Hello. Thanks for being patient with me. I wanted to make sure I get a lot of things done and concrete before I talk about the progress I've been making on v0.3.0. There have already been a lot of fixes on things like UI scroll affecting the camera and decal visibility range being too short. I also managed to add in nameplates and flags for ships in the Tactical Scene, to make the ships feel like they actually belong to a faction.
Just a bit of info about what the factions update will look like:
- Factions have a system of government with representatives and demographics
- The three government types are: dictatorship, oligarchy, and republic
- A faction's representatives will vote on spending, policies, diplomacy, and how the faction would react in certain events
- The player will be a representative at the start and can pay for an election campaign at the end of their term to become a representative again
- Aside from voting, the player can make their own proposals and bribe other representatives to force a certain vote.
- Diplomatic events are a bit dynamic. For example, one of the representatives in the Xin Republic may propose sending a spy against the faction they have the lowest negative relationship with, which means they will never send a spy to a friendly faction. I found that this gave factions a lot more character and makes the world a little bit more "lived-in" instead of randomized.
- I'm currently working on factions voting against other faction decisions. If Xin sends a spy to Shenzhen, there is a small chance that Shenzhen discovers it. If they do, they can vote on whether they should feed the spy false information or accuse Xin publicly.
- Demographics also play a big role with how a faction acts. For example, if a faction has more "Interventionist" representatives than "Isolationist" ones, they are more likely to declare war. Each government type has a rep/election cycle that replaces all representatives after a few months.
- To keep things simple, there are only three options in a vote: yea, nay, and abstain. If there are more yea votes than nays at the end of the voting period, the yea decision wins, and vice versa.
- This is a system I'd love to expand upon in Sol, but for now, I'm going to keep it simple. Even then, the Factions Update is going to take longer than I originally expected due to all the features I want to add in. I dont have a date pinned for the next update but rest assured I'm working on it every day.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I appreciate your patience and understanding. Happy hunting!