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Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013



Howdy folks. I'm Kaiju15 and welcome to my Shadows of Forbidden Gods SSLP. What is Shadows of Forbidden Gods you might ask? I'll let the steam summary give you the basics.

Steam store posted:

A strategy game in which you attempt to bring about the apocalypse, by moving covert agents through a complex fantasy world to accomplish a wide range of schemes, plots and rituals. You start the game by bribing guards and infiltrating minor farming communities and slowly build up your forces until you are bringing about ice ages, eradicating entire nations with plague, summoning volcanoes and commanding city-devouring snake-gods.

You play a set of agents and corrupted heroes against the forces of good, the rulers and heroes of humanity, lead by the Chosen One. They may be stronger than you, and could eliminate your agents with ease, but you have the advantage of secrecy, and humans are easily turned one against each other. Why fight a war against a unified empire when you could shatter in into civil war and clean up the pieces with orcish hordes?

Complex AIs power the forces of good, and you can, if the mood takes you, play on their minds. Rulers can be driven to gold-obsessed lunatics, who will cause their people to rise up in anger at the insane taxations, dukes can be tricked into turning on their Kings by a carefully placed personal item which implies a court scandal, heroes can be driven insane by the maddening tales read in The Laughing King's Tome and the shadow can corrupt your enemies to the point where they start funding your agents instead of their own people.

Designed as a very flexible apocalypse simulator, Shadows of Forbidden Gods allows you to mix and match your toolsets with unique agents and varied effects, with the human forces responding dynamtically, levelling up their heroes to face what they believe to be the major threats.

It's basically a Paradox-style grand strategy like Crusader Kings except instead of controlling a noble family, you're controlling a big, nasty elder god struggling to be reborn. Plus it was made by fellow goon, Bobby Two Hands, so that's pretty neat.

Why this? Why me? Why now?
It doesn't look like anyone else has done any kind of LP on Something Awful, and there isn't a ton of content out there on Youtube. That's a real shame, so I figured I'd give this whole Let's Play thing a try. I've put around a hundred hours in this game and won more than I've lost, and gotten at least one win with each god if that counts for anything.

How's this gonna work?
Dudes on a map gameplay doesn't make for the most compelling Youtube video, so this will be a screenshot let's play first and foremost. I might dabble with some heavily edited Youtube videos in the future if there's interest and I'm feeling ambitious. Also there are a TON of systems at play and options for interacting with those systems so I will be sprinkling in some choose your own adventure the form of the destructor options for anyone who'd like to weigh in.

Updates
Fundamentals of Forbidden Gods
The Setup
The Slow Road to Seal 1 (Turns 1- 34)
Ramping up to Seal 2 (Turns 35-69)

With that out of the way, let's have a look at our elder god contenders.

She Who Will Feast

The most beginner-friendly god. Focused on spreading shadow and pursuing the basic victory conditions. At full awakening you get a big old snake to control that can defeat entire armies, but typically my games end before that becomes necessary.

Iastur, the Laughing King

Iastur is focused on madness and reducing the sanity of rulers and heroes by strategically planting a cursed tome. There's typically sort of a two steps forward, one step back situation where you'll give someone the book, it will drive them mad, then a hero will bind the book and use it against you so that you can take the book back and drive someone else mad.

Vinerva

Vinerva is a nature-focused god whose central mechanic revolves around sprouting Hearts of the Forest, a unique point of interest that offers rulers boons like money and food in exchange for their souls. Eventually you can fully enshadow rulers who have taken your boons instantaneously as well as transform their cities into Manifestations which massively increase your victory points.

Ophanim, the Divine Beyond

Ophanim is one of the trickier gods to play. Victory with Ophanim involves creating a massive, public religion that eventually saps all free will from those who follow it. While other gods sneak around and covertly pursue their goals, Ophanim operates in the open and hopefully you can create a powerful enough theocracy that the chosen one's forces can't crush you.

Mammon, Wealth of Man, Spirit of the Mountain

Mammon is basically an evil mountain full of gold. You can lure in and devour civilian populations to increase the wealth of the mountain and grow your network of influence, but that also increases the likelihood that heroes find and raid the mountain for its riches. You can also instill greed and decadence in the rulers of the world to start wars between kingdoms and eat their sins.

Cordyceps Hive Mind

An evil fungus/bug thing who infects the people of the world with its spores to either transform them into drones and hives or paralyze and feed them to your swarm. Eventually you will have quietly converted and/or devoured enough of the population to openly attack and destroy entire cities with your swarms.

The Evil Beneath

A giant tentacled monstrosity living beneath the surface world introduced in the DLC that released earlier this month. Devour people to grow the god thing and eventually become so massive that your tentacles erupt from the earth and drag entire cities into the underworld to be consumed.

The other two gods are a sort of new game plus focused god and a god focused around drawing random effects from a deck of cards, but I don't feel like they're really suitable for this let's play.

Let me know which god you'd like to see or if I'm totally wrong and the goons crave card god or new god plus. Also let me know if I should play with the DLC on. For the base game gods, I don't anticipate making much use of the underworld layer, but I can include it if there is interest.

Kaiju15 fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Apr 15, 2024

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Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Alright acolytes, as of right now, Ophanim has the most votes. This is probably the god that I have the most trouble with, but it should be fun either way!

For this run I don't plan on using any mods, mostly because I haven't spent enough time with them to be totally comfortable teaching with them, but the suggestions upthread sound rad as hell. I'll also be playing without the DLC since I'll most likely have my hands so full with the surface world that I won't be giving the underworld proper attention.

I'm going to try and have a post up tomorrow night to lay down the basics and figure out where to put our new megachurch.

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Fundamentals of Forbidden Gods



Before we get started on our Ophanim run, I think it's best that we go over some of the fundamental mechanics and UI elements that will be important for literally any run with any god.



In the upper right corner of the screen are three counters that will determine whether you win or lose the game. There's the turn counter that by default ends your game in a loss at turn 500.



Then there's world panic which determines how hard the forces of light will fight against you and acts as an incremental difficulty modifier. By default this goes up over time no matter how well or poorly you're doing, but some actions you take part can make it go up quicker.



And finally there's your victory percentage. All gods have the objectives shown above by default while others (Ophanim for instance) might have additional goals. 200 points wins the game.

200 points. Great. How do we get those points? We use our godly powers and agents of our cult




Whichever god we choose, we have a constantly increasing pool of power points that can be used to further our goals. Some gods have powers that help spread shadow and infiltrate cities for instance.

There is also a "Seals Broken" counter that represents our god's reawakening and power growth throughout the game. Most gods will awaken naturally over time (Ophanim is one of these), while others will require some use of agents and powers to reach their full potential.

Most importantly, we have our agents responsible for the majority of the dirty work required to conquer the world.



Agents Have four primary stats that help them complete challenges across the map. Might for violence and combat, Lore for magic, Intrigue for subterfuge and infiltration, and Command for leadership and controlling minions. Agents level up and increase these stats as they complete challenges.
They also have two very important stats called Profile and Menace. Profile and Menace increase as agents complete challenges and represent how far away enemies can see them and how likely those enemies are to interfere respectively. These stats can be lowered by taking a "Lay Low" action, but they also have a minimum value that increases over time. Some crimes will never be fully forgiven.

Most of the gods available in the base game (once again Ophanim is included) have an agent called The Supplicant that has access to a helpful god-specific trait at game start. There are a bunch of other agents that can be obtained with recruitment points which replenish over time and your maximum number of agents increases as your god awakens.




The primary targets for your agents' challenges are settlements controlled by Humans (and sometimes elves and orcs).



Each settlement has a ruler whose personal preferences will affect which local actions (taxing citizens, reducing unrest, etc.) and national actions (if that settlement is the capitol of a nation) the government will prioritize.

There are also a bunch of statistics that help simulate the settlement's behavior, but most of them are only useful to us under special circumstances. The ones we'll need most are Security which determines how difficult infiltrating the city is, Enshadowment which tracks the spread of our eldritch corruption, and Infiltration which tracks how many of that settlement's points of interest our cult has control of. Higher infiltration grants access to new actions for our agents to take and also increases the flow of shadow into a location from its neighbors.



Throughout the game, settlements will gain and lose modifiers that have some effect on the settlement. Banditry, shown here, reduces the prosperity stat of the settlement which can pressure the ruler into taking certain actions and even cause a cascade of other modifiers that harm the population of the settlement. In many cases, our agents can create, destroy, increase and decrease these modifiers to achieve our goals.


Unfortunately, the forces of good aren't going to take this infiltration and enshadowment lying down. There is always a Chosen One and dozens of heroes to thwart us.



Heroes have stats just like our agents, but they also have likes and dislikes that determine which quests they prioritize. We can take advantage of those priorities by causing distractions that they are more inclined to investigate and thwart than our primary objectives, and sometimes we can even trick them into fighting amongst themselves.



The biggest threat to us is always the Chosen One who starts with 100% awareness of our impending conquest and is inclined to warn the world and form an alliance against us.


Ophanim Overview



Ophanim's central gimmick revolves around spreading faith across the map. This faith can be seeded in a partially infiltrated settlement using a free god power and will increase based on proximity to other faithful settlements, shadow (nearby and worldwide) or being part of an already established theocracy.



Unfortunately when there is a population of high faith near a population of low faith, there is a chance to generate doubt. Doubt increases over time and slows and eventually reverses the growth of faith if the doubters can't be eradicated.

Another thing to be wary of is ruler awareness. If the ruler in a settlement is aware of Ophanim's true nature, they will also quickly reverse the growth of faith in that location. Awareness is to be avoided at all costs in strategically important locations.



Ophanim can score victory points for population in Ophanim Controlled Society. That requires using one of Ophanim's god powers to declare a theocracy in a city that has more than 150 points of faith. Any nearby cities with more than 100 points of faith will join in and start a civil war against the other cities in a nation. Ideally we won't pull the trigger on the theocracy until we're absolutely sure to win the civil war.

Now that we've got some of the basics out of the way, I can generate the map and see what kind of mess we've gotten ourselves into.

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

The Setup

Here's the game options I'm going with for those who want to try and follow along. Can't promise I'll document every single step, but you'll get the broad strokes and my thought process.

The only mods I have enabled are the ones that come with the game by default: Chinese Cultural Scheme and Insect God(Not that we're using it)
World Size: 40x40
Heroes%: 100
Custom Seed: 1135652583 (I clicked Random World)
Custom Difficulty: 0
Turn Limit, Orcs, Deep Ones, Elves: On
Alliance: Humanity Vigilant
Mid-Challenge and End-of-Turn Events: On
Holy Orders: On
Number of Witches: 1
Everything else is unchecked


Ophanim is ready to be reborn!



We have one agent, one power, and 0 seals broken for the next 34 turns.



Our two starting powers are:
- Start Faith: Starts an Ophanim's Faith modifier at an infiltrated location with 1% charge. We won't be using this for quite a while.
- Sleepless Labour: Increases the task completion progress of one of your agents by 20 at the cost of 2 HP. A really neat ability that lets us get a lot more mileage out of our agents in the early game.


Here's our new world.



Not super readable, but luckily there's some handy map mask options you can get by clicking the magnifying glass in the lower right.



So here's a better representation of the nations at play (View 1).



Looks like the biggest, strongest nation in the world takes up most of that Eastern continent.

We can pull up the social groups screen by clicking that flag in the lower right.



That nation is called the Kingdom of Nghuai and it has twice the population as the next biggest nation.



Yikes. If the Chosen One decides to ask Nghuai to join the alliance we're screwed, so one of our primary goals this run is going to be to carve that up into more manageable chunks.

Speaking of the Chosen One...



This is Wayfinder Beng Chen, the Chosen One. Looks like despite being an Elf, he really loves Humans. He also likes some guy named Banbu. We can potentially take advantage of this friendship later. If we click on Family on the left there, we can find some more potential targets.



Daaaaaaang, Beng! Married to a Queen.

Queen Gnan rules the Elves of Feng, which is the light green nation on the East side of the map. They've also got a daughter who rules over another Elven settlement in Feng - all useful info if we want to distract him later in the game.




Another thing to note is that our Elder Tomb, the seat of our worldly form, is just North of Feng. Not super comfortable being this close to the Chosen One's homeland, but he can't fulfill the prophecy and defeat us for several hundred turns.

In the meantime, our tomb is going to pump Shadow through the City of Danjiao into Beng's homeland. I anticipate that Beng and his allies are going to waste a bunch of time pushing back that Shadow while we work elsewhere. We can see the world's Shadow by hitting F4 or finding Location Shadow in the map masks.



The Elder Tomb starts at 100% Shadow and can't be reduced for any reason. Danjiao is going to take 0.4% Shadow every single turn and also spread shadow into Feng. That doesn't sound like much, but it adds up over several hundred turns. The Forces of Good™ are almost certainly going to waste time stemming the flow while we work elsewhere.

There's also an orc horde next to Feng, but it looks like they have no army and Danjiao is already burning down their fortress.

But enough about Feng. What about Ophanim? Outside of the Elder Tomb, what does the world have to offer us?




We could try to make a play for Nghuai, but it's massive. Plus it's right next door to the Chosen One, so he's bound to stick his nose where it doesn't belong. I don't think we'll be able to spread Faith to the whole nation before being pressured to pop the theocracy by threats of Alliance, Awareness and Doubt. The ensuing civil war and border gore could get really messy.



The Kingdom of Gfen in the Southwest is the second largest nation on the map, and it's about as far away from the Chosen One's house as you can get. We could make a substantial foothold there before growing our theocratic empire. Of course we'd need to send agents to weaken Nghuai while we do it, and we don't get another agent slot for another 34 turns.

Speaking of agents...



Here's our Supplicant. Since we're Ophanim they have a white robe and wings - very stylish! They also have to choose between three Ophanim-themed traits which are going to set our strategy moving forward.

We have
- Duality: "When completing an infiltrate challenge, alternately add 30 shadow or automatically start an Ophanim cult with charge 20%, or add to an existing one" (the trait description tells you which outcome is next on any given turn)
- Leader of the Faith: "Increases any existing Ophanim Faith by 2% per turn while in the same location"
- Inquisitor: "Decreases any existing Ophanim Doubt by 3% per turn while in the same location (net -1% after Doubt's usual growth), but costs 1 population per turn"

Duality is an interesting one. Alternating decent sized chunks of Shadow and Faith gets the ball rolling immediately, but we run the risk of the Faith spreading in ways that make us much more likely to encounter Doubt. We also run the risk of having one of the cities we've already spread Faith to becoming aware and undoing some of our hard work.

Inquisitor is nice because we can infiltrate all or most of a nation and then use our God Powers to start Faith in every single settlement at the same time. Doubt is less likely if there aren't major imbalances in Faith and the Doubt that does spring up can be quickly stifled by our Supplicant. It's a really slow start though, and seeing the world panic creep up while our victory percentage stays low for most of the game feels kinda stressful.

Leader of the Faith seems... kinda bad? We have the option of a slow start like Inquisitor, but instead of helping with Doubt, we park on a settlement and potentially cause more Doubt by creating an imbalance. There's also the issue that the settlement we want to boost might not have any useful tasks for the Supplicant so it'll feel like wasted turns while they just sit and nest.

I'll leave our first target and Supplicant traits up to a vote and then tally the results Sunday night (in North America).

Target:
- Nghuai: The massive nation in the East
- Gfen: The more modest nation in the West

Supplicant:
- Duality: Alternating Faith and Shadow
- Leader of the Faith: Boosting Faith generation in a location
- Inquisitor: Crushing Doubt at the expense of population

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Kanthulhu posted:

This fantasy world needs dwarves

The D in DLC stands for Dwarves. (They are in the underworld layer.)

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Fajita Queen posted:

That fuckin rules as a game mechanic, this sounds great

It's even better with Ophanim. Later on, we can declare that an Orc (or any agent who is infamous really) is a heretic to do everything above and also remove Awareness and Doubt.

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Hello Sailor posted:

Put this on my wish list when it came out, but been unable to buy it because reasons. Are the orcs automatically your minions or somesuch?

Orcs start out as enemies of Humanity, but not necessarily allies of the Elder God. If left to their own devices, they'll typically pick little fights with their neighbors until they appear too threatening and then get stomped.

They can be infiltrated and enshadowed like any other faction, but you get a lot more control over them.

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Looks like we're going to conquer Gfen and have our Supplicant become an Inquisitor. Hoping to have an update through to the first broken seal up on Wednesday.

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

The Slow Road to Seal 1 (Turns 1 - 34)

Gfen won the vote, so The Supplicant is going on a long journey.



We're gonna be hitting End Turn for a while, but don't worry. We have plenty of time to conquer the world and the game will pick up significantly after we get a few more agents.

During our journey, some other religions started beefing over turf.



And Beng learned that we exist.



Apparently he either didn't know he was the Chosen One or didn't know what he was chosen to do. Either way, he's just sitting in Feng training while our tomb slowly spreads Shadow into its surroundings.



Finally, on turn 11, we make landfall in The City of Xinjianm. Now that we're finally in Gfen, we can get to work infiltrating...




This game can be pretty slow, but 38 turns is just too much. We're gonna need a better plan of attack.

Let's start with Ayue Citadel instead.



Ayue has lower security, so we should be able to infiltrate in half the time... but we can do better.

Ophanim's power, Sleepless Labor, allows us to get 20 points of progress towards an agent's task at the expense of 2 hitpoints. That's more than a quarter of what we need to fully infiltrate Ayue, so let's do that.

Now we only have to wait 14 turns to fully infiltrate the location.



While we're waiting for that to finish, a random event fires.



In this case, we can trade some challenge progress for some location Shadow or some gold.
I'm gonna go for the gold. It's a slightly slower start, but we're gonna need that gold later.

We also ran into some gossipy old ladies who forced us to choose between raising our profile (by ignoring them), raising our menace (by murdering them), and giving up the challenge. I'll let them live for now since it doesn't matter who can see us at the moment.



Meanwhile, Beng goes off to fight some bandits and Danjiao declares war on those pathetic Orcs near our tomb.




Speaking of tomb... How's our Shadow doing?



Danjiao is at 10% and it's starting to spread to Elven lands. That's not a ton, but it didn't require any effort on our part.



Unfortunately a couple turns later, someone drove it back again. Oh well. While they were wasting their time over there, we got a brand new, fully-infiltrated fortress!



What does this get us? We have a few interesting new options



But more importantly it reduced the security of every neighboring location by 1, so all five of its neighbors just got easier to infiltrate.



The Supplicant also levelled up which healed all the damage done by Sleepless Labor, and let us give them another point in Intrigue so that they can infiltrate even faster.

Next stop is Liao Village which should only take 10 turns and make it easier to infiltrate both Xinjianm and Ping.



While we infiltrate Liao, an Elven baroness decides to sabotage an Elven mage, presumably because she stole her haircut.



Or maybe it's because she's a generous, cruel, self-hating Elf... Weird!



After a few more turns, we break the first seal!



This gives us more maximum power, another agent slot and two new powers. Peace and Order won't be of any use to us since we aren't spreading faith yet, and Swift of Foot is an ability that literally lets us get more mileage out of our agents.

The next big question is who do we want to recruit for our second agent? We'll want to focus on candidates that can work to weaken that massive Kingdom of Nghuai. I've got a few in mind, but I'm going to leave exactly which one up to you folks.



The Dissident has good Intrigue and Command stats and specializes in starting civil wars. It looks like there's already some unrest brewing in Nghuai, and the Dissident can make local heroes and rulers waste even more time getting that under control. If they don't, the masses will execute the rulers and start a civil war.



The Courtier also has strong Intrigue and Command stats, but his specialties are a bit more subtle. He can steal a personal item from a hero or ruler and then plant it in such a way that it causes another hero or ruler to gain a disliking for them. This means we have the potential get the rulers of cities in Nghuai to start disliking eachother and potentially even dislike Beng, himself.



The Warlock is a generic agent that specializes in Lore. The Warlock has easy access to spellcasting abilities, but more importantly for our purposes, the lore stat can be used to create and spread a plague. Not only would a conveniently placed plague kill a lot of people, but the rulers and heroes of Nghuai will be forced to waste a lot of time curing victims and establishing quarantines.

Let me know by Sunday night what agent we should go with.

Kaiju15 fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Apr 4, 2024

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

PurpleXVI posted:

As a request, any chance you could downsize the big screenshots slightly? To maybe 900 or 1000 pixels wide? Not for any practical reason, they just strain my eyes slightly when they're too big.

Will do!

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Looks like The Courtier is our winner.

Work has been obnoxious, so I'll probably have the next update sometime over the weekend.

Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

Ramping up to Seal 2 (Turns 35-69)

Due to popular demand, our new agent will be The Courtier.



Like all unique agents, the courtier gives us a choice between three special starting traits which are:
Man of Means - Start with 150 gold.
Familiar Face - When in his home city the location's security is decreased by 3 (to a minimum of 0).
Noble Connections - When in any city that location's security is reduced by 1 (to a minimum of 0).

I'm going to have him start right in Ming, the Capital of Nghuai, and take the Familiar Face perk to offset that nasty security bonus that Capitals get.



Despite this bonus, I'm going to take an approach similar to the one The Supplicant is taking, rather than just grinding out the infiltration of Ming.



This will make future infiltration of Chendu and Dashan easier, and get The Courtier at least one levelup before tackling Ming.

As The Courtier gets started on conquering Nghuai, Beng travels to complete some feats of gallantry and derring-do




Sometime later, The Supplicant finishes up in Liao Village and can finally start infiltrating The City of Xinjianm.



Before we get to the infiltration, let's use another tool in our kit- cold, hard cash.



The bribery knocks another two points off of the security of a location, which in our case takes it all the way down to 1- just as easy as the very first village we infiltrated.



A few turns and some more Tireless Labor later, The Courtier infiltrates his Gzhou Castle and moves on to Jinen Village.



And Beng fights more bandits. I'm starting to think he's some sort of cop.



Also, the Orcs have their leader killed in battle. I'm just amazed that The Forces of Good™ haven't wiped them off the map completely at this point.



Next, we're given an opportunity to shape the Ophanimic Faith.




Throughout the game, if you have influence over a holy order by way of Shadow or infiltration, you can change the central tenets of the faith. In our case, since we ARE Ophanim, we don't need shadow or infiltration to gain influence.

The changed tenets can mean anything from making them more likely to build temples to making them more likely to start crusades against other holy orders. However, since no one is actually worshiping us yet, none of these choices will have any effect yet. I'm gonna go with fighting awareness since The Supplicant can already handle doubt, though the next tenet I grab will most likely be inquisitors as well.

After we make our choice, Beng goes and takes a nap.



While Beng is sleeping, The Supplicant completes his first step in infiltrating Xinjianm.



Since it's a city, it has multiple locations to infiltrate. After placing a network of spies in the sewers, we'll place one in the market as well.



You might be noticing that our Profile and Menace are getting a little high. The Profile of 21 just means people can see what we are doing up to two spaces away. The Menace of 24 is the thing that is actually starting to get worrisome. Once that number gets above 40, armies and heroes will be much more likely to interfere. We won't let it get that far though.

As the Supplicant continues infiltrating Xinjianm, The Courtier finishes his infiltration of Jinen and moves to bribe the guards and then infiltrate Ming.




We wait a few more turns and get a really lucky break with The Supplicant's random event



The Imply our involvement option here allows us to gain a huge chunk of challenge progress in exchange for a little profile gain, so we take it to almost complete the challenge outright.

We knock out our second city location in Xinjianm and it's time for The Supplicant to Lay Low until the heat has died down.



The good news is that since we've infiltrated half of the locations in Xinjianm, Laying Low is twice as effective.



Meanwhile... Beng fights more bandits. And The Orcs lose another Upstart leader.





I also realize that I haven't been paying attention to the Shadow pouring out of the Elder Tomb.




Apparently this guy hates shadow so much that he is just sitting in Danjiao spamming Drive Back Shadow



We're probably gonna have to do something about this guy later, but we're a little occupied at the moment.

Beng, on the other hand, is occupied with bandits



And this self-hating elf is still punishing people for stealing her haircut.



Eventually, The Courtier finishes infiltrating the sewers and moves on to infiltrate the docks. He's also going to want to take advantage of Laying Low in a 50% infiltrated city later before he starts causing scandals.



Just a single turn later, we hit turn 70 and break our second seal.



We gain one more max power and two powers that will be extremely useful in the future:
Theocracy is basically our win condition. We can cast it on a city location with more than 150% faith to declare a theocracy. Any cities in the nation with more than 100% faith will join them in a civil war against any cities that remain below 100% faith. Then we'll have additional ways to influence the theocracy in the future.
Declare Heretic lets us sacrifice an agent who has taken too much menace without laying low (and then gained the infamous trait) to remove all doubt and awareness in a location and its neighbors. I like to take an orc warlord on a murder spree and then sacrifice them with this if awareness pops up in an inconvenient location.

So what did we accomplish since breaking the last seal? The infiltration map doesn't look like much, but this is the foundation of our game plan going forward. We're about to have two safe-houses on opposite sides of the map, and a good foothold for spreading infiltration.



There's not a whole lot to vote on at the moment, since we're just continuing with the plans established earlier, but I did just realize that we can rename our agents. Let me know what we should be calling them instead of The Supplicant and The Courtier.

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Kaiju15
Jul 25, 2013

AtomikKrab posted:

Religions will have acolytes who have special actions to spread the faith they worship

Notably some of our agents who are members of human society can be faithful, and they can spread faith for us if so desired. Courtier for example can be faithful if you spawn him in a city with a faith attached.

This can be useful to bring a faith you are corrupting to places you have already infilitrated, or to causes holy wars between different faiths!

There’s also a God Power to start a new faith in any location with even partial infiltration. The current game plan is to try for a point of infiltration in every city in Gfen before starting faith everywhere at once. If one location has less Faith than its neighbors, there’s a chance of Doubt cropping up.

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