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Hinterlands Changes - posted on Fri Dec 31 at 20:24:53 by Timothy Collett

As promised, here is the high-level list of major changes in the Hinterlands feature package. If you have questions about them, the easiest way to ask is on the Discord server; if you prefer not to use that, the next-best way is to email us.

As a reminder and for those who missed the initial announcement, this will not be going live until after a playtest period, details of which are still forthcoming. As such, some aspects of this will likely have changed by the time it is actually live.

• The signature change of the Hinterlands feature package is the split of a realm’s regions into “Core” regions and “Hinterland” regions.[1]
• Core regions have to follow some specific requirements, but are otherwise what you have come to expect from regions owned by your realm.
  • The first requirement is that they must be well-managed. At present, this still simply means that they have a Lord and at least one Knight, but I’ve already got plans to change this to be based on each noble being able to “manage” up to a specific number of peasants (which will mean that most non-city regions can be “well-managed” with only a Lord).
  • The second requirement is that the realm’s core must be compact. What this means, mechanically, is that the game looks for concentric “rings” of regions that are owned by you and well-managed working outward from the capital. Once it reaches a “ring” that is not complete, it stops. That means that even if you had a region or two farther from the capital than that with a Lord, unless the broken ring is “fixed” within a certain amount of time (currently fairly generous), they will gradually decay until they are ungovernable by a Lord, and become Hinterlands regions.
    • There are some exceptions to this. The first is that regions belonging to your allies and federation partners are ignored for purposes of determining whether you have a compact realm core—thus ensuring that you don’t have to go to war with your neighboring ally just to hold onto your regions.
    • The second exception is based on something I’m calling Special Administrators. Once you have at least one full ring of core regions outside your capital, you will start getting a Special Administrator for every complete ring. Each one of these can be assigned to a well-managed region. Once a region has a Special Administrator assigned, it improves its “ring number” and that of all regions around it, thus making it possible to extend your region in a less round way. If a Special Administrator is assigned to a city, it becomes effectively a mini-capital, with the city itself getting a better “ring number” than an equivalent non-city region would, and control then spilling out from there in concentric rings just like from the capital.
• Hinterlands regions produce much less than Core regions—currently, 20%, both Gold and Food. Importantly, however, this only applies to Food after the peasants have eaten their fill, so regions that can feed themselves as Core regions can still do so as Hinterlands. They just won’t produce much for the rest of the realm.
• Regions outside the Core suffer Red Tape penalties, which come in three basic varieties:
  • Inefficiency, which reduces production, and can occasionally cause problems with recruitment centers and workshops
  • Corruption, which occasionally causes shipments of food or gold to go missing
  • Disaffection, which causes loyalty and control to suffer, and can occasionally increase Anarchy
  • Anarchy is a fourth variety, which is only generated in specific circumstances (not directly just from being outside the Core), and increases the chances of the region revolting.
  • There are also some other unique effects of these, beyond simple region stat debuffs.
  • The Courtier ability to Survey Administration is now specifically for removing these debuffs
• Peasants (and minor nobles) will now keep small amounts of gold and food for themselves. The two most important effects of this will be that a) looting will now target the gold the peasants hold, rather than the tax vaults (which should really be better guarded than they have seemed in the past), and b) that the food the peasants eat is the food that they hold. This means that starvation will not hit quite as quickly—but it also means that there is a limit to how fast food can be distributed once they have been starving.
• The takeover system has been completely overhauled
  • A new region stat has been added, called Administrative Power. This is intended to represent a combination of how much influence your realm has over the region’s administrative bureaucracy, and how much influence the bureaucracy has over the populace as a whole.
  • There are two crucial thresholds for Administrative Power (or AP): below 25%, you cannot hold the region at all, and below 50%, it cannot be a Core region, and thus cannot have a Lord and Knights.
  • If you want to take over a region, you also must make sure that your realm’s AP is higher than the owner’s.
  • There are a number of actions that can affect both your realm’s AP and the region owner’s; however, there are no longer any explicit “takeover actions”. All of these actions can be taken at any time, takeover or no.
    • Most obvious are the Looting actions, which have also been completely reworked.
      • Looting has been simplified down to stealing gold, stealing food, or generalized pillaging. There is still an option to attempt to straight-up kill peasants, but it is only available for realms you have declared Hatred against.
      • All looting now targets specific estates within the region, if there are any.
      • As mentioned earlier, looting for gold and food targets what the peasants themselves hold.
    • New actions have been added to Attack the Administration (either simply threatening them until they flee, or actually murdering bureaucrats) and Release Prisoners (currently only affecting commoner NPC prisoners—that is to say, it decreases Control and AP, it does not allow early release for player characters in prison)
    • There are also several positive actions you can take with units:
      • Civil Work and Police Work can now be done in any region, and will improve your realm’s AP there
      • New options to Help with the Harvest and Rebuild from Looting have been added
      • Additionally, options to Assign Administrators from the capital and Streamline the Administration have been added that are specific to Courtiers
  • The actions taken during—and recently before—the takeover are remembered by the peasants, and will affect the status of the region after the takeover is complete
• Region revolts now depend entirely on Independence, the aforementioned Anarchy debuffs, and low AP
• Damaging & demolishing recruitment centers now works differently: it’s much harder to do permanent damage, but much easier to disable them for a short period and clear out the recruits currently in them
• Travel time is reduced by 2/3 within your own realm, and increased by half in realms you are at war with (including rogues)
  • We recognize that this may cause some issues on Dwilight; we plan to be conducting a review of travel times on Dwilight some time during the Hinterlands playtest, with the intention of ensuring that they are not too great a burden.
• Within your realm, you can take special advantage of this speed boost by moving up to 2 regions in a single turn
• The RegionBuffs style region management code (active on testing islands for some time) will be coming to stable islands. This includes a wide variety of effects, far too numerous to list here, but overall should make region management less frustrating in most cases.

(1) I recognize that this creates a terminology conflict with the longstanding top descriptor for region control levels. I’m fully open to changing either one, based on community feedback; I simply couldn’t come up with a better term on my own just yet, and didn’t wish to hold up the Hinterlands playtest due to a mere terminology issue.