The glorious Evolution of Master of Mana - Big Update over the years - Soon (tm) on Steam

[Jojo_Fr]

Great. I hadn't realised.

Can you please tell us about the factions we'll be able to play? I love the classic factions, like the ones in Fall From Heaven 2.

 

[Milliopolis]

I am making the game because no one else makes the kind of 4x games I used to love. I tried to get into civ5/6/7 but just couldn't love them. I don't know what it is but something feels off for me.

Let's look this video made by Battlemode who write for eXplorminate.
Recent strategy game developers make games just fullfiling 4X factors with fun to play. Strict defined 4X needs decisions to choose necessary stuffs and not to superfluous ones (i.e. wonders).
They may be afraid to be complained from players who want to choose eating taco or hamburger as lunch not to letting your mother or wife die for saving either one.
It was destined that buttering up those mass gamers when civ5 was sold 10 million units on Steam and civ6 was best seller on Switch.
No one under stock market can't deny to make pseudo 4X games.

 

[OzzyKP]

Great. I hadn't realised.

Can you please tell us about the factions we'll be able to play? I love the classic factions, like the ones in Fall From Heaven 2.

This game isn't a new version of Fall from Heaven 2. It is an entirely different game. The factions and lore are all new.

 

[Blake00]

Would also point out that he'd have some trouble selling it if he just ripped all the FFH2 content made by others. It has to be all new.

 

[Jojo_Fr]

Yes, of course. Having said that, I wanted to say beyond FFH2 as such, that I appreciate the classic factions, the classic axes of good versus evil, chaos versus law. And the usual fantasy races, humans, elves, vampires etc.. FFH2 has taken up these classic codes.

I've played some current games where these classic distinctions have disappeared. Orcs aren't really evil any more, and there's no such thing as good and evil. Personally, I don't like this development at all.

 

[Sephi]

There are different high fantasy races like orcs or dwarfs or woodelfs and they all live mostly in isolation. Some have a unique twist to them but I do not want to spoiler things. You pick one of them and you play them from start to finish, no switcheroo. But how you play them is largely up to you. And your choices will decide whether you survive or not. With every research you evolve your empire. With every law you pass you set its future. Each fantasy race is radically different from the others. They have their own buildings, their own units, their own laws and unique ways to advance. Some study the world and discover new technologies, others advance their society with blessings or through valor in combat.

 

[Blake00]

Interesting.. Different buildings for each race that serve a similar function (eg HoMM), or different functions entirely?

 

[Sephi]

Interesting.. Different buildings for each race that serve a similar function (eg HoMM), or different functions entirely?

It's a difficult question. What I do not want are things like demons getting happiness by building opera houses. The quickfix would be to just add a copy building with the same function and different name/art like sacrificial pit. But 4x games aren't about building buildings, they are about building empires and buildings are just a tool to it. Building a demon empire should feel different and have different obstacles and challenges than building a dwarf empire. So you could just give every race 50 unqiue buildings all with their own mechanics. But then you run into other issues. Lets say there is a city enchantment that boosts farmer and other one that boosts hunting and so on. It's ok if you find a scroll with a city enchantment that you cannot use every now and then. Just sell it. But if everything is so unique that you can use only 10% of all the city enchantment scrolls you find because there are so many different unique race mechanics you are locked out of that would also be a bad thing. At that point you would barely every find a useful city enchantment. I guess the answer will be somewhere in between. A few iconic unqiue buildings with their own mechanics. Some buildings shared like in Master of Magic. And maybe the ability to research a selected set of buildings from neighbour/similar races.

 

[Jojo_Fr]

I like the bit about the demon empire. We can imagine that their happiness depends on the number of prisoners they take, and the destruction they cause to the natural world. We can too imagine that the demons might be discontented, but not the "damned" part of their population, who are worst than slaves.

There will be strong imbalances between the factions intially, but that's not a problem, as things will even out over time as players give feedback to the game.

I remember the first time I discovered the Warriors of Chaos as "horde faction" principle in Total War: Warhammer. I thought to myself, "Wow, this is brilliant! It's so unlike any other faction!"

Too many games don't offer enough difference between factions, it's a shame!

 

[Sephi]

I have been quite busy with a few things. First I updated several interfaces of the UI. Some of them now joined the dark side and changed from a light schema to a dark one. For the followers I gave their portraits no backgrounds and I think it works quite nice.

One mechanic that took me quite a while to get right was the promotion system for the battle captains. The biggest issue with the civ4 system was that the generic combat promotions are just too good. I also did not want a system with a static optimal solution so that once player find their preferred setup they just use it every game and promoting units becomes mostly busy work without much decision making. I tried a couple of systems like using for example a point system where you get x points every level and different promotions cost different amounts of points. But these systems for the most part just complicated things and I wanted a system where the player can make a decision fairly quickly. If you can promote three battle captains after a battle it should not take 10 minutes.

I ended up using a system where each level up you choose between 5 random promotions. Here you can see an example. The battle captain screen shows a summary of all bonuses provided by a battle captain and currently available promotions:

Now these 5 promotions aren't fully random. Players would just figure out which promotions are the best and pick them every time they are available. Instead each battle captain has a class and you want to promote different battle captains differently based on their class, the unit they are attached to and what role you want them to assume within your army. In this case the battle captain has the fanatic class. The fanatic class gives two bonuses: You ignore morale and you get a synergy bonus: for every point of damage that you have you get half a hitpoint. This not only applies to the promotions of the battle captain but also to the base stats of the attached unit and any equipment. You could turn the fanatic into a very beefy frontline unit with additional hitpoints and immunity to fear/morale effects or a deadly skirmisher or assasin with increased survivability.
Here are some more details about the promotion system:
Promotions are catogorized into three types: offensive, defensive and utility. Battlecaptain classes make certain types of promotion more likely to show up.
There are three tiers of promotions: generic, perk and specialization
- generic promotions provide a small boost and can be taken an unlimited amount of times. This makes sure you never run out of promotions or forced to take stuff that does not fit your battle captain.
- perk promotions are stronger but can be taken only once. The chance for a promotion perk to show up at the selection increases with the level of the battle captain but also decreases with the amount of perks already selected.
- specializations: these are very powerful promotions available only at high level but you can only take one. So pick carefully.

 

[Sephi]

The ocean graphics need better heightmaps so I had the choice to either switch now to a better heightmap system or never. I decided to put in the work for the better heightmaps even though it will probably delay the demo by two or three weeks. Before almost everything was just flat, now it looks a lot more natural.

I have also changed the city layout to look a bit more natural even though it means less space for buildings.

With every district that you build more houses will appear until the city is full of houses.

 

[Blake00]

Your terrain is looking really good these days. Nothing worse than that rolling flat carpet feel (eg the Master of Magic remake).

 

[Sephi]

Ocean graphics are now mostly done. This island is part of my start location in testgame IV.

I won't put my start city there but maybe later I will settle another city on the island. There are some pearls west of it.

 

[Sephi]

I am now doing a final (as in last one before demo) quality pass on the leader art. I consider the leader art the most important piece of art in the game as it needs to highlight the personality to the leaders you fight against or together with.One thing about civ7 that I loved and will also do is to give every leader a different mini portrait in the scoreboard depending on their relation towards you. Well two leader are wearing masks so you cannot see whether they smile or are angry.

On the scoreboard which is part of the main UI you can see the relation status symbolized by a smily icon. The percent number shows how close or far away the AI is from Victory. The blue number on the right is a diplomatic resource called trust. You gain trust by doing this for the AI like responding to help requests or demands. A good relation with the AI also gives you a little bit of trust per turn. You can spend trust to make the AI do something for you. This system replaces gold as a universal currency to broker deals.

 

[Sephi]

If you click on a mini portrait you get to the diplomacy screen.

In the top middle of the screen you can see the diplomat slot. Diplomats are followers you can attract by spending glory and each one provides a random bonus. This one provides +50% trust gained from the ai leader he is attached to.

Friendship describes the relation towards the AI. There are five different friendship levels: archenemy, hostile, indifferent, trustworthy and friendly. You have both a friendship score with an AI and a friendship income per turn.

If you mouseover an ai leader portrait on the scoreboard you can see what is required to advance the relation with that leader.

Aggression, Curiosity and Loyalty refer to AI personality. Aggression means a leader will attack more, Curiosity means the leader will spend more resources to claim wondrous locations and leaders with negative loyalty might backstab friends. Each leader has starting values depending on his lore. Leader talents also modify the ai personality, the mercenary lord talent for example increases aggression and reduces loyalty.

You can only sign a limited amount of treaties with all leaders. This reflects the limits of your administration. Currently the base value of treaty capacity is between 3-7 depending on how diplomatic a faction is and each diplomat you recruit adds another 2 treaty slots.You can sign different kinds of treaties with different leaders depending on their faction and leader talents. There are only two universal treaties that you can sign with anyone: peace treaty which requires atleast indifferent relations and military alliance which require friendly relations. Each faction unlocks three treaties that depend on the cultural values of that faction. In the screenshot above that is Border Patrols, Knowledge Exchange and Veiled Motives Pact. The Charter of the Black Banners is unlocked by the mercenary lord leader talent and the Treaty of Iron Resolve is unlocked by the general leader talent. So depending on what neighbours you have you can sign different treaties with them and gain different bonuses.

These mechanics are somewhat interlocked. For example I used the mentorship action which costs 75 trust to teach one of my leader talents, the mercenary lord talent to the Elisa. Teaching a talent to the AI makes the AI stronger but can also unlock treaties and modify their personality. Since I specialize on mercenaries in this game I want a lot of AIs that are somewhat friendly with me to have the mercenary lord leader talent so that I can sign a mercenaries treaty with them and gain more mercenaries myself. However because I teached the mercenary talent to Elisa her loyalty dropped below zero so she now might backstab me if I have bad luck.On the other hand I can now use trust to get her to attack other AIs she is at peace. Loyal AIs will only agree to attack other leaders they already do not like.

 

[Sephi]

I have experimented with video AI to give the leaders an intro animation and let them come to life a bit.
I cannot post the animations here since the forum does not support videos directly I think but I converted them to low quality gifs to show the idea. The gifs are looping which looks a bit silly but ingame you see the animation only once when you open up the diplo screen.

 

[Blake00]

wow.. just wow..

 

[Calavente]

all that is very beautiful and neat !
I'm guessing the step-up to be able to understand an juggle with all the feature may take a bit of time for a new player.

(btw, beware of the reaction of players or communities to the use of AI art ... I don't know how "AI animation of a non-AI art" places)

 

[Sephi]

all that is very beautiful and neat !
I'm guessing the step-up to be able to understand an juggle with all the feature may take a bit of time for a new player.

(btw, beware of the reaction of players or communities to the use of AI art ... I don't know how "AI animation of a non-AI art" places)

Words of wisdom. Better not poke some hornet nests, few places on the internet are as civilized as this forum.

It's true the game has a lot of features and this is even only one of three diplomacy layers. The classic empire vs. empire diplomacy modus that allmost all 4x games have. Maybe even more important is the diplomacy on the local level. The map does not start empty, there is lots of stuff on it like trade villages, scholar enclaves, bandit strongholds, etc. And then there is diplomacy via organizations that span accross multiple empires like merchant guilds or religious cults. At the same time I want new players to have a good time. There is this old design motto of "easy to learn, hard to master" which I always follow but of course it is difficult to implement, especially with this many features. UI of course is also important to make a game easy to learn. At the same time I want a UI that is highly functional. Some game developers hide advanced features behind multiple mouseclicks in some submenu but I think that's really bad because it annoys players who have mastered the game and play reguarly. Well I am going to take a close look at all the feedback of the demo.

Here is the roadmap of the last weeks. It's already finished.

Testgame III had the problem that I was able to win after only about 150 turns. Higher tier organization tasks gave way too much experience and since the organization victory is about focusing on organization tasks that highlighted the problem. I also have some code that limits the competetiveness of the AI when it comes to organization tasks but that code limited the AI a bit too much so it was too easy to do higher tier organization tasks. You compete with the AI for the organization tasks and I want prevent cases like in civ deity where the AI builds all worldwonders. I also increased the amount of tasks that need to be finished for the organization victory. So for testgame 4 I decided to try the organization victory again and it was much better balanced now. I won after 224 turns which is fairly similar to the economic victory in testgame 2 that took about 246 turns or so. In the long run I want a game with standard length to take about 300 turns.
The organization quite unique and pretty fun I think. You have to balance between doing tasks for the organizations and improving your empire. Since you can only do three tasks at the same time and you compete with other AIs for the tasks you cannot just build a big empire and the rush these tasks. I also really like the infiltrator leader talent.

The power from the talent comes from the diplomatic actions it unlocks. These are all infiltration actions that require corruption. Corruption is similar to espionage yield in civ games. The way you get it is to employ thieves in your cities. Thief is a profession that turns gold and traderesources into corruption. Basically you order your guards to look away every now and then and in return these thiefs must do some tasks for you. The slums district allows you to specialize cities into producing corruption.

With the infiltrator talent corruption becomes much more valuable. For example it allows you to trade corruption to gold with the steal gold action. At the end of the game you get statistics how much you used each action and I used steal gold 97 times. Probably more than half of my gold was stolen. Infiltrator talent and mercenry lord have a high synergy, for example I recruited mercenaries from a bandit camp for 500 gold, then send my thieves to them to steal back all that gold and more. The den of thieves unlocked by the infiltrator talent is a legendary tier building that increases the amount of gold your thiefs steal and gives a bonus to corruption in the city it was build.

I also added naval AI. This time I wanted the naval AI to work from the start. The AI has a strong focus to attack neighbouring cities first, it will only consider naval invasions if it is surrounded by friends or has no neighbours. I am not a fan of suicidal AIs that send their army to the other side of the world just because they hate someone.

 

[Calavente]

that's great !
the teaching-in is the most important part.
how will I, as a new player, understand to focus a game on a specific talent and not on a mix-mash of units and science...
How can I understand that some mechanic is great in that game, and not in that other one ?
in FFH2, different civs led to different strategy directions, and you were guided through the techs by your "special units, buildings & heros". and when more experienced, you could tweak or not follow that main lead by taking into account terrain, resources and neighbors to identify a "better strat"..
in FFH2, you were further proposed some "already existing synergies": Luirchips + MoK, Ljos & Svart with FoL... etc Ljos with archery line, Khazads without Mages...etc
and you could thus learn..

as each difference, talent / leader / advisor / conquered neutral city orients your civ's development in one direction , and because unless experienced, you'll only notice the fruits of that direction many turns later, how do you plan to ease the understanding of the different mechanisms and synergies and possible complexe interactions ??
It's a challenge for any game creator I think.

Otherwise the game is great for people that have time to understand all .. but not so easy to enter into....
(but maybe I'm a bit lost only because I never played any 4X beyond FFH2.. no civ 5, 6 or other more modern 4X that all introduce more and more mechanics and variables from the start.)