I'm currently in a contraction phase, brought about by seeing trends during playtesting. I've thought of a number of areas which could be streamlined without losing much, if anything, in terms of strategy or interesting choices.
- Trade Missions / Trade Tracking
- Setting up particular trades (X ore for Y timber, etc) and then tracking them is pretty fiddly and not all that interesting
- Instead, Trade Missions (which may need to be renamed Gain Support or something like that) should just increase disposition with the target faction
- Each season, trade is optionally done with factions based on what their disposition to the Stronghold is
- This is a little more fiddly than what I currently have, since the Stronghold players have to decide if they want to trade. Usually the answer will be yes, so hopefully it's not that fiddly
- Because of this, only the disposition with the factions would need to be tracked, not specific trades
- It also makes the Gain Support (previously Trade) missions make more sense. All the fiddliness of setting up a trade, and determining difficulty is gone. It also will make more narrative sense, putting the focus squarely on gaining support for the Stronghold, with most of the issues revolving around the conflict between the Autarch and the Stronghold
- Factions and Developments
- I constructed most of the factions similarly to the Stronghold, with regions, developments, units, stability, population, etc
- I don't think the factions really need development listings
- Instead, they should just have stats based on how difficulty various types of conflicts are
- Ex. Skirmish 4, Infiltration 3, Warfare 6, Diplomacy 5
- Infiltration Missions
- There are three infiltration missions: Espionage, Sabotage, and Assassination
- Each of these mission types has various options for them
- Many of these options relate to the developments each faction has
- These should probably be streamlined, to focus their intention
- Sabotage: Lower the target faction's stability (that's it)
- Espionage: Make it easier to build a development (each one of the five factions will have one of the five tech trees they're good at)
- Assassination: Kill a leader (that includes the Autarch)
- All of the other various options are scrapped (and worse, the need to not only know what mission type to do, but figure out if faction X has development Y)
- Assassination missions aren't all the useful right now, so the leaders for each faction need to have decent role in what makes the faction good at tasks - killing a leader nerfs the faction's effectiveness
- Resources
- At some point, I need to go through the neutral regions that can be found with exploration, and really make them specialized (as in, good at providing a particular type of resource)
- Right now, many of them are sort of a mush
- I also need to go through, and make sure all the resource numbers are as low as possible
- Some resource amounts were sort of arbitrarily inflated (like timber) in order to create various trade charts. Not sure what I was thinking there - but all the numbers should really be as low as possible to keep the math simpler and make it easier to form strategies
