Once again, the time has come to review the work done over the previous month.
The fog of war
Perfect information in strategy games is a bit of a bugbear of mine. The computer has perfect info of course; it has to. It's very easy and very logical to communicate that perfect information to the player. However we're striving for "hard historical fiction" here, so things must be different.
Games have had fog of war from almost the beginning. But if you have a force in a province, the fog of war is lifted not only for that province but for all the adjoining ones. That's fair for modern times of course, but in the 12th century communication was slow and the telescope still didn't exist. Reconnaissance was based on moving people to high vantages and using their eyes, talking to people, and delivering information in person. This took time and energy, and that is reflected in Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex. Gathering information is a deliberate act which must be done, lest previous reports get stale.
If you've been reading these dev diaries for a while, you might remember me tossing around the idea of more map modes. If you like games like this, then map modes are also probably something you appreciate. I was worried that too much information would work against some of the goals of this project; the average game gives you more information than the Domesday Book, but updated daily. This system allowed me to add another map mode, at least during war, that graphs the amount of pillage done to a county without going too far towards too much info.
Energy
From almost the beginning, there has been an "energy" system for movement. You are limited in how far you can march in a given month, and good military commanders can do more here than others. However it's now being used for reconnaissance as well. Immediately the thought comes to mind: why not do a tiny recon every turn and continue about one's business? I anticipated this exploit; without full energy there is a chance (scaled to remaining energy) that this might happen:
Various other
The AI has come along nicely. It knows how to wage war, and it knows how to flee from stronger forces and chase weaker ones. I did underestimate how much work was involved, but I think the heavy lifting is done now.
After fleshing out the energy system, I noticed that there was a possibility to work yourself into an inescapable state. Specifically if you exhaust all your energy inside your own territory, you can't actually lay siege or raid. It is now possible to end the turn doing nothing, and there are a handful of camping events which can fire.
The AI's success in war caused me to, on occasion, want to retake things which it had besieged. Most of the siege events I wrote months ago were entirely inappropriate to do in your own land, so I wrote a class of events for liberating your own holdings.
I also noticed that it would be super cool to have some shortcuts to the map of territorial control, and shortcuts for rapidly exiting any map screen. Those are now in. Also, visible above and again subject to recon, the position of enemies is show on the map. The player's position is always available.
More to come on the first Saturday of next month! And in the mean time, I hope everyone who celebrates this December has as joyful and happy a season as is possible in these times. Here's to hoping for a better 2021!