Trader Aristocrats, Goodwill and Exploration Rewards

The next version of Anamnesis will allow procedural aristocrats to engage in trade, opening a number of new options for business-oriented players. It will also make Local Tension slightly more manageable, and give players rewards for personally visiting all of the colony's territories at least once.

Those presently nebulous rival trader licenses will now be tied to individual aristocrats and you'll be notified if the aristocrat you just met happens to own a license and for what kind of goods. This information will be relevant to you is you're seeking to stablish a monopoly, as the license will expire if the aristocrat just so happens to have one of those of convenient but unfortunate accidents.

Even if you're not the kind to have acquaintances mysteriously suffer hunting accidents around you, knowing this information can still be useful as once you gain control of an aristocrat with a valid license you can either force them to relinquish the license, or use it for your advantage and start maritime trade ventures with it even if you don't personally own them, making for a nice backdoor to get into business without having to pay the outrageous costs of playing nice by the rules.

In this regard, trade has also been tweaked slightly, making monopolies more lucrative overall and drastically reducing the cost of vetting new licenses in markets you cornered from 5 Merits to 0.5.

There is now also a hidden "goodwill" variable in the game. It is essentially another aid for beginners, but it has found its way into some other systems. Basically it is a limited resource that dampens the effects of Local Tension increases. You get a moderate amount of it at the beginning of standard games to account for the judgement mistakes of new players, some of it at the beginning of advanced games and the beginning of each cycle, and smaller quantities from strategic advantages favourables to your faction and some other feyfolk effects.

Finally, and because I'm apparently feeling generous, you get yet another freebie in the form of a modest, once per cycle reward of 1 Merit and a slight reduction of Weariness and Local Tension once you have personally set foot in each of the colony's 16 territories to incentivize exploration. This comes along with a new social context for a grand race increasing that reward to 4 Merits and 1200 Arkhe if you can do this within the first 18 weeks of the cycle, which I've found to be find pretty fun because fleeing or being defeated on a fight while trying to visit a territory does not make said visit count.

Renascent Autonomy and Relationships

In the next version of the game, renascents will have more of a mind of their own, developing romantic relationships among them and generally being less reliable as mindless drones, especially if they don't like you.

At the beginning of each game, a number of renascents will get paired into romantic relationships semi-randomly according to their own tastes, promiscuity and some other hidden values. You will be able to see whether they are in a relationship and with whom in the "Forces" menu. These relationships will generally persist between cycles. They are subject to being broken or replaced with new ones, but as a general rule over time most renascents will end up paired, constraining our own choice of romantic partners and bonds. They will try to match your own character's sexuality preferences, but they'll take anything if there is not enough of one thing on the menu.

Most renascents involved in a relationship will reject your wooing and choose to remain loyal to their partners. There are exceptions, but these are generally the exceptions that now also have the capacity to leave you as soon as an upgrade comes around, so there is that to consider as well.

These relationships will also have an effect in the renascents' performance and reliability. Most relationships will be healthy and reciprocal, but some will be toxic and abusive. You won't normally be able to find out about this unless you have a new drawback/strength allowing you to do so, but there are telltale signs you might be able to pick up like a renascent's weariness increasing without explanation when their partner is also in your homebase while those in healthy relationships, including those with you from now on, will instead see their weariness drop. 

Renascents in a relationship will also naturally try to be together. Some will ask for their lover to join your homebase, in which case you'll get a free renascent, others will choose to leave said homebase to be reunited with their lover, in which case you'll lose a renascent. You can chose to refuse, but this will damage your relationship with both renascents unless this is an abusive relationship, in which case it will only be the domineering renascent that will be mad at you for not allowing their less enthusiastic partner to come back to them.

If you manage to earn enough trust from a renascent, when hanging around them, just like when you occasionally get to decrease or increase the availability of some of their actions, you can learn whether they consider their relationship healthy and use the trust they have in you to make them break it up. You can do this regardless of whether it is in their actual best interest or you just want said renascent for yourself, as dismissing or getting their lovers killed won't automatically break the relationship but instead anger them, and is more likely to simply result in the remaining lover leaving your homebase in turn.

The aforementioned changes of a renascent's actions will now also require a small amount of trust and respect from the renascent. You'll have to try harder to bond with a renascent that is already in a relationship as well, but bonded renascents with which you start a romantic relationship will no longer try to start relationships with others.

There is now also a small chance that renascents will either run away or get trapped in a territory on their own if they are left idle for long, especially if they don't like you and all they do is argue when you stay at home. In this case you'll have to rescue them once again from whatever territory they end up in if you want to recover them, though leaving them to clean their own messes is also a perfectly viable option. In this regard, there are some conditions renascents have to meet in order to become stuck in some territories, since it always felt weird to have someone like Rhodeghass having to work as a horse groom to pay off a debt and such.

It is my hope that this will not only make renascents feel more alive, but generate more interesting stories and also make bonds and relationships with them feel more precious.

Besides it is pretty fun to get pairings like Mealessea and King Handsome the Honest.

Enhanced Romancing and Related Perils

I couldn't help but notice that perhaps the majority of the people that found the game in itch.io did so through the romance tag, which might have been disappointing and justified some of the bouncing and negative ratings as it's remained a somewhat neglected and relatively secondary system compared to others, so in the next version of the game we'll have more complex romantic relationships to hopefully help generate more drama and interesting stories.

For starters, lovers will now occasionally come up to you when you are in their territories and try to initiate a relationship without you having to woo them first and a bunch of new flavour messages. This will be particularly interesting along with a new optional personal drawback making your character thirsty enough to automatically accept every relationship. Other things like the player character's status or contexts like those involving too few males or females within the colony will influence how likely your character is to be approached in this manner.

To different degrees, depending on each particular kind of lover, they will also start feeling neglected if you don't continue wooing them. They will start showing their discontent in different ways and eventually take action if they feel too ignored, with some leaving, some making a number and others being too spineless to do anything other than continue to whine meekly. Over time, as the relationship progresses their neediness will also decrease slightly, making most reasonable lovers fairly stable in the long run.

Since this will have you wooing lovers for a new reason other than Weariness reduction or baby-making, all generic lovers will have 12 rather than 8 flavour wooing events, with these new 4 being chosen at random from a pool of generic actions determined by their personalities and physical traits, making each one more unique and fun to explore. Renascents will instead have their 12 existing events doubled to 24 unique ones. Furthermore, renascents that fancy you will try to vie for your attention and make their disposition known to you when staying at home even if you are already in a romantic relationship with another. 

You will also get some new flavour text when existing lovers reject your wooing because you're being perceived as having the wrong kind of character. Furthermore, breaking up with a renascent will cause his or her opinion of you to decrease in accordance to how deep they considered the relationship to be, meaning that some will feel so betrayed as to never trust you again and most will require some work on your part and healing before they once again show themselves receptive to your wooing.

The possibility for a lover wanting to raise children will also be a little bit more specific to each one. Generally you will still be able to reproduce with most lovers, but some will tend to be more interested in the idea than others. Additionally, those lovers with which you chose raise children, as is often the case when you find yourself saddled with shrieking monkeys, will be a bit more patient towards romantic neglect.

Some people will just not be right for you though. Whereas up to now lovers had a random chance to do mean things outside your control, now you'll be able to counter some of those negative effects levelling up each lover's required stat. The lifestyles some would expect of you might require a certain level of Resistance or Mobility to prevent you from gaining Weariness or Local Tension, while others might outright take advantage of you or even become abusive if your Terror or Intelligence isn't high enough. You will be warned in advance about lovers that your character might suspect to try to do this and be informed of the stat you would need to increase to prevent this.

I'm making no guesses for a release date yet because of several new real life uncertainties and the fact that some of this kind of content is proving surprisingly tricky to come up with. I'm sure you can at least think of at least a couple of troublesome, not very romance-conductive renascents to write this sort of content for, but the challenge is where most of the fun is at anyway.

All in all, the release is going to take longer than the latest ones, but be closer to the older ones in terms of new content and mechanics.

Drawbacks, Turncoats and Fate

In the next version of Anamnesis we'll be able to give our character a number of personal drawbacks that can be turned into strengths, switch allegiance mid-game, and generate player characters entirely at random.

Player character drawbacks will be entirely optional and only available if you chose to play advanced mode. You'll be offered 3 at random and be able to re-roll them all or individually as many times as you want just like the starting contexts. They will work in a similar manner, but modifying your character rather than the world as a whole, generally giving your character a strongly negative handicap along with a positive advantage. In between cycles, you'll be able to turn any drawback into a strength, removing the negative trait while keeping the positive one or getting a new positive effect if it previously had none. This will cost 1 Insight tu turn around the first drawback, 2 for the next one and so on.

At the time of writing there are only 14 of these personal contexts, so more variety will be needed before the release. For example, the mysterious benefactor social context was turned into a personal one (and made harsher), allowing you to spend Insight to remove the Local Tension increase each 100 weeks while still getting the Arkhe reward at the end of said period. Others will have your character being a pacifist, granting you Merits but barring you from using unprovoked violence, add a time limit for each cycle by giving you a fading body, or making you an imperfect renascent so that any death in combat finishes the current cycle. Some others get us significantly closer to that long term goal of having a monster game mode for non-human player characters.

Others yet proved to work better as regular socio-environmental contexts, so the game also has 4 more of those for now.

Other than that, following a suggestion in the Discord server, I also decided to allow players to switch between The Court and The Influence between cycles, which I admittedly haven't even thought about until now. This can be done in a few ways. When you have 3 consecutive victories, a random enemy renascent will approach you to try to convince you to switch and join them with arguments of varying validity. When you befriend and bond a captured enemy renascent, you'll also be able to use this to earn the other side's trust and switch at any time. Some of those new personal contexts also allow this.

Lastly, every character generation option can now also be chosen for you at random and left to fate if you feel like it, in case that needed any further clarification.

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.

Stuff Being Slowly Worked On

Here's the result of tinkering and toying with ultimately discarded ideas during the last month.

Renascent characters, including the player, will be subject to a very slight loss of experience level after each cycle to represent the world changing around them. They will still have it better in the long run than mundane units and monsters, which see their level reset after each cycle, but a character that has not been around for literally ages should now notice a significant decrease in skill unless they were never around and had 0 experience to begin with.

Player character peculiarities can now also store some more information including non-zero starting values. This will enable more varied types in the future, but so far it only impacts the one for biting your own fingernails, allowing these characters to actually start with nails to bite.

Other than that I've fleshed out the new phase/mood for 7 of the 32 renascent and added 2 new social contexts.

The next couple of weeks at least are going to remain busy with paperwork and regular work, but there is a good chance I'll have some more free time to invest in the game afterwards and be able to give you more exciting news than these.

I might even resume updating the "Working on" list afterwards so you can once again enjoy the thrills of watching arbitrary numbers go up.

Convenient Break Ups and Hanging Around

In the next version of Anamnesis, you will be able to break up with lovers almost whenever you want and the personalities of renascents will both evolve somewhat over cycles and be more malleable by player actions.

 

A new option has been added to "Other actions" when you rest at home or visit territories if you have a lover in them that will allow you to break the relationship even if they haven't given you a reason to do so.

This will still cause a Local Tension increase proportionately to how deep the lover perceived the relationship and the time spent together, but I can still see a lot of people finding this useful seeing how this true love thing generally only lasts until an upgrade comes around.

 

The second, bigger change is that now renascents not only have one new common homebase action each, but will be more likely to display some of those actions than others even outside moods and phases. Which of these common actions are favoured or ignored will change with each cycle unless the renascent is bonded with you.

This will make their behaviours more consistent while also allowing them to evolve over time. At the same time, it also allows players to shape them into whatever versions they are more comfortable with at a slight cost in how much the renascent likes the player, which can of course be reverted doing actions said renascent likes and appreciates.

The manner in which this will happen is through the "Hang around" actions, thus finally giving them a purpose. Choosing this option will sometimes give the player the chance to make a random common action of the renascent more or less likely to show up, representing the patterns and quirks you might learn from the character.

If for example you're mainly interested in a character as a romantic partner, you can make wooing more common and show yourself more inclined to accommodate and pamper them. If the renascent is nothing more than a convenient workhorse for you on the other hand, you can just make actions having them work, mediate for you or write propaganda in your name more common and everything else rarer.

 

The framework is also in place for a new phase for every renascent, but fleshing all 32 out will take some weeks at the current rate, and since it's been a while since the last release I'm considering whether to just add some other token content and make a release of it now or wait until these phases are done.

I also haven't made a choice yet as to whether to continue updating the "Working on..." list once again. It was useful to pressure myself and set goals back when I had more time, but it's enervating not to be able to update it for days or even weeks at a time because of events mostly outside my control, thus becoming something of a source of unease and somewhat counterproductive.

It's a little infuriating to have so many ideas and so little time to implement them, but that's where we are for the time being.

Livelier Wars, Forgotten Horrors and Lost Technology

In the next version of Anamnesis mainland lobbies will be more active, especially when at war, and those units you acquire the details of will continue to be available for summon or manufacture in following cycles.

These barely count as full features and they sound a lot more exciting than they really are but still make the game more interesting so I'll give them their own development post. It's been quite a while since the last one after all.

The fist one is pretty self-explanatory. The frequency at which lobbies were changing the mainland was too slow for wars to really have an impact, so the overall frequency has been increased and now the more at war the world is, the more often mainland territories will enact new policies or attack each other. The odds are still heavily stacked against The Court so it's up to you whether it suits your interests to propitiate or avoid a world war.

On the other hand, the up to 7 units you could have details for have been doubled to 14, with the knowledge remaining with you between cycles. You'll still need a Fortress/Dungeon or higher to be offered details and manufacture or summon them, but this will have increasingly more important ramifications and make the long term game more interesting once technological ages become more differentiated.

If we're playing stalwart and we're successful enough on a 1930s cycle we might get to carry on and manufacture landships and dreadnoughts to get a huge advantage against the horrors of your average 1880s cycle. Conversely, lucky influenced players will still be able to rely on the good old Terror from the Deep on a high tech era and show those hopeless stalwarts just how far their big guns can really get them.

It is partly to be able to better diversify cycles that I've been focusing on new content lately, mainly with an eye on those areas with the lesser variety at present, such as 1880s stalwart stuff and 1930s influenced stuff. As more content is added, I'll be gradually allowing technological levels to have a stronger effect on the selection of adequate units, lobbies and territories giving us increasingly more genuinely victorian and interwar periods.

It's still a long term goal though, so don't expect that any time soon with what little free time I currently have. There are universes out there in which Anamnesis will eventually have enough content to even go up to a cold war era, but I'm not sure this is one of them.

Then again there are alternate universes where I've already been stabbed to death over a lousy stolen neck warmer for next to minimum wage so count your blessings and all that.

On Old Cumbersome Things

So we're still only up to just 16 of these roles and peculiarities done, but 4 of these were done in this last 15 days, so I seem to be somewhat picking up the pace and getting a clearer idea about which peculiarities are fun and which ones are just going to end up being deleted halfway there. I'm still aiming at 28 or 30 for the first iteration so we can take comfort in the thought that we're past halfway there one way or another.

Rather than just personality-related stuff I've also been adding some more fun stuff to roleplay involving a few supernatural elements and diverse lifelong skills, which not only settled the foundations for something similar to the originally planed monster mode and will allow us to play as more overtly conjurer characters but also created some overlap with the existing trades and abilities. For this and other reasons, it is very likely that, to keep things simple, this new system will end up replacing the one for trades altogether.

Let's face it, trades and abilities were often cumbersome, confusing and not very fun, and I can't imagine any of them that couldn't be improved by being redone in this new format. There is after all already more variety of content in these 16 roles than in all the 60-something existing trades, and roles can be much more easily expanded upon and integrated with other systems in the future.

Of course, it hurts to just press delete and remove any trace of a couple hundred hours of one's own work forever, hence why you see me here trying to convince myself to do it in the guise of making a blog post, but I'm sure the game will benefit in the long term from this and it was about time for me to let you know I'm still alive and developing the game anyway, so two birds with the same stone and whatnot.

Consistency and Subtlety

Like units in the current version, territories and lobbies will also be classified by their technological requirements and selected accordingly at the beginning of each cycle in the next version.

The effects will be subtle for now because we would need more territories and lobbies to make these cycles diverse, meaning entirely victorian or entirely interwar settings will still be rare, but the framework is now in place for the future. I believe this to be a better path to take than adapting territories to the current technological level for the reasons mentioned in previous posts.

I've also been tweaking and making some general improvements on the selection of those events at the end and start of each week concerning units, relics and such because I was dumb when I coded the original system. Among other things it will now be clearer which enemy units are going on a rampage and need to be dealt with and harder to tell what effects are caused by a looming doom and which ones happen just by chance.

Work on the character peculiarities continues meanwhile, but disappointingly slowly. I would like to get at least close to 30 of them for the first iteration but I barely got 10 so far. I'm not entirely sure why but I must admit I've never been as unproductive in all these years of development, which is why there is still no goal number on the "Working on" thingy at the side for this item. Normally I work for a while on a new feature, see how much stuff gets done on average in a day and estimate how many more days it would take, but when performance is all over the place the numbers remains pretty much arbitrary.

Trust me however when I say that the lack of progress hurts me more than it hurts you.

The Peculiarities of Absolute Power

I forgot a very important condition when first designing player character peculiarities, but that's fixed now so we'll get specific actions when we achieve the status of emperor or empress, allowing us to play a proper Caligula or Ludwig II.

Does your character have the habit of getting drunk and starting fist fights but everybody refuses to serve you drinks after the last mess you caused? See if they still dare to refuse you service after becoming emperor. It is also one thing to just have purported miraculous healing powers and quite a different one to be lauded as an empress with healing powers whose subjects regularly flock to the doors of her palace to seek her blessing.

I also initially forgot to make these traits comply with a number of uncommon situations like being trapped in a territory but that's nowhere near as exciting to report and it's also fixed now anyway.

In any case the whole thing seems to be taking something of a final shape for the time being. These things however are too different from each other to share a similar pattern like lobby events and the like, with each peculiarity basically amounting to a text-based mini-game of its own requiring proper design and balancing so I haven't found my rhythm yet. In fact I must admit that I've wasted entire days pondering whether a single one of these peculiarities was worth adding and how to go about it, or worse still starting work in one to find it boring a few days later and scratch everything altogether.

Nonetheless so far I'm satisfied with the personal touch these give to each playthrough and it's fun to write more subjective content for once. Everything will remain completely optional so I can afford to reflect the character's opinion, ignorant or biased as it might be, which is refreshing every now and then compared to the more neutral writing I've been trying to keep in the rest of the game.

Player Character Peculiarities

Many years ago a really nice person made a suggestion that I've been remembering every now and then ever since; Having some outright negative actions in the game for the player to choose with no positive outcomes whatsoever, other than the default action in some territories.

This person might not even follow development anymore, but the idea stuck on me. It's realistic and a great way to role play certain characters but it meant not only discouraging players from exploring freely, but also writing content that perhaps as much as 90% of the players would actively avoid. Then just a few days ago, while struggling with an unrelated idea, it finally hit me, we can get the motivation to do stupid, weird and gratuitously evil stuff by giving the player character unique interests, compulsions and tastes for us to manage and/or indulge.

Our character thus will now get 3 of these peculiarities at random at the beginning of the game. We'll be given infinite re-rolls to choose which set of 3 we are more comfortable with, so we will never be forced to have anything too icky. Furthermore we'll get a chance to change one of our 3 idiosyncrasies after each cycle for whichever new one our way of life and circumstances allowed at the time or keep the same ones, allowing some development over time. Whether this will be into better, more mature people or murderous psychopaths talking with the voices inside their heads is up to each of us.

In effect, this will often be a readily available way for players to lower their Weariness, so we'll also ease the problem of not having enough actions of the kind sometimes. For now this will use the same system as lobbies to generate events in matching territories. Suppose your character has a compulsion to steal things, you'll occasionally get the chance to shoplift in crowded places, not only giving you the material gain but satisfaction, though you'll still risk increasing Tension.

The available options will depend on the territory we visit, whether society has collapsed, and the prior way in which we've managed these habits and issues. Provoking too many fires because it makes our character feel good will make people suspicious, or perhaps your character just loves something as simple as reading a good science fiction novel but you can hardly find a place within the colony that sells them because you're the only nerd in it, incidentally giving you a taste of what my pre-internet years were like.

The idea is to experiment with the whole spectrum of peculiarities, from the deeply disturbing to the utterly mundane to make our characters deeper and more interesting. I believe it'll be a great way to encourage us to role play new kinds of characters without forcing anyone to do so.

And of course, there is a whole lot more we can do once the system is set in place. In particular, I'd really like to have renascent companions involved in a number of ways, but I want to wait and see how the basics develop before mentioning things I might later put aside like last time.

Tweaks, Bugfixes and Things Put Aside

So a completely unexpected thing happened by the time of  the previous post and people started playing Anamnesis, resulting in an influx of bug reports, including a few pressing ones that would be best to get out of the way as soon as possible.

Therefore, even though I mentioned in that last post that I'd be making the technological diffusion affect territories and their events, I was counting on this taking a couple of months so I'll put it aside for now to get a fixed release out sooner. I still need to add a number of new units to pad up the low technology stalwart and high technology influenced unit catalogues though, so the aim will be having a new version sometime next month.

The fixes in this new version will include things like actually being able to research The Punisher of Kings, removing an infinite unit exporting exploit, civilians occasionally falling dead for no reason during combat, a crash involving converted units and aristocrats that failed to realize they were dead. Some of these were rather amusing and a bit of a shame to fix though.

As for tweaks, having a lot of destroyed territories used to significantly lower the chances of lost relic pieces reappearing, but now the game can tell when this happens and speed things up a bit.

Reaching a truce with an enemy unit through an envoy will now also prevent mundane and renascent ones from extracting the Arkhe in the territory and in the case of monsters keep them from multiplying and expanding into other territories. This should make truces slightly more useful and give players a tool to prevent having to deal with 8 Terrors from the Deep without taking the fun of snowballing monster infestations away entirely, at least for now.

The bad news is, I made the mistake of properly doing my job in that one place I hated so much in which I spent most of August and September and will be going back for November and December. This time I'll be guarding a bunch of pipes by night a few kilometres away from civilization all by myself during the weekends rather than bothering railway travelers, so at least I won't be doing any long-term moving around and will have more free time to finish things up in time.

Technological Spread

Depending on the lobbies and territories available each cycle, the colony might lag behind technologically and change the availability of units and certain events to help make each cycle a little more different and interesting.

Territories will provide a baseline for technological spread, with centers of commerce, factories and fuel reserves having a positive effect and things like corrosive bogs and old cranky people having a negative one.

This baseline will then be further modified by the interests of each available lobby and their power. The Lore Keepers and The Church or the Glorious Draknharn for example will do their best to quash technological spread, while Hieronhortean Oil and Gas Company and The Foundation for the Promotion of Human Research will further it. Rarely some social contexts and feyfolk stuff will also have an effect, while the way in which the previous cycle ended will also have a say in the next one, with those relics and dooms basically destroying civilization having an understandably negative effect on the spread of technology.

For now, this technological spread will mainly influence 2 things; The kind of units most commonly available for both factions and the availability of certain actions within territories. A very low technological spread will favour rough frontierspeople and freely roaming wild beasts while making mechanized units extremely rare. With a high technological spread, we won't just be getting more planes, tanks and ships, but also more surgeons, lawyers and the like.

When visiting territories, this spread will also be a factor deciding which actions are available or not. I'll go ahead and add 4 new events for each territory to better exploit this. I haven't gone into this yet but the way I see it a low technological spread will probably result in electric trolleys being changed for horse-drawn ones at Nivhar's Spinal Avenue for example, adding new kinds of hazards on the street floor but opening new exciting career opportunities for the undiscriminating go-getter.

No game will ever part entirely with motorized vehicles and firearms and go into some sort of middle ages or anything like that however since that would require either a new independent set of content or at the very least the revision of what must already be thousands of pages' worth of flavour text, but I believe this will make things more interesting nonetheless.

Clock Auctions, Windjammers and Cowboys

In the next version of Anamnesis, about half the auctions will be what are commonly called dutch auctions. It'd be weird to call them like that in a game set on a fictional world though, so let's go with the less popular term of clock auction instead.

Rather than bid ever higher until you're the only one interested in paying that much, these auctions instead start at an already high asking price that decreases by a fixed rate every time you choose to wait, but you risk any of the gathering interested bidders choosing to pay that price every time you wait.

Meanwhile, the low tech units are actually proving quite fun to work with, an interesting change of pace at any rate, incidentally allowing me to further develop and explain bits and pieces of the game's history in their lore.

I can easily go all the way back to around 1870 or even slightly lower in some cases and still get congruent units easily explainable for some economic, political or social reason or another. In fact, many already existing units could actually be argued to belong to that general era more strongly than any historical 1930s society coming to memory right now. Anything beyond that however would need its own set of units, lobbies and territories and require many, many years of work even at a good pace, so it's unlikely to happen unless one of you happens to have a game development team lying about somewhere that you'd be willing to let me borrow.

Other than that, I recently died working 11 days straight in a row with a bunch of 12 hour night shifts mixed in there to really throw my circadian rhythm off whack, but I'm better now. I don't think I have lost any more weight to this but I fear I might have started to lose IQ points instead.

Weariness Reduction for Larger Bases

Larger bases are going to lower the weariness of your units and that of your character faster starting from the next version.

The change won't be too dramatic unless you have an imperial palace, but it should make the benefits of having larger bases outweigh the cons a little further. This is also another tool for players to better control weariness independently of territories and social contexts, because fun as it was, I really didn't have many other choices in that one testing playthrough in a forbidden colony with an unhealthy atmosphere. Staying in a shelter/refuge will still give no additional benefit though.

I also noticed that sometimes the new lobby events were a little too all over the place for my taste as well, so I'm going through them all making these events meet two different criteria each rather than one to fix this. A few weird ones will still get through, but that's kind of the point, finding surprising things every now and then. Being able to calmly gossip with neighbours in Hieronhortean Offshore Oil Fields on the other hand for example was just a kick in the ribs of my immersion. Making such an action require not only a population but also a quiet and tranquil environment should fix this.

 

And that's pretty much all I have to say worth noting at this point, other than the fact that I finally got around trying another text-based game called "Nocked! True Tales of Robin Hood" after it was mentioned to me some time ago and it seems pretty fun so far. I didn't have the time to get to the end yet, but it might be something worth checking out for some of you too.

Fixed Duplicate Renascents and Limits to Dismissing

Going by some more recent feedback, the next version of the game should fix a bug allowing cunning players to duplicate renascents and will cap the Local Tension increases for dismissing even the most long-lasting allies and lovers to 60 at most.

I was also inspired by some of that feedback to allow feyfolk to give you a somewhat disturbing new power, but I decided it'll be more fun to keep that a secret. I guess I can say however that, independently of this new power, actions causing the player character to be perceived as philanthropist, hedonist or ruthless might now also be a condition to trigger some of these bound feyfolk effects.

Other than that, more than half of the lobbies and renascents have their stuff done at this point, with some clear winners and losers emerging from there. The events for Confederation of Blood Sport Leagues for example were more laborious than those of other lobbies, but they'll be a pretty fun lobby to have around, allowing you to participate in exciting sharkball matches where appropriate or send your fellow renascents to do so. 

Lobbies like University of Stallia Foundation on the other hand, while necessary and useful elsewhere, are considerably more boring to write about when it comes to events like these. Nonetheless, perhaps the biggest problem is that now I have a lot of other ideas for new lobbies that could change the colony in more fun ways but will have to wait for the time being.

I mean, surely I can't be the only one curious to see how a world controlled by the trainers of living furniture of Efothe plays out. It could be fun to give the cult following The Terror from the Deep as a god their own lobby too.

Smarter Unit Range Changes

Starting from the next version of Anamnesis, units will try to be more clever when changing combat range to maximize their chances to win.

As somebody pointed out in the Discord's help channel, it was perfectly possible to see the crews of ships sometimes unsheathing their sabres and going "Hyaah!" on an enemy while forgetting all about the rocket launchers in their ships even in wide open spaces. We already took care of the lawyers picking too many fist fights with destroyers so it only makes sense to address the opposite scenario and give units a few pointers.

Units will now consider whether they can deal more damage by closing in or putting some distance between themselves and their enemies and act accordingly, choosing to stay at the same distance or move to a more favourable one when appropriate when the chance arises.

A couple of other tweaks were also made while at it. Units will now also be capable to move from firing range back to long range, which was not possible until now and gave too much of a disadvantage to artillery. The rationale was attempting to prevent artillery or bomber runs being used in caves and the like, but this could already happen through ambushes and traps, and all territories are assumed to have surrounding habitable lands for the population, so when in doubt I think it's reasonable to lean in towards the player's convenience.

The chances to outsmart an enemy unit to trap them are now also slightly influenced by the preferences of each of the units involved, the time of the day and the visibility of the terrain, meaning that nocturnal units will have a slightly greater chance to ambush  diurnal units by night in territories with low visibility while the opposite will be true of diurnal units. Each of these factors will add up to the total chances.

 

As an aside, I love the fact that the game is reaching a point where it can hook me up to continue playing a run that was initially merely intended for testing purposes. Took a while, but it's getting there.

Lobby Influence on Territories and New Renascent Phases

Visiting territories rarely surprised me anymore and the influence of lobbies in them was too subtle, so starting from the next version lobbies will directly create a number of new events on matching territories.

Depending on how powerful any one lobby is and 14 new hidden values for each territory describing the existence of crowds, mountains, water, misery, death and the like, there is a chance new actions will show up in matching territories when you visit them.

In a cycle in which World Wide Furs is very powerful for example you'll often find hunting competitions and poachers willing to trade when visiting territories with plenty of woodlands or jungles and plenty of hunting gear and weapons to buy in populated areas. If The Veshite Commune is also relatively powerful you will from time to time find their propaganda and even riots and demonstration in highly populated areas, but explosives will also be easier to buy in areas with high conflict and you might benefit from the commune's aid in areas with high misery.

With 12 of these events per lobby, for the time being this will bring a sprinkling of 72 potential new actions for each cycle and a total of 432 that should hopefully make visiting territories under different circumstances more interesting and less predictable. It will also help make lobbies have a greater impact and in some cases open new venues to interact with them, since some of these actions can earn or cost you favours from the lobby, change their power slightly or give you new voting proposals to directly affect or benefit them.

As for the renascent moods and phases, I want to do more with them and expand them in a few ways, but I feel like I need a greater variety first, so at the very least I can say that in the next version renascents are going to get 2 new phases each. Big changes will probably have to wait for another time though.

My performance has been all over the place during these last few weeks for a number of reasons, so I still won't be making any estimates as to how many days of work these things are going to take yet, but it'll take some time nonetheless.

New Renascents and New Look

As many of you probably already noticed, in the next version of Anamnesis we're getting 4 new renascents, bringing the total up to 32.

Initially, there were just going to be 2 new ones, but I kept having all these ideas I wanted to experiment with so it's 4 now. It's quite a bit of work with the moods and whatnot but writing renascent content is always a lot of fun anyway and I needed a lot of fun after the resolution change headaches and a bunch of other unrelated stuff I won't bore you with.

The Stalwart side will be joined by Aeranthel and Ma Mushy, while the Influenced will now also count with Zassell the Fiend and King Handsome the Honest. One of the sides got the short end of the stick, but you'll have to play the new version to find out which one. I do enjoy some double bluffs every now and then though.

All of them bring a bunch of interesting behaviours to the table that didn't quite fit with other renascents and will help make some future renascent features more interesting, but that will come later.

Other than that, I've finally made up my mind about the tittle screen, which is going to lean in a bit of a vanitas direction but it's far from done yet. I believe the rest of the game looks more or less the way it's going to look come release date, so there's probably no harm in showing a bit of it now. Apparently it's been 8 years since I last added a screenshot in a post, so let's just pray this comes up right first try.

 

Look at how much extra space we have for actions and text now. It was tempting to make the background more complex, but then it'd be too distracting and stand in the way of the text.

Map stays the same size, breaks the monotony a bit and leaves room for other things in the future. Have you tried playing with the Pristine Territory social context? Changes things up quite a bit.

Hey look, one of the new renascents, how did that get here? Also notice all the space left for hypothetical pretty pictures. The black photos probably won't even be there when/if we get pictures.

You'll still be able to resize the game window however you want and make it fullscreen, so don't worry if the text looks too tiny in these examples.