Heretics,
Our fourth dev blog will be centered around the creation and shaping of your doctrine in the game: after all, how can you imagine becoming a saint without rules to preach to your followers?
Your decisions, your creed
The core mechanic is making choices: the game presents you with a theme, like “what your followers can eat?”, “what to do with seized land?”, or “how do we handle money?” and you make your choices for each theme. Themes can be personal, concerning religion, society, and politics, and the ensemble of your choices determines your political stance, from Machiavellian to Pacifist to Guelph or Ghibelline. Then there are several other cases where you make decisions, like when the Pope proclaims a crusade, whether you decide to participate or not, etc... But let's dig further into the political stance in the game.
Inspirations behind the political stances
The political stances are broad characterizations that group sets of choices, and define a spectrum of nine political stances that are not mutually exclusive. The game tells you which is your predominant perspective, but by making new choices and eventually changing the ones already taken, which is always possible, other perspectives may become the main one.
The Reigns series and, in particular, Reigns: Her Majesty is surely an inspiration. There too, you have some space to express a personality, and survival and management give you the boundaries within which you can manoeuvre. The options of political stances are also related to one of the main inspirational sources, The Name Of The Rose, by Umberto Eco, whose text is also a mosaic of medieval sources and hidden quotations. Actually, one helpful book is “The Key to the Name of the Rose” in helping get all the hidden references in that wondrous book!
Who will follow you?
Political stances influence which kind of followers you may get, and which one you won’t. Each choice you make may change a kind of believer (fanatics, monks, lepers, peasants, musicians, barbers…) attitude towards you. There are also cases when a kind of follower needs a specific, special decision from you in order to follow you, like creating a specific order of cavaliers in your name.
Another aspect of your general politics that the game tracks is your relationship with the three main powers of the time: the Pope, the emperor and the banks. Hostility towards one may imply favour from the other, but be careful, as insisting on attacking the Pope may trigger a specific crusade against you, as historically -unfortunately- happened against so-called “heretic” movements.
Political stances - and your coherence in maintaining one - influence your charisma and the respect to your followers, changing personality and political stance may lead to whole groups of followers leaving you. Your personality and charisma also influence how much your followers may be able to convince people to give food to your beggar followers, and the availability of food for your followers is a crucial feature for surviving this punishing game!
Should I be true to myself or embrace chaos?
The game lets you evolve and change personality at any moment, not only by making new choices but also by changing previous given ones. But the game is not centred on a “heroine’s journey” model: you are the leader of the movement as a form of temporary delegation, but this is not unconditional: if you change line too many times, your followers may turn against you… Changing personality damages your charisma, as you must rebuild credibility from a new perspective; on the other hand, it may make you credible for a new set of believers.
This gives another strategy layer outside of combats: is it worth it to loose my first followers that were less powerful than the new ones but they tend to bring more food and are less demanding? Hey don't ask us, you're the one who wants to become a Saint, so the choice is yours!
Thank you for reading this dev blog! Next month there will be no dev blog with the winter holidays but in January, we will be back with new content to share with you! And just before you go, here is a presentation of the wonderful people working on the game!
Stay blessed, heretics!
- The Becoming Saint team -