Hey Heretics,
Our new dev blog this time will shed some light on the threats we face during this journey! From food management, rebellious followers to other powers in place, fights are made on and off the battlefield.
Food or foe?
There are several threats to your progression in Becoming Saint:
- Losing followers who run away or get converted during confrontations
- Not having enough food to feed your followers
The more your conquest progresses, the more the game may set you in a dilemma, between choices that keep your policy “pure” and constant (and hence those who follow you will keep doing so) and the need for compromise to facilitate getting resources like food or charisma.
Art made by Vic Macioci for Becoming Saint
Charisma and food are the main resources and needs of your movement. Your actions change them continuously, and they are also resources that you may use to obtain new items, units, and convert one resource into another. You will need to always keep charisma above zero, as that is the basic element that keeps your movement together. Not having food for your units, or pursuing a contradictory policy, will harm your charisma, and hence lead to an early end of your movement and, by extension, of your… life.
However, you are not the only one who has great designs. Other forces already have a claim on Italy, and they will not let go of it easily. The forces that oppose you are of three kinds:
- The Pope
- The Emperor
- The merchants and banks
Each of these may be supported by different segments of the population, and for each town, different and partially generative collectives.
For example, the Pope has bintegralist bachelors, perplex peasants and priests as default available units, plus say special ones like penitent puritan women, or blind superstitious men. The Emperor has cavaliers and town guards, the Merchants have mercenaries and wool workers.
The Pope and the Emperor were the main political powers in 14th-century Italy, together with the emerging power of the communes. These three powers were in constant conflict with each other, sometimes an openly armed one. And they all used different religious orientations to affirm their political aims. Does this mean they will oppose you completely in your movement? Not necessarily.
Depending on who you decide to conquer, your set of rules, and also your reactions in the case of “special events” (like the death of the Pope), you will be seen as friend or enemy, and in all cases, things may change any time depending which towns you are converting. In Becoming Saint, you are creating a new political force, so in the long run, the existing main powers, Church, Empire and Merchant/banks see you as an enemy that must be destroyed, but that does not mean you can't make the most of your brief alliances with some of them.
Your followers may see you as a leader (even as in a cult), or as a (temporary) representative of the ideas that you bring forward. All this depends on the choices you make when building your set of rules (regula), that you may also alter in time. Depending on how much your policy changes, your followers may even end up seeing you as a traitor of the movement, and that will not end well for you…
I tried to avoid setting yourself as necessarily a heroine; you may adopt a policy that is somehow more participative.
Attacks in Becoming Saint are symmetrically aimed at converting and discouraging enemies (nobody gets killed in confrontations), so they are aimed at reducing belief and determination, acting on the three dimensions of energy, faith, and courage. To reduce these, some units curse, some throw books, some sing off-key songs, some juggle to distract, some give “gentle” slaps, and so on, and the player can also directly throw items like money on the battlefield to distract enemy units.
New playtest starts on Friday
Our brand new playtest will start on this Friday, May 2nd, and will grant access to 500 players maximum to have a taste of all the new additions we implemented, thanks to your previous feedback.
To request access to this playtest, click on the button of the game's store page on Steam.
This playtest will only last a week and you can share any feedback either on the gameplay, visuals and new additions on Discord or in the Steam discussions. Thank you for your support and help in making Becoming Saint the best experience possible!
Here is the list of the new features you can expect in this new playtest:
- Cardinals and new victory conditions.
- Complete victory conditions are now clearer, as you have to control most of the cardinals to become Popesse in your lifetime and hence a saint while alive
- The fact that the cardinal seat locations are mostly generative creates a greater variety of paths in the map, as you “chase” the towns with seats
- Units are controlled by hand by default, plus a global switch at start, and the choice is persisted.
- New character and feature: the illusionist, which enables new unit types.
- There is a slimmed-down and interactive tutorial that introduces some actions in confrontations.
- New handling of pauses in confrontation and sync of infos.
Thanks @Turtler on Discord for somehow giving us the source of the idea
Want to learn more about the context and design ideas for Becoming Saint? Check out our post on historically inspired games here.
Stay blessed, heretics!
