Version 18: Community Led Development

Version 18! A version really made up of community suggestions packaged together.

-fishchisel recommended a few changes to the Dark Name "Winter's Scythe". All abilities have been buffed, and it has gained two new ones. The first, smaller ability, allows you to break links between locations. The concept is that it can advantage your agents by isolating them while they work, or to stop entire armies from making progress. It only works in the snow, so becomes more useful the more you expand. The second is a world-apocalypse power. Once you've got some of the map frozen you can begin to spend power to freeze the world directly.

-EuchreJack suggested that your agents should be able to be dismissed from service, to free up enthrallment slots. This made sense, but they also suggested "Turning them loose", putting them under AI control, but still allied to you. With a bit of code copied from the automatic testing we've got a first pass at that. You can tell your agents to "go do your own thing", and they'll try to infiltrate, enshadow and escape from hostile agents. Useful for causing a distraction, as the paladins chase them across the map, at least.

-smurph wanted the events on the side be click-to-zoom to, which they should already have been, but better late than never. You can now click on most of them to quickly go to the relevant location. Same with threat messages, where applicable

-SangerZonvolt, An Actual Englishman, Archifenix and TrentTheWanderer all chimed in about gameplay direction, specifically the question "What do I actually DO?" especially on the political front. While this is an ongoing design concern, we've started by giving a hint-prompt to tell the player about the 'intended' strategy, for both agents and political enthralled nobles. Should let people know our idea about how the game is best played. Obviously it's only a starting point, and other strategies exist. Infiltration is also now visible on the map screen, so people can see the progress of their cult, which persists even if the agents themselves die.

-nyotas has been wanting an Inquisitor role for a while, and it's finally made it in, in its first form at least. This new role for NPC agents allows them to hunt down enthralled and broken nobles. The agents begin by simply warning the society if they discover evil nobles, and must now transform into inquisitors before they can begin harming your enthralled noble. They also can be useful to you, as they detect corrupt nobles too. If you get lucky they can take down your rivals for you, hurting their prestige and political support. Again, might need some balancing before it's done, but it's a good first step.

-Lastly, a non-community idea, The Saviour, a new agent, is available. This agent is mostly there because I thought it would be fun, narrative-wise, to have a dedicated betrayer character. The agent can `save' a nation from either an invading force (that you control) or from a disease (which you caused). The nobles will then love them, and this can be used to either infiltrate, swing political votes or to boost your enthralled noble's prestige. I personally love the evil story of a character causing a disaster, only to set themselves up as the saviour, by rescuing the nation from the disaster they themselves created. Normally there's a third act, where the forces of good discover this deceit, but it's your job to avoid that happening.

Apologies if I missed anyone, and apologies if your suggested feature didn't make it in. Many are good, and still need to be implemented, but it felt like a good time to hit release, and leave the next set of features for the next version. Behind the scenes there's a bunch of stuff we need to implement which needs to be in its own version.