Dev diary 83: Reaper's Due adjustments (part 1)
Reaper's Due has turned out to be a bit messier than expected, so it has become prudent to split the relevant changes into multiple dev diaries. Below are some of the changes that currently have been made
The Dancing Plague:
Completely unchanged as of now, and fairly likely to stay that way (unlike various things not mentioned below); it is rare, at least subjectively funny, and fairly mild (a risk of One-Legged + Wuonded, as well as a temporary health penalty during the events). At most, I see myself doing very minor AI logic additions, but even that might not end up happening.
The End of Days:
The AI logic has been significantly overhauled (e.g. Kind/Just/Charitable characters are much less likely to support a councillor's "Take advantage of the worried peasants to make money" scheme than Cruel/Arbitrary/Greedy characters), there has been some restructuring (e.g. no more unnecessary letter from a poorly selected (it could select an imprisoned rival or someone at war with you...) worried character), and some sanity improvements have been made -- e.g. someone with a secret religion will no longer get to go with the "This is a punishment from [public religion's high god]!" option, and the "prophet" event will no longer select a courtier and randomly give them +22 raw stat points, +3 health, and some trait tweaks overnight -- to make things work better. The localisation also got a few tweaks, in particular some related to flawed vanilla assumptions regarding the gender or religion of characters.
Outbreak events:
Only the localisation has been changed, removing some assumptions about the world (e.g. the religion in specific places) when the Black Death comes to town. I don't think these events need any other changes, seeing as they're just narrative events with no effect.
Symptoms (and alchemical side-effects):
Assorted "You got a symptom!" events now have a smallish chance to give you a "The symptoms are getting worse" event and associated modifier on a small delay. This is partially to allow the RAS' potions' side-effect events to be less obvious (particularly when someone has been slipped a humiliating potion or a poison) and to let them give some ingredient-related penalties if you've already got symptoms.
(The loc tag will be fixed alongside assorted other modifier tags that still need loc, and the event picture is perhaps also changing (I didn't know the Byzantine group had that one for the "stressed ruler" picture...)).
Related to this, the side-effects for assorted alchemical potions (including those tested on a prisoner) have now been properly implemented. In addition to the short-term outcome -- and potentially even if the potion did something obviously good or bad -- you can now get a number of fun little side-effects ranging from getting rid of a hangover or a fever all the way to madness or an untraceable "natural" death.
Immortals beware; you
can be poisoned in plots, so you
can die from a very unhealthy potion (
working immortality potions can never result in death due to side-effects, however, outside possibly being killed from a more temporary health penalty if you are drinking it in a slow fashion). Maybe don't go overboard on the aphrodisiacs and fertility potions unless you know they are safe.
Eternal Life:
Aside from some smallish localisation tweaks (such as making sure the localisation does not assume that you don't reshuffle councillors at any point during the event chain), the main things done here have been AI logic -- despite vanilla potentially allowing these events for the AI, it went with a 50/50, 33/33/33, or similar setup in a lot of places -- along with making councillors that are your rivals less likely to actually find a real mystic (because why would they want to do that?) and making the frauds better at Intrigue but harder to catch overall (e.g. no more +15 Learning for the non-fraud child). Oh, and courtiers investigating frauds will only truly catch them with sufficient Intrigue!
Maimed and torture events and prisoner maiming and torture (plus a few related things):
There are some smaller changes here. The AI logic has been improved (also the case for e.g. dragon burning or using the brazen bull) to make it a bit saner (e.g. it is now less likely to read poetry if doing so would release a prisoner it has a very good reason to not want to go free), the random "Do you want to torture a prisoner?" event from the base game has been disabled with RD (because it's better to have all of the torture work similarly), characters that have already lost an eye now can be fully blinded (for whatever reason, vanilla did not allow for that; was your character strangely merciful, your prison guards very firm, or what?), and nicknames are rarer and a bit saner (e.g. no more "Son/Daughter of [your] EvilGod" for torturing/maiming your religious enemies).
Additionally, prisoner maiming now tries to make the punishment fit the crime or to make it particularly cruel. Are you a fan of reading (Scholar/Erudite)? Would be a shame to lose your eyes, would it not? Are you a man that got caught cheating on the character doing the maiming, did you sleep with their wife/concubine, or are you a Seducer? Say goodbye to your "favourite toy"!
Prosperity events:
The main things that have been done here is making the opportunities you get a bit more fitting (e.g. MRs are more likely to get merchant harbours), to make stuff rarer/inaccessible (it depends) for tribals since their realms at their most prosperous still shouldn't be too fancy, some sanity tweaks (e.g. no more "Hey, this province needs a Centre of Worship!" if it has an active Grand Temple (any type) Great Work), some AI logic being added, and the addition of a few options (a Silk Road-related option and, with JD, access to the special JD modifiers).
Still on the list is making the modifiers go away/require upkeep after a while, because they don't as currently implemented, meaning that even if the province is burninated by a dragon or ravaged by nomads it keeps the modifiers (and Jewish settlements stick around even on religious conversion to a Jewish religion (and general RD minority religous communities, in general)...).
AI vassal meddling:
Vanilla does not allow the AI to ask/demand that its vassals end their wars (outside laws and Realm Peace), nor does it get to ask/demand that a vassal switches to Gavelkind, which gives the player an unfair advantage and which potentially makes things weird (e.g. the EoC's MoH hurting because he won't lift a finger if his vassals are fighting each other). This will change in Tianxia come 14.1.0; it has now been given access to those tools (using pulse events), and will attempt to use them when it makes sense (the AI logic is not completely done yet, but it'll e.g. be far more eager to meddle in a rival's wars than a friend's).
There is a related game rule with four options:
- Let the AI meddle in both specific internal wars and succession. Makes the playing field much more even. Generally the option we're likely to have in mind while doing further work, seeing as "Prevent internal warfare" and "Keep my vassals from having a lot of hereditary land going to the same heir" (historically more along the lines of "Don't allow any hereditary titles", but gameplay considerations for vassals -- and not having the player be a special exception -- take precedence here) would be pretty relevant to assorted bureaucracies in the Far East.
- Only let the AI meddle in specific internal wars. Useful if you don't ever want to risk being told you should switch to Gavelkind.
- Only let the AI meddle in succession. Useful if you don't want your internal wars meddled with.
- Don't let the AI meddle in specific internal wars or succession. Vanilla's implementation, in case you want neither of the above.
The Gavelkind-related stuff has also been changed; instead of only ever changing the primary title's succession law -- which doesn't necessarily make the vassal significantly weaker since the primary heir still could inherit a bunch -- the decision will now attempt to pick a secondary primary tier title (excluding rel head titles), making it more likely that the result (assuming the vassal isn't able and willing to refuse) will be "Secondary heirs inherit secondary titles" rather than "The primary heir still inherits the top titles, while the others maybe get a few counties".
Outside Reaper's Due, a number of smaller things (not just the ones shown in the teasers posted previously) have been done, but I'll only show two of them off here:
First off, province climate, being coastal, and the presence of some kind of winter now has an impact on disease resistance (numbers not final).
The above should make it so that some of the less hospitable parts of the map -- deserts and arctic provinces, to name a couple -- are less disease-prone than certain other places, while building your castle in a swamp remains a terrible idea even if it doesn't catch fire, fall over, and/or sink into the swamp.
Secondly, an extremely minor (just localisation) thing completely unrelated to diseases has been implemented for Enatic Clans Hellenics: They'll now pick a rather more fitting name for their holy order (the missing "the" was fixed after taking the screenshot).
That's all for today. The next Reaper's Due-related dev diary -- focusing on the seclusion event chain, which is getting a
very significant overhaul because it has a lot of issues and it also happens to be something you're effectively forced to interact with quite a few times in any given playthrough (well, unless you want to risk your court dying due to epidemics...) -- isn't too far off (barring any surprises), considering it is decently far along, while the other remaining RD-related changes (concerning hospitals, "epidemic events", treatments, physicians, and "general flavour") most likely will have to wait until a third dev diary further down the line as the remaining RAS work is more important to get out of the way in the short term as that'll allow for us to do more proper internal playtesting of the society.
