Axioms Of Dominion: A Fantasy DIP Strategy Game

[MoLAoS]

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.co...e-intelligence


This is a post about more low level mechanics and systems in the Intrigue/Intelligence gameplay. Talks about Missions, Detail Level, and so forth. Spying on characters, surveying provinces, and like that.


Here is a couple screenshots for people who care about mediocre in dev version images. Technically this shows the Intelligence Network Map Mode and Intelligence Panel but there isn't a ton of stuff displayed here since I'm in the early stages of working on it:
https://imgur.com/a/g6EGR5P


In the first shot the info panels are Provinces, Missions, Characters, Units, and Populations top to bottom. The lowest panel is Extensions, so potential characters and provinces, currently, that you could assign to a new Mission.


On the right is the Display Panel that shows what you've selected, which you'll then assign to a mission with a button at the top. The bottom right is the Mission Panel that shows info on the currently selected Mission.


This is all dev mode stuff, will get Labels, most buttons swapped to images like at the very top of the window, and will be appropriately "themed". Currently is the basic "Black Theme" that comes with TGUI.

[MoLAoS]

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.co...utm_medium=web

Did quite a few more posts this month including the key post above about the social simulation.

Also 4 posts on magic, all specialized magic posts are subtitled esoteric arcana because basically no other game has comparable magic.

The other 3 are also social simulation posts like the one I linked.

I am planning to move back to the strategy/map painting/economic side of the design soon, since I know lots of people are ambivalent about the character/social simulation part.

[alhoon]

I really, really like the Character consciousness. Are the "values" attached by randomness or they are a mix of randomness and "social norms" ?

[Dismounted Feudal Knight]

I'm likewise fond of the character aspect, but I/we may be a minority in that and developing the grand strategy - at least in equal measure - would probably broaden appeal.

[MoLAoS]

I really, really like the Character consciousness. Are the "values" attached by randomness or they are a mix of randomness and "social norms" ?

So on game start each Character gets a randomly generated Personality and Ideology. Same for rpg stats and other data. I am thinking about having every Character in a Province spawn with an identical Ideology, though. Or some settings options. Over time Characters and Populations should normalize and have similar ideologies based on their location and membership in a polity, like a given kingdom or some other kind of polity would have broadly similar Ideology for all characters and populations. For a variety of reasons related to game mechanics. Child Characters currently spawn with an average of the Ideology of their Parents. Their Personality is an average with some random modifiers then applied.

I'm likewise fond of the character aspect, but I/we may be a minority in that and developing the grand strategy - at least in equal measure - would probably broaden appeal.

Well the character aspect ties in to the grand strategy. Ideology impacts relationships between characters in a way similar to Personality but it is also modified by the Propaganda system. Similarly the Personalities of the Characters impact the grand strategy aspect because they are a major part of the motivation/goals/ambitions and the preferences for different Actions and methods. Plus obviously being Gregarious means that a character both wants to and is somewhat effective at social engagement and interpersonal relations. A realm can be held together by a socially active/proactive/adept leader and fall apart if their child is shy or aloof or w/e. Attention Points of course represent the ability of a single person to handle all the tasks of ruling. You can't do it all. And interpersonal relations helps define the ability to delegate. Some characters might not be inclined to delegation, sometimes a character with a less than optimal personality might not be able to motivate loyalty, although some characters are naturally loyal.

In the first post on this page, #21, you can see how the character system ties into the espionage system. Similarly there is a logistics system.

https://axiomsofdominion.substack.co...utm_medium=web

That is a post about planning and manage campaigns, which is a solid intersection of the character interactions and the strategy aspect. I guess it has been 2.5 months since that was posted and the social simulation stuff is a lot newer so it might seem like the strategy aspect is seconadry.

[MoLAoS]

This is a picture of a functional but not skinned/theme Genealogy menu. Basically some Menus have a small "nuclear family panel" but if you need fancy stuff you can hit the button to bring this up. Clicking the image of a Character, most of which are that default rock on a wooden background right now, centers that character and rebuilds the tree. It probably won't say "Main Character" in the final version but it gets the idea across. My plan is to have a couple different top level "formats" with some filters and stuff for each one. So you can get one that is more like CK3 or like Ancestry or w/e you like. Also all the names won't be ones that start with A but I haven't fancified the name generator yet since I just need something that has basic functions. Similar to how the map is very basic and has those weird alternating line artifacts.

That horrific looking bell with a red 0 is the Alert icon, pretty similar to how Civ works, changes when you have alerts and clicking it takes you to the place to get a basic idea of what the alert is for. Like if an Unit in an Army is short on supplies or w/e.

[alhoon]

I don't want to be a dick but I think your interface needs work. Steam reviews will rip up that game based on the interface alone.

[MoLAoS]

I don't want to be a dick but I think your interface needs work. Steam reviews will rip up that game based on the interface alone.

If you read the post you'll see that this is using the basic "black theme" from TGUI. That's why I referred to it as unthemed/unskinned. I'm just doing the UI work necessary for me to check if things work and find bugs and so forth. The UI is in flux until pretty late into development so no point in fancifying it now. Similarly the map generator is just enough to be functional. Of course it isn't going to look as pretty as a Paradox or Creative Assembly game even then. More like At The Gates or Distant Worlds or something, visually. Mechanically I'd expect it to compete even with Paradox, though, if not surpass them.

[MoLAoS]

So I've spent the last week mostly doing optimizations and a little bit of refactoring the AI code. Performance is way up for turns even with 6 digit character counts. Additionally basic multi-threading is enabled. The NPC AI "Planner" is almost totally thread safe, which means it can run on the Player Turn and with a dynamic number of threads based on hardware. An 8 thread implementation, plus the main thread and other programs is rougly 80% faster than a main thread and a single thread for the Planner. And of course the speed up is enormous when you run it on the Player Turn since that is free processing time. 20 seconds for a special simulated version that represents ~1mil NPCs plus some relatively high computation data processing. Additionally for convenience some moderately intense code is run in the second AI step instead of the planner which could be moved. This causes roughly 2-4 second turn times when you hit end turn but I want to wait till later on for fancy optimizing.

For people with 8P/16L Core CPUs a top bound of 10 seconds on turns seems, currently, to be reasonable. Especially with heavy computation done on Player Turns.