Dev Diary 46: Character interactions, expanded revolts and more!
Salvete! Today we'll be talking about some highly desired features including expanded revolts, character interactions, AI schemes, some minor GUI changes and finally new loading tips. To begin i'll hand you over to Dementive.
Dementive here with a lot of changes that I've been making in all areas of the game.
First of all, changes have been made to how revolts will happen. Now, when a province revolts, if there are any other provinces in the same region or bordering the initial revolting province with less than 15 loyalty, they will also revolt and join the war. This will lead to less frequent but larger revolts. The AI balancing for this is tricky, so for the AI the larger revolts will only happen when the country has more than 400 territories.
A lot of new character interactions have been made. These include:
- Offer Citizenship - If your ruler is a friend with a foreign character who is a minor character and not married to anyone important, you can start an event chain to try to woo them over to your country. This has a lot of limitations to it so it can’t be abused, but it should be a fun way to get some characters every so often.
- Force Retirement - If a character is a corrupt office holder but also has sufficient loyalty, you can give them a holding to “retire on”. Additional incentives can be added to the offer to help persuade the character, but they may reject anyway because of their personality.
- Ruler Retirement - If your ruler is old enough and incompetent enough, an interaction to enter retirement may be gained. This also has a lot of limits so it can’t be abused and has a high cost in both stability and political influence.
- Suggest Training - If there is a character that is part of the ruler's family that is between the ages of 16 and 35 and is doing nothing at all, an interaction to “Suggest Training” will be available. This will allow the ruler to suggest that this worthless character who is doing nothing will train him\herself to try to better a certain attribute.
- Offer Protection - If your nation has the “Power Diplomacy” oratory invention, it unlocks a special character interaction that is used on the ruler of small foreign nations. There is a diplomatic interaction that is very similar to this, but this is meant to be more of a character level interaction.
(Image says feudatory but it actually becomes a client state.)
(Also worth nothing that the AI is generally a lot more efficient at doing these character interactions so they should be more competitive compared to players.)
A lot of new character ambitions have also been added, with a focus on making holdings more dynamic and exciting. Schemes are only picked by AI characters, but don’t be fooled - they have a big impact on the way your game plays out. I wanted to make it so that granting a character a holding will have more interesting effects. There were already a few existing schemes like this in the base game, such as “invest in mining” and “invest in agriculture”, but now, depending on the personality of the holder of a holding, there are a lot of new schemes that they may start to push their personal interests. These new ambitions include:
- Assimilate Pops in Holding - holding owner will attempt to assimilate some pops to his culture depending on his zeal and traits.
- Convert Pops in Holding - Same as above, but with conversion instead.
- Invest in Port - If a character has a coastal holding city with a port, they may attempt to expand the port.
- Exploit Populace - If a character is corrupt or has bad traits (such as cruel), they may start a scheme to exploit the pops in a holding. This will reduce output and potentially kill pops in the holding while giving the holder increased wealth.
- Increase Statesmanship - Characters that are office holders will now have a chance to start a scheme to try to increase their statesmanship. This is a very needed change, because statesmanship is often very low in the late game, so this should help bring it up for some characters with certain traits/attributes.
- Increase Ruler Popularity - Basically the same as the increased legitimacy scheme but popularity instead. This one and the next one are set with a character interaction on the ruler.
- Decrease Ruler Corruption - Travel the realm and show the benevolence of the ruler for a chance to decrease corruption.
- Prove Legitimacy - This is a vanilla character interaction for rulers but I’ve added the chance to get the new Invictus bloodlines to it. If your nation is in a Greek or Indian culture group and have no bloodlines yet, there is a small chance of gaining a new bloodline based on your culture with this interaction.
- Pregnancy trait has been removed, it now uses a base game GUI function instead, this is better for performance. An icon and description of the pregnancy will now show up when clicked on a pregnant character instead.
- The GUI for select target character and select target province have been updated. These show up when character interactions like Arrange Marriage or Revoke Holding are used. I’ve added more info to them to make decision making more informed.
Salvete omnes! My name is Zorgoball, and it’s a pleasure to meet everyone. Perhaps you have seen my name pop up in previous Dev Diaries; I’ve been helping out with writing some of the localization for the mod since January, mostly with the incredible mission trees and events you’ll get to play in our next update, but today I am here to briefly discuss a tiny little thing we have added; more loading tips!
In the grand scheme of things, loading tips are a very minor addition, but can absolutely add more flavor - a humorous anecdote from a Roman farming manual or a sharp rhetorical question by a grouchy philosopher goes a long way in setting the tone of the day-to-day world. We have basically doubled the amount of loading tips that you will now see when starting up the game, choosing from a wide variety of texts written during and around Imperator: Rome’s time period. You will be treated to selections, both prose and poetry, from all around the world, including but not limited to;
- The Irish epic Táin Bó Cúailnge
- The Edicts of Ashoka
- A True Story, The Satyricon, The Golden Ass, The Argonautica
- The Georgics and Eclogues of Virgil
- The Dhammapada
- Authors like Sallust, Vitruvius, Julius Caesar, Cicero, etc. etc.
And so on. This was tremendously fun to do, small yet impactful feeling - I hope it helps to set the mood as you get ready to write your own stories!