February was another foundational month.
We had a good balance of under the hood updates with actual player facing visual and gameplay changes.
Here’s what changed:
I dramatically rebuilt how modifiers function at a foundational level. I’ve called this the Dynamic Effect Modifier System or DEM for short.
The system is now modeled much closer to Total War: Three Kingdoms, where officer stats can affect multiple scopes in a scalable, layered way:
Self (personal stats like duel/escape/capture/retreat chance etc)
Building Output (Gold / Food / Weapon productions etc)
Town Administrative scope (efficiency, recruitment, growth etc)
Faction-wide scope (Faction Leader can affect all the above)
All modifier definitions have been moved out of Unity ScriptableObjects and into JSON.
Why This Matters:
Fully data-driven & modular
Easily expandable for future content
Designed to be exposed for modding
UI reads modifiers dynamically, making it inherently scalable
Supports deep role specialization (economic admins, military admins etc.)
This base layer is what makes strategy games actually work long-term.A scalable modifier pipeline that can be injected into at multiple scopes without hardcoding logic.
It Allows:
Meaningful skill trees and traits that fill unique roles
Clean extensibility without engine changes
Balance iteration via data instead of code
A much needed feature has been introduced:
If Player is Faction Leader:
Can appoint or replace Town Administrators
Officers assigned as Admins apply their administrative modifiers to that town
If Player is Not Faction Leader:
Can formally request to become Administrator of a specific town
Logic setup for other officers to vote for/against this based on variety of factors such as relationship.
Both actions cost the core strategic resource: Influence and can be accessed via the Greathall.
We’ve completed the full paint-over of the Territory Map background panels.
The old v1 terrain has been replaced with:
4 Distinct Biomes
Northern Mystical
Northern Mountain
Central Plains
Southern Jungle
Improved biome color separation
Cohesive tone mapping across the full map
New Art Style
New Foliage assets (trees) for 3 of the 4 regions
We’ve done a visual overhaul of the Inner Town view.
One full layout is now basically complete in the new style.
Note: The buildings slots are still being updated to match the new style.
Built out a proper terrain type system and tied to grid tiles.
That allowed me to:
Make diagonal movement respect rivers and natural block paths
Align gameplay logic with the actual map art
Add a terrain-color debug grid view
Add terrain stat effects for things like elves in forests
Improve debug/starting army placement logic
Fix a save/load race condition
Foliage editor tooling built
Central Plains foliage added
Northern Forests added
Southern Jungle added
Began experimenting with Hills terrain concepts
Fixed world-space UI being blocked by mountains/foliage
The campaign map is finally starting to feel like a world instead of a prototype board.
5 new officer added with unique portraits
3 new officers added with placeholder portraits
Reworked several officer portraits with minor adjustments
27th Town added
Added a togglable player UI log window for generic info that's not important enough for popups, banners, or side bubble notifications.
Added UI for searching all factions/towns/officers
Added ability to resign from a faction
Improved AI pathing behavior and integrated with new terrain costs
Added capture/escape chances for officers when defeated
Fixed lighting in build scene
Fixed an issue with Orc 3D model
Reworked some floating point rounding issues
Fixed a UI issue with tooltips not being the right size for the first frame causing them to pop in all ugly like that had been plaguing my existence
More soon!