Anamnesis 240429 Released

Previous savegames are not compatible.
 

If you squint your eyes hard enough, this almost passes as a medium-sized release by good old day standards. Not a whole lot of new written content, but it adds a few new mechanics to make cycles more varied and mechanically different.

Change Log:

• Each of the 32 renascents now has a new phase/mood for a total of 8.
• Each cycle can now have up to 5 simultaneous Socio-Environmental Contexts (previously less correctly named Social Contexts) rather than 4.
• Added a new Monster Strength value, displayed in the "Colony" information screen, determining how much stronger or weaker Monster units will be in the present cycle. Low technology diffusion, societal development and certain feyfolk and contexts will make them more powerful and viceversa, making the strongest ones nearly unbeatable during ages of magic, ignorance and superstition, but more manageable in enlightened cycles.
• Investments are more profitable, especially in novel ideas. These will get exhausted as the cycle progresses with other competing investors also seeking them out now, simultaneously weeding out over time the worst ideas for prudent investors.
  
• The Experience (EX) value of the player character and other renascents now decreases very slightly with each cycle while monster and mundane units will continue to see theirs reset.
• Generated aristocrats from any given territory can now sometimes be of different types to increase variety within the same cycle. As a whole, they are also slightly less likely to try to sabotage and spy on you.
  
• Inviting aristocrats to your homebase is now free and gaining control over an opportunist that had control over you in turn will allow you to break relationships with them for free.
  
• Fighting cautiously and resting at home very slightly decreases Local Tension now.
  
• New fey content, including a new fey power, 2 new passive fey effects and smaller assorted variations.
• 13 new socio-environmental contexts.
  
• The usual balancing and bugfixing, most notably removing the ability the consume any captured unit freely, which was supposed to be an uncommon fey power.

Socio-Environmental Contexts and Competing Investors

I had a small breakthrough last week in which a couple of new social contexts (now more aptly named "Socio-Enviromental Contexts" within the game) led to a bunch of more broad changes with interesting uses beyond their initial reach

For starters, there is now an overall Monster Strength value in each cycle, shown in the "Colony" screen, that will make all monster units stronger or weaker as a whole depending not only on a number of new contexts but other factors like technological spread, societal development and good old feyfolk involvement. The larger the value the more incentives influenced players will have to use them, while the wise stalwart player will have more reasons to bind feyfolk that weaken them or fight the superstitions surrounding and strengthening such creatures rather than risk direct confrontation.

Investments, which I assume most players have been ignoring in favour of trading and banking until now, also received some long overdue attention as well. They will be slightly more profitable as a whole, especially when they involve novel ideas, but on the other hand, other investors will seek these opportunities and gradually steal them from the player over time. This is a double-edged sword that will allow you to passively gather more information about what kind of investments work and which ones do not, but will take away the best opportunities. All this information will be automatically logged in the correspondent investment menu under "Correspondence" for your evaluation and convenience.

Along with these changes, we'll get 1 new fey power, 2 new passive fey effects, and 11 new contexts, most of them revolving around these new mechanics and a few other smaller things.  And since this increases the total amount of existing contexts to 77, I went ahead an allowed the game to have up to 5 simultaneous contexts instead of 4 per cycle, because I really like the way in which they make us adapt our play styles with the passing of the ages.

Meanwhile, 6 more renascents had their new phase/mood developed, which puts us at 13 out of 32. I'm going to try to focus on this now and will probably call it a release once the remaining ones are done either the following month or the one after that.

Stuff Being Slowly Worked On

Here's the result of tinkering and toying with ultimately discarded ideas during the last month.

Renascent characters, including the player, will be subject to a very slight loss of experience level after each cycle to represent the world changing around them. They will still have it better in the long run than mundane units and monsters, which see their level reset after each cycle, but a character that has not been around for literally ages should now notice a significant decrease in skill unless they were never around and had 0 experience to begin with.

Player character peculiarities can now also store some more information including non-zero starting values. This will enable more varied types in the future, but so far it only impacts the one for biting your own fingernails, allowing these characters to actually start with nails to bite.

Other than that I've fleshed out the new phase/mood for 7 of the 32 renascent and added 2 new social contexts.

The next couple of weeks at least are going to remain busy with paperwork and regular work, but there is a good chance I'll have some more free time to invest in the game afterwards and be able to give you more exciting news than these.

I might even resume updating the "Working on" list afterwards so you can once again enjoy the thrills of watching arbitrary numbers go up.

Anamnesis 240109 Released

 

Previous savegames are not compatible.
 

2023 has been an awful year for Anamnesis and me, so I decided to start the new year turning page and making a release out of the meagre progress I was able to get done during the last few months.

Change Log:

• Non-bonded renascents will slightly change their behaviours and available actions with each cycle.
• Hanging around with renascents now has a change to give the player the opportunity to make certain actions of theirs more or less available in exchange for a slight, non-permanent cost in the renascent's opinion on them.
• Each of the 32 renascents has a new action when staying at home.
  
• Players can now terminate any romance without a reason in the "Other actions" menu when they are in the lover's territory, or homebase in the case of renascents.
• 2 new units.
• Some balancing and bug fixing, mostly involving oddities about wars in the mainland and their effects on the colony.

Convenient Break Ups and Hanging Around

In the next version of Anamnesis, you will be able to break up with lovers almost whenever you want and the personalities of renascents will both evolve somewhat over cycles and be more malleable by player actions.

 

A new option has been added to "Other actions" when you rest at home or visit territories if you have a lover in them that will allow you to break the relationship even if they haven't given you a reason to do so.

This will still cause a Local Tension increase proportionately to how deep the lover perceived the relationship and the time spent together, but I can still see a lot of people finding this useful seeing how this true love thing generally only lasts until an upgrade comes around.

 

The second, bigger change is that now renascents not only have one new common homebase action each, but will be more likely to display some of those actions than others even outside moods and phases. Which of these common actions are favoured or ignored will change with each cycle unless the renascent is bonded with you.

This will make their behaviours more consistent while also allowing them to evolve over time. At the same time, it also allows players to shape them into whatever versions they are more comfortable with at a slight cost in how much the renascent likes the player, which can of course be reverted doing actions said renascent likes and appreciates.

The manner in which this will happen is through the "Hang around" actions, thus finally giving them a purpose. Choosing this option will sometimes give the player the chance to make a random common action of the renascent more or less likely to show up, representing the patterns and quirks you might learn from the character.

If for example you're mainly interested in a character as a romantic partner, you can make wooing more common and show yourself more inclined to accommodate and pamper them. If the renascent is nothing more than a convenient workhorse for you on the other hand, you can just make actions having them work, mediate for you or write propaganda in your name more common and everything else rarer.

 

The framework is also in place for a new phase for every renascent, but fleshing all 32 out will take some weeks at the current rate, and since it's been a while since the last release I'm considering whether to just add some other token content and make a release of it now or wait until these phases are done.

I also haven't made a choice yet as to whether to continue updating the "Working on..." list once again. It was useful to pressure myself and set goals back when I had more time, but it's enervating not to be able to update it for days or even weeks at a time because of events mostly outside my control, thus becoming something of a source of unease and somewhat counterproductive.

It's a little infuriating to have so many ideas and so little time to implement them, but that's where we are for the time being.

Further Summarized Unfunny Jokes

I'll spare you most of the melodrama this time and simply let you know that one of my brothers also died shortly after the game's last release.

This left the family house in which I've lived up until just over a year ago empty in what has been allowed to become just a step short of a slum over time, so I spent several days fishing for important documents and generally undoing decades of life before some squatters inevitably claim the building as their own.

I spent a bunch of weeks with a bit of a broken brain that refused and still resits to do anything productive or even interact or communicate with my fellow humans, so I grabbed all of my remaining paid free days of the year not only for getting as much of the paperwork out of the way, but also taking a direly needed break from everything and everyone and just shut in for a while.

This seems to have done me good and this dumb old thing inside my skull appears to be starting to work more or less as intended, allowing me to become a relatively socially functional human being once again, which is just as well because now I'm all out of safety nets if I were to lose my job.

More importantly for you, I've also tentatively resumed Anamnesis development during the last few days despite my neglect to reflect this on the poor old "Working on..." list, so with this out of the way the next post will probably finally involve Anamnesis development once again.

Unless the family curse continues to run its course that is.