Shadows 2 (Internal Dev build)
A downloadable game
Not a playable game, just an internal build to let people test the core mechanic of the hypothetical sequel to the previous game. Everything is still under development, but it has now reached a point where playtesters familiar with the previous game can answer the question "is the evidence mechanic fun or annoying?", which is critical to guide the next few months progress.
Major changes from Shadows of Forbidden Gods 1:
Information management via evidence
-Agents drop evidence for any major challenge
-Heroes can gather evidence and bring it back to universities to study
-Kill messengers to stop information from spreading
-Evidence leads to Adaptive Defences, which grow in power with each clue found
-You can slow but never stop evidence from being discovered
-Adaptive Defences respond to what you're doing: Wards are deployed following evidence of shadow, inquistors following evidence of infiltration, medicine in response to disease crafting...
-Wards therefore aren't spammed out
-Can have challenges which require you to protect evidence from research for a given amount of time. Example is Blood Magic "Ticking Clock" which enshadows a ruler 100% if it can be defended long enough
Building
-Cults now have types, and a central cult is required for infiltration. It then also gives buffs and unique challenges based on its level and type
-More agents making more locations, such as The Genius making The Laboratory
-Evidence is critical to this, because it means you can defend your lair for a while against prying eyes
-Deploy minions to ambush heroes to slow investigation or support your organised crime money-making operations
Disease crafting:
-Make your own disease by choosing genes and spending Pestilence Mastery points you've gathered
Final battle:
-When you gain enough victory, or panic reaches 100% or humanity reaches 100% 'understanding' which ticks up based on their clues found, the final battle begins
-You gaining enough victory points lets you start the battle with advantage, humanity reaching 100% understanding gives them the advantage
-Everyone gets to fight a big brawl at the Elder Tomb or sneak around The Undertomb, with military and magical combat
-Makes the game a bit more scripted, you can't win in as free-form a fashion, since you now critically need a military for the final battle, but makes it more dramatic
Other:
-Sea level rising as a geomancy for the deep ones
-Diplomacy. Make smaller nations sit out the fight or join the dark empire. Cult types give bonuses to certain leader personalities
-Challenges say why they're unavailble, under the restriction
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- the dark empire and the dark are hostile to one another, BUT dark combat support from heroes joining the DE applies to both the dark (tentacles) and the dark empire, while the dark empire is forced to battle the tentacles (despite being allied)
- the tentacles can only raze and drive back, since they cannot move and you need a movement point to attack
- you can just stack inordinate amounts of evidence via level 1 blood magic. if you are extra spicy, go up to blood 2 and thus double the effect of the disruption power
- in fact, talking about blood and evidence, if you make a single deep one city you can then begin converting minor settlements into deep ones after getting a special item from it, which you can mask via just using something like the web of hate or lies or whatever you wish, which then causes that to have more menace than the actual deep ones have, so they always succeed
- heroes do not know what to do if the nearby universities are raided and thus non functional, so everyone keeps investigating evidence but not reasearching it
- heroes joining the DE at 100% darkness is honestly kinda neat, especially after you kick start the magical arms race
- web of hate and web of guilt allow you to basically any evidence anywhere you want with barely any consequence, as well as directly creating the things that will make them active (since they drop evidence at their own location, thus making people either enshadowed or giving them a reason to hate them)
- the charity blood effect should either make the ruler give you 50% of the gold or scale with the blood level. 20 for that amount of menace is not really a good trade
- orcs are still incredibly hard to actually capture without either leveling up your warlord or giving them items and minions
- universities barely if ever get repaired, since they have a flat 50 motivation that is then divided by turns needed to do it, making no one really care
- messengers still appear from aware locations even if they are enshadowed. they should either stop spawning or have some sort of subversive effect like increasing shadow or like for shadow at the same time as spreading awareness (since awareness can be a boon for say, joining the dark empire)
- I have yet to see a single defensive mechanism vs blood magic, as researching magic related stuff does not actually seem to create any kind of thing like wards or inquisitors etc.
- slaughtering inquisitors creates neither menace nor evidence
- it does not appear as if being a deep one or liking deep ones does anything except somewhat reduce likelyhood of going against deep ones; aside from making them more likely to join the dark empire
- deep one rulers die when their city gets drowned via 100% maturation, making me question why I turn them into deep ones in the first place
- there is no way to scroll down if you have armies crowding everything else out
- messengers are in the recruit able units list. trying to recruit them does nothing except take away your recruitment point (they are recruit able due to being fully enshadowed, stemming from enshadowed locations)
- messengers have family trees and clog up the relations trees, even after they die
- the "final battle has begun" or "can begin" message appears every single turn
those are the things that come to mind right now. I am gonna attach a screenshot to show some of the absurdity (not derogatory, more like it is funny, though it definitely needs to be fixed). I am playing on version 2 as a side note (aka the one that was updated less than 24 hours ago)
side note, I think refugees should be nationless - since refugees might be fleeing, say, from the alliance (due to being razed) to the dark empire yet the dark empire will just see the refugees and consider it an enemy and kill the people that would work for it
I can say though, I do enjoy the new change that shadow cannot really spread unless you are at 100% shadow since it no longer snowballs by enshadowing every location a small amount
I think one of the most important things is going to be clearing up the descriptions - what I mean is that a lot of the challenges are randomly assigned text that is not supposed to belong to them, and a lot of challenges (like infiltration) do not have text to say what is needed to do them (like how I need a cult to infiltrate a location - or what happens in location that do not have a cult and how they can be infiltrated)
otherwise, it is definitely...interesting, although I do feel like I have to basically get a city right next to a university so I can immediately infiltrate it and thus reduce the amounts of understanding generated; especially since, when inquisitors are in play and I want to remove them, that just creates even more evidence to be used against me (and possibly to grow understanding)
orc upstarts basically require you to have a kitted out orc (or at least get vermin) so you can deal any kind of damage to the 8 damage dealing upstarts, which makes orc gameplay significantly harder
the way the new map looks is a bit eh in my personal opinion, as I much prefer the hex based one, especially since it meshes weirdly (suddenly cuts off into new pieces of land) as well as geenrates small islands in location that are purely ocean making me think there is land there
there are also problems such as there being no way to make a dark empire - since it still shows the old description, yet seemingly needs something different than a capital's ruler being at 100% shadow
Thanks for playing and giving feedback.
You're right that even at this early stage the descriptions need to be a better. I've gotten so used to testing it myself that I don't even read the descriptions, so don't notice that they're wrong or missing. I'll have to look back over them before we do any more testing. For instance it possibly hasn't ever actually been mentioned that a cult allows you to infiltrate around the cult AND the entire nation the cult is in, so you don't have to place cults right next to locations you want to infiltrate (like universities). I also think maybe the game needs to explain better that stopping understanding is useful, but not always critical, if you can win before it becomes a problem then you can just do that.
The map graphical issues are something that I planned on fixing, but wasn't yet a priority. I think the hexes look cool, but they were a Unity asset store thing, and I'd like to have a unique style to it. Having the terrain as this giant shader lets me do some new stuff with it. For instance Deep Ones will gain the ability to raise sea level, to drown entire cities and nations. It'll also allow weird shader effects so we can have stuff like "The Color From Outer Space" or giant fungus growing all over the map. Definitely needs some work, but hopefully the advantages will be useful.
Anyway, thanks again for playing, I'll try to get it at least slightly more playable in the immediate future. Maybe it needs some placeholder messages just to say what's different from Shadows 1, before a real tutorial can be made to explain cults, evidence and understanding.
I see, thanks for explaining
I am not sure if I need a tutorial exactly - SOFG was played by me without a tutorial as well (for the most part), most if not all the information was able to be inferred from the challenges or the quest descriptions - as such, I would request that those be the foci - something like having infiltration describe what is necessary for it to happen, or maybe having specific quests by the heroes describe what the quest is supposed to achieve (which would also be useful for quests like guarding - like, if a human is being guarded, it would be nice to know for how long they will be guarded. in fact it actually would be kinda nice if obsessively liking a species would not result in someone just becoming a dedicated guard forever)
what I can say are some nice changes mechanically or UI wise are how shadow does not spread as easily, how infiltration is not a thing that "just happens" anymore (since you need to have a somewhat significant cost to basically start doing it), and the way that the challenges are filtered (based on stat used or things like infiltration) means that it was easier to actually see specific things; especially when you have things like death, souls or geomantic loci in a given location since those added a looot of challenges you might not wanna see right away. I also like how numerous challenges have "other" effects that basically make them easier (or harder) like how cults improve certain challenges based on their growth
one of THE most important things right now, I believe, is to mark which challenges create a piece of evidence in the first place. as an example, I infiltrated two universities next to one another and put cultists into their faculty - however, the game never mentioned that at any point it would create a piece of evidence, which is especially counter intuitive since the evidence is right on the location where it would also be studied