Progress Report
Last time I went into detailing some information about the way intrigues and spies work in Sword&Scroll.
The recent development weeks focused on many things ranging from visual additions (such as waterfalls, a visualisation of the winter season, new terrain additions) over new features (such as laws, independence declarations, PC porting, new holding types) to AI improvements to handle all the new features having been introduced within the last two months (ie. when the AI was first created).
Here I would like to focus on the three most substantial changes Laws, AI and PC Porting.
Laws
Laws are an additional level for managing your realm. You can set taxes on your population, trade goods, tax your vassals, decide on a military budget for strenghening your army with mercenaries and set a conscription rate for your population to force them to join your army.Changing a law has various implications. Changing the population taxes not only nets you temporarily more money, it also reduces the local attractivity of your holdings! If there is a neighbouring holding possessed by a House which imposes lower taxes, your population will start wandering off to that holding.
If you change a law affecting a vassal, such as taxing their income, you will need their agreement. They can either not acknowledge the law and piss you off or acknowledge the law change and gain political favor over you, which they may later on reuse to force you to perform a request for them.
AI
The AI has been upgraded to use intrigues, laws and all new diplomatic actions recently introduced such as declaring indendence. The planning algorithm, heuristics and everything has been majorly improved. That being said, the AI is still very bad since its previous state was VERY poor to begin with.
PC Porting
The last point is the PC Port which has been my focus during the current week. I had already previously ported all the rendering code except for text rendering since I implemented this in a not-smart and not-crossplatform manner, meaning I had to rewrite it from scracth. After putting off this task for several weeks I have finally gotten around to doing it.
Additionally, input and controls have also been ported to the PC. The bindings are very bad since they are 1:1 with the mobile versions right now. But this will be corrected once my focus will lessen from porting the android version features to actually improving the PC version.Currently I am working on the UI scaling and on porting my code for the pie chart generation I need to display the population distribution.
Outlook and roadmap
That covers about the most important features and improvements implemented within the last 3 weeks. For now I intend to continue on working on the porting code. Feature wise, the most importing mechanics missing are technology, culture and guilds. After I have implemented these, however, the the core mechanics will be finished. From there on I intend to add new holding types, trade goods and terrain biomes to enrich the landscape. From that point on, a releaseable demo will be my next goal.
