You are ushered down a dark alley by a man in a cloak and hood. You follow him, but he darts into a shadowy passage and slams the door in your face. A narrow slot slides open, revealing a pair of glaring eyes.
“Password?”
“Wishlist KING OF THE CASTLE now,” you reply with a weary sigh.
“Pass, friend,” replies the shadowy figure. “Your devlog awaits.”
Welcome to the Scheme Team
This time, we’re talking more in-depth about something we touched on last week - treachery!
It’s not paranoia if everyone really is out to get you. As a Monarch in KING OF THE CASTLE, you’re right to be on your guard. Every region starts the game by voting on a Scheme, which they’ll follow in order to take you down and put their own Claimant in your place.
There are a grand total of 18 Schemes to choose from in the game - each of the regions has 3 unique ones, plus there’s another 3 generic ones that any region can choose if they happen to get the option.
The ‘generic’ Schemes are Intimidation, Subterfuge, and Doppelganger. Intimidation involves infiltrating the Palace with your own soldiers, and using violence to intimidate the Monarch into following your orders. Subterfuge involves subtly replacing the Monarch’s advisors with your own agents, shaping their reality to benefit your plans. And Doppelganger involves finding a lookalike and literally replacing the Monarch with a pawn of your own!
Generic Schemes are designed to be broadly applicable across any of the regions, but the unique Schemes have a more cultural flavour. For example, the Chiefs can plot Ragnarok - to bring the ice giants down from their frost-entombed mountains, and set them on a deadly course to invade and pillage the rest of the Kingdom!
Each of the Schemes has 2 drastically different endings. In order to see their evil plots come to fruition, regions must follow manipulate the Kingdom stats 3 times to meet a specific goal (for example - being the region with lowest Defiance, or having a Military higher than 6).
Generally speaking, the first 2 of these stat goals are relatively easy, while the 3rd and final is the most difficult. You can see these stat goals, and whether you’ve met them, on the left-hand side of the UI.
But what if your Scheme is out of reach? Well, in that case, look to Defiance…
Flipping the Table
The threshold for a rebellion is either your Stability or Authority - whichever’s highest. Once a region’s Defiance gets higher than that threshold, they can ‘flip the table’.
That’s the terminology we used internally, anyway. We loved the idea that, if you’re failing at the delicate chess-game of the Schemes, you could instead choose to throw the board in the air and stomp all over the pieces.
In order to declare a rebellion, over 50% of the Nobles in the rebelling region need to type ‘!rebel’ in chat. They can only do so while the right conditions apply - if Defiance decreases again, or Stability/Authority rise, they need to bide their time for another opportunity.
The Defiance threshold proved quite difficult to balance. In the original design, the rebellion threshold was if Defiance > (Stability + Authority). However, this proved very difficult for the Nobles to hit, and we were barely seeing rebellions in any of our games. So we experimented with just having a flat limit of 8, beyond which you can rebel, but this made Stability and Authority seem much less weighty and meaningful.
In the end, the current system won out, and we think it’s a good way of making the rebellions a constant, looming threat that can turn the game completely on its head.
But choosing to rebel isn’t a no-brainer! By doing so, regions put their Schemes on a pause. If you’re close to finishing your Scheme, it might be far more preferable to keep a lid on your revolutionary sentiment…
The Drums of War
Once a rebellion kicks off, everything changes. The entire Kingdom has collapsed into a civil war, and storylines will change to reflect that. We’re very proud of our story system, where if a rebellion is declared, every single plotline in the game adapts to take that into account. That might sound easy, but believe me, it was a nightmare to implement in a game with over 800 events and a higher word-count than The Bible.
We also get a whole new mechanic - Victory Points - which each side is scrambling to build up as much as possible. The first to reach 5 will win the rebellion. Failing that, if you reach the end of the ‘siege’ storyline with higher Victory Points, you win the rebellion.
A whole new category of events will spawn, ‘Rebellion Events’, which allow either side - rebels or loyalists - to gain these points over the course of the war.
And of course, a rebellion doesn’t need to be conducted alone. If a 2nd region accumulates high enough Defiance, it can join the rebellion too. And if the 3rd region also joins, it’s an automatic loss for the Monarch.
If 2 or 3 rebel regions win a joint victory, the game will end with a vote to see who ultimately takes the throne.
Rebellions are massively dramatic. As soon as we implemented them, we noticed that they changed the whole game - even in a reign where the Monarch never lets Defiance rise that high, they’re a constant concern and never far from the Monarch’s mind. Let us know on our Steam discussion page if you have any feedback for how we’ve implemented this feature!
One problem we’re noticing in games with huge numbers of Nobles (1000+) is that it can be hard to reach the 50% threshold for declaring a rebellion. I guess in such a huge game, hundreds of Nobles join but wander off or lurk without typing in chat. Don’t worry - we’re working on a solution to this! More on that once it’s ready.