleric hero in the party, and the new hero did not join

Nislien Wheyler joins your party.
Error!
-------------------------------
I accepted an escort mission to take a noble from to a city that was at war with the other, but cannot complete it. This is the only thing in the output:

You are brought before the city's leader, Anna Charvalise.
"Welcome, Clive", says Anna Charvalise. "May your battles be fair and your conduct noble in them."
You set out to complete this new quest.
Error!
You head out of town.

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Wanted to attack a mustering of lanfynches

UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR Exception in Tkinter callback Traceback (most recent call last): File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__ File "mainfile.py", line 2158, in handleryes File "mainfile.py", line 10465, in binchoice File "mainfile.py", line 13125, in fightsetup TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

This also happened when I was searching some tunnels in a city

You find old coins in the chest! You gain 80 silver aspers' worth of treasure. You explore the third level of the vast network of tunnels - and come to a cavern full of enemies! UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR Exception in Tkinter callback Traceback (most recent call last): File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__ File "mainfile.py", line 2158, in handleryes File "mainfile.py", line 10899, in binchoice File "mainfile.py", line 13125, in fightsetup TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

[Jubal]

Oh no, that's a lot of bugs And ones I never encountered myself, too... I'll start looking into them soon.

City politics events will start getting offered to you when you reach 50 relation points with a city.

Healing can be done by the Caradilis event in forests, by staying at taverns, naturally over time, or via a random upgrade event where you spend 25 adventuring points. Cara and the advp event give you an automatic heal to full health, the others are gradual. Taverns are likely your best best for healing in an emergency as they're reasonably reliable, albeit not the fastest.



Important question: how many of the above bugs did you encounter during the tutorial, and how many after starting a standard new game?

[Tusky]

Important question: how many of the above bugs did you encounter during the tutorial, and how many after starting a standard new game?

Oops - sorry I did not notice this question!

I encountered all of them during a standard new game, I just noticed the search one at first in the tutorial, but it reocurred during normal play (a few times actually)

[Jubal]

Next question: did you play the new game immediately after the tutorial without closing the game down first? And do you get the bugs if you start a completely new game now without playing the tutorial first?

I think I might have worked out the problem...

[Tusky]

At first I went straight from the tutorial, yeah.

I've tried to recreate the search bug from a fresh game and can't seem to

[Jubal]

Right, got it

The tutorial loaded an old (and incomplete) version of the unit bank, which wasn't being refreshed properly when you hit the "new game" button. I think that's what's triggering all your issues.

[Jubal]

Small tweak today - lots of new names and city name elements added, which should make that a bit more diverse

[Jubal]

OK, finally got some time to do a bit of work.

Changelog for today:
> New quest! Trophy hunting - this will be available only at slightly higher levels, and faces you off against one unusual and powered up variant on a normal map monster. This is currently either a red-skinned quarquare or a huge albino kinklade. When you attack parties of that monster in the relevant region, you may find the more powerful variant, and when you kill it you have to take the trophy back to the ruler of the quest-giving city.
> Gameplay tweak: you now have to click the "go to castle" button to finish as well as start city quests. This may seem a pain but a) means more audiences with city rulers which is important for getting the feel of what they're like, b) stops you getting so much load of text immediately every time you enter a city, and c) will be helpful when I add quests where the ending directly sparks another quest.
> Gameplay/rules tweak: map stamina is no longer a standardly upgradeable stat, and resilience is now properly a separate stat to defence which can be upgraded in its own right.
> The quest log systems now change their text for some quests once you've completed a major element (e.g. the find person quest is different once you've found the person).
> Kinkladelets now have a different visual to kinklades
> Letter delivery quests now have more word variation.
> The message when you already have an ongoing quest now depends on the ruler's personality.

[Jubal]

Finally got to look at this again

> Fixed a bug that meant you could sometimes randomly take units into companion-only areas
> You now have to wait a certain number of weeks before assaulting a city - this makes a "blitz across the map" strategy harder, as you need to pay your army for longer and enemy factions have more chance to capture your cities back whilst you're at it, especially if you didn't garrison them well. Currently it's set to a flat 3 weeks, which I think will be the baseline - having siege expert units (not yet implemented) in the player army will allow them to reduce it by a week or two, but also towns with more fortifications or a defence-specialist ruler will have increased time (I'm thinking +1 week for a defence specialist, and +1 week per fortification bonus item in the city).
> Port cities can no longer get cavalry-only armies. This just felt weird to me when it happened so I decided it shouldn't do any more.
> Minor spelling and grammar fixes on some messages that had typos in.

[Jubal]

Today's work:

• Now siege time is increased by a city having more defences or a ruler with the "defender" trait.
• New quest available from lords with either the "honourable" or "callow" traits - they may demand you defend their position in a dispute at swordpoint, in a duel with another ruler's champion.
• Fixed a bug where the +2hp upgrade only gave you +1

EDIT: And I'm calling that as 008. Hopefully time for more updates will occur in the coming days.

[Jubal]

Today's updates include some fun and quite noticeable changes:

> Quest threading! Some lords' quests, when you end them, now immediately trigger a new quest offer. Letters in particular are made less boring by this - they can turn out to be warning of a murderer or bandits in the area.
> Unit upgrades. The barracks or blacksmith can give a non-beast unit a +1 attack bonus, the blacksmith or tanneries can give +1 defence, and the tanneries can give +1 resilience. Each unit can get each upgrade type only once. Companions can be offered the upgrades too.
> Some opportunities now have semi-randomised variable costs, including weapon upgrades and bandit hunting, which may now be more or less profitable

[Jubal]

Smol improvement for today: I added a feature to add/strip modifications to the strings used to store map tiles. This makes life quite a lot easier when it comes to e.g. storing hidden items on the map, because I can now tell the computer those are different without having to duplicate the underlying art asset, so that's an improvement and might make future quests and more hidden locations easier to sort out.

[Jubal]

Productive day on this today I think!

The major advancement is that as well as characters getting their own throwaway vignette lines, they now have a range of possible scripted interactions with other characters, which can both show off their personality traits and those of others. They can also contribute to characters becoming friends or enemies. If two of your companions are enemies, their arguments may drag down morale: conversely, friendly characters can boost it. Particular combinations of traits in different characters can make friendships more likely (and more lasting). There may well be other effects of friendship/enmity too, but those aren't implemented yet.

Game start has now been tweaked too: you get a readout which tells you more explicitly a mini-backstory for you and makes your overall aim clear, and on your first move of the game you get offered a starting quest, which will tell you the location of a city to head towards. This should make the game start easier for new players.

[Jubal]

More diversity of starting quests added: still only two options, but you now get either a letter delivery or a scholar escort, randomised.

Wondering if there's a way to make these more engaging, but not sure atm. I feel like I have tons of ideas at the moment for this but they're often poorly connected and I'm struggling to implement them well.