Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Another big update this week! (Isn’t it great to see URR development actually moving fast? At least, I think it is). As mentioned last week, I prioritised getting the basic conversation system totally finished this week, which is to say the ability to ask any question to any NPC, and get a logical reply, or at least the outline of a logical reply with some variables (like “[nation]”) that need to be filled in later. We had a lot of progress, and almost, but not quite, got there. But don’t worry! Other essential stuff for this release has been done instead of focusing 100% on the basic conversation system; we have still moved much closer to release in the last seven days, albeit in a slightly unexpected direction, by adding a range of other world detail that NPCs will shortly need to draw on when they reply to the player. I can also now finally announce some pretty big and very exciting changes to my life coming in the next six months, some projects ending, some new projects on the new, and what this all means for URR in the next half-year. Read on!

Basic Conversations Almost Finished

Basic conversations have been developed further this week, with NPCs now responding correctly to almost 100% of the large number of “option” queries they can be asked – which is to say, questions that need to draw on some other information and are fundamentally different depending on the outcome of that information, rather than simply being sentences which say “My homeland is X”, in a context where all NPCs will always have the same basic answer to that question. Option queries need to draw on a range of traits in most cases (within the NPC) and a range of broader cultural and religious elements (outside the NPC), and most of this code needs to be hand-written for every possible question, making it a fairly substantial piece of work. From these screenshots you can see that some bits of wording still need tweaking, but I want to stress, these are totally random selections from the hundreds of possible questions; although they aren’t perfect, I’m still extremely pleased with how these look right now, how much variation there is, and the fact that only some fairly minimal tweaks remain to be done to some minor typos, plurals, that type of thing. (Both of these is me talking to the first character I find, hence why I’m clearly talking to people from the same civilisation as me for the sake of these tests):





Irrelevant Replies

This week I have also begun implementing “irrelevant” replies – meaning things like “I have no religion” as a response to “What is your religion?”, and so forth – which apply when an NPC is asked a question they have no valid answer to, or is entirely irrelevant. This means a massive range of potential answers, some of which are specific to the question – such as “I have no siblings” – whereas others are more puzzled. An NPC might be asked about a painting they couldn’t possibly know of, for instance, in which case they would say “I do not know of that painting”. There’s close to a hundred of these irrelevant replies, all of which (like everything else) need to vary between cultures and individuals. Some of these require quite complex sentences, although others are relatively simple, but this has definitely need a substantial task. I’ve now put about fifty percent of these in place, and NPCs do correctly use them, too! Of course, in some cases NPCs can’t yet give the correct responses – the coding for siblings isn’t in there yet, so everyone just says they have no siblings – but the code for generating a sentence once siblings are present is in place. Dealing with these kinds of familial relationships and the answers to some of the more complex questions will come partly before the release of 0.8, and partly in the speedy 0.9.

Traits

Added some new traits this week, with a focus on four elements that will influence substantially what NPCs know (and what NPCs can tell the player) about the world around them. These are all affected by the individual classes of NPC – generally speaking someone who is likely to be wealthier and better-educated is likely to know more, but there is also significant variation written into the system, and the knowledge of individual NPCs (regardless of their NPC class) is then varied further by ideological preferences of their homeland. For instance, people from an internationalist nation will tend to know more about foreign matters; people from a nation with a system of vassalage will know more about their own nation than average; those from a bartering nation will know less about history, as few records are kept; those from a free trade nation will know more geography, as they travel to trade; and so forth.

geography_knowledge

How much the NPC knows about the surrounding area. This doesn’t mean the nations and peoples and so forth, but rather purely a question of physical geography – nearby mountains, nearby roads, coastlines, deserts, animals, plants, and the like. Affected

history_knowledge

How much the NPC knows about the history of the world (inevitably heavily, but not exclusively, focused on their own nation). This means their ability to talk to the player about the historical events they are familiar with, how many events they are familiar with, and also knowledge about historical artworks, people, places, and so forth.

national_knowledge

How much the NPC knows about their own nation – where things are, who lives there, where towns and monasteries and mines and so forth are and what’s within them, information about important people, etc.

foreign_knowledge

How much the NPC knows about other nations; their locations, capitals, ideologies, religious beliefs, leaders, famous people, practices, etc. As with all the above, this varies across NPC classes, and is then modified by ideological beliefs of the nations in question.

Relics

I’ve implemented the first part of the generation system for religious relics, which needed to go in now so that NPCs could actually talk about them. Naturally the image generation for these will take place at a later date, but for the time being the game can generate the names of religious relics, a little bit of information about them, and who they were originally owned by. Each religion will only ever create two kinds of relics, depending on their beliefs, and these fall into a randomly-chosen “major” and “minor” category. For instance, a religion might primarily produce “Crown” relics, but sometimes have a small number of “Bone” relics; or a religion might focus on “Book” relics with a small number of “Weapon” relics; and so on and so forth. Each has a unique generation system for selecting its name, and we can now end up with relic names like the following:

Twisting Key of Monn’morra
Slender Ring of Saint Ynnop
Wooden Garland of Grey Fox Running the Sacred
Orangejaw Moonblizzard’s Holy Engraved Locket
Fi-Un-Gat’s Pitted Skull
Consecrated Pointed Sceptre of Ibimmom, Sly Rose

The game also now keeps track of how many relics need to spawn in each church (which varies across different kinds of religious building) and ensures that an appropriate number will always appear. Generating the images for these is going to be a lot of fun, but isn’t going to come until 0.10 or somewhere beyond. Anyway, these are now in place, so NPCs will shortly be able to talk intelligently about relics, and specific relics will now be tied to specific reliquaries in specific churches and cathedrals!

Laws and Punishments

Three of the “list” questions (questions where the answer is often of the kind “A, B, C and D are examples of the X”) relate to the particular laws of a particular nation regarding various topics – currently “violence”, “trade”, and “religion” are the three listed in there. This means that nations now generate laws in each of these categories, and a set of punishments, and then assigns punishments to each broken law depending on the severity of the crime (as the nation sees it). Laws and punishments on trade are determined almost entirely by trade policy, but a nation’s perspective on smuggling is also affected by a range of other ideologies; “violence” laws are determined by a wide range of ideologies from across the eight main categories; “religion” laws are naturally primarily determined by the religious policy of the nation, with a few inputs from a couple of other policies.

To take trade as the example, there are now five possible laws that a nation can enact:

District Entry: how much money (if any) it costs to enter a district in the capital.
City Entry: how much money (if any) it costs to enter the capital city.
Foreign Goods: how much extra taxation is put on foreign goods (light, middling, heavy).
Black Markets: whether black markets are tacitly accepted or not, and if not, the punishment for using one.
Smuggling: the level of punishment for those caught smuggling/with smuggled goods.

Each of these then, if appropriate for the ideologies of that nation, has a value assigned to it. When punishments come into play, punishments now vary according to the five possible justice ideologies. I’m not quite clear on how the “Ordeal” justice policy is going to work out, so I haven’t really developed that element yet, but the other four now work nicely. The Frontier policy imposes fines on those caught breaking the law; the Vigilantism policy will see those breaking the law hunted by the general public, who for lesser crimes will demand items in recompense, or injury, or will hunt to the death in the case of severe crimes, the Penitentiary policy imposes a range of prison sentences, and the Gladiatorial policy involves battles to first blood for lesser crimes, and fatal battles for greater crimes. There is also something of the god system from DCSS here; I wanted to develop these in such a way that they would seriously affect the player’s actions in the future, and which nations they choose to take actions in, when they keep in mind what the potential ramifications are. Justice policies should now have a substantial effect on player decisions once implemented –  and, of course, NPCs can now talk about them, listing all the policies that are worth talking about in the area in question.



Next Six Months

In other news, some big changes are happening, which are going to lead to some very exciting things. Firstly, I’m leaving my position as a postdoc at the Digital Creativity Labs at the University of York – although keeping my current secondment as a Researcher in Residence at the UK Digital Catapult – and taking up a new six-month postdoctoral position at Goldsmiths, University of London, to study paper puzzles (crosswords, Sudoku, etc), and those who play them, design them, implement them, with a view to developing a new set of paper puzzles that might one day be able to challenge Sudoku in national and international print newspapers. Such an outcome is obviously an immensely ambitious goal, but that’s one of the many things that attracts me so much to this project; the potential to make such a big impact into the game-playing lives of so many people is incredibly exciting. I’ll keep you all updated on this goes as time goes by; this might lead into further research in this area, though I also have a range of other irons in the fire for the longer-term future.

Secondly, during this summer, I’ll be taking up a range of visiting fellowship positions at numerous institutions around the world. Firstly, the University of Alberta in Edmonton, where I’ll be giving talks and running and contributing to seminars on professional gaming and the intersections between video games and gambling practices; secondly, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where my focus will be very much the same; and then the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where I’ll be researching the histories of professional gamblers, specifically with a focus on how professional gamblers are represented and talked about in news media, films, literature, and so forth. Somewhere in the middle there I’ll also be giving a few talks at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore on my research, and potentially travelling to two other countries I’ve never visited before as well to offer guest lectures and further develop my Esports and live-streaming research, although those are still in discussion with the relevant parties. If you live in any of those areas, let me know – maybe we can meet up! The few times I’ve met fans in person has always been awesome, and I’d certainly be keen to do so again.

What does all this mean in practical terms? Well, firstly, my brain is going to be a lot clearer to focus on URR 0.8 and finishing my first book in the next four months. Travel has always been something that galvanises and focuses me tremendously well, and these, combined with a new position more closely aligned to my research interests, will do a lot for me. People who read this blog regularly will know the last few months have been tough for a range of reasons, and these new positions are going to be a big help with some of those issues. Onwards, to bigger and better things!

Next Week

Having really pushed on URR this past week, I need to focus on my academic work this coming week, so next week will be a games criticism entry; then by the week after I’ll be aiming to actually finish off the Basic Conversation system by fully implementing the answers to list questions, and making sure that the range of “irrelevant replies” are all implemented and functioning correctly. See you in a week! When we will be talking the notorious “P.T.”, or “Playable Teaser”, and its clever implementation of environmental puzzles…

[Retropunch]

I was going to quote all the previous messages on this topic, but now I think it's easier to just give my general rationale/thoughts.

Basically: I'm trying to generate a world with major differences from our real world, within the realms of physical possibility: why restrict ourselves to what the real world has had? Why limit what can come up that way? That's just going to massively reduce the amount of interesting things the game can generate, and I'm very much against that. The idea that just because female soldiers might not be "as effective" as male soldiers (whether true or not) means civilizations wouldn't field them, implies everything that every culture does is "rational". And, I think, the history of culture demonstrates that every culture on earth does all kinds of things that aren't "rational" or "optimal", and I see absolutely no inherent reason why this would never happen. We have or have had cultures that kill a non-trivial number of their own children, infect themselves with diseases, hurt themselves or mutilate themselves in various ways, and so forth; cultures don't just do things that would be "best". I just think the game is just vastly more interesting this way, by allowing cultural ideas and preferences that didn't arise in the real world, but where there's absolutely no reason for those cultural ideas to not arise - as real-world cultures do far, FAR more striking things than some of the stuff that's in the game so far.

I get that, and there's certainly a lot of precedent in the real world for species doing things that are sub-optimal, however there are basically no examples (that I can find) of women being used as the main, regular troops up until the very modern age - and for good reason.

It's not to do with effectiveness of troops or anything like that at all, it's to do with growth - it's never even vaguely rational to expose your main method of growth (and therefore civilisation's strength) to harms way. All the things like mass killing offspring and similar have been done with ( very twisted) rationality behind it - ONLY sacrificing your primary method of growth in battle just doesn't make any sense.

Sure, I can well imagine there might be a small number which would have some cultural or religious reason behind it, but to have basically a 50/50 chance that a civilisation would sacrifice their only method of growth (and a 1/3 that they'd use ONLY their method of growth as troops) seems frankly wildly unbelievable.

It comes down to breaking immersion. I'm no history buff and I'm certainly not a stickler for everything having to be realistic, but with the model you've got, you could easily have three quarters of the world's civilisations using only women fighters, which would just seem really jarring. Again, I'm not suggesting doing away with having women as soldiers, just not on that level of probability.

[zaimoni]

I was going to quote all the previous messages on this topic, but now I think it's easier to just give my general rationale/thoughts.

Basically: I'm trying to generate a world with major differences from our real world, within the realms of physical possibility: ....

Then don't be surprised at pushback when you intentonally implement a direct contradiction of "within the realms of physical possibility".

That's what you've been called out on: flouting natural selection.  And no, I'm not expecting you to back down and implement your stated development policy: there's too much ego on the line for that to be a reasonable request.

[Scoops Novel]

If you dislike zaimoni's tone, just ignore him. I don't want the thread to be derailed.

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

I had written up quite a long reply, but honestly - my life is busy and stressful enough right now without a slightly heated internet discussion . So let's just agree to disagree for now, and I might re-examine the question in the future...

[Retropunch]

I think the only reason for the slight heatedness of people's (mine included) opinions, is due to how mind-bendingly realistic the rest of the game is turning out to be. So I'd take it as a credit to your work that people take it so seriously!

That being said, if you want this to be one of the differentiating from reality factors for your world then so be it (I doubt there are too many endless libraries hanging around either!) - I just wanted to absolutely make sure that I had got my point across about it being a 'practical' thing rather than a 'women are rubbish soldiers' thing (as this debate can often get seem like that).

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

Don't worry, it's all good, and I do get where you're coming from. We will see!

In the mean time, crunching on a piece of academic work this weekend, but I recently got a chance to play the infamous "P.T.", and I was impressed by how many puzzles and how much gameplay it packed into such a small environment. Thi week, here are some thoughts: http://www.ultimaratioregum.co.uk/game/2017/02/04/p-t-cryptic-puzzles-and-small-spaces/

[hops]

I wouldn't mind women soldiers to be fielded, so long as it does have an effect on the gender ratio and population of a civilization. Of course I haven't been keeping up so I'm not sure if that'd actually do anything interesting, but it'd be nice to see if a civilization actually adjust their customs to adapt to any difficulties they face in history. But, that might end up causing a single uniform mold to rise.

[Aquillion]

It's not to do with effectiveness of troops or anything like that at all, it's to do with growth - it's never even vaguely rational to expose your main method of growth (and therefore civilisation's strength) to harms way. All the things like mass killing offspring and similar have been done with ( very twisted) rationality behind it - ONLY sacrificing your primary method of growth in battle just doesn't make any sense.

Not quite true.  The women of Sparta would sometimes contribute to its defense.  Similarly, Shang Yang (a Chinese statesman) suggested that women be used to man (heh) fortresses and defensive fortifications, freeing up male soldiers for sorties; and while it was never adopted, the objections seem to have been cultural rather than practical.

You have to understand that in the ancient world, most soldiers, especially ones manning fortifications, would see little if any action.  If you have a fortification that is basically impenetrable to direct assault (as most well-designed ones are), it makes little difference by any measure if it's "manned" by women or men - and if it falls, large numbers of women would die or be captured regardless.

[Retropunch]

It's not to do with effectiveness of troops or anything like that at all, it's to do with growth - it's never even vaguely rational to expose your main method of growth (and therefore civilisation's strength) to harms way. All the things like mass killing offspring and similar have been done with ( very twisted) rationality behind it - ONLY sacrificing your primary method of growth in battle just doesn't make any sense.

Not quite true.  The women of Sparta would sometimes contribute to its defense.  Similarly, Shang Yang (a Chinese statesman) suggested that women be used to man (heh) fortresses and defensive fortifications, freeing up male soldiers for sorties; and while it was never adopted, the objections seem to have been cultural rather than practical.

You have to understand that in the ancient world, most soldiers, especially ones manning fortifications, would see little if any action.  If you have a fortification that is basically impenetrable to direct assault (as most well-designed ones are), it makes little difference by any measure if it's "manned" by women or men - and if it falls, large numbers of women would die or be captured regardless.

I'm not saying women never, ever took or arms or that women didn't contribute to defenses/militia - as you say, as a last line of defense from being invaded you may as well have every man, woman and child pitching in. More than that, there are many examples of women used as spies, logistics handlers, lookouts and similar.

My issue was with a situation where 33% of all the civilisations in the world would field women and only women as troops, with another 33% having a regular army which was comprised of both women and men. That's three quarters the world doing things that didn't - for pretty common sense reasons - happen at that time period at all.

Again, if Mark wants to make this his divergence from history/reality then that's absolutely fine - he can add in three headed lizard monkeys for all I care (as long as they're meticulously well simulated!!) but it definitely is a divergence.

[Scoops Novel]

It depends on the scale of the army somewhat. In the middle ages far fewer troops were fielded proportional to their population even in the worse wars, so perhaps co-ed armies would have a leg to stand on? I can easily envision a sufficiently secure culture encouraging it even if it's not as battlefield effective. In times of total war a case could also be made when things are desperate enough.

Women only armies just doesn't make sense when you've got muscly, replaceable men right there.

[Retropunch]

It depends on the scale of the army somewhat. In the middle ages far fewer troops were fielded proportional to their population even in the worse wars, so perhaps co-ed armies would have a leg to stand on? I can easily envision a sufficiently secure culture encouraging it even if it's not as battlefield effective. In times of total war a case could also be made when things are desperate enough.

Women only armies just doesn't make sense when you've got muscly, replaceable men right there.

It certainly makes sense in specific cases as part of some cultural/religious aspect or in desperation, but as you say, it doesn't make much sense the rest of the time when you've got replaceable men right there. Even in times of desperation (like a siege), there's normally a lot better things to do with untrained populations that thrust them into the heat of battle.

Again, it's not about 'this can't ever happen', just that it would be incredibly, incredibly unlikely on the scale that Mark first put forward.

[Scoops Novel]

Amazon cultures are interesting/fun, it just has to be culturally consistent (and historically nodded too). Something as simple as "in a society of 19 women for every man, things... change."

[Ultima Ratio Regum]

For now, I'm not going to make too many changes in that area - especially since soldiers aren't doing soldier-ing in the game yet! - but I will ponder things in the future. I do take the points raised here; at the same time, my commitment is quite strongly to exploring alternative possible histories and cultural practices. We'll see!

In the mean time...

----

This week (well, fortnight) we have some laws, some new list questions, some political parties, overall a reasonably large entry to make up for silence last week, and a paper, so let’s get to it:

Semiotics of Roguelikes

Firstly and briefly, the paper I wrote a couple of years ago now on the semiotics of various ASCII roguelike games has moved from being published online to being published with in actual edition/volume of Games and Culture. To mark this momentous event, I’ve uploaded a pre-submission version of the paper onto my academia.edu account, so if you’re interested in reading the paper – the abstract is below here – then click here and give it a read, and do let me know what you think.

https://www.academia.edu/31504292/The_Use_of_ASCII_Graphics_in_Roguelikes_Aesthetic_Nostalgia_and_Semiotic_Difference

This article explores the semiotics of the “roguelike” genre. Most roguelikes reject contemporary advances in graphical technology and instead present their worlds, items, and creatures as American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) characters. This article first considers why this unusual graphical style has endured over time and argues that it is an aesthetic construction of nostalgia that positions roguelikes within a clear history of gameplay philosophies that challenge the prevailing contemporary assumptions of role-playing games. It second notes that the semantic code for understanding the ASCII characters in each and every roguelike is different and explores the construction of these codes, how players decode them, and the potential difficulties in such decodings. The article then combines these to explore how such visuals represent potential new ground in the study of game semiotics.

Violence Laws

The game now generates a full set of laws for violence in each nation. These are not done in quite the same way as the other two sets of laws. Whereas “religion” and “trade” have a set number of values and each value always create a law in every nation, not all nations will even have some of the violence laws. It depends on the ideologies of the nation in question, and what they consider to be a meaningful violent event, and how severe they think it is. The game selects a set of laws, ranks them, and then distributes punishments according to the ranking of the crime, not the crime itself. Here is the sequence by which the game selects laws for violent acts, where the ones that a nation cares about the most come first, and the less important ones come later. As a result, you’ll see some very different values at play here, and what counts as a severe punishment in one nation will be far less severe in another, because it will be much further down the crime list, as a result of the nation being more concerned by other things:



If I’ve calculated this correctly, this means the shortest set of violence laws is five, and the longest possible set is thirteen, with most nations naturally falling somewhere in the middle. In each case the top crimes merit a “Punishment 5”, which is the highest level of punishment – such as three arena battles to the death, or a lengthy imprisonment, or a severely damaging physical ordeal – and the bottom will merit a “Punishment 1”, and the others in the middle will be distributed appropriately. I’m confident this will again generate an interesting and unique set of consequences for your actions in each nation, and when coupled with the wide variation in punishments, and the kinds of punishments that your character might or might not be able to withstand depending on your build, items, etc… I think some very interested decisions will emerge from this process.

More List Questions

Parents, Siblings, Grandparents, Children

NPCs are now able to talk about their parents, siblings, grandparents and children, in a pretty wide range of ways. For instance, if you ask about parents, they might simply answer that their parents are nobody important (if they feel you’re disinterested, or of a much higher social status), or might name only one, or both; alternatively, if their parents are consequential people recorded by the game, or they are important, then they’ll probably have some more info they’ll (proudly) be willing to give out. For the longer lists, the game also takes account of the sex of the people being mentioned, so they might say “My two brothers are X and Y and my sister is Z”, or “My maternal grandparents are X and Y, my paternal grandparents are A and B”, which will also vary based on any particular bias towards either sex present in that nation; for extremely long lists, lastly, such as children or siblings, they can now reel off a full list that is always grammatically correct. These lists also include titles, too, so you might get “My mother was Queen X the 1st, Keeper of the Brass Casket, and my father was Prince Y, Consort to Her Majesty” – or whatever.

Trade, Violence, Religion Laws

We covered these briefly in a previous entry, but NPCs are now able to tell the player about everything in these categories. Some of these require different lines of code, as in the case of trade and religion laws there is a finite set of “things” that each nation will have laws on, whereas for violence, some potential violent acts simply won’t be recognised or won’t be relevant to particular nations, and therefore won’t be there. Either way, people now give you a nicely detailed list of these laws; and as with everything, how much people tell you will be modified by mood, and their knowledge of their own nation…

Nearby Things

I’ve started to implement the code for NPCs replying to questions of the sort “are there any X nearby”, where X might be cities, towns, nomads, tribal nations, mountains, coastline… you get the idea. There’s a pretty wide number, and some of them have to request information from different parts of the game’s databases, but this code is now being put into place. There are also now appropriate sentence structures here for people to word things appropriately; for instance, if there are individual things, such as towns, you’ll just get a list. By contrast, mountains do not take up individual map tiles but stretch across mountain ranges, so someone might say “There are mountains far and very far to the northwest, far to the north, and somewhat far to the northeast”, which should give the player a decent impression of what the mountain range looks like. (The same then applies to deserts and coasts and so on).

Political Parties

Returned to political parties and developed names for the parties, which will soon be matched up delegates, and we should be able to get some kind of political system actually working. The game first selects a number of parties for each nation, which is semi-random and partly influenced by several ideological factors (outside of their commitment to a democratic form of government), and then (as we discussed before) ranks the various overall trends in the nation, such as individualism or collectivism, nationalism or globalism, and so forth. It then creates parties for the dominant trends, and sometimes with a secondary ideology from lower down in that chart, and now it finally creates names. As such, we can now find NPCs who might be willing to tell you about parties such as:

The Liberal Sovereignty Party
The Party of Enlightenment
The Conservative National Party
The Devout Singular League
The One Reformist Party
The Association of Independent Selfhood

And so on and so forth. As with most things in URR, you should be able to extrapolate some reasonable guesses about the commitments of these parties from their names. In a later version I’ll connect these to delegates, and get the political system in democratic nations working properly.

Next Week

As you’ll have noticed, we’ve slipped back to a fortnightly update this time – although I’m generally back to a post every weekend, this last week has again just been absolutely jam-packed, and I had to push things back. However, hopefully, updates will resume the weekend model from next weekend moving forwards, and I promise lots of screenshots next week. I must apologise for this, but leaping back into the weekly blog posting has been quite a bit new pressure on my time, and although I thought I could go from sparse blog posts to every week: it hasn’t been quite that easy. Things are ramping back up, but maybe just a little more unevenly than I’d hoped. I am also working on finishing my first book at the moment, which is of course taking up a lot of my time, as well as planning how best to get around the world and take up three visiting positions in three countries in the coming months, so there’s a lot of admin in my brain at the moment. I’m desperately hoping to get 0.8 before April, as otherwise that’ll be a ridiculous two years between release… and that’s just too damned long, however much detail I’m putting in to this major version. Nevertheless, normality should resume again next week, with hopefully an even more significant URRpdate. See you all then!

[Ehndras]

leadership_like: This trait refers to how much the NPC likes the leadership of their nation. This is not to say the leadership policy of their nation, as above – theocracy, monarchy, etc – but the individual personality/personalities of the person/people at the top. There are a lot of elements which go into this particular decision for each NPC, and as with the above set, I’m hoping to later tie this into the potential for social movements, conspiracies, and the like…

fellow_soldier_opinion: For those who are within the military, this determines what they think of their fellow soldiers. This varies by rank, by leadership, and by the individual histories of particular soldiers. I’m not quite sure what else this variable will affect yet – beyond a couple of possible conversation replies – but I think it could be a nice way to build up a sense of how different military forces function in the URR world.

Suggestion: As in modern and ancient armed forces, there are contextual details one might often miss if solely observing basic rank/hierarchy details.

For example, the Navy Seals and Green Berets can hold the same rank as a counterpart of far less skill and experience. My Father, for example, was a US Army drill sergeant and first fought in Vietnam as a footsoldier. He wasn't infantry, but they got ambushed and many died. He definitely saw combat, but never discussed his service before he died. Not sure what his rank was, but he was at least a Sgt. At the same time, a Sgt. whose a recruiter or officer may be a paper pusher with little combat experience, while another guy might be like my best friend's husband: demolition specialist, former paratrooper who participated in the Bay of Pigs and numerous major conflicts, and thus presents a far greater variable of experience, skillset, and vital to personality and behavior: opinion. As he's now in his 70's, the generational differences have lead to a highly complex set of ideals and opinions that wouldn't be shared by most civilians, nor even soldiers. Still built like a fucking fortress, though, even at his age. 73 or 74 I think? 6 foot 3 or 4 in height (far taller than most humans the world-over) and arms/legs like tree trunks. Not someone you'd want to challenge to a bar fight. (which, ironically, happened a lot)

To show even most variation, let's compare that to another relative of mine. Comm-spec, US Army Guard, warrant officer (W‑1)(I think? Not entirely sure.), was deployed to Kandahar, Afghanistan but not to a combat unit. Saw some shit, got bombed and mortared, drove their upper in convoys for a bit, etc. If I'm not mistaking them with someone else I know, present deployed to the FOB during the 2010 Tali strikes.

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2010/05/taliban_attack_kanda.php

(Sorry for vagueness, hope you understand the necessity with the way the world is these days. The other two are way past their time, and thus its no issue to discuss. The last is recent, so its a different story. I have their permission to discuss. The last, I am only allowed to mention vaguely.)

That last one has a solid shot at joining a federal intelligence agency in 2 years time, to give you an idea of rank-to-factionalization divergence. Thus, comparing three soldiers of relatively similar rank brackets, you get highly developed contextual skill, knowledge, experience, physical builds, mental acuity, languages known, and thus: opinions & beliefs.

For URR, this could mean the soldier you're chatting with is going to gather data on *you*, is a total newb with a shortsword, or is the Achilles of spearmanship. Or, they could be a spy and lying through their teeth.

Hoping you account for that detail down the road. All of this in the last few updates implies people tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. All the time.

We all know that's rarely the case.

What do you think of the leadership?
What do you believe your foreign policy should be?
What do you think of your culture’s art?
What are the religious policies of your nation?
How widely spread is your religion?
What is your job?
What is the history of this monastery?

In all of these cases the game can’t just take a default sentence and then vary it, but it has to instead select a sentence from a wide set depending on the data available, and then create that sentence anew each time. There are substantially more possible “base” responses for option questions than there are for all the basic sentences combined, which gives some idea of the kind of variation that some of these need to have. With this fortnight finished, I’ve now finished these off, and I’m very happy with the kinds of sentences they create – they’re varied, detailed, and will take far longer than the basic sentences before the player will ever come around to seeing the “same” sentences again.

Suggestion: Do such inquiries account for multi-tiered context? For example, why not ask the soldier from Uralia what he thinks of the Rothgarians? Maybe they're officially allies, but you find out Uralians and Rothgari don't get along too often. Maybe their alliance is shaky, or on paper yet effectively non-existent. Or perhaps, within a variable magnitude of deviation, they might really fucking hate them for botching an operation or being unskilled at a particular type of combat.

If you take Colonial British tactics against, oh let's say, Revolutionary American tactics, British lose. I'm sure there are those who held strong beliefs that the Brits were buffoons for wearing bright red coats and marching rank-and-file against hit-and-run tactics in dynamic terrain.

That reminds me: broader, or contexual opinions on random details.

Hey, maybe the Rothgari really like those spiffy Uralian uniforms. Maybe they scoff at their cultural facial-tattoos and see them as technologically-advanced barbarians.

If URR is anything like Earth, some cultures/people will be prejudiced against *anyone* with body modifications, whereas others will see them as a normal and righteous sign of faith, culture, or strong roots.

In the Brit's case, something as seemingly silly as uniform color may be a major point of contention, or even a serious weakness in combat.

As we know, a knight in heavy platemail is great in some ways, yet seriously lacking in others.

All the same, a scimitar-wielding, or dual short-sword dancing Sikh warrior has little protection against a rain of arrows from above.

Opinions will vary.

After all, Armokian Dwarves really tend to dislike those tall, lithe elves and their "stupid wooden bows".

Hell, someone can dislike Elvish soldiers alone because they once watched them lose a battle, or they can outright hate the entire Elvish species, or a particular culture specifically, because they were in a village under attack and the Elves failed to arrive in time to protect them.

So much variation to account for. After all, opinions are flimsy, seemingly nonsensical, and as dynamic as the Earth itself.

Hope this provides you an idea or two. Cheers!