V21: Ecosystem

So I got a bit of free time, and came up with a new thing to muck around with in the game.

Previously I had wanted the game to be purely played by enthralled nobles and agents, and avoid base-building mechanics as much as possible, mostly just because I figured it would make it different from other strategy games. In this version I decided to give up on that, slightly, and allow the player to slowly build up a fishman society. It also features the ability to create an AI-run NPC fishman society, which will spawn its own agents and do its own dark dealings. This was mostly there for testing, but I included it as an option, in case anyone wanted to muck around with it.

It was partially driven by the new "threat assessment" mechanic the NPCs have. They look out at the world and try to figure out what threats they are faced with, and how to respond. The system is in its infancy, but the theory was that they could defeat any foe if they put their mind to it (they could quarantine any plague, invade any fishman city, find any agent...), and the player would be trying to fool them, by presenting false threats to distract them. For example the player could get a noble to keep shouting about the threat a nearby worm nest is posing, in order to distract the other lords from the threat of a fishman colony in the nearby ocean. This could then tie into the Zeitgeist system, as well as the messengers, as the lords and ladies would need to exchange information with each other to distribute knowledge about threats.

For now, it's a bit under-developed, but I wanted to get it out there while it's in a mostly-playable state, firstly because I might take a while to get the next version out, and partially because it contains at least one bugfix for V20 and some minor improvements.