Legion
6/10/2015 8:26:34 PM | There are more or less two different games to be played now. The first is the traditional
game in Mythic City where all new players begin. That game is unchanged and the goal is still to adventure enough that your people can pay the daily tax to the clan in order to accumulate enough money to hire quality recruits. However, once you save and spend the 25 gold for your own clan world (CW), you have access to the second game.
This "world game" is very much under development, and while it will see the bulk of my programming time these days it might not yet be something everyone wants to investigate. Although, for what its worth, I have moved all my characters in Legion onto the clan world and from now on I intend to only play from there. After an initial period of suffering (I lost 10 characters levels 4-8 in the first week and several lower ones) it seems to be quite playable.
On-world you have much less control over how you launch your adventures. Functionally, CW play basically consists of going to the clan page, picking a recruit value, and clicking "next day." At this point your people will decide, on their own, how they would like to spend the day. Most days, most people do nothing. Or perhaps they'll cast some healing spells on injured friends. However, they slowly accumulate ambition at a rate determined by their health and willpower. When their ambition is high enough, they will decide to start an adventure.
Adventures are started at shrine locations, and every CW has a shrine location in the initial zone. Right now there is no way to view your locations, nor explore new ones, but this will be coming. The fact is that right now each CW has a single location, and it is a shrine, and all your CW people are located there. Note that I use "person" and "character" interchangeably. I always refer to people as your in-game characters as opposed to players who are you, the human, running the show). So, when a person decides to go on an adventure due to sufficient ambition, he will invite everyone else in the zone to come along. Each character in the zone will decide, on his own, whether or not to join. This decision is based on many, many things. But the four biggest are their own health, their own ambition, the level difference between them and the leader, and how much they like the leader. To determine how much they like the leader, they consider a large number of things like the charisma of the leader and their leadership skill level, as well as factors such as alignment similarities/differences, racial preferences, which god they worship (more on that below), and even gender.
Once the party is auto-selected a sacrifice must be made to one of the gods in order to open the portal to the adventure. The leader is in charge of the adventure, so it is his god that will gain power from the sacrifice, and the leader who will gain credit in the eyes of his god. People without a god give it to a random god and get much less credit. The sacrifice amount is a small amount of money (or item, if you're out of money) from each person. If the total sacrifice is large enough, the leader will gain piety (more on that later).
The adventures are random, and their difficulty level is hidden from view. Random adventures (all of them, now just these CW ones) now have a chance not having a return portal in the starting square. This is uncommon, but it does happen on occasion. When it does, the only way to get home is to locate an exit. There will be times (it has happened to me already) when you get dumped into a mythic adventure with no initial portal. I suspect there will be times where you lose everyone. I will be adding a movement spell that allows you to open your own portals home sometime in the future, but it will be a relatively high level spell requiring a lot of SP. In the meantime, people will lose parties -- know I'm planning to. That is just part of MW, as you know, and nothing to get upset about. Luckily, daychanges are free on the CW since people are not taxed there and have no expenses. The only thing slowing you down from clicking "next day" a zillion times are these self-starting adventures, but they are infrequent and despite whole-party losses you should see your clan member count increasing. Mine is already up about 15 people and that is after all the losses I've been suffering. Also, losing high level characters on the CW might actually be a good thing now. See below.
In addition to these self-starting adventures, you can, if you choose, select a person on the CW and tell him to go on an adventure today. This can be handy, for example to complete a mission. You can also do this strategically such as starting an adventure with a good leader (high charisma+leadership) so similar characters will come with him on a large adventure rather than risk them going in much smaller and more vulnerable groups. Keeping an eye on ambition can identify people likely to adventure each day, and if a horrible leader is high in ambition it might be worthwhile to try to coax him into someone else's adventure where there will be a better chance of success. Or perhaps, you want a specific guy leading so that the sacrifice is made to his god instead of someone else's, which will both increase his piety and increase the power of his god.
Selecting people is done through the clan page. On your CW map (once you get one) you'll see a number in each zone for how many characters are there. Click the zone, check "show people," and you'll get the list of personnel available. Just click the name of the guy you wish to select and you'll see an option for starting the adventure. You'll also notice that the title bar turns blue and your clan name is replaced by the person name. This is because you are now in person mode. There are 3 modes of play in your CW. The default clan mode is what you're used to already. Here you will click "next day," create characters, and do other clan-related tasks. In person mode you will be playing the game as a single character. You will have control over what this guy does, set up how he will spend his time, where he will go, etc. Right now the only additional thing you can do in person mode is, as I mentioned, launch an adventure with that guy.
The third mode isn't accessible to players yet, and that is god mode. In this mode you will take on the role of a specific god and have available actions that will include, among others, sending followers to the CW. This will be sort of like recruiting, where the more power the god uses up, the better the new character will be. Characters gained in this manner may have the ability to start at higher levels and will often be similar to the god in the sense of having the same race, similar alignment and class, and perhaps even similar skill sets and attributes. Note that you can't access god mode yet, so ignore this paragraph.
About gods. When a character of sufficient power (currently 1000 xp) dies on the CW, he is still deleted and gone from your clan. But he will also become a god! That's right: every 1000xp+ character you lose becomes a god in your own CW, meaning there can be literally thousands of gods one day if you lose enough high level people. Of course, all gods are not equal. They have a power rating which determines what level of interference in the affairs of mortals they can affect. A freshly-created god has 0 power. However over time, they gain it. The rate they gain it is related to their level as a character when the died, but primarily affected by the number and power of their followers. It will also increase drastically when sacrifices are made (to open portals for adventures, as described above). So as your still-living people start to worship your gods, the gods gain power, and their followers will make sacrifices which give them even more power.
A character on the CW also has a happiness score. This will ultimately be affected by many, many factors, but initially is only based on two: his health and his wealth. Each day it will go up if he is at full hp and has a lot of money, or down if he is poor and/or injured. If it goes below 0 he will be eligible for selecting a god. After all, if you're rich and powerful, you don't really need divine help do you? So once a person has a god, you probably want to keep his happiness high, since if it goes too low the character will be in danger of looking for a new god which will wipe out any piety he has accumulated with the old one.
Piety is currently primarily gained through sacrifices, although it can also be gained during daychanges under certain circumstances.
What good is piety? And what good does it do you to build up powerful gods? Right now, none at all. These values aren't used anywhere, for any reason. But in the future this should change. I foresee many uses for gods and piety, including a pray button as a character action in battle where if your piety is high enough and your gods power large enough he might grant you a divine gift of some sort. Perhaps just some healing or fatigue reduction. But if you are the most powerful and pious follower of a powerful god, you are very important to that gods power stream! Not only does your existence as a high-level follower directly boost the gods power, but if your piety is high it is because you have directed many and large sacrifices for him. In essence, your piety is a representation of how much you have directly contributed to the power of your god, and thus how important you are for that god to keep alive. I expect many high-powered actions to be available to gods from blessing you with buffs or smiting your foes, to whisking you (or even your party) home from a bad situation or even resurrecting you if you die! Yes, I said that!
So this is a long explanation of some of the things I've been working on the past couple weeks. I'm not exactly sure what is coming next. As always I have big plans that will inevitably get side-tracked. I'm not going to get into any specifics here, since I don't want to be held to any agenda or time-table. But if you're adventurous, you might want to move your guys (or at least a large chunk of them) to the clan world for a while to see how it all works. Transit back and forth from Mythic City to your CW is free and unrestricted, so if you don't like it, you can move them all back. |