[II] Feature Preview 7: Influence

Before I start with our newest preview, let me apologize for the long wait. I am currently pretty busy with exams at the university and therefore I'm not in a mood to do a real lot of modding in my free time. Anyways, here it comes:

Quote:

---

in·flu·ence
-noun

1. the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others: He used family influence to get the contract.

---

This is the definition from dictionary.com, one that in my opinion fits quite nicely what I want to talk about today.^[1] But let's start, as they say, at the beginning.

Glorious Achievements

Let me take you on a journey back to the days of the original Medieval: Total War, into a world of sprites and a beautiful 2d strategic map with artistic inlays that actually made you feel like you were sitting at a table with your generals and planning the conquest of the whole known world. But wait, you didn't have to conquer the whole map!
Remember that feeling when you first discovered the little checkbox that you could tick when you started a campaign - it was labeled "Glorious Achievements". What it did was to fundamentally change the conditions you had to meet to win the game: At certain key dates, so-called glorious achievement points were scored. You got most of these for controlling certain regions or calling a successful crusade, and as such they weren't very diverse or well-balanced - however, they presented you with a way to win that didn't necessarily involve conquering the whole map, which in itself is a marvelous achievement. Meanwhile, all of the AI factions scored victory points, too, and at the last of these key dates the faction that received the most points over the course of the game would score the big prize.

It will revolutionize the way you have to play

If you read our earlier previews, you probably have a fairly accurate suspicion of what this will culminate in: For II, we want to bring back the enjoyment of this great feature - and thus we are developing a similar system, which we are calling Influence.
I'm very excited about it, it's the greatest change in the game that we're attempting to implement and will revolutionize the way you have to play to be able to win. You won't have to follow the monotonous routine of conquering most of the map - instead, you continuously collect Influence for owning core regions, building advanced structures, fighting battles, gaining trade monopolies, signing diplomatic agreements like faction marriages, papal standing, conquering regions, ...
This leads me to the three important differences between our take on the feature and the implementation in the original MTW: One is a greater variety in the conditions that reward you with Influence; the second one is that we don't have key dates, you score points continuously; the last one is that you can also spend Influence again.

An investment into the future

That's right, Influence will be another resource to invest and in each case you'll have to decide whether it is more advantageous to save your points to win the game or to spend them to enforce a ceasefire, improve your faction standing or use it to make your settlement convert to your culture more quickly. So it's not like you just collect points in a safe stash somewhere (although you can if you want to), you invest it again to potentially get a larger reward in the future and only he who manages this resource well is going to win the game.
Influence will be very well integrated with our other features, for example you can spend some influence to improve the units recruited via the levy script, or you can pay some to allow for a higher degree of independence in a city for some time.

Artificial Stupidity - or was it Intelligence?

Our system of gaining Influence and having to wonder whether to spend it or not will force you to make some interesting decisions that will hugely influence the course of the game, so it's already a very enthralling experience in itself, but the maybe largest advantage of this feature is that the AI will actually be able to win the game. A large caveat about the game a lot of people complain about is that it's practically impossible to lose a campaign (if you don't see "not winning it" as defeat, and even then it's pretty hard) - the AI just doesn't nearly expand quickly enough to have any chance to conquer the large amount of provinces you need to win a campaign, and doesn't follow it's aims well enough in a short campaign.
This means that players have to find their own goals which can be fun, but I'd still rather have challenging goals from the designers of the game that I have to try to meet. It's readily apparent that the AI will easily gain as much influence as you (or more) for controlling its core provinces which will constitute the major part of your Influence, furthermore we can aid it a little by giving it some advantages over the player on the higher difficulty settings.
All this will make sure that the AI will finally become competitive and present a real challenge even to good players.^[2]

Interface problems

It's important to know that one of the largest problems when modding advanced features for this game is to create a good interface to actually allow the player to use the new system. Unfortunately we can't create new pages for the game's user interface, or add anything to the existing ones and therefore it's hard to find a decent way to interact with the player.
For Influence the problem can be broken down into two parts: Notifying the player of his (and the other factions') current Influence, and giving him ways to use it.
I think I found a fairly good solution for the first part of the problem. You will automatically be spawned a character who bears the title "the Accountant". His traits will exactly tell you how many Influence points you currently have and give you a rough idea about how many the other factions have. In addition to that, he will keep track of which core provinces you currently have and how much Influence they reward you with per turn.
Additionally, you will get an event message whenever a faction reaches certain Influence thresholds to keep you up to date or warn you should a faction get dangerously ahead of you. Below are a few screenshots to give you an idea of how this looks like.
The second problem is quite a bit more tricky and more compromises have to be made here. A lot of options will be enabled via advisor show-me interactions (yes/no decisions) and triggered by certain things you do. Some of these are one-of events, such as the opportunity to enforce a cease-fire which you will only get every few turns, others are triggered via the building interface. Furthermore, buildings that cost influence will tell you how much you will pay for them in the building descriptions (which will also carry a lot of other information).


Well this is it from me. I hope you enjoyed this preview and will visit us more often in the future.


Screenshots:

https://img175.imageshack.us/img175/...nce2wp2.th.jpghttps://img209.imageshack.us/img209/...nce1cj6.th.jpghttps://img213.imageshack.us/img213/...nce3ji6.th.jpg




^[1] Those of you who have read the Eagle Standard issue from July 15th will already have an idea of what I'm talking about, but I wanted to share our best feature with everyone else, too. (Back)

^[2] You may wonder why you shouldn't just conquer any AI that has more influence than you, but attacking them will severely hurt your reputation which can hopefully be coded to influence the AI's attack decisions to a large extent. In addition, it'll be very expensive to conquer new settlements and your supply lines will become very long.
And ideally, more than one faction will be a close competitor for the victory and therefore you'll be hard-pressed to win the game in that way.
(Back)


-----------------------------------------------------------------------

[II] Feature Preview 1: View City
[II] Feature Preview 2: Degrees of Independence
[II/AD] Feature Preview 3: Authority
[II] Feature Preview 4: The Levy Script
[II] Feature Preview 5: Scalable Difficulty
[II] Feature Preview 6: Imperial Support

i just want to thank you for that post!:2thumbsup:


i would offer to help but my modding skills are still quite limited - i haven't done programming since TurboPascal :)

In the meantime; let me ask; speaking of influence;
if there is any way or any thought towards titles - from sega from your guys;
from anything.


The no titles and the cavalry cant dismount at setup are two of my major annoyances...

and i always wondered how much influence (didnt it used to be authorty?)

affected the new game.

To suggest something you may be doing already -
were you saying that influence is In EFFECT how many settlements you can give DIRECT orders to without having to give a title have a governor)...?

This is very impressive.
Hopefully AI will be able to handle all your innovations to certain extent.

No, the number of settlements you can directly control is determined by the authority attribute of your faction leader, but you can invest Influence to temporarily boost it.

Influence is a new thing we introduced, it doesn't have anything much to do with authority.

@Herkus: Well the AI won't handle them, but I hope we'll manage to design them in a way were we can make our features work in a way that favors the AI (and we'll script some stuff for the AI). In addition, we'll have some feature only for the player.

Hi again O Wise One!

Some thread =- yours? - was saying how little authority actually DOES in the game -
i keep thinking of MTW; too..

But as i see it:
Authority and influence are near to the same IN THAT:
one of the things mtw2 doesn't do well is represent (despite quoting machi)
is the struggle of feudalism vs central authority, and the emerging middle class.
Armed militias can be a boon or a threat...

Thats why i asked if it was how many you can directly control without governors..
still wish titles were in -
but that can be a seperate discussion -
i was told mount/dismount in deploy stage isn't moddable; i suspect the same is true re: Titles.
I liked that in MTW YOU decided if you wanted to grant someone Nobility by granting them titles.

Anyway; you fellows seem to have scripted around many of the 'bumps' in the road so far; so one never knows.

Actually, we are going to implement a titles system, but that doesn't have too much to do with this.

Anyways, there's not that much we can do with the game, and creating a really realistic socio-economic simulation is pretty much impossible anyways ~;)

cool ideas! map looks interesting too. maybe we'll get more shots of it later?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by paullus

cool ideas! map looks interesting too. maybe we'll get more shots of it later?

---

Yeah the map is currently revisited by Solo (the current projection isn't very good), after that we can give you some.

I really like this idea, as said earlier I hope you work out ways around the obstacles and that the AI can handle it

Good stuff, I like all of your scripting ideas here.

Looks very good ~:thumb: , I'm eagerly waiting for more info. Keep up the good work!

Once again you please me immensely by mentioning titles (this time)

but one thing that comes to mind is that as I'm reading this Mod it's the Arthurian "keep Order" scenario--

which harkens back to STW and the other thread I pa-troll (lol);
the one about AI...

the AI I'm sure is better for having your scripts but no offense intended; I am guessing the inherent limits and difficulty will keep it as i say it is now:

FAR more appropriate for minor factions than great world powers..

the Imperial Byzantine vassal-state trying to survive rebellious "ronin" and petty dictators; sounds like the perfect usage of the AI.

As I said in a PM;
I also think the M2TW engine is more suited to a smaller scale map & time-

ideal to your mini-campaign.

btw: i took out King's Purse - and yet another of your features -
Being Broke Script:2thumbsup:
was vindicated - its TO ME alot more fun.

would you belive that up til now i thought no one else thought like i did about this kind of thing?