Trader Aristocrats, Goodwill and Exploration Rewards

The next version of Anamnesis will allow procedural aristocrats to engage in trade, opening a number of new options for business-oriented players. It will also make Local Tension slightly more manageable, and give players rewards for personally visiting all of the colony's territories at least once.

Those presently nebulous rival trader licenses will now be tied to individual aristocrats and you'll be notified if the aristocrat you just met happens to own a license and for what kind of goods. This information will be relevant to you is you're seeking to stablish a monopoly, as the license will expire if the aristocrat just so happens to have one of those of convenient but unfortunate accidents.

Even if you're not the kind to have acquaintances mysteriously suffer hunting accidents around you, knowing this information can still be useful as once you gain control of an aristocrat with a valid license you can either force them to relinquish the license, or use it for your advantage and start maritime trade ventures with it even if you don't personally own them, making for a nice backdoor to get into business without having to pay the outrageous costs of playing nice by the rules.

In this regard, trade has also been tweaked slightly, making monopolies more lucrative overall and drastically reducing the cost of vetting new licenses in markets you cornered from 5 Merits to 0.5.

There is now also a hidden "goodwill" variable in the game. It is essentially another aid for beginners, but it has found its way into some other systems. Basically it is a limited resource that dampens the effects of Local Tension increases. You get a moderate amount of it at the beginning of standard games to account for the judgement mistakes of new players, some of it at the beginning of advanced games and the beginning of each cycle, and smaller quantities from strategic advantages favourables to your faction and some other feyfolk effects.

Finally, and because I'm apparently feeling generous, you get yet another freebie in the form of a modest, once per cycle reward of 1 Merit and a slight reduction of Weariness and Local Tension once you have personally set foot in each of the colony's 16 territories to incentivize exploration. This comes along with a new social context for a grand race increasing that reward to 4 Merits and 1200 Arkhe if you can do this within the first 18 weeks of the cycle, which I've found to be find pretty fun because fleeing or being defeated on a fight while trying to visit a territory does not make said visit count.

Anamnesis 250217 Released

Previous savegames are not compatible.
 

I've made some beginner-friendly updates that seemed wise to put out there before engaging with more time-consuming content and features, so we get a new mid-sized release ahead of schedule.

Bugfix 1 Released on 25-02-28: Should fix a bug causing the purchase of a house not being properly registered after fleeing a territory and the game losing track of when to apply feyfolk stat buffs and debuffs along with some other minor reported stuff.

 

Change Log:

• Renascents will now engage in procedural romantic relationships with each other on their own with a number of gameplay implications, ranging from rejecting your wooing, trying to leave or bring their lovers to your homebase, and changes in their weariness and liking for you. You can see whether they currently have a partner in the "Forces" menu.
• Hanging around renascents with which you have a good enough relationship will let you know what kind of romantic relationship they are engaged in and allow you to break it.
• Certain conditions must be met for renascents to wander, hide or become stuck inside territories. They might sometimes free themselves or leave on their own. Occasionally new ones will also start wandering the colony over time so you won't be limited to rescuing or recruiting only the initial ones during each cycle.
• Renascents that dislike you enough might spontaneously leave your service and wander the colony.
• New pity timers to balance out bad luck and rng in some situations if the game detects you've been too unlucky. Certain new modifiers and feyfolk effects for curses and ill-fortune will potentiate, negate or even invert them.
• Added 16 new traits to the existing 14 in each territory and made player character peculiarities and lobby actions require 3 matches rather than 2 to increase consistency.
• Tweaked the character generator for players and procedural characters to make it more varied and slightly reduce the weight of cultural background when appropriate.
• New feyfolk content and tweaks, including 2 new powers, 3 passive effects, a retaliation and some flavour variations.
• 2 new player character drawbacks/strengths.
• Some more minor bug-fixes and typos.

Renascent Autonomy and Relationships

In the next version of the game, renascents will have more of a mind of their own, developing romantic relationships among them and generally being less reliable as mindless drones, especially if they don't like you.

At the beginning of each game, a number of renascents will get paired into romantic relationships semi-randomly according to their own tastes, promiscuity and some other hidden values. You will be able to see whether they are in a relationship and with whom in the "Forces" menu. These relationships will generally persist between cycles. They are subject to being broken or replaced with new ones, but as a general rule over time most renascents will end up paired, constraining our own choice of romantic partners and bonds. They will try to match your own character's sexuality preferences, but they'll take anything if there is not enough of one thing on the menu.

Most renascents involved in a relationship will reject your wooing and choose to remain loyal to their partners. There are exceptions, but these are generally the exceptions that now also have the capacity to leave you as soon as an upgrade comes around, so there is that to consider as well.

These relationships will also have an effect in the renascents' performance and reliability. Most relationships will be healthy and reciprocal, but some will be toxic and abusive. You won't normally be able to find out about this unless you have a new drawback/strength allowing you to do so, but there are telltale signs you might be able to pick up like a renascent's weariness increasing without explanation when their partner is also in your homebase while those in healthy relationships, including those with you from now on, will instead see their weariness drop. 

Renascents in a relationship will also naturally try to be together. Some will ask for their lover to join your homebase, in which case you'll get a free renascent, others will choose to leave said homebase to be reunited with their lover, in which case you'll lose a renascent. You can chose to refuse, but this will damage your relationship with both renascents unless this is an abusive relationship, in which case it will only be the domineering renascent that will be mad at you for not allowing their less enthusiastic partner to come back to them.

If you manage to earn enough trust from a renascent, when hanging around them, just like when you occasionally get to decrease or increase the availability of some of their actions, you can learn whether they consider their relationship healthy and use the trust they have in you to make them break it up. You can do this regardless of whether it is in their actual best interest or you just want said renascent for yourself, as dismissing or getting their lovers killed won't automatically break the relationship but instead anger them, and is more likely to simply result in the remaining lover leaving your homebase in turn.

The aforementioned changes of a renascent's actions will now also require a small amount of trust and respect from the renascent. You'll have to try harder to bond with a renascent that is already in a relationship as well, but bonded renascents with which you start a romantic relationship will no longer try to start relationships with others.

There is now also a small chance that renascents will either run away or get trapped in a territory on their own if they are left idle for long, especially if they don't like you and all they do is argue when you stay at home. In this case you'll have to rescue them once again from whatever territory they end up in if you want to recover them, though leaving them to clean their own messes is also a perfectly viable option. In this regard, there are some conditions renascents have to meet in order to become stuck in some territories, since it always felt weird to have someone like Rhodeghass having to work as a horse groom to pay off a debt and such.

It is my hope that this will not only make renascents feel more alive, but generate more interesting stories and also make bonds and relationships with them feel more precious.

Besides it is pretty fun to get pairings like Mealessea and King Handsome the Honest.

Anamnesis 241223 Released

 

Previous savegames are not compatible.
  

Bugfix 1 Released on 24-12-24: Fixes some drawbacks and strengths not adding Merits and Arkhe properly in the initial cycle and events for trapped player characters showing occasionally under wrong conditions at the start of new cycles. 

Bugfix 2 Released on 24-12-25: You will no longer be romantically pursued by your homebase's furniture, defences and boats.

Bugfix 3 Released on 24-12-30: Some more minor fixes and corrections, along with a bonus new drawback/strength.  

Bugfix 4 Released on 25-01-21: Fixed an issue preventing Mac users from saving the game. For compatibility reasons, new saves are now created on each user's "AppData/Roaming/RenPy" folder on Windows. Added 2 new units.

Bugfix 5 Released on 25-01-28: Fixed a couple of issues with captured units and related social contexts. Added a few more physical and feyfolk traits to the pool.

 Change Log:

• You can now start an advanced game with 3 optional drawbacks from an initial pool of 24 that can be turned into strengths spending Insights in between cycles. These work like Socio-Environmental Contexts but affect your character more directly, generally preventing you from doing something while granting a different benefit. Using an increasing amount of Insights these can be turned into permanent strengths, removing their negative effects.
• You will be able to switch sides between cycles under certain circumstances. For now by bonding with an enemy renascent, achieving 3 consecutive victories to have enemy renascents approach you to try to convert you, or through some of the new drawbacks.
  
• Potential lovers might now occasionally approach you without you having to woo them depending on a number of factors such as your status, contexts, your appearance and certain drawbacks and strengths.
  
• Lovers will feel neglected to different degrees depending on their personalities if they feel you don't interact with them often enough, displaying different emotions about it and reacting in varying more or less harmful ways if left ignored.
  
• Your character will require varying levels of Resistance, Intelligence or other stats to prevent some negative effects when in a relationship with certain lovers, ranging from a general lack of compatibility to outright abuse.
• Renascent lovers now have 24 pieces each of flavour text when wooing instead of 12 and mundane ones have 12 rather than 8. Generic lovers draw their new text from a common pool of so far 420 flavour texts matching their randomly selected physical traits and personality to make each one more unique.
• Renascents can now vie for your attention even if you're already in a relationship with another one.
  
• Different lovers are now more or less likely to want children than others and react differently to mismatched personalities.
  
• You can now leave every aspect of the character creation to fate to get a completely random character.
  
• You can commit up to 80 Arkhe to influence outcomes rather than 40. Bear in mind that the effectiveness increases linearly while the Arkhe cost increases exponentially, meaning it's generally inefficient to spend too much outside of vital moments. Certain drawbacks and strengths modify this.
  
• 3 new passive feyfolk effects and smaller assorted variations. Tweaked other effects to make them more interesting in combination with some of the new drawbacks and strengths.
  
• 6 new socio-environmental contexts.
• Probably left something out because I didn't feel like reporting or documenting most of the progress.
  
• Fixed bunch of reported and unreported bugs, typos and weird behaviours.

Enhanced Romancing and Related Perils

I couldn't help but notice that perhaps the majority of the people that found the game in itch.io did so through the romance tag, which might have been disappointing and justified some of the bouncing and negative ratings as it's remained a somewhat neglected and relatively secondary system compared to others, so in the next version of the game we'll have more complex romantic relationships to hopefully help generate more drama and interesting stories.

For starters, lovers will now occasionally come up to you when you are in their territories and try to initiate a relationship without you having to woo them first and a bunch of new flavour messages. This will be particularly interesting along with a new optional personal drawback making your character thirsty enough to automatically accept every relationship. Other things like the player character's status or contexts like those involving too few males or females within the colony will influence how likely your character is to be approached in this manner.

To different degrees, depending on each particular kind of lover, they will also start feeling neglected if you don't continue wooing them. They will start showing their discontent in different ways and eventually take action if they feel too ignored, with some leaving, some making a number and others being too spineless to do anything other than continue to whine meekly. Over time, as the relationship progresses their neediness will also decrease slightly, making most reasonable lovers fairly stable in the long run.

Since this will have you wooing lovers for a new reason other than Weariness reduction or baby-making, all generic lovers will have 12 rather than 8 flavour wooing events, with these new 4 being chosen at random from a pool of generic actions determined by their personalities and physical traits, making each one more unique and fun to explore. Renascents will instead have their 12 existing events doubled to 24 unique ones. Furthermore, renascents that fancy you will try to vie for your attention and make their disposition known to you when staying at home even if you are already in a romantic relationship with another. 

You will also get some new flavour text when existing lovers reject your wooing because you're being perceived as having the wrong kind of character. Furthermore, breaking up with a renascent will cause his or her opinion of you to decrease in accordance to how deep they considered the relationship to be, meaning that some will feel so betrayed as to never trust you again and most will require some work on your part and healing before they once again show themselves receptive to your wooing.

The possibility for a lover wanting to raise children will also be a little bit more specific to each one. Generally you will still be able to reproduce with most lovers, but some will tend to be more interested in the idea than others. Additionally, those lovers with which you chose raise children, as is often the case when you find yourself saddled with shrieking monkeys, will be a bit more patient towards romantic neglect.

Some people will just not be right for you though. Whereas up to now lovers had a random chance to do mean things outside your control, now you'll be able to counter some of those negative effects levelling up each lover's required stat. The lifestyles some would expect of you might require a certain level of Resistance or Mobility to prevent you from gaining Weariness or Local Tension, while others might outright take advantage of you or even become abusive if your Terror or Intelligence isn't high enough. You will be warned in advance about lovers that your character might suspect to try to do this and be informed of the stat you would need to increase to prevent this.

I'm making no guesses for a release date yet because of several new real life uncertainties and the fact that some of this kind of content is proving surprisingly tricky to come up with. I'm sure you can at least think of at least a couple of troublesome, not very romance-conductive renascents to write this sort of content for, but the challenge is where most of the fun is at anyway.

All in all, the release is going to take longer than the latest ones, but be closer to the older ones in terms of new content and mechanics.

Drawbacks, Turncoats and Fate

In the next version of Anamnesis we'll be able to give our character a number of personal drawbacks that can be turned into strengths, switch allegiance mid-game, and generate player characters entirely at random.

Player character drawbacks will be entirely optional and only available if you chose to play advanced mode. You'll be offered 3 at random and be able to re-roll them all or individually as many times as you want just like the starting contexts. They will work in a similar manner, but modifying your character rather than the world as a whole, generally giving your character a strongly negative handicap along with a positive advantage. In between cycles, you'll be able to turn any drawback into a strength, removing the negative trait while keeping the positive one or getting a new positive effect if it previously had none. This will cost 1 Insight tu turn around the first drawback, 2 for the next one and so on.

At the time of writing there are only 14 of these personal contexts, so more variety will be needed before the release. For example, the mysterious benefactor social context was turned into a personal one (and made harsher), allowing you to spend Insight to remove the Local Tension increase each 100 weeks while still getting the Arkhe reward at the end of said period. Others will have your character being a pacifist, granting you Merits but barring you from using unprovoked violence, add a time limit for each cycle by giving you a fading body, or making you an imperfect renascent so that any death in combat finishes the current cycle. Some others get us significantly closer to that long term goal of having a monster game mode for non-human player characters.

Others yet proved to work better as regular socio-environmental contexts, so the game also has 4 more of those for now.

Other than that, following a suggestion in the Discord server, I also decided to allow players to switch between The Court and The Influence between cycles, which I admittedly haven't even thought about until now. This can be done in a few ways. When you have 3 consecutive victories, a random enemy renascent will approach you to try to convince you to switch and join them with arguments of varying validity. When you befriend and bond a captured enemy renascent, you'll also be able to use this to earn the other side's trust and switch at any time. Some of those new personal contexts also allow this.

Lastly, every character generation option can now also be chosen for you at random and left to fate if you feel like it, in case that needed any further clarification.