Version 17 is now out, bringing with it Fog and Lights.
The first part is a new Dark Name, revolving around Fog. This set of powers attempts to give a broadly useful buff to your agents as they try to infiltrate and enshadow the human nations. It reduces security, which makes infiltration easier, which ideally should be a buff to nearly all agents, in various ways. It also makes human nobles take longer to gain suspicion of enshadowed others, as long as these are inside the fog, so they have more time to spread their shadow to others. Once you've taken control of a noble, you can use them to expand your sea of fog, and so can take control of their adjacent neighbours too.
Within the fog you can teleport your agents about, by selecting a point and instantly moving all your agents who are inside the fog to that point. It also allows your agents to ignore exile, so even if the nobles discover them, they won't take damage from being inside a human nation, as long as they remain safely inside the fog. Ideally this would create a cat-and-mouse game as you constantly teleport around to escape from hostile agents (the only people who can harm your agents now), while slowly expanding the sea.
The second part is the end-game. The world panic/awareness has now changed a bunch, and there should be a definite group of nobles who have high awareness when world panic reaches high levels. Currently they have two tools to combat you. Firstly they can form an alliance, to try to defend against military foes, and secondly they can use the new Lightbringer Ritual. This feature, which is optional on the start screen (defaults to on), allows them to defeat the player. Firstly they have to be aware, then sufficient nobles need to vote to start the Ritual, at which point it will pick a number of locations in their society, either places of science (universities, libraries...) or religion (abbeys, churches...). The player has to stop them by removing these locations. Invade them, destroy them or replace the noble with one under your control (enthralled, broken or shadow > 50%) before the timer runs out. Obviously we're going to need to do a bunch of balancing here, to get it right for the different strategies, but it's a start at an actual "Last Alliance" type scenario.
Various ideas for how the Ritual could be improved are:
-Have the human agents need to accomplish tiny quests (go to locations) to make it more personal and active (a community suggestion)
-Have a 'backfire' victory, where if you can get enough enshadowed nobles into the Ritual locations you can corrupt it, and instantly win, by using the humans' own weapon against them
-Broadly expand the range of things an aware society can do to defend themselves (protect their nobles from enshadowment, reveal dark agents, add evidence to the enthralled noble...)
We'll have to see.
This patch also brings some typo fixing (User feedback indicates that 'sovereign' is in fact spelt 'sovereign', who knew? No me, that's for sure.), and a few bug fixes.
Lastly, we have another community suggested feature, the "Next Age". This is currently extremely experimental, and could easily break everything when you click it, but luckily you'll have won/lost by then. This feature allows you to play time forward a few centuries after your victory, and have the world reset itself. Human nations will repopulate, and the shadow will recede. You can then play a second round inside the same world, in an Age following the one you last saw. It's possible, depending on how history develops, that some remains of the previous world will be present. Tiny dark nations, if you enshadowed a lot of things, maybe an Unholy Flesh or Deep One. As mentioned, this shouldn't be relied upon to work, but we'll continue to test it to get it as stable as possible, especially with regards to save-file sizes.
Hopefully for the next version we can take a look at balance, at least a bit, an adding an agent for the player and a role for the human agents, specifically the inquisitor, to defend against enshadowed nobles. Although we'll need to avoid the Inquisitor making politics even harder, as it's currently a bit hard and fiddly, so doesn't need a nerf.