New batch of updates!

Rebellion Actions and Balance

My intention was to have two main gameplay aspects competing for your attention and resources. One is the combat side where you are recruiting units and conquering other territories. The other is to influence territory unrest to crack your opponents. Unfortunately I think the first aspect, combat, has largely overpowered the second aspect, influence, when ideally they would be similar. There are two problems that come from this imbalance

1. It usually does not makes sense to spend money on increasing or decreasing unrest because it cannot help you in the face of an attack, so the best use of your gold is usually to create units and buildings. 
2. When you are a weaker faction, usually the only realistic path to win is to recruit units to defend/attack, and even then it can be futile in the face of a massive enemy who can create armies faster than you.

These updates bring more balance to the two main gameplay aspects.

• Implemented logic for the AI to "Fund Rebels" and a particle effect for visibility. 
  • Increases the unrest gain across the map and makes the "Suppress Rebels" action more relevant.

• Added a new action to "trigger a territory rebellion". This pushes a territory to 100 unrest and triggers a single tile rebellion after 10 days. If unrest was < 50%, then the rebel army will be controlled by the funding faction.
  • Creates flexibility to quickly spawn problems for other factions, spawn reinforcements, or take territory.
• Increased gold income ( x 5). 
  • This seems counterintuitive because in the late game there is an issue with too much gold, but I actually think it  opens up the possibility space for the player because there is not so much fear of running out of money.
• Added army upkeep by subtracting the "number of armies" x "number of territories" from the monthly gold calculation.  
  • This aims to make the large increase in gold income benefit smaller factions more instead of scaling up everyone's power level. 
    

• Limited construction to one building at a time. 
  • Reduces the amount of money you can spend on buildings at one time, leaving funds available for other uses.
• Sieges will no longer block the UI for controlling territory unrest. 
  • Opens up the possibility to interrupt a siege with a rebellion (even a friendly one) and increases opportunities to influence unrest.
• Castle upgrades now only need farms of the same level built. 
  • Allows building tall without a side quest to make stables and gives more freedom to only build what you need.
• Recruitment times for LV2/LV3 units shortened to 15/20 days. 
  • Reduces the ability for a mass of weaker, quicker to build, units to blitz an opponent.

Other Bugfixes and Changes

Tutorial

• added new tutorial steps for triggering rebellions
• removed some unused UI in the tutorial when its not needed for less confusion

Map

• fixed a bug where new rebel armies would kick out other factions from the game
  
• fixed a pathfinding issue where a previous armies pathfinding would be used for the currently commanded army
  
• fixed some incorrect territory coordinates, which was leading to inconsistent behavior when moving armies

UI Improvements

• added a restart button to the in game menu for faster restart
• made it so the player can lose the game
  
• added faction effects to the faction selection list and made the list items larger
  
• removed the currently selected faction from the faction list since it was already at the top and duplicated in the UI
• abstracted away the "number of starting tiles" with "difficulty" on the faction selection screen
  

• re-worded some text to be clearer and added translations for some things that were not
• made the placeholder personality icons outlined to look more like the other effect placeholder ones
• added a feedback button link
• made the in game menu also come up in the faction selection screen for consistency
  
• removed quit button on the start screen because it did not do anything

Audio

• changed audio for calm rebels to the coin sound
• changed audio for fund rebels to a fire sound

WOW you made it to the end 😮 .... what are you waiting for, go check out the updated demo 🙂