Attrition and Pacification

So far, as players, we've always found ourselves on the losing side when it came to wars of attrition, but in the next version of Anamnesis we might even be able to use them to our advantage.

Following some feedback on the Discord channel, which is still right there at the top menu next to the development goals in case you haven't noticed yet, I decided to make the movement of enemies have an economic cost for them.

This will have a number of interesting and emerging consequences, since as the opposition is driven into debt, it will be less able to actually attack even when the Local Tension is off the roof, allowing players to safely ignore opportunistic aristocrats and idle threats. But of course, we'll have to plan for it in advance most of the times.

Checking the "Enemy Wealth" value on the "Colony" screen will become more important. The frequency of their attacks will start to go down as soon as it shows a negative value. Th opposition will have some fixed costs for now, they'll continue to benefit or suffer from the consequences of a positive or negative overall economy, but to their usual ways of financing they'll also add a steady income from enemy lobbies, which will each provide a small weekly sum relative to their current power value.

This will generally give them plenty of profit unless we come around to turn the tables. Players can both reduce the power of enemy lobbies to choke their finances, or they can take the more direct approach of charging "tolls" to enemy units and seizing their cargoes when these units have Ferrying (FE) capacity. You can already do this in the current version of the game, but it's kind of unbalanced and you can't possibly get an enemy to have negative wealth right now.

Finally, we'll actually have the possibility of bleeding the enemy dry by deliberately provoking their attacks against impenetrable fortresses a la Verdun and strategically chosen locations. The higher the Size (SZ) value of the units, the higher the cost will be for the enemy to move them, with extra costs for enemy landlocked units attacking across bodies of water as well as any unit attacking from overseas, adding a new reason to fully control the colony. To better adjust these costs, the cosmic horrors, big guns and armies will also have their SZ value increased from 9 to 12.

The most exciting part is that this will actually allow us to turn the colony into a pacified empire with some careful planning, but still quite a bit of effort nonetheless. There might be more to do with this in the future, possibly involving fleshing out our nemeses and giving them some decision-making powers with their wealth, but for now there is a lot of balancing to be done first.


As an aside, I also decided to walk an extra mile with the new renascent behaviour and add some paragraphs of flavour text when they go in and out of their new moods and phases, just because it'll be fun to come up with them.