Exile Princes Closed Beta Testing

[Jubal]

Some progress! The groquetes are now in, as are the gatherers though those need more testing. Today though I mainly worked on the "midway" bonus, which is a special set of four additional court cases only available if you're mid-range on liberty/authority or rich/poor scores: you can get a reputation as even-handed which means you might get paid to help arbitrate certain cases in your court.

More testing of all this needed as I get back into this, but plenty more to do in general after that...

[Jubal]

Started today on a new block of 3-4 additional companion quests, which should bring the game to the point where many companions have a couple of options and it's not just "oh this is a companion of X type so I'm definitely getting Y quest".

The first of these is pretty simple, it's a trading quest available to characters with the liberal or socialite traits where they want to start a new luxury goods trade and you need to search around for buyers and provide them with starting funds, with a unique resulting trait for them which should help you recoup the loss and more besides over time.

[Jubal]

Over the weekend I did a screeching turn away from the companion quest work and instead started on a new lategame feature: emergent threats. There will probably only be one of these in the imagined 1.0, which will never trigger on a first playthrough but then will turn up on 30-50% of subsequent runs.

The one I'm adding will be an "enemy king" event, essentially, when you've captured 50% of the cities, an enemy noble will rally the remaining settlements to themselves as king, to provide you with a new higher level endgame challenge. The king will have some bonus features, most obviously some much tougher honour guard units and a system whereby if they lose their city but their emergent faction still has at least one city, they just get to go there and replace the new ruler. They might also have elections against them switched off and their faction or city might get protection against renown based loss (where the player can flip a city through sheer renown)? This feels mean to players who really want to complete the game in a less conquesty way though. Possibly you can only flip/election the king's city once their faction is down to a single city? That might make sense.

Anyway hopefully this will make for a more interesting endgame on some runs. I don't want to spend too much time on late-game content because I don't think many people will ever see it, which is why I'm not adding other options. Other endgame threat plans on the list include an emergent wibulnib threat where the game spams them at you in actually dangerous scale hordes, something where you either face or spearhead some kind of wrath of the forests/fairy revival as the Duke in Green chooses a champion, a dragon threat where a dragon moves around causing major destruction to cities, and an external invasion where a new faction comes in with a whole new and more powerful military unit roster. I think those are all quite low down the list though, and along with the late-game story quests they might end up getting bundled into some kind of expansion plan if the game ever has a player count to merit it.

For now, the king threat has been implemented in its basics, though the king's bonus units aren't in yet and nor is the rule for their moving out of a captured city to a new capital. So those are my next steps - then I'll try to get back to the companion quests, and then after that probably achievements and early-game quest tweaks are next on the list.

[Jubal]

Okay! As of this weekend the king feature is much more functional:

• Flips & election triggers can only happen to a royal capital if it's the royal ruler's last city
• Capturing a royal capital if the royal faction has a remaining city will lead to the ruler picking a new capital and becoming ruler there
• Royals spawn two Royal Knight units in battles with the player, these are slightly beefier than Armoured Riders and have the Charge2 rule meaning that unlike most cavalry they can charge even in siege contexts.

I still need to do a few things to mostly-complete this feature:

• It should only trigger on about 50% of runs.
• Rulers should also get a chunky bonus on autoresolving battles for their royal knights - don't want it to be the case that the best way to beat them is just letting an AI ally do it.
• Need to test & check that if they do get beaten by an AI ally, the capital switch mechanic works.

I'd also like to add some extra bonus units that reflect the ruler's personality, and in my original conception I wanted the royal rulers to have some additional ways to challenge the player like sending duel knights or assassins, but those (especially the latter) may have to be nice-to-haves given the number of other features I'm keen to add and the fact that this is all late-game content that I wouldn't expect many players to see.

[Jubal]

Some new additions lately! I'm adding companion interactions for the city events, so there's now a chance companions will give you a comment while you're at feasts, and I'm going to add soon some little bonus mini-events for the different companion classes for tourneys - ranger, sergeant, minstrel and squire all feel quite doable, not sure what clerics and scholars will do at the tourneys yet. Thoughts welcome!

Also, had Spritelady's other half run a test, which was interesting. He stuck close to a core gameplay loop of lord quests, with little city searching, and so didn't pick up any companions etc, I wonder if I need to push the searching and exploration more at people?

[Jubal]

I recently had some testing done by a Ukrainian friend here in Vienna which was useful.

Also, a lot of work has been going into getting this towards Steam recently! The store page is prepped and I'll be announcing that properly in a day or so from now.

Alongside that, a long-awaited addition of achievements is the next thing on the list. I've got one working and, thanks to some help from psyanojim, piped up to Steam, so that's neat. Lots to do there though - I'm aiming for about thirty achievements in the initial release.

[Jubal]

As of the weekend I'm up to 16 achievements, so that's good progress Making the pictures and thinking up good names is honestly often the thing that takes time.

I am also thinking about rebalancing the faction bonuses a bit, in particular to try and give the Scholars and perhaps the generals some bigger mid-late game thing - Phoenixes get, well, Phoenixes, dragons get Dragon summoning, and the Generals' arequebusiers are powerful. The Scholars' pangolins are a very good unit too especially due to their training ability (which makes no sense but it's staying in now) - but the Scholars don't necessarily have anything flashy for the later game.

[Jubal]

32 achievements now ingame! So that's progress. Here are some more of the latest ones:



I've also started work on the much needed dungeon crawl overhaul: I've been putting in "service" sections for piping more information around the various functions so far, but I've now got to a point where:

• Completing a dungeon turns it into a ruin instead (which could then be redeveloped, so it lets you "clear" the area in your own cities if you'd rather have another amenity).
• Ruins have a chance to turn into dungeon entrances (which is currently set way too high for testing purposes, this will be a very rare event).
• Dungeons have a type, which will set the final enemy, and which I'm also planning to use to flavour some of the miscellaneous events on lower levels.

The next and probably bigger section of the overhaul is to add three new enemies on top of the one already used. I want these to be some of the more interesting/unusual boss fight style encounters in the game, there to stretch its better players, so they're going to involve some difficult/unusual mechanics.

[Jubal]

Today's dev work: adding one of the tougher possible optional boss fights. The game includes mini dungeon crawls where you can only take your hero and companions (without your "regular" warband units). These are entirely optional and provide some extra challenge, and I'm working my way through adding three new unusual end fights for them which are designed to test players with well prepared parties.

Today I've been doing the mechanics for the Whisperer of Lies, which can turn one of your units around to attack you. If you need to face one, it's good to hire some weaker "fodder" companions to help (at some risk to their lives) because if the Whisperer grabs one of your most powerful heroes or player character you might find yourself hacking your way through your own party!

The Whisperer will have a couple more tricks up its sleeve too, but I'm not revealing those yet. I've already completed another of the three bosses, leaving one to go. Which I think will be an easier ride: the Whisperer has been relatively complex to code...

[Jubal]

Having a big round of testing so I'm making a lot of smaller improvements at the moment, here's a few of the recent changes:

• Tweaks to the sound player, nothing very major but should hopefully have reduced "double start" issues on tracks, and ensured that files are periodically closed which may help players with older systems or linux systems with low file limits.
• Started work on ascertaining what can & can't run the game in general - Windows 7 and lower seem to be out because Python itself isn't back-compatible that far (which surprised me as a discovery). Not sure about Windows 8, 10 and 11 will both be absolutely fine. I'm not sure if I could make a Win7 version by running the code through an older version of Python 3, but this is unlikely to be worth the bother I suspect. On the plus side, it looks like the whole thing should actually run OK on Linux systems with WINE.
• Fixed a silly saves bug which I caused just by not preparing the save storage file properly.
• You can now press Esc to leave the information or army menus and return to the map (or to the city if you're looking at a garrison).
• Added a new interaction for characters who've completed the Grand Merchant quest, where they'll basically occasionally give you chunks of free money when visiting areas of cities with alleys or markets.
• Tweaked a couple of dialogue lines for Ruthless characters so if you're in late-game and they're fully on-side they'll act more trusting towards the player character.
• Various minor text fixes.