Captive Renascent Interactions, Unit Events, Strategic Advantage

Now let's see...
 
In the next release you'll be able to interact once again with enemy captured renascents under the "Stay Home" option.

For now, there will be two basic actions, Approach and Befriend. Approaching a captured renascent will give you a flavour line, similar to the actual "Hang around with" option, while Befriend will attempt to normalize the renascent. Once a renascent character is befriended, he or she will be available to hang around, woo or perform any specific action under Stay Home. They will at least for now still not fight for your cause however.

You could actually interact with captive renascents back in the day, but only because interactions were much simpler back then.

That's change #1, change #2 will involve unit orders.

In the Forces menu, under Actions, apart from the Discard option, in the next release you'll see a Change Orders option. This option will allow you to switch between "Standing by", "Under training" or "Acting at discretion".

Standing by, the order by default, will allow the unit to recover Weariness faster. Under training, the unit will not recover Weariness, but will increase EX each week. Finally, Acting at discretion will recover Weariness in a smaller degree than Standing by, but grant the unit a certain degree of freedom to perform actions as it sees fit.

This brings me to change #3, which involves events for units and their aptitudes.

Units Acting at discretion will at times generate events with small repercussions that will usually tend to be good for you. There will also, however, be those of active hostile enemy units that will most often harm your cause. Capturing these units or reaching a truce will them will stop their undermining as well as their conventional attacks.

The events, shown as reports, will vary but will tend to fall into each unit's general aptitude. For now, there will be 3 aptitudes, Gather Arkhe, Sway Population and Obtain Strategic Advantage. Some units will gather Arkhe by stealing it, others by hard work, others will sway population by genocide, others will do so through propaganda, etc.

Then there is change #4, which is the introduction of Strategic Advantage.

Units with an aptitude for obtaining it, be that enemies or allies, will from time to time sway the advantage in their favour, affecting all units' combat stats significantly.

All of this should allow for a more indirect approach towards conflicts and more unfavourable circumstances for warfare without frustrating the player too much, or so I assume.