Version 19: Events

This version introduces the last planned major feature: Events. Narrative events are little bits of story with a picture and maybe a few decisions to make. As seen in Stellaris, FTL and Crusader Kings, they're mostly there to add flavour to the game and a few elements of surprise. Hopefully they're mostly benenficial, giving the player a few helpful little boosts on their mission to destroy the existence of all life. There are four "major" event trees, with multiple events all chained together, The Twins, The Tomb of Gods, The Pyromanic and The Letter, then a variety of others. They might have their probabilities a bit high right now (making them appear too often), and we'll definitely be adding more in future versions, so they may get a bit repetitive after a while until we beef up the numbers to keep them novel.

Other than that, this version has a whole load of bugfixes (see below for full list) which hopefully will catch a number of the annoying issues people have been encountering.

We made faster progress than we expected in getting events working, my co-author really did solid work, with a system we hope will be extremely flexible and robust, and allow all manner of exciting side-adventures for the agents of evil to partake in. Coupled with some excellent images drawn from wikimedia's royalty-free paintings, we are happy with how the event system has worked out.

Now that we've reached the last gameplay feature, we can continue fleshing out the game, adding content in the form of events, new agents and new Dark Names until the game reaches a completion point. Despite this being the last major feature we planned, the future is still bright for Shadows. More patches will allow us to add to it, and once done, it's almost inevitable we'll begin work on Shadows 3, which can be a more polished, professional game, learning all the lessons from community feedback (less politics, more agents) and hopefully re-investing some of the income into art assets, especially on the UI side, which could really benefit from a rework. At the very least, we coule try a font which isn't bright yellow.

Hopefully you enjoy the events, and how we add to them in the future. If not, they can be disabled in the in-game options menu.

List of changes for Version 19:

-Bugfix to prevent dark empires existing into the next age

-Dark empires no longer spawn investigators

-Investigators are disbanded by Dark Society, try to avoid it while wandering and will not report suspicions to nobles of dark empires

-Vampires on AI now drink

-Boosted visibility of hostile units on map screen, increasing hosility border graphic and making them visible above location and name tags

-Nobles' fear of dark agents now occurs based on how close they are to the evil action, not globally. Gives highest threat estimation at the evidence location, then decreasing amounts in the nearby connected nodes

-Moving towards a more unified and complete hint system

-Only allow a single seeker

-Investigators and agents now automatically instantly go after seekers once they discover the truth

-Seekers can access libraries for twice the secret rewards to speed things up

-Plague doctors buffed, temporarily, with rework planned to allow interaction with disease mechanics

-Files to load now displayed in chronological order

-Expanded event messages a little bit

-Dark Heirophants can sacrifice broken nobles to gain power and refill enthrallment uses

-Nerf sacrifice broken noble heirphant ability, to prevent it being spammed infinitely in a dark empire

-Power gain now increases with world panic and with enthralled noble prestige (giving you a good reason to rise the ranks)

-First few events added

-Plague Doctor given a plague ability, for thematic reasons

-Agents told to go to a distant location by right clicking will assign themselves a "go to location" task

-Option to enable/disable events

-Added more events. Four major chains now exist: Twins, Letter, Tomb and Pyromaniac

-Bonus difficulty given to high-level rulers and dukes on harder difficulties

-Undead no longer attack Dark Empire

-Deep Ones are no longer hostile to surface-dwellers when not at war, reducing risk of getting killed by passing armies

-Your enthralled no longer sends letters to themself to turn themself insane

-Gods no longer exist between worlds, avoiding cooldowns being inherited from previous games

-Fixed Spread Fear so it's actually castable

-Fixed bug in events where they couldn't trigger on non-city locations

-Bugfix for issue where two locations could be in the same place

-Fixed text display issue on difficulty options

-Fixed wording in vampire tooltip

-Fixed bug where an army would be assigned the first ever person born as its leader, leading to them dying in battle despite being on the other side of the map

-People forget about long-dead ancestors when moving to the next age

-Merchants now no longer attack if controlled by the AI

-Movement is refunded if you can't complete a move due to an army

-Armies now no longer go after agents