Player Information and Enemy Misinformation

People keep dying horribly and repeatedly to Local Tension spirals, so I went ahead and gave you two new tools for the next version to deal with them.

The first and most powerful is an existing one that I get the feeling not many people knew about. Punishing the population, available after sending a more or less victorious expedition into an enemy territory, was if I remember correctly one of the original uses for Terror values in units.

The idea was that they would lower Local Tension by slightly under half that unit's Terror value, but if this resulted in negative Tension, it would instead increase Tension by the same amount. This was intended as a way to take the war into the enemy territory, serving to cool them off when they get too trigger happy, but causing the opposite effect if the action proves disproportionate or feels unprovoked.

To better convey this idea, the game will now calculate in advance and inform the player whether the action will be considered retaliation and lower Tension or an unprovoked crime and instead increase it. The number of casualties this will cause will also be more strongly tied to the punishing unit's Terror value, because after all we have feyfolk now, and in case you didn't know, some of them give us neat things in exchange for sacrifices.


The second tool is a spy related one. Whereas up until now you were unable to be fully certain whether an aristocrat was spying on you or not, enough investigations will allow you in the following version to obtain irrefutable proof that an aristocrat is a spy, at which point you'll be able to feed them misinformation, significantly lowering Local Tension, even beyond 0, and at the same time allowing you to get rid of the spy without the usual Tension penalties of breaking contact with them the traditional way.


As for the other ongoing thing, today I also finished the moods of the 10th renascent out of 28, and I must say that it feels like I'm making no progress at all and the goal seems just as distant as it looked months ago. Each renascent is taking about a week so there is still a long road ahead, but that's assuming no setbacks whatsoever in the following months. We all know that would be kind of lucky considering the circumstances, so still no estimates for a release date, but I chose to remain optimistic.