The Faith ModuleHere's my summation of what we're going to work on the coming months. The Faith module is meant to give more things for the player to do, we have spent a long time focusing on making the simulation richer, but it's time that the input got more nuanced.
There are five core pillars or goals with the module:
1 - Closer relationship between the player and the followers Writing commandments will no longer be accepted at face value and randomly (and almost arbitrarily) changed with associations. What will happen instead is that when a player has written their commandment the followers will react on the commandment depending on their ideology (more on that below). If a commandment lies outside of their comfort zone they will "downvote" it and/or change the wording of it, which is the true implementation of the association feature. If the player write commandments that the followers like they will be more eager to accept whatever the player says.
2 - Concept of timeThere will be a calendar of sorts where the player will get a better sense of when things should be done, this can be compared to games such as Pharaoh where you in the campaign get requests to send say, 1 ton of fish to the capitol, you have five months. If you don't comply you will suffer. This is a similar direction, but of course more of a "soft goal".
3 - Civilisation ProgressionInstead of being mostly static the people will gain knowledge in areas they perform in. For example if you have a city state that likes to farm they will get more food when working the fields. Another state might get really good at genocide. Knowledge in Crest is not static however, they can lose what they have gained if they don't use their skills for a long time. This is done to provide a more interesting story, for example the farming kingdom might transition into a trade empire or a city state eager, and able to wage war.
4 - IdeologiesDepending on how the followers fulfilled needs that will influence how they percieve the world. Since most of the city states won't be copies of each other there's a high possibility that there will always be dissenters regardless what the player is writing, this is intentional.
5 - Nuanced InputTo give the player more to do while not writing more commandments the player will be able to improve upon commandments, at the moment we're thinking of that you can add an association in the condition slot. The new association system would mean that Desert + Lion would mean a lion in the desert. The player would be able to do more micromanagement, but, commandments with associations will always run a bigger risk at being rewritten ("Didn't god mean 'lion' instead of 'lion desert'?). A risk and reward situation.
Bear in mind that we're still finding ways to expanding the input, without cheapening the commandment idea. So there will probably be more additions in the future!
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Here's some more mockup images that ties mostly into "pillar" 1 and 2. Let me know what you think.
New Interface
New Tablet
Calendar
The "F" means "festival", it's meant that at the end of each year the player will get feedback on if the people are satisfied with what you've done for them (or not).
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An extra proofreader never hurts
Fair enough!
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