Shadows Behind The Throne

I just wanted to drop by and say how much I enjoyed this game you made. Your later experimental versions were a little flaky, but version 13 was really fun and had the seed of something great in it. I do hope you pick it up again some day, or else someone else has a go at making something similar.

Hi!

First of all, I like your game! Is it possible for you to share the code? I really want to see how it looks/works from code/unity side.

Hope I'm not asking for too much.

P.S.: Sorry for my bad English.

I had a go with v22. I quite like the idea, though things got chaotic very quickly - I infected a few caravans with fishman disease and before long the majority of the world was exile camps!

You can use Battle for Wesnoth art for free if you make your project open-source. Just an idea.

Bit of a strange question, perhaps, but: What assets do you use for your game?  Are they all made by yourself?  They're certainly simple, but there's a certain charm to the tile terrain and landmarks.

Hi!

I played your game a lot( about two evenings testing) and now I like it very much! Idea of this game is amazing and there are really many things to do there! I was very sad, when I saw how your Kickstarter Company finished, but, as I see, you continue your work and that's great!

But, at first, I'd like to tell you about a small bug. It ruined my game twice, so, as you understand, It's terrible.  When rebels destroed Lunarium in my city Wolfs went out of my control and pillaged it. After that my country started the war against dark( all Lords, who were ruling it were dark Lords) and I couldn't attack anyone. And, when I killed them, my Mist Monster(who is unkillable) attacked me and ruined all my strategy and kingdom.

However that didn't ruin my enthusiasm. Perhaps I may help you by repainting tiles/cities and other things. I will do it for free just because your project is very interesting! So, if I can help you, please, write me!

Best wishes,

Rovik.

P.S. I looked at the 20-th version and saw that you're changing your game to something, which will be like "Dominions" series. Is it right and you're making province system?

Hi, I loved one of the previous versions of the game that I played, but now I am having problems with the latest zip file. Both WinRAR and 7Zip freeze while trying to unpack the archive, on the UnityEngine.dll file. Is that a common problem with a known solution?

Hey are you by any chance looking for a writer?

I'm going to be finishing my Bachelors starting September, so I wont ask for any payment as my time wont be as free as it currently is. I'm more than happy to get in touch with you in a more direct manner (be that discord, private messages or even email) to provide you with examples of my work in earlier college-related projects.

If you are not in need of a writer currently, there's no hard feelings about it; Sometimes you need to stay focused on the more demanding aspects of development.

Hey,

just registered here to say thank you for this game, it's really cool one. The V13 is excellent one and I'm really glad that you keep working on this (I was really interested in the `That which sleeps` idea and this game is really nice one realisation of the concept).
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Also I'd like to submit some bugreport (I google a little, but didn't find the place to submit it, so if I need to submit it on some other place, please note me). The thing is that on Xubuntu 16.04 x64 kernel 4.4.0-83-generic on my first game from around 80+ turn all buildings and rebellions stop to progress. Even though I see `uprising 10% per turn` and `6 turns to finish the building` even after dozens of turns it still freeze. I tried save\load and reload the game but nothing changes. I used weather control and rebellion uprising as the selected buildings, normal game and dawn complexity. Hope this info will  help to figure out a problem if any exists.

Unfortunately I didn't save the savefile an just rerun the game with other buildings allowed. On my new game it's still ok, but I didn't reach 80+ turn yet.

In any case the game is really enjoyable, so hope you'll have time and inspiration to keep improving it

Hey,

Sorry I disappeared for a while there. Life happened. I've recently come back to this, and found V13 to be absolutely excellent. The Aspect of Undeath's playstyle is a sheer joy, I must say. Also, I'm sorry about the Kickstarter. It's a shame. Nonetheless, what you've done is already incredible, and I reckon it could easily become something really special given time. Who knows, maybe the time will be right later?

Anyway, I hope to see you persevere!

As a balance suggestion, the Lord of the Broken might be a bit overpowered at the moment because of the ability to turn an entire society broken upon conquest. If you simply don't build any dark buildings or cast any rituals, world evidence never goes up and you can simply invade each independent society until you've conquered enough of them to have 66% of the world population. At that point, you can just enshadow all of your enthralled lords and wait until you win the game. Maybe the Lord of the Broken should only make the highest-level lord of a conquered society broken, so there will be at least some resistance to your rule?

Loving the new updates, and I hate to be a downer but...yeah its gotta be asked.

Working on the assumption that the kickstarter isn't going to go through, do you intend to drop work on the game, and if not, what's the plan going forward?

Is there a way that I could make a donation for this game that isn't though Kickstarter? I've really enjoyed this game as it is and would love to pay it forward.

Thanks for your detailed responses - I backed your KS and best of luck with it! Here are a few more thoughts after some further gameplay:

Maybe you're right about enthralled action restrictions getting micromanage-y. But I agree it would add a lot to gameplay if NPCs can take independent actions and form committees etc. I wasn't aware there were some "hidden" character stats controlling rate of Shadow spread and Suspicion growth, etc. That's actually a cool feature, and it is good to add more variability between NPCs (with some being weak-willed and easy to enshadow, and others less so, etc).

Adding more Traits to NPCs will help a lot, and I hope you'll also consider giving them a few stats/skills similar to games like CK2 (Warfare, Stewardship, Diplomacy, Perception, Magic, etc). These could influence the results they gain from taking various actions and their susceptibility to certain dark powers, as well as influencing how they're respected by NPCs with various traits. This could also make entourage members a lot more interesting, if their stats can sometimes contribute to employer's stats and actions (a skilled Captain of the Guard protecting from assassination attempts, a devout Priest making hostile dark actions more difficult, etc etc).

It's also kind of neat that all these NPC stats aren't all visible from the start on everyone. Maybe visibility into stats/traits of local NPCs could gradually get unlocked with time as you gain more infiltration or visibility in the local area (e.g. from local Shadow spread and enthralled NPCs, Fish Man spies, or controlling nearby Eye-of-Sauron like buildings etc :)

I also like that you're planning to add more customization to the player "Shadow" character itself. Rather than having a few fixed archetypes like Undead or Trickster (which would be totally different from others but play the same each time you choose them), it could make sense to let the player have adjustable stats for various powers (like Solium Infernum let players buy or earn points in Wrath, Prophecy, Deceit, Diabolism and Destruction), and allocate points to these and other special powers (Trickster, Deathlord, etc) during game setup, similar to character customization in games like Master of Magic. I'm hoping a system like this could be easier to balance than making a few dramatically different archetypes with unexpected dramatic effects like in your Undeath post :D

It could be cool if controlling certain Buildings and special map tiles (representing mana nodes, dark towers, ancient tombs etc) and performing certain rituals (e.g. sacrificing population in controlled cities) could let you upgrade stats and unlock more powers and increase Dark Power generation, at the cost of attracting Suspicion. This would let your character start out weak and expand its range of dark powers as the world falls into shadow, while having to strike a balance between growing your power and not becoming too obvious >:D

Anyway, hope these suggestions are useful and that your KS goes well. If you hadn't heard of SI, the manual could be worth a read for inspiration:
http://simanual.s3.amazonaws.c...

First : Congrats for your recently launched kickstarter, wish you all the best.

I suggest to read "the wheel of time" by Robert Jordan / Brandon Sanderson for how to characterize an anti hero (lews therin, 13 forsaken, dark one).

The point is people always interest to play as an interesting "anti hero" rather than generic one.

Some general thoughts...

It's way too hard to eliminate members of an entourage who have come to dislike or suspect you; and this is a problem, because currently the only way to permanently get rid of evidence (and the easiest way to calm your population) is to dump it onto a member of your entourage who likes you and then make them a scapegoat.  Once you have an entourage member who knows you're dark, there doesn't seem to be any non-supernatural way to get rid of them.

Currently the only way to get rid of an entourage member who dislikes you is to kill them with dark powers, which is too expensive to contemplate most of the time and unrealistic.

There should probably be options to use conventional assassination (at no Power cost, but at the risk of creating evidence), plus the option to dismiss entourage members (at the risk of them sending messages to everyone with warnings and all the information they gathered, plus potentially raising the suspicion of other members of your entourage and even your peers depending on the situation.)  Having a Baron replace their Captain of the Guard shouldn't require some complicated frame-up or an invocation of dark powers.

Thanks for updating! FWIW I figured out my loading problem was due to Comodo antivirus tagging it as unrecognized and running it virtually.

Really liking the game so far and looking forward to your KS. Here are a few thoughts and comments:

1) Characters and actions
As others have mentioned, the current game often leads to spamming certain actions repetitively over a short period (eg "share ideas" to set someone up for promotion) often followed by long periods of doing nothing.

I'm thinking it might work best to move to a system where each character on the map can take one action per turn. Most of these actions would be standard administrative or diplomatic tasks that non-enthralled characters will regularly do based on their own agendas, like Train Troops, Build Fortifications, Cultivate Farms, Send Scout, Send Messenger, Suppress Revolt, Eradicate Worms, etc.

For non-enthralled characters, the action they choose to do each turn will be based on their beliefs, personality and skills plus a random component (e.g. a Militarist character could often choose to Recruit or Train Troops, a Xenophilic character could choose Organize Trade Caravan, a Pacifist character would more often do Diplomatic actions, etc).

For enthralled characters you can command them to take any action (including special Dark Actions and rituals etc) but doing something far out of the ordinary for them will build Evidence against them. Alternately you could let them Lay Low and continue normal actions to decrease Evidence slightly. For non-enthralled characers, you can choose to spend dark power to change what a character would do (e.g. one potential strategy would be to interfere with beneficial NPCs at a crucial time, like preventing a skilled General from raising troops effectively through a sudden bout of lethargy or madness :)

Anyway, that's a thought for how to make actions a little more natural and interesting, and avoid repeated spamming of actions within a single turn. As the game develops you could also add lots more interesting actions for characters to do and for the player to interfere with (e.g. crafting magical artifacts, adventuring to explore hidden dungeons, etc etc)

2) Characters, stats and traits

The fact that most actions and attitudes are based on the Militarism/Xenophilia/Monarchy sliders seems to make the characters a little 1-dimensional. (ok, 3-dimensional.. ;) As a result, it can get repetitive if your basic goal is just to manuever M/X/M sliders into the right combo.

It's always a treat when someone with one or more of the personality traits shows up, even if they are currently pretty standard like "Charismatic". As development continues, I hope you'll continue to add lots more interesting traits similar to games like Crusader Kings 2 to make characters more nuanced (could be things like Pious, Dogmatic, Chaste, Ascetic, Lustful, Wrathful, Temperate, Drunkard, Decadent, Sadistic, etc etc). Characters personal likes/dislikes and their actions can be modified by their traits, making manipulation less of a "cookie cutter" approach and leading to lots of interesting potential..

Also, it could make sense to give each character some stat or skill sliders in addition to their 3 attitudes (e.g. Martial, Diplomatic, Administrative, and Arcane skills could influence what type of actions characters tend to focus on and give them an appropriate bonus to the result.)

Your dark powers could bless or curse important stats, and voluntarily or involuntarily cause enthralled to gain certain warped traits or mutations, opening up all kinds of evil possibilities.. >:D

3) Tooltips and UI

Though I'd assume everything's currently based on their MXM sliders, I often can't tell why lords vote or like/dislike things the way they do (e.g. in voting for offensive focus, wasn't sure what to do to convince more lords to target a certain country). It would be great to have a tooltip textbox appear when hovering over their portrait (like in Crusader Kings 2), which lists the factors contributing to their attitude/vote. Even better, you could display voter portraits along a line from "Strongly Opposed" to "Strongly Favor" and let players use tooltips to find out more.

For voting, it's cool to get the option to interfere with votes, but once you have several enthralled this often leads to repeated messages nearly every turn about votes that don't matter much (e.g. an "open gates" vote which repeatedly fails due to lack of support); these messages can be hard to dismiss and can get annoying. IDK what the best solution is, but maybe let certain votes happen less frequently or make the notifications less obtrusive?

Anyway, sorry for the long message but I'm excited about the game; good luck with continued development and keep on truckin!

It's cool that you're listening to suggestions this early in the game's development :D

Here's some ideas to take into consideration, possibly for that Jester player character you mentioned.

Shift ideology: A ritual (or card) that relies on randomisation. The ritual targets an entire society and (to a certain degree) randomizes the ideologies of its pawns. The cost would increase for larger societies, either leading to a destabilized kingdom ripe for the civil war treatment, or you could leave the society's bonds stronger than when you started.

Peace bonds: More on the political side, if the darkness takes interest in stopping a kingdom from assimilating another, it can orchestrate a peace agreement between the two societies. It would simply be decided by voting, if both societies are made to have a majority vote in favour, neither society can attack the other for a number of turns. Pacifists support, militarists oppose.

Plague warding: Occasionally a seemingly well placed plague of discord can unintentionally spread towards cities that the darkness would prefer to go uninfected. The plague totem would be given a world power that protects a selected city from plague for a number of turns. Of course, there's a chance others in the society will notice the city's uncanny immunity, and possibly begin investigation.

Cleansing light: Armies from cities that are part of a kingdom of light are taught a small amount in the lightbringer's ways, giving them a noticeable advantage against human armies that are enshadowed. 

Crushing darkness: Similarly, if a kingdom of darkness has been established, armies under enthralled lords take a piece of the shadow's will into battle, evening the playing field against lightbringer armies, and giving them an advantage against regular humans.

Both of these buffs can be improved by buildings exclusive to lightbringer/enthralled towns, an increase in power for either side is declared in an event.

Poison Soul: Essentially a slower version of assassinate, the darkness slowly nibbles at its target, instead of outright devouring them. This can be made to look like a death by regular human espionage and costs slightly less power. This means that less evidence will be created and less courtiers will become suspicious, but removing the pawn takes an unpredictable amount of time, and is by no means swift.

Influence stars: The shadow can only operate for such a short time due to the position of the stars (If I remember that right), but creating an astrology based building can change its time, in both directions. It would have access to two rituals, one which would increase how many turns the game lasts, and another to reduce the amount. The ritual that adds turns would debuff the shadow in some way, while the one that shortens its precious time would give it some kind of advantage.

Cultists: An enthralled character could be ordered to form a cult. This cult could then be sent to a city that is not under the control of the shadow. Depending on which type of cult was selected, the city would be debuffed in some way (weaker armies, poorer relations with other pawns etc). Cults would generate evidence in the city they occupy, and can be discovered by investigators sent by other lords. This suspicion could also be used to turn members of a society against a specific pawn by ensuring that the investigator does not return with news as normal. If the cult is uncovered and a lord receives knowledge of them, it is traced back to the enthralled lord that founded it and gives them a large amount of evidence, as well as making both the investigator and the lord of the cultist afflicted city aware of the darkness.

Torment: If orchestrating a society to disagree with a ruler's views is the scalpel, Torment would be the mallet. An expensive ability that can be used on a lord to confer the "tormented" trait, lowering his general likeability the same way "hideous" does. The Torment of mortal minds is a common tool of the darkness, causing worldwide evidence to increase at a steady rate for each turn the tormented pawn is alive as memory of its use is sparked.

I realize this is just a sea of half baked ideas and I don't know much about game balancing, but maybe there's something usable here.

Looks cool and promising. The core idea is pretty solid :) You should definitely try a Kickstarter! You got solid gameplay and a plan for expanding upon it.

A few minor things: I had a lot of rebelling people, and not a lot of ways to deal with it except for expending power to shush 'm. I'd like some more political actions to deal with unrest, e.g. vote on using military power to stop it or a vote of no confidence to oust a (higher ranking) noble to stop unrest.

Do we have an ETA on the Kickstarter? I understand if you don't wanna rush into things, but I had thought it was supposed to start by now.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but couldn't find exact details anywhere. Do the enthralled types currently change anything besides what it says on the tin? From where I see it, there's no reason to pick a dark one over a lord of the broken. Or anything over a lotb really, since they produce no evidence at all without player action.

This is a fun game, lots of good ideas in it. So far, though, the core gameplay needs some help.

Sharing ideas a lot is spam of a single repeated power, and that's bad. This could be addressed by making it something with greater effect, but greater cost and/or time requirement; that'd remove some tedium. I also found myself with my Rise plummeting (and someone else's increasing) for reasons that weren't clear to me.

The heavy-handed ability to enthrall someone seems a bit too direct. I reckon that it would be better to have a kind of little mini-game to nab them, and it might be a good idea to make a persistent cost to keep someone directly enthralled.

This might be planned, but it seems like once the game is further along it would make sense to have a character creation bit at start, letting you pick which buildings and capabilities you get, somewhat altering the details of your goals, and giving you different numbers. In this way you might get a different power per turn (this could also be boosted by shadow, or other factors, as options purchased in character creation) which would allow you to give major things in the world (such as enthrallment) a power upkeep rate.

Buildings, I reckon, need a bit of reconceptualization. Rather than having lots of different buildings, each in only one form, it would make sense to have one or a couple buildings but to keep adding on upgrades, making (for example) a mist that is truly abominable in all ways.

I couldn't figure out how to use the military, so no feedback there other than maybe explain it better.

Thanks for updating :) When I start the latest build, a "Development Console" window at the bottom left says the following two times in red:

<RI> Failed to register devices:
The operation completed successfully.

Then none of the buttons will respond. Any idea what's wrong?

Could you record a video and explain this game a little bit?

Also, I had one other question: one of the coolest purported features of That Which Sleeps was the ability to play as different kinds of cosmic evil - a planetary parasite that controls the minds of men, a trapped titan that can see the future, or an omnicidal deity whose shattered body forms the very planet. This kind of customization seemed cool, something akin to the different nations in Civ, with each giving a different way to play the game. I don't know how viable something like this would be to implement, but it'd seem cool. For instance, maybe one Ancient Evil has the power to create a unique kind of Thrall, with special abilities, or perhaps a certain other gets a new spell to call up a volcano or something. At the least, I reckon it's worth considering.

Hey man, this is a really interesting project, especially after the disappointment that followed on hearing about That Which Sleeps, then learning that it might never come out. I'll be interested to follow a cool game all the way from its earliest days. Wishing you the best for the possible Kickstarter, or just, well, further development.

Also, while patchnotes make it clear that you already know this, the A.I should probably have some way to counteract the Climate Change spells. Perhaps Lightbringers should be capable of casting climate restoration spells, at least in certain areas? I'm pretty sure that if I became aware that a dark power was constantly raising the global temperature, the first thing I'd do is find some kind of climate magic.

Hey, also created an account just to say really liked the initial demo and the potential it showed for a really interesting game. Occasionally I had a few problems with the UI and getting actions to work (not sure if it's my setup?) but got their eventually. Enjoyed the initial enthral, rebel and then generally cause chaos & upset and going to continue to play around with rituals.

What are your plans for the future with this? How do you see it developing?

Created an account just to comment. Pretty fun game! I realize it's not exactly meant to rival EU4 in complexity, but I could see this game getting there with a few thousand hours of dev work XD It has the potential, however far you want to take it. Anyway feedback:

Stalemate wars suck. There doesn't seem to be much you can do to influence them or stop them so once they're going you're stuck. There should be some way to stop a war after X turns, with whichever cities were conquered switching sides. If that means white peace so be it.

Endgame becomes a little trivial if you just wait, With 400 power, you can almost instantly enslave mid sized countries of 4-5 cities. Because dark forces are so powerful after weakning the world via famine, this allowed me to win a game after my initial dark uprising got crushed (I did all that waiting because my initial little shadowed empire wasn't doing so hot). Either limiting how quickly you can thrall/shadow/enslave, or some kind of cap on power (50 maybe?) would take a step to making this less trivial.

Edit: I've actually thought of a potential solution: Thralled characters that are then part of an enslaved city count permanently towards your thrall limit. That way you can't just keep spamming new dark towers once your original ones fall without increasingly higher costs.

1) Can I scale global map? If not, that's pretty bad.

2) Esc may be pretty great for exiting Society view. And there are no reason for main menu button, preferably use Esc for that.

3) There are no charts about cities, armies etc. That would be pretty great.

And except for that 3 things - that pretty interesting game, I really enjoyed it. Thanks.