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[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I’ve pretty much finished all the work on religions. These take three forms – monotheistic, polytheistic, and “spirits”, which is the under-the-hood classification for animist/shamanistic beliefs, ancestor worship, and so forth. Hunter-gatherer civilizations are highly biased towards the third category whilst feudal civilizations have a roughly equal chance of producing monotheistic and polytheistic religions. Nomadic civilizations, meanwhile, never have official state religions – made up as they are by peoples from a wide range of places, and given their fluidity as civilizations whose people are generally in near-constant transit, I decided it would be more interesting if they were to often serve as “hubs” where large numbers of religions might be represented, as opposed to their feudal equivalents who may be more restrictive in the religions they’ll allow.



As in the above image, feudal religions have agendas and rewards. I have tried to design these so that you cannot build your game plan around pursuing them – since there will be an overarching “clock” in the game (not a food clock, something else) you will not be able to farm for the rewards that your religion offers, but rather these are things that in the process of playing you might be able to work towards and thereby gain the religion’s rewards. Many religions have agendas that you can pursue by exploring the world, getting access to multiple cities and the like, but carrying out one religion’s wishes may turn others against you. As with most good things in roguelikes, the religious agendas are meant to be a middle-ground between things you can plan for – “I’m going to focus my gameplan around doing X and Y that my religion wants” – coupled with things you cannot plan for, such as which religions might be close to you, which religion you start with, how easy or difficult its agendas will be to carry out, etc. Religions will be one “faction” you can assist, and gain rewards from, or not, depending on the situation and your preference.



Religions can all now be viewed in the in-game encyclopedia once you’ve discovered that religion. Monotheistic and animist religions can fit all their information on one page, whilst you can use Tab to cycle through the gods in polytheistic religions (as below). For monotheistic and polytheistic religions, the symbols or items that individual deities carry are dependent on what their worship entails; an agriculture god may have a sheaf of wheat, a war god an axe, and so on and so forth.



The last part of religions I need to finish off for this release are the spread of religions, but I think this might need a reasonably sophisticated mechanic. In the end it would be interesting if you could view the spread of each religion on the world map (i.e. switch between religions, as many may overlap) so that you can see where in the world you might meet with a positive response, and where else you might meet with a rather less positive one. However, depending on how complex I want to make that system, that might get relegated to a future release or not. Currently hard to say. Some religions appreciate the player spreading their religion to other nations – setting up altars, encouraging nobles to allow the religion to exist within their borders, etc – so such data about the spread of religions will be important for that, though I still need to desire exactly how that mechanic is going to work.

I have also begun work on some of the hidden cults in the game – their names/functions will be fixed, though their locations, how you access them, who leads them etc, will be changed each game. I wonder what purpose they serve?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

"The war lasted for five months and saw a large number of close-fought skirmishes as well as three major battles. The first of these was the Clash at Ostozil`s Redoubt, which saw an army of the Horde of Ebropox`s spearmen, axemen and horse archers attack the Kingdom of Afatic positions, being defeated after a closely-fought three hour battle. This was followed  by the Clash at Fohete`s Bridge, which saw an elite force of the Horde of Ebropox`s horse archers face off against the Kingdom of Afatic`s swordsmen and macemen, being defeated after a decisive six hour battle. This was followed almost immediately after by the Battle of the Running Shields, which saw an elite force of the Horde of Ebropox`s axemen face off against the Kingdom of Afatic`s crossbowmen and knights, being defeated after a subdued four hour battle. During this engagement Ixo Brynoraxym of the Horde of Ebropox was killed fighting an enemy crossbowman, causing her axe Wrathshatter to be lost on the battlefield. These engagements led to heavy casualties on the side of the Horde of Ebropox. This contributed to their eventual defeat due also to the sympathy with the enemy among many in the civilization. This led to the signing of the Treaty of Fappoze which guaranteed the Kingdom of Afatic an amount of new land."

[Silleh Boy]

causing her axe Wrathshatter to be lost on the battlefield.

Ignoring the thought of "Could I keep this for myself?" ...

There's the mention of gaining favour within a faction by doing tasks for them / recovering things of note for them, but, this has me wondering if this was specifically mentioned to tie directly into that, or to indirectly allow for the player to find things related to a faction that while not directly mentioned as a thing that they wish to recover.
If so, would this mean that you could identify the location of the battlefield, recover the lost weapon and return it to the family (thus permitting them to honour / put to rest this lost relative.) whom wouldn't have disclosed that this was something they desired?
Would you be able to pass it to a faction opposed to their own, thus gaining a reward with them instead for denying them this lost treasure?
Would returning it to the faction in question improve your standing with them directly, as well as the view they hold of your family/faction?
Would putting it into the hands of an opposing faction have negative consequences instead?
Would whomever it ends up in the hands of have a chance of discretion, so that you gain all the positives of dealing with them, but none of (for the time being at least) the negatives as the other factions do not know you have had any involvement (yet)?

Given you've mentioned recently that the religious factions would have their boons for assisting them, it makes me wonder if noble houses and nomadic tribes and the like would potentially have undisclosed ones.

The direction things are going sounds ambitious, yet when done right it could make for a rich and unique experience - One that I'm still keen to see the realisation of.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

First off, yes, most definitely - any weapon/item/area mentioned in a game history will generate in the game itself.

The sentence you described about the battlefield is precisely what I intend. It will not be the gameplay focus, but it will be one way, of many, to curry favour with one particular kind of faction (again, of many). There will be a "global clock" - akin to corruption in ADOM, but rather more subtle - so you cannot meander forever, but there will be many ways to support your character by gaining favour with factions. Opposing factions is an interesting question though and how they would respond - I'll have to think more about that when I come to implement the faction system more fully (i.e. once NPCs exist, etc).

Houses and tribes and so forth will all have agendas (I think), though I am still working on the specifics. A lot will be unknown to the player at the game's start, and that may be well part of it. Thanks for the long-term support, by the way - it really gives me faith for the continuation of this huge project .

[Neonivek]

Honestly the further you develop this URR the more I kind of want to see more fantasy elements.

Since a lot of these religions seem to have a lot of mystical names or themes.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Honestly the further you develop this URR the more I kind of want to see more fantasy elements.

Since a lot of these religions seem to have a lot of mystical names or themes.

I'm afraid it's staying fantasy-clear, but as I've mentioned in the past, there will be elements of "magic realism", but nothing even remotely like fantasy species, magic, or anything like that. They do, but that's largely because it's hard to gen religion names without!

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Got a(nother) mention on Rock Paper Shotgun!

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/03/24/devlog-watch-trees-religions-spaceships/

[Neonivek]

I'm afraid it's staying fantasy-clear, but as I've mentioned in the past, there will be elements of "magic realism", but nothing even remotely like fantasy species, magic, or anything like that. They do, but that's largely because it's hard to gen religion names without!

I know, the grass is always greener and all that.

Also I wanted to ask

Are bones dusk or monsters? Because Bones as monsters is kind of hilarious.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Also I wanted to ask

Are bones dusk or monsters? Because Bones as monsters is kind of hilarious.

I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean! Can you elaborate?

[Neonivek]

Also I wanted to ask

Are bones dusk or monsters? Because Bones as monsters is kind of hilarious.

I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean! Can you elaborate?

For what a god holds in its hand. Does it hold bones if it is a god of monsters or a god of dusk?

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Also I wanted to ask

Are bones dusk or monsters? Because Bones as monsters is kind of hilarious.

I'm afraid I'm not sure what you mean! Can you elaborate?

For what a god holds in its hand. Does it hold bones if it is a god of monsters or a god of dusk?

Ah. That's odd, I'm not sure what the bones are for in that instance. Let me check...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Well spotted, that was an incorrect assignment! Fixed now.

Today I'm working on hacking load times down way further in the main menu, and also redoing the "choose a save" screen so that you can see much more information about your world, and then also reducing the file sizes of each world (down by maybe 20-30% or so)...

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

This week I’ve been working on the in-game histories. These can be viewed in the encyclopedia, and can either be looked through in one long list or according to the category they fall into. As you can see from the pictures here, histories currently fall into eight categories – colonies, conflicts, cults, disasters (natural disasters, plagues, etc), discoveries (languages, technologies), individuals (rulers, important soldiers, religious figures, etc), religions and settlements (although the term “Settlement” is used in a specific term in the game to mean hunter-gatherer settlements, as opposed to feudal Cities and Towns and nomadic Fortresses, in this regard settlement just means all population centers). Each category has its own associated icon.



All the histories you see here are procedurally generated to a greater or lesser extent. Some build upon archetypes that vary game-by-game, whilst others have a huge range of different sentences that build up into a coherent story. The above screenshot also showcases one important aspect of the histories – any NPC mentioned in a history who is still alive will spawn in game (NPCs will be spawning in a few releases time – we’re getting close!), any weapon mentioned will appear somewhere, any and every town/city will be on the map, and so forth. As well as giving hints towards the story and – I hope – just being generally interesting/varied tales to read, the histories will also highlight potential items, people or locations of interest. In later versions histories will only “unlock” in the encyclopedia once you reach a logical location – a city’s history will only appear once you discover it, the history of a language’s discovery when you find the appropriate book that records the initial research, etc. I’m still working on the precise triggers, but when you begin the game you’ll only start off with the history known to your civilization (and also histories from the perspective of your civilization). For this release, however, all histories will be visible except for cult histories (which will remain hidden), most discovery histories (because a lot of those hint towards hidden parts of the later game) and individual histories (because I’m still working on how those are going to function, and those may stay absent until NPCs are added a few releases down the line).



So, what does all this mean for you, the player? Well, for starters, it means an early release! This is going to be my fastest release yet (surprising, given the first two months were very academia-heavy); I’m currently expecting to release – at the very latest – in the middle of April, thereby making this between a 3 and 3.5 month release, as opposed to my others which have ranged inconsistently between 4 and 6. This has come down to my general improvement as a programmer and also, in part, my attempts to “standardize” and optimize my coding practice a little more (thereby speeding up development times) in the lead-up to something I’ll be announcing soon after this release. As for 0.5, all that now remains is tidying up the encyclopedia a little bit then a whole range of small optimizations and bug-fixes for unusual situations that can occur in world-gen such as handling unusual angles were territories meet, speeding up the placement of roads, limiting the number of towns a civ can spawn, ensuring the game never runs out of feudal flags to generate, adding some more variety to religion names, etc etc. Within a week from now I would hope to have a build that is pretty much finished, assuming all goes according to plan. I’ve also worked on upgrading the “Choose a Save” page to give much more information about each world you might have saved, whilst at the same time hacking down saving and loading times even further (because those can never be hacked down enough), and on a rather snazzy new world gen screen that’s a great improvement over the old one.

[Reyn]

The names of all these are very cool, it all sounds fantastical, I can't wait to drawn myself into reading what each new world can generate for history. I'd like to point out though, something that's been irking me. The names of civilizations and families. They're too..difficult? Too strange, too unfamiliar. Too hard to remember. If they're to be of importance in the plot, the first thing players will forget will most likely be this. I've gone through the 2 pictures presented, and 2 different civilizations have been talked of. They've been wiped from my memory already(the meteor, green eleven, the math language however, haven't)^{hope I don't come off as offending}

Any possibility in normalizing them, or giving them an english variant, like DF does?

P.S. First picture has a typo in the name of the people for "Rites of the whisperers"

[Servant Corps]

URR is inspired by Borges, right? So instead of having the names of civilizations and families be random strings of letters, why not lift them wholesale from Borges' work?

For example...Uqbar is more interesting (and sounds like Iraq, so it's familiar) than the feud between Ej-ipox and Ejop-ax.