Enemy Emplacements

Enemy units and enemy lobbies will now try to set up emplacements from which to extract a terrain's resources to pursue their goals and annoy you.

Each territory will show in the "Interests" screen whether if there is reason to suspect of an enemy emplacement on a territory and, if located, what that emplacement is and what it does.

Provided the enemy has enough funds, you'll occasionally get a sneaky little message reporting suspicious enemy activity around a certain territory. At that point, you should send a unit with high mobility to "Search for enemy emplacements" in the territory, which is a new action apart from sending expeditions and envoys that will also carry confrontation risks in enemy territories, but not in friendly ones. Each emplacement has a different concealment value, and units with low mobility might fail to detect them and wrongly report that there is nothing suspicious there.

Here's where things get tricky. Not all enemy activity reports are true, so it will be ultimately your choice to decide if further searches are necessary or not. At that point you'll have to take into account rapid growths of enemy wealth and irregularities in that terrain's finances in order to find out those hidden emplacements.

Each emplacement will have a different effect, ranging from financing the enemy to increasing local tension, converting population or slowly increasing the power of an enemy unit or lobby. During the process, they will consume the terrain's reserves, if any, but now these reserves will naturally fluctuate slightly as well, so it won't be that easy to find the emplacements. Something like one of the pompous embassies of Alchrousse, for example, would increase local tension but will be easy to spot. A nest of kitten spiders, on the other hand would continue to strengthen the swarm while remaining nearly impossible to locate.

Once you find an emplacement, if it is located in a friendly territory, you'll be able to simply dismantle it. If, on the other hand, they are located in an enemy territory, you'll have to fend the defending unit away and choose to raze the emplacement in question.

On the plus side, most emplacements will give you a bonus of some sort when razed or dismantled, be that Arkhe, Merits or a decrease in local tension.

The enemy cannot create emplacements in territories under your control, so in order to prevent this, governor players will now be able to control more territories before the local tension increases out of control. In fact, in the next version, they should strive to do this, as controlling every territory in play will grant them an additional 0.5 Merits per turn to better represent the capacity of an all-controlling player to achieve victory by becoming emperor/empress.

The effects of emplacements while playing on the level of merchant venturers, adventurers and outcasts will be lesser than when being a governor. Additionally, Anomalies are also now more likely to happen if you have a fortress/dungeon since they are often caused by enemy aristocrats after all.