Socio-Environmental Contexts and Competing Investors

I had a small breakthrough last week in which a couple of new social contexts (now more aptly named "Socio-Enviromental Contexts" within the game) led to a bunch of more broad changes with interesting uses beyond their initial reach

For starters, there is now an overall Monster Strength value in each cycle, shown in the "Colony" screen, that will make all monster units stronger or weaker as a whole depending not only on a number of new contexts but other factors like technological spread, societal development and good old feyfolk involvement. The larger the value the more incentives influenced players will have to use them, while the wise stalwart player will have more reasons to bind feyfolk that weaken them or fight the superstitions surrounding and strengthening such creatures rather than risk direct confrontation.

Investments, which I assume most players have been ignoring in favour of trading and banking until now, also received some long overdue attention as well. They will be slightly more profitable as a whole, especially when they involve novel ideas, but on the other hand, other investors will seek these opportunities and gradually steal them from the player over time. This is a double-edged sword that will allow you to passively gather more information about what kind of investments work and which ones do not, but will take away the best opportunities. All this information will be automatically logged in the correspondent investment menu under "Correspondence" for your evaluation and convenience.

Along with these changes, we'll get 1 new fey power, 2 new passive fey effects, and 11 new contexts, most of them revolving around these new mechanics and a few other smaller things.  And since this increases the total amount of existing contexts to 77, I went ahead an allowed the game to have up to 5 simultaneous contexts instead of 4 per cycle, because I really like the way in which they make us adapt our play styles with the passing of the ages.

Meanwhile, 6 more renascents had their new phase/mood developed, which puts us at 13 out of 32. I'm going to try to focus on this now and will probably call it a release once the remaining ones are done either the following month or the one after that.