Version 11: UI and AI

Version 11 is coming out a bit early, because honestly I thought the UI change was too critical to leave missing.

UI Addition: Agent selection button

This button, down the bottom of the screen, gives an at-a-glance overview of your agents' turn-taking status. Green if you can/should move someone, yellow if they're all busy on tasks, red if you can't move any at all. You can then click it to cycle through your agents, to quickly pan to them. Should make it far less common to forget about an agent for a few turns, losing precious time.

AI: Crisis response votes

The first of a new style of politics has been introduced. When the societies in non-streamlined mode discover evidence (reported to them by the investigators), they hold an emergency response vote. This decides how they'll handle the situation (if at all). They have a few options, which scale with how afraid they feel at the current time. These range from "no response", to raising security on provinces, to expelling all foreign agents.

This is designed to allow societies to respond faster to problems, in a weaker fashion. Rather than let agents run free until sufficient nobles are suspicious enough to condemn them, this allows broader responses faster. They may not know WHO is to blame, but they are prepared to put in place measures to stop dark agents.

It should also give more utility to having an enthralled noble. The difference between decisions' desirability, in the minds of the nobles, can be very low, so your enthralled should be able to swing the vote, and get the wrong province locked down, or scale back a response to a less damaging one.

Overall, we hope to implement this style of voting in more places going forward. Obvious crises are: War declared, civil war imminent, dark nobles detected, world panic passing thresholds and plagues starting. It would be nice to be able to sabotage the nations' responses by either convincing them to vote against their interests, or by making them so selfish that they refuse to help other nobles in times of need (will need a trait to make a person politically selfish, and an agent to cause nobles to become that way).      

Paladins as promoted investigators

Paladins are now not new agents, but rather investigators who have received a promotion. They are investigators who've discovered evidence left by one of your agents, and are able to track down that dark agent for a number of turns. You can avoid and/or delay for this time, and they'll return back to their normal investigator duties.

This is part of a plan to give NPC agents far more complexity. They should be shaped by their experiences, and by the needs of their society. For example in this case, finding evidence gives them a rivalry for one of your dark agents, giving them a personal connection. In the future, they might then be given more aid by their society, if their society is filled with aware nobles and passes a vote, making this agent a major player in the forces of your enemies. This would then give you a good reason to sabotage individuals, leading them into traps or driving them insane (as suggested by nyotas), to remove key players.

They could also be involved far more in other tasks. NPC agents could assist in wars, aid in reconstruction of damaged cities, and assist in curing plagues. We're unsure of how this would be best implemented. Maybe the NPCs would have some kind of level-up system, where they can specialise into a class (paladin if they need to hunt down a dark agent, healer if they need to cure a plague, general if they need to lead armies, builder if they need to reconstruct damaged lands). Specialist NPCs would be more powerful in their chosen domain, but weaker in others, so the player could trick them into adapting in one fashion, then pivot, making their new skills useless.

But all that is speculation. We'll need to give it some thought.

Might also need a bit of balancing on the crisis voting (seems still a bit slow to respond, unsure if the responses are strong/weak enough).

Oh, and the Linux version is untested (as was 10), because while I have a few Linux machines, none of them have a screen, and the game doens't support (yet?) command-line only interaction (but it would be crazy if it did).