Hello everyone! Those who have been using the public 0.12 beta have given me good feedback and I am continuing to work on new content for Solar Nations 2. This week, I will be talking about factions and giving more control and freedom to players.
Today I pushed some changes to the beta which include the following:
- New Custom Faction Privilege Mechanic
- Bugfixes (lots of them)
- Faction region control changes
- Balance tweaks
The Faction Privilege system has been the primary way to interact with the pieces of your country known as factions, but I felt that privileges did not give enough interesting options or gameplay to factions that I would have liked. In addition, the bonuses were often unbalanced as each faction had specific privileges that could not be modified.
In order to rectify this, I have modified the privilege system to allow you to create your own special privileges to give to each faction. These privileges can select bonuses and maluses from a large list, and each faction has certain bonuses they are better at giving, maintaining differentiation between factions while also allowing for greater customization and gameplay opportunities.
A policy which would give population growth at the cost of unity.
The existing privileges are still there and have been rebalanced so that they use the new points/picks system, so each faction should have parity with the others now. They are also there in case you don't feel like messing with the special policies.
However, the increase in creativity comes at the cost of probable balance issues, and as a result I encourage you to try to break the new privilege system by stacking as many modifiers as possible, or finding broken combinations. I have tried to remove what exploits I could think of, but I am sure I did not get all of them.
Other Plans
Ranged Attacks
Currently, I am working on Ranged Attacks for Military units. This will be able to represent Missile Strikes, Airforce sorties, and bombardments from long-range weapons like Railguns in space. Forces will be able to commit resources to these attacks, and at the cost of morale, do significant damage to enemy units and regions from long distances. This will also extend to the AI, which will be able to use Nuclear Weapons against you in wars, provided they have reached the appropriate stage of escalation.
Progression Overhaul
I am also planning on addressing technological progression, for instance, technology and traditions will no longer be mutually exclusive to research at once. Also, I plan on changing the tech tree to be less linear, and offer more opportunities for specialization, as well as less emphasis on beelining.
I would like suggestions as to the specifics of this, as the extreme late game is not well known to me on this patch since I have been working on the game much more than playing it recently- so if there are any balance or QOL concerns at that time please let me know.
Space Habitation
Currently, the plan for Space habitation is to allow for the creation of Space Station regions which function identically to land regions except for the fact that they can be besieged and taken without the use of land forces. Due to internal structure problems, this will take a while to implement, so I am not going to start the process until the beta build is stable.
Saturn and the Outer Planets
With the changes to Politics, I plan on working on Saturn and the outer planets soon. They will now be able to be sufficiently different from other places so that there can be interesting and unique gameplay there.
More Creativity and Flavor
I am continuously looking for ways to make Solar Nations 2 more creative, so if you have any ideas please feel free to contact me on the discord or via email. Many of the features in the beta are community-sourced, and if it improves the game I will be happy to implement it!