July was a super productive month, with a heavy focus on Diplomacy, officer relationships, progression systems, and AI improvements. A key milestone was reached as core gameplay systems began interacting in previously unattainable ways, resulting in the game reaching a fully playable state. It was wild to suddenly have this collection of systems you’ve been working on for 4+ years turn into a playable game in a single month.. Anyway, here's what I worked on.
Diplomacy was by far the biggest focus this month. I took a base empty system into one where every faction has long-term strategic goals and tries to act intelligibly. I knew this was going to be a lot of work (and theres still more to do) but I was surprised just how much needed to go into this. Especially to support the individual officers going out as diplomats/ envoys to the factions capitols.
The diplomatic deal types I added are:
Goodwill (send gold to improve relations)
Alliance
Annul Alliance
Ceasefire
Declare War
Solicit Surrender (essentially confederation)
I started work on but still need to add more logic for:
Prisoner Exchange
Request Join War
Request Reinforcements
Other Highlights include:
Greater Faction Strategy Objectives for AI diplomacy.
Player driven diplomatic audience conversations.
Allow promising food, weapons etc during diplomacy agreements then having follow up foreign Resource Collection missions as part of accepting the request.
Officers must go to the other capitol and pick up the caravan of resources and transport back to their capitol
Penalties for not fulfilling such as ceasefire terminates, and diplomatic opinion shifts
Many new relationship and game state modifiers, including factors like mutual allies and faction leader opinions.
The goal is for diplomacy to feel like a living system that evolves naturally throughout a campaign instead of a bare bones system.
Relationships continue to become one of Notoris 2's defining mechanics.
AI officers can now trigger a new type of Social Encounter when talking to one another or the player. I've added a large number of dynamic conversation events that trigger based on friendships, rivalries, faction membership, and current circumstances. Depending on the situation, officers might influence a faction leader's opinion of someone, challenge each other to friendly duels or debates, bond over meals, hunting trips, or drinking. Sworn allies can reward each other with Mastery XP and other secret benefits.
Many existing systems were also expanded so relationships now influence combat, diplomacy, item ownership, and other campaign events. As well as 6 new skill tree nodes focused on friendships, sworn allies, enemies, and nemeses.
I iterated on and improved progression for officers and factions alike.
Highlights include:
New faction rank progression system (10 levels).
XP calculated based on # of towns owned, tiles controlled, and officers employed
Probably still need a gait based on current towns owned.
Streamlined promotion flow without requiring a dedicated menu.
AI officers can now promote themselves when qualified.
Faction leaders and town administrators will attempt to promote eligible officers.
Town Admins promote based on top performer for each month assignments (has dialogue)
Faction leaders attempt to promote based on loyalty issues
Mastery progression expanded with new XP sources from tactics, defeating enemies, assignments, and events.
Requirements such as # of assignments needed, and mastery per level have been significantly reduced for officer progression.
Combat continued receiving new tactical options and progression.
Highlights include:
New tactics including Impale, Entrench, Feint Attack, Entangle, Crippling Strike, Provoke, Blunder and Hamstring Strike.
Damage over Time support added to the buff and debuff system.
New Taunt effect that increases the chance of duels.
Panic now correctly prevents both player and AI units from acting.
Smarter tactical decision making and targeting for AI armies.
Unit deployment now previews stats, aptitudes, and available tactics before on the config menu.
Seizing a town now puts the army (if melee) inside to help prevent oscillation.
After spending most of development with zero audio, I added the Sonity audio framework and began working with 2 new audio devs from Sweden.
In preparation I ported over existing audio assets and the dynamic campaign music intensity system based on game state from NOTR1.
As always, a significant amount of development time went into improving AI behavior behind the scenes.
Some of the larger improvements include:
Smarter faction strategy planning.
Better military target selection.
Improved logistics and army supply planning.
Better officer assignment priorities.
Smarter free officer recruitment behavior.
Improved transport, transfer, and search assignment logic.
Better pathfinding through congested areas.
Numerous balancing tweaks and bug fixes.
Several major interface improvements were added this month.
Highlights include:
New Faction Details panel showing diplomacy information and strategic resources.
New Town Details panel showing critical details like population, troop and resource breakdowns.
Faster navigation between factions and officers.
Improved player notifications for many things that occur.
Better localization support, including Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese fonts.
New day wind visual effect
Now that the core gameplay loop is essentially fully playable, I've been focusing on eliminating performance hitches and reducing long end-turn times discovered during playtesting. Campaigns are becoming noticeably smoother as more optimization work is completed. AI turn times are still about twice as long as I’d like.
Since the game is playable over many turns, certain balance issues were exposed and tweaked during internal playtesting:
Population calculations (still needs more work late game)
Control spread
SEC affects on efficiency and Patrol action
Rebalancing AP recovery rate and AP max.
Content creation continued alongside programming.
This month included:
17 new officers.
1 new faction.
2 new towns.
Rebel Goblin factions system for low SEC towns.
Additional items and equipment.
New CDIR events.
Liu Bei + Tao Qian confederation type event
Free officers socializing at the tavern may trigger a convo with the town admin and offer to join.
More western map progress.
Finished foliage/mountains on eastern part of map.
Continued localization work.
Overall, July was about making the campaign world feel more alive. Diplomacy has grown into a much deeper strategic system, officer relationships now influence even more aspects of gameplay, progression continues to evolve, and AI factions make more believable decisions than ever before. Most importantly the game finally feels like a game!
Next month I'll be continuing work on the generic officer system, adding more variations of officers and fleshing out skill trees while continuing to support Audio implementation.