Sengoku - Development Diary #17 - Post Release III - September 30!

[Johan]

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the post release development diary series. This is the third and final chapter of the 1.2 patch. We are putting it into QA now, and aim to have it out next week, if the stars are aligned right.

Thank you all for your feedback, and we hope that you will enjoy the game even more after we release this patch.

This week have seen quite alot of development of new features and interface improvements. I'll just mention several them briefly in todays diary.

First of all, we added a new alert for when you have unmarried childs of your leader in your court. Which should help also alerts clickable.

Secondly, we also added a back button on the character screen which lets you get back to previous character, for quite alot of selections.

We talked earlier this week about the addition of a 1551 starting date, so for more details, go to http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum...g-that-will-make-you-happy-with-the-1.2-patch..

Last week saw a few event series, and this week we added a fairly important one. An event series where your vassals and courtiers will ask for titles, and you can promise them stuff. Just make sure you live up to your promises.

Sometimes its not easy to see who is who when you try to select them for a ninja assassination or determening clan heir, or just giving a title to them. Now we've added some more detail to the character selection view, so you can see who is a son, daughter, heir or has a job.

If you want to change the names of your armies, then that will also be possible in the 1.2 patch.

Speaking of armies, when you conquering, you often spend a lot of time just giving out titles, so this was something we needed to streamline. There is now a "grant" button on each province of your demesne, where you can quickly select who to give that province to.

Its not just interface, scenarios and events. We have added a new diplomatic option, where you can transfer any of your direct vassals to become vassal of another of your direct vassals. This should help you organise your clan quite a bit better.

We also rebalanced honor for the endgame, with two changes impacting it. First of all, the cost of declaring war is relative to the size comparison between your clans, so that beating small ones is not deemed honorable. Also giving out titles when you are a big clan does not net as much honor as when you are small.


Its not just been adding new features and improving the interface thats been done in the last week, we've also fixed bugs, with the 3 most noticeable ones, being the following. 1) Not being able to win when conquering entire Japan, 2) difficulty option not having a real effect, and 3) provinces ending up without any owners. Those are now eradicated from the game.

Here is a screenshot of granting a province from the province view, with the new selection mechanics.

 

[Captain Gars]

Does anyone know if the Wife bonus issue is resolved? I would really prefer the first wife (or whoever is providing the stat bonus) have some kind of outline on their icon. And if she dies, either the next one you marry, or one of the current ones, can be appointed in the new bonus-providing "First Wife" role.

With the patch all of the wives will be able to provide stats. Whoever has the best stat in one category will be taken into account. So you can have one wife with high martial skill and another with high diplomacy for instance.

 

[Captain Gars]

So everyone will now have a Warrior Wife, a Diplomatic Wife, a Spy Wife, and a Pretty Wife.

Exactly.

 

[Captain Gars]

I would just love to know if the team has considered a few things I posted lately for gameplay/historicity/realism improvement.
I am particularly interested about:

1) neutral territories can't be violated

No. We decided early on to skip to usual system of demending neutral access, which usually just aids the player in a rather gamey way.

2) levies can't be raised in just 1 day

No. They are still raised on day one, but they always start with 40% morale so it still take some time before they're fully operational.

3) movement speed should be at least CLOSE to 30 li per day

?

4) rising levies will spoil relations with clans who border your mobilized territories and they also will react with counter mobilization.

No.

5) rising levies will suffer from heavier attrition during the harvesting months (Ashi only) and during this month the mobilized provinces should have a $ production penalty.

No, since we don't have seasons. Seasons would however be nice to implement at some point.

 

[Captain Gars]

Excellent. I've wanted to play as Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and the back button is probably the #1 change requested by the fans.

He is in the game, but has another name and is just a courtier. So to be able to play as him you'd need to start as his liege, give him land, then switch to playing him. Same as with Hōjō Sōun in the 1467 scenario. But it's fully doable and something I'm planning on doing myself.

For those interested in playing some of these historically important characters that goes under another name can find them here (the 1551 guys after the patch is out):

1467:
Hojo Soun: Ise Shinkuro (# 417)
Courtier of Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, usually traded away as a hostage at start.

1551:
Tokugawa Ieyasu: Matsudaira Ieyasu (# 693)
Toyotomi Hideyoshi: Hashiba Hideyoshi (# 800)

 

[Captain Gars]

I didn't mention asking for permission. Only very firm allies would allow to do that and only against a common enemy. I was wondering if this petty and very gamey feature of walking nonchalantly onto neutral territories could be fixed. It's just really horrible. The only viable "easy" fix would make you able to pass through only if involved in a common plot. That's the easiest way to do it I can think of. Just a suggestion of course.

I think this could gridlock the game. What about clans that have their territory spread out in several places? What about two clans at war with each other but having a neutral clan in between? I'm not saying our system is historical but on the other hand I can't recall from reading about this period that armies on the march were all that restricted by clan borders.